The Callahans: The Complete Series

by Gordon Ryan

  Teresa was quiet for a moment, holding Harold’s stare. “Harold, if my father knew of our arrangement,” she said, pausing to look at Katrina and back again to Harold, “he would kill you himself, if Miguel did not do it first. You have deceived us all—not only my father, but me and Katrina as well. This must stop, Harold. Here and now!”

  Harold’s face reflected his shock at the knowledge that both Katrina and Teresa knew of his duplicity. A group of men had gathered behind him and were watching the scene unfold. Harold turned to them.

  “We’ve got trouble,” Harold said. “Teresa says a mob is coming and they want Brother Williams’s wife returned.”

  One of the men nodded knowingly. “Didn’t think it was a good idea—a local girl, I mean,” he said. “Better get the women and children into the barn,” he suggested.

  “Right, and round up the men. And Frank,” Harold said, glancing up at Teresa and Katrina for a moment, “better have them bring their guns.”

  “Come, climb down, Teresa. You and Katrina can stay in the barn with the women. We can’t risk the baby.”

  “Harold, you’ve got to get away from here,” Teresa pleaded again.

  “No, I’ve got to stay. These are my people. And Father will be here in a few minutes. C’mon, let me help you down. Katrina, give her a hand,” Harold commanded.

  “No!” Teresa shouted, striking out at Harold with the buggy whip. “I can stop them,” she said, urging her horse forward. Katrina held on, looking to the rear as Harold stood helplessly, watching them drive away.

  “Teresa!” he hollered after them. “Stay here.”

  Teresa turned the buggy around at the far end of the compound and raced back past where the men were busy herding the women and children into the barn. Harold stepped out in an attempt to head the horse and stop the buggy, but Teresa steered wide of him and went on by.

  Pulling out of the colony and beginning the climb back up the rutted road, Teresa and Katrina saw the first of the Mexican riders come into view on the crest of the hill. They paused to assess the scene below and wait for Teresa to drive the buggy up to them.

  As she jerked her horse to a stop in front of the first riders, another group, this one led by Miguel, galloped up in a swirl of dust. He spurred his horse through the cluster of horsemen, over to the buggy.

  “Teresa,” I told you to stay in your home,” he said. “This is no place for you or Katrina.”

  “Miguel, you cannot do this. They are armed and will defend themselves.”

  Standing in his stirrups and looking around to the group of about thirty men on horseback, he shouted, “Do you hear that, compadres? She says they are prepared to defend themselves. Are we ready also?” He was answered by a chorus of angry determination, shouted by the massed men.

  Miguel sat back down on his saddle and leaned over to speak to the man riding next to him, who immediately dismounted and approached Teresa’s horse.

  “Remain here, dear sister, and do not interfere,” he said. “We want no more of these blasphemous marriages, and it is time to tell them so. They have deceived Don Sebastian,” Miguel exhorted, his voice rising, so the men could hear his comments.

  Spurring his horse, Miguel led the column of riders down the hillside toward the cluster of New Hope men who had been standing near the barn but who now scrambled for cover behind their wagons and buildings. The young Mexican man who had dismounted, remained behind, holding the bridle of Teresa’s horse to prevent her from leaving. The two women watched as the riders neared the community, the first shot ringing out loudly as one of the Mormon settlers, frightened by the approaching mob, fired at the horsemen. A volley of shots were fired immediately by both groups and several of the men on horseback fell from their mounts, the rest quickly riding for cover behind the homes and partially completed buildings.

  The man restraining Teresa’s horse had his attention focused on the skirmish below, and Teresa suddenly lashed out with her whip, striking him across his face and causing the horse to rear. The man lost his hold on the bridle, and Teresa quickly drove the buggy past him, heading back down the hill toward the exchange of gunfire going on below. Katrina held on with both hands as the buggy gyrated wildly over the uneven ground.

  As they neared the bottom of the hill, one of the rear wheels of the buggy rolled over a rock that sent the buggy careening wildly sidewise before overturning and catapulting both women off the seat and into a small, brush-filled gully. The horse raced on, dragging the wildly bouncing vehicle after it.

  Katrina hit the ground hard, stunned by the impact and her breath knocked out of her. Dazed and struggling to breathe, she rolled around in agony on the hot, rocky ground, afraid for a few panic-filled moments she was not going to be able to catch her breath. Then, recovering slightly, she began to look about frantically for Teresa.

  She saw her lying a few feet away, sprawled in an awkward position, with blood running from her scalp, down over her face. Katrina crawled painfully to Teresa’s side, and cradling the bleeding woman’s head in her lap, she began to rock back and forth, crying uncontrollably.

  Hurting and shaken, Katrina didn’t know what to do. The sound of gunfire continued to ring out, and she feared for a time they might be hit by stray bullets. They were lying, however, in the bottom of a little gully, which afforded some shelter, but Teresa obviously needed help.

  How long they remained there, listening to the sound of the gun battle, Katrina did not know. She lost consciousness and slept through the rest of the afternoon, finally reviving as evening approached and Teresa began groaning. Random gunfire could still be heard from the direction of the village, although from their position in the gully, Katrina could not see the buildings or any of the actual fighting.

  Darkness slowly enveloped their sanctuary and Katrina could tell that Teresa was in pain. She groaned more loudly and almost continuously. Regaining consciousness, Teresa struggled to speak and finally said in a weak voice, “The baby comes.”

  “Oh, please, no!” Katrina cried. “We must have help,” she said, looking around.

  “No time,” Teresa said.

  Through the night, the only light was the distant glow of the fires that were consuming the village. In the darkness of the ravine, Katrina worked to help Teresa deliver her baby, praying constantly as she did so. Ever since she discovered Harold’s duplicity, she had neglected her prayers, feeling somehow unworthy to ask for help, but her supplications to Father in Heaven this night were born of fear and desperation, and she plead for help and for Teresa to survive her ordeal. In spite of the desperate situation she and Teresa were in, Katrina was somewhat comforted and knew what to do.

  By the time it began to get light, Katrina knew that the baby boy she had wrapped in his mother’s torn petticoat, if he survived, would never know the loving and caring mother who had given him life—a woman Katrina had come to love in spite of their duplicate roles in Harold Stromberg’s life. During the brief period they had been allowed to share knowledge of their respective positions, Teresa and Katrina, while not in agreement with the practice, nevertheless had come to understand how two women could love each other and, indeed, the man also to whom they were jointly married.

  Teresa’s breathing grew more shallow during the pre-dawn hours, and finally, as it began to grow light, the exhausted woman surrendered her spirit. But before succumbing to her injuries and the strain of childbirth, Teresa Cardenas Stromberg whispered a single request and received a promise from Katrina.

  Coming out of hiding after sunrise, two men from the Mormon colony found Katrina and Teresa’s baby in the gully. The mob of angry villagers was gone, their bloody work done.

  “Sister Stromberg?” one of the men asked, climbing out of the wagon bed where he had been riding and approaching the scene.

  “Yes,” Katrina answered. “I have a baby here, too,” she said.

  “You’d better come with us, Sister Stromberg. We must get away from this place before the Mexicans come back
.”

  “Where’s Harold?” she asked.

  Ignoring the question, the man took the baby from Katrina and handed it to the wife of the driver of the wagon. Then he helped Katrina to her feet. “We can’t leave Teresa,” she said.

  The man looked at Teresa, lying crumpled and silent in the brush. “She’s with God now, Sister Stromberg. We can’t help her.”

  Moving quickly, he helped Katrina into the back of his wagon then scrambled in himself as the wagon moved ahead. He took the baby from the woman on the seat of the buckboard and handed it back to Katrina, who sat numbly, holding the crying baby and staring to the rear, watching as the site where Teresa’s broken body lay, receded into the distance. In a few minutes the wagon moved over the hill and out of site of the grisly scene.

  “Harold?” she asked again.

  “I’m sorry, Sister Stromberg, Harold’s dead. And so is his father. Eight of our men are dead, and two sisters.”

  Without a word, Katrina faced backward, jolting along in the wagon bed, too numb and exhausted to cry, watching the smoke from the ruins of New Hope rising through the early morning mist. As the wagon slowly creaked its way north, away from the massacre in and around the village, Katrina dozed, and the baby slept too, oblivious to the carnage that had surrounded his entrance into the world.

  The sight of a small group of Mexican horsemen riding toward the wagon late that afternoon, filled their hearts with dread. Surrounding the wagon, the riders roughly dragged the two Mormon men to the ground and at gun point took them off into the scrub brush. In a moment, two shots rang out and the woman in the front of the buggy emitted a scream.

  One of the Mexican riders spurred his horse toward the back of the wagon where Katrina sat, holding the baby tightly against her chest, her head lowered in fear. The man sat his horse in silence, looking down into the wagon, waiting until Katrina finally looked up at him. With the sun behind him, she saw him in silhouette, his face only a shadow under his sombrero. Without sound or apparent compassion, he gestured for her to get out of the wagon. Holding the baby and climbing down, she looked up fearfully at the man and saw the stern and angry face of Miguel Antonio Cardenas. When the two other Mexican riders emerged from the bushes, Miguel motioned for one of them to climb up and drive the wagon with the remaining Mormon woman.

  “Mount the horse,” he said to Katrina as the wagon drove off with the second Mexican rider following.

  With great difficulty, holding the baby in the crook of her arm, Katrina mounted the horse left by the Mexican rider. Miguel rode slowly in the opposite direction of the wagon, clearly expecting Katrina to follow.

  “Where are we going?” Katrina called after him.

  “To hell,” Miguel responded . . .

  The Callahan

  The Complete Series

  Book Two

  Conflict

  By

  Gordon Ryan

  Chapter 1

  Dawson City

  Yukon Territory, Canada

  May, 1897

  Excitement filled the air in Dawson City as miners prepared for breakup when the ice would free, opening the way for riverboats to arrive. Since the last week in May, Tom and the old codger who had helped him haul his gold out had lingered about, talking with those in town about who had the most gold or whose claim had produced the most in the shortest time. Tom kept quiet about his findings, but it didn’t take long for the word to get around that his take was among the largest, valued at well over two million dollars. Those whose claims had been located near Emerald One and Emerald Two, knew that since Tom and John had been partners in both claims, Tom had doubled his earnings by also bringing out his uncle’s share.

  All told, nearly forty million dollars in gold was stashed in various places around the wharf in Dawson, waiting for the ice to break up and make it possible to float the Yukon down to St. Michael’s on the Bering Sea. From there, the men would board a steamship to Seattle or San Francisco.

  It had taken Tom and the old fellow, supported by three pack mules, three weeks and four trips to haul out their stashes, along with the few personal possessions they wanted to take with them. They left their tents and most of their other gear right where it had been used. Tom’s claim document and that of John Ryan, duly probated in Tom’s name, both of which had been filed timely and legally, were in his pocket, and several of the old timers told him that if he played his cards right, he could sell them in Seattle for double what he had in gold. The fever would be that high, they speculated.

  A lottery had been started on the exact date and time breakup would occur. A light rope had been stretched across the river between two jagged peaks of ice. When the river began to flow again, the ice would move and the rope would snap. That would determine the exact moment of breakup. Nearly two hundred thousand dollars in gold dust was wagered on that single event. Tom missed by two days and seventeen hours and lost ten ounces of gold dust. The winner added another $120,000 to his take.

  The most depressing aspect of the time spent in Dawson City was the fact that the city had no food. As miners continued to pour into the ramshackle town, food was not to be had for any price, and much of the population was in danger of literally starving to death. As the food shortage grew more acute, the darkest joke around town was that when the riverboat finally did arrive, they’d find the richest dead men in the world.

  On the next to last day of May, eight days after official breakup, the first paddle wheeler arrived, having wintered at Ft. Yukon, and bringing with it fresh vegetables, meat, and other provisions. Unknown to the riverboat crew, waiting for their arrival on the docks in Dawson City, if the hodge-podge of ice-broken pilings could rightfully be called a dock, was a motley collection of nearly seventy, fabulously wealthy miners, some even millionaires. Young and old, they were waiting to transfer their newly acquired fortunes to the deck of the first vessel to arrive. From their appearance, after a winter spent panning for gold, living off the land, and following several weeks of meager rations in Dawson City, a New York banker might have had the gracious impulse to flip any of the ragged and disheveled men a dime and feel he’d done his good deed for the day. However, by the time the ocean steamer transported these bedraggled-looking men to Seattle, those same bankers would claw their way through solid rock to accept the deposit of the first fruits of the largest gold strike in American history, and would stand in line to wine and dine even the raunchiest-looking miner, even before his bath.

  The riverboat unloaded its cargo and passengers and turned around within hours, heading downriver and spreading the news of the strike at every stop along the way. A second riverboat docked in Dawson City two days later, and the remaining miners boarded, heading west and then south with their fortunes and urging the captain to make all haste.

  By the middle of June, both riverboats had traversed the two thousand miles of the Yukon River, arriving at its mouth on the Bering Sea, where two oceangoing steamships lay anchored offshore near St. Michael’s.

  The two riverboats, anxious to turn around for Dawson, quickly took on passengers and cargo, and within hours were on their way back north. Included in that cargo were two sacks of mail, and in one of them was Sister Mary’s letters to Tom, in which she had joyfully informed him that he was not being sought by the authorities in Kansas City and that there was no murder charge pending against him.

  During the course of Tom’s journey down the Yukon, one thought continually occupied his mind. Possessed of what he was assured was a fortune, he was unable to take any comfort in his riches. What worried him most was that he was still a fugitive. Until and if his name was cleared, he would always be looking over his shoulder and constantly on the run. He gradually came to the conclusion that he would use part of his wealth to hire an attorney and that he would return to Kansas City in an attempt to establish his innocence. Just how such a thing could be accomplished, he didn’t know, and what might happen to him should he fail, filled him with fear. But he reached the conclusion
that the way to start would be to consult a lawyer as soon as he got to Seattle.

  Obtaining accommodations on the southbound vessel, Tom waited impatiently as the oceangoing steamship completed unloading its cargo and took the tide out into the mouth of the channel, turning Southwest as she made her way into the Bering Sea, bound for Seattle.

  In late July, 1897, the steamship Portland, with sixty-eight millionaires or near-millionaires on board, steamed into United States waters and threaded its way through the islands of Puget Sound, bound for the port of Seattle. One enterprising newspaper reporter had taken the initiative to hire a boat to intercept the steamship prior to its arrival at the port. His news headline, A Ton of Gold Aboard, flashed around the world in hours, and the great Alaskan gold rush was on. Several years would pass before the world would come to realize that the men on board the Portland had already claimed well over seventy percent of the gold that would ever come out of the Klondike find.

  Within days, thousands of almost desperately anxious men and some hardy women, crowded the docks in Seattle, seeking passage to Alaska on anything that would sail. Within weeks, the numbers milling about the waterfront would swell to over one hundred thousand.

  Arriving in Seattle, Tom went ashore to make his banking arrangements, and received all the courtesies that might have been paid to the largest landholders in Ireland. It was quickly confirmed for him that in America, the possession of wealth was the single largest factor in determining how one was treated by the upper classes. It was evident that ancestry, accent, or in fact physical attire, were all secondary considerations in acquiring social acceptance. In Tom’s case, it was gold that opened all the doors he would not have been able to pry open in any other way.