Scream of Eagles Read Online Free Page B

teams, riding horses, and hired men to drive the wagons.
    â€œIt’s all so, well, thrilling and grand!” cooed Miss Evelyn Wadsworth (better known as Fifi the Feathered Fan Lady to a certain segment of New Yorkers who frequented the burlesque houses), as she took in all the sights and sounds (and smells) of the raw frontier town.
    â€œIt is that,” her companion, Marshall Henry Ludlow, agreed. “What say you, Richard?”
    â€œOh, quite,” Richard Farnsworth replied. Dickie to his friends.
    â€œI must say, it’s all rather primitive,” Charles Bennett remarked. Chuckie to his friends. “I’ve never seen so many guns in my life.”
    â€œI’m awed and overwhelmed and a little frightened,” the Brooklyn-born Rebecca Willingham said, with an accent so pronounced a voice coach would have been reduced to tears of despair. Rebecca was better known as Lulu, in that part of the city where at night the glass of the lanterns glowed red.
    Dickie put an arm around her waist. “I’ll personally see that no harm befalls you, dear.”
    Dickie couldn’t protect a pork chop from a devout Jew, but everybody has illusions.
    However, as the three former fraternity brothers were about to discover, the western frontier was no place to put those illusions to the test.
    Mary Marie O’Donnell, a flaming redhead with a scattering of freckles across her nose, whose family had come over from Dublin, and who possessed more common sense in her little finger than the others did in their entire bodies, took one look around her and decided that she had made the right decision by agreeing to accompany Chuckie to the Wild West. It was indeed a grand place. “All this fine land for the homesteadin’,” she muttered. “New York City, ye’ve seen the last of this Irish lassie.”
    One burly teamster that the odd group had hired took a hard look at his employers just before they pulled out the next morning, and summed up the feeling of the other drivers. “Lord have mercy on my soul!”
    * * *
    It was nearing dark when Jamie topped the ridge and looked down at the small cluster of buildings standing around the larger structure that was the trading post. An army fort had just been constructed not far from the trading post. It had started out as Fort Augur, but recently changed to Camp Brown, in honor of Captain Fredrick H. Brown who had been killed in ’66 in the Fetterman massacre. The camp would be abandoned in early ’71.
    Jamie stripped the saddle and pack frame from his animals and stabled them. He rubbed down his horses and saw that they both had ample feed and water before even thinking about seeing to his own needs.
    Jamie had bathed that morning in the cold waters of a creek and, after stropping his razor, had carefully shaved around his neatly trimmed beard and moustache; like his close-cropped hair, the beard and moustache were gray. A few weeks back he had stopped in a Shoshoni village, spent a few days with them, and traded for new buckskins, moccasins, and leggins.
    Now he had to resupply, for he was low on some things and completely out of coffee, bacon, and beans.
    He entered the low-ceilinged trading post and stepped to one side, as was his habit, carefully looking all about him, sizing up the half dozen or so men sitting at the rough-hewn tables, playing cards and drinking snake-head whiskey. (Some who made their own whiskey actually did toss in a few snake heads during the “curing” process, claiming it added flavor to the brew. History does not record if anyone died because of that practice.)
    Jamie ordered a plate of stew from the counterman and sat down at a vacant table. Before his meal arrived, a question was thrown at him, springing out of the darkness of the far smoky depths of the room.
    â€œYou be Jamie MacCallister?”
    â€œI am.”
    â€œI got a message for you, MacCallister: Call off your