Law enforcement officers were much more practical back in those days when it came to dealing with trash and thugs and ne ’er-do-wells. Standing outside the telegraph office, the marshal and sheriff talked it over.
“Hell,” the town marshal said to the sheriff, after a brief discussion about the situation. “Maybe MacCallister will take care of the problem for us.”
“That is a thought,” the sheriff replied. “Tell you what, it’s an unusually warm day for this time of year. Why don’t we take off and go fishing?”
“Damn good idea,” the marshal replied. “I’ll get my pole and meet you down on the Humbold, right there where the river bends and it’s quiet and shady.”
“I know the spot. ’Bout three miles west of town?”
“That’s the place.”
“See you there.”
The sheriff told his wife, “Stay in the house and off the streets.”
The marshal told his wife, “Stay in the house and off the streets.”
After registering at the hotel, and having the desk clerk’s eyes bug out at the name on the registry book, and after a bath and shave and change of clothes, Jamie asked directions to the toughest and seediest saloon in town, and it was pointed out to him.
Jamie checked his guns, worked them in and out of the holsters a couple of times, and headed for the saloon.
Before taking off to go fishing, the marshal had told a couple of notorious gossips about Jamie being in town and what he and the sheriff were going to do, and the word had quickly spread. The stores on either side of the saloon were closed and so were the stores across the street. The wide street in front of the saloon was deserted when Jamie reached the batwings and shoved them open, stepping inside. He walked up to the bar and ordered a whiskey. Outside, the wind picked up as storm clouds began gathering. A dust devil spun crazily up the street. A few drops of rain suddenly splattered against the ground, sending up quick puffs of dust and pocking the dry earth. Lightning licked across the sky.
Jamie took his drink and moved to a rear table, sitting down with his back against the wall. He picked up a worn deck of cards and began a game of solitaire. He had just laid out the cards when the batwings flew open and a man stood there, his eyes wild and his hands over his guns.
Jamie drew his right-hand Colt and kept it out of sight, by one leg of the chair.
“Damn your eyes, Jamie MacCallister!” Red Johnson shouted. “I ain’t runnin’ from you no more.” His hands closed around the butts of his guns, and he started his pull.
Jamie’s pistol roared, and Red went stumbling outside, the front of his shirt blossoming crimson. He fell off the boardwalk and died in the dust. A few raindrops glistened on his face.
Jamie laid his pistol on the table, took a sip of whiskey, and resumed his card game.
Moments later, the sounds of galloping horses reached those in the saloon. All eyes turned to Jamie. Jamie smiled and said, “That would probably be Waddy Keeton and Bob Perlich. I guess those boys just don’t have the stomach to face me. Another time, I reckon.” He looked over at the barkeep. “You got anything to eat in this place?”
“Y... Y... yes, sir,” the man stammered. “Got a stew my old woman just fixed. And some hot bread.”
“Bring it. And a big glass of water.”
“Yes, sir. Right away, sir.”
Jamie took his pocket watch out of his vest and snapped it open. But he was not checking the time. Inside the cover, there was a picture of Kate, frozen in time, smiling at him, her golden hair shining and her blue eyes sparkling.
Jamie smiled at the picture and closed the watch, returning it to his pocket.
“You kilt a mighty fine man just then, MacCallister,” a man said in a rough voice.
“I killed a piece of scum and totally worthless trash,” Jamie corrected the man just as his food was placed in front of him. “Now shut up and leave me alone.” Jamie started eating with his left hand, his right hand close to the pistol on the table.
The local wanted to say more, but friends of his hushed him up and started to lead him outside.
“Leave the body alone,” Jamie called. “He’s probably wearing a money belt filled with stolen money. The money belongs to the bank in Valley, Colorado, and to Wells Fargo.”
“What are you going to do with it?” the big-mouthed friend of Red Johnson questioned, turning to face Jamie. “Take it for your own self?”
Jamie smiled at that. If the truth be told, Jamie was probably one of the richest men west of the Mississippi. He was worth millions of dollars. Ever since first settling in the valley, Jamie had been working gold mines, many of them lodes his grandfather had discovered in the latter part of the last century—when he first came out with the mountain men—and all during the eighteenth century, until his death in 1844. He was buried along the same ledge as Kate, high up, overlooking the long valley.5
The local just wouldn’t turn it loose. “You find something funny about that, MacCallister?”
“Let it alone,” Jamie warned him. “Just let it alone.”
“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!”
6
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 o
ver 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.”
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