17
Ben F. Washington sat on the front porch of the small house and watched the sun sink over the mountains. He was at peace with himself and the world. He had never known such inner peace. Ben stuffed his pipe with tobacco and fired it up, filling the air with the fragrant scent. A young couple strolled past, and they smiled and spoke to Ben. Ben returned the greeting warmly and watched the handsome couple until they were out of sight; both of them blond-haired and blue-eyed.
A man rode by on a fine bay animal, smiling and touching the brim of his hat with his fingers. Ben waved in return. With a sigh and a contented smile, Ben, right then and there, made up his mind as to his future. He had made a tentative offer to the aging editor and owner of the local newspaper, and the man had accepted. Ben would see him tomorrow and firm up the deal.
“Yes,” Ben muttered to the cool winds blowing off the snowcapped mountains all around him. “I am home.”
* * *
The bartender slid a bottle and a glass down to Jamie and then hit the air, exiting out the back door of the saloon. The half dozen other patrons and one henna-haired, worn-out, and used-up-looking Soiled Dove took tables close to the wall.
Sam Woodson, Art Adams, and Ramsey Wicks were standing up at the far end of the saloon, hands over the butts of their guns.
“Now you hear me good, MacCallister.” Sam was the first to speak. “I’m tarred of you doggin’ my back trail. This here is gonna end tonight. You hear me?”
Jamie, using his left hand, poured a drink and sipped it. He held the Greener in his big right hand. He said nothing, only smiled.
“It ain’t right what you been doin’,” Art took it up. “We’s human bein’s. What’s done is done, and you ain’t gonna change it.”
Jamie bluntly and profanely told the trio to go commit an impossible act upon their persons.
“Goddamn you!” Ramsey screamed, and reached for his guns.
Jamie lifted the Greener and blew a hole in Ramsey, some of the buckshot striking Art in the arm and bringing a yelp of pain. Ramsey slammed against the wall and slid down, coming to rest on his butt, still alive, but not for long.
Yelling his rage, Sam Woodson grabbed iron and cleared leather, tossing a wild shot in Jamie’s direction. But Jamie was no longer there. After firing the first barrel, he had dropped into a crouch and duck walked behind the bar, reloading the sawed-off as he went.
“Where the hell did he go?” Art yelled.
Jamie stood up behind the bar. “Right here,” he called, and pulled both triggers of the Greener.
Art took the full load of buckshot in the chest and was flung off his boots, both his guns flying from dead fingers. The pistols discharged upon hitting the saloon floor and blew holes in the front windows, sending the spectators leaping for the floor. The Soiled Dove, no lightweight, landed on top of a traveling man and drove the wind from him. He thought he’d been shot and, when he caught his breath, commenced to bellering to beat the band. While he was doing all that, the Soiled Dove lifted his watch and chain and wallet.
Jamie dropped the Greener and hauled iron just as Sam Woodson shifted his weight and brought up his guns. Jamie gave him two .44 rounds in the chest and belly and added a third slug for good measure. Falling backward, Sam pulled the triggers and blew two holes in the ceiling of the saloon.
“Jesus H. Christ!” screamed a wandering cowboy who was trying to get some rest in a room on the second floor, as the bullets tore through the floor and a chunk of lead whined off the iron bedpost. The other slug blew a hole in the chamber pot under the bed.
Jamie returned to the end of the bar and his drink, reloading the sawed-off on the way. He took a sip of the whiskey and peered through the acrid screen of gunsmoke that hung thick in the saloon. Satisfied that no more lead was going to come in his direction, Jamie took out a creased sheet of paper and a stub of pencil and drew a line through three more names on the list.
The bartender opened the door to the storage room and peeked inside. “It is over?” he inquired.
“You offer food here?” Jamie asked.
“Sort of. Stew and bread is all we got.”
“Then I’ll be back in an hour. Have some hot for me.” Jamie finished his drink and walked out into the gathering night. He stood for a moment, breathing deeply of the cold air, then stepped off the boards and returned to the livery to wash up for supper.
The smithy stood in the open double doors of the stable, a hammer and saw in his hands, carpenter’s apron tied around his waist.
“How many coffins?” he asked.
“Three,” Jamie said. “Just like I told you.”
“They got any money on them?”
“I have no idea.”
“Well, I guess their guns will be worth something.”
“And their horses,” Jamie added.
“True.” The smithy watched as Jamie took off his jacket and rolled up his shirtsleeves. “You gonna pray now and ask the Lord for forgiveness?”
“No.”
“You ought to. Terrible thing, taking a man’s life. What are you gonna do?”
“Wash my hands and face and have supper. I’m hungry.”
* * *
Jamie dropped out of sight for almost six weeks after the shoot-out in the dying little no-name town. No one saw him except Indians, and they were not exactly on speaking terms with most whites. When he again surfaced, it was in eastern Nevada, in a wild and wooly town called Pioche. It was an isolated place, the closest town of any size being Hamilton, almost a hundred miles away to the north. One rumor had it that of the first one hundred people to be buried in the local cemetery, none died of natural causes.
Before Jamie pulled out, two more would be added to that dubious list of honor.
Jim Levy, perhaps the fastest gunslick ever to belt on pistols, but curiously the least known (some claim he was even faster than John Wesley Hardin), watched as Jamie rode up to the livery and swung down from the saddle.
“Going to get interesting around here,” Levy muttered, then turned and walked into one of the town’s many saloons.
* * *
After a well-needed bath and shave and haircut, Jamie dressed in his best suit and had the first meal in many weeks that he hadn’t had to cook himself over an open fire.
By now, thanks to a gabby and very excited desk clerk, every man, woman, and child within the city limits (if indeed there were any known city limits) knew that Jamie was in town and on the prod.
And so did Barry Herman and Skip Beech, the two members of the Miles Nelson gang that Jamie had tracked to the town.
Herman and Beech were exhausted and very nearly at wits’ end. They had been on a hard run for more than two years, not daring to stay in one place for any length of time, for Jamie Ian MacCallister was always just a step or two behind them.
Newspaper accounts and the writers of various Penny Dreadfuls would claim that Barry Herman went insane that night in Pioche, Nevada, driven into madness by the relentless pursuit of Jamie. But in later years, writers with less wild flights of fancy (mainly one Ben F. Washington) would do some research and find that Herman just drank too much Who-Hit-John in an attempt to screw his courage to the sticking place and called Jamie out.
Jamie obliged him.
“You son of a bitch!” Herman yelled from the end of the street. “I’m gonna end this right here, right now, this minute.”
“Then make your play, tinhorn,” Jamie called.
The edges of the street and what boardwalks there were in the raw town were filled with spectators.
“You think I’m afraid of you, MacCallister, you damned old buzzard?”
“I think you’re a two-bit, back-shooting, woman-killing punk, ”Jamie said, his words cutting into Herman like a knife.
Barry Herman screamed his rage and jerked iron. Stepping into the center of the street, he began wildly banging away. His shots kicked up dirt in the street, busted windows along both sides, sent two dozen men and women scrambling for whatever cover they could find, and finally hit a traveling dress-and-corset salesman in the butt, causing the rather portly gentleman some discomfort for several days.
Jamie calmly drew his pistol, took deliberate aim in the murky light of dusk, and shot Barry Herman right between the eyes.
“Now face me,” said a much more sober Skip Beech from the darkness of an alley. Then he lifted his pistol and pulled the trigger.
The cartridge misfired, the action jammed, and that was all the time Jamie needed. He lifted his .44 and drilled Skip in the belly, doubling the outlaw over in hot agony. Cursing and screaming, Skip dropped the useless pistol and hauled another gun out of his waistband. Jamie fired again, the bullet striking Skip in the hip and spinning him around.
Still game and still on his boots, the outlaw lifted his pistol and cocked the hammer. The last words to leave his lips were curses, all directed at Jamie.
Jamie plugged him with a well-placed shot to the heart.
Skip Beech dropped like a stone.
Jamie holstered his pistol and walked back to his room. Come the morning, Pioche, Nevada, would see the last of him.
Christmas day, 1871.
“I hear tell MacCallister kilt two more men down in Nevada ’bout two months or so ago,” the old trapper broke the silence in the saloon.
Two unshaven and roughly dressed men seated at a corner table looked up at the words. They uttered silent sighs and exchanged glances at the news.
“More of the Nelson gang?” the bartender asked, polishing a glass with a towel.
“Yep. Some gunslicks name of Herman and Beech. Ol’ Mac never flinched. Just stood out tall and tough and plain in the street and gunned ’em down like the dirty bastards they is—or was, I should say.”
The front door to the saloon was pushed open, and for a second, the bitter winds of Montana winter howled inside, flakes of snow briefly landing on the floor, quickly melting and puddling. All heads turned to stare at the tall and rugged-built man who stood there.
“Goddammit!” one of the two men at the table muttered under his breath.
The tall, erect, and powerfully built man with the gray hair and moustache, deeply tanned face, and cold, piercing eyes removed his heavy winter coat and hung it on a peg, brushed back his hip-length coat, exposing twin Colts, and walked to the bar, his spurs jingling. “Whiskey,” he said.
The trapper took his drink and moved away from the bar, as did the cowboy at the far end of the bar. They both knew who the tall stranger was and had absolutely no desire to get caught by a stray bullet.
Jamie Ian MacCallister. And the old lobo wolf was on the hard prod.
Jamie took a sip of his whiskey and carefully placed the glass on the scarred bar. “Good whiskey,” he told the bartender. “Hits the spot. But it stinks in here,” he added. “Smells like outlaw scum to me.”
Outside, the wind howled in a mindless fury.
“Damn!” the other man at the table muttered. “I knowed it had to come someday,” he whispered to his friend.
Tom Brewer stood up from the table. “Old man,” he said to Jamie’s back. “You been doggin’ my back trail for more’un two years now. And I’m tired of it. You’ve killed my friends and even some of my kin. But your killin’ stops right here.”
Jamie turned to face him. It was then that Brewer noticed the short-barreled twelve gauge shotgun that Jamie had been holding in his left hand, pressed tight against his leg. “Is that a fact?”
“That’s a fact, MacCallister.” But there was a very sick feeling in the pit of Brewer’s stomach.
Will Judy slipped away from the table and edged along the wall until coming to the storeroom door. He opened the door and stepped out into the cold winds and blowing snow, heading for the livery across the street. If Tom had just used his head, they could have double-teamed MacCallister and taken him out. But Tom had allowed his hate to overcome logic.
Will hated a fool.
He and MacCallister would meet on another day.
“I don’t think so, Brewer,” Jamie was saying. “I still got a goodly number of you trash to deal with.” He had let Will Judy leave. There was always another day.
“Why, you beat-up buzzard! You ain’t half the man you used to be. You just think you are, you gray-headed old son of a bitch!”
Jamie, standing tall and unbending in the Montana saloon, smiled at the killer. Outside, the winter winds screamed like angry eagles. “Make your peace with whatever God will claim you, Brewer. Then hook and draw.”
Brewer cursed Jamie and grabbed iron. Jamie lifted the sawed-off and blew the killer all over the back end of the saloon. He broke open the Greener and pulled out the empties, loading it up fresh. Then he drained his glass of whiskey and walked out of the saloon, retrieving his coat from the hook.
“Who in the hell was that?” a salesman from St. Louis blurted.
“That’s an ol’ lobo wolf name of Jamie Ian MacCallister.” The grizzled trapper spoke from the corner table. “The Miles Nelson gang kilt his wife down in Coloradee two year ago. He’s been on the prod ever since. And he’ll be on the prod ’til he kills ever’ one of them.”
“You reckon he’ll get it done?” the bartender asked.
The old mountain man smiled. “Bet on it.”