1920: America's Great War-eARC Read Online Free Page B

herself in San Diego a few months ago. She was an excellent shot. She was not so familiar with the Bowie knife strapped to the outside of her boot. She jokingly said she mainly used it to clean her nails, while her cousin Ella once quietly accused her of using it to castrate suitors. Kirsten had the feeling that Ella was a fragile creature who was having a difficult time dealing with the harshness of ranch life.
    Motion in the sky caught her eye. For an instant, she thought it might have been an airplane. She’d only seen a couple of them and they fascinated her as they did just about everyone. Even though they’d been invented more than fifteen years ago, they were still so rare that the very sight of one resulted in gasps of wonderment. Someday she would like to go up in one. Maybe she could use some of her precious savings to buy a ride from one of those pilots people were calling barnstormers.
    But no, it was just a vulture. Then she saw a couple of more. Something had disturbed them and caused them to take off from the ground. They were a mile or so away and she wondered what they were feeding on. Was it one of her cattle, perhaps a calf that had wandered off? Or was it something else?
    Kirsten pulled the rifle from its sheath and checked to see that it was loaded. It always was but she always checked. She urged the horse into a trot and hoped it was only a calf.
    It wasn’t. Kirsten fought down the bile in her throat at the sight of the two dead men lying face down on the ground. They were Mexicans and had been shot in the back, executed, hands tied behind them. She did not dismount and examine them more closely. No point, she decided. Their wounds were just too massive.
    That was about as much as she could tell after the vultures had been working on them. Their clothes were in rags and they were barefoot. More casualties from the long and bloody civil war being fought in Mexico, she thought, but these two had been chased or followed into California. They were likely soldiers of defeated General Alvaro Obregon, murdered by the victorious forces of Mexico’s current president, Venustiano Carranza. If the newspapers were to be believed, Carranza had essentially proclaimed himself a dictator, thanks to the backing of Imperial Germany.
    That Mexicans were killing Mexicans was nothing unusual. They’d been doing it for decades. But now they’d begun taking their fighting and their vengeance killings into the United States. The presence of the two dead men meant that they’d passed close by her ranch in order to get where she had found them, and that was very unsettling. She didn’t want her ranch to become the front lines in a Mexican civil war.
    What to do now, she wondered? First, she decided, she would send a detail out to bury the two men and, second, notify the sheriff. The sheriff would be powerless to do anything but take down a report and forward it to the state capital at Sacramento where they would also do nothing.
    Kirsten wiped her brow with a neck kerchief. Her cousins, however well meaning, would use this as further ammunition in their argument that she should sell and move on. Maybe they were right.
    She rode home and gave the instructions for the burial detail, ignoring Ella’s look of concern. She went to her room, poured several buckets of water into the cast iron tub, stripped, and settled in. The water was comfortably lukewarm. She wondered what her late husband would have done about the situation she’d discovered.
    Kirsten laughed quietly. She knew what Richard would have done. He would have climbed into the tub with her, washed the riding dirt from her body, and then thrown her down on the bed where they would have romped like naked bunnies. Damn, she missed him. It wasn’t fair, she thought as she closed her eyes and envisioned him. It just wasn’t fair.
    * * *
    “Good morning, Mister Vice President.”
    Secretary of State Robert Lansing was startled. Then he grinned at his secretary, the