Scream of Eagles (5 page)

“Come on,” the citizen's friends urged him. “Let's get out of here, Max.”

But Max had worked himself up into a killing mood. He shook off the hands that held him and stalked over to Jamie's table. He put both hands on the tabletop and said, “Stand up, MacCallister. I think I'll kill you!”

Jamie sighed. He did not want to harm this man. He didn't come to Elko to do harm to locals. But what puzzled Jamie was why this citizen was so worked up over the killing of a murderer and rapist.

“I said get up, you son of a bitch!” Max hollered.

Jamie rammed the edge of the table into the man's belly, doubling him over as all the air was forced from him. Jamie rose from the chair with an easy movement and popped Max on the side of his jaw, sending the man tumbling to the floor. He then reached down and took the man's pistol from the holster and tossed it on the table, out of reach. Cursing, Max crawled to his boots, his big hands balled into fists.

Jamie hit him three times in the face, right, left, right, the blows coming together so fast they sounded as one. Max went down for the second time and didn't get up.

“Jesus Christ!” someone in the crowd muttered, looking down at the much younger man who was lying unconscious on the floor, his nose busted and his lips pulped.

Jamie picked up Max's gun and walked over to the bar, handing the pistol to the barkeep. “Give it back to him when he cools down.”

“Y . . . y ... yes, sir,” the man stammered. “I'll hide it away right now.”

Jamie paid for his drink and food and walked outside. He ripped open Red's shirt, removed the money belt, then walked over to the bank to make arrangements to have the money sent to the bank in Valley.

Jamie had put five miles behind him before the sun rose the next morning.

* * *

Falcon sat in his hotel suite in Denver and carefully read all the newspapers he'd bought: papers from New York City and Boston and San Francisco and St. Louis. The article in the Boston paper, written by somebody named Ben F. Washington, particularly disturbed him. The reporter, while not coming right out and openly saying he hoped Jamie would fail in his manhunt, came damn close to it.

Falcon folded up the newspapers and tried to put the article out of his mind. He'd never had much use for big city newspaper writers; seemed like they wanted a perfect world but didn't have enough sense to realize the world was populated with imperfect people.

Falcon decided that if the day came when he ran into this Ben F. Washington, he just might jack his jaw a time or two—maybe that would knock some sense into the man.

Falcon dressed carefully and went down to the lobby, checking to see if James William and Page had replied to the message he'd sent upon arriving in Denver. They had not. Falcon shrugged that off. Could be they were out of town. But he'd go see for himself. He had the doorman hail him a carriage and smoked a cigar on the ride over to James William's house.

Falcon dismissed the carriage and stood for several moments looking at the darkened home just at the edge of town, in a very fashionable neighborhood. The homes were set some distance apart, with lots of shrubbery and trees in the well-kept lawns. He saw the lantern lights of another carriage approaching and stepped behind a tree, although why he felt he had to do that was a mystery to him. Habit, he guessed.

He stood in the shadows and watched a man step from the carriage, pay the driver, and dismiss the carriage. In the darkness, Falcon could see that the man was dressed in Eastern garb and looked to be in his mid to late twenties. But Falcon couldn't be certain of that.

Falcon froze as still as granite when the man whispered, “You've done well, sister. Very well for yourself. Not bad at all for a quarter-breed nigger gal. It's going to be amusing to watch your make-believe white world crumble all around you.”

Falcon let the stranger get a block ahead before he fell in behind him. Following him was easy, for Falcon, like his dad, was a woodsman. He followed him right back to his own hotel. When the man was inside, Falcon approached the doorman.

“That fellow who just walked in, I could swear I know him, but his name escapes me.”

“Why, that's the Boston reporter, sir,” the doorman replied. “Ben F. Washington.”

“Do tell?” Falcon said, slipping the man some money. “Well now. I guess I didn't know him after all.”

“The West is getting crowded, sir.”

“That it is. That it is.”

* * *

Waddy Keeton and Bob Perlich had taken out to the east, and that's the direction Jamie took. He had him a hunch they were going to try to link up with that part of the Nelson gang hiding out in Utah Territory.

The more of them I catch together, Jamie thought, the sooner I can finish this thing and return to ...

What?

Back to the home that he and Kate had shared for so many years?

No. Jamie didn't want to live in that house without Kate.

Too many memories.

He made up his mind right then and there to give the home to one of his grandkids and build him a little cabin up in the High Lonesome, overlooking his valley; maybe not too far from Kate's burying place. That way he could walk down there and tend to the grave and sit and talk with Kate from time to time. Until his moment arrived to join her on the Starry Path.

To tell the truth, he just didn't want to live without Kate.

Was that why he was on this manhunt? Did he have some sort of death wish?

Maybe. Maybe that was a part of it.

The thought of another woman never entered his mind. Jamie was a strong, healthy, and virile man. But another woman? No. There could be no other woman in his life. Not ever.

Not even the grave could separate him from Kate.

Jamie looked up at the blue of the sky. “I'll be along soon enough, old woman,” he said, speaking in the Shawnee tongue. “You just wait a time. We'll be together. And then we'll never be apart.”

Soaring on the currents, high overhead, an eagle screamed.

* * *

Falcon followed Ben around Denver for several days, determined to get to the bottom of Ben's whispered comments in front of James William and Page's house.

He didn't learn much, except that it seemed to him that Ben had surrounded himself with fops and fools and, with the exception of a redheaded, green-eyed young lady named Mary Marie O'Donnell, shady ladies. Even before he introduced himself, Falcon had taken an instant liking to Mary Marie. The Irish girl had a tongue on her that could be as sharp as a Bowie knife and didn't mind at all using it. On several occasions, when she was away from the group, Falcon had managed some lengthy conversations with Mary Marie. But he was very careful to make it clear right off that he was a married man and not looking for romance, just conversation. He never told her his last name, and she never asked.

No, sir, she was not the girlfriend of Chuckie. But Chuckie wanted the others to think she was. It was all a game of pretend.

Ben F. Washington? A man who had an axe to grind and someone's ox to gore, she told Falcon. A troubled man, she thought.

Did he ever talk about himself?

No. As a matter of fact, whenever someone would bring that up, he would change the subject. But, she added the last time they spoke, he did let slip one time that he had ties to a family that used to live around Richmond, Virginia.

* * *

“Falcon is going to stay longer in Denver than he first thought,” Joleen told her brothers and sisters one afternoon, after the stage had dropped off the mail. “Something's come up.”

“What?” Megan asked.

“He didn't say.”

“Probably a blonde,” Matthew said with a grin, cutting his eyes over to Marie Gentle Breeze.

She smiled. “He knows better,” she said.

Everybody there knew that sure was the truth. The Cheyenne/French lady had her a temper that could cause a cougar to think twice. Falcon walked the line at his house. He could play cards all night long at his saloon if he wanted to, and sometimes did. He could have a night out with the boys occasionally. He could go off hunting or fishing and stay gone a week if he wanted to. But when he came home, Marie ran the house. Period.

As the old mountain man, Preacher, put it one time, that Gentle Breeze could turn into a tornader faster than you could spit!

* * *

Snow covered the ground when Jamie rode into the Mormon controlled area that Brigham Young called The Place. It was then called Deseret, and a short time later, Utah. Jamie had always gotten along well with the Saints, simply because he respected their ways and did not condemn them for their practices. But he did not want to do anything that might bring the Danites, the enforcement arm of the Mormon Church, sometimes called the Avenging Angels, down on him.

But he need not have worried. The Mormons he encountered were friendly and for the most part totally sympathetic toward Jamie and his manhunt. He learned that the Mormons had driven out the members of the Nelson gang who had been hiding in Northern Utah. They were believed to be somewhere around the Fort Bridger area.

Jamie found an old trapper's cabin that was in pretty good shape and decided to stay there for a time. He rechinked some of the logs, cut an ample supply of firewood, and then went hunting, smoking and jerking some of the meat and making pemmican. If he had done nothing else during the first year of his manhunt, he had broken up the Miles Nelson gang and put the outlaws on the run.

He had detectives from San Francisco, Denver, and St. Louis working to find Miles Nelson, but the outlaw leader had vanished, going into deep cover.

As the days grew colder and the snow deepened, Jamie sat snug in his warm cabin, before his fire, and talked to the dancing flames, occasionally glancing at the picture of Kate he carried inside the face cover of his watch.

“I'll find you all,” he whispered. “You can't hide forever. You've got to surface someday, and when you do, I'll be there. And I'll kill you!”

* * *

Marshall Henry Ludlow, Richard Farnsworth, and Charles Bennett each received an identical wire from their fathers back in New York City. They were ordered to stay in Denver and open an office. Come the spring, they were to begin traveling Colorado Territory in search of land and mining operations that might prove profitable to the corporation.

At the end of the telegrams were these words: YOUR WIVES DUE TO ARRIVE NEXT TRAIN.

That threw everybody in the group except Mary Marie O'Donnell into a panic. She found it hysterically funny. Chuckie did not share in the humor and kicked her out of the hotel, putting her on the street very nearly penniless.

Falcon found her on the curbside, sitting on her luggage.

“Can you sew?” he asked.

“Are you daft? I'm Irish,” she popped back at him, emerald-green eyes flashing. “Of course I can sew. What's sewing got to do with farming?”

Falcon blinked a couple of times. “I beg your pardon?”

“Farming. You hitch up the horse to a plow and turn the ground a time or two. Then you plant the seeds. Then—”

Falcon held up a hand. “I do know something about farming, Miss Mary.”

“I want a piece of ground to call my own.”

“Who's going to farm it for you?”

“Who? Me! Who else? Saint Pat?”

Falcon smiled and wrote a short note on the back of an envelope then hailed a carriage and began putting Mary's luggage in the rear boot.

“Where are we going?” Mary Marie questioned.

“We're not going anywhere,” Falcon told her. “But you're going to Valley, Colorado.”

“I am?”

“You are. Now get in. I'll see you to the stage.”

“If you think I'm going to be a kept woman, you are out of your mind!”

“Get in the damn carriage and hush up. Did I say anything about you being a kept woman?”

The driver was finding all this very interesting.

“No, but . . .”

“The MacCallisters own Valley. And everything around it for miles and miles. One of my brothers will sell you a piece of land. You can sew at my sister's dress shop until you save some money to get you started. Now stop arguing and get in the carriage.”

“MacCallister?” Mary Marie whispered. “You're? . . .”

“Falcon MacCallister. Jamie Ian MacCallister is my father.”

“Damn sure is,” the driver said. “Looks just like him.”

Ben F. Washington had exited the hotel and was standing just outside the doorway, listening to the exchange.

Mary Marie was rendered speechless for a moment, and for an Irish girl, that was quite a feat.

Falcon picked her up as if she weighed no more than a butterfly and deposited her in the carriage, then climbed in after her. “The stage depot,” he told the driver. He looked at Mary Marie and smiled. “I have a nephew named Jamie Ian the Third. I'll make a wager that he'll take one look at you and start walking into trees. By the time I get back to Valley in the spring, I'll wager that you two will be planning a summer wedding.”

“Hah!” Mary Marie snorted. “The day I marry some damn tightwad Scotchman, leprechauns will play the ‘Star Spangled Banner' on the pipes.”

Falcon smiled as the carriage pulled away from the hotel.

“How interesting,” Ben F. Washington said.

Ben paid no attention to the three burly men standing across the street, watching him intently.

Restlessness gripped Jamie, and he could not winter in the cabin. He headed for Fort Bridger.

“They've been here and gone, Mr. MacCallister,” the commanding officer of the fort told Jamie. “Six of the hardest-looking men I ever saw. They bought enough supplies to last the winter, loaded them on packhorses, and left. I heard one of them call another Waddy.”

“Which way did they go?”

“Straight north. Into the mountains. Give it up until spring, Colonel,” the officer urged, addressing Jamie by his old military rank. “This winter is shaping up to be a bad one.”

The officer fought away an urge to back up at the sight of Jamie's grim smile and those cold blue eyes. “I'll give it up when they're all dead.”

Jamie rested his horses for a day while he resupplied, and then pulled out, heading north.

Jamie found an old campsite on his third day out and spent some time reading sign. When he finished, he knew a lot more about the men he was after.

After studying the ground for a time, Jamie could now recognize their horses' hoof marks anywhere. There were six men, and one of them walked with a limp. None of them appeared to be very concerned about personal hygiene. They had tried to hide the campsite, but either weren't very good at it or had made only a half-hearted effort to do so. He found part of a burned envelope with the name Terry recognizable. That would be Slim Terry, he was sure.

Jamie hit the saddle and continued north. He put the Muddy behind him and stayed on the west side of Commissary Ridge, heading for the trading post on the Hams Fork. He was closing the distance between them by several miles each day.

His friends among the Indians had spread the word about his hunt, and he was not bothered by them. He did wake up one morning to find a new set of buckskins lying beside his bed, and a fine tomahawk with the buckskins.

The Utes, he was sure it was them, were leaving the outlaws alone—leaving them for Jamie.

Jamie sighted the trading post and swung down from the saddle. He took his field glasses from his saddlebags and studied the place for a moment. The long, half-open lean-to that served as a stable was filled with horses.

He had found Slim Terry and his bunch.

* * *

Ben F. Washington had not noticed the men trailing him, but Falcon had. He'd spotted them several days before. After seeing Mary Marie O'Donnell off on the stage for Valley, Falcon returned to the hotel and sat in the lobby, pretending to read a newspaper. As shadows began to creep silently over the city, signaling that dusk was about to turn the day into night, Ben walked through the lobby and out to the street. Falcon laid his paper aside and followed him.

Falcon had learned that James William and Page had taken the train to New York City the very day that Falcon had arrived in Denver. They would be gone for a month at least, maybe longer.

And maybe that was a good thing, Falcon thought. That would give him time to get to the bottom of whatever the hell was going on here.

Ben was taking his nightly walk before dinner. Falcon knew the route he would take, for Ben had never deviated from it. Staying across the street and half a block behind Ben, Falcon spotted the three toughs when they swung in behind the reporter. Falcon quickly crossed the street and closed the distance just as the three thugs—nicely dressed, but thugs nonetheless—reached Ben and dropped a bag over his head and shoved him into a darkened alley.

Falcon picked up a broken wheel spoke from the gutter and ran into the alley, swinging the hard wood. He didn't want to shoot unless it was absolutely necessary, for he wanted some time alone with Ben, without the police.

Falcon's attack came as a surprise to the thugs. The heavy spoke rang off of noggins, splitting the skin, sending the blood flying, and dropping the goons to the dirty and trash-littered alley floor.

Falcon jerked the hood from Ben's head and slammed the reporter up against a brick wall, a .44 stuck up under Ben's chin.

“My name is Falcon MacCallister, mister.” Falcon whispered the words to a very scared Ben F. Washington. “James William Haywood is my nephew. Now, you've been snooping around, muttering some damned odd words. You and me, Mr. Washington, are going to have a long talk. And you're going to level with me about what the Billy-Hell is going on around here. And you're going to be truthful with me. For if I think you're lying, I'm going to blow your goddamn head plumb off. You understand all that, city boy?”

Ben managed to nod his head, the muzzle of the .44 cold against his chin.

“Fine,” Falcon said, easing the hammer down. “I just knew you'd see it my way.”

* * *

Jamie rode up to the trading post from the rear, reining up behind the stable. He broke open and filled the twin barrels of the sawed-off shotgun with buckshot loads. At close range, the Greener was a fearsome weapon, capable of taking out two or three men with a single blast from both barrels.

Walking around the stable, Jamie paused as the front door to the trading post opened and two old gray-bearded men stepped out. Trappers, from the looks of them. Men whose time had come and gone, but who were still hanging on to a way of life that advancing civilization had forever destroyed.

The old mountain men spotted Jamie and walked up to him. “They's a smell of evil in yonder, MacCallister,” one told him, jerking a thumb toward the trading post. “Fairly stinks, it does. They's six of 'em and they's waitin' for ye. You need airy hep?”

“No,” Jamie said softly. “But I thank you for the offer.”

“Knowed your grandpere,” the second old mountain man said, a touch of French accent in his words. “And I knowed ol' Robedeaux what took up with the Cheyenne and bred forth the woman who's the mama of Gentle Breeze. Your son treatin' her rat, MacCallister?”

“That he is.”

“Figured he must be. The Cheyenne would a-never a-stood for it if he wasn't a good man.” The old man, who Jamie figured must be eighty if he was a day, looked at the Greener in Jamie's hands and smiled. “That's two men a-sittin' at a table just to your rat as you step in the door. Two more facin' the door, backs to the rear wall. The other two is along the bar. That'd be to your lef' as you walk in. Take the two at the right side table out furst, they's the fastest. Waddy Keeton and Slim Terry. They's some other folks in there, but they's moved out of the way. Go in shootin'. Good luck to you, Mac.”

“Thanks.”

The old mountain men walked to the hitch rail, swung into their saddles, and were gone.

The cold winds off the mountains blew harsh against Jamie's face as he walked to the front door. Pausing for a few seconds, Jamie took several deep breaths. He eared back both hammers to the sawed-off, slammed open the door and went fast and low, turning to his right.

* * *

In Falcon's hotel suite, a pot of coffee on the table, Falcon listened with rapt attention as Ben F. Washington carefully recounted the whole sorry and sordid tale of his family's history—as much as he knew.

When Ben had finished, Falcon poured a fresh cup and leaned back in his chair. “Roscoe and Anne Jefferson became Anne and Ross LeBeau, the actors and singers and musicians. I often wondered what happened to them. So Anne is the mother of you and Page?”

“Yes. She passed for white. Obviously, if you have eyes, you can see I could not.”

“But you don't know Page.”

“No.”

“She's done nothing to you personally.”

“No. Nothing.”

“And she doesn't know she is a quarter Negro?”

“No.”

“Then why do you hate her so and want to destroy her life?”

Ben did not reply to that. He leaned back into his chair and stared at Falcon.

“Is it jealousy?” Falcon asked. “Is that it?”

“Quite possibly, that is part of it.”

“You know, of course, that I will not allow you to ruin my nephew's life?” Falcon could butcher the English language when he wanted to, and when he wanted to, he could speak with the precision of a teacher.

“How would you stop me?”

“That's easy. I'd kill you!”

Ben's eyes widened in disbelief. “But you just saved my life!”

“Strictly to get information; to find out what in the hell is going on.” Falcon stared hard at the man. “I don't sympathize with you at all, Ben. Not one bit. You've got your own life, so why not just live it, and let others live theirs. You have no right to come along and destroy others just because you're angry at the hand life dealt you. If you want to live, just settle down and play your cards.”

“I can't believe you'd kill me, Falcon.”

“This is a family matter, Ben. And the MacCallister family sticks together. You poke one of us with a needle, we all feel it. I will stop you from ruining two lives.”

Ben didn't believe it. He just didn't believe Falcon would kill him. The reporter rose from his chair and walked to the door. He paused, turned around. “Thank you for what you did in that alley. Tomorrow, I shall buy a pistol and learn how to use it. Good night, Falcon.”

Falcon sat for a time, staring at the closed door. He knew what he had to do, but damn sure didn't look forward to doing it.

* * *

Six men in the trading post grabbed for guns when the door burst open. The other men hit the floor.

Jamie pulled both triggers of the Greener, and Waddy Keeton and Slim Terry got splattered all over the log wall. Dropping the sawed-off, Jamie bellied down on the floor, his hands filled with Colts, and let them bang.

Bob Perlich took a round in the belly and sat down hard on the floor, screaming and cursing Jamie. Willie Evans' lights were forever turned out as a .44 slug punched a hole in his forehead. Lonnie Rayburn and Jed Hudson ran out the back door and made it to their horses.

But they left all their supplies behind.

Jamie got to his boots and walked over to Perlich. He stood for a moment, then knelt down beside the man.

“You're a rotten son of a bitch, MacCallister,” Perlich gasped the words.

“I've been called worse,”Jamie replied, reloading his pistols.

“Miles will kill you, MacCallister. You'll not get lead in that man.”

“We'll see about that.”

The other men in the large room were getting up, looking warily all around them.

“It wasn't in our plans to kill your wife, MacCallister,” Perlich said with a grin. “We had plans to grab her and as many of yourn and hers daughters and use 'em up 'til we got tarred of 'em.”

Jamie fought back his anger and stared at the man.

“See, we had us a plant in your town feedin' us everythin' that went on. How'd you figure out what we was gonna do?”

“A lucky guess, I suppose.”

“I'll see you in hell, MacCallister. 'Cause you ain't no better than us'n.”

“You may be right, Bob . . .”

“This here one's still alive! ” a man called from the bloody, buckshot-blasted corner of the room. “But not for long.”

Kicking Perlich's guns away, far out of the man's reach, Jamie walked over to Waddy Keeton and knelt down.

The man had taken a full load of buckshot in the belly and chest. The pale rider on his death horse was galloping hard toward Waddy, and the man knew it.

“You have something to say to me, Waddy?”Jamie asked.

“Yeah,” the outlaw gasped through his pain. He spewed obscenities at Jamie for a moment, then had to catch his breath as the pain from his wounds overcame him.

Jamie waited. Glanced over at Slim Terry. Terry had received the second blast as the shotgun was lifting from the recoil and Jamie's body twisting. He had taken the full load in his face and was unrecognizable . . . due to the fact that most of his head was missing.

“Miles Nelson is shore to be hirin' the top guns in the country, MacCallister,” Waddy blurted, spitting out blood with every word. “I ain't gonna be around to see it, but he'll git the last laugh.”

Jamie had been hearing words to that effect for nearly five decades. He was still around. He offered no comment. Kneeling there, he watched Waddy die, a curse on the outlaw's lips as he passed over from life to death. Waddy was blaspheming God with his last breath.

“I'd not like to go out cussin' the Almighty thataway,” a trapper remarked.

Jamie removed the money belts from the men. They were not as thick as when he first started his hunt, but still held a goodly amount of stolen gold and money.

“The money is stolen,” Jamie explained. “I'm sending it back as I find it.”

“Drag them heathens out back and plant 'em,” the trading post owner told a couple of men. “Do that and I'll zero out your bar bill. Somebody open the door and let this damn gunsmoke out. It's smartin' to my eyes.”

“Can I have his boots?” another man asked, pointing to Perlich. “Mine's plumb wore out.”

“Hell, I don't care,” the owner said.

“How 'bout them pistols?” another man asked. “Them's fine shootin' irons.”

“Take 'em if you want 'em,” the owner told him. “That all right with you, Mr. MacCallister?”

Jamie shrugged his indifference as to what happened to the personal effects of the dead men. “I'll take their supplies,” he said. “And the best of the packhorses. The rest of the animals you can sell or give away. I don't care.”

“That's fair,” a man said.

“Rat nice of you, Mr. MacCallister,” another spoke up, stripping the guns from Willie Evans while another man tugged off his boots. Willie wore no socks, and his feet were filthy, crusted with dirt.