Another gang member left the clearing to relieve himself. Jamie notched an arrow and then relieved the man of his life, the arrow from the powerful bow driving deep into his chest, piercing the heart. The man dropped soundlessly. Jamie would take his scalp later.
Two down, eight to go.
“Where the hell did Will go?” a man asked, looking up from the card game. “Will? Will!” he hollered.
Will was in no condition to reply now or ever. Jamie waited, an arrow notched and ready to fly.
Another man stood up. Jamie studied him closely. He vividly recalled the events in that trading post not far from the Mississippi River . . . hard to believe it was only a few quick years past; it seemed like ages. This one was a Newby. Hatred filled Jamie as he pulled back the bow string and let the arrow fly. Waymore Newby turned just in time to save his life. The arrow pinned his wrist to his hip, sinking deep, and Waymore screamed in pain. Jamie dropped his bow and jerked out his pistols, letting the double-shotted balls fly. He dropped his pistols and grabbed up his rifle, shooting a slaver in the belly. Through the gunsmoke, he could see the ground littered and bloodied with four bodies, two were still, the two others were jerking and twitching in pain.
But Waymore Newby was not among them.
“Damn!” Jamie whispered, as he shifted locations and quickly reloaded rifle and pistols.
“Waymore!” came the hoarse and scared call from north of the clearing. “Where you is, man?”
“Hurt!” Waymore’s pain-filled voice came from Jamie’s right, some distance away. “Goddamn arrey pinned my hand to my hip. Head’s in deep, too. Grindin’ agin my hipbone.”
“If it’s Injuns,” came another voice, “how come they don’t come on and finish it?”
“It ain’t the red niggers,” Waymore moaned. “It’s that goddamn Jamie MacCallister!”
Jamie waited, as silent as the death he brought.
“MacCallister!” another voice called. “That cain’t be!”
“Yeah, it is,” Waymore said. “Soon as y’all told me ’bout that yeller-haired gal I knowed it had to be. He’s out there, waitin’. Git him, boys. You can’t afford to let him live. He’ll track us all to the edges of hellfire.”
Jamie did not move. Had they just used their vision as their Creator gave them the power to do, they could have spotted Jamie, for his cover was scant. But as long as he did not move, they seemed unable to spot him.
“Damnit, man, he’s a ghost in them woods!”
“Settle down, Barton,” Waymore said, and then could not stifle his moan of pain. “Just settle down. He ain’t nothing but a snot-nosed kid who got lucky, that’s all.”
Jamie allowed himself a small smile when a shriek came from over by the picket line. Someone had found the scalped bounty hunter. The hair was hanging from Jamie’s belt.
“It’s Wilson! He’s been scalped!”
“MacCallister was raised up by them damn Shawnees, remember?” Waymore said. “He’s a savage like them. GoddamnJesus! I hurt somethin’ fierce.”
Jamie had moved as the man shrieked, knowing that cry of alarm would cause all eyes to shift for a second.
Now Jamie began working his way around the edge of the clearing, slipping along the creek bank, knowing the bank would conceal him. He paused, smelling the man’s unwashed body and filthy clothing to his left, not more than a few feet away. Don’t these people ever bathe? he thought. He slipped on a few yards and crawled up over the lip of the bank, coming up silently behind the crouching man. Jamie cut the man’s throat and took his hair.
“Osgood?” a slaver called. “You all right, Os?”
Jamie patted the dead man’s shoulder, thinking: He’s a better man now than he’s ever been in his life.
“Anybody see where Osgood jumped to when the shootin’ started?”
“Over by the edge of the crick, I think.”
Jamie threw back his head and howled like a wolf, and then jumped behind several cottonwoods that had been blown down in a storm.
Those left alive filled the air with lead balls as the call wavered silent. While the guns were roaring, Jamie had crawled the length of the cottonwoods and slipped into the brush, working up behind Waymore. But Waymore was gone, leaving a bloody trail where he had crawled away, toward the horses. A man suddenly reared up in front of him, his face pale and his eyes wide. His mouth was open, exposing stubs of blackened and yellowed teeth.
Jamie ripped him open from crotch to the V of his rib cage with his big knife, splattering Jamie with his blood. The dying man wailed once and then fell back, his innards exposed. Jamie threw himself to one side as two rifles roared, one slug knocking bark off a tree, stinging and bloodying the side of Jamie’s face.
How was Waymore working a rifle with one hand? Jamie thought.
“Oh, damn, that hurt!” Waymore moaned. “I broke the arrey off and freed my hand. But the point’s still layin’ agin my hipbone and scrapin’ when I move. How many’s left, Barton?”
“Just you and me, Waymore, I think. Ain’t been airy sign of Osgood or Alfred.”
“Work your way toward me, Barton. We’ll have a better chance of stayin’ alive if we’re together.”
“Comin’ over.”
He didn’t make it. Jamie drilled him clean on his first jump and Barton went down bonelessly. Jamie knew he’d made a righteous shot.
“Just you and me now, Newby,” Jamie called.
“Damn you, MacCallister! You kilt my brothers!”
“They started it, Newby. You should have left it alone and stayed away from men like Olmstead and Jackson.”
“Let’s deal, MacCallister.”
“You have no bargaining position, Newby.”
“I got gold!”
“I don’t want gold.”
Waymore Newby cursed him, the vile oaths ringing out over the small and bloody clearing. The clearing! Jamie studied it. Where there had been four men lying around the fire, now there were only three.
“Waymore!” a weak voice called. “I’m done for. But I got four loaded pistols and two rifles. Make for the horses and get gone from here. I’ll hold MacCallister for a time.”
“You’re a better man than all the rest put together, Smathers,” Waymore called. “I’ll tell your kin how you died and on the next run, they’ll be along.”
“Get gone, Waymore. I can’t last much longer.”
To get to the picket line, Jamie would have to cross several barren spots. He wasn’t going to risk it. He heard Waymore stumbling along and then heard the horse gallop away. Waymore crossed the creek and headed east.
“You can relax, Smathers,” Jamie called. “I’ll stay here and talk to you while you got breath.”
“You show yourself and I’ll shoot you, MacCallister,” Smathers warned in a weak voice.
“I know it. Why’d you get tied up with a bastard like Newby?”
“Money. Hard cash is tough to come by now. I wanted enough to buy me a piece of ground. I done had it cultivated. It’s goin’ for a dollar an acre. Good bottom land, too. Had me a good gal an’ we was betrothed.”
“You’d have been better off settling for less land.”
“Don’t I know it now. You gonna take my hair, MacCallister?”
“No. And I’ll give you a decent burial.”
“Kind of you. I want you to know that I didn’t have no idee the men was gonna try to mo-lest no good woman. I never would have took no part in nothin’ like that. I never even come onto your land. I was the lookout ’bout a mile up the trail.”
“All right, Smathers. Will your brothers come after me?”
“Yeah, they’ll come. They’re fools if they do, but I reckon they will.”
Jamie had nothing to say about that.
“MacCallister? How come you let me bluff you? I wanted you to shoot that damn Waymore. I ain’t even got no gun.”
Jamie chuckled. “You sure had me fooled, Smathers.”
“My dear sainted mother always said
I could charm birds out of the trees. MacCallister? I’m holdin’ a flower in my hand so’s you’ll know who I am and won’t scalp me. Look, them horses we’re ridin’... they ain’t stole. The bay...” He coughed violently for a moment. “... with the stockin’ feet is mine. He’s a good’un. They’s all good. You can have...”
Jamie waited for a time, then worked his way around the camp, taking hair as he went. He found a shovel and buried Smathers deep, piling rocks on the mound to keep the varmits away. The other bodies he stacked up and caved a portion of the creek bank over on them — after he took all their money, which was a nice sum of coin. He packed up all their supplies and guns and powder and lead and put out the campfire. Then he roped the horses together and swung into the saddle of the bay with the stocking feet. He headed back toward Nacogdoches, the bloody scalps dangling from his belt.
Adolphus Sterne paled at the sight of the scalps, but said nothing about it. Jamie handed him a list he’d prepared and then prowled the store, with the other customers getting quickly out of the way of the young man with the bloody buckskins and the scalps dangling from his wide belt.
Jamie suddenly realized he had not tied the scalps to his horse’s mane. “Oh,” he said. “Please excuse me. I’m sorry to have offended you.” He went back outside and tied the scalps to the bay’s mane and then cleaned off the gore from his buckskins and reentered the store.
“You get them all, MacCallister?” a swarthy skinned man wearing two pistols under his dress coat asked.
Jamie turned. “Let’s just say justice was served.”
“By the authority vested upon me by President Guerrero of Mexico, I now place you under arrest for murder.”
Jamie laughed at him and the man’s face darkened with rage. “Try it,” Jamie told him.
The man reached for a pistol and Jamie’s hand fell upon his wrist, seizing it in a grip as tight as any vise. “Don’t be a fool,” Jamie warned him. “And think like a man. Those men callously and brutally stomped the life out of a helpless five-month-old baby girl, and tried to rape my wife. Now what would you have done?”
The man’s eyes lost some of their anger. A curious expression passed over his dark and handsome features. He nodded his head. “I, too, have a family. You did say your name was Curtis, did you not?”
Jamie released the man’s wrist and stepped back. “That I did, senor.”
“And you are from the country west of the Trinity, are you not?”
“That I am.”
“For a man only five feet, four inches tall, you have quite a grip, Curtis. Now I regret that I have pressing matters outside of town that I must see to. Buenas días, Senor Curtis.” He smiled. “And... adiós.”
* * *
Kate was working in the garden when she heard the sound of many hooves pounding the ground. She ran for her rifle, only a few feet away, and grabbed it up. She lowered the rifle as she saw the lone rider’s golden hair hanging to his shoulders. He was leading a half dozen heavily laden pack horses and driving a herd of magnificent-looking riding horses. She walked out of the garden and over to the cabin, enlarged by another room the past year. Her husband was riding a fancy-stepping bay with stocking feet. She looked at the dried scalps tied to the bay’s mane. The scalps did not surprise her; she knew Jamie could be as savage as any human when pushed past a certain point.
He jumped from the saddle and grabbed her up in his arms, lifting her off her feet and kissing her lips. They held each other for a long time.
When he finally released her and her feet were once more on the ground, she asked, “It’s over?”
“For a time. Waymore Newby got away, swearing he’d return with more men. I won’t josh you about that.”
Jamie looked out at the fields he could see. They had been worked and planted. “Moses?”
“All of us worked, Jamie. Moses and the others would work the mornings in their fields, then work the afternoons in our fields.”
“Titus and Robert?”
“No sign of them. But Moses said someone has been slipping about our places at night, spying.”
“Just one person?”
“Several. They wear boots, Wells said.”
“They play a dangerous game.” He swept up Jamie Ian and Ellen Kathleen in his arms and spun around, kissing them. Andrew and Rosanna were taking their naps in cradles in the covered dogtrot, where they could catch the afternoon’s breeze and still be protected from the sun. He put the older set of twins down and they ran off, shouting and playing. They would not venture far from the cabin. Several spankings had convinced them that their parents meant what they said about staying away from the edge of the swamp.
“The scalps?” Kate questioned.
“I’ll keep them,” Jamie said. “And if I have to hunt men again, I’ll tie them to my horse’s mane or my long rifle as a warning to others who try to hurt us or take from us.”
Kate knew that topic of conversation was concluded. She looked at the pack horses. “Jamie, you brought back the whole store!”
Jamie smiled. “Some of those supplies were gifts from the Newby Brothers’ gang.”
“How very nice of them.”
“Yes,” Jamie’s reply was dry. “Toward the end, they had nothing to say about it.”
Kate let that slide. They both turned at the sounds of an approaching horse. Moses and Jed.
“Jed’s grown,” Jamie remarked. “And I sure haven’t been gone that long.”
She looked at him and smiled impishly. “That’s what you think. But yes, Jed’s shooting up like a stalk of corn.”
Liza and the twins and Sally and Wells and their kids soon joined the group and they began unloading the supplies, with Jamie dividing them equally. It was quite a pile. When everything was unloaded, and the foodstuffs belonging to Kate were stored, the women went off to oohh and aahh over the several bolts of cloth that Jamie had returned with, and after the horses had been seen to and corralled, the men relaxed for a time, Jed among them, over cups of coffee.
“The men skulking about at night?” Jamie asked. “Tell me about them.”
“Half a dozen of them,” Wells said. “At least. But they don’t all come at once. Two this night, two others the next night, and so on. It’s got me jumpy.”
“Anything been stolen?”
“Not a thing that I can see.”
Jamie looked at Moses. The older man, his hair now almost totally gray, shook his head. “I don’t know who they is. It’s got me baffled. It’s like they’re playin’ a game with us. But only they know the rules.”
“Have any of you spoken with the Indians?”
“They haven’t been around. This time of year, they’re plantin’, too.”
“Stay close to your cabins this night,” Jamie said. “The rules of this game are about to change.”
Nineteen
Hart Olmstead and John Jackson sat in Olmstead’s fancy office in New Orleans and stared in silence at one another. The two teams of men they’d sent into the Big Thicket country were long overdue. And both men knew that meant only one thing: they were not coming back. They knew another thing, too: Jamie Ian MacCallister had struck again.
Hart cursed and looked at a very rough drawing, a not very precise map of the Big Thicket country. It stretched for several hundred miles and was about as accurate as trying to count the fleas on a dog.
Both men were dressed elegantly, but anyone with a knowing eye could tell they were nothing more than dressed-up white trash. Both men had been rebuked by everyone of quality in the city. Jim Bowie, a man who had made a fortune working with the pirate, Jean Lafitte, in the selling of slaves, would have nothing to do with Olmstead or Jackson. Despite his wild reputation — Bowie had done it all, from capturing and breaking wild horses to riding on the backs of alligators for fun — Bowie was a gentleman, and knew trash when he saw it.
But Olmstead and Jackson were now reasonably well-off men, and their gangs of brigands were large, roaming all over several s
tates and territories slaving — among other things, most of them borderline illegal or just plain outlawing.
Bowie was out of the city now, and not expected to return anytime soon. He was in Mexico, down in Saltillo, capital of the state of Coahuila, a guest of Veramendi, the vice-governor of San Antonio of de Bexar. Both of them were involved in some sort of land deal. Bowie was, according to rumors, also actively courting Veramendi’s daughter, Ursula.
Hart Olmstead hated Bowie, but concealed it rather well, for he was scared to death of the man ... most people with any sense were. Hart looked up from the crude map. “Titus could not find the cabins this trip?”
John shook his head. “No. He got everybody lost as a goose in those swamps. I tell you, Hart, you’ve got to see that place to believe it. It’s the spookiest damn place I ever seen in all my life.”
“I’ll see it,” Hart said. “I’m putting together an outfit now. We’re going into the Big Thicket country to settle this once and for all.”
The door to his office burst open, startling both men. Hart’s aide said, “Waymore Newby’s back. He’s been hurt. His gang was wiped out by that MacCallister person.”
“Goddamnit!” Hart said, slamming both hands onto his expensive desk. “Where is Waymore?”
“Bein’ attended to by the doctor. His left hand is crippled and the doctor’s diggin around now for the arrow in his hip.”
Waymore’s face was shiny with the sweat of pain, but he was conscious and able to talk, the bloody arrowhead lying in a pan on a table by his bed.
“Can you tell me what happened?” Hart asked.
“He ambushed us,” Waymore said, his voice weak. He elected not to tell the man about the attempted rape of his daughter or the callous killing of his grandbaby. “MacCallister killed all the men and scalped them.”
Both Hart and Jackson paled at that last bit of news.
“There ain’t nobody over yonder goin’ to arrest him, Hart. The area is po-liced by Chief Diwali’s Cherokees and Jamie’s done made friends with all of them. A man can’t git through the Big Thicket from the east. There just ain’t no way’cept that known to but a few, and they ain’t talkin’.”
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