“How long . . . before? ...” Joleen managed to get those words out before tears stopped her voice.
“Maybe an hour, maybe a day,” the doctor said. He looked at Jamie Ian the Second. “How old is your father, Ian?”
The eldest son cleared his throat. “Pa thought he was born in 1810, Tom. But he never was real sure of that. It may have been 1808 or 1809.”
The doctor nodded his head. “During a moment of consciousness, he asked that one of you kids lay out his good set of buckskins. For now, well, all of you can go in for a moment and see him. But he won’t recognize you. He’s drifting in and out. He’s . . . ah, well, he’s been talking to Kate.”
Matthew stepped into the doctor’s outer office, a telegram in his hand. His brothers and sisters turned to him. Matthew’s eyes were bright with anger. He held up the wire. “This is from a sheriff friend of mine over near the Utah line. Seems as though a posse of men from some ranch called the N/N, and headed by several newly appointed deputy federal marshals, think they got lead into Falcon. Happened yesterday or the day before some miles north of here. What they done was they mistook Pa for Falcon.”
Joleen said, “There’ll be blood on the moon when Falcon hears of this.”
“For a fact,” Matthew said. “My friend is gonna send me more information as he gets it. How’s Pa?”
“Dying,” Ian said, then put his big hands to his face and wept openly.
* * *
Jamie Ian MacCallister, the man called Bear Killer, Man Who Is Not Afraid, Man Who Plays With Wolves, died on August the first, 1876, at eight o’clock in the morning. He was buried that afternoon, beside his beloved Kate and his grandfather, on a ridge overlooking the town of Valley. Overhead, circling and soaring high above the ridge, several eagles screamed.
Jamie and Kate were together again, never to be separated.
* * *
The next day, James William Haywood, Jamie’s grandson from Ellen Kathleen and William Haywood, opened Jamie’s will in front of the family. He had read it the night before, and was shocked right down to his boots at the enormity of Jamie’s wealth.
“Your father,” he told the gathering, “was more than likely the richest man in all of Colorado. He was worth millions of dollars. He drew up this map—” he held up a map carefully outlined on a large piece of deerskin—“about a year ago. It shows all the places where he cached bags and boxes of gold and silver. During the wanderings of your great-grandfather, the man called the Silver Wolf, who lies buried up on the ridge with Jamie and Kate, he discovered a cave of Spanish treasure. He gave that to Jamie, and now Jamie is giving it to all of you. The location is on the map. You children of Jamie and Kate MacCallister just might be the richest family in all of North America. Now, your father left some of his wealth to every member of the MacCallister family. Nieces, nephews, cousins . . . he left no one out. He left a sizeable sum of money to be used by the town of Valley. It is carefully invested and will bring in a nice return for decades to come.”
James William sighed and looked up from the pages-long will. “I never realized what a complex man Jamie Ian MacCallister was. Not until I opened and read this will. He was a self-educated man, and he did a good job of it.” He lifted the will for all to see. “We’ll go over this document point by point later on, but for now, does anyone know where Falcon is?”
“No,” Matthew said. “I received a coded wire from him last night. I replied, in code, telling him of our father’s death. The telegrapher tapped back that it had been received, but I have no way of knowing where Falcon was when he sent the wire. Hell, he might not have sent it. He might have had a friend do it.”
The young lawyer looked at Rosanna and Andrew. “And you two? ...”
“We’ve rescheduled our tour. It’s what Ma and Pa would have wanted us to do,” Andrew said. “Pa used to say that life has to go on.”
James William nodded. “It’s going to be ... strange around here without Grandpa Jamie. It’s going to take some . . . getting used to.”
“It will never be the same.” Megan summed up the feelings of all the kids of Jamie and Kate MacCallister.
After the initial reading of the will, Jamie Ian met with Matthew in Falcon’s Wild Rose Saloon and said, “Now, brother, you want to tell the truth about Falcon?”
“He’s in Utah. He’s going after Nance Noonan and those posse members. He’s going to destroy the N/N and then burn down the town. Right down to the last brick and board.”
“There were federal marshals in that posse.”
“You think Falcon gives a damn about that?”
Jamie Ian sighed and shook his head. “I reckon not.”
“Joleen summed it up the other day. There’s gonna be blood on the moon before this is over.”
The brothers walked out to stand on the boardwalk, looking up at the ridge where their mother and father and grandfather lay in peace.
“You think Pa would have done what Falcon is about to do?” Jamie Ian asked.
“It’s exactly what Pa would have done.”
Notes
1 The town also went by the name of Doe for several years.
2 Talon of Eagles—Kensington Books
3 The Last Mountain Man—Zebra Books
4 Eyes of Eagles—Zebra Books
5 Dreams of Eagles—Zebra Books
6 Dave Cook was sheriff for several terms. He formed the Rocky Mountain Detective Association, a network of law officers that stretched from Wyoming to New Mexico, and was a thorn in the side of outlaws for years. He was a lawman, in one capacity or another, for forty years, and during that time, Dave and his association arrested thousands of criminals and solved several hundred murders.
7 Scotts Bluff National Monument is named for Hiram Scott, a fur trapper and explorer.
8 Talons of Eagles—Kensington Books
9 Rapid City would be settled as a town in 1876.
10 Named Fort Bennett in 1878. Abandoned November 1891.
11 In 1895, John Wesley Hardin, while drinking and playing dice in the Acme Saloon in El Paso, was shot in the back of the head by John Selman. Selman was killed the next year by lawman George Scarborough in an alley outside a saloon in El Paso.
12 James H. Levy, born in Ireland in the early 1840s, of a Jewish father and Irish mother, killed his first man in Pioche, Nevada. It is rumored that he had to borrow a pistol to do that! In his decade-long career as a gunfighter, gambler, and guard for various mining operations, the tough little Jewish/Irish immigrant is credited with killing at least sixteen men (some say the total is twice that), in stand-up, face-to-face gunfights. Levy roamed all over the Southwest, several times traveling as far north as Wyoming, where he killed at least one man outside a saloon in Cheyenne. In Tucson, Arizona, in 1882, after a faro dealer made some disparaging remarks about Jim’s ancestry (and Jews in particular), Jim told the man to meet him outside, then left for his hotel room to get his gun. The faro dealer gathered up several of his friends, and they hid along the street and ambushed Jim, emptying their guns into him. When the marshal inspected Jim’s bullet-riddled body, he found the man was unarmed. His killers were never brought to trial.
13 By the time Colorado became a state, in 1876, Valley was recognized as having the finest school system in all the state. A private fine arts college was established there in 1900 and is still flourishing.
14 Jamie and Kate’s home was turned into a visitors’ museum and was open to the public for years, before being returned to the MacCallister estate. It was completely restored in the late 1960s, and one of Jamie and Kate’s great-great-great-grandsons and family now live there.
15 Ben Thompson returned to Austin in 1875, and the next year killed two men in the Senate Saloon. Despite being a convicted felon, Ben was elected city marshal of Austin in 1881, but resigned the next year, after killing several men. Ben Thompson became an alcoholic and in 1884 was killed by Joe Foster and William Simms while watching a show at the Vaudeville Theater in San Antonio.
Although he had been shot nine times, Thompson still managed to get his pistols out and put lead into Joe Foster before he died. One of Foster’s legs had to be amputated, and he died three days later.
16 After the town was laid out, it was named Hot Springs and remained that way for years. On the tenth anniversary of the radio program “Truth or Consequences,” the town accepted an offer to name itself after the show.
17 Talons of Eagles—Kensington Books
18 Many on the frontier did not consider the Indian to be part of the human race. The hatred was so strong the Indian was regarded as a subspecies.
19 The Mogollon Rim, named after Juan Ignacio Flores Mogollon, Spanish Governor of the area that would someday become Arizona and New Mexico.
20 Gallup, New Mexico, would grow from there.
21 In a few years, the name would be changed to Holbrook.
22 In the West, a “bad man” was not necessarily a thug or outlaw. It just meant the person was a “bad” man to fool with.
23 Durango would be founded here in 1880.
24 The site of the battle of Adobe Walls lies about twenty miles northeast of the town of Stinnett, Texas.
25 That power play certainly would have been attempted had not Jamie and the others forced the Kermit brothers’ hand that late winter’s night in the border town and all but wiped out the male members of the Kermit family. King Fisher continued his lawless ways until about 1883. Then he reportedly “got religion” and moved his family to Uvalde County and became a deputy sheriff. On March 11, 1884, Fisher was attending a show at the Vaudeville Theater in San Antonio with his gunfighter friend, the English born Ben Thompson. Joe Foster and William Simms, aided by Canada Bill and Harry Tremaine, suddenly opened fire on the two men, killing both Thompson and Fisher. Fisher was shot a dozen times in the head and chest. John “King” Fisher was thirty years old.
26 The government had just declared Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull and those warriors who followed them to be hostile Indians. A few months later, they would order all Indians in the Black Hills to be removed to reservations or face military force. When the Indians refused to budge, Lt. Colonel George Armstrong Custer and his Seventh Cavalry would be ordered in.
27 Blue River
28 Little Bighorn River
29 Custer
30 Indian scouts who fought at the Little Big Horn and survived the battle.
31 Estimates put the number of Indians at close to fifteen thousand, with several thousand warriors; never again would such a large force be assembled.
32 Sometimes called the Dying Dance. A dance by boys and young men who pledge to fight to the death.
33 The city of Casper would be founded here in 1888.
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