The Rattler of Zacatecas
by Jay Raymond White
Category: Fiction

War! Here is a word that erupts into the mind and sets the heart afire. And into that cardiogenic blaze tumble more words to encourage and sustain it: cruelty; love; hate; lust; murder; madness....In 1910 the Mexican Revolution raced across the face of the continent like a holocaust, driving every living thing before it, and most of those it drove, it overtook and destroyed. Those it could not destroy, or would not, it made mutant, their descendents capable of innocence, or amnesia; but it formed in their hearts, nevertheless, the language of future betrayels: the crude and familiar cartage of desperate human conflict. Here is a story of two men and a woman whom war could not destroy: Rodolfo Villalobos, a giant Yaqui Colonel of artillery in Pancho Villa's famed Division del Norte; Senorita Lucy Jurado, a beautiful Creol lady born to the Spanish aristocracy, and Lewis Flintoff Files, a demented, treasonous American sailor who escaped Saigon to fire the last shot of the Mexican Civil War. The first two characters depicted here were instrumental in the assassination of General Francisco Villa. The last one avenged him.