Look Behind You (The Order of the Silver Star) Read Free

candy, all for the sake of politics, when she had been governor before. Matt hadn’t been eligible to join until after the primary runoff that had ensured her defeat in ’26, but his memory was as long as his colleagues’.
    However, as he drove through the miles and miles of miles and miles that lay between Lilburn and Marfa, with little in the arid landscape to draw his eye save the familiar heights of the Davis Mountains, he found himself musing mostly about family. He and Amy Hoerster hadn’t exactly been high school sweethearts; he’d grown up in Castell and played football for Llano, while she’d lived across the county line in Hedwigs Hill and been a cheerleader for Mason. But somehow he’d fallen into conversation with the cute, petite blonde at one of the baseball tournaments where his younger brother Chris was playing. The game had been called on account of fog, but no one had been in a hurry to try to drive through it, so Matt and Amy had kept chatting, and her wide blue eyes had lit up with interest when he mentioned wanting to join the Rangers. They’d married within the year, and she’d stood by him ever since, even becoming his unpaid secretary and typing his reports from his dictation because her piano-trained fingers could fly over the typewriter keys far faster than he could hunt and peck with his giant mitts. And in Marfa she’d gotten a job running the telephone switchboard, which helped her get to know families even on the more distant ranches as well as Matt had come to know them through his patrols looking for tequileros smuggling booze from Mexico. He worried sometimes that life in the desert as a Ranger’s wife would do a number on her health and sanity, but she seemed content enough most days.
    And this day, it seemed, was one of those days. Amy had supper in the oven and paper in the typewriter when Matt parked his state-issued black car in the garage next to the kit car Chris had built for them as a wedding present. She met him at the door with a kiss and all the latest gossip, which carried them through eating her excellent roast and peach pie. Then she took his report while he washed the dishes, and after he delivered the finished report to Company A headquarters downtown, she pulled him into the bedroom for a proper welcome-home.
    Yet marital bliss couldn’t keep the election off Matt’s mind forever. And Amy always did know what was bothering him.
    “What will you do if Ferguson wins?” she asked later that night.
    He shook his head. “I don’t know, Liebchen . A lot of the men are planning to resign. I don’t want to work for the Fergusons, and it would free us up to go back to the Hill Country. But if we all quit… who’ll be left to protect the state?”
    “What about working for another agency, like Presidio County?”
    “Guess that’s an option. Wouldn’t be the same, though.”
    “I know.” She kissed him. “But it would keep you in the fight, which going back to Castell wouldn’t. And these days, there’s more work for lawmen than there is for most other people.”
    He nodded and kissed her back. “Guess I’ll see about talking with the sheriff when we know more.”
    But in the end, the decision wasn’t entirely his to make. Both Roosevelt and Ferguson won, and many of the Rangers promptly resigned, including Hamer. Matt might have joined them had he not been called to Odessa on a murder case shortly after having cast his vote. Then in January, one of Ferguson’s first acts as governor was to fire every last man who was still on the Ranger force.
    Two weeks later, Adolf Hitler was named chancellor of Germany. Matt hated the man from the first newsreel he saw and had a sinking feeling that the dark days ahead for Texas and for America wouldn’t be over in a hurry. So did Chris, newly graduated from Texas Tech with a Master’s in aviation, who was worried enough about both Germany and the insanity happening in Manchuria that he went off to Virginia to join