Jamie smiled and then chuckled. Sparks looked up from his biscuits and gravy. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and asked, “You know something I don’t?”
“They’ll never bankrupt me, Sparks. I could probably buy and sell the both of them and damn sure wouldn’t miss the money. What gang?”
“John Wilmot and his bunch.”
“Names from the past, honey,” Kate said, taking a chair on the porch.
“Yes. I thought we’d seen the last of that crew. Which way you heading, Sparks?”
“East. Over to the army post on the Arkansas.”
“Take a message to be posted to St. Louis?”
“You bet.”
“What do you know about this gang?”
“It’s big. Wilmot brung together a lot of small outlaw bands operatin’ out of the wilderness, usually preyin’ on small wagon trains and the like. I know some names. The Biggers Brothers, Buford Sanders, Pete Thompson, Rodman, Barney Saxon and some kin of his, and a big thug called Tiny. You know them boys?”
“Every one of them,” Jamie said with a sigh. “Well, this time I end it. Once and for all time it’s going to be over. Once I do this, Kate and I will live in peace and never leave these valleys.”
Sparks smiled. “Don’t bet on that, Jamie.”
Jamie cut his eyes. “Now it’s my turn to ask if you know something I don’t.”
“War.”
“War? Out here. Who’s going to be fighting?”
“There’s gonna be a war ’tween the states, Jamie—north against south.”
“Slavery?”
“That’s part of it. States’ rights, mostly, ’way I hear it.”
“States’ rights?” Jamie said softly. “What the hell is that, Sparks?”
“Durned if I know. But a lot of folks in the southern part of the country is right upset about it.”
“What does it have to do with Jamie?” Kate asked.
“Well, there was a big shot officer come out to Fort Laramie a couple of months back. I disremember his name right off. Plant or Gant or Grant or something like that. He wants Jamie to be a part of the United States Army . . . in case the States go to war agin each other.”
“I’m not interested,” Jamie said quickly.
“That’s what Morgan told him. But this officer said you’d hear the call of freedom when and if all this happens and come flyin’ to hep on wings of eagles. He was a right poetic feller, when he wasn’t drinkin’ whiskey or smoking the most terriblest smellin’ cigars that ever stunk up a room.”
“I’m still not interested. I don’t hold with slavery, but the federal government’s got no right to tell states what they can or can’t do. You let that happen and in a hundred years this nation won’t be fit for a decent man to live in. Besides, slavery won’t last much longer. Fifteen, twenty years at the most and it’ll be gone. The government doesn’t need to start a war over it. That’s the problem with government. You let it get too big, and before you know it, it’ll be in everybody’s lives.”
Kate patted Jamie on the arm and smiled. “I have an idea. Perhaps you should be in politics, honey. You do turn a nice phrase.”
“Good God, no, Kate. I’m too honest and too blunt to be a politician. Well, if a war comes, it won’t touch us out here. Now then, Sparks, let’s talk about this gang.”
* * *
It had to be one of the most disreputable gatherings of the dredges of humanity to ever congregate west of the Mississippi River. There was not one spark of decency in the whole bunch. John Wilmot felt he had chosen well. He looked over his motley crew and smiled; there were the Saxon boys, and kin of Jack Biggers, Buford Sanders and Pete Thompson had brought their gangs in, Tiny Bates, the huge oaf who cursed the name of Jamie MacCallister daily was there with his sinister-looking band of brigands and cut-throats. When the call went out along the hoot-owl trail, a man named Rodman had answered it, bringing with him a half dozen thoroughly disgusting bits of jetsam and flotsam of what might pass for humanity.
All in all, John thought with pleasure, it was quite a nice gathering.
* * *
“I didn’t think we was leavin’ so soon, Pa,” Falcon said, watching his dad snug down the ropes on the pack frame.
“We’re not leaving,” Jamie replied. “I want you here with your mother. You know Morgan can’t come home. He’s up in the Dakotas for the Army. Ian’s got his hands full with nursin’ that busted leg of his. He can’t even get out of bed. Matt’s got to tend his fields and his cattle and horses. That leaves you to take care of your mother. And I’ll brook no argument, Falcon.”
“You won’t get none, Pa. I’ll take care of Ma right and proper.”
“Your Ma and me said our goodbyes, boy,” Jamie said, sticking out a big hand. Falcon shook it. Jamie swung into the saddle and picked up the reins. “I’ll see you when I get back.” He rode off toward the northwest without a glance back.
Kate stepped out on the porch to watch him ride away. Falcon turned to look at his mother. She was still beautiful, although there was a touch of gray now among the gold and maybe a line or two in her face. But her figure would still match that of any woman in the village, of any age. “Don’t you ever worry about him, Ma?”
She smiled. “Of course, I do. Just like I worry about you and Ian and Morgan and all the rest of my children. That goes with having a family. Someday you’ll see. But for you, I think, that’s years in the future.”
Kate studied her youngest chick. Falcon looked so much like Jamie at that age it was scary. Strong as a grizzly and not an ounce of back-up in him. And like his dad, Falcon wore his pistols like they were a natural part of him.
For awhile, she was afraid that it would be Ian who would turn out to be a gun man, or “gunfighter” as some eastern writers were now fond of. But Ian had settled right down after marrying Caroline. Matthew had never taken to the high lonesome like his pa or his brother Falcon.
Falcon caught his mother looking at him. “You go on about your business, Ma. There ain’t nobody goin’ to bother you long as I’m here.”
Kate turned quickly, hiding her smile. How to tell her youngest that long before he was born, back on the trail in Arkansas and many times in the Big Thicket country of Texas, she had stood alone or beside Jamie with rifle and pistol and defended hearth and home? Chuckling, she walked into the house and into her kitchen and put on water for fresh coffee.
“What’s Ma laughing about?” Ellen Kathleen asked, walking up holding her latest in her arms.
“Durned if I know,” Falcon replied. “I just told her that she could go on about her business. That nothing was goin’ to happen to her as long as I was here.”
Ellen Kathleen stared at her younger brother for a moment and then burst out laughing. Ellen was twenty-nine years old and had vivid memories of how fierce her mother could be in a fight. She had personally witnessed her mother chase off curious bears with a broom and had seen her back down a swamp panther. She had also seen her mother kill several men. She was still laughing as she climbed the steps and entered her parents’ cabin.
Falcon stared in disgust at his sister. “Damned if I’ll ever understand women!” he said.
Eleven
“Once and for all,” Jamie repeated several times a day as he headed toward the spot where the gangs were supposed to have gathered, awaiting word from Layton and Olmstead. “I’ll settle this once and for all.”
But he really didn’t believe his own words. The feud between Jamie and Kate’s father and brothers and kin, as well as the Newbys and the Saxons had been going on for far too long. It would only end when one side or the other—all of them—were in the grave. And Jamie had to smile at that. It would take some doing to kill off all the MacCallisters and their kin. It seemed like Jamie and Kate had more grandkids running around the twin towns of Valley than nuts on a pecan tree . . . with more on the way.
Jamie had to give lawyer Layton his due. He had chosen men who knew the west
and knew it well, for the area where they had chosen to gather, while not that many miles from the twin valleys as the crow flies, was a tough three-day ride for a man on horseback. It was also perfect ambush country.
For them, as well as for me, Jamie had to keep reminding himself.
As he rode, he tried to pull up into his memory the faces of some of the names Sparks had told him. He could remember with some amusement the face of Barney Saxon, the man who had accused him of stealing money and who had suffered a busted mouth for that remark. He could recall some of the others but not all.
For a short time, he toyed with the idea of calling John Wilmot out and trying to reason with him. But he soon gave that up as a very bad idea. He had tried to persuade other men to give up the hunt for him and always failed with the leaders.
The letter he had given Sparks would reach his attorney in St. Louis, and the lawyer would handle matters on that end, quickly putting a stop to Olmstead’s attempts to seize the twin valleys. Olmstead was going to be in for quite a shock when he came face to face with Jamie’s lawyer, one of, if not the, most powerful men in the state and well-connected in Washington.
The ride took longer than Jamie anticipated and it was mid-morning of the fourth day before he began to smell the cook-fires of the gang. He immediately began searching for a place to picket his horses and found one after an hour’s searching.
He let the horses roll for a time, and when they had cooled down, he let them drink and then they settled down to graze. Jamie picketed them on a long rope, with plenty of room to walk to water, and shouldered his heavy pack. He figured it was about a two-hour walk to the gang’s campsite.
“Once and for all,” Jamie muttered, as he took the first step on foot to the smoky little valley where the men who had gathered to kill him were camped. “I end it today, Kate. And that’s a promise. After today, we start living the remainder of our lives in peace.”
* * *
Bob Sutter looked up from his plate of beans and venison and stared at the end of the clearing for a moment. He could have sworn he saw the figure of a man standing there. A man dressed all in buckskins. “Impossible,” he muttered and returned to his eating.
Joe Ed Williams was pouring a cup of coffee from the big pot when he paused for a few seconds. He stared at the timber for a moment and then shook his head. “Not likely,” he muttered.
One of Buford Sanders’s gang thought he heard one of the horses whinny. He raised his head from the blanket he was using as a pillow and listened hard. Nothing. Must have been his imagination. He laid back down and dozed off.
Jamie had cut the horses’ halter ropes from the picket line and was slipping around the camp, listening to the men talk. He wanted to be absolutely certain. When he saw Tiny Bates he knew he’d found the gang.
“I want that honey-haired wife of MacCallister’s,” Tiny said. “And by God I’m stakin’ my claim for her right now. Anybody got anything to say about that?”
No one did. They were, to a man, thinking and talking about all the other women in the twin towns of Valley and of all the booty that would be theirs for the taking once the raid was over and done with. They were quite vocal about what they were going to do with the women and the men, and none of it was pleasant to the ears.
When Jamie had satisfied himself that this was indeed the nest of vipers he had come to destroy, he did not hesitate in starting the job at hand. With fully-loaded pistols hanging all over him, Jamie stepped out to the edge of the clearing, a Colt in each hand, and started cocking and firing. It was a rolling thunder of death in the beautiful wilderness of northwest Colorado. Jamie would empty one brace of Colts, holster the empties, hook and draw, step out of the thick whirl of gunsmoke that hung around him, and continue the deadly fire and thunder into the knotted up camp of raiders.
When he had emptied eight Colts, Jamie ran back into the timber and quickly began the job of inserting freshly charged and fully loaded cylinders into all his pistols. Behind him, he had left a camp of death and pain. But he wasn’t nearly through just yet.
He still had some snakes to stomp on.
Jamie had poured forty-eight .44 caliber balls into the camp and had personally witnessed two dozen men go down in the first fusillade. The cut-loose horses had panicked and bolted during the attack and by now were a good mile away and still running hard. A dozen had run right through the camp, destroying supplies and doing no small amount of damage to any man who happened to be in their way.
From where he knelt behind a small rise, Jamie could hear the crying and moaning of the wounded in the ruins of their camp . . . and the hard cussing of others.
Jamie flitted through the brush and timber until he had circled the camp, coming to rest on the opposite side of where he had launched the first attack.
“The goddamn hosses is gone!” a man yelled.
Jamie lifted a .44 and drilled the man about three inches above his belt. Without hesitation, he emptied both pistols into the still startled and confused camp and then changed positions again.
Jamie’s philosophy of warfare was simple for this day: just attack until you defeat the enemy. He watched as several of the would-be raiders grabbed up blankets and a few supplies and hit the timber, running in the opposite direction of the gunfire. He let them go. It was the leaders he wanted.
“Rally around me, men!” a man shouted, a pistol in each hand.
“Go to hell, Thompson!” another man shouted, and ran for the timber.
“Coward!” Thompson shouted and shot the running man in the back.
Jamie leveled a Colt and plugged who he assumed to be Pete Thompson in the belly. Pete sat down hard and tried to lift his pistols. He gave up that idea after a few seconds and toppled over on his face.
A few of the men had found their horses, or somebody’s horse, and were hightailing it out of that area. When the sounds of hooves pounding the earth had faded, Jamie lay in brush and listened to the sounds of what remained of the camp.
“Yeller-bellied, red-nigger-coward!” Tiny Bates shouted. “You ain’t got the balls to fight lak a man, goddamn you, Jamie MacCallister!”
Jamie lay motionless and silent in the brush.
“He’s gone,” a man said.
“Don’t you believe that,” Rodman said.
The moans and cries of the wounded were fading as the badly hit died and most of the less seriously wounded kept quiet, not wanting to draw Jamie’s fire.
“Oh, dear sweet baby Jesus, help me!” a gut-shot man screamed.
“Somebody shoot him,” Wilmot said.
“Damn you, John Wilmot!” the wounded man cried.
Jamie heard the sound of gunfire coming from south of where he lay and couldn’t figure out what was happening.
“Jamie MacCallister!” came the shout, and Jamie recognized the voice of Lobo. “We got this camp circled, friend. We found your camp and left fresh venison. Get on back to your hosses and put on some coffee and get them steaks a-cookin’. We’ll take care of the rest of these hyenas.”
“You didn’t think we was gonna let you have all the fun, did you?” Preacher shouted.
Big Jim Williams yelled, “They’s a dozen of us out here, Jamie. You done your part, now let us take care of the rest of it.”
“Can we deal?” John Wilmot shouted.
“At the end of a rope, you damned worthless ne’er-dowell,” Audie yelled.
“Have to it, boys!” Jamie shouted. “I’ll have coffee on when you finish.” Jamie headed for his horses, glad that his part was over.
“Wait a minute!” Tiny Bates hollered. “You ain’t hangin’ me, you bastards!”
“Then we’ll just shoot you,” Preacher said. “That’s faster, anyways.”
“I protest this!” Buford Sanders squalled. “This ain’t right! ”
“Take it up with the Lord,” Lobo yelled. “’Cause you ain’t far from comin’ eyeball to eyeball with Him.”
Jamie found several of the raiders’ horses
and led them back to his camp. He had sliced the venison, started it broiling, and was just dumping in cold water to settle the coffee grounds when the last shot rang out.
Preacher rode in out of the silence and swung down. “It’s over, Jamie. You and Kate can rest easy for a time.”
“Where are the rest of the men?”
“They ain’t civilized like me. They’re takin’ scalps.”
“What’s that hangin’ on your belt?”
“Well, hell, I only took one!”
Twelve
The next five years were peaceful ones for those who called Valley, Colorado, their home. But turbulence rolled and rumbled all around them. The United States congress began setting spending precedents that all future congresses would follow: in 1855 they appropriated thirty thousand dollars to import 30 camels from Egypt to settle them in the western deserts. One hundred and thirty-five years later, congress would spend nineteen million dollars of taxpayer money to study cow farts.
In 1856, the first bridge across the Mississippi River was built, running from Rock Island, Illinois, to Davenport, Iowa. The first real blood-letting of what would in a few years become an all-out civil war between the states erupted in Kansas Territory as Missouri pro-slavery forces—including the Kickapoo Rangers of Colonel Buford—attacked and burned Lawrence, Kansas. Later that same year, John Brown, along with his sons and a few other men, murdered five pro-slavery men at Pottawatomie Creek in Kansas. John Brown was later hanged for that. In July of 1856, Fort Lookout was built on the Missouri River in what would someday become South Dakota. By November, when Buchanan defeated John Fremont in presidential elections, the nation had begun to tear apart along pro-and anti-slavery issues and talk of war was strong. In the south, uniforms were secretly being manufactured.
In 1857, the U.S. Supreme Court, in ruling on the Dred Scott decision, declared that Congress had no right to deprive people of their property without due process of the law. The Butterfield Overland Mail Company was awarded a contract to provide mail and passenger service from St. Louis to San Francisco.
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