Adios Eden

About the Book

    With the Civil War about to start, confederate Elan Mundy leaves his silver mining camp outside Monterrey, Mexico and heads home to New Orleans to reunite his old cavalry unit. Counting down the days to the war´s beginning Adios Eden takes Elan from Monterrey to Laredo, San Antonio and Galveston then, finally, home.

    Temporarily escaping Mexican bandits in Monterrey, Elan is joined by two orphaned children he´d earlier befriended - a crippled seventeen year old boy and his precocious twelve year old stepsister. Because the children have stolen gold and silver from the bandits, he and his young companions are pursued by them throughout the story.

    In Laredo, Elan is coerced into allowing an aging, reprobate Texas Ranger to join them. When the group continues north for San Antonio they become involved with a Yankee lieutenant and his detachment of soldiers battling a band of renegade Commanches. Some of the Indians escape and return to fight the lieutenant again several days later when they depart San Antonio for Galveston, and Elan and his group become involved once more.

    An obsessive prostitute waits to renew her relationship with Elan in San Antonio. Successful, she creates competition and jealous encounters with the precocious twelve year old, and Elan is caught between them.

    The physical challenges for Elan are numerous, but the story´s major emphasis is on lingering love for his dead wife conflicting with a new and different love with the prostitute - and conflicts within his own social and political structure as he and the prostitute strive to find a proper place with each other. She is a Unionist from New York, Elan a firm believer in the Confederate cause. In Galveston, port of departure for Yankee soldiers leaving Texas, their individual beliefs and ideals too strong for even love to overcome, she boards a ship home while Elan and the twelve year old continue on to New Orleans. The war has started.

    There are subplots and subordinate paricipants, but the only principals alive in the end are Elan, the prostitute and the twelve year old.

    The title, Adios Eden, refers to the South as Eden, Adios as it´s eminent destruction.

About the Author

Born and raised in the New Orleans area, Gran Robertson now resides in southern California where he continues to write historical dramas and stories reflecting life's basic building blocks of honor, courage, love and obligation. He can be reached at his E-mail address: granrobertson@aol.com.