This time, Buford was not nearly so nimble in getting to his feet. The men from the outside had come rushing into the huge room to see the fight, and almost to a man, they stood smiling as Jamie MacCallister kicked the crap out of Buford Sanders. Buford was not a well-liked man.
“Yield and it’s over,” Jamie told the man.
“You go to hell!” Buford said, and picked up a roughhewn chair. He hurled the chair at Jamie, and Jamie stepped to one side, the chair crashing against a wall. Buford roared and rushed across the room, both big fists whipping the air.
Jamie set himself and hit Buford a right and a left, both powerful blows landing on the man’s jaw, right and left side. While Buford was stopped cold, trying to clear his head of the pain, Jamie set himself again and started his punch down around his ankles. He landed a solid right to Buford’s mouth and the blood and several teeth flew. Buford’s feet flew out from under him and he landed on his back on the floor.
Jamie stepped back and waited. He wasn’t even breathing hard and had yet to work up a sweat—a fact not unnoticed by the men in the room.
“Give this up, Buford,” one of his few friends in the room called. “Afore the lad kills you with his fists.”
“I’ll yield to no goddamn dirty Scotsman,” Buford pushed the words past pulped and bloody lips. “I’ll see you dead this day, MacCallister.”
“No, you won’t, Sanders,” Jamie said easily. “I don’t know why you carry such black hate in your heart for me, but it’s going to get you killed if you continue this.”
Buford heaved himself off the floor and advanced toward Jamie, his face a mask of wild hatred, his boots thumping heavily on the plank floor.
Jamie didn’t wait. He took the offensive and began battering Buford with terrible, punishing blows to the face and belly. Buford could do naught but attempt to cover up. After two full minutes of taking blows that would have killed a lesser man, Buford’s face was mottled with bruises and slick with blood. But still he would not go down.
Jamie stepped back and looked at the swaying man. “It’s over,” he said. “I’ll not continue this.”
“Good lad,” the man who ran the post said.
“No!” Buford screamed. “No, by God, it ain’t over. Fight me, you dirty bastard out of a spread-legged whore.”
No man present would have taken that slur, and Jamie was no exception. His eyes narrowed as he stepped forward, one big right hand balled into a huge fist. He laid that fist against Buford’s jaw and all present could hear the breaking of bone. Buford’s eyes rolled back into his head, and he toppled over, landing on the floor with a mighty crash. He did not move.
His few friends came to his aid and dragged the man outside and placed him beside a horse trough.
“That was as good a tussle as I’ve ever seen,” a mountain man remarked. “And I have seen some kick, gouge, and cuts in my time.”
“Aye,” another said. “Twust a good ’un, all right.”
“Step up to the bar, Jamie MacCallister,” the barman said. “And have a drink on me. Buford Sanders has had that comin’ to him for a long time.”
“Aye,” a trapper said. “And Jamie MacCallister shore give it to him.”
“You made a powerful enemy there, Jamie,” yet another said. “He’ll not forget or forgive. He’s a hater, he is.”
Jamie began to relax his muscles as the tenseness gradually left him. He had not come out of the fight unscathed, for his head and jaw hurt and there was blood on his lips where Buford had smacked him a pretty good lick. Had Buford not lost his temper, he could have done some real damage to Jamie. But the Shawnee chief had taught Jamie well in the art of hand-to-hand combat. Jamie tried to never enter into a fight with his blood hot and to always keep a cool head.
Jamie did not want the cup of whiskey the barman had set before him, but neither did he want to insult the man. He took a couple of small sips, and then when the man went to serve another customer, Jamie moved away from the bar and started picking out items for the long ride home.
The crowd thinned as men went outside to take another look at the battered Buford Sanders, who was now on his feet and wobbling around, muttering dark threats, all directed at Jamie. He was muttering because his jaw was clearly broken and badly swollen. His friends got the man into the saddle and they rode off, with Jamie taking note of the direction they took. He liked the look of none of Buford’s friends, figuring them all for brigands and backshooters.
Jamie paid for his supplies and was gone a half hour after the fight. He offered to pay for his share of damages done to tables and chairs, but the man who ran the post would have none of that.
“Watch your back, lad,” a burly trapper told Jamie. “Them that rides with Buford is no-count.”
Jamie certainly agreed with that. He headed south.
* * *
There was much to do in the long and lovely valley before winter’s cold fist closed over the countryside. But for the first couple of days after Jamie’s arrival, he and Kate did nothing except get reacquainted . . . several times.
Although all the men who settled in the valley with Jamie were skilled hunters, none were in Jamie’s class; indeed, few men anywhere were. Jamie spent the first week back hunting for game, meat to jerk and smoke and to make pemmican. He put the older children fishing and the women began smoking the fish. The younger children gathered what berries were left, under the supervision of adults.
Black Thunder had taken his people to new winter camping grounds, and those in the valley were now truly alone. Had there been word from Carson or Fremont, it was to have been dropped off by the first trapper or mountain man leaving Bent’s Fort traveling east. There was no message from either.
But the cabins were snug and the winter that season was mild, if one calls temperatures occasionally dropping down to ten or twenty degrees below zero mild. No one got sick, and even though the food was very bland toward the end of the winter, no one went hungry. In the spring of 1841, Jamie and Sam once more made ready their mules and headed for Bent’s Fort, with Sam complaining that the shopping list was longer than his arm.
“More mouths to feed,” Sarah told him.
That was sure a fact, for when Sarah’s barren streak ended, it didn’t just break, it shattered to the four winds. Sarah gave birth to another set of twins that winter. As before, a boy and a girl.
“You trying to catch up with Kate and me?” Jamie kidded his friend.
“God forbid!” Sam said.
Jamie looked at his oldest son, Jamie Ian, who was now thirteen and very nearly a grown man. He was not yet as tall or heavy as his father, but he would be someday. “Look after your ma and your bothers and sisters, Jamie Ian. It’s in your hands now.”
“Yes, Pa. I will.”
“Next year, I’ll more than likely be gone by this time. I’ll speak to Sam about you going along with him and probably Swede for supplies. Would you like that?”
The boy’s smile would have lighted up a dark room. “Yes, sir!”
Sam and Swede and all the rest had toughened both physically and mentally during the years out in the vastness of the west. During Jamie’s absence, a crew of brigands had happened along and tried to have their way with the women while the men were in the field. Ellen Kathleen had rung the warning bell and the men had come at a run. There had been eight brigands. Five of them now lay in the ground some ways out from the plot of ground designated for the community cemetery—when the time came—and all knew it would. Sam would not have them buried among decent folks. Sam had killed two, Swede had killed two, and twelve-year-old Jamie Ian had used his handmade Bowie on the fifth, cutting him open from neck to crotch.
Three had gotten away. Lewis, Watkins, and Smith. Jamie had been given their descriptions and silently vowed to find them. For they had been the ones who had manhandled Ellen Kathleen, almost stripping her naked before Juan and the others had shown up causing the brigands to take flight.
“You have a talk with that
son of yours, Jamie,” Kate told her husband. “He is entirely too quick to use that knife of his.”
Jamie had stared down at her. “He used it protecting his mother and family and the others.”
“Jamie!” she stamped her foot. “He wanted to scalp the man!”
“So?” the rugged frontiersman said coldly.
“I fear for him, Jamie. He’s too much like you.”
“That’s bad, Kate? Who stopped him from scalping the bastard?”
Kate stared up at him. “Sam.”
“I’ll have to speak to Sam about that.”
Kate’s blue eyes turned cold and she swung around and walked out of the home, before she said something that both of them would later regret. Kate and Jamie quarreled little, but when they did, the kids scattered to nearby cabins to wait it out and the others in the community left them alone until they had patched it up.
But try as hard as she could, Kate could not stay mad at Jamie for very long, and Jamie could not stay mad at Kate. Kate knew that she had to always bear in mind that Jamie had spent his formative years living with Indians, where scalping was not only acceptable, but a sign of bravery and honor. But she darn sure didn’t have to like it when father told son it was acceptable white behavior.
But she also knew that Jamie Ian was so much like his father that the best thing she could do was keep her mouth shut and learn to live with it. Like it or not.
Andrew now, the twin of Rosanna, their second born, was not at all like his father. Andrew was serious and sensitive, tending to be a bit of a dreamer and to lean toward books and the classics. Rosanna was just like him.
“Put in an order for a piano,” Kate told Jamie, just before he and Sam pulled out.
“A what?” Jamie blurted.
“You heard me. I want Andrew and Rosanna to learn to play.”
Jamie very nearly lost his temper. “How in the name of God am I going to get a piano out here?”
“You’ll think of a way. Just do it.”
“Do you have any idea how much that is going to cost?”
She smiled sweetly at him. Very sweetly. Jamie took a step backward. He’d seen her back down an angry Ute with that smile.
“We can afford it.”
“If you say so.” He bent down and kissed her. “We’re gone.”
Jamie muttered under his breath for several hours on the trail. Sam was amused but said nothing. He knew Jamie would get to whatever was bothering him in time.
“A piano,” Jamie said aloud.
“Beg pardon?” Sam asked, doing his best to hide his smile.
“A piano. Kate wants me to order a piano.”
“Oh, that would be grand! Oh, my, yes. The girls should learn how to play.”
“She wants Andrew to learn how to play the piano,” Jamie said sullenly.
“Nothing wrong with that, Jamie. The greatest composers in the world are men, you know?”
“No. I didn’t. Andrew is a boy. Damn near grown. Sits around and dreams all the time. Invents things—when he doesn’t have his nose in a book. Makes up little tunes in his head and hums them. Good Lord, Sam. The boy can’t hunt worth a damn, can’t fish worth a damn, couldn’t track a wounded bear across an open meadow. Can’t shoot a rifle, can’t shoot a pistol, can’t shoot a bow and arrow. Sam, if he stays out here, he’s going to get killed. He’s as different from Jamie Ian as day from night. I keep hoping he’ll grow out of it. But now I don’t think he ever will. I just don’t know where I failed the boy.”
Sam smiled. “He is what he is, Jamie. If you try to make him something he’s not, he’ll resent it for all his life. And probably hate you for it.”
Jamie looked at his long-time friend. Sam was graying now, his hair all salt and pepper. And his wife Sarah was no longer a young woman. Her last birthing had been a very difficult one. After the hard birthing, Sam had said they would have no more children.
They rode in silence for a few more miles. Finally, Jamie heaved a great sigh and nodded his head. “If Kate wants a piano, then a piano she shall have.” He smiled and lifted his head up. “Oh well. Perhaps a musician or two in the family will be a good thing.”
“Of course, it will. We’ll have a good time gathered around the piano.” Excitement grew in his voice. He twisted in the saddle. “Jamie. Let’s build a combination school and church building. We’re growing and soon there will be others coming in. Won’t it be grand to gather on a Sunday and sing praises to the Lord while Andrew or Rosanna plays the piano?”
Jamie smiled and agreed with his friend. Jamie was more inclined to worship in the Indian way—to Man Above, the Great Father, Wakan Tanka. It just made more sense to him. But Kate had been firm about that. The children would be raised in a Christian home with white European concepts of God. “You’re right, Sam. It would be a good thing.”
“Wonderful, lad! Wonderful.”
“But right now, let’s pull in them rocks up yonder and see who it is that’s trailing us. There’s a spring in there and I have a bad feeling about them who’s been slipping up behind us.”
Eleven
As soon as Jamie and Sam and the mules vanished into the rocks those behind sought cover.
“No decent man would do that,” Sam remarked. “They must be scalawags.”
Jamie did not reply. His mind had already shifted to what the Shawnee called the Warrior’s Way. His eyes had taken in all his surroundings, picking out the best defensive positions and any place he and Sam might be vulnerable. He concluded that they were in a very good spot.
“Secure the mules, Sam. And bring the rifles up here when you return.”
“Are they Indians, Jamie?”
“No. White men. But I don’t have a clue as to who they might be. And that troubles me.”
After Sam had picketed the mules and gathered up the rifles, he said, “You told us about the man you had trouble with last summer, Jamie. Could this be him and his kin?”
“Maybe. But it could be anybody. To have lived no longer than I have, I certainly managed to gather more than my share of enemies.”
Sam nodded his head in agreement with that. Jamie had just passed his thirtieth birthday, and Sam had never known nor could think of anyone in recent memory who had more enemies than Jamie MacCallister.
The puzzle was suddenly solved when a shout rang out. “You give us them fine-lookin’ mules and you boys can ride on. There ain’t no mules worth dyin’ for. Think about that.”
“Highwaymen,” Sam said with a snort.
Jamie smiled. “How can they be highwaymen when there are no highways out here, Sam?”
Sam shook his head. Jamie’s sense of humor could surface at the strangest of times. “Then we’ll just call them thieves.”
“Among other things.”
“How ’bout it, boys?” the shout came from the west of their location.
“Why don’t you come and take them,” Jamie yelled defiantly.
“That ain’t very smart on your part,” the unknown man yelled. “You bes’ think ’bout that some.”
Jamie leveled his rifle and put a big ball whining and bouncing among the rocks where the thieves were hiding. He did not expect to hit anyone, and he didn’t, but judging from the yelling, he sure caused some anxious moments among the brigands.
“Fire into those rocks, Sam. Let’s give them something to think about.”
Sam and Jamie emptied eight rifles into the rocks as fast as they could pull their triggers, and this time they drew blood. A man gave out a terrible shout of pain, which was followed by horrible choking sounds, then silence.
“You sorry sons!” the voice shouted again. “You’ve kilt my partner.”
“Good!” Sam yelled.
Jamie looked at him and grinned. It had taken Sam awhile to learn about law and order in the wilderness, but once he caught on, the lesson stayed with him.
“That ball took half his head off!” the indignant brigand yelled.
Jamie and Sam remained sil
ent. They had a small spring behind them in the rock. Not enough water for a sustained standoff but enough to get them by for a day or two. However, Jamie had no intention of letting this continue for a day or two. Sam, looking at the set of Jamie’s jaw, could read that in his face. Jamie’s eyes were bleak and cold, the pale blue softness replaced by a terrible hard light. Jamie would befriend anyone who needed help, but cross him, and he would become a deadly foe.
Suddenly, there came a shout from the rocks. “We’ll meet again, boys! No man crosses Pete Thompson and lives long to boast about it.”
“Who is Pete Thompson?” Sam asked.
“I don’t know,” Jamie replied. “But he’s a fool, telling us his name after threatening to steal our mules.”
Seconds after the sound of the brigands’ leaving reached them, Jamie was out of the rocks and moving toward the rocks just below them. He stood for a moment over the body of the dead man. Thompson had been right: the ball had made a mess of the man’s head.
“You know him?” Sam asked.
Jamie shook his head. “No. Ground’s too hard to dig here. Let’s gather up some rocks and cover him best we can. Then we’ll move on.”
Sam had long grown accustomed to Jamie’s coldness when it came to dealing with outlaws, so the suggestion did not shock him as it would have years back. Sam went through the man’s pockets and found only a few coins; no clue as to who he might have been. After covering the outlaw with rocks, Jamie went to retrieve the mules, and Sam Montgomery stood for a moment over the mound of rocks, battered hat in hand. He knew he should say something over the remains, but the words just would not come to him. He finally shook his head and walked back to Jamie and the mules. Jamie just looked at him and said nothing. Five minutes later, they were on the trail, heading east toward Bent’s Fort.
* * *
Jamie asked around at the fort, but no one there had ever heard of anyone called Pete Thompson.
“Country’s fillin’ up,” a trapper said. “A body can’t ride a whole week without seein’ some settlers tryin’ to scratch out a crop somewheres. But with the good comes the bad. I’ll shore pass the word ’bout Thompson. I get him in gunsights, that’ll be the end of Pete Thompson. We don’t need his kind out here.”
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