Scream of Eagles

by William W. Johnstone

  “Did you hear me, boy?” his father asked.

  Jamie Ian the Third turned and hit his head on an awning post, putting a knot on his forehead.

  “Good Lord!” the father said.

  “Falcon didn’t tell me you had a son that was addled,” Mary Marie said.

  “Only at times,” Jamie Ian told her, picking up her carpetbag.

  Matthew and Morgan walked up. Morgan looked at the red knot on young Jamie’s forehead. “You get in a fight, boy?”

  “Shot in the butt with an arrow is more like it,” Jamie Ian told his brother.

  “An arrow?” Matthew questioned, leaning over to inspect his nephew’s rear end.

  “It’s a long story,” Jamie Ian told his other brother. “You two pick up the lady’s trunk. I’ll fill you in on the way over to the house.” He turned to his son. “Do you think you could find your way home without falling down or running into anything else, boy?”

  “Sure, I can, Pa!”

  “Then take the lady’s arm and let’s go.”

  Jamie Ian the Third took a misstep and fell off the boardwalk, landing in the street in a sprawl of arms and legs.

  Mary Marie shook her head. “Poor lad’s spastic, too,” she remarked.

  * * *

  Jamie sat alone at a table in the rear of the trading post just north of the Colorado Territorial line, slowly eating from a large bowl of stew. The winter winds were howling like banshees, beating furiously against the walls of the trading post. Huge, wet snowflakes were tumbling out of the sky.

  Jamie tore off a chunk of fresh-baked bread and sopped up some liquid, chewing slowly. He was very conscious of the four men sitting at a table on the other side of the room, occasionally glancing over at him, then returning to their low talking and whiskey drinking.

  Jamie’s hair held no more gold among the silver. In the months since Kate’s death, his hair had completely grayed, as had his beard, making him look older than he really was. But he still had most of his teeth. Old-timers knew that Jamie Ian MacCallister still had quite a bite—in more ways than one—but much younger men either did not know the legends about Jamie, or did not believe them. For some younger men, that lack of knowledge would prove to be tragic.

  “Ol’-timer,” one of the men across the room called. “You sloppin’ up that food like a hog at a trough. You ’bout to make me sick.”

  Jamie said nothing. He continued eating.

  The man behind the bar got ready to hit the floor. He had come west back in the ’40s and knew all about Jamie Ian MacCallister.

  The one man standing by the rough bar said, “You bes’ shut your mouth, Woody. ’Fore you stick a boot in it.”

  “Go to hell,” Woody told him.

  The man who had offered the friendly warning shrugged his shoulders and picked up his cup and jug and moved as far away from the line of fire as he could.

  “I’m talkin’ to you, old man,” Woody turned his attentions back to Jamie. “What’s the matter, are you deef?”

  Jamie did not look up. He continued eating, enjoying the meal and the warmth if not the company.

  “Hey!” Woody yelled. “Look at me when I talk to you, you old turd!”

  Jamie laid down his spoon and cut his eyes to the four men. “Shut up,” he said. “You’re beginning to bother me.”

  Woody flushed a deep red. “Old man, do you know who you’re talkin’ to?”

  “No. And I don’t care. Now shut your mouth and let me enjoy my meal.”

  Woody pushed back his chair and stood up. He wore two guns, Remington conversions, Jamie noted.

  “Woody,” the barkeep said. “That’s Jamie Ian MacCallister.”

  “I don’t give a damn who it is,” Woody said. “Far as I’m concerned he’s just a noisy ol’ fart who eats like a hog and probably hasn’t had a bath since last summer. Get up, old man, and make your apologies for sassin’ me.”

  Jamie smiled, and then bluntly and very profanely told Woody where to go, how far to venture, in what part of his anatomy he should stick his pistols, and added that he could ram his horse up there, too, for if that part of his behind was anywhere near as large as his mouth, there would be ample room.

  “Goddamn you!” Woody finally screamed, after recovering from his shock at being spoken to in such a manner. Back where Woody had come from—Missouri—he was known as a real tough fellow. A man who liked to hit women, fight smaller men, and strut around on Saturday nights, showing off his fancy guns. “Make your play, you old bastard!”

  Jamie lifted the sawed-off 12 gauge with his right hand and pulled the trigger. The buckshot took Woody in the center of his swelled-up chest and knocked the man off his boots, flinging him backward to land on the table he’d just left. The legs of the table collapsed and pinned one of Woody’s pals to the floor. The other two jumped out of the way and grabbed for iron.

  Jamie fired the other barrel of the Greener and then added his left-hand Colt to the fracas. The whole thing had taken about five seconds.

  “DearJesusChristAmighty!” the thug pinned under the table and Woody’s leaking body bellered. “Don’t kill me, I’m out of this!” He cut his eyes first to one of his friends lying mortally wounded to his left, and then to the other friend, lying as dead as a hammer to his right, his face unrecognizable from the heavy blast of buckshot.

  The man who had stood at the bar and warned Woody shook his head. “I told you, boy,” he muttered. “MacCallister is a ring-tailed tooter.”

  Jamie opened the shotgun and pulled out the empties, loading up full. Then he loaded up the Colt’s cylinder and laid both weapons on the table. “I’m tired of punks and hooligans woolin’ me around,” he said. “I’ll not take no more of it. Not from this day forward. Goddamn young people nowadays have no respect for their elders.”

  “You want some more stew, Mr. MacCallister?” the barkeep asked in a nervous voice.

  “Halp!” the thug pinned under the table and Woody’s body hollered. “Halp!”

  “Shut up,” Jamie told him. “You’re getting on my nerves, boy.”

  “Yes, sir,” the trapped thug said weakly. “Whatever you say, sir.”

  Jamie walked over to the wounded man, lying to the left of the thug with the table and the body on top of him. Jamie had fired just as the man was turning, and dusted him, the bullet going in one side and blowing out the other.

  The man blew blood bubbles and gasped, “Guess we made a . . . real bad mistake, didn’t we, Mr. MacCallister?”

  “It certainly appears that way.”

  “I really don’t want to die, Mr. MacCallister.”

  “I never met anybody who did.”

  “Maybe I won’t. Maybe I’ll get better.”

  Jamie stood over the young man and watched him close his eyes. A few seconds later, he slipped quietly beyond the veil. Jamie looked over at the barkeep. “You know these fellows?”

  “They been driftin’ in and out of here for about six months. They don’t never work. I don’t know where they get their money. Steal it, I reckon.”

  “That’s about right.” Jamie shoved Woody’s body off the busted table and then lifted the table off of the pinned man.

  “Oh, Lord,” the young man said, getting to his hands and knees.

  “You reckon He knows you, boy?”

  The young man looked up, fear stark in his eyes. “He will from now on, Mr. MacCallister. And that’s a promise.”

  “Take a little more time in choosing your friends in the future,” Jamie advised him.

  “Count on it, sir. Can I go now?”

  “I’m not holding you.”

  The man struggled into a coat and without a look back at his dead friends ran out of the trading post, into the bitter cold and howling winds and blowing snow.

  “Ground’s too damn frozen to bury these fools,” the barkeep said. “We’ll just stack ’em out in the shed and they’ll freeze soon enough. We’ll plant ’em come spring.”

  * * *

/>   James William and Page returned from New York, and both were surprised and pleased to see Falcon. Falcon gave them a day to get settled in, then went over to their house for dinner and brought them up on all the news from home.

  “Something is really gnawing at you, Uncle Falcon,” James William said, over cigars and brandy in the front room that faced the street.

  “Yes,” Page said. “You seemed to be preoccupied all evening. What’s wrong? Do you have news of Grandpa Jamie?”

  “Last we heard from Pa, he was going strong in his hunt. He’s nailed over a dozen of the bunch who killed Ma.”

  “Do you have any idea where he is, Uncle Falcon?”

  “No. He might be up in Canada.” Falcon sighed heavily. He knew he should tell Page about her brother. He should warn her about what her brother was going to do, and Falcon was certain that Ben was going to spill the beans. But was it his place to tell the couple? Moreover, did he have the right to do it? What would be Page’s reaction? Hysterics? Shock? Fainting? And what would be James William’s reaction? Would he pick up a gun and go after Ben F. Washington? He was a MacCallister, and MacCallister blood could run hot. There were a lot of things that had to be considered, and Falcon had spent many an hour going over them in his head. But all the hours of ruminations hadn’t done a thing to make this moment any easier.

  Falcon drained his brandy glass and got up to pour another. He lingered by the table for a moment, sat down on the sofa and looked at the young couple. “This is about the hardest thing I have ever tried to do,” Falcon said, his voice low.

  Page smiled strangely at him, reaching over to take the hand of James William.

  “Just come right out and say it, Uncle Falcon,” James urged. “Whatever it is, there is no point in allowing it to fester.”

  “There is a man here in town who wants to cause a lot of trouble for the both of you,” Falcon said quickly. “He’s a reporter, from Boston. I’ve spoken at length with him, trying to talk some sense into the man. But I don’t think I got through to him.”

  “Ben F. Washington?” Page said, that strange smile on her lips.

  Falcon stared at her. “Yes. But how? . . .”

  “Page told me all about her family history before we got married, Uncle Falcon,” James William said. “I am well aware that she is a quadroon.”

  Falcon stared for a moment more. “But? . . .”

  Page laughed, and it was a good, hardy, lusty laugh. “I grew up on a plantation, Uncle Falcon. In the deep South. Like my mother, I am somewhat of a sneak. I may even be better at it than she is. When I was just a little girl, I used to slip out of bed and make my way down to the colored quarters at night and eavesdrop on conversations. I’ve known I have Negro blood in me since I was about eight or nine years old. Probably the best job of acting my mother ever did was in telling Jamie that ridiculous story about how insanity runs in our family, and how I had a brother who was a monster and who was confined in a mental institution back east. And how I must never have babies. All piffle and flap-doodle, of course. I know all about Uncle Ross and all about my daddy. And everything I know, James William knows. I hid nothing from him.”

  Falcon sat silent for a moment. Then he rose and hit the brandy bottle again—hard. Seated, he looked at the young couple and said, “Well, I’ll just be goddamned!”

  Both of them burst out laughing. Falcon soon joined them, and their laughter rang free, carrying outside to the street.

  Standing in the cold shadows, Ben F. Washington stood and listened to the merriment, wondering what in the hell was so funny. It filled him with sudden rage. What right did they have to be so happy?

  He turned away and began his walk back toward the hotel. As he walked, his hot anger faded, to be replaced by a cold, calculating anger. Now, he thought, would be a good time to start that book he’d had formulating in his brain. A book about the plantation days in the South, prior to the Civil War, about incestuous relationships and cruelty to slaves and white masters bedding down high yellow Negro wenches, and quadroon and octoroon babies. It would be about a half-Negro woman who passed for white and about her daughter, and about her son that she betrayed and gave away at birth. And a lot more. He would detail his mother’s rise to power and how evil she was, and her brother, too. Both of them were filth. And he’d write about the oh-so-haughty Page and her passing for pure, lily-white, and her marriage to the grandson of the famous Jamie Ian MacCallister.

  Ben hated the MacCallisters. All of them. Despised them. Especially Colonel MacCallister, that high-and-mighty hypocrite, who preached treating all people fairly but fought for the Confederacy. Hypocrisy, pure and simple.

  Ben would make them pay. All of them. He’d grind them down with words. Rub their rich noses in dark and evil family secrets.

  He picked up his pace.

  He couldn’t wait to get started.

  9

  On the evening that Page was astonishing Falcon with her knowledge of her family’s dark—in more ways than one—history, and Ben was wallowing in his cold and vindictive anger, Jamie was riding into the no-name and nearly deserted mining town in the Medicine Bows. He stabled his horses and carefully rubbed them all down while they were feeding. The hotel clerk was so delighted at finally having a customer who could pay with cash money, he magnanimously gave Jamie the finest room in the hotel . . . guaranteed to have clean sheets with no fleas or bedbugs.

  Jamie ordered a bath and lingered long in the hot water, scrubbing the trail dirt from him and washing his hair. Then he trimmed his beard and hair until he felt he was looking almost human again.

  The dining room of the hotel had been closed for some time, so Jamie walked across the street to a small cafe and ordered his supper. Venison and beans and bread cooked and served by a man who wore his surly indifference like a badge of honor. The venison was tough, the beans undercooked, and the bread as difficult to chew as hardtack.

  “As a cook,” Jamie told the man, after paying for the meal, “you’d make a fine carpenter.”

  “You don’t like the grub, go somewheres else and eat in the mornin’.”

  “There is no other place to eat.”

  “That’s right, ain’t it?” the counterman replied with a nasty grin. “Mister MacCallister!”

  Jamie stared at him for a moment, his eyes narrowing in suspicion; then he stepped outside. He quickly cut to his right, moving swiftly toward the dark alley. There had been something in the counterman’s tone that set his teeth on edge and made him very wary.

  Just as he left the awninged walk in front of the cafe, a rifle barked from across the street, the slug knocking a huge chunk of wood from the corner where Jamie had just exited.

  “Sharps,” Jamie muttered. “Take your damn arm off with that thing.”

  The rifle boomed again, and Jamie guessed it to be a .50-70, or maybe even a .60 caliber. One thing for sure, he didn’t want to get hit with that damn round . . . or any others if he could help it.

  Jamie ran down the dark alley and rounded the corner, turning left. He remembered that the building he was now behind was empty and boarded up. He tried the back door and found the doorknob turned in his hand. He stepped out of the snow and wind and into the quiet of the empty building.

  Jamie knelt down and removed his spurs, slipping them into his jacket pocket. He let his eyes adjust to the darkness before moving toward the front of the building. He could see through the ice-frosted front windows of the building across the street, one lamp burning in the street-side window.

  A shadow passed in front of the lamp-lit window: a man on the warped boardwalk. A man carrying a rifle. Behind him a few yards, another man, also carrying a rifle. Jamie recognized the shape of the weapon: a Sharps rifle.

  But he couldn’t be sure these were the men who had fired at him. He was certain in his mind they were hunting him, but they could also be two men returning home from hunting game for the supper table.

  Jamie tapped on the window with the barrel of his
pistol and then hit the floor. The window exploded, and shards of glass flew as the night was filled with gunfire.

  “No doubt about it now,” Jamie muttered, belly down on the cold floor.

  He crawled to the nearest corner of the room and peeked out through what remained of the frosty glass. No sign of the two men.

  Then he heard a boot scrape on the boardwalk, followed by a soft curse.

  “That wasn’t him in the building,” a voice sprang out of the night, coming from the other end of the boardwalk. “May have been an owl beatin’ agin the winder. MacCallister wouldn’t make no mistake like ’at.”

  Jamie silently stood up, both hands filled with Colts and said, “He damn sure wouldn’t.” Then he cut loose with both pistols.

  The man on the boardwalk, standing not two feet from Jamie, took the slugs in the chest and fell silently to the frozen street, his rifle clattering on the icy ground.

  Jamie ran through the building and exited out the back door, running hard toward the far edge of the short block. He stopped, listened, and could hear the sounds of cursing. He slipped up the dark alley to the street and paused. A few dogs were barking, but only a few. Most of them had enough sense to find a warm place on this freezing night and stay put.

  A man suddenly jumped out of the shadows and began his run across the street. A man carrying a Sharps rifle. Jamie stepped out of the alley and shot the running man, the impact of the bullet turning him around several times and finally dropping him to his knees in the street, the Sharps falling from his hands.

  Jamie walked up to the moaning man as a crowd began to gather.

  “Asa Pike,” a man said. “He’s a gun for hire. You better hunt you a hole and pull the ground in over you, mister. Asa’s got a whole passel of kin, and they’ll all be comin’ after you.”

  Asa fell belly down on the frozen street and moaned. “You’re a dead man, MacCallister,” he gasped.

  “MacCallister!” another citizen said in a shocked tone. “Jamie MacCallister?”

  “Yes,” Jamie told him.

  “I don’t know this one over here,” a man shouted, standing over the man sprawled by the edge of the boardwalk. “But he’s deader ’an hell.”