Riders of the Hard Country (el. knyga) (skaityta knyga) | knygos.lt

Aprašymas

Caleb Freeman grows up as the son of a soldier, and when he comes of age, he puts on the coat his father, Isaiah, set aside and rides out with the Tenth Cavalry, certain he is following the old man into glory. The hard country has another lesson waiting. The same nation that would not free its people without a war is now taking another people's land by war, and it has put a wronged man into its uniform and pointed him at a people wronged still further.

Caleb rides well. He scouts, he fights, he outlasts the desert and the mountains and the long, cold marches, and the Army pins a medal on him for how well he does it. But he has his father's eye, and his father's dangerous habit of writing things down, and in a soldier's record-book, he keeps the account the official reports will never carry, the first pages in which a Freeman calls the country a liar to its face. He keeps, too, the memory the record erases entirely: a man on the other side, one of the people he was sent to break, whom the histories wiped away as though he had never drawn breath.

Caleb comes home with the medal and the guilt braided so tightly that the family, for a generation, decides the medal is easier to keep than to discuss. Years on, an old keeper lifts two things from the cedar chest and sets them in the light at last, a brass cavalry buckle worn soft by a dead man's thumb, and beside it the medal no one would name. He is the last one who knows the story. He means to be the one who finally says it.