Without thinking he said, “Tornadoes. Did you ever see one?”

“God is merciful,” said the land man. “No.” He shuffled through a stack of papers. “Here. One hundred and fifty acres on the Colorado River, near Austin, a spring reportedly, a structure reportedly, unfenced, undefended, and subject to miasmas. Here is another—taken by the Confederate government for taxes. It’s on the Guadalupe, abandoned, since the family was all killed in a Kiowa raid. This is near a town called, horribly, Comfort. They probably left their skillets and bedding, all things considered.”

“I see,” Simon said. He put a finger on the top paper and turned it toward him, but he could not read the legal language and so turned it back.

“And what are you doing in Galveston, young man?”

“I play fiddle,” he said, hesitantly. “And we have a group. Currently playing at the Jamaica.”

“Ah.” A knowing silence and then the land-sales man recovered himself. “And here . . .” He drew out a deed from under a stack of badly printed maps. “This is an interesting one. The attempt to get a clear title should take you the rest of your life. It’s a section of the old Peters Colony land grant, far away in the interior of our great state, where an English consortium attempted to set up a colonizing scheme and tried to run it like a lord’s estate back in old England. The settlers came after his manager with loaded pistols. Then the settlers ran off with all the deeds and records to the Dallas County Courthouse. The Texas Republic and then the State of Texas passed some laws regarding this situation as to titles and deeds, to what end I do not know. But here you have four hundred acres, unimproved, unfenced, no structures, situated just south of the Red River. Indian country. Five dollars an acre. All yours for two thousand, in what currency is a question. I assume you know how to load and shoot a weapon? Because you would have need of one, if not several.”

“Yes,” said Simon, and took the paper. He was silent for a measure, two measures. He looked at the other papers pertinent to the deed. It was all very legal and confusing: deeds, grants, maps with great white spaces, reports by the Texas Rangers. He leaned back in his chair and drummed his fingers on his thigh. “Do you have some kind of land for sale that is . . . simple?”

“Land titles are never simple. Never. Not here. Maybe back in . . . where are you from?” The man gave him a narrow glance as if the better to understand Simon’s provenance, his background, his finances.

“Paducah, Kentucky.”

“Ah. Who are your people?”

“Alexanders. Boudlins.”

“I’m from Little Egypt. I knew some Alexanders in Paducah. They owned the big livery stable, the one Forrest raided.”

“Right,” said Simon. “That’s my mother’s people.”

The man raised a grizzled eyebrow and seemed to perk up; maybe this fiddler had money after all. “Well. Your mother’s people. But I’m afraid I don’t know any Boudlins.”

“They’re from around Baton Rouge,” Simon answered. He hoped the man would not continue to ask impertinent questions. This was about money, about finding a piece of land and somehow making a deal on it, and not an inquiry as to his antecedents. Simon was not quite sure how these deals happened but he would find out. “So what does that mean, a clear title?”

The man considered; a mosquito circled relentlessly and the smell of the office was of damp leather-bound volumes earthy with unclaimed acres. “It means that nobody else has a claim on it, that claim being hidden away in some obscure land office or government office having to do with legislation passed by either the Republic of Texas or the State of Texas or the Confederacy or all three. Some claim you don’t even know about. You pay your money down on a mortgage and then at some time somebody else comes along and says, ‘Wait a minute, that’s mine!’ And they got a paper says they paid down on it. “

“All right,” said Simon.

“And Texas land titles are a dog’s breakfast. Because first it was under Spain. To register a land title you had to travel all the way to Mexico City. So hardly anybody did. Then it was under Mexico. Same deal. Nobody had a secure title to land or buildings. Then it was the Republic of Texas, and their files are moldering yet in the dankest corners of the capitol in Austin. The State of Texas added a whole new pile. Then the Confederacy, which is now in its death throes and didn’t do squat about land titles anyway, and soon we will be under some other government, who knows what, and so there you are.”

And Simon thought, I don’t care. I’ll buy land somewhere, somehow. There has to be a way.

He said, “But lots of people own land. Here in Galveston. They own town lots and businesses and so on.”

“Yes, well, we just cripple along.”

“What about this place on the Red River? The old land grant place?”

The man shuffled out the papers. He read from the title description. “Four hundred acres approximately fifteen miles south of the Red River, straight south of Preston’s Bend—survey marks here indicated—unfenced and unimproved, no structures.” He ran his finger down the pages. “Here’s the latitude and longitude. Latitude thirty-three degrees and four minutes north, longitude ninety-six degrees fifty minutes west. Here, I’ll write it down for you. Also the various survey markings, blazed trees, bluffs and so on and the fact that there is a spring of water flowing into Big Mineral Creek, hardwood trees meaning live oaks and Spanish oaks, so on and so on, about two hundred acres of open meadow, or so they say. Plus a noxious sink of rock oil where your milk cow can sink in up to her hocks and die. Price is five dollars an acre, that’s two thousand dollars in case you don’t want to be seen counting on your fingers. Owner, Solomon G. Bradford.”

“I want it,” said Simon, and suddenly smiled. “That’s it. I want it.” It seemed that the papers had been waiting for him in this untidy little office, waiting for his appearance with fiddle strings in his pocket. It came to him sure as guns.

“Subject to Indian raids. Also I warn you, white people up there are lunatics. They hung a lot of people up there because they weren’t loyal to the Confederacy. It was a hanging spree of unparalleled dimensions.”

“I want it. Who do I pay?”

The man raised his head to look into Simon’s face. He took off his low-crowned black hat and wiped his bald skull and put the hat back on.

“Well,” he said. “I swan.”

Simon waited.

“Son, you need a down payment of about two hundred dollars as ten percent of the price, but I am going to make that two hundred fifty as times are so unsure. Then you need a lawyer to draw up a deed of sale, and you have to pay him because he has to go look up stuff in whatever records are available. Let’s say you just give the down payment to me. Makes it all simpler. Then you have to also pay me for title research and to record the deed. Then you have to go there and survive. Now, what else?”

Simon lowered his head as he counted up the costs. He had to find the man who owned it. If he were dead or alive. He needed a hundred dollars down payment because he was sure he could get the person to come down. Then more for title research and recording the deed. This was his land and he knew it.

“So where is this Solomon Bradford?”

“No idea. Don’t know anything about him; old, young, killed in the war, died of yellow fever, living a life of luxury in Austin as a clerk to some politician, who knows?”

Simon got up out of the chair. He was not about to hand a penny over to this man. He had been born into a world of horse traders and was well acquainted with deception and the need for caution at every step when it came to buying and selling. He casually pressed aside the top paper, read the second, the longitude and the latitude of this land up in the Red River Valley, then bent his head down to regard his hands with all the music in them and a brief thought of how rare it was to have your heart stirred like this out of an ordinary day in the ordinary sunshine. He needed to find Solomon Bradford. That was the first job.

“Well, thank you, much appreciated.” His land and his girl almost within reach. It was going to take some doing. And himself yet young and inexperienced in many ways. But that’s why God made people young at first, to get the doing done. He smiled politely, pulled the sticky door open, and said, “Looks like I’ll just have to wait a few years to go looking.”

“That would be wise.”