Talons of Eagles

by William W. Johnstone

  “But, Ma,” Falcon had protested. “Me and Marie was married in the Cheyenne way!”

  Kate had stamped her little foot, said, “Shit!” and grabbed her son’s ear and damn near twisted it off. Falcon had done so much hollerin’ half the town turned out to see if someone hadn’t got themselves all tangled up with a mountain lion.

  “You go get the pulpit-pounder, Ma!” Falcon yelled. “Me and Marie will stand up and be married in front of God and everybody. Just please turn a-loose of my damn ear!”

  Kate did, then promptly grabbed the other ear. “Don’t you swear in front of me, boy!”

  “Lord have mercy!” Falcon hollered, towering over his mother.

  Jamie had beat it off the front porch when Falcon had told his mother about the twins. He’d already ridden to the village to see them, and knew at first glance they were Falcon’s kids all right. Both had dark hair, fair skin, and very pale blue eyes.

  “Boy,” his dad had told Falcon, “I don’t know how you’re gonna break this news to your ma, but when you do, you leave me out of it.”

  “I was kinda hopin’ you’d sorta, ah . . .”

  “You want me to tell her?”

  “Ah . . . yeah, Pa. As a matter of fact, I do.”

  “Hell, no!”

  As they rode along toward home, Jamie cut his eyes to Falcon. “How’s your ear, boy?”

  “My what, Pa?” Then he flushed, remembering. “Aw, Pa,” he said with a grin. “It’s all right. To be no bigger than a minute, Ma sure has some strength, don’t she?”

  Jamie laughed and rode on ahead. Falcon was a good boy, but he could be as wild as the wind. Marie though, both he and Kate hoped, would settle him down. Falcon would be the last of their kids to marry. The last eagle to really leave the nest. Jamie recalled a conversation he and Kate had ’bout a month back.

  Jamie had pointed to a couple of blond-headed, blue-eyed youngsters walking past their home, a boy and a girl. “Now those have to be MacCallisters, Kate, but damned if I know who they belong to.”

  Kate had laughed. “They’re Pat and Joleen’s kids, Jamie. Number forty and forty-one.”

  “Forty and forty-one what?”

  “Grandchildren, Jamie. Our grandchildren.”

  “Jesus Christ!” Jamie muttered. “Don’t those kids of ours ever get out of bed?”

  Kate started naming names until Jamie’s head began aching. He finally got out of his chair and went for a walk. He’d never heard so damn many names in all his life. Walking didn’t help much: seemed like every other person in town, grown-up and kid alike, had blond hair and blue eyes. And nearly half the kids called him grandpa.

  When he had finished his walk and finally returned to the porch and sat down in his chair, Kate had said, “Look at it this way, Jamie: there will be someone to take care of us in our old age.”

  “Yeah,” Jamie replied drily. “Providing we can remember their names.”

  43

  Falcon stayed around long enough to greet Rosanna and Andrew and all the troupe, and James and his new bride, then took off for the hills to fetch Marie and his kids. Andrew’s wife and Rosanna’s husband both arched an eyebrow and looked a little cock-eyed at that news—both being European and raised in very wealthy and proper homes—but said nothing. This was, after all, they thought, the Wild West of America where people did things differently. Much differently.

  Falcon was back the next day, with Marie and the twins, and everybody in the twin valleys oohhed and aahhed and carried on over the black-haired, pale-eyed twin brother and sister. The members of the troupe had never met a real life Indian princess before, and Marie played her role to the hilt, even though she spoke perfect English and nearly flawless French.

  Marie and the twins were to stay with Jamie and Kate, until after the wedding ceremony, while Falcon would stay at his own house he had just built.

  “Ain’t that kind of like lockin’ the barn door after the horse has already been stole, Pa?” Falcon asked sourly.

  “Shut up, boy,” his dad told him. “Just keep in mind what your ma did to your ear.”

  “Both of ’em!” Falcon said with a quick grin.

  “And get shut of those guns, boy. Are you planning on being married wearing two guns?”

  “Got to stay ready for trouble, Pa.”

  “Good Lord, boy! There will be the entire population of a Cheyenne village up in the hills around the valleys. You think anyone is going to attack the town with them around?”

  “That is something to consider, ain’t it, Pa?”

  Marie’s immediate family, including aunts and uncles and cousins, were in attendance, in full regalia. The Cheyenne warriors were some of the most magnificent of all the plains Indians, and they were most impressive. They made some of the Europeans very nervous, but the foreigners soon were at ease when they realized the Cheyenne were old friends of Jamie’s. The Cheyenne also had a high sense of humor, and after a time pointed out to the Europeans that they were dressed for a ceremony, not war. Soon Indian and white kids were running about, playing games, and the men were chatting while the women exchanged gifts and gabbed about this and that.

  Almost too quickly, the wedding was over, the bride and groom disappearing into their house. The troupe members looked around, and the Cheyenne were gone without a trace.

  Jamie and Kate were keeping the twins until the honeymoon was over. Everybody had gone home, and Reverend Powell was quite pleased that Marie and Falcon had been officially married in the eyes of God (even more pleased that Jamie had actually set foot in his church). The troupe members were staying in various homes, and Jamie and Kate were alone on their front porch with the twins playing and cooing and gurgling in their crib.

  Jamie looked at the twins. “Is that number forty-two and forty-three?”

  “Yes.”

  Jamie shook his head in disbelief.

  Kate laughed at the expression on his face. “We’ve certainly come a long way, haven’t we, Jamie?”

  Jamie took a sip of his coffee. “Two scared kids running west. Your pa disowning you and me with a murder warrant on my head. My God, Kate, that was forty-five years ago. That’s just damned hard for me to believe.”

  “Seems like yesterday, Jamie. Jamie? Do you feel old?”

  “Not really. I like to go to bed a bit earlier than I used to. Linger longer under the blankets come the morning. I enjoy sunsets and the risin’ up more than I did when I was younger. But old? No.”

  “Jamie Ian and Ellen Kathleen are both forty-four years old. Our youngest is thirty-one.”

  “Woman, how in the hell can you keep all those dates and names in your head? It boggles my mind just thinkin’ about it.”

  Kate laughed, and her grandson chose that time to spit up all over himself. Kate rose to clean him up. She plopped the girl in Jamie’s lap and took the boy into the house. The child promptly snuggled up in her grandfather’s arms and went to sleep.

  “My little breed,” Jamie whispered. “You’ve got a hell of a background, girl. Scotch, French, German, Cheyenne, and God only knows what else. I won’t live to see you finally pick a man and settle down. But you’re gonna be a heartbreaker; I can tell that right off. And a wildcat; you got that blood in you. You’re going to see things happen in your lifetime that your grandma and me couldn’t even dream of. This old world is changin’ fast. And you’re gonna be a part of it. I envy you that...”

  Jamie’s eyes caught a flash of sunlight off of metal high up in the hills. It came and went in a bright sudden wink, but it was there. He studied the hills for a time, but the flash did not come again. He grunted and sighed. “Travelers, I guess. Place is sure fillin’ up, girl. When your grandma and me came out here, there wasn’t nobody but us and your folks and the like. Now there’s wagons rumbling through near ’bouts every day, seems like. Civilization is upon us. I reckon that’s good. Couldn’t have stopped it if I’d wanted to.”

  The day was warm, and Jamie fell asleep on the front porch,
holding the child in his arms. Kate stepped out a few minutes later, saw the sleeping pair, and gently took the girl without waking her husband, then went into the house, placing her on a pallet on the floor, beside her now cleaned-up and sleeping brother. Kate stepped back outside just as Jamie was opening his eyes and looking all around him.

  “I took her,” Kate said. “She’s asleep on a pallet with her brother.” She shaded her eyes and looked up the road. “Riders coming.”

  That was nothing new. The ever-growing town in the twin valleys had opened up, and riders and freight wagons came and went constantly. MacCallister now had a stage that ran twice a week and mail service. The town also had a fair-sized hotel and a bank. The town of MacCallister was growing and prospering; even more so since gold and silver had been found all around the twin valleys.

  “Enough for everybody,” Jamie had said with a smile, with only Kate knowing what that smile meant.

  There were five riders, and they wore long dusters, a garb that was growing ever popular among travelers. There was nothing about the riders to arouse suspicion, so Jamie paid them no mind. He stood up, stretched, and went around the house to the well to draw a bucket of cold water. He sloughed his head with the cold water and that woke him up.

  Then he suddenly recalled that five other riders had ridden in the day before and taken rooms at the hotel. And they, too, had been wearing dusters.

  “Odd,” Jamie said. But then he recalled that Louie Huske, who owned the new hotel, had said the men were polite and well behaved, did not drink too much, and caused no trouble. And they were also trailing pack animals heavily laden with mining equipment. “Well, that explains that,” Jamie said, and forgot about the men.

  He started doing some repairs around the house that he’d been putting off all summer. Jamie lost himself in the work and did not notice the five other men who rode slowly into town, or those who followed about half an hour later. The last bunch did not ride into town, but camped about two miles outside the settlement, in a thick stand of timber along a creek. The land on either side had not been used for farming that year because of flooding and was a perfect place for a small group of men to hide out.

  Jamie woke up suddenly in the middle of the night, remembering that the next day was the day of the month the stage line always sent an extra stage, one in the morning and one in the afternoon, to bring in cash and to carry out gold from the new mines. But he drifted back off to sleep, wondering why he should be thinking about that. The stages were always heavily guarded, and he’d heard that this line was under contract to Wells Fargo, or some big outfit, and nobody in their right mind messed around with companies like that. Their detectives would spend a lifetime hunting men down.

  When he awakened the next morning, Jamie had forgotten all about the riders.

  Jamie ate his usual breakfast of several eggs, about a half pound of bacon, a bowl of oatmeal, and half a dozen biscuits smeared with butter and honey. Falcon, Jr., picked out the bits of dried apples and then poured his bowl of oatmeal over his head, his hi-chair and the floor, and then grinned at everybody while Katie promptly followed suit.

  “Wouldn’t you just love to have them to raise, Jamie?” Kate asked.

  “I don’t think so, honey. I really don’t.”

  Megan came over just after breakfast and took the twins back to her house for the day, Jamie carrying Falcon, Jr., for her. After dropping the twins off, Jamie walked into town and stopped in at the hotel for a cup of coffee with Doctor Tom Prentiss and Louie Huske. Out of long habit, Jamie had tucked a pistol behind his wide leather belt.

  Tom opened his watch and checked the time. “About time for the stage to arrive,” he said.

  “Whose horses are those at the hitchrail, Louie?” Jamie asked. “I don’t recognize the brand.”

  “Beats me, Colonel. They was tied there when I opened up this morning. But they haven’t been there long. No droppin’s around them.”

  “I seen Matthew ridin’ out ’fore dawn,” a man spoke from the table next to theirs. “I waved at him, and he said there had been some trouble up to one of the minin’ camps. Said he ought to be back around noon.”

  Jamie nodded his head. There was always some sort of minor trouble at one of the raw camps, but it seldom amounted to much. Matthew ran a tight county and would brook no serious trouble, and everybody knew it. Matthew would run a man out before the troublemaker could blink.

  “You’re quiet this morning, Jamie,” Doctor Tom observed. “You feel all right?”

  “Fit as a fiddle, Tom. I just have an odd sort of feeling, that’s all. Not physical, mental.”

  “Kate all right?”

  “Ornery as ever,” Jamie replied, and that got a laugh from everyone within earshot.

  The man who ran the bank, Paul Carrington, strolled in and joined the men at the table, ordering breakfast. Jamie noticed that the man looked worried and asked about it.

  “Hell of a double shipment coming in today, Jamie,” Paul spoke in low tones. “More than twice the usual amount of cash and we’ve changed schedules. We’re shipping out on the return run.” Paul cut up his breakfast steak and sopped a buttered biscuit through his eggs.

  “You have plenty of guards, don’t you?” Louie asked.

  “I sure as hell hope so,” Paul replied. “I’m sitting on a fortune of gold at the bank. It’s got me jumpy. Matthew rode out to one end of the county this morning to check on trouble, and the two deputies rode out to the other end. That leaves us with no lawmen.”

  “There is more to it than that, Paul,” Jamie said. “Come on. What’s the matter?”

  “The Nelson gang. Miles Nelson escaped from the territorial prison and was spotted heading this way. His old gang ran anywhere from twenty to fifty men. And no bigger band of cutthroats exists anywhere.”

  The Nelson gang had formed up and started their dirty work while Jamie was away in the war and had grown bigger and stronger during the years. They were perhaps the most brutal and cold-blooded gang west of the Mississippi. Miles was a college-educated man who planned his raids brilliantly and was almost always successful in carrying them out. The Nelson gang was notorious in that they seldom left any witnesses alive. To a man, they were vicious killers and rapists.

  “Surely they wouldn’t attack a Wells Fargo stage or bank,” Tom said.

  “They’d attack anything,” Louie said. “Way I heard it, Miles Nelson is connected to some big money back east. Has political connections, too. He and some of his men are blood related to a group of powerful men back east name of Newby and Saxon.”

  Jamie stared hard for a moment at his old sergeant major. “What did you say, Louie?”

  Louie repeated it.

  “Something, Jamie?” Doctor Tom asked.

  “Maybe. The Saxons and the Newbys are old enemies of mine and Kate’s. A blood feud that goes back more than forty years. You armed, Louie?”

  “I ain’t carryin’ one on me. Hell, Jamie, you’re about the only person in town who packs a gun . . . other than Falcon and Matthew and his deputies. There is never any trouble here. This is the safest spot in all of Colorado.”

  “It might not be today. Get a pistol. All of you.”

  “Jamie,” Doctor Tom said. “No one in their right mind would attack this town. Would they?”

  “Miles Nelson might. And he might be doing it for more than one reason.”

  “Damn!” the banker said, and pushed away from the table, forgetting his breakfast.

  “Here comes the stage!” a citizen shouted from out in the street. “No. They’s two of them this day.”

  Jamie rose and walked to the windows of the dining room. He watched as eight men got off the two stages, all of them wearing dusters and all of them carrying rifles. “Goddamnit!” Jamie cursed. “Dusters. Dusters. I should have put it together. I must be gettin’ old.”

  “That’s odd,” Louie said, walking to the windows and looking out. “Must be nigh onto thirty men done come into town . . .
all wearin’ those fancy dusters.”

  “The Nelson gang wears dusters!” the banker said. “That’s the Nelson gang out there!” He pushed open the batwings and stepped out, frantically looking up and down the street.

  Women were beginning to appear on the boardwalks, ready to do the day’s shopping. The school bell was ringing. School would commence in fifteen minutes. Boys and girls were all over the place, all of them slowly walking toward the schoolhouse.

  “Oh, God,” Jamie said. “This could turn into a slaughter.” Then it came to him: Miles Nelson had planned it this way. Townspeople would be reluctant to shoot for fear of hitting women and kids.

  Jamie turned, walked across the room, and jerked the pistol from the waistband of a very startled traveling drummer who had just sat down to eat.

  “Say now!” the man blurted.

  “Shut up,” Jamie told him. “And get down. All hell is about to break open here.”

  The drummer left his chair and stretched out on the floor. He was relatively new to the West and had heard all sorts of terrible tales about shoot-outs and renegades and outlaws and savage Indians. “I didn’t want to come out here in the first damn place!” he said.

  Paul Carrington was hurrying across the street when one of the duster-wearing men coldly pulled out a pistol and shot the driver of the stage out of the box. The outlaw leaped onto the stage and grabbed up the reins. Paul turned and took a bullet right between his eyes.

  “Here we go!” Jamie shouted, and pushed open the batwings, a pistol in each big hand.

  44

  Jamie shot the outlaw out of the driver’s box, and the team panicked, running up the street, wild-eyed and frightened.

  “It worked, boys!” someone shouted. “There’s MacCallister. Kill him!”

  Set-up! the words flashed through Jamie’s mind. This whole thing was a set-up to get me. Or at least a part of it was. He ducked back into the hotel dining room just as the lead really started flying.

  “They’s outlaws comin’ from both ends of the street!” a man yelled. No sooner had the words left his mouth than a bullet doubled him over and left him dying in the dust.