The Virgin
Seventeen-year-old Gospel, an orphan from Tennessee born in 1863, two years before President Lincoln’s assassination, ended up in Texas when Fort Quitman was re-commissioned in 1880.
There's a short story (historical fiction) my dad wrote and published titled - "The Virgin", It's about a Buffalo Soldier named Gospel Storey stationed at Fort Quitman in West TX in 1880. The title refers to the Guadalupe Mountains in West TX (the highest point in Texas), and stories about a silhouette of - La Virgen de Guadalupe visible in the rock-faced peaks...
My current writing project is expanding that character - "Gospel Storey" and telling the story of his life before and after his time in West Texas, how he reconciles the horrible things he's done in the past despite yearning to live a life of peace, with the harsh realities of his present situation as a black man in the late 19th century...
Below is the original as imagined and written by my dad...
The Virgin
by Clarence Giles
I
It was the soldiers’ tenth day searching for Mescalero-Apaches with no luck.
First Sergeant Cecil Mackey bent to retrieve the reins he had dropped as he watered his horse in a foothill spring of the desolate, west Texas Guadalupe mountains. At the same time, he and other Buffalo Soldiers heard the familiar crack of a Springfield carbine.
Flinching, his first thought was, “What fool is firing’ his carbine?” The bullet had struck the water about two yards in front of him and would have hit him in the upper back had he not bent to retrieve the reins just before the carbine’s report. Then, he heard multiple crackling gunshots. This time, he realized the shots were too far away to have come from his comrades spread along the meandering spring’s bank. Fear replaced anger, sending a chill down his spine as he realized the shot was from an Apache, not his soldiers...
