All of Kate’s shopping, some for herself but most for family and friends, would go to the valley by commissioned wagon train. Jamie had told her to spare no expense, and she hadn’t.
Jamie and Kate had an uneventful ride up through northern California and into Oregon. Sometimes they followed established trails, many times they left the trails and blazed their own. This was a real vacation for Kate, the first time she had been away from the kids in twenty-five years.
The Indians they met riding through Oregon and then Washington were friendly and curious about the pair, many times inviting them to their villages to share their food. Settlers had been coming into this area since the late 1830s, so these Indians were accustomed to the strange ways of the whites and unlike the Indians of the plains, they had seen golden-haired women before. What they had not seen was golden-haired women who could handle a gun the way Kate could. They were impressed and warned Jamie and Kate that there were bad white men up ahead of them, men who robbed and raped and killed for no good reason.
“Do they have names?” Jamie asked.
“Oh, yes,” the chief of one tribe said. “We have heard the names of Jack Biggers and John Wilmot. They are very bad men.”
“Jack Biggers,” Jamie said, when he and Kate were once more on their way. “I had almost forgotten all about him. I dismissed him as being dead years ago.”
“That’s the one who tried to ride Horse?” Kate asked.
“Tried is right.” Jamie patted Horse on the neck. “Ol’ Horse here almost killed him. I’m going to put this fellow out to pasture when we get back. He’s getting old. He’s still got a lot of trails he could ride, but he’s earned a rest.”
They were in north-central Washington, following an old Indian trail when both Horse and Star became tense, their ears pricked. They kept swinging their heads to look behind them. Jamie quickly left the trail and headed into the timber and brush. He and Kate dismounted, rifles in hand, ground-reined the horses, and slipped through the timber until the trail was in sight. Jamie bellied down and put his ear to the hard ground. He looked up at Kate and held up two fingers, then motioned for her to stay put.
He slipped up to within a few feet of the trail and waited. Soon he could plainly hear the sounds of the horses’ hooves coming up the old trail. Then he could hear the men talking.
“I still think we better ride on up ahead and fetch Jack and Wilmot,” one said. “If this is MacCallister and his woman, my guts get all tight just thinkin’ ’bout the two of us tryin’ to take him alone.”
“All that talk ’bout how tough MacCallister is ain’t nothin’ but shit,” the second man said. “Jack Biggers whupped him, didn’t he?”
“Jack says he did.”
“You callin’ Jack a liar?”
“I didn’t say that. But if he whupped him, why didn’t he go on and kill him and take his head for all that reward money that was on him at the time?”
The two men reined up, studying the trail.
“I don’t know, Axel. Do seem queer, don’t it?”
“Yeah. The damn trail just quit, Clyde. What do you make of that?”
Before Clyde could reply, Jamie flung one of the stones he’d picked up and hit Clyde’s horse solidly on the butt. The sharp stone scared the animal and he started buck-jumping on the narrow trail. Jamie flung another stone and the animal really went wild. Clyde was holding on and hollering as the horse started chasing its tail, going round and round on the trail.
Jamie left the brush, grabbed the other man and jerked him off his horse, slamming him on the ground so hard the wind was knocked out of him. Clyde was facing the other way and saw none of it. Jamie dragged the man into the lush timber and quickly trussed him up with lengths of rawhide he always carried on his belt. Kate crept forward and placed the muzzle of her .36 caliber Baby Dragoon against the man’s head. He looked up at her through frightened eyes and nodded his head, indicating that he understood perfectly that he was to remain still and quiet.
Clyde finally got his horse calmed down and jumped out of the saddle, holding the reins. He looked around him, a rather confused expression on his face. He could see Axel’s horse, but where the hell was Axel?
“Axel? Where you is, boy? You answer me, Axel. This ain’t no time for games.”
Kate pressed the muzzle harder against Axel’s head and the man peed his pants. Kate sniffed and glanced down at him, a disgusted expression in her eyes. Axel blushed under the dirt on his unshaven face.
“Damn it, Axel!” Clyde shouted. “You bes’ talk to me, boy. You hear me?”
Jamie stepped out silently and tapped Clyde on the shoulder. When he spun around, his mouth open and his eyes wide with fright, Jamie popped him with a big fist. Clyde’s eyes rolled back into his head as he hit the ground hard. He did not move. When Clyde awakened, he was lying on the ground beside Axel, both men trussed up tight.
“Oh, shit!” Clyde whispered. “MacCallister! Axel, we be in big trouble.”
“You got that right, Clyde,” Jamie told him. He slowly pulled out his big Bowie knife and laid the sharp cold steel against Clyde’s cheek.
“Oh, LordyLordyLordy!” Clyde said. “Don’t kill me, MacCallister. I didn’t do you no harm a’tall.”
“Me, neither!” Axel whispered.
“You boys are riding with Biggers and Wilmot. Where are they camped?”
“Northeast of here,” Clyde quickly replied. “Over on the Chewack. It’s the truth, I swear it.”
“How come you boys are such a long way from your friends?”
“We been down to the settlement to drink some,” Axel said.
“What settlement?”
“’Bout three days’ ride from here, over to the south and west. It ain’t been there long. Used to be just a tradin’ post.”
Jamie stared in silence at the men for so long they both got very nervous. “Where on the Chewack?” he finally asked.
“Down to where it runs into that other river. I don’t know the name of it,” Clyde said.
“Any unfriendly Indians around here?” Jamie asked.
“Not no more,” Axel spoke up. “Unless you run into some Blackfeet, and they can be downright quarrelsome.”
“How many members in the gang?”
“Oh ... near ’bout thirty, I reckon. They come and go.”
Jamie took Kate aside and said, “We’ll set them afoot with ample food and the guns they have with them.”
“And the gang?”
“We avoid them. If there were four or five of them, I’d tangle. But twenty or so.” He shook his head. “No.”
Jamie returned to the men and stared down at them. They were plenty scared and made no effort to hide that fact. “I’m going to let you boys live,” he finally said.
“Oh, thank you, Jesus!” Axel said.
“But I’d think twice about returning to the gang. They’re going to come to no good end.”
Staring down at the men, Jamie sensed his words had not gotten through to Clyde. Axel was too scared to do anything other than bob his head up and down. Jamie shrugged and walked off. Gathering up the reins to their horses, he led them back into the brush and dropped the men’s saddlebags and bedrolls to the ground.
“Thank you kindly, Mr. MacCallister,” Clyde said, but Jamie could see the meanness in the man’s eyes shining plain. “You’re a real gentleman, you are. Is you goin’ to loosen these bonds just a mite, kind sir?”
Jamie looked down at the man and decided he might as well get it over with here and now. Clyde wanted to kill him so bad the odor of it very nearly fouled the cool air. Jamie reached down and cut the man’s bonds, then stepped back and kicked his saddlebags to him, figuring the man had a couple of guns in the saddlebags. Jamie took a couple of more steps back.
“There is no money on my head anymore, Clyde. Not a penny that I am aware of. And if you’re looking to make a reputation, my advice would be to forget it.”
Clyde rubbed his wrists and grinned. “Man who kilt Jamie M
acCallister could name his own price.”
“If that’s the kind of business you want to be in, I suppose so,” Jamie said softly.
“What kind of a break is you gonna give me, MacCallister?” Clyde asked.
“Clyde!” Axel called. “Don’t be a damn fool, man. He’s give us our lives, let’s take it and get clear of this whole damn dirty business.”
“Shut up,” Clyde said, slowly crawling to his knees and reaching for the saddlebags. “I axe you, MacCallister. What kind of break is you offerin’ me?”
“None,” Jamie replied honestly. “When you reach into those saddlebags, you’re dead.”
“Now that ain’t sportin’ of you.”
“I never said I was a sport.”
“Clyde!” Axel yelled. “Don’t do it, man.”
“I knowed all along you was yeller, Axel,” Clyde said. “Shut up your trap. There ain’t no way he can haul them big heavy pistols out of them holsters afore I can jerk and fire. He’s a fool, he is.”
“You be the fool, Clyde,” Axel said.
“You been runnin’ your trap for months ’bout wantin’ to go back to Maryland and farm the old homestead, Axel. When I see MacCallister dead on the ground, I’ll cut you loose and you can get gone to the farm. Me, I’ll take me a taste of that there woman of his’n.”
Kate laughed at him. “Not you or ten like you,” she told him.
Clyde reached into his jacket pocket and came out with a pocket knife. He cut Axel’s bonds. “You got a hide-out gun they didn’t see, Axel. When I kill MacCallister, you knock a leg out from under the bitch. I’ll pleasure myself whilst she’s bleedin’ to death.”
“I ain’t a-gonna do it, Clyde. And that’s that.”
“Then we ain’t pards no more, Axel.”
“Good,” Axel said from his position on the ground.
Jamie’s hands were by his side, and he appeared to be totally relaxed as he waited for Clyde to make his move.
Clyde slid the leather straps out of their buckles and slowly opened the flap to one of the saddlebags. “I reckon your woman is gonna shoot me after I shoot you, huh, MacCallister?”
“What do you think?” Jamie asked him, sensing that Clyde was having a lot of second thoughts.
“Well, hell! This ain’t a bit fair.”
“What it is,” Axel said, “is stupid.”
“I agree,” Kate said.
“This is getting ridiculous,” Jamie said, and quickly stepped forward. He popped Clyde on the side of the jaw and the man dropped like a stone.
“I hate to say this,” Axel said. “But you should have shot him, Mr. MacCallister. ”He’s gonna come after you for doin’ this.”
“Then he’s a fool.”
“I can’t argue that.”
Jamie cut Axel loose and pointed to the man’s horse. “You want to go back to your farm in Maryland?”
“More’n anything else in this world.”
“Then ride.”
Axel was gone in under a minute, heading south.
“Jamie?” Kate said.
“I have an idea.”
“What is it?”
“Let’s go home.”
* * *
The wagon train from San Francisco with all the presents arrived in the valley just a few days before Jamie and Kate rode in. The crates and boxes were stacked unopened in a barn, awaiting the arrival of Jamie and Kate. The four mountain men had ridden in with the money Jamie had sent to Ian along with Kate’s mare and told the settlers that Jamie and Kate would be along sometime in late summer or early fall.
The man and wife topped the ridge trail overlooking the western valley late one summer afternoon and stopped.
“Prettiest valley in all the world,” Jamie said.
“I don’t care to leave again, Jamie,” Kate said softly. “I had a grand time in the city, but this is my home. I’ve seen the sights now, and those wonderful memories will last me for the rest of my life. It was a grand adventure going to San Francisco.” She pointed to the valley below, her eyes on their cabin. The largest one in the valley. With most of the kids gone, she and Jamie rattled around in the large home like peas in a pod. “That’s where I want to stay. Right down there with family and friends and familiar things.”
“Then we’ll stay here together,” Jamie said.
Kate laughed at the words and cut her blues to Jamie. “Don’t you be making promises to me that you won’t be able to keep, Jamie Ian MacCallister. You’re a wanderer, husband of mine; you always will be, and I love you for that. You’ll stay for a time, then the wild trails will start singing their soft songs to you, and you’ll saddle up and go. I saw that in you when we were just children.”
“Then why did you marry me?”
She looked at him with a woman’s patience and said, “Because I love you, you ninny!”
“Oh,” Jamie said. “Well, I love you too, Kate.”
She laughed at the expression on his face and lifted the reins. “Let’s go see how the kids and grandkids have grown. My goodness, it feels like we’ve been gone for years. I want to sleep in our own warm feather bed this night.”
“Just sleep?” Jamie asked with a smile.
“You have anything else in mind?”
“I could probably think of something.”
“My goodness!” Kate said with mock seriousness. “I just can’t imagine what it might be!”
Six
Spring 1851
The westward movement was on and there was no stopping the pioneers. The tide of humanity surged forward, toward new lands, new hopes, new opportunities, new beginnings. They came in wagons, on horseback, and on foot. Men, women, and children. Thousands of them, like lemmings to the sea and ants on a march, invading, overrunning, seizing, slaughtering, and fouling what the Indians had called theirs for centuries. Many killed game for sport, something the Indian did not and never would understand. The Indian was one with Mother Earth; the white man scorned that and ruined whatever he touched. The white man put up wooden houses that could not be moved and built fences around land and called it his. The Indian could understand that, sort of. Many whites tried to make friends and live in peace with the Indians, many more did not.
With thousands of people on the move west, leaving wagon wheel ruts in the earth that would last for hundreds of years, game began to disappear along the Oregon Trail and many Indian tribes met in council and decided to fight. That decision was to mark the inevitable end of the Indian way of life. The Indian simply could not change a way of life that had been practiced for only God knew how many hundreds of years, and the white man demanded that he must change. The irresistible force met the immoveable object.
In late 1849 and during 1850, the nation changed rapidly, with much of that change taking place west of the Mississippi River. The army bought the fur trading post of Fort Laramie and turned it into a military post. Mormon Station was settled in Nevada. It was the first white settlement in the state. A stagecoach line was formed to carry mail between Missouri and Santa Fe, New Mexico. Mail service was established between Missouri and Utah. Millard Fillmore became the thirteenth president of the United States. Gold was discovered in Oregon. California was admitted as the thirty-first state of the Union. Portland, Oregon, now had a newspaper, the Weekly Oregonian. The Deseret News began publication in Utah, that state’s first newspaper, and the University of Deseret opened in Salt Lake City.
In the late spring of ’51, a treaty was signed called the Traverse des Sioux, calling for the Dakotas—better known as the Sioux—to give up their land in Iowa and most of Minnesota.
* * *
But in MacCallister’s Valleys, crops were planted and babies were born and life was good.
All that was about to change.
* * *
Kate had been wrong about Jamie and his urge to wander, but being a tactful person, her husband didn’t mention it. Jamie and Kate were both forty-one years old—al— though neither of them looked it—and as
for Jamie, he was content to farm the land, raise horses and cattle, trap and hunt, and be with Kate.
Jamie Ian and Ellen Kathleen were both twenty-four and each had a houseful of kids.
Andrew and Rosanna now made their homes in New York when they weren’t touring in Europe.
Of the triplets, Matthew and Megan had married and were busy with families of their own. Morgan had become a scout for the army and was building a reputation as a damn bad man to mess with. He was fast as lightning with a six-gun and not a bit slow to use it. He was, also, like all the boys except for Andrew, approximately the same size and temperament as his father, and looked enough like him to be his brother.
Joleen was seventeen and looked exactly like her mother, and the boys from both valleys were buzzing around her like bees to honey.
“Goddamn it!” Jamie said, after hauling his youngest daughter and a neighbor boy out of the hay loft, both of them panting and red-faced. Kate, holding onto Joleen’s right ear with all the strength of an angry badger, marched her into the house and sat her down for a mother-to-daughter talk about the birds and the bees.
“Pat,” Jamie said to the boy. “I’ve about had all of this gropin’ and pawin’ I’m gonna tolerate.”
“Mr. Jamie,” the boy stood his ground. “I’ve been courtin’ Joleen proper for two years now. I got me a piece of ground and I’ve proved it up. I’ll have me a good crop and I got some cows and pigs. I been buildin’ a right nice cabin, and—”
“Will you get to the goddamn point!” Jamie roared, rattling the rafters of the still-steamed-up barn.
“I want to marry Joleen!” the frightened young man stammered.
“Well, Jesus Christ, Pat! Why didn’t you say so? You want my permission to marry her? Hell, yes. Please do!”
* * *
Falcon MacCallister was twelve and looked and acted several years older. When he was twelve, he said he wasn’t goin’ to go to school no more and that was that. If his pa and ma didn’t like it, then they could just take turns whuppin’ him all they liked—wasn’t goin’ to change nothin’.
“Go to your room!” Kate told him. “And you get no supper this night.”
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