Novel 1972 - Callaghen (v5.0) by Louis L’Amour Read Free Book Online

that time. The Ever-Victorious Army, they called it. She was just a skinny kid then, and she’d been stopped near the temple. She, her mother, and a doctor had run there for shelter from some of the rebels. We fought our way out of there and took them with us.”
    “And you were a major then? You’ve had quite a career, Callaghen.”
    He shrugged. “Ward had picked up his army off the waterfronts, Captain. He had scum of the earth, and right alongside them some of the finest fighting men in the world. He enlisted men of all nationalities, and he didn’t screen them. Combat did that for him, and we were in battle almost constantly. Seventy per cent of the men had served in other armies—there were a couple of hundred Irishmen in the outfit. When Chinese Gordon took command he had a trained battle outfit. A man couldn’t go wrong with them.”
    “Did Sykes know about the girl’s recognizing you?”
    “He saw us talking, and he was furious. I was an enlisted man and I was being too friendly. Of course, Malinda spoke up, and in the midst of it her father appeared. He’d always been grateful to me for getting his family out of that situation, so we had a long talk, and Sykes just faded out.
    “Two days later I was transferred. They were building a new outfit for frontier service, and I found myself one of the cadre that would form it.”
    “And that left him with the girl?”
    “No, sir. Malinda had a mind of her own, and she was suspicious about the transfer. No, sir. I am afraid it didn’t do him much good.”
    Chapter 6

M AJOR EPHRAIM SYKES was a man of definite mind. Positive in his opinions, he approached every problem knowing that there could be just two possibilities: his way and the wrong way. The opinions he held had been absorbed with his mother’s milk, and nothing subsequent to that time had served to alter even one of them.
    He was tall, handsome, immaculate in appearance. He was gracious, polite, and considerate to those he regarded as existing on his level. Others he ignored, or considered only with contempt. An only child, he had been brought up to believe that as an Anglo-Saxon white man of the right church, the right schools, and the right social position, any decision he made was of course the correct one.
    He had been born on the right street in a medium-size town where his father operated the largest of the town’s three banks. In school he had been bright but without brilliance, capable but without imagination, and he had graduated close to the top of his class. At the beginning of the War Between the States he had been given a commission, and he had advanced rapidly to the rank of major, partly by virtue of a cavalry charge in which he smashed the enemy at a crucial moment, driving them from their position and so turning the tide of battle.
    A fact that he had conveniently forgotten was that the charge had begun when his horse ran away with him, and his men followed. Uncomfortable about the praise that came his way, he had gradually forgotten how the charge had begun, and modestly said it was nothing. He had, he said, been fortunate enough to detect a weakness in the enemy line at that point.
    The war ended too soon for him, for he had hoped to become a general—or at least a colonel. Failing that, despite the surplus of officers after the war, he had hoped to be sent to a good station where he might win a smashing victory over the Indians—the Plains Indians, of course, who had dash and glamour as fighting men.
    The immigrant Irish were despised by many of the “right” people, so he despised them. The only Irish with whom he had ever had contact were a group who had settled on the edge of his town to build a spur of track for the railroad. Many of them drank too much, and most of them seemed to be amused by him, and this offended his dignity. In the army he had a few Irishmen in his command, and they, too, drank too much and were amused by him.
    As his father’s partner, he owned a