Rebel Yell by William W. Johnstone

Author:William W. Johnstone
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Kensington Publishing Corp.
Published: 2014-09-17T16:00:00+00:00

SEVENTEEN

The Hog Ranch was merely a prelude to the horror of Fort Pardee.

“Not so many buzzards this time,” Sam Heller said to himself as he reached the fort at sunset. That helped, somehow.

It sat on a flat, a stone rectangle with walls ten feet high and three feet wide. Cube-shaped turrets rose at the four corners of the oblong. The hollow rectangle enclosed lines of buildings bordering an open parade ground and barracks square.

Set in the middle of nowhere, the man-made geometric structure lay a quarter mile west of the northbound Comancheria Trail, beyond the shadow of the Breaks. The walls were made of stones quarried and gathered from the west face of the Breaks. It was grueling, backbreaking work, but that’s what peacetime garrison troops were for. Not that peace was so peaceful in Hangtree County, or Greater Texas, either, for that matter.

A dirt road ran west from the trail to the front gates of the fort. A stream ran a hundred yards north of the structure, behind the back of the north wall. A working artesian well lay inside the walls, supplying an independent water source.

Fort Pardee had been built a few years after the successful (for the United States, that is) conclusion of the Mexican War. It was part of a string of such forts the federal government had built along the frontier line of the hundredth meridian to check and suppress the Comanche and lesser hostile tribes. Its high thick stone walls had been proof against the tribes, who had never been able to overcome it. Many a blistering Comanche charge had broken under withering rifle fire from those ramparts. When the War Between the States broke out, the government in Washington, D.C., closed the forts, pulling the troops out in preparation to fight the big battles east of the Mississippi.

Fort Pardee had been reopened after the war’s end in the summer of 1865. It was undermanned and had never been at full strength since commencing operations.

As Sam approached, it was obvious the fort had fallen, the manner of its undoing as yet a mystery to him. But that it had fallen, of that there could be no doubt.

A handful of buzzards circled high overhead. A few stray horses roamed aimlessly in the middle ground outside the walls. They looked up with curiosity from their grazing to take note of his arrival. A few thin gray lines of smoke rose from within the walls.

New tracks crisscrossed the land, the ground churned up by many hoofprints. A hundred and fifty horses or more, like a cavalry column. Nothing unusual there. It was a cavalry fort. But the direction of the line of march was surprising.

It came out of the Breaks via the nearest path north of the fort, cutting diagonally southwest, then circling around to the southern front gate. The assembly massed, some entering and then leaving the fort, the entire column moving south beyond the horizon.

Damnedest sequence of troop maneuvers at Fort Pardee Sam Heller had ever seen! The question was, Whose troops?

The front gate was open, its massive portals flung wide.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.