A Big Sky Christmas

by William W. Johnstone

  “Friends,” Pearsoll repeated. “Like the McCoy girl. She didn’t look any too friendly when she slapped your face.”

  Jake felt himself flushing. He blustered, “She’ll come around. She just needs some time, that’s all.”

  “And maybe for something to happen to Bodie. That’d make things easier for you, wouldn’t it? Maybe more inclined to keep your word to your real friends and honor the deal you made with them.”

  “Forget it. Nothing’s gonna happen to Bodie.”

  “Is that so? You know good and well that if you’re ever gonna get that girl, he’ll have to die. You change your mind about that, let me know.” Pearsoll turned and walked off toward the wagons, leaving Jake standing there with a worried frown on his face.

  He didn’t want to admit it, even to himself, but maybe there was some truth in what Pearsoll said.

  “I’m getting tired of carrying water,” Abigail said. “Can’t we do something else?”

  “Miss Savannah asked us to do this,” Alexander told her. “I don’t want to let her down.”

  Abigail made a face, but she walked back toward the creek with her brother. As they dipped the buckets in the water, she exclaimed, “Alex, did you see that?”

  “What?” he asked as he looked around.

  She pointed. “I saw something up the creek that way. It looked like a pretty bird with bright-colored feathers.”

  “All the birds have gone south for the winter,” Alexander pointed out. “You’re just saying that because you want me to say we can quit fetching water.”

  “That’s not true! I did see it, and if you’ll come with me, I’ll prove it.”

  “What are you doing, Abby?” Alexander asked as his sister set her bucket aside.

  “I told you. I’m going to find that bird.” She started walking along the creek, toward a bend in the stream a couple hundred yards away where low brush lined the banks.

  Alexander looked around for Savannah, but didn’t see her. A few minutes earlier, she had been talking to Bodie’s friend, that other scout Mr. Lucas. But he wasn’t in sight, either.

  Abigail was beyond where the wagons were parked, and she wasn’t slowing down. Alexander knew how impulsive and dadblasted stubborn his sister could be when she put her mind to it. She was going to get in trouble if she wandered off. She would get both of them in trouble, since their father would take it for granted that Alexander should have been looking out for her.

  He trotted after her, calling, “Abby, hold on.” When he caught up to her, he frowned. “I’ll come with you to look for that stupid bird that’s not even there.”

  “It is, too,” she insisted.

  He ignored that. “But then we’ve got to go back. Just a few minutes, all right?”

  “I saw it right up here, moving around in those bushes.”

  Alexander still didn’t believe it. Either Abigail was seeing things, or she had just made up the story. If she had made it up and their father found out about it, he would punish her. Making up stories was lying, he always said, and lying was a terrible sin.

  Sometimes it seemed to Alexander that most things in life were terrible sins.

  The closest wagon was about a hundred yards away when they walked around the bend and into the brush. Alexander looked around. “I don’t see anything except a bunch of old dead bushes—”

  At that moment, something closed around his right ankle and jerked. Before he knew what was happening, he’d been pulled right off the creek bank. Somebody grabbed him, looping an arm around his ribs and squeezing so tight he couldn’t breathe. At the same time, a hand covered his mouth and clamped down equally hard, so he had no chance to yell.

  His eyes widened in horror as he saw an Indian standing a few feet away. The man wore buckskins and had feathers in his hair—feathers!—and the worst thing of all was that he had hold of Abigail and was clutching her tightly to him as she kicked and squirmed. The Indian was more than twice her size, and Alexander knew his sister had no chance of getting away.

  He knew that an Indian had hold of him, too, and even though he fought, there was nothing he could do. The Indians began walking through the creek, taking their two young prisoners with them.

  Nobody at the wagon train even knew they were gone, Alexander’s panic-stricken brain screamed.

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  Jamie knew something was wrong as soon as he got back to the creek where the wagons had stopped to water up. He heard shouting. There was anger in the sound, of course, but there was also something else.

  Fear.

  He swung down from the saddle and dropped the reins. Sundown would stay ground-hitched. He walked toward the large group of immigrants gathered beside the stream. Several people were talking at once, but the loudest voice belonged to Reverend Thomas Bradford.

  “—unforgivable!” he was saying. “I knew I couldn’t trust a . . . a shameless jezebel like you to watch my children! I never should have allowed them to associate with the likes of you! I should have put a stop to it as soon as they started sneaking off to visit you!”

  The crowd parted without Jamie having to say anything. It was just a natural result of his imposing presence. He saw that Bradford was shouting at Savannah. The preacher’s rough-hewn face was as red as a brick, while Savannah’s, by contrast, had all the color washed out of it. She looked frightened.

  Moses stepped up. “Please, Reverend, there’s no need to browbeat Miss McCoy—”

  “You stay out of it, you damned Christ-killer!” Bradford roared.

  Moses went pale, too.

  Bradford went on. “This harlot was probably seducing some man when she should have been watching my children—”

  “That’s enough,” Jamie said as he moved forward. He hooked his thumbs in his gun belt and confronted Bradford. “There’s no need for talk like that. You’d better be glad Bodie Cantrell isn’t here right now, mister. If he was, I reckon he’d be going after you for saying such things. I’m tempted to myself.”

  “You don’t know what she did!” Bradford leveled a finger at Savannah. “My children were with her, and now they’re gone! Disappeared!”

  Now they were getting down to it. Jamie turned to Savannah. “What happened?”

  “Reverend Bradford is right,” she replied in a shaky voice. “It’s my fault. I was supposed to be watching Alexander and Abigail while they fetched water, and they . . . they vanished while I was busy talking to someone else.”

  “They can’t have gotten very far on foot,” Jamie said, keeping his tone calm and reassuring. “Where was the last place you saw ’em?”

  “They were right here along the creek, getting water for their father’s water barrels.”

  Lamar Hendricks spoke up. “I’ve been asking around, Jamie, and a couple people saw the children walking up the creek toward that bend.” He pointed. “But I looked up there and there’s no sign of them.”

  There might be sign that Hendricks wasn’t experienced enough to see, Jamie thought. “I’ll take a look.” He glanced around, spotted Jake in the crowd. “Come on, Jake.”

  The young man fell in with Jamie as his long legs carried him along the creek bank. Several other men tagged along, including Hendricks.

  The banks deepened around the bend. They were about four feet high, and the ground was covered fairly thickly with brush on both sides of the creek. Jamie studied the growth, looking for broken branches that might indicate a struggle. When he didn’t find anything, he turned his attention to the creek itself and the narrow band of muddy earth at its edge.

  His jaw tightened as he spotted a familiar-looking indentation. He pointed it out to the men who had come with him. “That’s a footprint. The fella who made it was wearing moccasins.”

  “Indians!” Hendricks exclaimed.

  “Looks like it.” Jamie nodded and pointed to a vertical mark on the bank. “Something skidded along there. A foot, maybe, like somebody slid down the bank . . . or was pulled.” He pointed again. “Ano
ther footprint there, but not left by the same man. There were two of them.”

  Hendricks said, “They lurked here and kidnapped the Bradford children.”

  “Maybe. I want to look around some more.”

  It took Jamie another few minutes to locate hoofprints left by unshod ponies on the far side of the creek, beyond the clump of brush. The Indians had left their mounts there, skulked along the creek to spy on the wagons, and then when Alexander and Abigail had come wandering up the creek for whatever reason, had grabbed the kids and carried them off.

  This was bad, Jamie thought, but it could have been worse. Indians seldom killed such young captives. They might murder children in the heat of battle, but if they went to the trouble to take prisoners away with them, they usually kept those captives alive. They would either make slaves of the children, or more likely raise them as members of the tribe.

  He didn’t intend to let either of those things happen. “How long have they been gone?”

  “Less than an hour,” Hendricks replied.

  Jamie jerked his head in a curt nod. “I’ll get after them. There’s a good chance I can bring ’em back. There were only two Indians. Probably just out hunting, although they could have been scouting for a war party, I suppose. If I can catch up to them before they get back to their village, I’ll rescue those kids.”

  “But what if there wind up being more Indians?” Hendricks asked. “You’ll need help, Jamie. I’m coming with you.”

  Several other men voiced their eager agreement with that sentiment.

  Jamie didn’t want to be saddled with a bunch of inexperienced pilgrims, but if there was a whole war party out there, he probably couldn’t risk taking them on by himself. That would put the children in too much danger.

  He compromised. “I’m starting after them right now. Hector Gilworth ought to be coming in soon. Jake, maybe you can go find him and bring him in sooner. Hector can put together a rescue party and lead it after me. He ought to be able to follow my trail. No more than a dozen men, though. The rest need to stay with the wagons. This could be a diversion.”

  Hendricks said, “What do you mean?”

  “They could’ve grabbed the kids thinking they’d use ’em to lure most of the men away from the wagons, while the rest of the war party circles around and hits the train from another direction. I don’t think that’s what’s happened here, but we can’t risk it.”

  “I understand. We’ll do what you say, Jamie.”

  Jamie’s long legs carried him back quickly to the wagons. As he was about to swing up into the saddle, Reverend Bradford stormed up to him and demanded, “What did you find out, MacCallister?”

  Jamie knew the truth would just set off the reverend even more, but Bradford would find it out soon enough from one of the others even if Jamie didn’t tell him. “It looks like Indians have them, but I’m going after them right now. I’ll bring them back.”

  Bradford looked horrified. “My God!” he burst out. “My poor innocent children, tortured and scalped—!”

  “Nobody said anything about them being tortured and scalped,” Jamie snapped. “Usually when Indians take white kids like that, they adopt ’em into the tribe.”

  That seemed to bother Bradford more. Eyes wide, he said, “I’d rather them be killed than see them turned into godless heathen savages!”

  Jamie put his foot in the stirrup and swung up onto Sundown’s back rather than say what he was thinking. He supposed most people would share the sentiments Bradford had just expressed. That made no sense to Jamie, though. Life was too precious to throw it away that easily.

  He turned the stallion and heeled Sundown into motion, splashing across the creek. It took him only a moment to pick up the trail of the two unshod ponies as they headed north. He followed it, his eyes constantly scanning the landscape for signs of danger.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  After following the Indians for about an hour, Jamie came to a spot where the hoofprints of the two ponies joined with those of a number of other horses. He reined in, studied the marks on the ground, and frowned.

  The hoofprints confirmed one of his biggest worries. The two men who had grabbed the kids had rendezvoused with a larger party. The prints were such a muddle, he couldn’t tell for sure how many there were. More than a dozen, that was certain. Maybe as many as twenty-five or thirty. Even if the group from the wagon train caught up to him, they would still be outnumbered.

  But he wasn’t going to leave Alexander and Abigail to become part of whatever tribe had taken them.

  People usually fell into one of two extremes when it came to the Indians. Most folks considered them filthy, bloodthirsty savages, little better than animals. But some people—usually easterners who had never actually seen an Indian, much less had anything to do with them—claimed that they were noble aristocrats of the plains, living in harmony with nature, the land, and each other.

  As usual, both sides were full of buffalo droppings. There were plenty of things to admire about the Indian way of life, but there was no escaping the fact that most of them suffered through hard, short, brutal existences, struggling to survive and constantly warring on each other. The odds of starving to death, dying of illness, freezing in the winter, or being killed in a raid by another tribe were high.

  Jamie wasn’t going to abandon the Bradford children to such a fate. He would get them back or die trying. Once the two kidnappers joined up with the war party, if that’s what it was, the trail was easier to follow. He pushed on, confident that Hector and the others would be able to find him.

  By late afternoon Jamie entered a range of small, wooded hills, the highest elevations and the most trees he had seen in quite awhile. With his instincts warning him that he might be closing in on his quarry, he used every bit of cover he could find as he continued following the trail.

  He smelled the camp before he saw it. Wood smoke, cooking meat, and horseflesh. He dismounted and went up the slope ahead of him on foot, moving in silence over a carpet of pine needles. Before he reached the top he took off his hat and got down on his belly to crawl the rest of the way. When he got to the top, he worked his way through a patch of undergrowth, parted some branches, and looked down into a little canyon where more than two dozen Indians had made camp.

  Blackfeet, Jamie thought as he saw the markings on their buckskins and the way they wore their hair. No women and children in sight. It was a raiding party. Several of the warriors sported crude bandages, which meant they had already been in a fight. They’d probably skirmished with another tribe and were on their way back to their usual hunting grounds, taking with them the two white captives a couple scouts had been fortunate enough to come across.

  Jamie saw Alexander and Abigail sitting with their backs propped against a fallen log. They appeared to be all right, although their hands and feet were tied and Abigail was slumped against her brother’s side, sobbing. Alexander had his head up and Jamie could tell that the boy was trying to be brave, but he had to be scared out of his wits.

  Not for much longer, son, Jamie thought.

  The trick was figuring out how to get him out.

  Jamie studied the landscape around the Blackfoot camp. The canyon was formed by two ridges that dropped off almost sheer for about forty feet. He lay where those ridges angled in and came together. The trail the Indians had used to get into the canyon zigzagged down from that point. Anybody going down it would be in plain sight from the camp below.

  At the far end, the canyon ended in a shale slope at the top of which rose a stone wall. The drop from the top of that wall to the shale was about twenty feet. However, the cliff face was rugged enough that it would provide handholds and footholds so that a man could climb down part of the way, leaving a reasonable drop to the shale.

  If a man tried that and landed right, he could slide all the way to the canyon floor. If he didn’t land right . . . well, he’d probably break an ankle, at the very least.

  Jamie didn’t see any ot
her way into the canyon. He would have to have help to manage it.

  He moved back down the near slope and glanced at the sky. About an hour of daylight was left, giving the other men from the wagon train time to catch up to him. He could finish working out his plan then.

  The sun had just dropped below the western horizon when Jamie heard horses coming. He stepped out of the thick stand of pines where he’d been waiting and waved his hat over his head to signal the approaching riders.

  They angled toward him. Hector Gilworth was in the lead, with Bodie Cantrell and Jess Neville right behind him, trailed by nine or ten men from the wagon train. Most of them were carrying rifles or shotguns.

  He didn’t see Lucas, Mahaffey, and Pearsoll and figured those three had stayed behind at the wagons. That was good. Jamie wanted some seasoned fighting men left with the rest of the immigrants.

  He was much less pleased to see Reverend Thomas Bradford with the rescue party. He had hoped that Bradford would stay behind. He didn’t trust that the preacher would follow his orders. In his arrogant stubbornness—and, to be fair, his legitimate concern for his children—Bradford was liable to try some foolish stunt that would endanger all of them.

  Jamie would make sure to tell Hector to keep a close eye on the man.

  Bradford crowded his mount ahead of the others and said loudly, “Have you found them? Have you found Alexander and Abigail?”

  “Keep your voice down,” Jamie snapped. “Sounds carry farther out here than you think they would, and the Indians are right on the other side of that ridge. I figure they’ll be posting guards on top of it any time now since it’s getting dark, and we don’t want them to know we’re here.”

  Bradford was a little quieter as he said, “All right. But what about my children? Have you seen them?”

  “I have. They look fine, just a little tired and scared.” As the men gathered around him, Jamie went on to describe everything he had seen.