by Mike Blakely
I glanced to the west. The moon was diving like a kingfisher. And the rainbow—why, it was waiting there, its colors growing deeper and richer. The moon and the rainbow were just about to touch. “I don’t have a real pearl,” I said, “but I’m going to show you exactly what one looks like.”
I lined them up and turned them westward. “See the moon?” I said.
“I see it,” Ben the Third answered.
“And a rainbow!” Connie squealed.
“Watch!”
The moon slipped behind that rainbow as a little wind came from somewhere and whipped the shower into a light mist, heightening the hues in the arching bands of color. The moon seemed to slide along inside the curve of that rainbow, all the way to the horizon, like a South Seas god riding to Earth.
The girls clutched at my arms, and Ben the Third bear-hugged my waist. Their little gasps told me they knew how rare a moment it was.
Billy Treat was right. It was one in ten thousand. It was just like a pearl.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Between 1850 and 1910, a series of “pearl rushes” occurred from New Jersey to Texas and from Florida to Wisconsin. In some isolated areas, for mysterious reasons, freshwater mussels produced unusually high numbers of pearls. These local discoveries led to small-scale economic booms for some rural communities as working families enjoyed the treasure-hunting aspects of opening mussels in search of pearls. Most pearl rushes lasted for a year or two at best, as local mussel populations were depleted.
One of the last pearl rushes occurred in 1910 at Caddo Lake, on the Texas-Louisiana border. For this novel, however, I have created a fictitious pearl boom set in 1874 in the dying riverboat town of Port Caddo, Texas, on Caddo Lake. Port Caddo, now a ghost town, was a viable community until railroads preempted the riverboat trade in East Texas.
The Great Caddo Lake Pearl Rush did not occur in 1874, as this novel suggests. All characters in this story are fictitious, and none is based on any particular historical figure. I have, however, attempted historical accuracy in all else, including the riverboat trade, the freshwater pearl industry, life in Port Caddo, and the clearing of the Great Raft by government snag boats. If the Caddo Lake pearl boom had started in 1874 instead of 1910, it might have happened this way … .
Forge Books by Mike Blakely
The Last Chance
Shortgrass Song
Too Long at the Dance
Spanish Blood
Dead Reckoning
The Snowy Range Gang
Comanche Dawn
Come Sundown
Forever Texas
Moon Medicine
Praise for Mike Blakely
“One of America’s best writers of the Western.”
—The Dallas Morning News
“Besides a fine spinner of tales, Mike Blakely is a poet and a musician at heart, which makes his narrative sing and his unusual characters dance their way through the epic story of the changing West.”
—Elmer Kelton, seven-time Spur Award and
three-time Western Heritage Award winner
“Painstakingly researched and carefully written, the novel is an .obvious labor of love that merits comparison with such established classics as Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, Little Big Man, and Hanta Yo.”
—Booklist on Comanche Dawn
“A well-made novel can sometimes inform a reader far better than documents of history. Comanche Dawn is such a novel.”
—Dee Brown, author of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee
“Funny, suspenseful, and affecting.”
—Publishers Weekly on Come Sundown
“Come Sundown is a marvelous book, full of action, color, and meaning … . Read it for its insight—and for its gripping story.”
—David Nevin, author of Dream West
“Come Sundown is great fun, witty, and highly believable … . Blakely is deservedly among the top Western authors working today.”
—True West
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
SUMMER OF PEARLS
Copyright © 2000 by Mike Blakely
All rights reserved.
A Forge Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010
www.tor-forge.com
Forge® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.
eISBN 9781466820043
First eBook Edition : April 2012
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Blakely, Mike.
Summer of pearls / Mike Blakely.
p. cm.
“A Tom Doherty Associates book.”
ISBN-13: 978-0-7653-2257-9
ISBN-10: 0-7653-2257-9
1. Texas—Fiction. 1. Title.
PS3552.L3533 S86 2000
813’.54—dc21
00-034722
First Hardcover Edition: September 2000
First Trade Paperback Edition: December 2008