20
After spending an hour erasing his tracks, Jamie reined up in a thicket along the Attoyac Bayou. Once he’d picketed his horses, he took his rifle from the boot and his field glasses from his saddlebags. On the crest of a knoll, just at the edge of the timber, he bellied down in the grass. He had waited until mid-morning, when the sun would be to his back—and in the eyes of those trailing him—and would not reflect off the lenses of the field glasses.
Jamie waited patiently, in his mind becoming one with the earth, his very being reverting back to his Shawnee training. The minutes ticked past, marching into an hour, then two. Jamie waited. Movement far in the distance caught his attention. He lifted the long lenses and adjusted for range. He counted twelve men, but they were too far away for him to pick out a face among the crowd.
One man did, however, seem vaguely familiar.
The men dismounted and appeared to be discussing something; probably what to do next. They broke apart and began circling all about, searching for the lost sign.
“Oh, come on, fellows,” Jamie muttered. “A six-year-old Shawnee boy could find that sign in two minutes.”
Jamie had no way of knowing if the men found his sign or not, but something warned them off. After several minutes of standing around, talking and pointing in his general direction, the men mounted up and headed off to the north, soon disappearing from view.
“They’re definitely after me,” Jamie said to the gentle wind that blew cool around him. “But I have no idea as to the who or why.”
He returned to his horses and pulled the picket pins, then stood for a moment, thoughtful. “Miles Nelson,” he mused aloud, then shook his head. He didn’t think so. He shrugged and swung into the saddle.
Jamie crossed the bayou and headed east; he was getting close to his old home now. Then he came to a road that sure hadn’t been there when he and the others had pulled out. And it was a well-traveled road, too.
There was a weathered sign that read CARTHAGE. An arrow under the name pointed the way.
“I’ll be damned,”Jamie muttered, as he walked his horses across the rutted road. “Progress has sure come to this area of Texas.”
* * *
The cabin was gone. Not a trace of it remained. Kicking around, Jamie found some old charred wood and wondered if the fire had been accidental or deliberate. It took him the better part of an hour to find the grave of Baby Karen. He spent the rest of the day pulling weeds and carving a new marker. Then he lined a square area around the grave with rocks. The marker read: KAREN MACCALLISTER B 1829 D 1829.
Jamie camped that night near where the old cabin had stood. He did not tarry long the next morning. After saddling up, he sat for a time, looking at the tiny grave site. “Goodbye, Baby Karen,” he said. “I reckon you’re with your mother now. And I envy you that.” Then he turned Sundown’s head toward the south and rode away without looking back.
* * *
No one really knows for sure how Beaumont got its name. It might have been named for the agent who sold the original acres, or for the slight elevation called beau mont in French. But it sure had grown since Jamie had last seen the town.
In 1901, Beaumont would become a boom town with the discovery of the Spindletop oil field.
Jamie stabled his horses and rubbed them down, making sure they had ample feed and water, then checked into a small hotel and called for a bath.
After he left Beaumont? ... He didn’t have any idea where he might go. He just didn’t want to return to Valley. Kate wasn’t there.
Jamie wandered around town for a day, but while he appeared to be just strolling about, he was also keeping an eye out for anyone who might be following him. He could spot no one and pulled out early the next morning, heading west.
He entertained the thought of veering a little south and visiting the Alamo, but decided against it. Too many memories associated with that bloody old mission.
It was a hundred-mile ride over to Navasota, and it was uneventful. Navasota was one of the earliest Anglo-American towns in Texas, settled in 1822 by families from Louisiana. It was also where the explorer La Salle, while attempting to find the mouth of the Mississippi River, was murdered by his own men. La Salle was just a tad south of his objective.
There had been no further sign of those men who had dogged Jamie’s back trail in East Texas. Jamie was riding easier, but very much alert for trouble. And he knew once he got in West Texas, he had better keep his eyes wide open if he wanted to keep his hair, for that was Comanche and Kiowa country. In Navasota, Jamie spent the night in a boardinghouse and was on the move early the next morning, heading for Austin.
Jamie knew he was piddling, just wasting time. But he was without direction, drifting. He just didn’t know what to do with the rest of his life. For almost forty-five years, the center of his existence had been Kate. Now there was a great empty void in his being.
The reporters from back east who had been sent out into the Wild West to cover Jamie’s life and times had long since returned home. Trying to catch up with Jamie Ian MacCallister was like attempting to get a firm grip on smoke.
The young men who had been sent west to buy property and check out other investments had visited Valley. The trio were quickly wising up to the ways of the West, and it didn’t take them long to realize that anybody, anybody, who tried any shady deals in and around Valley would not last long, and would probably end up shot or hanged, or both. They told their fathers to forget that area of Colorado . . . unless they had a death wish.
During Jamie’s brief stay in Valley, he had talked with Ben F. Washington every day, at length, with Ben taking careful notes. And after going through Kate’s diaries and journals, he had given the young man most of them. A few were just too personal, and those he had placed in a lockbox. Ben worked on his manuscript for at least an hour every day. There was no rush, for he had given his word that the book would not be published until after Jamie’s death.
Those shyster lawyers hired by Newby, Olmstead, Bradford, Layfield, and others to horn in on the MacCallister holdings had hit a stone wall that they could not go around, through, over or under. It had come in the form of one Ulysses S. Grant, President of the United States of America, a good Republican and a man who admired Jamie Ian MacCallister.
With the intervention of the president, those schemers and plotters quietly backed off. But they didn’t go away. They would bide their time and wait, for their hate ran deep and dark, passed from father to son.
In Austin, Jamie stabled his horses and checked into a hotel. Austin was the state capital, but it still had its wild and woolly places, and was also the home of the gunfighter Ben Thompson. Ben hadn’t been out of the state pen long, having served his time for shooting his brother-in-law (after the man had beat up Thompson’s wife) and threatening to kill a local justice of the peace.
Jamie wanted no trouble, and breathed a little easier when he learned from local gossip that Ben was raising hell up in Kansas.
Jamie rested his horses, then provisioned up and put Austin behind him as he continued on west. At Fredericksburg, a town settled by Germans in 1846, when it was right on the edge of the western frontier, Jamie was warned that the Comanches and Kiowa were on the warpath. But there were wagons filled with supplies gearing up to head west for El Paso in a couple of days. It would be a prudent move on Jamie’s part to join them. The wagons would be accompanied by a detachment of cavalry heading for Fort Bliss.
Jamie hunted up the wagon master. After the man had recovered from his shock at meeting one of the West’s most famous men, he quickly agreed to Jamie coming along. It would be an honor, he said.
The young cavalry officer in charge of the detachment of soldiers (as yet mostly untrained and untested in battle) was clearly in awe of Jamie and for two days followed him around like a lost puppy. The young lieutenant, a recent graduate of West Point and who, until his trip to the Point and this grand adventure out west, had never been more than ten miles from his home in New Hampshire, amused Jamie, and he decided to take the young officer under his wing, so to speak, and try to teach him enough about the frontier to keep him alive.
“I’m to be posted here for three years, sir,” Lt. Cal Sanders told Jamie. “Then I’m going to request duty somewhere in Montana or Wyoming.”
“Is that right?”
“Yes, sir. I’m told the Cheyenne are the most magnificent Indians to be found.”
“One of my sons married a Cheyenne princess.”
“Oh, my. I didn’t realize that. And you’re friends with the Indians?”
“I’ve been friends with them and fought them on occasion. But mostly I’m a friend with the Sioux, the Cheyenne, the Nez Perce, the Ute, the Arapaho. I don’t know much about the Apache and Kiowa and the Comanche . . . except they’re great fighters, and don’t get captured by them.”
The young lieutenant didn’t have to ask why Jamie said that. He had already heard horror stories about what happened to men, and women, too, who were unfortunate enough to be taken alive by the savages.
“It would be a great honor to have you ride along with my detachment, sir,” Lt. Sanders said. “I mean, beside me, sir. Not back with the . . .” The lieutenant got all flustered. “You know what I mean, sir.”
Jamie laughed. “Relax, Cal. You’re going to do just fine out here.”
“I’m looking forward to an encounter with the hostiles.”
“Not after the first one you won’t be,” Jamie muttered, as the lieutenant walked away. “If you live through it, that is.”
But the Indians obviously thought the wagon train, some twenty-five wagons long, with both civilian guards and soldiers, was too strong for them. Much to the disappointment of Lt. Sanders and the great relief of all the others, the trip to El Paso was uneventful.
Scouting around, Jamie picked up a lot of Indian sign, but saw no Indians, although he was sure they had seen him.
Jamie did his best to pass along to the young lieutenant at least some of his knowledge about the frontier. By the time the wagons reached El Paso, in the dead of late winter, 1873, Lt. Sanders knew a little something about survival on the frontier.
Jamie lounged around El Paso for a few days, trying to make up his mind where he wanted to go next. He did not want to strike out alone across New Mexico and Arizona, for the Apache nation was at war with the whites—a war that would continue until the surrender of Geronimo, in 1886.
On a cold morning in February, Jamie and five other men, all of them well-seasoned (which meant in the vernacular of the West, they were all gray-beards), rode out of El Paso, heading west, into New Mexico Territory—statehood was still years away: January, 1912.
In Las Cruces, two of the men decided to drop out of the group. That left Jamie, Red Green, an old mountain man who was called Logan, and a retired army sergeant named Canby.
Jamie’s eyes were amused as he looked at his new friends, who now sat around a table in a saloon. “Boys,” he said, “I reckon between the four of us, we’ve got about two hundred years of Indian fighting. I aim to see me some new country ’fore I cash in. I have ample money and can get more. What say you we provision up and head into country few white men have seen?”
The three “well-seasoned” men exchanged glances, and all of them smiled.
“Why the hell not?” Logan was the first to speak. “We damn shore ain’t gettin’ no younger.”
“Suits me,” Canby said. “Why not? But let’s just make damn sure we got enough ammunition to ward off some Injun attacks. ’Cause sure as God made little green apples, we’re gonna have to fit some fights.”
Red Green nodded his head in agreement. “I like you boys’ company, for a fact. I generally shy away from folks, but you boys is different. We get along. And you boys is trail wise and don’t jibber-jabber nonsense all the damn time. But you bes’ understand somethin’: Odds are that some of us, maybe all of us, won’t be ridin’ back. ’Paches is about the most notional of all Injuns. I’ve lost good friends to the ’Paches. And on the other hand, I’ve made friends with some ’Paches. A few. This ain’t gonna be no Sunday school picnic.”
Canby looked at him. “You all done preachin’?”
“Shore.”
“Then let’s ride,” Logan said.