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of the choking stickers he'd quickly come to detest. He thought, with great effort of mind and soulful contemplation-despite a complete inability to solve such problems-that it would make sense to dig a well down through deeper ground than to risk having a tainted well closer to those awful smelly black pools.

The very idea of hearing Nora complain made him realize what a living hell the rest of his life would become under such circumstances, and he bent himself to the task at hand, turning the first spade of dirt ever turned in the region.

The excavation was slow going and he fought back tears of dismay almost at once when he found dead soil and dust laced with pebble-sized rock and a huge fish-net like root system of surrounding weeds that seemed almost impervious to the blade of his shovel.

Sweat ran from his body, trickling off his nose like a leaky faucet, dampening the dust each time his spade shoveled into one, then another unwilling clump of earth.

Silas had staked the mule close by, some eight feet from the hole he was digging, where the animal could easily get to a thatch of weeds to munch on as the human worked. Now and again, Silas would stop and have a drink of gritty water, which he would share with the mule while he tried very hard not to be disappointed with the choices he had made; gradually feeling a certainty, like a dark thunder cloud hanging overhead, that he'd been mightily mistaken with this choice. He gave the horrid land around him another scan, shrugged moronically, and bent back into his task.

Never a man to shirk a chore, Silas Tuck was ever busy, in fact the ride out over the territories had been maddening for him because he was not able to effectively use his bulky body to do anything strenuous, such as he was now, at last, doing with his new well. Because he was such a man, bent always to mindless toil, he tended as most would, to allow his mind to wonder adrift, colliding into any random thought which may invade the small amount of reserved space Silas' poor brain reserved for intelligence.

All alone, but for the company of his mule which seemed to be making good headway with the weeds above where he worked, Silas somehow allowed his mind to rest upon the idea of the local savages he'd heard some tale of while making his way out and through the state of Texas.

Some of these accounts left him feeling a cold sense of foreboding, and had caused him to keep his trusty flint-lock musket at hand-usually. The hole had distracted such attentions,

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