The Black Jacks Read Online Free

acquainted with Leah Pierce had dared to warn him before the marriage took place, but McAllen, completely beguiled, had refused to listen to their counsel. Now he was paying for his folly.
    And paying dearly, mused Ashbel Smith. There were no children involved, and Smith believed his friend ought to divorce his unfaithful wife. But he didn't dare suggest such a course to McAllen. For one thing, it wouldn't do any good. Call it stubborn pride, a refusal to admit failure, but McAllen was a man who simply could not let go. And so, even though he knew that Jonah Singletary's information concerning Leah's indiscretions was probably accurate, McAllen felt duty-bound to defend the honor of a wife who had none. What cruel irony!
    Deeming it unwise to press the issue, Smith changed the subject. "I wonder if Lamar really is up to something with the Comanches."
    McAllen only shrugged. He was a man of occasional massive silences, and he now forgot all about the physician who accompanied him, and brooded over what Sam Houston had said about the imminent peace talk at San Antonio's Council House.
    Comanche affairs were of tremendous importance to McAllen—as they were to all settlers who lived on the fringes of civilization. Criticizing Houston's conciliatory approach to Indian affairs, Mirabeau B. Lamar had made nothing but belligerent talk when it came to the Comanches. So why now, suddenly, these peace overtures?
    The Comanches were a proud and fierce people. Tested by more than a century of conflict with the Spanish as well as other Indian tribes, they were now the undisputed masters of the plains. As fighters they had no peers. Fortunately for Texas, they were divided into a number of autonomous bands—the Quohadis, the Penatekas, the Tanawas, and others. Lacking unified leadership, they had yet to combine for the purpose of waging full-scale war upon the white interlopers.
    But if they ever get together, mused McAllen, there wouldn't be a white left alive west of the Sabine.
    That was what Sam Houston was worried about. The Old Chief was concerned that Lamar, by some underhanded device, might give the Comanche bands motivation to join together. In which case, the fledgling Republic of Texas would be extinguished in a maelstrom of fire and blood. McAllen hoped Lamar had better sense. Surely the man could see that Texas was in no condition to battle the Comanches, not with another war with Mexico so likely.
    Lamar's chief weapon in his campaign to rid the republic of what he liked to call the "red scourge" was a group of hard-bitten Indian-haters called the Texas Rangers. The organization had been created by Stephen F. Austin in 1823, when the impresario dipped into his own pockets to pay ten men to serve as "rangers." Their job was to protect the Austin colony from all enemies. Later, the colony's militia as a whole took to calling themselves Rangers.
    During the revolution, the Committee of Correspondence resolved to create a corps of Texas Rangers "whose business shall be to range and guard the frontiers between the Brazos and Trinity Rivers." The Rangers were irregulars; they furnished their own horses and weapons; they had no flag. There were three companies of fifty-six men each. They did little to distinguish themselves during the revolution, and while he was president, Sam Houston had made no use of them.
    Then Mirabeau B. Lamar succeeded Houston. In his opinion, the white man and the red could never live in harmony. "Nature forbids it," he declared. He approved a law for the protection of the frontier by creating eight companies of mounted volunteers. Since the men who volunteered came from the frontier counties and had in all likelihood already tangled with the Comanches and, in some cases, had lost loved ones during a Comanche raid, there was no love lost between the Rangers and the Indians. The only good Indian was a dead one. That was their creed, and they tried to live by it. Their mission was to exterminate the