Four
Those in the valley heard no word of Jamie Ian and Silver Wolf all that hard and long winter. When spring finally arrived, after several false starts, the wagons had already begun rolling out of Missouri and onto the Great Plains, and the Indians were getting angry about the influx of whites into country they had long claimed as their own. It was to be the beginning of a terrible and bloody time in the west, a time of sporadic wars that would last well into the 1880s.
In June of that year, Jamie received word that his oldest son had cornered John Wilmot’s younger brother in California and killed the man with a knife. Jamie did not keep the news from Kate. She stood in the kitchen of their cabin and received the news with a coolness in her eyes that belied her true inner feelings. “Was John Wilmot’s younger brother a member of the party that raided this settlement?”
“I ... don’t think so, Kate. But we don’t know the whole story about the killing. Wilmot may have braced Ian, called him out. Let’s not judge until we learn all the facts.”
Kate stepped outside to stand on the porch for a time. After a few moments, she called, “Jamie. I think it’s Grandpa riding over the ridge yonder.”
The old man was still spry, but his color was bad and his face twisted in pain. Jamie really didn’t know how old he was. In his late 70s at least, probably older than that. He walked up to the porch, kissed Kate, ruffled the hair of the kids, and shook Jamie’s hand. Kate showed him to a porch chair and went inside to fix him something to eat.
“I’ll eat first,” the Wolf said. “Then share the news with the family so’s I won’t have to repeat it.”
The Wolf didn’t have much of an appetite. He ate a small bowl of beef stew, a few pieces of fresh-baked and buttered bread, and a pot of coffee before he spoke, and then only after the younger kids were at play or at chores, well out of earshot.
“Ian almost killed them all,” the old man said. “Right down to the last man-jack of them. Sixteen men in all. But he never got John Wilmot, Biggers, or Winslow. And the lad ain’t gonna quit until he does. Them’s his sworn words. I brung you a letter from your boy, Kate. I watched him write the words and sometimes a-cryin’ he was whilst he done it. He loves both of you. But he’s got a devil ridin’ his back. And the only way he’s gonna get loose from it is by killin’ them who kilt his bride. I seen it in him and said it and he agreed. He’s a man growed now, and he don’t need my help no more. He’s stayin’ out from here so’s them kin of them he kilt won’t attack the settlement. That’s why he’s stayin’ away. Too many goddamn bounty hunters lookin’ for him.”
The old man pointed to a bluff about mid-way up a mountain. “See that spot up yonder? Jamie, you told me that’s where you wanted to be buried when your time come. Well, my time ain’t far off and that’s where I want you to plant me. I got me a cancer growin’ in my belly. Feel it near’bouts all the time. I might have a year, six months, or two days. I don’t know. But I know I’m goin’. I left my white buckskins here after the brigands struck, and I want to be buried in them. You plant me with my rifle, my pistols, and my good knife. When I’m gone, you put my horse out to pasture and see that he never wants for nothin’. I’m goin’ up yonder and dig the hole myself, just the way I want it. You won’t see much of me. I’ll chisel out the stone and put the words I want on it. Jamie, you come check on me from time to time, ’cause I’m growin’ weaker daily. Pisses me off, too, it does. Pardon my filthy language, Kate.” He stood up and reached inside his jacket, handing Kate the letter from Ian. “Thank you most kindly for the fine grub, Kate. It hit the spot. I’ll be goin’ up yonder where the winds blow and the pumas prowl and snort. I’ll see you in a few days, Jamie.”
“I’ll be along, Grandpa.”
The old man stepped off the porch, tall and straight and proud. Kate and Jamie watched him ride off into the high-up country.
“A dying breed,” Jamie said softly. “When he’s gone, it’ll be the last of a breed.”
“No, it won’t,” Kate said softly. “You’ll just step in to fill his moccasins.”
* * *
A week later, Jamie rode up to the far-off bluff he had chosen for his own final resting place and checked on his Grandpa. The old man had lost weight and looked bad but was still moving around well and working on his headstone.
“Sit down, boy,” the old Wolf said, pointing to a spot by the fire, for it was cold this high up. “Pour us some coffee.”
Coffee poured, the old man laid out a piece of deerskin, on which was a beautifully drawn map. “Done this myself, boy, over the years. See all these little Xs? That’s where they’s veins of gold. Some veins might not yield no more than ten pounds of gold. Others will give up maybe five hundred or a thousand pounds of it. They’s enough there to see that your family and offspring for a hundred or more years will never want for naught.”
The old Wolf laid back against his saddle and pulled a blanket over him. “Tired, boy. I’m almighty tired. You know how old I am, Jamie?”
“No, sir.”
“I think I was born in 1757. What year is this, son?”
“1844, I think, Grandpa.”
“How old would that make me?”
Jamie did some head ruminating. “Nearabout 87 years old, Grandpa.”
“Damn!”
“What’s the matter?”
“My daddy lived past ninety and his pa lived to be over a hundred. I thought shore I’d hit ninety at least. Well, I come close, didn’t I?”
“You sure did, Grandpa.”
“Maybe it was 1747,” the old man said, his eyes still closed. “Oh, hell! It don’t make no difference. When your string’s run out, it’s gone. You take that map, boy, and after I’m gone, you tell your woman that you’ll be gone until the snow flies. You dig out that yeller metal and cache it where nobody but you knows where it is. Take a goodly mess of it back to home with you and cache it up here. I found a spot over yonder.” He waved a hand that suddenly looked awfully frail. Jamie’s eyes followed the movement and saw where the Wolf had marked a spot in the rock wall of the bluff.
“I see it, Grandpa.”
“I lived me a full life, Jamie Ian MacCallister. So I don’t want no weepin’ and wailin’ and blubberin’, and a bunch of nonsensical carryin’ on over my bones. You hear me?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Fine. Now go on back to your woman and love her. Come back in a few days. Go on, boy. I’ve made my peace.”
Jamie sat for a few minutes beside his grandpa. He could see that the old man was asleep and breathing, if a bit ragged. With a sigh, Jamie tucked the map inside his shirt and rode back to the valley.
* * *
On the third morning after leaving his grandfather in the high-up, Jamie stepped out onto the porch of his cabin just as dawn was splitting the skies. He looked up to the mountain and saw no smoke. He knew his grandpa was dead.
“Is Grandpa dead?” Kate called from the open shutters.
“Yes.” Jamie finished his coffee and saddled up Thunder. No one in the settlement asked where he was going—they knew.
When Jamie reached the bluff, he found his Grandpa all dressed in his white buckskins, laying by the deep hole he’d dug. Jamie wrapped the body in the buffalo robe his grandpa had laid out and as gently as possible, for the old Wolf was no small man, placed the body in the ground. He turned at the sound of hooves on rock. Kate.
She hopped down and walked to her husband’s side, taking his big hard hand in her small hand. “How old was he, Jamie?”
“Nearabout ninety, I think. He thought he was born about 1757. He wasn’t real sure.”
Kate knelt down and looked into the dark hole. “He dug until he hit bedrock.”
“Yeah. We’ll mound it good with rock and . . .” Jamie paused as his eyes touched the rock where his Grandpa had carved out his final eulogy. Jamie pointed and both he and Kate chuckled at the inscription.
JAMIE IAN MACCALLISTER.
B 1757 SCOTLAND
D 1844 AMERICAN WILDERNESS.
I NEVER BACKED UP FROM
NO SON OF A BITCH IN MY LIFE.
“He must have wore out a dozen chisels doing that,” Jamie said.
“I’ll go get Swede and the others,” Kate volunteered.
“I’ll get busy filling in the grave.”
The service was a short one, just as Silver Wolf had requested. A few of the women cried but demurely, and the Wolf would have liked that. Reverend Haywood read from the Bible and that was that. Jamie told Ellen Kathleen to take the rest of the kids home, and when he and Kate were once more alone at the gravesite, Jamie showed her the map his grandpa had given him.
“No one else must ever know of this, Kate. I thought long and hard about whether to tell you, for fear that if outlaws ever learned of the map, they would torture you to tell them. I’ll be gone the rest of the summer, and when I return, none of our kids or grandkids will ever have to want for anything. And it means that Andrew and Rosanna can travel abroad to continue their studies in music. And you and I can enjoy a few extras in our life.”
“And also help others less fortunate than we are,” Kate said.
“Right,” Jamie smiled through the words. “I was just about to say that.”
* * *
The first X on the map was less than twenty-five miles from the valley, and it was not a big vein. It played out after only a day’s digging and gouging. But Jamie figured he had about forty pounds of gold after everything was knocked off and cleaned up. He cached it safely and rode on to the next X, about half a day’s ride away.
After crawling through about fifteen yards of thick brush and chipping away at the stone, Jamie sat back with a gasp. It wasn’t a mother lode, but it was going to take him a good week or better to dig it all out.
It took him longer than that, working from can to can’t, to dig out and clean up the gold. He found a spot and, marking the exact location in his head, he carefully buried the gold and moved on to the next X.
This one was a tiny creek that played out after only a few hundred yards’ run. And it was loaded with nuggets. Grandpa MacCallister always had a small sack full of nuggets, and now Jamie knew where he got them. What Jamie didn’t know, and was not likely to ever know, was how his Grandpa managed to get rid of the gold without arousing suspicion, for government experts had already assured two presidents that there was no gold west of the Mississippi River.
The old Silver Wolf had told Jamie that a government expert was a man who couldn’t get a job nowheres else.
Jamie cleaned out the creek and moved on.
He had not nearly covered even half of the Xs on the map before he knew it was time to head back to the valley. For humanity’s sake, he could not load another pound on any of the pack animals he had brought with him. He didn’t know what gold was going for then, but he figured he had thousands of dollars worth of gold in the packs lashed onto the frames.
Jamie returned to the valley and spent the night on the ledge where his grandpa was buried, hiding most of the gold before anyone knew he was back. Only Kate and a lawyer he trusted back in St. Louis would know about the gold, and only Kate would know where it was hidden. The next day, before the sun was up, Jamie rode down into the valley and put the weary pack animals out to pasture for a long and well-deserved rest. Jamie was sitting on the front porch when Kate arose and threw open the shutters to air out the cabin.
“I figured this was what you did while I was out working my hands to the bone,” Jamie said, maintaining a straight face. “Just lay a-bed and lollygag about all morning.”
Kate hadn’t seen her husband in weeks, still she didn’t bat an eye. “Go fetch some wood if you want breakfast. And wash your hands. They’re filthy.”
Jamie sighed. After almost twenty years of marriage, he was still hard-pressed to get one over on Kate.