The Jackals Page 2

  —Mark 7:21–22

  Finally and most disappointing, there is another jackal in our midst—and perhaps he is the worst of the entire lot.

  Matt McCulloch is a man of middle age, tall, lean, with a fine head of hair (yes, your balding editor is jealous of his black and gray mane). Once, he lived in our town, was respected, was honest, and the only time longtime residents recall him ever wearing a gun came when he went hunting for a deer or some rabbits to feed his family; or to rid West Texas of an unnecessary rattlesnake that had its fangs set to sink into the leg of one of the fine horses McCulloch and his sons raised and sold.

  And then, some years back, Matt McCulloch returned home after driving six fine horses to sell to Texas Rangers Captain John Courtright—Courtright was killed in the line of duty four years ago, and ably replaced, but never forgotten, by our current Rangers leader, J.J.K. Hollister. McCulloch’s home and barn were in ashes, his family butchered, and his horses stolen. The one daughter in the family was missing, kidnapped by those red-heathen butchers.

  So McCulloch, after burying his beloved wife and sons, spent more than a year futilely searching for his daughter. Eventually, reluctantly giving the child up for dead like the rest of his family, he rode back to the Rangers headquarters and enlisted with Captain Courtright. He pinned on the cinco pesos star. He bought a long-barreled Colt revolver, and his Winchester carbine was replaced with a new, more current model, as his previous rifle had been consumed by the flames the murderous fiends had set to his home. The Texas Rangers in his battalion pitched in for the new carbine, I have been informed.

  Of course, none of us at the Herald Leader can know how it must feel to lose one’s entire family and home to such butchery. We do, on the other hand, feel Matt McCulloch’s pain. And for a few years, Matt McCulloch wore his badge with honor and lived by the code of the Texas Rangers and by the law of the state of Texas.

  Yet if you look at the stock of his Winchester rifle or the walnut butt of his revolver of .44-40 caliber, you will see the carvings that represent the men he has killed—as well as three Apache women, and one Mexican bandit woman—all reportedly as rough and wild as the brutes they rode with and all deservedly and justifiably killed. The brown stocks are now, literally, carved so much that the walnut is but a mass of ditches and scratches covered with grime, filth, and, yes, stained by blood.

  “Sometimes,” a former friend of the weary-eyed Ranger told me, “I get the feeling that Matt has to kill. He just doesn’t know anything else after these years. He thinks every man he goes after, or every outlaw that comes after him, is responsible for the murders of his wife and children. And the truth of the matter is, it pains me to say, but we’ll never know—not while we’re living on this earth, I mean—who all committed that horrible crime. Those Apache vermin might be alive. Most likely, they’re dead. And some think that maybe it was white renegades who made it look like the work of those red devils. And it just doesn’t matter. McCulloch kills. He kills because he has to kill. He kills, I sometimes think, hoping that somebody will kill him.”

  It pains me to say this, too, but our state and our towns and our people and citizens and visitors and friends would be much better off if Matt McCulloch, the jackal with the Devil in his soul, would be killed.

  “No one calls for justice; no one pleads a case with integrity. They rely on empty arguments, they utter lies; they conceive trouble and give birth to evil.”

  —Isaiah 59:4.

  To these three jackals—Sergeant Keegan, the despicable Breen, and Ranger McCulloch—we quote from the Book of Kings: “You have done more evil than all who lived before you.”

  Yes, yes, yes, there are likely other jackals in our midst. And more will come. But for this town, this community, this county, this glorious state and the entire Southwest to grow, we need to get rid of—one way or another—this trio of jackals.

  CHAPTER ONE

  “Begging the lieutenant’s pardon, sir, but, if you were to ask me, sir, that’s not a trail I’d be inclined to follow.”

  Sergeant Sean Keegan, Eighth United States Cavalry, stood beside his dun gelding, tightening the cinch of the McClellan saddle, and sprayed a pebble with tobacco juice. He knew the lieutenant, proud little peacock that he was, kept watching and waiting for Keegan to look up before he began ridiculing the sergeant in front of the men.

  Keegan let him wait.

  Eventually, though, Sean Keegan did look up, and even pushed up the brim of his slouch hat so Second Lieutenant Erastus Gibbons of Hartford, Connecticut, fresh out of West Point, could see exactly what Keegan thought of the fool.

  “Did Captain Percival put you in charge of this patrol, Sergeant?”

  “No,” Keegan said, and wiped his mouth when he added, “Sir.” He thought, But he should have.

  “And Sergeant”—Lieutenant Gibbons seemed to like this—“in what year were you graduated from the United States Military Academy?” It made him feel important. Made the kid with acne covering his face think that he was a real man. A soldier, even.

  “Never went. Never even got to New York state.” Keegan tugged on the butt of the Springfield rifle in the scabbard, just to make sure he would be able to pull it out cleanly and quickly. They’d have need of it in a few minutes if he couldn’t talk some sense into the green pup.

  “That’s what I thought,” the lieutenant said.

  Keegan gathered the reins to his dun. “And when was it, sir, that you got your sheepskin from West Point?”

  The eight troopers, all about as young and as inexperienced as the lieutenant, laughed, which made the lieutenant’s face turn as bright as the scarlet neckerchief he wore around his fancy blue blouse.

  “Quiet in the ranks!”

  As Gibbons, who had been at Fort Spalding all of four months, took time to bark commands and insults at his enlisted men, Sergeant Keegan climbed into his saddle and lowered the brim of his hat.

  The hat, he guessed, was likely older than Erastus Gibbons.

  When he had talked himself into even a deeper red face, the kid sucked in a deep breath, and turned his wrath again on the sergeant. “Do you remember our orders, Sergeant?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “So do I, Sergeant. Captain Percival said if we were to come across tracks that we suspected belonged to hostile Apaches, we were to pursue—and engage—unless the tracks led to the international border. Is that your understanding of my, no our, orders, Sergeant?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Have we crossed the Rio Grande, Sergeant?”

  “No, sir.”

  “And what do you make of those tracks?” Gibbons pointed at the ground.

  “Unshod ponies. Four. Heading into that canyon.”

  “Unshod. What does that lead you to believe, Sergeant?”

  “Likely Apaches, Lieutenant.”

  “So why should not we, numbering ten men, pursue, as we have been ordered, four, four stinking, uncivilized, fool Apache bucks?”

  If the Good Lord showed any mercy, Keegan thought, He would let Erastus Gibbons drop dead of a stroke or heart failure right now.

  The way the kid’s face beamed, there had to be a fair to middling chance that would happen, but the lieutenant caught his breath, uncorked his canteen, and drank greedily. His face began to lose its color, and Keegan began to think that nobody lives forever, and that he had lived a hell of a life, but getting eight kids killed alongside him wouldn’t make him proud when he had to face St. Peter, or more than likely, Old Beelzebub or Satan himself. He didn’t care one way or the other about Erastus Gibbons’s fate. The punk had become tiresome, a boil Sean Keegan couldn’t lance.

  “Orders say pursue, Lieutenant,” Keegan pointed out. “I’m all for pursuing. Just not following . . . into there.” He nodded at the canyon’s entrance.

  “Sergeant, you disgust me.”

  Still, Keegan tried again. “Four Apaches can do a world of hurt, sir. Especially in that canyon.”

  The kid shook his
head. “All right, Sergeant. What would you have in mind?”

  Keegan pointed at the tracks. “Those Apaches didn’t hide their trail. Tracks lead right into that canyon, and this canyon twists and turns about a mile and a quarter till it opens up. They could be hiding anywhere in those rocks, waiting to pick us off.”

  “Or they could be riding hard to Mexico.”

  Keegan shook his head. “If they wanted to be in Mexico in a hurry, they wouldn’t ride through this death trap.”

  “You haven’t told me what you have in mind, Sergeant.”

  Keegan pointed. “Leave Trooper Ulfsson here with the horses in the shade. He don’t speak enough English, I don’t speak no Swede, and his face is blistered already. Leaving him here might keep him from dying of sunstroke. The rest of us climb up to the top. I work my way ahead, and when I spot where those bucks are laying in wait, I fetch you boys. We ambush the ambushers.”

  The lieutenant shielded his eyes as he examined the mesa then swallowed while still looking at the top. “How long would it take us to climb up there, Sergeant?”

  Fifteen minutes if I was alone, Keegan thought, but answered, “Us? Forty minutes.”

  “The other side isn’t as high, Sergeant,” Gibbons said. “Why not try that side?”

  “Because the Apaches will be on this side. And they’ll see us up yonder.”

  The young whippersnapper shook his head. “How do you know which side the Apaches are on, Sergeant? If they’re even up there.”

  “Because you’re shielding your eyes from the sun, Lieutenant. And once we start throwing lead at those bucks, they’ll be shielding their eyes to try to spot us.”

  The kid looked away, wet his lips, and stared hard at the tracks and the entrance to the canyon. “And what if we find no Apaches?”

  Keegan shrugged. “Then we’ve rested our horses, gotten a good stretch of our legs, Ulfsson ain’t dead, and you get to write me up in your report to Captain Percival that I’m a fool.”

  “And the Apaches?”

  Keegan shrugged again. “We’ll fight them another day.” If I prayed, would that change the punk’s mind?

  No, no, that wouldn’t do. If Sean Keegan prayed, God himself would drop dead of a heart attack—and that would be another black mark in the book on Sean Keegan.

  The kid pulled down the chinstrap on his kepi, and Sean Keegan knew the boy had made up his mind.

  “Sergeant, there’s no glory to be found ambushing four Apache renegades. More important, I don’t think those savages are waiting for us. We’re going through that canyon, Sergeant. Follow those tracks, and catch the Apaches wherever they might be.”

  “You’re in command, Lieutenant.” Keegan pulled the trapdoor Springfield from the scabbard and braced the carbine’s stock against his thigh.

  “I gave no order to draw your long gun, Sergeant.” The boy’s face was brightening again. “Return that weapon, soldier!”

  Keenan sprayed the ground with tobacco juice, then hawked up the quid, and spit it out, too. “I don’t reckon I’ll do that, bub.” He was done showing respect to this know-it-all who was about to get killed some young boys who might’ve made decent soldiers.

  The punk stuck his finger, hidden underneath that fine deerskin gauntlet, at Keegan. “You better put that Springfield away, Sergeant. Or when we reach Fort Spalding, I’ll have you up on charges of disobeying a direct order.”

  “If we reach Fort Spalding, boy.” Keegan looked behind him. “And I suggest you gents follow my advice and get your carbines at the ready. You’ll have need of them soon enough.”

  A few Adam’s apples bobbed, and some of the green pups even glanced down at their Army-issued. 45-70 weapons. But none dared disobey the lieutenant. Not that Sean Keegan could blame them. He slightly recalled what it was like to be a young soldier after he had joined the Second Michigan in ’61. Thinking that you had to do everything a fool officer told you to do. Not knowing any better. But Keegan had learned. Maybe some of these boys would live long enough to learn, too.

  “You’ll wind up a buck private, Keegan, and in the guardhouse for a month.”

  “I hope you’re right, Gibbons. Means I won’t be dead.”

  The kid turned around, angry, and raised his right hand. “Follow me! Follow me!” He rode, ramrod straight—Keegan would give the kid that much—into the canyon.

  He let the other soldiers pass him, felt their stares, but he did not look them in the eye. Didn’t want to remember what they looked like, for one reason. And he waited till the blond-headed, sunburned pup of a Swede, Trooper Ulfsson, passed by at the rear. Only then did Keegan nudge his dun.

  “Hey,” Keegan called out, dropping his reins over the horse’s neck, and holding out his right hand. “I’ll take the lead rope to the pack mule, sonny.”

  The Swede stared at him blankly.

  “The rope, boy. The rope.” He gestured again, and finally, just grabbed hold of the lead rope and waited till the raw recruit understood. “You’ll need both hands soon enough, Ulfsson,” Keegan said.

  The boy likely only understood his name.

  The Swede rode ahead, pulled up even with another soldier whose name Keegan could not remember.

  Column of twos. Riding to their deaths.

  Keegan sighed and rode behind them, pulling the mule along. Yeah, Ulfsson would have need of two hands in a short while, but that’s not why Keegan wanted to pull the mule. The mule carried the kegs of water. It also carried ammunition.

  They’d have need of both shortly.

  * * *

  Most of the troopers looked up as soon as they entered Dead Man’s Canyon, but had to duck their heads, pull down their hat brims, or raise a gauntlet-covered hand to see. Keegan did not bother looking for Apaches. He knew he would never be able to see the butchers. He studied the terrain on the ground. Always looking for a place where he and anyone who lived through the first volley could take cover.

  Two hundred yards into Dead Man’s Canyon, Keegan figured, They’ll hit us now.

  Only they didn’t, and Keegan gave a begrudging nod of respect. Smart Apaches. Don’t hit us where we figure you will. Make us sweat a little more.

  The first shot knocked Ulfsson out of the saddle. The second punched another hole in Keegan’s hat, which did not fall off. A long time ago, he had learned to wear a hat that fit tight and snug.

  He quickly lost track of the other shots, too busy shoving the carbine back into the scabbard, gathering the reins he had draped and cramming those into his mouth. He reached out as he passed the body of the Swede, somehow managing to snag the reins to that horse before it bolted away.

  He saw Ulfsson and frowned. At least the boy wasn’t suffering from sunstroke anymore.

  Keegan pulled hard on the lead rope, spurred the dun harder, and grabbed the reins with his left hand. “To those rocks!” he yelled. “To those rocks!”

  The Apaches had picked a good spot. No place for the soldiers to hide on the western edge. Just some rocks and a clump of juniper on the east.

  One of the troopers didn’t make it. Keegan saw the dust fly from the back of his blue blouse, saw the kid’s arms fly out, and watched him topple onto the ground. Keegan cursed. There was no way anybody was going to catch up to his spooked gelding. The little gray kept galloping down the canyon.

  Somehow, the other six troopers made it to what would have to serve as cover. Keegan credited that to the Apaches. They might have been younger than the kids wearing the blue of the United States Army. Of course, shooting downhill took a bit of knowledge. Mainly, Keegan figured, the Indians didn’t want to kill the horses.

  He saw Lieutenant Erastus Gibbons, trying to unpin his left leg from underneath his dead brown gelding. The boy was screaming as the rest of his command thundered past him. Keegan didn’t stop, either, until he was behind the rocks. There, he quickly but deftly wrapped the reins to his dun around a juniper branch, and securely tied the lead rope around the tree’s trunk, pulling the mule up shor
t.

  Next, Keegan started yelling at the frightened troopers. “Baker!” At least, he thought that was the boy’s name. “Holster that six-shooter, kid. You need both hands. You’re holding the horses. All but mine and the mule. They’re not going anywhere. You kids, you can’t shoot a carbine and hold your horse. One at a time, take your horses to Baker over yonder.

  “You, you blasted fool, holster that pistol, son. Those Apaches aren’t in range for a short gun. Do it.

  “You. Get your horse over there to Baker. Pronto.

  “Baker, don’t you fret. These horses were sold to the Army four years back. These are Matt McCulloch horses. As good as the Army ever got, back in the day.”

  A bullet clipped a branch.

  “But they will skedaddle if you don’t keep a good hold on the reins. Whatever you do, don’t let go of those reins, bub.”

  The boy held two horses, and Keegan was running ahead, keeping low, making himself as small of a target as he could, nodding at the next soldier to take his horse to Baker.

  After sliding to a stop, Keegan peered over the boulder. Lieutenant Gibbons had managed to get his leg from underneath the dead horse, but was huddling close to the horse. Bullets slammed into the animal. Each shot made the kid cringe and cry out in terror.

  “They’ll find the range soon enough,” Keegan said, more to himself. He looked at the redheaded kid with a face covered with freckles next to him. “Boy, where in blazes is your carbine?”

  Tears welled in the boy’s eyes. He made a vague gesture to Baker and the horses. “In the . . . holder . . . on my . . . stallion,” he managed to choke out.

  “It ain’t a holder, kid. It’s a scabbard. And it ain’t a stallion, either, but a gelding.”

  “What’s a gelding, sir?” the teenager asked.

  Keegan shook his head, but somehow he smiled. “An unfortunate stallion, boy. And I ain’t no sir. Here.” He shoved his own Springfield into the redhead’s trembling hands. “Don’t blow your fool head off by accident. And don’t blow mine off, either.”