Scream of Eagles (11 page)

Jefferson Washburn turned and walked off toward the river. Jamie lingered over his coffee until the old trapper had emerged from the trees and was riding south. He did not look back.

Jamie carefully doused his fire and rinsed out the coffeepot and frying pan. As he swung into the saddle and pointed Buck's nose toward the Bluffs, he recalled an old line about the number six.

“Kill 'em all 'cept six. Save them for pallbearers.”

“And I own a small cabin on the edge of town that you can use just as long as you like,” Megan told a very stunned Ben F. Washington. “I think the story of Ma and Pa is one that should be told, honestly and truthfully.”

Ben cleared his throat and found his voice. “I will have to interview all of the children extensively. And that will take some time. And I will have to have access to all of your parents' papers and notes.”

“You can talk to us all you want,” Morgan said. “But you'll have to have Pa's permission to read all the letters and diaries and such. And Ma kept a record of everything that went on from the time she first met Pa, back in Kentucky, I think it was.”

“Yes,” Joleen said. “That was right after Pa and Hannah escaped from that Shawnee village where they'd been held prisoner.”

Ben leaned forward, his eyes alive with excitement, pad and pencil ready. “Tell me what you know about that,” he urged. “I want to get everyone's perspective on everything.”

“That's gonna take some time,” Falcon said with a grin, cutting his eyes to Joleen. “Especially when she starts runnin' her mouth.”

Joleen smiled sweetly. “And I have a few things I can tell Mr. Washington about you, too, brother.”

“Oh, hell,” Falcon muttered.

“I'll make fresh coffee,” Megan MacCallister Johnson said.

“Well,” Jamie Ian the Second said. “I think Pa was seven years old when the Shawnee attacked . . .”

* * *

Jamie sat his saddle and gave the trading post a good eyeballing. There were half a dozen horses tied up at hitch rails in front of the place. The doors to the stable were open, and it appeared to be about half full.

Jamie lifted the reins and said, “All right, Buck. Let's go see what we've found.”

Jamie stripped the saddle from Buck, relieved the packhorse of its burden, and rubbed them both down. He was sure he'd been seen riding up, but no one had as yet left the main building to see what he wanted. Jamie broke open the sawed-off twelve gauge and shoved shells into the twin barrels, snapping it closed.

He checked both his Colts. He usually carried the hammer over an empty chamber, but on this day he loaded them up full. He carefully wiped them clean of dust and checked the action, then slid them back into leather.

Jamie walked toward the closed door of the long and low-roofed trading post on the North Platte.

He passed by an open window and caught the smell of fresh-burned gunpowder. Past the window, Jamie hunkered down low and ran past the closed front door and around to the rear of the building. He checked the rickety, old two-hole outhouse. Empty. He pressed up against the back of the post and put an ear to the door. He could hear no sound. Then: “He rode up,” a man said. “Goddammit. It was him. Where is he?”

“I bet you he's standin' by the front door, listenin',” another said.

“That old gray-headed bastard is tricky,” yet another voice was added.

“He ain't that old,” a fourth voice said calmly. “He may be sixty year old, but he's still one hell of a man. Don't let him get them hands of hisn on you. He's bull strong.”

Jamie smiled.

“You sorry piles of buffalo droppin's,” another voice came to Jamie. “There wasn't no need to kill Clay. He didn't do you no harm.”

“Shut up, storekeeper,” a new voice said. “We thought he was goin' for a gun.”

“Well, he wasn't. Me and him been pards for years. Now he's dead for no good reason. I hope MacCallister kills ever' one of you trash bags.”

The sound of a hard blow came to Jamie, then a thud as a man hit the floor, followed by: “Now keep that blowhole of yourn closed, old man.”

“Don't hit him again!” a woman screamed.

“You can shut up, too, you ugly old bitch,” the outlaw said. “You just be glad you're as ugly as a hog's butt, or we'd have you in that back room doin' some pumpin' and humpin'. Now drag that bastard behind the counter and don't say no more.”

Jamie lifted the latch string and eased the door open just wide enough for him to slip inside. But this time fate worked against him.

“Oh, hell!” a man yelled, spinning around in the center of the room, spotting Jamie and lifting his pistol.

Jamie blew a hole in him with the Greener, shifted the weapon and cut down a second man who was lifting a rifle. Jamie jumped behind some stacked crates and hauled out his pistols, earing back the hammers as the lead really started to howl and the trading post filled with arid gunsmoke.

Jamie jumped from one spot to another, trying to get a clean shot. He could see only a man's leg from where he squatted, so he shot the outlaw in the knee.

The kneecap shattered, and the leg crumpled under the suddenly screaming outlaw. “Oh, my God. I been ruint.”

“Where is he, dammit? I can't see nothin'.”

Jamie loaded up the Greener and eared back both hammers. He waited.

“Who's down?” a commanding voice called.

“Sandberg and Reynolds is dead. Bellar's down with a busted knee.”

“Oh, God,” Bellar hollered. “I ain't never had nothin' pain me so.”

While they talked, Jamie moved again, silent in his moccasins as he crept toward the wall that separated the large main room from the storage area. Jamie picked up an empty wooden box and slung it toward the back door. A half second after the box smashed into the door, a man stepped into the archway, both hands filled with pistols and both pistols smoking.

Jamie gave him both barrels of the sawed-off and very nearly blew the man in two. He quickly shifted positions, the thick gunsmoke hiding his silent move.

“So much for Jack,” the calm voice spoke from the other side of the wall.

“Let's git out of here, Hulon!”

“Naw,” Hulon Nations said. “I'm tarred of runnin' from this bastard. You hear me, MacCallister. Let's finish this thing right here and now.”

Jamie waited.

Hulon suddenly giggled like a girl. Jamie recalled Jeff Washburn telling him that the man was about half crazy.

“Kill 'em all, Mr. MacCallister! ” a woman's voice shrieked. “You kill ever' black-hearted one of 'em, you hear?”

“Shut up you, you crazy old bag!” Carl Dews hollered.

“I got to have some re-lief,” Roy Bellar said with a groan. “I'm tellin' you, I'm in pain.”

A pistol roared, and Roy Bellar was silent.

“Good God, Hulon!” Carl yelled. “You done kilt Roy!”

“I's tarred of listenin' to him whine. I never did like him no how. Come on, MacCallister. Let's stand up face-to-face and hook and draw. How about it?”

Jamie waited.

“I'm out of here,” Carl said. “I'm like . . .
gone!”

Jamie heard boots strike the boards and then a wild scream.

“She stobbed me!” Carl bellered. “That old bag stobbed me, Hulon. Oh, God, come pull this thing outta my belly. I'm on far, Hulon.”

“Shoot her,” Hulon said.

“I can't see her! Where's she gone to. Oh, shit! She's got an axe!”

A flat, smushing sound filled the room, and what was left of Carl Dews hit the floor with an ugly sound.

“Old woman,” Hulon said, “I'll deal with you when I git done with MacCallister.”

Jamie stood up and stepped into the doorway, both Colts blazing. Hulon started soaking up the lead. The big man had been taken by surprise by Jamie's sudden move. Even with half a dozen bullets in him, the big, black-bearded man lifted his guns and started smoking. Jamie felt the tug of a bullet tear through his jacket and burn his arm. Pain exploded in his head as a hot chunk of lead cut a groove in his scalp. Another bullet creased his ribs as Jamie turned and took careful aim with his right-hand Colt. He let the hammer fall, and the .44 round hit Hulon Nations in the center of the forehead. The big man's boots went flying out from under him, and he stretched out full-length on the boards, fingers still clutching both pistols.

It was over.

Jamie retrieved his Greener and loaded it up, then saw to his pistols. The woman was bathing her husband's bruised and battered face with wet cloths.

“Vilest people I ever encountered in all my years,” the woman said. “There's a young girl in the back room. Thirteen or fourteen years old. Homesteader's daughter from the look of her. They brung her with them. Said they grabbed her two days ago, after they killed her parents. They been usin' her somethin' terrible. In all sorts of unnatural ways. I don't know if the poor thing is dead or alive. She stopped screamin' about an hour 'fore you got here.”

Jamie stepped over and around the bodies and pushed open the door to the bedroom. A young girl, wearing nothing but what she'd been born with, sat huddled in the center of the bed, her eyes wild with shock. Her thighs were streaked with blood.

“It's over,” Jamie told her. “They won't hurt you anymore.”

The girl started weeping.

“See to the child, Marybelle,” the trading post owner said, just as Jamie stepped back into the room. “She'll be needful of a woman's touch.”

Jamie began the job of dragging the bodies out the back door.

“I just finished diggin' me a new privy pit,” the man said. “Got the new outhouse built. Just shove that old relief station over and drop them bastards down in the shit and whatnot. It's a fittin' place for them.”

“I couldn't agree with you more,” Jamie replied.

He dragged what was left of Jack Moore out the back door and over to the privy. Jamie shoved the privy over and let it crash to the ground. The impact tore it apart. He tossed the body into the pit as the blood from his bullet-grooved head dripped onto his jacket. The post owner was digging a hole for his partner.

When the six outlaws had been deposited into the pit, Jamie looked at the trading post owner. “You want to say anything over them?”

“Yeah,” the man said. He looked down into the dark and odious pit. “Burn in hell, you bastards!”

* * *

Jamie spent several days at the trading post. The owner's wife saw to his wounds, and Jamie helped the couple get the place cleaned up and the floor mopped free of blood.

The young girl, who had lost her entire family to the mindless, ruthless savagery of the outlaws, quickly agreed to stay with the couple and help run the trading post.

Four days after the shoot-out, Jamie saddled up, heading north for the Dakotas. Earlier, at a town with a telegraph, he had wired his detective agency, and they had responded the same day.

There was a trading post of sorts up on the Rapid River, just to the east of the Black Hills, and Jamie had received word by wire that two or three of the men he sought were hanging around up there.
⁹

Jamie forded the Niobrara and then crossed the White, riding past the place where, in March of 1874, the army would build Fort Robinson. Jamie had no way of knowing it, but he would return to this same area in a few years.

The Cheyenne River was running low, and Jamie forded it easily, heading due north. Days later, he crossed the Battle and the Spring. He saw many bands of Indians, but they left him alone.

Jamie had heard that the Indians were on the prowl in this area, due to a few white men coming in to search for gold in the sacred Black Hills, but the word had been passed from tribe to tribe about Jamie; the bands of Indians only watched in silence as Jamie made his lonely way north.

Inside the trading post, Lonnie Rayburn and Jed Hudson, the two thugs who had escaped the shoot-out in the trading post on Hams Fork, had decided they weren't going to run any farther. Lonnie and Jed were just about at the end of their string. They were down to their last few dollars, and their nerves were ragged and raw from the nearly two years of relentless pursuit by Jamie Ian MacCallister. Gary Crane, who had ridden in about a week back with hard news, was in just as bad a shape. But he, too, had decided he would run no more.

The owner of the trading post, who had fought both Indians and outlaws during his long years on the frontier (and who knew all about Jamie MacCallister), watched with amused eyes as the three men grew more and more jumpy. MacCallister was coming, and the outlaws knew it. They sat and talked in low tones, the trading post owner catching only a word now and then: Ambush. Back shoot him. Run.

The owner knew that these dregs of society would never ambush that wily Ol' Wolf MacCallister, and odds were against them ever getting into position to back shoot him. They'd made their brags that they would run no more, so that left them only one option: stand and fight.

It was going to be right interesting when MacCallister did ride up. For a few minutes at least.

Then the man looked up, and Jamie Ian MacCallister was standing in the doorway, lookin' like an Avengin' Angel, holding that sawed-off Greener in his hands. He must have picketed his horses some distance away and Injuned up on silent feet.

Lonnie, Jed, and Gary were all hunched over a back table, whispering and conjuring up dark and evil plans that none had the courage to see through, totally unaware of Jamie's presence.

The trading post owner signaled to his squaw to stand clear. The Crow woman slipped silently into the storeroom and hunkered down behind some crates.

Lonnie Rayburn felt eyes on him, and looked up, the color draining from his face. “Oh, my God!” he screamed. He jumped to his feet, knocking the chair over as he frantically clawed for his pistol.

Jamie lifted the sawed-off with one hand and pulled the trigger, the buckshot blast striking the outlaw in the upper chest and face and slamming him against the side wall.