by P. J. Keogh
LOST LANDS
by
P.J. Keogh
TORRID BOOKS
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Published by
TORRID BOOKS
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An Imprint of Whiskey Creek Press LLC
Copyright © 2018 by P. J. Keogh
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Names, characters and incidents depicted in this book are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of the author or the publisher.
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ISBN: 978-1-68299-278-4
Credits
Cover Artist: Kelly Martin
Editor: Dave Field
Printed in the United States of America
Other Books by Author Available at Torrid Books:
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Johnson County
Jared Hackett
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Jan and her team for their help and support.
Thanks to Sue and Ian for their patient assistance.
Dedication
To Maureen.
Prologue
Fort Chadbourne, Texas, stood on the north-fork of the Concho. Abandoned by the Union in ’61, and ignored by the Confederacy, it spent five years falling into dereliction. Then, with warriors of the Comanche and Kiowa nations bent on turning the conquered Lone Star State into a charnel house, Uncle Sam decided that the fort had a role to play.
For their sins, the black troopers of the 9th U.S. Cavalry were the ones selected to provide the manpower.
Like any frontier post, Chadbourne had not been designed with even one eye on the comfort of those stationed there. The headquarters building was a low-ceilinged structure, its timbered rafters supporting a roof of prairie sods that provided a snugger home for vermin than any to be found in the quarters of the men. The shuttered windows, set into the adobe walls, provided little light and not much ventilation.
It was early in the year, 1867. Texas can be cold in the winter months, so the pot-bellied stove that stood in the post assembly room was lit. The woodsmoke that escaped from the stove’s flue, mingling with that of the harsh-tobacco given out by the pipes and cigars of the officers present, rendered the atmosphere both stuffy and acrid.
The officers, seated behind the green-beize-covered trestle-table that took up the full width of one wall of the room, constituted a court-martial. Their deliberation had been short, its conclusion inevitable.
Now they watched, as the victim of their verdict was marched away.
The presiding officer was a bewhiskered colonel, who chewed while his fellows smoked. With an accuracy of which any sharpshooter would brag, he directed a stream of brown tobacco-juice into the brass spittoon provided for those who pursued his habit. “Christ!” he said, “I’ve sent bounty-men before the firin’-squad, and not lost a minute’s sleep. But, Nigger or not, that Fisher looks to be one fine soldier. Puttin’ troopers like him in the stockade is the hardest duty an officer is called upon to perform.”
“True,” the gray-haired major, seated to his right, agreed. “But that’s the army.”
“Yeah,” the colonel grunted. “Too damn right it is.”
Oberon Fairchild’s office was in Washington’s Capitol Building. It was early when Fairchild—a man built along the lines of an overfed dwarf—left the place that day, and waddled out to where his black driver waited to lever him aboard his carriage.
Clutching to his ribs the document case he carried as if it held pure gold, Fairchild settled his rotund form into the carriage seat and commanded the Negro to drive on.
Fairchild was a US Congressman from Massachusetts and a New Englander by birth. A firm disciple of the cause of free, cheap, sweated labor, he had opposed the war with Mexico as a ploy by which to extend slavery, and supported the war with the southern states as a crusade by which to destroy it. Loud-voiced in his backing of the Wade and Stevens political faction, he had given Abe Lincoln a hard time between ’61 and ’65, while calling on him to give Jeff Davis an even harder one.
Fairchild’s belief had been that the key to Union victory was a large army, with each man clothed and shod and armed at taxpayer’s expense. To play his part in the formation of such, he took big blocks of stock in a shoddy-mill in Lowell, a boot-manufactury in Lynn and a cannon-foundry in Scranton, Pennsylvania.
Of none of these did Fairchild—who prided himself on modesty—boast. He was an unsung hero. And a man whose appreciation of war had grown so large that he hoped with fervor for the next one.
He held a place on the House Military Affairs Committee, did Fairchild, and had access to papers that the Great American Public was not invited to view. Such papers he now carried in the case gripped tightly to his breast.
There was a US Post Office on the route to Fairchild’s home, and he ordered his driver to halt the carriage there. The congressman took a brown-wrapped package from his case, and gave this to the driver, along with a handful of coins.
“Tell the clerk, this must be in New Mexico Territory, as fast as the mails can travel,” he said.
The Legionnaire colonel had been in Mexico for four long, arduous years.
Soon, he knew, he would return to France, not as the conquering hero he had dreamed of becoming, but as a sad remnant of a national disgrace, a soldier in an army humiliated by an Indio peasant and a rabble of ill-armed mongrels.
How this could be excused, even explained, he did not know. One thing, he did know. There would be no victory parade down the Champs Elyse for him, or for any of them. More probable would be exile to guard-duty in some penal colony—likely one where rampant yellow fever rendered chances of survival small.
Such were the colonel’s musings, as he crouched on the flat roof of the derelict adobe, watching the column of Mexican riders canter down the street of the deserted pueblo into the trap that awaited them.
His lips parted in a smile. The war may be lost. Still, there was vengeance to be wrought, between here and the ships that lay at anchor at Vera Cruz. Savouring, in anticipation, the coming moments, the shock and fear that would show on the faces of these damned Mestizos, he ordered the trap be sprung.
“The Secretary will see you now, General.” The clerk’s voice was high-pitched, almost querulous. It went with his appearance. He was a man who had seen better days. His face, pale from his quill-pushing life, was wizened by the years, so that his skin resembled that of a bleached prune. Such hair as remained upon his scalp was white, thin, and wispy, but still dropped sufficient dandruff onto the shoulders of his black-dyed alpaca jacket to give them the appearance of tar spattered with snow.
Christ, another relic of the Black Hawk War, the soldier thought, as he rose in response to the clerk’s words. The carnage that followed on from Fort Sumter had harvested the flower of the nation’s youth, but it had done nothing to prune the dead wood from the Washington forest. Still, he reflected, one purpose of government, the world over, was to provide sinecures for those good for nothing else.
Why should that of Uncle Sam break the rule?
Dismissing the question from his mind
, he stepped through the door the clerk held open for him.
The office he entered was functional and unadorned. A large mahogany desk, bereft of papers or clutter, stood where the light admitted through the room’s only window could fall upon it. The titles on the spines of books set on shelves that lined the walls gave the room the look of a lawyer’s chamber, which was appropriate, since its occupant had travelled to the nation’s capital by way of the Pennsylvania bar. Dominating the space was a wooden structure, one that would have served as a pulpit in a church or chapel.
Standing behind its lectern was a small man, formally dressed in a suit of dark material, and elevated in height by the platform upon which his feet were planted.
When the madman, Booth, murdered Abraham Lincoln, on Good Friday of ’65, he ensured that Secretary-for-War, Edwin McMasters Stanton’s brow would be the one to wear the political laurel wreath due the victor in the conflict then all but ended.
Now, two years on, with a lame duck in the White House, the secretary, in truth, was the power in the land—and one who enjoyed his power.
Stanton, invariably held interviews standing on his pulpit. This was partly so that he could stare down, through his round-lensed eyeglasses, at whoever it was to whom he spoke, thus compensating for his lack of height, but, mostly, so that his petitioners, forced to stand also, would not get comfortable, and hang around. It was a habit, formed in war, that had persisted into peace.
For a brief moment, before speaking, Stanton eyed the soldier, trying to get his measure—something he had never yet managed to do.
Stanton was a man whose career had followed a well-planned line. College, law-school, legal-practice, politics, high-office.
The general’s life, by contrast, had been one of twists and turns, advances and retreats.
A West-Pointer and hero of Chapultapec, he had risen fast to captain’s rank. Then, under the influence of John Barleycorn, had dropped out of the army into a nondescript’s life, selling harness in his father’s store in Illinois, cutting props for mines, and chopping logs for firewood in Missouri, doing what was necessary to scrape by.
Had the secession war not come along, it is certain he would have lived out a non-career of whisky-soaked obscurity.
But the war had come along. Both Union and Confederacy needed officers, so badly that any old academy-man who stepped-up—even a discredited drunk —could be sure of a command in either army. Despite his marriage to a slaveholder’s daughter, this old academy-man stepped up for the side in blue, and that turned out to be the making of him.
Hard-fought victories in Tennessee and Mississippi had marked him out as the top Yankee soldier, made him the army’s first three-star general since Washington, and earned him the task of taking on the great Bobby Lee—a job he had waded through mud and blood, finally to complete at Appomattox Courthouse, Virginia, in April ’65.
Now Ullysses Simpson Grant, General-in-Chief of the U.S. Army, was spoken of by those in the know as a likely future President—a possibility that Stanton liked not at all, and one that made him wary.
His moment’s inconclusive scrutiny passed, the secretary spoke, his voice carrying an asthmatic wheeze. “I take it, you’re here to talk about Mexico, General.”
Grant nodded, looking up. He was not a tall man, nor was he burly. His slouch-shouldered style was not one instilled by the Point’s drillmasters. With his scrubby-bearded, homely features, he would have passed for a small-town storekeeper, or hardscrabble farmer, had he been in civilian clothes—and had it not been for the keen, hard look in his watchful eyes. “Maximilian’s still down there,” he said.
“But not for long, it would seem,” Stanton rejoined. “The French out of the game, the tide’s turned Juarez’s way. Not surprising, in view of the help he’s been getting.” He said this last as an insinuation, one to which the general did not rise.
“I still think we should take a hand,” Grant said. “Of what value is the Monroe Doctrine otherwise?”
“The Monroe Doctrine is of questionable value, in international law, General. It passed unchallenged for so many years only because Britain’s Royal Navy had an interest in acquiescing in it.”
“So we continue to do nothing?”
Stanton smiled. With him, it amounted to no more than a movement of his narrow lips. “I wouldn’t call it nothing, General. Secretary Seward put some heavy diplomatic pressure on the French. And who knows what would be found, if I sent someone from the Inspector-General’s office, to take an audit of General Sheridan’s stores of ordnance?”
Grant made no reply to this, and Stanton said, “I know you have a conscience, General, about the war we waged with Mexico, and about the brevets you won there. I, too, was opposed to that war. However, rest assured, the French are now gone from this continent. They won’t be coming back, and Juarez’ll soon be in Mexico City.”
He said this with an air of finality, closing the subject, before moving on. “Now, the problem in West Texas? What is the position with regard to that?”
“General Carson has it in hand, Mr. Secretary,” Grant told him.
“Good.” Stanton’s lips twitched once more. “Is that all?”
“For the present, Mr. Secretary.”
“Good,” Stanton said again.
The interview ended, Grant turned and took his leave.
Chapter 1
El Prision Militar in Santiago de Queretaro was not a place in which anyone sound of mind would volunteer to spend much time. Even the jailers were conscriptos. Yet length of time was the least concern of the men incarcerated there. The firing-squads busily enforcing Maximilian’s Black Decree, ensured that shortage of time was what preyed on the inmates’ minds.
Jose Scanlon lay on the wooden pallet that passed off for a bunk in the rat-infested hole, reflecting on his prospects. The rattle of musketry sounding from beyond his cell-window, as another Juarista partidario was despatched to final judgement, told him that these fell someplace between slim and skeletal.
Well, he supposed that it was fitting. He had lived by the gun. Soon he would die by it. He wondered how he would do when his moment came. He had resolved not to go out screaming and struggling, as so many of the poor bastards did. He speculated now on whether, at the crunch, he would hold to that resolve.
He thought, not for the first time, about his comrades already in their graves, and about the man whose treachery had put them there. He wished he could have the chance of five minutes alone with the bribe-taking hijo de puta, even if those minutes were to be his last on Earth. Not much chance of that, the way things stood.
Still, Armandez would get his, soon or late, from somebody. His kind always did.
Scanlon heard the sound of a key’s insertion into the lock of his cell’s heavy wooden door. So now was to be his turn. Feeling a spasm in the pit of his gut, he squeezed his buttocks tight. He’d be damned before he’d shit his drawers in front of any mother’s son, let alone the kind of barrel-bottom recuclista to be found in the rear echelons of Maximilian’s army.
The door swung open. For a moment the carcelero stood, his eyes upon Scanlon. The eyes were black, dull, and expressionless, like the muzzles of a discharged scatter-gun. The man said nothing. He moved aside, remaining in the passageway.
Another man stepped past him into the cell. He was a small man, sparely built, sad-faced, with weathered skin and eyes like those of a neglected red-bone hound. His hair, dark-sandy and gray-streaked, spread Indian-long from beneath his slouch trooper’s hat, to cover the collar of the deerskin jacket worn unbuttoned over the red-flannel undershirt. His Union-blue britches were tucked into long-tongued Navajo moccasins. A Colt’s Dragoon Pistol rode his hip, left-side, butt-facing. From the right of his belt an Arkansas toothpick hung in a beaded scabbard, cut, maybe, off the hide from which the jacket had come. The gun and the knife were the only things about the man worth remarking on.
Then, Kit Carson’s appearance had never matched his deeds or his reputation.
He could have passed unnoticed in a crowd of two or more, even in his prime.
And his prime was well-past now.
Scanlon raised himself on an elbow. This was a turn up. Carson was the last man he had expected to see, this side of Hell. “Come on in, General,” he invited, though not with warmth. “Make yourself to home.”
“Scanlon,” Carson nodded. He seemed no better disposed toward Scanlon than Scanlon was toward him. He remained standing, since the cell offered nothing, save the floor, upon which to sit. He volunteered no handshake. Then, nor did Scanlon, so that was fair.
“What brings you south of the border, Carson?” Scanlon asked him.
“You do.”
Scanlon grinned. It was a crooked, side-mouthed grin that had little of humour in it. Not troubling to rise, he took up the pallet’s full length with his six-foot-odd of frame. His blue eyes—part of the legacy from his Irish father’s side—were fixed, unblinking, on the visitor. The eyes provided sharp contrast to the dark completed features in which they were set. The harsh planes of the face proclaimed the centuries of Castellano blood that had flowed down Scanlon’s maternal line.
“That’s unexpected. Mind, I’d’ve guessed you didn’t ride a thousand miles just to fill your nostrils with the stink of this place. How’d you know I was here?” Though his words were frontier vernacular, Scanlon’s accent held a strong trace of his childhood-raising on his grandfather’s estancia in Baja California.
Carson shrugged. “General Grant don’t favour Maximilian none. Left to himself, he’d’ve waged war on him, soon as the rebs were done with. Would now, if Stanton’d let him loose. Meantime, he keeps tabs on what goes on down here, while he lives in hope.”
“So,” Scanlon’s tone was thoughtful. Sam Grant’s sympathy with Juarez was widely spoken of. Scanlon, himself, had led Juaristas armed with US hardware. Rumour even had it that Grant’s Irish bulldog, Phil Sheridan, had turned a blind eye while such weaponry was shipped south from arsenals under his command. All such tales were not lies then. “What’s on your mind, Carson?”