Scream of Eagles by William W. Johnstone Page B

on conversations. I’ve known I have Negro blood in me since I was about eight or nine years old. Probably the best job of acting my mother ever did was in telling Jamie that ridiculous story about how insanity runs in our family, and how I had a brother who was a monster and who was confined in a mental institution back east. And how I must never have babies. All piffle and flap-doodle, of course. I know all about Uncle Ross and all about my daddy. And everything I know, James William knows. I hid nothing from him.”
    Falcon sat silent for a moment. Then he rose and hit the brandy bottle again—hard. Seated, he looked at the young couple and said, “Well, I’ll just be goddamned!”
    Both of them burst out laughing. Falcon soon joined them, and their laughter rang free, carrying outside to the street.
    Standing in the cold shadows, Ben F. Washington stood and listened to the merriment, wondering what in the hell was so funny. It filled him with sudden rage. What right did they have to be so happy?
    He turned away and began his walk back toward the hotel. As he walked, his hot anger faded, to be replaced by a cold, calculating anger. Now, he thought, would be a good time to start that book he’d had formulating in his brain. A book about the plantation days in the South, prior to the Civil War, about incestuous relationships and cruelty to slaves and white masters bedding down high yellow Negro wenches, and quadroon and octoroon babies. It would be about a half-Negro woman who passed for white and about her daughter, and about her son that she betrayed and gave away at birth. And a lot more. He would detail his mother’s rise to power and how evil she was, and her brother, too. Both of them were filth. And he’d write about the oh-so-haughty Page and her passing for pure, lily-white, and her marriage to the grandson of the famous Jamie Ian MacCallister.
    Ben hated the MacCallisters. All of them. Despised them. Especially Colonel MacCallister, that high-and-mighty hypocrite, who preached treating all people fairly but fought for the Confederacy. Hypocrisy, pure and simple.
    Ben would make them pay. All of them. He’d grind them down with words. Rub their rich noses in dark and evil family secrets.
    He picked up his pace.
    He couldn’t wait to get started.

9
    On the evening that Page was astonishing Falcon with her knowledge of her family’s dark—in more ways than one—history, and Ben was wallowing in his cold and vindictive anger, Jamie was riding into the no-name and nearly deserted mining town in the Medicine Bows. He stabled his horses and carefully rubbed them all down while they were feeding. The hotel clerk was so delighted at finally having a customer who could pay with cash money, he magnanimously gave Jamie the finest room in the hotel . . . guaranteed to have clean sheets with no fleas or bedbugs.
    Jamie ordered a bath and lingered long in the hot water, scrubbing the trail dirt from him and washing his hair. Then he trimmed his beard and hair until he felt he was looking almost human again.
    The dining room of the hotel had been closed for some time, so Jamie walked across the street to a small cafe and ordered his supper. Venison and beans and bread cooked and served by a man who wore his surly indifference like a badge of honor. The venison was tough, the beans undercooked, and the bread as difficult to chew as hardtack.
    â€œAs a cook,” Jamie told the man, after paying for the meal, “you’d make a fine carpenter.”
    â€œYou don’t like the grub, go somewheres else and eat in the mornin’.”
    â€œThere is no other place to eat.”
    â€œThat’s right, ain’t it?” the counterman replied with a nasty grin. “Mister MacCallister!”
    Jamie stared at him for a moment, his eyes narrowing in suspicion; then he stepped outside. He quickly cut to his right, moving swiftly toward the dark alley. There had