Even the coming of an autumn dusk could not subdue the color of this land. Shadows here were not gray or black; they were violet and purple. The crumbling adobe walls were laced by strings of crimson peppers, vivid in the torch and lantern light. It had been this way for days, red and yellow, violet—colors many had hardly been aware existed back in the cool green, silver, gray-brown of Kentucky. So this was Tubacca! Back in ‘59 this had been a flourishing town, well on its way to prominence in the Southwest. The mines in the hills behind producing wealth, the fact that it was a watering place on two cross-country routes—the one from Tucson down into Sonora of Old Mexico, the other into California—had all fed its growth. Then the war … The withdrawal of the army, the invasion of Sibley’s Confederate forces which had reached this far in the persons of Howard’s Arizona Rangers—and most of all the raiding, vicious, deadly, and continual, by Apache’s and outlaws—had blasted Tubacca. Now, a horseback rider was heading in. The animal he rode, the two he led were, at first glance, far more noticeable than the dusty rider himself. What now? You can listen and find out.
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