Eyes of Eagles (38 page)

“I would like that, old friend. I cannot think of another warrior I would rather have with me through the eternal years.”

Bad Leg began shrieking more loudly than before, thrashing about in the dirt.

“He is shot in the lower belly,” Tall Bull said. “His death will be long and painful, and he is not dying well at all.”

“Did you really expect him to die well?”

“No. He was always a fool and is dying like one. Little Wolf will die no better,” he added, disgust in his voice.

“Why should he? He does not have your blood in his veins.”

“True.” Tall Bull sighed. “I adopted two sons. Both of them failed me.”

“You love him, don't you?”

“Who?”

“Man Who Is Not Afraid.”

Tall Bull was silent for moment. “Yes,” he spoke the word very softly. “And it is because of that love that I must kill him.”

“Or be killed,” Deer Runner said.

Tall Bull was thinking of his wife's vision when he replied, “Only the mountains never die.”

By midafternoon on the day the Alamo fell, the bodies had been separated and the defenders of the Alamo were placed on huge funeral pyres. There was a layer of wood, then a layer of bodies, the bodies and wood soaked with grease and oil. There were half a dozen or more of the pyres, all of them much higher than a man's head.

Just before the torches were thrown onto the pyres, Santa Anna said, “This will teach those damn Texans a thing a two. This is the only kind of independence they'll ever get!”

The torches were hurled onto the pyres and the smell of burning flesh was so overpowering the men were forced to move back some distance in an effort to escape the odor.

“These damn Texans are offensive to me even in death,” Santa Anna said, holding a white handkerchief to his nose.

Another bunch of Texas volunteers would prove to be a whole hell of a lot more offensive to him in about six weeks time. At a place called San Jacinto, where the Texas Army, under the command of Sam Houston, would wipe out Santa Anna's entire command and, a few days later, force the arrogant Santa Anna to accept unconditional surrender.

But on this late afternoon, Santa Anna gave Susanna Dickerson a horse, some provisions, and a black man who had been serving as his cook to go along as escort. He told her to ride to Gonzales with this message: “Tell the citizens there what happened here at the Alamo. Tell those people to never again rise up in rebellion against me. Now, go!”

Susanna would be found, some six or seven days later, by a group of Texas scouts who were on their way to the Alamo to see what had happened there.

* * *

Just about forty-five minutes before dawn, during the darkest hour, Jamie heard the three remaining Shawnees coming for him. Bad Leg had died a few hours before, whimpering and sobbing and still begging for someone to come to his aid. Just before he died, he cursed his friends for deserting him.

Jamie had to make the loads in his pistols and rifle true ones, for when the rush came, there would be no time for reloading. He made certain his Bowie knife was at hand, for he felt — no, he
knew
— the final minutes, and maybe seconds, would be knife to knife, and probably with Tall Bull, one of the most skilled knife handlers Jamie had ever known, outside of Jim Bowie.

Something flitted to Jamie's left, casting a quick shadow. But the move brought no gunfire from Jamie, for he knew it was a ruse. Many whites felt the Indian to be stupid, or dumb. Jamie knew better. They were some of the finest fighting men on the face of the earth. If he had fallen for that maneuver, that quick shadow, and fired, he would more than likely be dead, for he knew that at least two rifles were pointing at him.

He waited.

Jamie had changed positions earlier, and had replied to none of the probing questions from Tall Bull, Deer Runner, and Little Wolf since then. He had darkened his face and hands with dirt and had put himself in the least likely spot; the one that offered only the barest of protection, right at the northern edge of the clump of trees. And whoever it was coming in from the north was very nearly on him.

Deer Runner. And he was moving as silently as a ghost, making only inches of headway at each forward move. Jamie could make out only part of the man's features, but enough to see the long scar that ran from Deer Runner's eyebrow down to the point of his jaw.

Jamie's hand was on his knife, on the ground, and he brought it up swiftly and powerfully, the cutting edge up, and nearly took Deer Runner's head off. Just as the knife impacted against flesh, a rifle roared and Jamie felt a white hot burst of pain in his left shoulder. Using his feet, he pushed himself back, deeper into the heavier growth. It was a good move, for a second rifle roared and the ball slammed into the tree where, only seconds before, Jamie had been.

Jamie pulled out a bandanna and stuffed it under his buckskins, plugging the bullet hole and slowing the bleeding as best he could. He sheathed his knife and waited, gritting his teeth against the waves of pain. He felt the slow flow of blood wetting his flesh. His fingers felt about the base of the tree and found some moss. He pulled some loose and placed it, he hoped, under his buckskin shirt at his back, where the ball had torn through. He knew the pain he was feeling now was nothing compared to what it would be when the shock wore off.

Silver was showing in the eastern sky when Little Wolf seemed to come out of nowhere and made his leap for Jamie. Jamie lifted a pistol and shot him. Little Wolf landed on top of him, his knife slicing Jamie's left leg from just below the hip down to almost his knee. Jamie kicked the Shawnee off him and tore Little Wolfs shirt to use to bandage his leg. He could not tell how deep the knife had penetrated, but it felt like a serious wound. He bound it tight and quickly reloaded his discharged pistol.

“Just the two of us now, Man Who Is Not Afraid,” Tall Bull's voice reached him. “I felt sure Little Wolf would fail, but I was confident that Deer Runner would take you.”

“You were right about one and wrong about the other,” Jamie said.

“Something has changed in your voice. I think you are badly hurt.”

“That's a hell of a lot better than you're going to be, Tall Bull.”

“What do you mean?”

“You're going to be dead.”

Tall Bull chuckled. “I taught you well, my son.”

“That you did, father. And I thank you for it.”

Tall Bull's laugh held no humor. “Perhaps I taught you too well.”

“We'll soon know, won't we?”

“That is true.”

Jamie could tell with each reply that Tall Bull was slowly working his way closer. He was in the cluster of trees now. Jamie did not know if he could stand up; did not know if his wounded leg would support him. But he did know he was now no match for Tall Bull if it came to hand to hand with knives. He had to shoot him; had to get lead into the man. Tall Bull was an enormously powerful man, perhaps not as powerful as he'd been when Jamie was a child in the Shawnee town, but Jamie knew if Tall Bull ever got his hands on him, the fight was over — and Jamie would be the loser.

Tall Bull made only one mistake in his deadly advance: he waited too long to make his move. The skies were growing lighter by the minute and Jamie's eyes were sharp. He saw a lower branch move and a brown hand reach up to still it. Jamie put a heavy caliber ball right through that hand. Tall Bull made no sound, even though Jamie knew the pain must have been awful, for he'd seen the sudden splash of bright red color the dead leaves.

Jamie laid that pistol aside and picked up his second pistol, muffling the cocking with his left hand. Waves of agony lanced through him when he moved his left arm and bright lights of pain erupted behind his eyes.

Tall Bull burst out of the brush running hard. There was a knife in his left hand, his ruined right hand dangling and dripping blood, and a wild cry on his lips. His face was pure savage and his eyes were alive with victory.

Jamie lifted his pistol and shot Tall Bull in the chest, watching as if events had suddenly slowed down to only a fraction of life's speed. Tall Bull stopped and looked down at the hole in his chest, just below the V of his rib cage. Blood was pouring out.

“Iiiyyee!” he cried. “I died at the hands of a true warrior!” He stumbled forward and fell, the knife driving deep into Jamie's side.

For just a few seconds, the eyes of Jamie and Tall Bull met. Tall Bull gasped, “My son! My son! Only Man Above knows how much I loved you.”

“You sure picked a funny way to show it,” Jamie said, just as darkness began to take him.

“Deer Woman was right,” Tall Bull whispered, lowering his head to Jamie's chest. “She said I would not return.”

“So we both lost the war,” Jamie's voice was very weak.

“Both sides always do,” the Shawnee chief said, as his eyes and the eyes of Jamie Ian MacCallister closed and they were spun whirling into a world of shadows.

Little Wolf crawled to his knees and staggered toward the river to splash water on his wounds and try to bandage them. Then he would return and take the scalp of Jamie MacCallister. He made the river only to pass out again. He lay with his legs in the cold water and his upper torso on the bank.

Jamie opened his eyes to a world of pain. It was full daylight and the sun was bright. About eight o'clock, he guessed. He did not try to pry the dead fingers of Tall Bull from the hilt of the knife. He doubted he had the strength left in him to do that and then pull the blade from his side. He gritted his teeth, summoned all his strength and willpower, put one hand around Tall Bull's wrist and the other around the dead Indian's closed hand, and jerked.

He screamed and passed out from the pain.

By the river, Little Wolf stirred at the sound, but could not drag himself to consciousness.

Jamie pulled himself back to white-hot awareness and pushed Tall Bull from him. He did not yet have the strength to stand, so after gathering his pistols and rifle, he began the painful crawl back to his camp. Twice he had to stop and rest. At his camp, he built up the fire and dressed his wounds as best he could with what he had and could find, the latter provided by nature.

He forced himself to eat and drink some coffee and then, working in stages, for he was very weak, he packed up and saddled up. His horse did not like the smell of blood, but Jamie quieted the animal and got the saddle on him. Next came the task of getting himself into the saddle. After three tries, all of them hideously painful, he made it.

He pointed the nose of the horse north, toward the road. He was very tired, and wanted very much to just lie down and rest. But he knew if he allowed that, he would not get up. He would just die.

How he stayed in the saddle for as long as he did was something short of a miracle. He was only half conscious much of the time. When he reached the road, he turned east and ran right into a Mexican patrol. Through the painful haze behind his eyes, he saw them and lifted his rifle. It seemed to weigh a thousand pounds. The Mexican patrol literally blew him out of the saddle. Jamie was unconscious before he hit the ground. He was not aware of the gentle rain that started falling from the clouds. It was a warm rain, and it signaled the beginning of spring.

Jamie lay sprawled on his face and belly in a ditch by the side of the road. His horse had raced off as soon as Jamie was shot out of the saddle. Two of the Mexican cavalrymen tried to catch the animal, but the horse was too fast for them and they gave up.

Jamie was covered with blood from his newly received head wound to his knees, and the officer took one careless glance at him and said, “Dead.”

Jamie had been carrying the pouch on the outside of his coat to prevent any blood from leaking through and the Mexican officer ripped it from him and pawed through the letters. He could read and speak English and he saw quickly that there were no military dispatches among the bits of torn paper. He shook his head and cursed and threw the papers on the dampening ground and swung back into the saddle.

He looked over at Jamie's horse, about a half mile away, grazing. “Too bad,” he said. “That was a fine animal. I would have liked to have caught him.”

The patrol galloped off, toward San Antonio, as the rain began turning the ink on the papers once more into liquid.

* * *

Kate straightened up from her work and looked westward. An almost physical stab of fear had suddenly filled her. She clutched at her breast and gasped. What was wrong with her? She'd never before experienced anything like this.

Jamie Ian and Ellen Kathleen, now in their ninth year, and both very bright and quick, looked at their mother and then at each other. Ellen shook her head at her brother.

Andy blurted, “Are you all right, Mommy?”

Kate turned from the stove and forced a smile. “Yes. I'm fine. Get me some potatoes, will you, Andy?” She looked out the kitchen window. Sarah and Hannah were walking up the path, coming over for afternoon coffee and conversation. The men were in the fields.

Kate took a deep breath and calmed herself. She just couldn't understand that sudden moment of anxiety. It was gone now. She sighed and took the potatoes Andy handed her and thanked him. She had to smile as she looked at the children. Everyone of them blond and blue-eyed. The boys all looked like Jamie and the girls all looked like Kate.

Kate stepped to the door to greet her friends. What's happening, Jamie? she thought. What is going on where you are? Are you safe? Well? This waiting is becoming harder and harder to bear. Come back to me, Jamie. Come back to me.

* * *

San Antonio was very quiet. Over at the Alamo, ashes from the funeral pyres were cold. All that remained of over one hundred and eighty men were a few teeth and some bones that had managed to survive the intense fires.

When asked what he wanted done with the ashes of the defenders, Santa Anna said, “I really don't care. Let someone else worry about it.”

No one really knows what happened to the ashes of the men who fought so gallantly and died at the Alamo.

* * *

A Mexican family found Jamie. The man was getting a shovel from the wagon when his wife screamed. He ran to her side.

“He moved!” she said. “His hand. His hand moved.”

“Impossible, woman! The man is
dead
.
Madre Dios,
look at him!”

“I tell you his hand moved.”

The man knelt down in the rain beside the sprawled body. He recoiled in shock when he saw Jamie's eyelids flutter. He looked up at his wife. “This is truly a miracle. He's
alive!
”

Jamie's horse had wandered over. The woman tied the reins to the back of the wagon and then she and her husband struggled to drag Jamie over to the wagon. It took them three tries to get him into the bed of the wagon, for Jamie was a big man.

“I wonder what happened to him?” she asked, when they were on their way.

“Bandits, surely,” the husband replied. “This is a dangerous road.”

Neither of them knew anything of the fight at the Alamo.

“What are we going to do with him?” she asked.

“Give him the dignity of dying on a pallet with a roof over his head. We can't leave him for the coyotes and the buzzards. That would be a sin.”

At their farm, the man and woman and their children carried Jamie into the house and undressed him. They all gasped when they saw his fearsome wounds, then set about tending to him. When they had done all they could do, they covered Jamie and sat at the table, looking at him.

“It's in the hands of God now,” the woman said.

“I wish the priest would come by. He would know what to do.”

The man wasn't nearly as devout as his wife, but he wisely made no comment. He rose from the table to see to Jamie's horse. When the horse was stabled and rubbed down and fed, the man gathered up Jamie's weapons, unloaded them, and cleaned them of mud and blood.

He and his wife had carefully cleaned the wounds, then stopped the new bleeding with cayenne pepper. They applied poultices to the wounds and then sat back and waited for Jamie to die. The man and his wife had done all they knew to do.

* * *

It would be days, in some cases, even weeks, before all the Anglos in Texas knew what had taken place at the Alamo. While Jamie lay hovering between life and death, sometimes conscious enough to drink herbal tea brewed by the Mexican woman, Houston was putting together and pulling together his Texas army.

When Mrs. Susanna Dickerson was found by Houston's scouts, she told them what had happened at the Alamo and also that General Santa Anna had ordered a detachment of his troops to march to Gonzales and either drive out or kill all Americans.

A pall settled over the tiny town of Gonzales. The entire force of Texans at the Alamo had been killed and their bodies burned. But soon despair turned to outrage and cold fury. Who in the hell did Santa Anna think he was to treat human beings in such a manner? To mutilate and butcher and then burn the bodies like so much garbage. Goddamn the man!

“We retreat,” Houston said, and then waited for the howls of protest to die down. “We have no choice in the matter. Send a rider to Goliad and order Colonel Fannin to pull out and link up with us... here.” He pointed to a crude map. “Tell him to destroy the fort and get the hell out of there. And tell him that by God I want this order obeyed!”

A rider was immediately dispatched to Goliad, to Fannin at Fort Defiance.

Houston immediately had Gonzales evacuated. His plan was to fall back across the Colorado River. The rain that had started a few days earlier fell in abundance now, turning the poor roads into roads of mud. The soldiers and the frightened refugees had a very tough time of it, but they made the Colorado with Santa Anna's troops right behind them. Houston's men crossed the river just before it poured over its banks and flooded everything. A full Mexican division was looking at him from the west side of the river. Houston was counting on Fannin for help, and wondered where in the hell the man was.

But Fannin once more had difficulty in making up his mind. He decided to delay leaving Fort Defiance. That decision would cost him his life and the lives of his men. When he finally decided to abandon the fort, he got some four or five miles outside of Goliad and found himself looking at about two thousand Mexican soldiers, under the command of General Urrea. Fannin had slightly over four hundred men under his command. He ordered his wagons circled and made his stand. They fought for several days, killing over three hundred Mexican troops, but finally had to surrender. There was no hope left. Urrea assured Fannin he and his men would be treated fairly and humanely.

A week after Fannin surrendered, on a Sunday morning, Fannin and his men were taken outside of Goliad and shot... on orders from Santa Anna. The thirty or so badly injured men, unable to march out of town, were carried outside the makeshift hospital and also executed.

* * *

When the news of the slaughter at Goliad began leaking out over the countryside, many of the civilians went into a panic, quickly packing a few possessions, and taking off for safer ground.

Nearly three weeks had passed since the fall of the Alamo, and the news had finally reached Kate and the others living in the Big Thicket country just east of San Augustine. She was devastated; but she could not bring herself to believe that Jamie's ashes were among those scattered to the wind around the Alamo. She knew her Jamie, and knew that among his virtues was the ability to survive.

“Kate,” Sam Montgomery told her, as the month of March drew to a close. “You've got to accept it. Jamie is gone.”

“No!”

“Kate, Kate, I don't like it, either. I'm heartsick at just the thought. But there were no survivors.”

Kate looked up at the sounds of a lone horseman making his way up the lane. It was the man who ran the livery in San Augustine. He dismounted and took off his hat. “Ma'am,” he said. “Sam. I got news. Some of the women that was in the Alamo is talking. They say that just hours before the fall, Colonel Travis sent out a man with a pouch full of messages from the defenders. They said it was Jamie MacCallister.”

Kate's heart swelled and she nearly swooned. Sam steadied her arm and she leaned against him.

“How straight is this news?” Sam asked.

“Pretty straight, Sam. And the patrol that found Susanna Dickerson said they come up on a place where there had been one hell of fight 'tween somebody and some Shawnees.”

“Shawnees?” Kate asked. “There are no Shawnees near San Antonio.”

“Well, not many, leastways,” the liveryman replied. “Anyhow, whoever is was that fought these Shawnees killed more than his share, according to the patrol. They counted eleven bodies. All Injun.”

“And the white man?” Sam asked. “Assuming it was a white man; what about him?”

“Not a trace, Sam. Looks like he got away clean.”

“Did not,” the heavy voice spoke from behind them, startling them all.

They whirled around. It was the huge Cherokee, Egg. He had slipped up on them as silently as a snake.

“Get wagon,” the Cherokee enforcer said. “Pack provisions for a long trip. I will take you to your man.”

“He's
alive?
” Kate cried.

“Yes. Badly hurt. Long way off.”

“I'll go with you, Kate,” Sam said.

“You stay here,” Egg told him firmly, in a tone that Sam had learned meant the subject was closed. “No one will bother us. I have man with me to drive wagon. We leave in one hour.” He looked at Kate. “No more faint. You must be strong. Move!”

* * *

Houston now had about a thousand men. He could never be sure because of the desertions and new additions that were arriving every day. Houston formed a cavalry unit, and assigned men to man the cannon, of which he had six, all mounted.

Meanwhile, Santa Anna had left San Antonio and joined up with General Sesma. It made for an awesome force of trained, combat-experienced soldiers. Santa Anna felt confident that this time, he would drive every American out of Texas... or kill them where they stood.

Then he made a fatal mistake.

He split up his huge army into several groups. He sent over twelve hundred troops to the south, about nine hundred to the north, and he took personal command of a select group of infantry and cavalry and crossed the Colorado river — his objective was San Felipe.

That move was to be Santa Anna's Waterloo.

* * *

On April 21st, 1836, Kate arrived at the home of the Mexican couple who had cared for Jamie. On that same date, far to the east, Houston and his army were preparing to meet Santa Anna's troops in the battle that would turn the tide for Texas independence.