Massacre of Eagles

by William W. Johnstone

  “Mrs. Kirby, how nice to see you,” he said. He looked at Gary, who still had his arm in a sling.

  “How is your arm?” Falcon asked.

  “I have shown it to everyone,” Gary said. “I’m the only one of my friends who has ever had a broke arm,” he added proudly.

  “Broken,” Mrs. Kirby corrected.

  “Yes, ma’am, I’m the only one.”

  Mrs. Kirby laughed and shrugged her shoulders. “Correcting his grammar is a losing battle,” she said. The smile left her face. “Have you heard the rumor about Mr. Bellefontaine? Do you really think he is dead?”

  “Generally, when the rumor is that strong, it is true,” Falcon said. “I’m sure he is dead. The question, of course, is who killed him?”

  “It could have been almost anyone,” Mrs. Kirby replied. “As I told you before, he was not a man one could easily like. I imagine he had many enemies, and since the story came out of his brutal activity with those poor people in the Crow village, almost anyone could have done it. I’m just glad that my husband had already left Mr. Bellefontaine’s employ. We are going back East, tomorrow.”

  “Well, I wish you all the luck in your move,” Falcon said.

  “So, did you just drop by the table to visit? Or would you like a piece of fried chicken?”

  “I would love a piece of fried chicken.”

  The first shot rang out, just as Falcon reached for the drumstick.

  One year later—excerpt from the now-published MacCallister and Cody: Heroes of the Western Plains

  Before we come to the conclusion of this factual story of the adventures of Falcon MacCallister and Buffalo Bill Cody, I believe it would serve the reader well if a perfect picture could be summoned from my imperfect words, by which the reader could visualize the appearance of Falcon MacCallister on the day of the events to be here described.

  Falcon MacCallister is a plainsman in every sense of the word, yet unlike any other of his class. He is north of six feet in height and looks even taller due to his bearing. He has broad shoulders, well-formed chest and limbs, a face that, though cured by exposure to wind, sun, rain, and cold, is nevertheless considered handsome by every woman who has ever made the observation. Whether mounted or afoot, Falcon MacCallister is one of the most perfect specimens of manhood one might ever see.

  Of his courage, there can be no question, for it has been tested far too often for there to be any doubt. His skill in the use of the pistol and rifle is unerring, while his deportment is entirely free from all bluster or bravado. He is anything but a quarrelsome man, yet he has been involved in innumerable conflicts, always instigated by another party, and almost always ending in the death of his adversary.

  On the day of the parade and picnic and while celebrating the victory over Mean to His Horses, extensively written about in a previous chapter of this book, Falcon MacCallister was confronted by the desperadoes, Sam Davis, Lee Regret, and Lucas Depro. Without regard to the safety of the innocent men, women, and children of DeMaris Springs, the three brigands began firing at Falcon MacCallister with the intention of killing him.

  “MacCallister, you have drawn your last breath!” Davis yelled. “For my friends and I have come to lay you in your grave!”

  “It is not I who will die this day, but you, for I am armed with the power of right!” Falcon called back. As he shouted at the villainous three, he drew his pistol and with but three shots, none wasted to put the innocent to danger, killed the men who would have killed him.

  And with their demise, this story of Falcon MacCallister and Buffalo Bill Cody, a factual account more thrilling and exciting than anything I have written of the two of them before, despite that it is true, comes to an end. Buffalo Bill has returned to tour with his Exhibition, and Falcon, though earnestly invited to be a part of the show, declined. As of this writing Falcon MacCallister continues to live in the wind, and his destiny now, as it ever shall be, is danger.

  Turn the page for an exciting preview of the blockbuster new series, America’s leading Western writer captures the most violent chapter in frontier history—in the saga of a Yankee with a rifle, an outlaw with a grudge, and a little slice of hell called . . .

  SAVAGE TEXAS

  by William W. Johnstone with J. A. Johnstone

  Authors of The Family Jensen and Matt Jensen, The Last Mountain Man

  Coming in September 2011

  Wherever Pinnacle Books are sold

  “Texas . . . Texas . . .”

  —LAST WORDS OF SAM HOUSTON, SOLDIER, PATRIOT, AND FOUNDER AND PRESIDENT OF THE REPUBLIC OF TEXAS

  CHAPTER ONE

  Some towns play out and fade away. Others die hard.

  By midnight Midvale was ablaze. The light of its burning was a fire on a darkling plain.

  It was a night in late March 1866. Early spring. The earth was quickening as Midvale was dying.

  The well-watered grazing lands of Long Valley in north central Texas supported many widely scattered ranches. Midvale had come into being at a strategic site where key trails came together. The town supplied the needs of local ranchers and farmers for things they couldn’t make or grow but couldn’t do without.

  A cluster of several square blocks of wooden frame buildings, it had a handful of shops and stores, several saloons, a small café, a boardinghouse or two, and a residential neighborhood.

  Tonight Midvale had reached its end. Its passing was violent. The killers had come to usher it into extinction. Raiders they were, a band of cutthroats, savage and merciless. They came under cover of darkness and fell on the town like ravening wolves—gun wolves.

  The folk of Midvale were no sheep for the slaughter. The Texas frontier is no place for weaklings. For a generation, settlers had fought Comanche, Kiowa and Lipan Apache war parties, Mexican bandits and homegrown outlaws. The battle fury of the recent War Between the States had left this part of Texas untouched, but there was not a family in the valley that hadn’t given husbands and sons to the armies of the Confederacy. Few had returned.

  The folk of Midvale were not weaklings. Not fools, either. They were undone by treachery, by a vicious attack that struck without warning, like a bolt out of the blue. By the time they knew what hit them it was too late to mount any kind of defense.

  Ringing the town, the raiders swooped down on it, shooting, stabbing, and slaying. No fight, this—it was a massacre.

  After the killing came the plundering. Then the burning, as Midvale was put to the torch.

  The scene was an inferno, as if a vent of hell had opened up, bursting out of the dark ground in a fiery gusher. Shots, shrieks sounded. Hoofbeats drummed through the red night as the killers hunted down the scant few who’d survived the initial onslaught.

  All were slain outright, all but the young women and children, boys and girls. Captives are wealth.

  The church was the last of Midvale to burn. It stood apart from the rest of the town, a modest distance separating it from worldlier precincts. A handful of townfolk had fled to it, huddling together at the foot of the pulpit.

  That’s where the raiders found them. Their screams were silenced by hammering gunfire.

  The church was set on fire, its bell-tower spire a flaming dagger thrusting into night-black sky. Wooden beams gave, collapsing, sending the church bell tumbling down the shaft into the interior space.

  It bounced around, clanging. Dull, heavy, leaden tones tolled Midvale’s death-knell.

  The marauders rode out, well-satisfied with this night’s work. They left behind nearly a hundred dead men, women and children. It was a good start, but riper targets and richer pickings lay ahead.

  The war had been over for almost a year, but there was no peace to be found on the Texas frontier. No peace short of the grave.

  But for the ravagers and pillagers who scourge this earth, the mysterious and unseen workings of fate sometimes send a nemesis of righteous vengeance

  CHAPTER TWO

  From out of the north came a lone rider, trailin
g southwest across the hill country down into the prairie. A smiling stranger mounted on a tough, scrappy steeldust stallion.

  Man and mount were covered with trail dust from long days and nights of hard riding.

  Texas is big and likes bigness. The stranger was no Texan but he was big. He was six feet, two inches tall, raw-boned and long-limbed, his broad shoulders axhandle wide. A dark brown slouch hat topped a yellow-haired head with the face of a current-day Viking. He wore his hair long, shoulder-length, scout-style, a way of putting warlike Indians on notice that its owner had no fear of losing his scalp to them. A man of many ways, he’d been a scout before and might yet be again. The iciness of his sharp blue eyes was belied by the laugh lines nestled in their corners.

  No ordinary gun would do for this yellow-haired wanderer. Strapped to his right hip was a cut-down Winchester repeating rifle with a sawed-off barrel and chopped stock: a “mule’s-leg,” as such a weapon was popularly known. It had a kick that could knock its recipient from this world clear into the next. It rested in a special long-sheath holster that reached from hip to below mid-thigh.

  Bandoliers lined with cartridges for the sawed-off carbine were worn across the stranger’s torso in an X-shape. A sixgun was tucked butt-out into his waistband on his left side. A Green River knife with a footlong blade was sheathed on his left hip.

  Some time around midmorning the rider came down off the edge of the Edwards plateau with its wooded hills and twisty ravines. Ahead lay a vast open expanse, the rolling plains of north central Texas.

  No marker, no signpost noted that he had crossed a boundary, an invisible line. But indeed he had.

  Sam Heller had come to Hangtree County.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Monday noon, the first day of April 1866. A hot sun topped the cloudless blue sky. Below lay empty tableland, vast, covered with the bright green grass of early spring and broken by sparsely scattered stands of timber. A line of wooded hills rose some miles to the north.

  The flat was divided by a dirt road running east-west. It ran as straight as if it had been drawn by a ruler. No other sign of human habitation presented itself as far as the eye could see.

  An antlike blur of motion inched with painful slowness across that wide, sprawling plain. It was a man alone, afoot on the dirt road. A lurching, ragged scarecrow of a figure.

  Texas is big. Big sky, big land. And no place for a walking man. Especially if he’s only got one leg.

  Luke Pettigrew was that man, painfully and painstakingly making his way west along the road to Hangtown.

  He was lean, weathered, with long, lank brown hair and a beard. His young-old face, carved with lines of suffering, was now stoically expressionless except for a certain grim determination.

  He was dressed in gray, the gray of a soldier of the army of the Confederate States of America. The Confederacy was now defunct a few weeks short of a year ago, since General Robert E. Lee had signed the articles of surrender at Appomatox courthouse. Texas had joined with the South in seceding from the Union, sending its sons to fight in the War Between the States. Many had fallen, never to return.

  Luke Pettigrew had returned. Minus his left leg below the knee.

  A crooked tree branch served him for a crutch. A stick with a Y-shaped fork at one end, said fork being jammed under his left arm and helping to keep him upright. Strips of shredded rangs were wrapped around the fork to cushion it as best they could. Which wasn’t much. A clawlike left hand clutched the roughbarked shaft with a white-knuckled grip.

  A battered, shapeless hat covered his head. It was faded to colorlessness by time and the elements. A bullethole showed in the top of the crown and a few nicks marked the brim.

  Luke wore his uniform, what was left of it. A gray tunic, unbuttoned and open, revealed a threadbare, sun-faded red flannel shirt beneath it. Baggy gray trousers were held in place by a brown leather belt whose dulled-metal buckle bore the legend: CSA.

  Many extra holes had been punched in the belt to coincide with his weight loss. He was thin, half-starved.

  His garments had seen much hard use. They were worn, tattered. His left trouser leg was knotted together below the knee, to keep the empty pant leg from getting in his way. His good right foot was shod by a rough, handmade rawhide moccasin.

  Luke Pettigrew was unarmed, without rifle, pistol or knife. And Texas is no place for an unarmed man. But there he was, minus horse, gun—and the lower part of his left leg—doggedly closing in on Hangtown.

  The capital of Hangtree County is the town of Hangtree, known far and wide as Hangtown.

  From head to toe Luke was powdered with fine dust from the dirt road. Sweat cut sharp lines through the powder covering his face. Grimacing, grunting between clenched teeth, he advanced another step with the crutch.

  How many hundreds, thousands of such steps had he taken on his solitary trek? How many more such steps must he take before reaching his destination? He didn’t know.

  He was without a canteen. He’d been a long time without water under the hot Texas sun. Somewhere beyond the western horizon lay Swift Creek with its fresh, cool waters. On the far side of the creek: Hangtown.

  Neither was yet in sight. Luke trudged on ahead. One thing he had plenty of was determination. Grit. The same doggedness that had seen him through battles without number in the war, endless forced marches, hunger, privation. It had kept him alive after the wound that took off the lower half of his left leg while others, far less seriously wounded, gave up the ghost and died.

  That said, he sure was almighty sick and tired of walking.

  Along came a rider, out of the east.

  Absorbed with his own struggles, Luke was unaware of the newcomer’s approach until the other was quite near. The sound of hoofbeats gave him pause. Halting, he looked back over his shoulder.

  The single rider advanced at an easy lope.

  Luke walked in the middle of the road because there the danger of rocks, holes and ditches was less than at the sidelines. A sound caught in his throat, something between a groan and a sigh, in anticipation of spending more of his meager reserves of energy in getting out of the way.

  He angled torward the left-hand side of the road. It was a measure of the time and place that he unquestioningly accepted the likelihood of a perfect stranger riding down a crippled war veteran.

  The rider was mounted on a chestnut horse. He slowed the animal to an easy walk, drawing abreast of Luke, keeping pace with him. Luke kept going, looking straight ahead, making a show of minding his own business in hopes that the newcomer would do the same.

  “Howdy,” the rider said, his voice soft-spoken, with a Texas twang.

  At least he wasn’t no damned Yankee, thought Luke. Not that that made much difference. His fellow Texans had given him plenty of grief lately. Luke grunted, acknowledging that the other had spoken and committing himself to no more than that acknowledgment.

  “Long way to town,” the rider said. He sounded friendly enough, for whatever that was worth, Luke told himself.

  “Room up here for two to ride,” the other said.

  “I’m getting along, thanks,” muttered Luke, not wanting to be beholding to nobody.

  The rider laughed, laughter that was free and easy with no malice in it. Still, the sound of it raced like wildfire along Luke’s strained nerves.

  “You always was a hard-headed cuss, Luke Pettigrew,” the rider said.

  Luke, stung, looked to see who it was that was calling him out of his name. The rider was about his age, in his early twenties. He still had his youth, though, what was left of it, unlike Luke, who felt himself prematurely aged, one of the oldest men alive.

  Luke peered up at him. Something familiar in the other’s tone of voice . . .

  A dark, flat-crowned, broad-brimmed hat with a snakeskin hatband shadowed the rider’s face. The sun was behind him, in Luke’s eyes. Luke squinted, peering, at first unable to make out the other’s features. The rider tilted his head, causing the light to
fall on his face.

  “Good gawd!—Johnny Cross!” Luke’s outcry was a croak, his throat being parched from lack of water.

  “Long time no see, Luke,” Johnny Cross said.

  “Well I’ll be go to gawd-damned! I never expected to see you again,” said Luke. “Huh! So you made it through the war.”

  “Looks like. And you, too.”

  “Mostly,” Luke said, indicating with a tilt of his head and a sour twist of his mouth his missing lower leg.

  “Reckon we’re both going in the same direction. Climb on up,” Johnny Cross said. Gripping the saddlehorn with his right hand, he leaned over and down, extending his left hand.

  He was lean and wiry, with strength in him. He took hold of Luke’s right hand in an iron grip and hefted him up, swinging the other up onto the horse behind him. It helped that Luke didn’t weigh much.

  Luke got himself settled. “I want to keep hold of this crutch for now,” he said.

  “I’ll tie it to the saddle, leave you with both hands free,” Johnny said. He used a rawhide thong to lash the tree branch in place out of the way. A touch of Johnny’s boot heels to the chestnut’s flanks started the animal forward.

  “Much obliged, Johnny.”

  “You’d do the same for me.”

  “What good would that do? I ain’t got no horse.”

  “Man, things must be tough in Hangtree County.”

  “Like always. Only more so, since the war.”

  They set out for Hangtown.

  Johnny Cross was of medium height, compact, trim, athletic. He had black hair and clean-lined, well-formed features. His hazel eyes varied in color from brown to yellow depending on the light. He had a deep tan and a three-day beard. There was something catlike about him with his restless yellow eyes, self-contained alertness and lithe, easy way of moving.