The Red Pender Chronicles

Ignition Point, Part 1, September 1939

The man's name was Robert Joseph Brown, but it had been a long time since anyone had called him that.

The last person to do so had been a judge, the first time he had been sentenced for vagrancy.

Brown still remembered looking up to the bench, barely able to meet the man's gaze and the fierce

fire of contempt that had blazed in his eyes. The judge was practically swimming in his great black

robes. He had been lean and gaunt, more so than Brown himself, though it was not poverty that ate away at

him. He had sentenced Brown to thirty days' detention as though he had been giving candy to a deeply

unworthy child. That pronouncement was the last time

that Robert Joseph Brown had heard his own name spoken,

in part because it was the last time he had ever told it to anyone.

Since then he'd had more names than he could possibly recall,

in little towns and labor camps, in breadlines and soup kitchens.

He had seen a great deal in ten lost years.

He had done things he never could have imagined, things he had needed to do to survive,

and he had done none of them under the name of Robert Joseph Brown.

"'Digger!' a voice hissed, echoing through the empty space,

sound bouncing off brick and concrete all stripped to the bare walls, hidden deep in the shadows.

"'Digger, where did you go?'

"'Over here,' Brown called, stepping into a shaft of moonlight, gesturing with his hands for the kid to keep his voice down.

"'He wasn't exactly a kid, but he was young, and he was new to the street.

"'Brown had made the mistake of helping him out, and now he was saddled with him.

...