fragment of a star, the knife carried within it 'a bit of heaven – or a bit of hell.'
Fused from a
by Paul Wellman
IRON The
The Iron Mistress is Paul Wellman's fictional re-imagining of the life of Jim Bowie, the Louisiana-born adventurer who was martyred at the Alamo with Crockett, Travis and the rest and whose name is forever alloyed with the fearsome knife that bears his name – the knife that Wellman, in a stroke of literary genius, christened the Iron Mistress. In these passages from the book, Wellman describes how Arkansas blacksmith James Black forged the original Bowie knife from "a fragment of a star," and how the mingled destinies of the man and the blade would lead them ultimately to immortality. – Tom Davis