War Valley

by Lancaster Hill

  “Especially former Rebs,” Garcia said.

  “I see,” Gannon said. Another war that resolved nothing, he thought sadly.

  “You’d think he’d at least be happy not having to saw off any more arms or legs,” Garcia said. “‘Butcher’ Breeding, I heard ’em say he was called during the war.”

  “Maybe he liked the work,” Calvin offered. “I told him not to come near me with a saw or I’d kick him to death with my good foot.”

  Throwing off the sheet and pivoting on his backside, Gannon was able to put his feet on the floor and work himself erect, holding on to the bed and table. His feet were blistered and untreated, but other than that he felt better than he had in days.

  Garcia said helpfully, “I can get a nurse to help you dress, if you like. She isn’t very pretty, but at least you won’t be embarrassed.”

  “I think I can manage,” he said, hobbling over.

  By using one hand to prop himself on the iron bedpost, another to work the footlocker, Gannon was able to remove the garments and dress with a minimum of grunts and relative ease. The bandages held him together. The clothes were a good fit, though the new boots were not broken in and were more of a problem. Gannon had to sit and have Garcia help him, pushing one-handed on the heel, to get them on. When he was finished, Gannon rose with a sense of resurrection and collected the two weapons and the waterskin.

  “You planning to sell those as souvenirs?” Garcia asked.

  “No,” Gannon said as he walked stiffly toward the door. “To use them.”

  * * *

  Walking down the sunlit streets of Austin, it seemed to Gannon as if he had never been away; and then, as he would see a new sign, a new window, a curb that had been repaired, fresh paint, it felt as though he’d been away for years.

  It was later in the afternoon than Gannon had imagined. The slanting sun gave everything a bit of an orange cast while shadowing and brightening angles along both sides of Pecan Street. In the open spaces crafted by nature, not man, one did not see gradations like these, only big spaces that were light or dark.

  Most people did not recognize the tall man walking very erect, due to the bindings, and at a leisurely pace, in unbroken boots, nor pay the unfamiliar face, half-hidden in a fawn-colored Stetson, much attention. He carried a small canvas bag in his right fist, U.S. ARMY stamped on its side, containing his two weapons and the waterskin. A few citizens smiled and nodded courteously as they would at any stranger. If Gannon had made an impression during his unconscious arrival, it was as a wild man in the back of a wagon and not this clean man, neat and reborn. There were children in the street, which meant that school was out, so he made his way directly to the Breen house. Gannon did not doubt but that Constance would have gone back to class as quickly as possible. She was dogged that way. Not even her own affliction would keep her from her pupils.

  Only you could do that, he thought, remembering with even greater emotion now how she left everything to be with him.

  He arrived at the house and stood for a moment outside the gate. The flowers and shrubs just inside the white fence were looking a little weary so late in the season. The aroma of freshly baked pie was absent so late in the day and—

  The wagon would not be here, he realized suddenly. You destroyed it.

  A woman moved behind the pulled-back curtains of the living room. Gannon could not tell, in the shadow of the eave, whether it was Constance or her mother. It did not matter: the alarm would be sounded. He intended to raise the latch and cross the slates to the door, but he froze. His gut burned. He was afraid in a way he had not been in any of his confrontations with Roving Wolf.

  It was Constance he had seen, because in just seconds she was out the door and running toward him. He drew his hat from his head and held it in his left hand, beside his private little medicine bag.

  “Hank! I was just coming to see you!” Constance said—quietly, conspiratorially. “What are you doing out like this?”

  “The doctor said I could leave,” he said.

  The girl reached the gate, about to hug him, but hesitated when she saw how stiffly he was standing. Instead, she dropped her arms on the other side of the plumb-straight gate and boldly took his free hands in both of hers, twining her fingers in his, clutching them, drawing on their strength. She looked well, other than for the tears that suddenly lined the bottom of her eyes.

  Before they could speak again, Martha Breen emerged from the house after her daughter.

  “Constance, come back inside!” she said. “You are creating a scene.”

  Gannon had not taken his eyes from the young woman. Peripherally, he noticed two men and one woman stop, look at them, and move on. He didn’t care. He didn’t have time for nosy passersby or a woman who had been dismissive of him since the day they met, who almost certainly blamed him for everything that had befallen her daughter these last few days.

  “They don’t know you’ve been to see me, do they? Your parents?”

  Constance shrugged. It didn’t matter. Her beaming smile did not diminish. Gannon let his thoughts about anyone but Constance go. In nine years of war and assimilation, he had become accustomed to being disapproved of.

  “I had intended to ask for your hand,” Gannon said, “but I wouldn’t want to create another scene. Constance, will you marry me and come to California?”

  Constance smiled up at him but was distracted as she saw her father running down the street. Apparently, during his walk from the hospital, someone had recognized Hank Gannon.

  Albert Breen arrived breathless and wearing an apron that held a hammer and a chisel in loops on the side. His expression was one of anger, barely contained.

  “Constance,” he panted, “please go back inside. I wish to talk to Mr. Gannon.”

  “Officer Gannon, sir,” he corrected, looking down at the head-shorter man.

  Breen’s eyes narrowed. “I see. I did hear, when they carried you back, that you performed heroically after you left my daughter to the savages.”

  “Father!” Constance said.

  The older man brushed her away. “I will have my say in private!”

  Constance released his hand, turned, and brushed silently past her mother on her way inside. The two men stood in the street, Breen waiting for a horse and rider to pass before speaking.

  “Dr. Breeding, at the hospital, told us what happened to our daughter,” Breen said through his red-cheeked rage and tears. “Do you know, I actually defended you and her girlish infatuation. I did not see the harm.” He laughed mirthlessly. “The harm? It may well have destroyed her life. I—I tried to understand when she rode out, then I tried to forgive her and you when she returned with the police. But I keep returning to this, Officer Gannon. You—you were a soldier. You have known women. You know how they get swept away. If you loved her, you should have watched out for her!”

  “That is why I’m here,” Gannon said. “I came to ask your permission to marry.”

  Breen snorted. “And take her to San Francisco, as she told us, where there are nothing but hooligans and roughnecks?”

  “They need police there, too.”

  “And half-breed children?” he hissed. “Do they need those, too?”

  Gannon did not know how to answer that. He hadn’t thought the topic through himself, not entirely. He had not gotten further than wanting to be with Constance.

  “I can’t answer for the city, only for myself,” Gannon said. “I want to be with Constance—as wife, as mother, for better or for worse.”

  Breen moved closer, his fingers tight around the head of the hammer. “It will be better if we cut the thing from her, before it has a chance to take root!” he said. “She still has a chance for happiness here, for a proper life and marriage.”

  Gannon looked to his left, to the small, sweet home. There were no faces in the window.

  “Do the decent thing and leave,” Breen said, so close that Gannon could feel his hot breath. “Go to the dance halls and docks o
f the Barbary Coast where you belong. You, not my daughter. Go to your plantation in Florida—”

  “It was a farm.”

  “With slaves?” Breen said. “Like the man you killed?”

  Until now, Gannon had not understood that this was not just about him but about any man, Southern-born, who would have courted his daughter. Even an aristocrat from the former Confederacy would have been spurned—though very few Southern gentlemen, other than blatant collaborators, had anything left that would give them status.

  All of which made the plan he had roughly formulated even more important.

  Gannon put his hat back on his head, tipped the brim toward the man he had hoped would agree to be his father-in-law. He saw now how ridiculous that was.

  “I wish you a good evening and a good life, sir,” Gannon said. He held the man’s eyes a moment longer. “I am not sure you are destined for either.”

  “I will tie her to the bedpost!” Albert Breen yelled, then immediately shrunk into himself as he saw that his customers, the Spicers, had heard.

  Gannon reached into the canvas bag and showed the man the knife. “With what, sir? Chains? The Gannons would never have done that.”

  So saying, he turned and walked briskly toward the office of the Texas Special Police, where he had business.

  EPILOGUE

  December 24, 1871

  The old and stately Mission San Luis Rey de Francia loomed large against the darkening sky, its tower and Spanish-Moorish-inflected façade dimly white under the nearly full moon. Riding the two horses Gannon had purchased with his wages, the former police officer and his wife had crossed the Southwest into California, camping in the open as he had learned to do, enjoying the company of each other without concern for anything else.

  It had not been necessary for Gannon to further disrupt the Breen household. Constance had taken care of that. She could not see the front of the house from her bedroom, but she could see the southern side of the street. When she saw him leave, and make a turn onto Congress Avenue, she knew where Officer Gannon was going.

  Her father had stormed into the house, slammed the door, and was yelling with her mother, in chorus. It would be a few moments before they got to her. She had already removed her green day suit and slipped into a walking dress more suitable for movement. She also took her wool coat from the wardrobe. Constance left by the window, wanting to hear no more harsh words about the man who loved her, the man who had saved her life. They met at police headquarters and went directly to the stable, where Evan Bosley was working with his brother Gary. The woman could not help but wonder if the damage inflicted on the officer was as great as the hurt she had suffered. The elder Bosley sold them two horses, not presently needed by the depleted force.

  “I do not believe I will lose my job helping you,” the stable hand had said.

  The couple was away from Austin before her parents had discovered her missing and realized where she had gone.

  The couple journeyed through the Southwest, traveling wide of Indian encampments and reservations. It was a revelation to Constance how unpopulated so much of the land was and how much of it was desert or plain. There was, nonetheless, ample food and water, courtesy of the skills Gannon had acquired in the wild. Nights were spent under the sky or, when it was cold, in a cave or in burrows Gannon dug with a shovel he purchased in Fort Mason. Constance missed her pupils and she missed teaching, but she had never experienced a time in which she felt so free and so loved. Not protected or instructed but truly cherished.

  Upon reaching the California border at Fort Yuma—having followed, in part, the mail route—the couple rested before deciding to ride on to the Pacific Ocean and follow the coast north from San Diego. It was by chance that they reached the mission when they did. It was a chill night, with cool air from the sea, and Gannon thought it best to be inside.

  Unable to go on in the dark, they turned at the well and followed an irrigation ditch and a row of pepper trees to the mission. Under torches, they saw Mexican and Indian converts moving contentedly among the few padres who had remained at the secularized Franciscan outpost. Preparations for Christmas were underway, and the couple was welcome.

  “As Mary and Joseph were wanderers, we are honored by your presence,” said one of the old men in brown, Father Cornelius, with a warm smile.

  While Gannon stabled the horses, Constance followed the padre along the tiled patio that rounded an inner courtyard.

  “Do you require the assistance of a nurse?” he asked, looking back at the woman. He wasn’t entirely sure, judging from her buttoned coat, but said, “There is a lovely one, a Cajun all the way from Louisiana, who is also a midwife if you stay so long.”

  “I am very well, thank you,” Constance said, smiling graciously. “And we will be leaving in the morning. We have a long way to go and would like to be settled before our child arrives.”

  “I understand, and may the blessings of God be upon the three of you,” the padre said as he showed her to a small, candlelit room. “You will join us presently for our evening meal?”

  “Very gratefully,” Constance replied, adding, “Father.”

  As the sun went down and the brilliant moon rose higher, Constance and Hank Gannon went to the window of their room before going to the dining hall. They stood in close embrace, eager and ready to face their life together in a free and welcoming land.

  Turn the page for an exciting preview!

  ONE BAD APPLE . . .

  John Apple, a gardener and preacher,

  has a good life in Ohio in 1834—until a failed

  romance sends him fleeing to the south in search

  of a new life. An encounter with a very drunk

  Jim Bowie sets him on a path to the Texian

  Revolution. There, as indignity upon indignity

  is piled on the settlers by Mexican President

  Santa Anna and his soldiers, Apple learns

  he has a third skill: Killing.

  . . . CAN SPOIL THE WHOLE BUNCH

  Working with Bowie, Sam Houston,

  Stephen Austin, and their ragtag army,

  Apple becomes a secret courier and bloody

  advocate for the cause. His calling card is

  distinctive and fills agents of the tyrannical

  generalissimo with terror: Apple plants apple seeds

  deep in the chest cavity of every soldier he slays,

  his way of bringing new life from old.

  For Apple, the road leads to the Alamo, where he

  is sent on a dangerous mission in an effort to

  stave off disaster. Yet the fall of the bold defenders

  does not deter him. For him, the war—and a

  particular case of revenge—is just beginning!

  BAD APPLE

  by Lancaster Hill

  Coming soon, wherever Pinnacle Books are sold.

  PROLOGUE

  Fort Gibson, Oklahoma, May 1836

  Save for the steady plick, plock, plick of the longcase clock across the room, it was another cemetery-quiet night at the Hickory Bar. That was the saloon I established two years ago, shortly after graduating from school back east, coming west, losing my wife Lidyann and child in childbirth, and finding just enough silver in a sandstone deposit to buy out the barbershop and the cooper’s place. I knocked down the wall between them and used the barrels the cask-maker left behind to start distilling my own brands. One day, I hoped to sell them. First, I had to keep from going broke.

  The Hick, as she’s called by those who love her, is just a big jump past Fort Gibson, whence came most of my legal clientele. The illegals—Creeks mostly—had a special knock they used at the back door in the small hours of the night to make their own private, illegal purchases. As of this evening, the Indians were my only regular customers, sometimes paying in gold dust; I hadn’t much use right now for the animals they also brought in exchange for alcohol, since there was no one around to enjoy my celebrated Three-Hare and a Frog Stew.r />
  The Hick was a very private place. The entrance was not at the front but on the side, on a broad alley. That kept the dust and the sound to a minimum. It also allowed me to focus on my job tending bar, not listen for every potential new customer. But there’s private . . . and there’s dead.

  Right now, we were dead.

  I take the liberty of sharing this little bit about myself and my place of business because, frankly, this is all the time I get in the footlights. Hereafter, the stage belongs to another. Another who is unlike any man who ever passed through my swinging doors. A man who would become a legend different from the legends he would talk to me about.

  This night—the sixth in a row, by my mournful reckoning—the Hick lay as hollow and silent as the Liberty Bell. The chalkboard hanging behind me had the same scant menu it had a week ago. There was a section of the wall across from the door where I hung pictures drawn by customers of the strange things they had seen on their journeys, from man-bears to contraptions that flew. One of my regulars from the fort, a Frenchman, was an expert with the rapier and had given me such a relic to hang there. I looked at it often, thinking about the weapon that helped to conquer an old world compared to the new and better firearms that were spreading us west and south.

  I had not added anything new to the wall for weeks. Things had been that way since the troops and harder-drinking officers of Fort Gibson had been sent south to babysit the war. Old Hickory, the President of the United States—for whom this institution was respectfully named—the great Andy Jackson had drug every man in uniform, and some who weren’t, from the garrison and sent them to the Texas border in case any Mexicans tried to enter the territory in pursuit of rebels. I didn’t know how that struggle for Texian independence was going, save that everyone was upset about the massacre at the Alamo. But I kept a flintlock musket under the bar in case any of Santa Anna’s weasels tried to enter the Hick. The only ones who liked those kill-minded loons were the Indians, only because the Mexicans were hated more.