* * *
The first rays of the morning sun were licking the tops of the tall oaks beside the Milltown road when Trace passed Travis and Nettie Bowen’s old cottage. They had vacated it only a few months before, but already it was choked with weeds from Nettie’s garden. Trace thought about Nettie and Travis and wondered if they were any closer to the Oregon country they had set out to find. If anybody can get ’em there, it’ll be Buck, he thought. The picture in his mind brought a sad smile to his face. As he continued on, he looked no more to his left or right, not wishing to burn any of this hateful place into his memory.
Behind him, next to the burnt-out ashes of the house that John Tracey had built for his wife and his two sons, Trace McCall left a fresh grave. He laid his mother to rest near her flower garden, now grown up in weeds, in the shade of the tall poplar. Once the bright and happy home of a hardworking and caring family, it was now a place of sorrow, filled with bitter memories best forgotten. Leaving his boyhood home, Trace next paused briefly in the church cemetery to say a final good-bye to his brother, Cameron. Now there was but one last farewell he was determined to make.
CHAPTER 17
Trace paused near the crest of the steep slope that descended to a rocky stream below, surveying the scene beyond the rushing water. Although it had been years now, still the image of that day came clearly to his mind’s eye. He nudged the paint, and the horse made his way slowly down through the pines, carefully stepping over loose rock and shale. He pulled up short of the huge boulder near the water’s edge. It had been from behind this same boulder that he had first sighted the evidence of LaPorte’s Blackfoot slaughter. Henry Brown Bear’s body had been lying only a few yards away in the shallow water.
He shifted his gaze forward to a large pine on the edge of the clearing, and for an instant the vivid picture flashed before his eyes of his father propped up against the trunk—his body pierced by a dozen arrows, the skin of his face sagging as a result of his missing scalp. Trace closed his eyes, trying to blink the image away. After a moment he glanced at the ruins of the little cabin that he, his father, and Henry Brown Bear had built. The brush had all but taken it over. A casual glance might have missed it entirely.
The impact of returning to this place of horror hit Trace harder than he had anticipated. After so many years, he thought his emotions were hardened to what had happened in the past, but the vividness of what took place here was almost enough to take him back in time—and he once again felt the guilt that had burdened him for being absent when his father needed him most. His rational mind told him that it was not his fault that he had begged to go hunting that fateful day. Still there was a deeper feeling that if he had been there, the three of them might have had a better chance of turning the Blackfoot party back.
“It’s done!” he pronounced, shaking himself out of his melancholy. He dismounted and walked toward the two mounds on the edge of the clearing to complete what he had come here to do. Trace felt the need to return to this place to testify before his father’s grave that his murderers were in hell where they belonged. Only then could he close this chapter in his life.
He was gratified to discover that the graves had not been disturbed. Though grown over in weeds and brush, his father’s grave was readily defined, wider at one end in order to accommodate John Tracey’s body, stiffened in a sitting posture. The thought caused Trace to catch his breath briefly before saying what he had come to say.
“Pa, that’s the three of ’em—Tyler, Morgan, and Hamilton. I hope it brings you some peace. I reckon you probably already know, but Ma’s dead. I buried her beside Cameron. Don’t judge her too harshly for marrying Hamilton Blunt—she had no way of knowing. I reckon I’m the only one left now, and I hope you’ll understand that I wanna bury Jim Tracey too. It ain’t that I’m not proud to be your son. It’s just that too much sorrow is riding with that name, and I’d just as soon start over. ’Course, you know I’ll never forget you. I’m taking your name and Ma’s maiden name as my own. Well, that’s about it—that’s what I wanted to say.”
The last memory of Jim Tracey now buried with his father, Trace McCall stepped up in the saddle and, without hesitation, turned the paint toward the Bitterroots that loomed before him.
Climbing to the top of the ridge, he pulled up to take one last look at the clearing below. Then he looked west, toward the mountains and the fresh breeze that danced across his face. He breathed it deep into his lungs, and he thought about what might lie ahead for Trace McCall. Life was new again. He was back in the high mountains. There had been deep sorrow in his young life, but a man is not made whole without a generous portion of sorrow. It was the healing that built compassion in a man’s soul. Trace had lost an entire family, but he had another family. Somewhere beyond the mountains he could find Buck and Jamie—and Travis and Nettie Bowen—or somewhere between this spot and Canada, there was a little Indian girl named Blue Water. The thought brought a smile to his face.
Free to go in any direction he chose, he paused when he heard the far cry of a hawk. Shielding his eyes with his hand, he looked toward the mountains until he spotted it, circling high over a mountain pass. “That’s as good as any,” he said and turned the paint in that direction.
CHARLES G. WEST lives in North Port, Florida, and was the proprietor of a commercial typesetting and printing business. He now devotes his full time to writing historical fiction. This is his seventh novel.
Wings of the Hawk Page 27
