Eyes of Eagles (4 page)

He quickly climbed down and told Hannah the news. She was deliriously happy for a few moments, then a worried look sprang into her eyes.

“What's the matter, Hannah?”

“They'll shoot us, Jamie. They'll think we're Indians. Look at us. We're more Shawnee than white.”

Jamie had not given that any thought. But he did now. “Hannah, you have a petticoat in your pack. I saw it. It's white. We'll rip off some pieces and tie them on sticks. We'll walk in holding the sticks in the air. That way we'll be safe. But first we'll wash as best we can. We're both filthy. Then we'll put on our spare clothing.” Buckskin clothing. But it was all they had.

It would have to do.

They scrubbed themselves clean at a spring and changed clothes, then looked at each other, the grown woman and the eleven-year-old man/boy who had thought up the escape plan, and carried it out.

They still looked like a couple of Indians.

Hannah started giggling and Jamie lost his usual serious demeanor and let the child free. Soon they were howling with laughter.

They finally sat down on a log and wiped their eyes with pieces of Hannah's torn petticoat. She looked at what was left of the undergarment. “I've been so careful with this all these years. It was my last hold on reason and order and... sanity, I suppose. It sounds stupid, but it was all I had left.”

“No, it wasn't, Hannah,” the man within the boy once more surfaced. “You had memories and you had hope. Just like I did. And we had each other. And now we're free to start over.” He stood up and held out his hand. “Let's go make a new start for ourselves, Hannah.”

That new start almost ended before it could begin. As they walked up the rutted road that led to more buildings than Jamie had ever seen, they both heard the call.

“Indians! Indians! To your posts. Man your posts.”

Jamie and Hannah froze and held up their white pieces of petticoat and waved them.

“We're not Indians!” Jamie called. “We're white. We've been captives for years. We're not Indians.”

A dozen mounted men, all heavily armed, rode out to the pair, standing still in the road.

“My name is Jamie Ian MacCallister. And this is Hannah Parker. We escaped from a Shawnee town about eight or nine days ago. Far north of here. Tall Bull's tribe.”

“Good Lord!” a man breathed. “Where are you from, lad?”

“The western edge of Ohio Territory, sir. I think it was four, maybe five years ago. I'm just not sure. I know it was the day before my seventh birthday when they came out of the night. Tall Bull led a raiding party to my cabin. They killed my pa and ma and smashed my baby sister to death against the stones of the fireplace. Tall Bull and his wife, Deer Woman, adopted me. Hannah here...” He paused for only a second, thinking fast. He knew that if any settler knew she had been touched by an Indian, much less shared the robes with a savage, she would be shunned; an outcast. “She played like she was crazy so the Indians would leave her alone. It worked.”

“Smart thinking, lass,” another man said. “Damn filthy savages.”

The men all swung down from their saddles and looked at the pair.

“They dyed Jamie's hair with coloring from plants,” Hannah told the men.

“Sure did,” another man spoke. “You can see the blond roots.”

“After Jamie faced down a pack of wolves...”

“Faced down a pack of wolves!” yet another man said, clearly startled.

“Yes,” Hannah said quickly. “The boy was hunting and became separated from his guards. He was only nine years old and had killed a huge deer with the bow and arrows he'd made. The wolves were about to fight him for the meat” — Jamie struggled to keep a straight face, but it was done only with a lot of effort — “and he grabbed one by the throat and stared it down. The animal clawed him fiercely but Jamie refused to drop his eyes. Jamie and this huge wolf stayed that way for several minutes, as the other wolves became afraid.” Jamie rolled his eyes. “Finally, Jamie threw the big wolf from him and all the wolves ran away. Look!” She opened Jamie's shirt, exposing the long scar.

“Would you look at that?” a young man exclaimed. “What a fearsome mark the beast left on you, boy.”

“And after that,” Hannah continued. “Jamie was called Man Who Is Not Afraid. The Shawnees sang songs about his bravery and danced in his honor.” She put her arm around Jamie's shoulders. “He saved my life, and I shall forever be in his debt.”

Jamie decided to change the subject before the manure got too deep. “Where are we, if I may ask?”

“Why, you're in Kentucky, lad. And you and the lady here are safe. Come on, the both of you. Let's get you out of them savage's clothes and into a tub of hot soapy water. How does that sound.”

“As near to heaven as I might ever get,” Hannah said.

And the men laughed. All but one.

Jamie and Hannah had traveled many more miles than they thought. They had come about a hundred and seventy-five miles from the Shawnee town on the river.

“You must have gone right by a dozen or more settlements,” Reverend Hugh Callaway told them. “Why, the country is filling up fast, I tell you.”

“Tall Bull's band is one of the last real holdouts in this area,” a farmer named Mason said. He leaned forward. “Lad, what are you going to do? Will you seek to find relatives up yonder whence you came?”

Jamie shook his head, conscious of Hannah's eyes on him. “No, sir. I think not. I had no kin there. Just Pa and Ma and the baby. They're all dead. I see no reason to go back.”

The men looked at one another. Callaway said, “Then what do you intend to do, lad?”

Jamie met the reverend's gaze with one of his own. “Survive, sir. I'm really very good at it.”

“But where, lad?” Mason asked.

“In the woods, if I have to.”

“But you're only a child!” the reverend's wife said. “You can't live out in the woods in a cave like a sav — ” She bit the words off.

“Like a savage Indian, mum?” Jamie said that with a smile. “It's all right. I don't mind. I learned a lot from the Shawnees.”

“From a filthy pack of red niggers?” another man spoke up. A man that Jamie had taken an instant dislike to back on the road.

“Beggin' your pardon, sir,” Jamie said. “But this band of Shawnee bathed regularly. They make their own soap, just like we do.”

“Sounds to me like you're defendin' them savages,” the man said angrily.

“Now, calm down, John Jackson,” the reverend said. “You've no call to address the boy in such a manner.”

“How do we know that both the boy and the wench ain't spies for the red devils?” Jackson demanded. “I say we banish them both from town.”

“I say nay to that!” a merchant man named Abe Caney spoke up. “John, you've no right to accuse these people of any wrongdoing. They've been put through enough without adding false charges from you.”

The others in the meeting room were quick to agree with Caney. John Jackson stood up, jerked his hat from the peg, and stormed out into the late afternoon.

“Pay the man no heed,” Mason said. “He's an ill-tempered man but a good man in his own way. We've all fought the savages and John will stand with the best of them.”

“Aye,” Caney said. “And he'll be the first to help with the building of a cabin.” He smiled. “Although he does grouse about it the whole time.”

“My child,” the Reverend Callaway said, speaking to Hannah, who was anything but a child, with a well-rounded figure and full bosom. The only thing the ladies of that time would object to were her tanned cheeks and arms. But that would be the case in the cities, not on the frontier, where women usually worked alongside their men in the fields. “Have you given thought as to the rest of your life now that you are free from the hostiles?”

Hannah smiled. “My life was interrupted at age fourteen, Reverend Callaway. I'm afraid I haven't been free long enough to do much thinking about the rest of it.”

“Of course, of course!” He patted her hand. “Well, you can stay with us for a time, and Jamie, a young couple will be along shortly to fetch you to their home. They're a lovely Christian couple without children and they were delighted when I sent a boy riding to their farm with news about you.”

Jamie nodded his head. “Yes, sir,” he said.

“You'll not be needing that bow and quiver of arrows now, Jamie,” Mason said.

“I'll keep them,” Jamie replied. He smiled. “As souvenirs.”

* * *

Sam and Sarah Montgomery were a nice young couple, and Jamie found himself liking them from the start. They were amazed at Jamie's size, expecting to see a small boy of eleven, not this strong and quite capable appearing young man who, despite his young age, exuded strength and quiet confidence.

After supper at the Callaway home, on the wagon ride back to their farm that evening, Sam asked, “Do you have much knowledge of the fields, Jamie?”

“I helped Pa when I was little, yes, sir. And I had a section of the garden that was mine.”

“Wonderful. I'm in the process of clearing land to raise more crops.”

“I haven't had much experience with an axe, sir,” Jamie said dryly.

Sam cut his eyes to the boy/man sitting between he and his wife. Jamie had a sense of humor, Sam discovered. But he doubted the boy rarely let it show. Probably wasn't much to laugh about while a slave in a Shawnee town. “I imagine that's true, Jamie,” he replied.

Jamie knew why the quick glance. “Indians have a good sense of humor, Mr. Montgomery,” Jamie said. “They just don't show it much around people not of their kind.”

Sam started to say that the only good he'd ever found about Indians was when they were dead. But he held his tongue. There were dozens, hundreds, of questions the couple wanted to ask Jamie, but they did not know how or where to begin.

“You live a long way out of town,” Jamie observed, after a few moments of silence.

“We have a little settlement out here,” Sarah said. “About a dozen families live within a two- or three-mile radius of one another. There are enough children that we now have our own school. I do some of the teaching.”

“I could read and write some when Tall Bull took me. I think I've forgotten how.”

“It'll come back to you in jig-time,” Sam said. “We won't push you, Jamie. You've got a lot of adjusting ahead of you.” Like learning how to wear shoes again, he thought. Jamie wore his moccasins; said the shoes he'd received hurt his feet.

“Do the Indians bother you out here?”

“Sometimes,” Sam admitted. “There are a lot of areas close by that are not settled. But the savages are slowly being forced out as more and more settlers come in. Some are saying that the nations will someday be settled from coast to coast. Probably not in our lifetime,” he added. “What lies beyond the Mississippi is pretty much a mystery”

“Not to my grandfather,” Jamie said, suddenly remembering the stories his pa used to tell him.

“What's that?” Sarah asked.

“My grandfather. The man I'm named after. He went west to the big mountains years before I was born. Seventeen ninety, I think Pa said. He came back once, Pa said. Years before Pa and Ma got married. Said he looked like a wild man. All done up in beaded buckskins and hair long as a woman's. Then he went west again and no one's ever heard no more from him.”

“Wasn't there a MacCallister with the Lewis and Clark expedition, Sarah?” Sam asked.

“I believe there was. Seems like I've read something about that. He joined up with them in the west as a guide.”

“That's my grandpa, then,” Jamie said. “I wonder if he's still alive?”

Sam did not want to tell the boy that he'd heard nothing good about the white men who lived in the mountains of the west. They were, for the most part, a wild and Godless lot, more savage than civilized, heathen to the soul. Some had taken to calling them mountain men. And there sure was a MacCallister among them. A bad man, some said, who had killed other men with knife and gun. He would tell Sarah not to mention the man to Jamie. In time the boy would forget all about his wild and Godless grandpa.

* * *

There was to be a shindig, Sam told Jamie. All the people who lived in the small community were going to gather the first warm Saturday and there would be singing and eating on the grounds. Jamie would get to meet all the folks and make new friends. It would be a grand to-do, Sam promised.

The cabin of Sam and Sarah Montgomery was much finer, larger and better built than the one Jamie vaguely remembered from his childhood. Sam and Sarah came from monied families, and that was evident in the cabin's construction, for it was a two-story log house with several rooms. It had a central chimney — something that Jamie had never seen before — and it was made of stone and was fireproof. It was the grandest house that Jamie had ever seen, and he said so.

“Is it, now?” Sam said. “Well, let's take the grand tour then, lad. I'll show you your room.”

The boy surfaced. “My own room?”

“All your very own, Jamie,” Sarah said softly. “We want you to be happy here. We think you've had quite enough unhappiness in your life.”

Jamie couldn't believe his eyes. His room, his very own room, was bigger than the whole cabin in which he had been born. And he had a whole big bed to himself, with a feather tick and two pillows.

“The corner logs of the house are not square-notched, Jamie,” Sam explained. “I had a skilled worker come in and dovetail them all. Makes for a sturdier structure. The home is built on stones for support and it's stone-walled all around the base. The roof don't leak. Put together with nails. They're expensive, too. This home is solid, Jamie,” he said proudly. “She'll be standing for years to come.”

“You best get ready for bed, Jamie,” Sarah said. “You must be exhausted and here we've been prattling on.”

Long after the candles had been pinched out and the lamp wicks had cooled, Jamie lay wide awake in the soft bed. It was too soft. He couldn't get comfortable. Finally, he took his blankets and rolled up in them on the floor, on the rag rug beside the bed. That was much better. He was asleep in minutes.

Jamie was jerked out of sleep by a slight noise. While the senses of anyone living in the frontier had to be keen to stay alive, Jamie's were Indian-keen. And something had brought him wide awake. Jamie slipped from under the blankets and padded soundlessly to the shutters. He cracked them and looked out. Two men were slipping across the clearing toward the barn where Mr. Montgomery's fine horses were kept. Mr. Montgomery worked the land himself, and had no paid hands or indentured people on the place. Sam and Sarah did not believe in indenturing people and frowned mightily on slavery. Jamie dressed quickly and silently and took up his bow and quiver of arrows. He strung the bow — it was a powerful one, made just recently by Tall Bull — and slipped his way silently down the steps. He had already tested to see which steps squeaked and which did not. He stayed close to the wall on his way down and fixed the latchstring so he could get back into the home.

Jamie slipped around to the side, where an overhang had been built, to both afford shelter from the rain and allow Sarah to wash clothes in the big pot while enjoying the shade. Mr. Montgomery hadn't missed much when he had the home built.

Jamie had overheard Mason and Caney talking about the rash of horse-stealing that had been going on in the community and about how the man appointed sheriff seemed unable to do anything to stop it. Jamie knew how to stop it. For his Shawnee town had come under attack by Indians several times since he'd been renamed and accepted by the tribe. Jamie had put arrows into several enemies. He didn't know if he'd ever killed anyone, or not. But he had sure tried.

Jamie had helped Mr. Montgomery put away the team earlier that evening, and had seen the fine horses kept in the barn. They would be a prize for anyone, and would bring a lot of money for a person who didn't particularly care where they came from.

The men were dressed all in dark clothing and had kerchiefs tied around the lower part of their face. They carried bridles in their hands. Jamie slipped closer; close enough to hear them talk.

“We'll ride to Tennessee,” one said. “Sell them down there. I got a man who'll fix up papers for us.”

Jamie notched an arrow.

“Too bad we can't knock Sam in the head and have us a time with Sarah,” the other one said.

Jamie drew back.

“Maybe next time we're in the country. I could have me a high ol' time with that wench.”

Jamie let fly.

The arrow flew straight and true and embedded deeply in the man's rump and he let out a fearsome shriek and fell to the ground, on his knees. Jamie put his second arrow into the other man's leg, knocking him down. Within seconds, Sam Montgomery was outside, a pistol in each hand.

“Over here, Mr. Montgomery,” Jamie called. “Horse thieves.”

“By the Lord!” Sam said, as Sarah came outside in a dressing gown. She carried a lantern. “Ring the warning bell, Sarah,” Sam told her. “Ring it loud and long.”

He looked at Jamie, standing calmly, another arrow notched and ready to fly. “Lad, you should have called me. You might have been killed.”

“Not by those two,” the boy said, no sign of fear in his voice. “I've stood and faced Yuchi, Miami, and Creek, and got arrows into all of them. Those two are cowards.”

Sarah was ringing the large bell set at the front of the house. “We all have those bells, Jamie,” Sam explained. “It's a warning system for Indian attacks or a house afire. There'll be ten men here in that many minutes.”

Sam had lit a lantern from a peg under the overhang and he and Jamie walked over to the groaning men. “Masked brigands,” Sam said contemptuously. “Thieves in the night coming to steal from honest men.”

“I'm bleedin' to death, man!” one of the horse thieves said. “Help me.”

With his next gesture and following words, Jamie knew that Sam was no man to play with. He lifted one heavy pistol, cocked it, and said, “Want me to put you out of your misery? I can. Just say the words.”

The man screamed, “No. For the love of God. Are ye daft, man? And who is that little savage with ye?”

“My son,” Sam said, the words proudly spoken. “And if you call him a savage again, I'll put a ball between your eyes.”