Destiny of Eagles Read online

  Look for These Exciting Series from

  WILLIAM W. JOHNSTONE

  with J. A. Johnstone

  The Mountain Man

  Preacher: The First Mountain Man

  Matt Jensen, the Last Mountain Man

  Luke Jensen, Bounty Hunter

  Those Jensen Boys!

  The Family Jensen

  MacCallister,

  Flintlock

  The Brothers O’Brien

  The Kerrigans: A Texas Dynasty

  Sixkiller, U.S. Marshal

  Hell’s Half Acre

  Texas John Slaughter

  Will Tanner, U.S. Deputy Marshal

  Eagles

  The Frontiersman

  AVAILABLE FROM PINNACLE BOOKS

  Destiny of Eagles

  WILLIAM W. JOHNSTONE

  PINNACLE E-BOOKS

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  www.kensingtonbooks.com

  All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

  Table of Contents

  Also by

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Notes from the Old West

  Teaser chapter

  Teaser chapter

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Notes

  PINNACLE E-BOOKS are published by

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  119 West 40th Street

  New York, NY 10018

  Copyright © 2004 William W. Johnstone

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.

  PINNACLE BOOKS and the Pinnacle logo are Reg. U.S. Pat. & TM Off.

  First electronic edition: September 2016

  ISBN: 978-0-7860-3758-2

  Prologue

  New York, February 14, 1884

  The house servant who opened the door recognized J.P. Murray, and stepped back quickly to allow him to come in from the snow.

  “Hello, James. Is the Assemblyman in?” Murray asked, taking off his snow-flecked coat and handing it, and his hat, to the servant.

  “Yes, sir, Mr. Murray. He is in the library.”

  “How is he?”

  “He is brokenhearted, as I’m sure you can imagine,” James said. “But you know Mr. Roosevelt, he keeps his suffering to himself.”

  “Do you think it would be all right if I went in?”

  “Yes, sir, I’m sure Mr. Roosevelt will take comfort in your visit,” James said.

  Murray walked down the long hallway from the foyer, then into the library, where he saw Teddy Roosevelt standing at the window, looking out at the falling snow.

  “Teddy?” he called from the door.

  Roosevelt looked around upon hearing his name called. His eyes were red, the more so because they seemed enlarged behind the pince-nez glasses that he was wearing. His face, always round, seemed a bit more so now because there was a puffiness under his eyes.

  “Hello, Joe,” Roosevelt said. “It was good of you to come.”

  “I came as soon as I heard,” Murray said. “God in heaven, man, your mother died this morning and your wife this afternoon? How can one man be asked to endure so much?”

  “I just made an entry in my diary,” Roosevelt said. He handed the diary to his friend.

  There was a huge X at the top of the page. Beneath the X was a simple entry.

  THE LIGHT HAS GONE OUT OF MY LIFE

  “She died in my arms,” Roosevelt said. “I . . . I take some comfort from the fact that her last awareness as she left this world was feeling my arms around her.”

  “And the baby?”

  “The baby survived,” Roosevelt said. “Bless her little heart, she knows nothing of the sorrow that happened in this house today. She’s just a little girl, a fighter, I might add, taking her place in this new world of hers.”

  “I sent word of your bereavement to the Governor, and the Speaker,” Murray said. “You being a member of the Assembly, I’m sure they will want to acknowledge it in some way.”

  “Thank you. And thank you for coming over, especially in the snow.”

  “I wasn’t going to let a little snow stop me,” Murray said.

  “Ironic that it would be snowing today,” Roosevelt said.

  “Oh? How so?”

  “Some of my fondest memories of Alice are with the snow. We liked to walk in it, to catch the snowflakes on our tongue, to play in it like children. I just reread one of my earlier entries in my diary, made when I was still a student at Harvard. That’s where I met her, you know.”

  “You met Alice at Harvard?”

  “Well, not Harvard, of course. But in Boston. Read the entry for February third, 1880.”

  Murray thumbed through the pages and started to read.

  “Read it aloud, if you don’t mind,” Roosevelt asked.

  Murray cleared his throat, then began to read. “Snowing heavily, but I drove over in my sleigh to Chestnut Hill, the horse plunging to his belly in the great drifts, and the wind cutting my face like a knife. My sweet wife was just as lovable and pretty as ever; it seems hardly possible that I can kiss her and hold her in my arms; she is so pure and so innocent, and so very, very pretty. I have never done anything to deserve such good fortune.”

  Murray looked up again. “That is a very touching entry, Teddy.”

  “Do you believe in the survival of the soul, Joe?”

  “Yes, of course I do. Don’t you?”

  “Yes, I do. I believe the soul is kept in God’s memory. And that means that, after we die, we can revisit any part of our life that we wish, any time we wish. I have no doubt in my mind but that . . . right now . . . this very minute, my Alice and I are riding together in that sleigh, pressed against each other under the warm lap robes. For me, here, now, it is but a memory. But for Alice it is real, it is actually happening this very minute. And I am there with her, Joe. I am there with her.”

  “That’s a nice thought,” Murray said.

  “But,” Roosevelt said, holding up his finger, “here is the wonder of God’s mystery. Even as Alice is reliving that moment with me, my dear mother may be holding me on her lap when I was her infant. I am in both places at the same time. And in both cases, it is really happening. It is like our life is a single stream, everything we have ever done we are still doing, and when you are in God’s memory, you can dip into that stream at any place you wish.”

  “I’m sure you can take comfort from that,” Murray said, clearly not comprehending everything Roosevelt was telling him.

  “You will come to the funeral?” Roosevelt asked.

  “Yes, of course I will.”

  “It will be a double funeral. Then, we shall christen the baby.”

  “Have you a name for the baby?”

  “Yes. I am calling her Alice, after her mother.”

  “What are you going to do now, Teddy?”

  “Now?” Roosevelt replied. He shook his head. “Funny you should word your question that way, for now is all I have. I cannot, for the life
of me, project myself beyond this very moment in time. I don’t know what the next year, month, day, or even minute will bring. For joy or for sorrow, my life has been lived out.”

  “No,” Murray said, shaking his head. “Your life isn’t lived out, Teddy. It’s just beginning. I know it’s hard for you to think such a thing now, especially after today. But I’ve known from the moment I met you that you were something special. You have a bright and brilliant future in politics, my friend. I think I can promise you a spot at the national Republican Convention in Chicago, this year.”

  “I will not support James Blaine,” Roosevelt said.

  “You could do worse than hitch your wagon to a rising star,” Joe said.

  “I consider the man corrupt, and I will not support him,” Roosevelt said.

  “Well, at this point it doesn’t matter. All that matters is that you find some way to get on with your life. And let’s face it, Teddy, your life has been Alice and politics. With Alice gone, you have only politics left.”

  “And my integrity,” Roosevelt insisted.

  “Yes, of course that.”

  Chapter 1

  MacCallister

  It had been three years since Falcon MacCallister stumbled across the settlers’ wagon. The buzzards were still circling when the big man on a tall black horse came on the scene from the south.

  One man lay on his blankets, his head back, his throat cut, a pool of coagulated blood around him. Owen Blanchard looked like he had gone down fighting; he had three bullet holes in his gut. There were three females, one adult and two girls, ages twelve and thirteen. The young ages not withstanding, all three had been raped before they were murdered.

  Dismounting and brushing his long, wheat-colored hair back from his blue-steel eyes, he read the sign as clearly as if a newspaper reporter had witnessed the event and wrote the story. He found the family’s name, Blanchard, in a trampled Bible, picked up a piece of a map, saw a few scraps of paper and a woman’s locket. Immigrants from the East, the little family had started west to get a piece of the American dream.

  What angered Falcon more than anything was the realization that this was not the work of Indians, defending their land. The Blanchards were killed by their own kind in some sort of savage blood lust.

  Falcon buried what was left of them, then stood over the rough grave, bowed his head, and said a little prayer over them.

  “Lord, in case you’re paying any attention now to what you let happen here, these were the Blanchard family, from east of Neosho. I don’t know anything to say about them, good or bad, except they didn’t deserve this.”

  They didn’t deserve it, his deep grief echoed, any more than his wife, Marie Gentle Breeze, deserved what happened to her back then. But then, things happen all the time that folks don’t deserve.

  In that moment, Falcon MacCallister felt an anger deeper than any he had known in a long time. “I couldn’t do anything about you, Marie,” he continued aloud, raising his eyes toward the sky, where his beloved wife now dwelt among the spirits. “Lord,” he growled, “there’s a limit to what any man can tolerate, and I believe I just found it. Help me if you want to, or not if you don’t care, but I guess I have to go after those men. Somebody else tracked down those savages who should have been mine, but there’s another score here to settle and there’s nobody else here right now. Just me. Amen.”

  That had set Falcon on a personal quest for revenge, a quest that didn’t end until a gut shot shattered his ribs and nearly killed him. But during his quest, he uncovered a land-fraud scheme that extended all the way back to Washington, D.C., at the highest echelons of government. Head of the scheme was Asa Parker, said by many to be the fastest and deadliest gunfighter in the West. It was Asa Parker’s men . . . he called them his vigilantes . . . who were responsible for the massacre of the Blanchard family.

  Falcon finally caught up with Parker in the little town of Paradise, caught him in the middle of a stolen herd of horses.

  * * *

  For a big man, Asa Parker was quick. Elusive and cunning, he moved among the milling horses, and it was all Falcon could do to keep track of where he was.

  But when the horses were bunched in the middle of town, then set off with some shots in the air, only dust remained to hide a man.

  Holding Diablo on a tight lead, Falcon had backed off around the corner of the hotel. But when the thunder of the stampede had passed, he dropped the reins and stepped out into the street. There was no need to shout orders, and no one to shout them to. The Mason boys knew what to do, and they were doing it.

  While Jude headed off to knock down the fences at the livery and corrals, Jubal prowled the edges of the town, looking for snipers. He had already found one, and the man lay sprawled under the rickety water tank. Now Jubal was hunting for more of them, keeping pace from building to building, setting fire to everything that would burn.

  Fading babble, punctuated by shouts, dimmed as the various noncombatant residents of Paradise fled for their lives.

  Falcon strode the firelit street, his hunter’s eyes cutting this way and that. The street was a littered shadowy clearing where the dust still swirled on the breezes like mist on a pond. From knee-level down, it was hard to see anything.

  Down the street Jubal yelled a warning and Falcon ducked, feeling a jab of lingering pain from his wound as his .44 came up. It bucked once, licking at the gloom with a fiery tongue, and a man pitched headfirst from the roof of the old trading post.

  Falcon was past the big wagon when some impulse made him turn and duck. A bullet sang past his ear.

  There in the street, rising out of the settling dust, was a man as big as Falcon himself... a man with a spitting gun in his hand.

  Falcon dodged, tumbled, and rolled, and the pain in his middle was a living thing. But there was no giving there, no feeling of things tearing loose. It was only pain. Two more bullets kicked up dirt beside him as he rolled again, coming up on his elbows to return fire.

  The specter in the dust dodged wildly, and ran. In an instant he was out of sight beyond the wagon.

  Falcon came to his feet, advancing. A broken-down trough hid the underside of the wagon, and he started around it, then doubled back and went the other way.

  Asa Parker was waiting for him, crouched in shadows behind a tall wheel. He held a ready .45 and leaned outward, ready to shoot the instant Falcon cleared the water trough.

  Falcon circled around the lashed-up tongue and stepped past the iron tire of the off fore-wheel.

  “Time’s up,” Parker,” he said levelly.

  If he expected Asa Parker to react suddenly, he was disappointed. The big outlaw didn’t even move for a moment. Then he raised himself slowly. His hands went up, and his .45 dropped to the ground.

  He turned slowly. “I guess you got me, MacCallister,” he said. “I’ll come along peaceably.”

  Falcon stared at the outlaw for a moment, then lowered his gun as though accepting his surrender.

  Parker’s eyes glittered in the gloom. Slowly, he lowered his hands and extended his right hand as though to shake it. The flicker of motion at his sleeve was almost undetectable.

  Falcon’s .44 roared once, then again. Both shots took Asa Parker front and center, forming two dark little holes that could have hidden behind a playing card.

  The outlaw stood for a second, weaving on braced feet, then fell facedown in the dust. In his outflung right hand was a nasty-looking little .41 derringer, exposed as his dead fingers uncurled from it.1

  * * *

  The Blanchard family was avenged, but even with Asa Parker and the outlaws who had worked with him rotting in their graves, Falcon still did not know peace. For three years after his run-in with Asa Parker, Falcon lay low while he nursed his wounds, both physical—he still had twinges of pain from the bullet Billy Challis had put in him—and emotional. Marie Gentle Breeze had been dead for several years now, but sometimes he could hear her laughter in the still wind that was her namesake. And
at night, wrapped up in his bedroll out on the plains, he could feel her warm body next to his.

  Falcon hung up his guns and lived a quiet life, fully intending to spend the rest of his days quietly enjoying the fortune in gold that his father had left him. The first thing he did was go to New York. His brother and sister, the twins Andrew and Rosanna MacCallister, were performing in a Broadway play. He could remember, before the war, how they would entertain, not just the family, but all the people of MacCallister Valley.

  Everyone said they were good enough to be professionals, but no one really believed the twins would actually follow through with their ambition. After all, MacCallister Valley was a long way from New York.

  But follow up they did, and Falcon went to New York to see them for the first time in many years.

  Falcon MacCallister was not a man who was easily impressed, but it was hard not to be awed by New York. The streets were crowded with a steady-moving stream of conveyances of all kinds, from wagons to carriages to horse-drawn omnibuses. In addition, trains moved back and forth through the city, sometimes on elevated rails, sometimes on the ground.

  “What do you think of our city, little brother?” Rosanna asked.

  “I’ll be honest with you,” Falcon said. “I don’t like it.”

  “You don’t like it?” Andrew replied. “How can anyone not like New York? Why, this is the most exciting city in the whole world.”

  “MacCallister is too crowded for me,” Falcon said. “And New York is much worse than MacCallister.”

  Rosanna and Andrew laughed.

  “Andrew, were you and I ever such country bumpkins?” she asked.

  “Surely not,” Andrew said. He smiled at Falcon. “But country bumpkin or not, I can’t tell you how happy we are to see you.”

  Again, Andrew and Rosanna embraced Falcon.

  Falcon didn’t say it out loud, but just as they wondered how he could be such a bumpkin, he wondered how they could be such dandies. If he hadn’t known for a fact that they were his blood kin, no one would have been able to convince him of it.