A Big Sky Christmas

by William W. Johnstone

  The separation lasted only a second before they were wrapped around each other again, battling for any advantage. Jamie grabbed the man’s hair, hunched his shoulders, and head-butted the man in the face.

  He sensed the tide swinging in his direction, but at that moment something smashed against the side of his head with stunning force. The dark predawn lit up with jagged red lightning bolts he knew were only inside his head.

  In the few seconds that his muscles refused to obey his brain’s commands, the man shoved him away. Jamie knew there was a good chance the intruder had hit him with a gun, which meant the next thing might be a shot. He forced himself to move, galvanizing his muscles through sheer force of will and rolling across the ground.

  A revolver went off with a roar like thunder. Jamie saw the muzzle flash, dragged out his right-hand .44, and returned the fire. With rain in his eyes and his head still spinning from the clout he had taken, he couldn’t tell if he hit anything.

  The next moment he heard hoofbeats pounding against the ground and knew his shot hadn’t found its target. The intruder had gotten on one of the horses and was fleeing. Jamie lifted the Colt and triggered three more shots in the direction of the sound, but he knew it would be sheer luck if he hit the man.

  As he climbed to his feet, he saw lights from the wagon train bobbing closer. People were coming to see what was going on. They were probably pretty spooked, so to keep them from getting trigger-happy, Jamie called, “Hold your fire! It’s MacCallister!”

  Bodie Cantrell was in the lead when the group of armed men hurried up to Jamie. “Mr. MacCallister! Are you all right?”

  Jamie was covered with mud and he knew that by the next day he would be stiff and sore from the fight. “I’m fine. What about Savannah?”

  “She’s all right,” Bodie said. “She ran back to the wagons and told us you were out here fighting with the man who tried to carry her off. Where is he?”

  “Gone,” Jamie replied curtly. “He got on a horse and lit a shuck before I could stop him. At least we’ve got the two I left back in camp.”

  Bodie shook his head. His face was etched with grim lines in the lantern light. “There’s only one man in camp, and he’s dead. His neck is broken.”

  Jamie grunted. Obviously, the man he’d hit in the back of the neck with his clubbed fists had been injured worse than he thought. It wasn’t the first time he had killed a man with his bare hands, but it had been a while since that happened. “There was another one. I’m pretty sure I broke his wrist. May have broken his nose or a cheekbone, too. He was out cold when I left him.”

  “He must have come to, crawled off in the dark, and slipped away,” Bodie said. “As soon as it gets light enough, we can search for him—”

  Jamie waved away that suggestion. “We’ve got better things to do. As bad as he’s hurt, he’s not going to be interested in causing any more trouble for us. He’ll probably try to find one of the horses he and his friends brought with them and head on back to Kansas City.”

  And if the man wasn’t able to catch one of the horses, he’d probably die out there, injured as he was. Jamie wasn’t going to waste any time worrying about a no-good kidnapper, though.

  Bodie said, “They had to be some of Kane’s men. They didn’t pick Savannah at random to go after.”

  “I reckon you’re right about that. Help me find my hat.”

  It was Hector Gilworth who found Jamie’s hat in the mud where it had fallen off and gotten trampled on during the battle. “Looks like it’s in pretty bad shape,” he said as he handed it to Jamie.

  “The rain’ll wash the mud off,” Jamie said as he punched it back into shape. “This old hat’s been through almost as much as I have. It’ll be all right.”

  They trooped back to the wagons. Jamie told Hector and Jess to make sure everybody was awake and preparing for the day’s journey, then he went with Bodie to the Binghams’ wagon. He wanted to talk to Savannah and see for himself that she was really all right.

  A lantern was burning inside the wagon, its yellow glow coming through the gaps around the canvas flaps in front and back. Bodie stepped up to the tailgate. “Savannah?”

  Leticia Bingham pulled the flap aside. “She’s resting. What do you want, Mr. Cantrell?”

  “Mr. MacCallister wants to talk to her.”

  Savannah might have been resting, but she wasn’t sleeping. She heard what Bodie said and spoke up from behind the older woman. “It’s all right, Mrs. Bingham. I need to speak to Mr. MacCallister, too.”

  “All right, dear, but you’ve been through an ordeal. You should take it easy for a little while.”

  Mrs. Bingham moved back, and Savannah put her head in the opening at the rear of the wagon. “Mr. MacCallister, are you all right?” she asked anxiously. “I heard some shots . . .”

  “Nothing to worry about,” Jamie told her. “Those fellas are long gone and won’t be bothering you again.”

  “You killed them?” Her voice was hushed.

  “Well . . . only one of ’em.” But it wasn’t from lack of trying, Jamie thought. He would have gladly sent all three of the varmints packing across the divide. “The other two got away, but I don’t think they’ll be coming back.”

  “You can’t be sure of that.”

  “Not much in this life is certain. Did you get a good look at any of them?”

  Savannah shook her head. “No. One of them grabbed me from behind. The big one who carried me off. I never even saw him. I didn’t even have a chance to fight. But I did manage to kick the wagon tongue. I hoped that would make enough noise to attract someone’s attention.”

  “So that’s what I heard,” Jamie said. “That was fast thinking on your part. If you hadn’t done that, they might’ve been able to drag you off without anybody noticing.”

  A shudder went through Savannah at the thought. “You said a couple of them got away. You know what’s going to happen now, don’t you, Mr. MacCallister? Now they’re sure that I’m traveling with the wagon train. They’ll go back to Gideon Kane and tell him, and since this attempt to kidnap me failed, he’ll try something else. Something bigger and more dangerous.”

  “Let him try,” Bodie said. “We’ll be ready for him.”

  “That’s right,” Jamie agreed. But at the same time he was thinking that Savannah was right. Kane would send a larger group next time, and chances were that they wouldn’t be worried about stealth. He would hire gunmen, and their goal would be to catch up to the wagon train and take Savannah away by force.

  If that happened—when that happened, Jamie amended because every instinct in his body told him that it would—the rest of the pilgrims would be in danger as well.

  It was too bad he hadn’t taken the time to hunt up Gideon Kane while they were still in Kansas. He could have gone ahead and put a bullet in the varmint then and there.

  Sometimes the simplest ways were the best.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  The rain continued as the wagon train rolled northwestward along the Blue River that morning. The sky was such a flat, leaden gray it seemed like the immigrants traveled in a depressing state of perpetual twilight.

  The warmth of the sun was nowhere to be found. A dank cold had settled over the landscape, the sort of weather that chilled a person to the bone.

  Jamie felt it in his bones, that was for sure. He felt every one of his more than sixty years of life.

  But he didn’t let that stop him from doing the job that needed to be done. He was out ahead of the wagon train with Hector Gilworth riding beside him as they watched out for muddy areas that the wagons needed to avoid.

  The rain grew harder at midday, turning into a slashing downpour that quickly formed large puddles on the already wet ground. Jamie grimaced under the dripping brim of his hat as mud began to suck at Sundown’s hooves. “All right,” he told Hector. “We might as well turn around and tell the wagons to stop for the day before they get bogged down. If some of those wheels sink down far enoug
h in the mud, it might take days to get them back out again.”

  When they arrived at the lead wagon and told Captain Hendricks of the decision, the leader of the immigrants wasn’t happy. “We haven’t covered much distance today,” he complained. “Don’t you think we can push on just a little farther, Mr. MacCallister?”

  “No, I don’t,” Jamie replied bluntly. “You’ll be risking an even longer delay if you do. It’ll be better to stay here, hope the rain stops tonight, and that the sun will come out tomorrow and dry the ground some. It hasn’t been a very rainy autumn so far, so the dirt ought to suck up most of the water pretty fast once it gets a chance.”

  Hendricks heaved a sigh and nodded. “Very well. Tell everyone to go ahead and make camp. We’re not going to be able to build fires in this weather, though.”

  “It’ll be a cold camp,” Jamie agreed. If folks were smart, they would gnaw a little jerky, crawl into their blankets, huddle together for warmth, and wait it out.

  Earlier, he had told Bodie to drop back a ways behind the wagon train and watch for pursuers. It was possible the men who had sneaked into the camp early that morning to kidnap Savannah had been part of a larger force. If that was the case, they might make another attempt, and Jamie wanted some warning if that was going to happen.

  The other scouts had seen that the wagons were stopped and came on in. Jamie left them to keep an eye on things while he rode back to meet Bodie. He had gone about half a mile before he saw the gray figure plodding toward him on horseback, shrouded in the curtains of rain.

  Jamie reined in and waited for Bodie to come to him. He slipped a hand under the yellow slicker he wore and tried to dry it on his damp buckskins. He didn’t have much luck with that, but it was better than nothing.

  Then he wrapped that hand around the butt of one of his .44s, just in case it wasn’t Bodie Cantrell coming toward him through the downpour.

  A few moments later Jamie relaxed as Bodie hailed him. He took his hand off the gun.

  “Any sign of anybody coming after us?” Jamie asked as Bodie rode up to him.

  Bodie sounded as wet and miserable as he looked. “I didn’t see anything but this blasted rain. Ulysses S. Grant could be right behind us with the Army of the Potomac, and I wouldn’t know it!”

  Jamie chuckled. “I think old Useless S. Grant has his hands full right now being president and dealing with that bank panic back east I heard about. He’s too busy to be chasing us, even if he had any reason to.”

  “Maybe so, but I still say there could be an army back there. You couldn’t prove it by me one way or the other.”

  “We’ll figure there’s not,” Jamie said. “Come on. I’d say you can go get warm, but I’m afraid that may be an impossible chore under these conditions.”

  “How long do you think it’s going to rain?” Bodie asked as they rode side by side toward the wagons.

  “Hard to say. I’ve seen it settle in and rain like this for days. Maybe even as long as a week. Or it could stop tonight. You don’t ever know.”

  “This is why you warned everybody it might be hard to reach Montana by Christmas.”

  “One reason,” Jamie said. “There are still plenty of other things that can go wrong, too.”

  When they arrived at the camp, Jamie saw that the wagons had been formed into a circle, as usual, and the men were unhitching their teams. As they passed the Bingham wagon, Savannah stuck her head out the back. “Why don’t you two come in here and get out of the rain? It’s miserable out there!”

  “I’ll be back as soon as I tend to my horse,” Bodie promised. “How about you, Mr. MacCallister?”

  “I’m going to scout around for a while longer,” Jamie said. “Then I reckon I’ll climb in with Moses, since he’s got that wagon to himself.” He touched a finger to the broad brim of his hat. “But I appreciate the invitation, Miss McCoy.”

  Jamie made a big circuit around the camp on Sundown. Satisfied that there were no imminent threats, he rode to Moses Danzig’s wagon, tied Sundown’s reins to the vehicle, and unsaddled the big stallion. The horses and the other animals were going to be even more wet, cold, and uncomfortable than the humans, but there was nothing that could be done about that.

  Hardships were part of life on the frontier. The sooner the immigrants knew and understood that, the better.

  Jamie rapped his knuckles on the tailgate and climbed over it into the wagon.

  Moses welcomed him. “Come in, Mr. MacCallister. I can’t offer much in the way of hospitality other than a canvas roof over your head.”

  “Right now I’ll take it.” Jamie stripped off his slicker and hung it over the tailgate.

  Moses sat on a crate beside a candle burning on top of a keg and Jamie perched on a second crate. He handed an airtight to Jamie, who opened it with his Bowie knife. Moses then used the candle flame to heat up the can of beans, although it wasn’t very effective for that chore.

  “All the comforts of home,” Moses said with awry grin. “What do you think, Jamie? Is it going to rain for forty days and forty nights, like in the Old Testament?”

  “It better not. If it does, this prairie will get so muddy it’s liable to swallow up the wagons whole.”

  As it turned out, they didn’t have to worry about that. The rain stopped during the night. In the wee hours, Jamie woke up enough to be aware that he no longer heard it hitting the canvas cover, then he dozed off again. When he woke up at his usual time, long before dawn, and climbed out the back of the wagon, he tilted his head to look up at the sky.

  Stars glittered against the ebony backdrop. The overcast had broken and the clouds had moved on, which meant the sun would be shining later.

  The wagons wouldn’t be going anywhere for a while, though. The softness of the muddy ground under Jamie’s boots told him that. As long as the vehicles stayed put, they would be all right, but if they tried to move their iron-tired wheels would sink deeply into the earth.

  There wouldn’t be any early start that day.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  Once the sky cleared, the temperature had dropped during the night. Some of the puddles had thin skims of ice on them. But once the sun was up, the temperature began to rise and by noon the day was fairly pleasant.

  The ground was still too wet for the wagons to risk moving. Out on the plains, there wasn’t much chance for rainfall to run off. Once it fell, it had to soak into the ground, which took time.

  Jamie conferred with Lamar Hendricks. “Let’s give it until tomorrow. I hate to waste a day, but we don’t want to do anything that’ll cost us even more time in the long run.”

  With a gloomy expression on his face, Hendricks nodded in agreement. “I trust your judgment, Mr. MacCallister. I have a feeling that if Jeb Ralston were still our wagon master, we’d be good and stuck here.”

  “You might be right about that.”

  Since he had plenty of time to kill, Jamie took Hector and Jess and rode out to make another big scouting circuit. He would have taken Bodie with him, but he was still hanging around the Bingham wagon so Jamie decided it would be better to leave him where he was. Jamie didn’t expect any more trouble from Kane’s men right away, but if anything came up, he knew he could count on Bodie to protect Savannah, even if it cost him his own life.

  Bodie was head over heels in love with that girl.

  Jamie and his two companions were riding about a mile west of the wagon train when Hector suddenly said, “Look over there, Mr. MacCallister. Is that what I think it is?”

  Hector was smart enough not to lift his arm and point. Instead he indicated the direction he was looking with a nod of his bearded chin.

  Jamie didn’t have to turn his head to look. He had spotted the Indian pacing them a good five minutes earlier. The lone warrior was riding along the top of a slight rise about a quarter mile away.

  “Pawnee, if I had to guess,” Jamie said quietly. “He’s just taking a gander at us.”

  “What else can he do?” Jess a
sked. “There’s one of him and three of us.”

  “There’s only one of him that we can see,” Jamie pointed out. “Could be fifty more just like him right on the other side of that rise. Maybe more than that.”

  Hector and Jess got nervous expressions on their faces, and Jamie knew they were thinking about what he had just said.

  “He wants us to see him,” Jamie went on, “otherwise we wouldn’t know he was there. That’s his way of making sure we know he’s not afraid of us.”

  “I’m not sure I can say the same thing,” Jess admitted. “Redskins make me downright antsy.”

  “He’s not looking for trouble right now. He’s just curious.”

  “What about later?” Hector asked. “He could come back with a bunch of his friends, and they could be looking for trouble.”

  “We’ll just have to wait and see about that,” Jamie said.

  After a few minutes, the distant rider peeled away and disappeared from sight. His absence didn’t seem to make Hector and Jess relax. If anything, they were more watchful than they had been earlier.

  The three scouts rode back to the wagon train in the late afternoon.

  Jamie told Hector and Jess, “There’s no point in saying anything about what we saw today. People would worry about it and might get all worked up for no good reason. I’ll tell Cap’n Hendricks, and we’ll let it go at that for right now.”

  Hector and Jess nodded in understanding.

  Captain Hendricks, on the other hand, didn’t take the news as well. When Jamie told him about seeing the Indian, he became agitated. “We have to warn everyone on the train.”

  “So they can do what?” Jamie asked. “Keep their eyes open? They’re already doing that if they’ve got any sense, and anyway, that’s what the scouts and I are for, to serve as the eyes and ears of this wagon train. You don’t want a bunch of inexperienced pilgrims on edge and ready to start blasting away at anything that moves. That’s how innocent folks wind up getting shot.”