Dead river, p.1
Dead River, page 1
Look for these exciting Western series from
bestselling authors
WILLIAM W. JOHNSTONE
and J. A. JOHNSTONE
Smoke Jensen: The Last Mountain Man
Preacher: The First Mountain Man
Luke Jensen, Bounty Hunter
Those Jensen Boys!
The Jensen Brand
MacCallister
The Red Ryan Westerns
Perley Gates
Have Brides, Will Travel
Will Tanner, U.S. Deputy Marshal
Shotgun Johnny
The Chuckwagon Trail
The Jackals
The Slash and Pecos Westerns
The Texas Moonshiners
Stoneface Finnegan Westerns
Ben Savage: Saloon Ranger
The Buck Trammel Westerns
The Death and Texas Westerns
The Hunter Buchanon Westerns
AVAILABLE FROM PINNACLE BOOKS
THE JACKALS DEAD RIVER
WILLIAM W.
JOHNSTONE
AND J.A JOHNSTONE
PINNACLE 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 ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Teaser chapter
PINNACLE BOOKS are published by
Kensington Publishing Corp.
119 West 40th Street
New York, NY 10018
Copyright © 2022 by J.A. Johnstone
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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.
To the extent that the image or images on the cover of this book depict a person or persons, such person or persons are merely models, and are not intended to portray any character or characters featured in the book.
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
Following the death of William W. Johnstone, the Johnstone family is working with a carefully selected writer to organize and complete Mr. Johnstone’s outlines and many unfinished manuscripts to create additional novels in all of his series like The Last Gunfighter, Mountain Man, and Eagles, among others. This novel was inspired by Mr. Johnstone’s superb storytelling.
If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the Publisher and neither the Author nor the Publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”
PINNACLE BOOKS, the Pinnacle logo, and the WWJ steer head logo are Reg. U.S. Pat. & TM Off.
ISBN: 978-0-7860-4910-3
ISBN-13: 978-0-7860-4911-0 (eBook)
PROLOGUE
From Box 31, Folder 7, Perdition County Archives, Crossfire, Texas
Unpublished letters and manuscripts dealing with Purgatory City, other ghost towns, towns that merged with larger metropolises, and uncorporated towns, villages, way stations, and railroad sites.
* * *
They called my father a jackal. And that was the most polite word I remember hearing in Purgatory City, Texas. They called him a hard man. They called him lots of things. Well, so did I. There were times when I was a little girl that I thought my pa loved horses—mustangs, mostly—more than he loved me.
Much of my childhood has been forgotten, wiped out by a memory—a nightmare—I will not relate to you or anyone, though it still haunts my dreams. Often, I can’t even remember the faces of my late, dearly departed brothers. Or even Mother’s face. How beautiful I’d like to think she was.
Yet I just do not know.
But I remember my father.
I also recall vividly a wild Irishman, who loved to take a nip—oh, no, that does not do this man justice. He was a man who drank more liquor than could fill the tank on a fire wagon. He was a man who loved to brawl, no matter that he rarely won a round of fisticuffs, but he loved to fight. He would fight over a drop of a hat or a wink of an eye or just for a bet, even if the wager would win him only a copper cent.
They called him a jackal, too.
Yet I remember him with kindness. Stories around tell he once cared for a little baby in the jail that often served as his second home in Purgatory City. Most people thought this man would eat babies raw and spit out their tiny little bones. Did he? I never saw that. What I remember of this alleged jackal was a man who wore the uniform that freed the Negroes from bondage and prevented the dissolvement of our Union. Yes, I know. Here in Texas most of our great citizens pride those ancestors who wore the gray, who fought under John Bell Hood, Stonewall Jackson, Robert E. Lee, those who “saw the elephant”—as they like to say—in glorious battles at places like Shiloh, Chancellorsville, Seven Pines, Bull Run, Antietam, Kennesaw Mountain, Atlanta, Cold Harbor, and Gettysburg. But even those old soldiers, most of them all gone now, fought for Texas. And well, they also had a strong respect for the men they fought against.
Sean Keegan was one of those men. He also served in the frontier cavalry in Texas, fighting against the Indians that protested white settlers for taking over their country. Sean Keegan might have been branded a jackal, especially after he was court-martialed and drummed out of the service he so dearly loved, but I know this alleged jackal was tried and condemned for doing what any man, woman—anyone—would have done. He did what he had to do to protect the lives of his fellow soldiers. The men who rode with Sergeant Keegan on that day, I have to believe, would never have said anything derogatory about their gallant hero. Most likely, I think now with a great big grin on my face, they kept the man from County Cork filled with Irish whiskey and fine stout Irish beer.
A jackal? I call him a hero. I call him a man.
And I remember someone else, a man whose reputation was lower perhaps than that of my father. Especially after all the dime novels and picture shows and so-called factual accounts printed in newspapers like the one we have here in Crossfire—the county seat. Is it any wonder people frown at the very thought of a bounty hunter—a man who tracks down other men, not for justice, but for the money he might collect?
In this terrible calamity many are calling a Great Depression, I do believe the men sent by banks to foreclose on homes or to kick people off their properties where loved ones might be buried are much more vile than a man who had the courage to bring wanted men—some charged and condemned for the most wicked of crimes—to justice. Jed Breen was such a man, and while nobody recalls his name today, it was bandied around quite often all across this land we call West Texas.
Jed Breen was the third man termed a jackal in the roaring days of the town that is no more than a memory. Purgatory City thrived for a few more years beyond a rip-roaring, Hades-raising decade, till Progress—that awful thing known as Progress—doomed the city. It was nothing more than a few streets of mostly saloons and places of ill repute, when the railroad chose another path.
Fate—and the engineers who picked the path for the Great Texas and California Railway—is why Crossfire has become the seat of Perdition County. Fate is why this letter, this memoir, I write in my feeble hand will be posted to the Crossfire Public Library. And Fate is why Purgatory City is nothing more than a memory to most of us who remember it at all.
Perhaps this letter, these rambling thoughts of an aging Texican, will help people remember where they came from.
I am rambling, of course. I was writing about the third and last jackal, the bounty hunter Jed Breen. They said he had the blackest heart of anyone in the land—a black heart, they said, to contrast with his stark white hair. They said he never brought in anyone alive, but I can deny that as an ugly falsehood. Jed Breen brought in several men alive.
One of them was an Apache renegade named Blood Moon.
It strikes me as strange—no, it is heartbreaking and even numbs my very soul—the Apache Indian who terrorized both sides of the border between our United States and Mexico is the one whose name is remembered. Gridiron teams across the county are called Apaches, Indians, Warriors, Redskins
I can barely see well enough to write.
The best historians will be able to tell you Blood Moon was an Apache renegade who waged basically a one-man war against Mexicans and Texans and federal soldiers in the Southwest. He was so vilified and so terrified many settlers the total reward offered for him was a staggering amount today, let alone in the decade after the War Between the States.
Blood Moon was a jackal, too, and perhaps he deserved to be labeled thusly.
Some men have even called another Indian, an Apache, too, who lived most of his life in Mexico, and tried to avoid most white people and most Mexicans, a jackal, as well. Three Dogs, he was named. But if he were a jackal, I never saw him that way. He was like a father to many of his people, and he was like a father to me. For a long, long, terrible while, he was the only father I had . . . or the only one I remembered.
Until one day . . . or weeks . . . and then—
Well, this is no story to be told by an old person whose memory is fading, whose hand has begun to ache, and whose fingers are cramping.
Three men were called jackals in Purgatory City. Matt McCulloch, a former Texas Ranger and a grand mustanger back when wild horses ran free in this part of the state. Sean Keegan, the former cavalry soldier and rumored drunkard. And a bounty hunter called Jed Breen.
These white men were likely despised worse than the Apache butcher we called Blood Moon. And the old warrior whose name was Three Dogs.
One more man from these wild and savage times needs to be remembered, though I cannot attest to his background except from what I’ve heard. He was a soldier of the Confederacy, too, and his name was Block Frazer.
The way I recall, from my old fading brain, this Block Frazer did not hail from Texas but from some Southern state—Mississippi, Louisiana, one of the Carolinas. I don’t think it was as far north as Virginia or Tennessee. After learning the Confederacy was lost, he crossed the border with some of his men at the invitation of the ruler of Mexico. I don’t remember that emperor’s name, but you likely can find it in some history book. Perhaps even at the library.
I have read and heard stories that other former Confederate soldiers, their egos and will strong, also went to Mexico, refusing to admit defeat to President Lincoln’s rule. Some stayed in Mexico, others grew tired or homesick after months or a few years, or they realized their welcome in that fine country was wearing out since Juarez had taken over the country.
Block Frazer, however, remained. I don’t know why he stayed and I do not know why he hated Indians so much, but Block Frazer became—the way I remember things—a true jackal. He was an evil, evil, evil man, and he had his men do evil, evil, evil things.
Block Frazer was a jackal, though as far as I can tell, no one in either Mexico or Texas called him such.
I did not know Block Frazer. He came into my life just once. I did not even know his name until months after I saw him try to kill my father.
Here, my dear readers, is what I know, and what I remember, and what in my aching heart is true.
Matthew McCulloch, Sergeant Sean Keegan, and Jed Breen are whom Purgatory City, Perdition County, Texas, branded jackals. But if it were not for those three men—and, I can say with a weak smile, one of them, in particular—I would not be here to write this piece of minor trivia, minor history.
Believe me or call me a fraud. That is your right.
McCulloch, Keegan and Breen were jackals to many, but they will always be heroes to me. And in their own way, Blood Moon and Three Dogs, were heroes, too. Block Frazer, well, he was a scoundrel and the vilest of men and though I should not think such thoughts, I hope he has been burning in Hell for many, many years. And that he will continue to rot in misery for he was a true jackal.
Note from J.S.T. Cohen, Archivist, Crossfire Public Library, November 13, 1936. This letter arrived on October 1, postmarked Crossfire, but with no return address and was not signed. While we are unable to verify the veracity of this—woman’s from the look of the handwriting—account, research in our own archives has turned up some supporting evidence that warrant its claims.
An editorial from the Herald Leader of Purgatory City—no longer, as the letter writer observed, existing—indeed ran a page 1 article in the [illegible] under this headline.
THE TIME HAS COME
FOR OUR CITIZENS TO STAND UP
TO THE JACKALS OF WEST TEXAS
AND MAKE A STATEMENT
FOR LAW
The rest of the headline has been torn.
The editorial does, however, cite a Texas Ranger named Matthew McCulloch, a federal Army sergeant named Sean Keegan, and a bounty hunter called Jed Breen as the so-called jackals.
If what the editorialist, one Alvin J. Griffin IV, wrote is even half-true, then it is my opinion that these men were indeed jackals, and that is an understatement.
Other articles found in various Perdition County newspapers from 1871–1883 (the last year was when the railroad bypassed Purgatory City that led to the town’s collapse) have scant mention of McCulloch, Keegan, and Breen, but their names do pop up and sometimes they were still called jackals.
Letters to state archivists in the states mentioned by the anonymous letter writer regarding Block Frazer were returned with regrets that no one under that name for the period cited were found in city directories or newspaper searches or just not returned at all.
There are a few spotty mentions of one Blood Moon in Perdition County newspapers, but the National Archives and Records Administration said several pages of official military correspondence mention the name of the Apache Indian from as far east as San Antonio to as far west as Fort Inferno on the Arizona–Colorado border.
The Apache Indian named as Three Dogs has not been found in history books on this library’s shelves, and the archivist at the National Archives and Records Administration said no name popped up in a casual search.
We are waiting to hear back from the archives in Mexico City. [No record of any reply has been found as of this date, 7-11-1953, BKJ.]
Therefore, it appears three men in this county were known as the jackals, and they might rank up there with Jesse James and William Quantrill in their bloodlust and butchery.
It is, however, with deep regret that the person who wrote this account did not sign her (or his) name, but provided enough material and enough names and items that have been verified to make the staff and I believe this letter is worthy of being filed here.
But the county officials and the state archivists in Austin all stress that in no way are we endorsing this letter.
That is something we must leave to the individual readers.
CHAPTER ONE
Ugly Juan Maldado had put up quite the resistance in an arroyo near Devil Ridge, east of Fort Hancock, till a round from Jed Breen’s Sharps rifle busted the murdering rustler’s left shoulder. Although Breen cauterized the wound, he half expected Maldado to die before the reward could be claimed—especially when the soldier boys at Fort Hancock refused to take Maldado since he had never stolen government horses or mules. The post surgeon declined to operate on the badly wounded Mexican because he had not been wounded by a bluebelly or had ever worked as a civilian contractor for the United States Army.
The army boys decided to be uncooperative, Breen figured, because they wouldn’t be claiming the reward on Ugly Juan Maldado, but that wasn’t Breen’s fault. Breen had earned this one, wearing out two good horses, spending six weeks sleeping—when he could risk sleep—in the scorching furnacelike heat, getting his fine new Stetson punched through the crown with a .45 slug that, two inches lower, would have blown off the top of his head.
