Children of the Desert

Eagle Pass, Texas, in the late 1880s: a dusty border town where a person’s history is public property. Harboro is a railroad man of forty, grave and sparing with words, who has climbed from brakeman to a chief clerk’s desk at the company headquarters across the river in Piedras Negras. He marries Sylvia Little, a pretty young woman whose father never works yet always has money, and whose callers come and go by a path through the mesquite. The town has long since made up its mind about her. Dodge follows the marriage through the slow pressure of gossip, half-heard evidence and a husband’s dawning suspicion, and he does not soften the ending. Written by a former Eagle Pass newspaperman, the book treats the desert less as scenery than as moral climate: exposed, unforgiving, nowhere to hide.