A Big Sky Christmas

by William W. Johnstone

  Groaning, he hauled back on the reins. Despite everything they had done, the wagon train was completely surrounded by barriers of flame and smoke. Most of the flames were still half a mile or more away, but it wouldn’t take long for them to continue their inexorable advance until that whole part of the country was burning, with the wagons and the immigrants right in the middle of the inferno.

  The sky overhead was black as midnight from the smoke and the clouds, but the plains and the hills were lit up by the blazes so it looked like the landscape of hell. Jamie wheeled Sundown and saw that the wagons had come to a stop. So had the men who had attacked the Blackfeet. Everyone realized that they were trapped. There was no way out.

  They had come so far only to meet a fiery death days before the holiest time of the year.

  Jamie rode back to the wagons, not getting in any hurry. His eyes searched the landscape around him, what he could see between the clouds of smoke, anyway. He didn’t see any sign of the Blackfeet. Any of them who had survived the battle had either been swallowed up by the fire or managed to find a way out, so they were on the other side of the flames and no longer a threat.

  Seeing quite a few people gathered beside the Bingham wagon, Jamie headed for them. He dismounted, and the crowd parted to reveal Jess Neville lying on the ground with his head pillowed on Savannah’s lap. She was crying. Bodie and Hector knelt on either side of Jess. Burly, bearded Hector was bawling like a baby.

  “D-don’t worry about it,” Jess said in a weak voice.

  Jamie hadn’t noticed him being wounded before, but Jess’s coat was pulled back and the shirt underneath it was sodden with blood.

  Jess went on. “The way I look at it . . . I’m finally gonna get plenty of . . . rest now.”

  Hector took his cousin’s hand and held it tightly. He said in a voice choked with emotion, “That’s right, Jess. You just rest. You . . . you’ve got it comin’.”

  “Yeah . . . just a nice long . . . sleep . . .” Jess’s eyes closed, and a final sigh came from him.

  Bodie reached over and squeezed Hector’s shoulder. “I’m sorry, Hector. He was a heck of a fine fella.”

  Moses came up behind Hector. The young rabbi had a bruise forming on his jaw, courtesy of Jamie’s fist earlier. He rested a hand on Hector’s other shoulder. “He died trying to save us all. No man could ask for a more honorable end.”

  “I reckon not,” Hector agreed with a heavy sigh. He lifted his head and looked around. “But it won’t be long before all of us are crossing over the divide, will it?”

  One of the men burst out, “I can’t stand this! We’re all going to burn to death! I won’t let that happen to my wife and kids. Where’s my gun? I . . . I’ll end it for all of us!”

  Jamie grabbed the man’s arm and jerked him around. “No, you won’t. Nobody’s going to give up hope. Not yet.”

  “But we’re trapped,” someone else said. “The fire’s all around us. We can’t get away.”

  “No, but look at the smoke,” Jamie insisted. He had just noticed something. “It’s going almost straight up now. That means the wind isn’t blowing as hard. If the wind’s not blowing as hard, the fire won’t move as fast.”

  “So it gets here in fifteen minutes instead of five,” one of the men said bitterly. “What difference does that make?”

  “That’s ten more minutes to say good-bye,” Jamie said. And ten more minutes to hope for a miracle, he thought.

  He was a pragmatic man, always had been. He looked at life as it was, not as he wished it could be. He had stared death in the face on many, many occasions. He knew that when his time was up, his days on earth were going to come to an end.

  But he also knew that when that time came, he would lie down for his eternal rest next to his beloved Kate. They would be together again, never to be separated. He knew that with every fiber of his being—which meant that it couldn’t be the end. It just couldn’t.

  Blamed if he could see any way out, though.

  He stood there as the immigrants slowly dispersed, going back to their wagons to be with their families for what they believed would be their final minutes on earth. He saw Bodie huddling with Savannah, Alexander, and Abigail.

  “You reckon this is the end of the trail?” Preacher asked from beside him.

  Jamie looked over at the old mountain man and shook his head. “No. For some reason, I don’t.”

  “Neither do I,” said Smoke, who came up on Preacher’s other side. “I’ve still got too much to do.”

  Audie said, “We all know Preacher here is just too stubborn to die.”

  “Ummm,” Nighthawk added.

  They stood there together, five of the more formidable fighting men the West had ever known. Between them they had killed hundreds of badmen, had risked their lives to protect the innocent countless times, had seen things and done things that few other men ever had. Even though Smoke Jensen was still young, he was one of them as much as any man could be. It was bred into his blood. If Smoke survived, Jamie was sure he would go on to carve the most illustrious career of them all.

  The flames crept closer.

  “Dang, I’m sure glad we got to fight side by side again, you ol’ hoss,” Preacher said.

  “I am, too,” Jamie whispered.

  Something touched his cheek.

  He lifted his head. It wasn’t an ember that had come swirling down from the sky to land on his rugged face. That would have been hot. The thing that had touched his cheek was . . . cold. Then he felt another and another.

  Preacher said, “What in tarnation?”

  Jamie looked up into the sky and saw more of the fat white flakes, heavy with moisture as they tumbled down from the heavens. Dozens, no, hundreds, thousands, millions, were falling almost straight down because there was no wind, already blanketing the ground.

  A smile spread across his face. “It’s snowing.”

  CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE

  It wasn’t a blizzard, but the snow fell so thickly that it was hard to see more than a few feet ahead. At first, the terrific heat of the fire melted the snow as it fell and vaporized the water, but there were just too many flakes. When the flames reached the unburned ground that was covered with a couple inches of snow, they couldn’t go any farther. Soon they began to sizzle and go out.

  The danger was over. It might not be Christmas yet, Jamie reflected as he stood with his friends and watched their salvation piling up whitely on the ground, but it was sure close enough to call it a Christmas miracle.

  Moses, Bodie, Savannah, and the Bradford children came to stand with the frontier men. Jamie rested a big hand on Moses’s shoulder. “You were the most valuable fighter of us all, amigo.”

  “How do you figure that?”

  “You fought for us with your prayers.” Jamie swept his other hand at the deepening snow. “If this isn’t an answered prayer, I don’t know what is.”

  By morning, the snow was a couple feet deep, completely blanketing the landscape so that there was only a vast expanse of pristine white around the wagon train. The ugly swath of black, burned ground was hidden underneath the snow.

  Jamie worried that if the drifts got much deeper, the wagons wouldn’t be able to move. They would be stuck there, maybe for weeks.

  The snow stopped falling not long after dawn. It would slow the wagons’ progress, but it wouldn’t stop them. They could still push on to Eagle Valley.

  The immigrants took half a day to bury Jess Neville and the other men who had been killed in the fighting. Some of the bodies were badly burned from the prairie fire, which made the grisly task even worse. It wasn’t easy chipping graves out of the frozen ground, but they did it.

  With the sun starting to peek through the thinning overcast, they moved on, bound for their new homes.

  Late in the afternoon of December 24, 1873, Jamie Ian MacCallister reined Sundown to a halt at the top of a saddle between two hills and looked down into a broad, fairly level valley bounded by wooded slopes on the n
orth and south. The valley stretched for fifteen miles before more hills gradually rose into the snowcapped peaks looming over it. A twisting line of trees showed the course of the stream that meandered through the valley. Frozen over now, come spring it would thaw and water the land, turning it into a verdant oasis. Protected from the worst of winter’s storms by the heights around it and fertile in the summer, Eagle Valley was one of the prettiest places Jamie had ever seen. It would make a fine home for the pilgrims in the wagon train rolling slowly up the trail behind him.

  He looked to his right and saw a lone pine tree growing there. Snow dusted its branches. A smile spread slowly across his weather-beaten face as he looked at the tree.

  Bodie rode up to him. “What are you thinking, Jamie?”

  “I’m thinking we’ll camp right here tonight. It’s Christmas Eve, and there’s our tree. We’ll celebrate here and thank the Good Lord for getting us this far.”

  “That’s a fine idea,” Bodie agreed. “I’ll go tell the others.” He turned his horse and rode back to the wagons.

  Jamie stayed where he was, resting his hands on the saddle horn, easing weary bones and muscles. He looked up at the mountains and the towering vault of sky above them. “I figured it was loco, starting out with those pilgrims so late in the year, but that was Your plan all along, wasn’t it? You got us through, and now You’ll watch over these folks while they make their homes here. I’m glad I could be a part of it.”

  The children improvised decorations and tied them to the branches of the little pine tree. Everyone gathered around that evening and sang hymns and Christmas carols. As the strains of “Silent Night” drifted out across the valley, Jamie walked over to Moses, who stood watching silently.

  “Must be sort of hard on you, seeing them like this when your faith doesn’t agree with what they’re doing,” Jamie commented.

  “Hard?” Moses smiled and shook his head. “Not at all. I’m happy for them. They have their beliefs to sustain them, just as I have mine. The differences . . . well, right now they’re not as important as the things we all have in common. Love one another, your scriptures say, and that’s what matters the most.”

  “Remember when I told you you’d do to ride the river with, Moses? I reckon that’s more true than ever.”

  “And you as well, my friend. We’ve been to see the elephant together, haven’t we, Jamie?”

  Jamie laughed and slapped Moses on the back. “You’re learning, amigo. You’re learning.”

  They were still standing there a few minutes later when Bodie and Savannah came over to them. Bodie shook hands with Jamie and Moses. “We’ve got a favor to ask of you, Moses.”

  “Anything,” Moses answered without hesitation.

  “We’d like for you to perform our wedding tomorrow,” Savannah said.

  “A Christmas Day wedding?” Moses said, smiling. “Well, that should be easy for you to remember.”

  “We figure we’d better be married,” Bodie said, “since we’re adopting Alexander and Abigail. I’m not sure how we’ll go about doing that legally, but—”

  “Don’t worry about that,” Jamie said. “I’ve got friends in the territorial capital. We’ll see to it that it gets done. I don’t reckon a piece of paper will make much difference, though. In all the ways that count, you two are already mother and father to those kids.”

  Savannah said, “I don’t want them to ever forget their real parents. Reverend Bradford had his faults, but he loved them and I’m sure their mother did, too. They’ll grow up knowing that.”

  “They won’t have to worry about knowing they’re loved,” Moses said. “I think you and Bodie will handle that just fine.”

  “So you’ll do it?” Bodie said. “You’ll perform the ceremony?”

  “Of course. Tomorrow, before everyone spreads out across the valley to find their homesteads. It’s my Christmas gift to the both of you.”

  Most of the snow from several days earlier had melted, but there were still patches of white here and there, enough to make the valley beautiful on Christmas morning. Jamie was up early, as usual, and was sipping a cup of coffee when Preacher came up and helped himself to a cup from the pot sitting at the edge of one of the campfires.

  “Well, you done it,” the old mountain man said. “Got them pilgrims here by Christmas.”

  “With a lot of help from you and Smoke.”

  “I got a hunch you’d have brought ’em through somehow even if we hadn’t come along. I’m glad we got to help out, though.” Preacher sipped the hot, strong brew. “As soon as ol’ Bodie gets hisself hitched to that pretty little Savannah gal, Smoke and me are gonna be movin’ on. We got places to go.” He paused. “Varmints to kill.”

  “I could give you a hand with that,” Jamie suggested.

  Preacher shook his head. “Nope, but I’m obliged for the offer. This is just too personal. The fellas we’re after killed Smoke’s daddy. Score like that, an hombre’s got to settle his own self. I’ll do my best to help him catch up to those murderin’ skunks, but once he does, he’ll want to take ’em on alone.”

  “I reckon I can understand that,” Jamie said.

  “How about you? I recollect how fiddle-footed you can be. You’ll be movin’ on, too?”

  “Maybe when winter’s over,” Jamie mused. “Reckon I’ll stay long enough to see to it that these folks get established all right. And then come spring, I’d like to make sure Moses gets to where he’s going. He has a calling of his own he needs to answer.” Jamie thought of something else. “What about Audie and Nighthawk?”

  “Those two are gone already.”

  “What?”

  “It’s true,” Preacher said with a nod. “They drifted out last night. Audie said they was gonna spend Christmas in the high country, then maybe winter with Nighthawk’s people.”

  Jamie shook his head. “Wish I could’ve told them so long.”

  “That’s just it with them two,” Preacher said with a chuckle. “They’ll turn up again one o’ these days. They got a habit of showin’ up when their friends need ’em.”

  At mid-morning, the immigrants began assembling in the center of the camp for the wedding. Bodie had no suit, but he had cleaned up his clothes as best he could. Savannah left the Bingham wagon wearing a white dress that Leticia had altered to fit her. Bodie stood with Moses, waiting for her, a big smile on his face.

  Savannah stopped short as she started to walk up the aisle formed by the gathered immigrants. With a worried frown on her face, she asked, “Where are Alexander and Abigail?” She raised her voice. “Bodie, where are the children? I thought they were with you.”

  “I thought they were with you.” Bodie started toward Savannah. “Where in the world—”

  “Right here,” a man’s harsh voice called out.

  Tall, powerfully built, and ugly, he stepped out from behind one of the wagons with his right hand clamped around Alexander’s arm, his left holding Abigail equally cruelly. Behind him loomed a large group of men bristling with guns. “And unless you want them to die on Christmas Day, Miss McCoy is coming with us.”

  Jamie, Preacher, and Smoke stood to one side. Bodie had taken his gun off for the wedding, but they were all packing two irons apiece, as usual. They couldn’t slap leather with those kids in the line of fire, though.

  “Kane!” Savannah gasped. “Kane sent you! You’re the man who tried to kidnap me before!”

  The big stranger grinned, but that didn’t make him any less ugly. “That’s right. It’s taken us a long time to catch up to you.” He glanced at two of the men with him. “My so-called guides didn’t really know where they were going, after all. But this time I’ll be taking you back to the boss, just like I promised.”

  Jamie recognized Keeler and Holcomb, the former scouts. Somehow the treacherous varmints had thrown in with Gideon Kane’s men, he thought.

  Hector growled, “Jamie, what do you want us to do?”

  “Have everybody back off,” Jamie orde
red. “If bullets start to fly, we want as many folks out of the way as possible.”

  Hector prodded the immigrants back, leaving a rough triangle with Jamie, Preacher, and Smoke at one corner, Bodie and Moses at another, and Savannah, the two youngsters, and the gunmen at the final point.

  Moses suddenly stepped forward, putting himself between Jamie and his companions and the hired killers. He held his hands up and said quickly, “Let’s all just settle down here. It’s Christmas Day. A holy day for these people. We don’t want any bloodshed or violence.”

  “There doesn’t have to be, as long as Miss McCoy comes with us,” the leader of the gunmen said.

  Moses came closer, still with his hands lifted beseechingly. “Please be reasonable. You can’t expect to come in here and steal a bride away from her groom.”

  “We’re taking her,” the man grated. “No matter who we have to kill do to it.”

  Moses sighed. “I was hoping I could get through to you, talk some sense to you. I really hoped it wouldn’t come to this.”

  The man sneered at him. “You’re some sort of sky pilot, aren’t you? What the hell are you gonna do?”

  “This,” Moses said softly.

  He launched himself into a diving tackle. His arms, already spread out, went around Alexander and Abigail and jolted them loose from their captor, knocking them to the ground. As he shielded the children with his body he cried out, “Now, Jamie!”

  The hired killers already had their guns out. They were completely ruthless men, eager to slay without conscience or hesitation.

  But they were facing Jamie Ian MacCallister, Preacher, and Smoke Jensen.

  They never had a chance.

  It was a gun battle that would be talked about in that part of the country for years, even decades. Less than two hundred people actually witnessed it, and of those, many caught only brief, chaotic glimpses because they were too busy ducking for cover as shots rang out. But even so, over time thousands of people told friends or children or grandkids about how, yep, they were there when Jamie, Preacher, and Smoke faced thirty hired killers. Or forty. Or a hundred, depending on how the story got inflated. The important thing was Jamie, Preacher, and Smoke all suffered wounds that laid them up for a while.