Prologue

Chihuahua, Mexico, 1853

Esteban Alvarez stands in the open patio of his family's hacienda, a ramble of adobe burnished by late light. Looking west, Esteban does not see the setting sun. He does not notice the Alamo Huecos surge from navy to purple when gold explodes across the sky. Bathed in this glory, Esteban instead is focused on the landscape of Mexico City far to the south, where a dire and fate filled bargain is being made - without his presence and without his permission.

He swings from disbelief to outrage that something so heinous could occur. Esteban's anxiety sticks in his throat like a lump of uranium. He can swallow nothing, not even a drop of sweet well water, but, surely, by tomorrow his oldest son will arrive from Hidalgo de Parral carrying real news instead of endless speculation. Or, his sister Constanza in El Paso will send carrier pigeons with the freshest news penned on strips of paper wrapped tight around their legs – surely, one of those birds will survive the hazardous flight to the cote behind the milk barn.

Either way, Esteban will have to continue waiting to find out the extent of Santa Anna's worst crime yet, this time against the citizens of North Chihuahua. Knowing better than to expect reason or logic from Santa Anna, knowing Santa Anna too well to believe sanity will prevail because it never has before, Esteban allows himself only one thin slice of hope while waiting for news he knows will destroy him.

What makes this crime this time so much worse is the greedy bastard found a powerful friend in James Gadsden, official American liar and thief, who spoke so eloquently to the haciendados of North Chihuahua about the possibility of a railroad coming through, a railroad for them! A railroad for everyone, Gadsden claimed, but in reality a railroad only for the flood of Americans suddenly arriving in Chihuahua and claiming it as theirs.

Esteban clenches in contempt at the thought of James Gadsden and Santa Anna conniving together. Selling north Chihuahua for some paltry sum? And then stealing his and his neighbors' citizenship, their very nationality as patriotic Mexicans? Esteban trembles from a corona of rage flaring from his heart. Treason! Traitors! How dare that testicle of a Presidente sell off even one square foot of Mexico.