A Big Sky Christmas Read online

  Jamie grunted. “Yeah. That’s what happens when you start out on a trip like this so late in the year.”

  Hendricks’s face hardened angrily, but he said, “What do we need to do?”

  “We’ll go ahead and make camp. Build fires now while we still can and get some hot food and coffee in everybody. Then tie everything down tight to keep it from blowing away, climb in the wagons, and heap as many blankets and quilts as you can on top of you. It’ll be a mighty cold night, but we ought to make it through all right.”

  Hendricks nodded. “I’ll make sure everybody gets busy and does what you said.”

  For the next hour, as the Blue Norther rampaged closer and closer, the camp was a beehive of activity. Everyone seemed to understand the seriousness of the situation. As the cloud bank swept in, it grew darker and more sinister.

  The wind, which had been fairly light, died down to almost nothing as Jamie walked around the circle of wagons, checking to make sure everything was secured as much as possible. Most of the immigrants were worried. He tried to reassure them. They had all been through cold snaps back where they came from, he told them. A great plains norther was a mite more . . . enthusiastic, he explained, but they could ride it out.

  “Keep everybody close,” he said again and again. “And huddle up together. You’ll need the warmth by morning.”

  Satisfied that the immigrants were as ready as they were going to be, he headed for Moses’s wagon. The clouds had swallowed up the sun, and even though the hour was just past mid-afternoon, it was almost dark as night.

  The wind hit while Jamie was walking across the camp.

  He reached up quickly and grabbed his hat to keep it from blowing away. The wind smacked into his face like an icy fist. By the time he reached the wagon he was leaning forward into it, struggling against the violent gusts.

  He climbed into the wagon, ducked through the opening, and pulled the canvas flap tightly closed behind him, tying it in place with the cords attached to it. He could feel the wagon vibrating from the wind pushing against it.

  “You know, I’ve seen some bad blizzards back in Poland,” Moses said. “Is this one going to be worse, Jamie?”

  “Don’t know. I’ve never been to Poland. I don’t smell any snow in the air, though. I think we’re just going to get the cold wind. But it’s going to be mighty cold.”

  “You can smell snow?” Moses sounded like he found that hard to believe.

  “Sure. Snow, rain, dust storms . . . you get to where you can smell what the weather’s going to do if you stay out here on the frontier long enough.”

  “Somehow I don’t doubt it. I don’t think I’d doubt anything you had to tell me, Jamie.”

  “Oh, I can spin a few windies when the mood strikes me,” Jamie said with a smile. “But when it comes to getting by out here, I won’t steer you wrong.”

  The wind began to howl in mindless shrieks that sounded like lost souls being tormented in hell. It made the cold seem even more numbing. Jamie dug an old buffalo robe he’d had for more than thirty years out of his gear and wrapped himself in it. Night closed down quickly, and he slept the way any frontiersman would sleep when he had the chance.

  He woke to shouts, stirred himself, crawled out of the buffalo robe, and untied the flap over the back of the wagon. He had just stuck his head out when Savannah McCoy came running toward the vehicle, carrying a lantern and calling urgently, “Mr. MacCallister! Mr. MacCallister!”

  “What is it?”

  Savannah lifted her stricken face toward him. “It’s Alice Hamilton, Mr. MacCallister. She’s gone!”

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  “What do you mean, gone?” he asked Savannah as he climbed out of Moses’s wagon.

  “I decided she shouldn’t be alone tonight and went over to her wagon right after the wind hit. Alice seemed glad to see me. We put our bedrolls next to each other on the floor. I . . . I tried to stay awake, but I dozed off. When I woke up, she wasn’t there anymore.” Tears began to roll down Savannah’s cheeks. “I’m so, so sorry—”

  “Stop that. It’s not your fault. Anything you did to watch out for that gal was from the goodness of your heart, and nobody’s going to blame you for what’s happened.”

  “Do you think something has . . . happened?”

  Jamie didn’t answer that question directly. “Let’s go take a look around. Maybe we can find her.”

  Moses was leaning out the back of the wagon. He had overheard what Savannah said, and asked, “Should I rouse everyone else, Jamie, to help you look?”

  Jamie considered for a second. The wind was bitingly cold, and it was only going to get worse. Everybody was hunkered down in their wagons, buried in quilts and blankets, and that was where they needed to stay.

  “Get Bodie and that fella Lucas,” Jamie decided. “We won’t tell anybody else for now.” He reached back into the wagon, got his hat, and tugged it down tight on his head. He pulled out the buffalo robe as well and wrapped it around his shoulders. Then he took the lantern from Savannah and headed for Alice Hamilton’s wagon.

  He studied the ground around the wagon for tracks, but it had dried out since the rain several days earlier and he didn’t see any footprints. He found a place where he thought the dry grass had been disturbed, but he couldn’t be sure about that.

  Bodie and Jake Lucas arrived, looking half-frozen already even though they had blankets wrapped tightly around themselves. Bodie asked, “What can we do to help, Jamie?”

  “We’re going to look for Miz Hamilton, but we don’t want anybody else wandering off and getting lost, so stay close together while we search.”

  “Do you think that’s what happened to her?” Savannah asked. “Do you think she got lost?”

  “More than likely. She might’ve stepped out of the wagon to tend to some personal business, gotten turned around, and started off in the wrong direction, thinking she was coming back. By the time she figured out she was going the wrong way, she couldn’t locate the camp anymore.”

  That explanation was entirely possible, Jamie thought. But his gut told him it wasn’t the only explanation.

  Since her husband’s death, Alice Hamilton had been trying to drag herself up out of a pit of despair. Maybe it had pulled her down so deep she couldn’t escape from it.

  “I’ll help you look,” Savannah said.

  “No!” Jamie and Bodie said at the same time.

  “Get back in the wagon, out of the wind,” Jamie told her. “The four of us will find her.”

  As he, Moses, Bodie, and Jake spread out in a fan shape from the Hamilton wagon, Jamie thought about how the chances of finding Alice would be increased if more people were searching for her.

  But the chances of somebody else getting lost and freezing to death would be greater, too. It was like the old saying about being caught between a rock and a hard place. Whatever he did increased the risk of somebody dying.

  With the temperature dropping the way it was and the savage wind ripping away any trace of warmth, a person could freeze to death in an hour, maybe less. The frigid cold wouldn’t kill as quickly as that flooded creek had, but it could kill just as surely.

  Jamie cupped his hands around his mouth and bellowed, “Mrs. Hamilton! Alice!” The other men began calling her name, too. Somebody at the wagon train might hear the shouting and wonder what was going on, but that couldn’t be helped. If Alice was lost and truly wanted to be found, the sound of their voices might save her life.

  The yelling helped Jamie keep track of the other men, too. He didn’t want to lose anybody else.

  They spread out away from the wagon for what seemed like a long time. When Jamie estimated that they had covered close to a mile, he called his three companions to him. “I don’t think she could have gotten this far. We’ve missed her somewhere.”

  “She could have headed off from the wagons at any angle,” Bodie pointed out.

  Moses suggested, “Maybe we should go back and start over, taking a di
fferent direction this time.”

  “That’s all we can do,” Jamie said. “Come on.”

  The night dragged past. First one hour, then two, then three. Jamie’s worry had grown with every minute that ticked by. Somebody could survive in the wind for this long—he and his companions were doing it, after all—but they were all bundled up in thick jackets and blankets. Even so, they were suffering. Jamie knew he was going to have to call off the search soon or else risk the men suffering from frostbite.

  “I . . . I can’t feel my fingers and toes anymore,” Moses said, reinforcing Jamie’s concern for their safety.

  “Let’s head on back,” he said with a heavy sigh. “We can’t do any more.”

  “Wait a minute,” Bodie protested. “You can’t mean to just leave poor Mrs. Hamilton out here.”

  “I don’t mean to let you three fellas freeze to death, either. Or lose your fingers and toes.”

  Moses gulped. “Is that what’s going to happen?”

  “It could if we don’t get you warmed up.” Jamie herded them back to the wagon train.

  Savannah met them, and the lantern light revealed the worry etched into her face. Her expression fell when she saw that the men were alone. “You didn’t find her.” It wasn’t a question.

  “We can’t stay out there anymore,” Jamie said. “Maybe she found a place to get out of the wind and hole up for a while. There are little gullies and such—”

  “You know she didn’t,” Savannah said. “She didn’t get turned around so that she couldn’t find her way back to the wagons, either.”

  “What do you mean?” Jake Lucas asked.

  Moses said gently, “I suppose she didn’t want to live without her husband. She thought the pain was too much for her to bear and she couldn’t go on. So she walked off into the night, never intending to come back.”

  Savannah started to cry again. Bodie took her in his arms and drew her against him.

  Jamie let the young man comfort Savannah for a few moments, then told her, “You’d better go back to the Bingham wagon. The rest of us will hunker down in Moses’s wagon. We can start searching again at first light. It’ll be easier then.”

  They would be able to see better in the morning, he thought, but the chances of finding Alice Hamilton alive then would be practically nonexistent.

  He didn’t sleep much the rest of the night. Along toward dawn, the wind died down, ceasing its eerie howling. The stars came out as the overcast broke. And the temperature dropped harder and faster, like the bottom had fallen out of the thermometer.

  Jamie and his companions resumed the search in the gray light of dawn. The air was so cold it seemed to burn their lungs with every breath. Huge clouds of steam fogged the air in front of the men’s faces every time they exhaled. It looked like smoke wreathing their upper bodies.

  They found Alice about half a mile from the wagons. She was in a small gully, all right, but from the way she was lying there it appeared that she had stumbled and fallen into it instead of seeking shelter. It hadn’t saved her. Frost glittered on her open, sightless eyes, and her flesh was cold and hard as stone.

  By the time they got back with her body, everybody in the wagon train knew that Alice was missing. Sobs filled the air as the men carried in her blanket-wrapped form. Alice’s mother threw herself on her daughter’s body and wailed piteously.

  Jamie felt the grief that gripped the camp, but didn’t show it. In his life he had seen so much death and suffering that he knew it was inevitable. He drew Captain Hendricks and several other men aside. “It hasn’t been cold enough long enough to freeze the ground. We’d better get a grave dug while we can.”

  “It’s a shame the poor girl couldn’t be laid to rest beside her husband,” Hendricks said.

  “I reckon it’s a big country on the other side of the divide,” Jamie said, “but not so big that the two of them won’t be able to find each other.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  As often happened out on the plains, within a couple days the fierce, freezing wind out of the north was replaced by a much gentler, warmer breeze from the south. Jamie knew it would be only a matter of time until the next Blue Norther came barreling down on them, so he wanted to cover as much ground as he could while the weather was decent. He pushed everyone hard and used every bit of daylight he could.

  The grinding pace meant there wasn’t much time to mourn Alice Hamilton. Her death and that of her husband were tragic and senseless, but those graves were behind the wagon train. Everyone needed to look ahead, because that was where the next challenge would be found.

  As Jamie could have predicted, that challenge wasn’t long in coming. He was riding the point with Hector Gilworth several days later when he spotted riders paralleling their course about half a mile to the west.

  Without saying anything to Hector, Jamie turned his head and looked to the east. He saw more riders in that direction. That came as no surprise to him. He had been expecting something like this. The wagon train was just too tempting a target.

  “Ride on back and tell Cap’n Hendricks to have everybody circle the wagons,” Jamie said quietly to Hector.

  “But it’s the middle of the day,” the burly, bearded scout protested. “We don’t usually circle up until we stop at nightfall.”

  “Well, we’re going to today, because there are Indians on both sides of us.”

  Hector let out a surprised exclamation. “Are they going to attack us?”

  “Too soon to say, but we’d better be ready in case they do. Now git!”

  Hector got, hauling his horse around and galloping back toward the wagons.

  Jamie reined Sundown to a halt and sat easily in the saddle. As soon as the Indians saw the wagons forming up into a circle, they would know that their presence had been discovered. If they planned to attack, they would probably do it quickly, before the immigrants had time to get set up for defense.

  On the other hand, it could be that the Indians just wanted to parley. Some of the tribes didn’t mind the wagon trains passing through their territory as long as they received some sort of tribute in return for safe passage.

  They liked to negotiate from a position of strength, though, which is why they usually showed up with a considerable number of warriors, all painted fiercely and bristling with lances, bows and arrows, and occasionally, rifles. They liked to throw a scare into the settlers.

  It wasn’t just for show. If things didn’t go well, the Indians would welcome a fight.

  Jamie turned his head slowly from side to side. More mounted figures were visible in both directions, and they were angling their ponies toward the wagon train. The Indians were closing in, but they weren’t getting in any hurry about it. Jamie hoped that meant they just wanted to talk.

  He turned the stallion and rode back toward the spot where the immigrants were hurriedly pulling the wagons into a circle. Seeing the train stopping, the other scouts and outriders were coming in, too, some of them galloping hard to make it back to the relative safety of the wagons.

  Bodie Cantrell rode out to meet Jamie a couple hundred yards away from the wagons. “Hector says there are Indians about to attack us.” They both reined to a halt.

  “That’s jumping the gun a mite,” Jamie said. “Right now it looks to me like they don’t want to fight. Of course, that could change mighty quick-like.”

  “What should we do?”

  Jamie narrowed his eyes in thought. After a moment he said, “Your friend Lucas is pretty good with a gun, isn’t he?”

  Bodie looked a little uncomfortable about answering that, but he said, “Yeah, I suppose so.”

  “He’s cool-headed and can take orders?”

  “I’d say so.”

  “Go get him. The three of us will ride out to see what they want.”

  Bodie nodded. He was aware that what Jamie was asking of him involved considerable risk, but he wasn’t the sort to dodge trouble.

  When Bodie came back, he didn’t have jus
t Jake Lucas with him. Captain Lamar Hendricks rode with them, too.

  Before Jamie could say anything, Hendricks spoke up to explain his presence. “If you’re going to talk to these savages, I need to be there. I was elected to be the leader of this wagon train.”

  “And I was hired to be the wagon master,” Jamie said. “Who’d you leave in charge back there?”

  “Hector Gilworth.”

  “Well, Hector’s a good man, I suppose. If we all get killed, he’ll put up a good fight.”

  Hendricks was a little pale under his tan. “Do you think there’s a chance we’ll all be killed?”

  “There’s always a chance.” Jamie inclined his head toward the north. “I reckon we’ll find out pretty soon, because here they come.”

  About a dozen warriors were trotting their ponies toward the four men. As they drew closer, Jamie saw that they were painted for war. But that didn’t have to mean anything, he reminded himself. They might still be able to get out of this without a fight.

  “Somebody else is coming from the wagon train,” Jake said suddenly.

  Jamie twisted around in the saddle to look. It was hard to surprise him, but his eyebrows rose slightly when he saw Moses Danzig riding toward them on one of the extra saddle horses.

  Confronting a bunch of potentially angry Cheyenne was just about the last thing Moses needed to be doing, Jamie thought. But it was too late to send the rabbi back to the wagons. Jamie turned back to keep an eye on the approaching Indians.

  As Moses came up beside him, panting slightly from the effort of riding two hundred yards on horseback, Jamie said quietly, “Moses, what in the Sam Hill are you doing out here?”

  “Hector wanted to let you know that we’re all dug in and ready to fight if need be,” Moses replied. “He was going to send his cousin to do it, but I suggested that he let me ride out here instead. Jess can use a gun and I can’t, so he’s of more value there.”

  “If there’s a fight out here, you can’t even defend yourself.”

  “I’ll trust in a higher power for that.”