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.”