SADDLEBAG DISPATCHES
REAVIS Z. WORTHAM
SECOND ANNIVERSARY PART TWO OF THE EXCLUSIVE SERIAL NOVELLA
I
A SHORT STORY
t was raining and had been for hours, the type of cold, steady shower that seems to fall endlessly, whispering onto the cracked pavement. The saturated ground could hold no more. The runoff in front of the Alamo filled the gutter, curb deep. Ambrose B. Hollis watched a familiar young lady step out of a black Suburban. Sandy Anderson held a folded newspaper overhead as an impromptu umbrella as the Uber pulled away and looked down at the damp guidebook in her hand. She glanced up at the squat gray structure across the busy street. She was a mature woman now, but he remembered her as the young lady he’d met amid a storm of horror and death, however briefly, on a grassy Montana hillside five years before. Ambrose B. Hollis wasn’t an average man. He was a dwarf and wasn’t particularly offended by the word, but he preferred to be called Ambrose, or Mr. Hollis. He didn’t look upon his unusual size as an affliction, it was merely an obstacle occasionally presenting minor challenges.
Long blonde hair hung damp and limp against Sandy’s face, falling in strands across her shoulders. She hunched her shoulders against the cold rain running off the paper that trickled down the neck of her blue cotton shirt. Tucking a rogue strand of hair behind her left ear, she sighed and smiled to herself. Even though it had been raining from the moment she landed at
the airport, things had been going fairly well. Her first vacation in five years was a well-deserved threeweek break. Sandy peered through the gray curtain of falling weather and studied the Alamo before her, comparing the tired old chapel to the movie images she’d seen on television. She was surprised to find that instead of the vast emptiness she expected to see surrounding the old San Antonio mission, it sat huddled small, dwarfed amid buildings towering like a manmade forest above its weathered facade. Behind her, a garish display of tourist traps hawked cheap Texas souvenirs made in China. Sandy started across the wet street, its gutters running full and fast. The heavy traffic momentarily held her at bay while she looked both ways as her mother had taught her, then darted through an opening. Her sneakered foot slipped off the curb and into the small, cold current, just before reaching the safety of the sidewalk. Water filled her sneaker and she grimaced and shook her foot, standing like a stork on the other.
Hollis watched her through the milling swarm of people from under his wide-brimmed hat. Rainwater dripped from the ancient oak tree above him, steadily plopping onto his already soaked hat to funnel off the back of the brim. The tree was a leaky shelter at best, but it would do until he got his gabbling tour group inside the old mission where it was dry and comfortable.
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