Ten yards … a matter of two swift strides.
And Bass was there before them—close enough to see paint and color and dark eyes beneath the greased hair tied up in a provocative challenge to raise a scalp lock.
Swinging clubs and bows and an old fusee, more than eight surged toward him as he burst into their midst. The frightened pony sidestepped, then lunged forward again as the warriors swung and leaped and cried out to frighten the animal, to scare their enemy. First one bow, then a stone club, smacked his legs, raked along the horse’s ribs, grazed along its bobbing neck as he shot past.
Suddenly Scratch became aware that he had plunged into the most dangerous moments of their dash through the enemy’s lines.
He twisted to look over his shoulder, beyond the pony’s flying tail. More than half of the Blackfoot had turned, stringing arrows to shoot at him and Potts and those first few Flathead warriors, to shoot them in the back at the moment they streamed through the enemy phalanx.
“Watch your backside!” Bass screamed, the words ripped from his mouth as the riders closed on the rocky fortress.
“Damned buggers!” Potts growled. “Gonna shoot us in the ass!”
Behind them streamed more than sixty mounted trappers, both free and company men. At least that many Flathead horsemen were mixed in among them as they galloped toward the Blackfoot, who were quickly realizing that the odds were beginning to tip from their favor. In the rocks ahead, black forms became men, and faces took shape beneath the shadow of hats. Sounds became words: cries of joy and shouts of challenge flung back now at the enemy.
As a handful of arrows clattered around them, Bass and Potts crossed the last few yards as three of the besieged trappers emerged from the rocks, hollering, reaching for the horses, eager to drag the horsemen to the ground and back to the safety of their tiny fortress.
“Potts!” a tall, full-faced man bellowed as he dashed up. His left cheek was bleeding, having been grazed by the stone tip of a war arrow. “Is that really you, Potts?”
“Campbell?”
“Aye—it’s me, lad!” the brigade leader shouted, jumping forward to seize Potts in both arms and pound him soundly about the shoulders.
“Good to see you standing, Booshway!”
“They’d had us all eventually,” Campbell said gravely as he stepped back toward the rocks. “Had all of you not shown up.”
Bass agreed as he stepped up. “If ronnyvoo wasn’t close—you’d all gone under.”
Then Scratch knelt suddenly, peering about him at that scene within the crude oval of rocks. More than a handful of half-breed children, at least that many Indian women, all huddled next to some of the white trappers as they helped their men reload weapons, these stoic mothers preparing to sell their lives dearly come a final assault on that narrow compound. Bass’s eyes stopped here and there, looking over the bodies sprawled on the ground within the fortress. Three of the dead had a blanket, a hat, or their own leather shirt pulled over their faces. At least three more were having their wounds attended to by comrades who washed off blood with water dipped from the trickle of a spring that issued within the rocks. A few others firmly held bloody compresses against their bright, bleeding injuries.
“W-would I know …” Then Daniel took a deep breath before gesturing at the dead and continued quietly, “Do I know any of these?”
With a doleful cloud passing over his face, Campbell replied, “You know every one of them, Potts.”
Immediately sinking to his knees, Daniel dragged back the edge of a greasy blanket, stared a moment at the familiar face, then gently replaced the blanket. His shoulders quaking in grief and rage, he suddenly tore at the bloody grass with both hands as a guttural cry burst from his throat.
“Damn these thievin’ bastards!” he roared.
Bass stepped up to stand beside the man, placing a hand on his trembling shoulder.
“Fools they were!” Daniel’s voice cracked. “Just like me, Scratch! Fools just like me for coming out here where there ain’t no God to watch over a man!”
“Damn right, Potts,” one of the wounded said in a small voice grown weak from loss of blood. He had a bandage wrapped around his head, the bloody cloth covering one eye and all but concealing half his face.
“That … that you, Scott?”
Hiram Scott nodded. “God don’t dare come out this side of the Missouri, Potts.”
Daniel looked up, eyes imploring as his clenched fists slowly opened, allowing the broken blades of bloody grass to spill from them. “I ain’t staying here no more, Cap’n Campbell.”
The brigade leader protested, “We get these Blackfoot run off, we’re moving on to rendezvous—”
“I don’t mean staying to ronnyvoo, dammit!” Potts spat to interrupt. “I ain’t staying out here in this country!”
Campbell started, “It’s natural for a man to be bitter—”
“God don’t look down from heaven on this country!” Potts shrieked. “Not for no white man, He don’t!”
On the ground the wounded Scott agreed, “Not a man gonna convince me God’s looking down on this land … this place fit only for the devil’s kind!”
Raising his face toward the sky, Potts roared in grief, “Man crosses the Missouri an’ leaves the settlements behind—there ain’t no angels watching his back then, and there ain’t no God to drive off Satan’s whelps clear away out here!”
“Look here around you, boys—there, there … and there. Look and you’ll see the proof of it.” Scott winced in pain as he straightened, then continued, “No God in this sky out here! No God a’tall!”
Bass watched the tears stream down the wounded trapper’s bloody face as he went to sobbing, quietly.
Why some were spared, and others heard their number called—Bass figured he would never know. Likely this was something only someone like his mother could answer, if not one of those circuit-riding preachers. No reason and no rhyme could he put to it … yet one thing was for certain: out here he had discovered that the choices were simpler and more sharply drawn than at any time in his life. And out here in this unforgiving wilderness, the consequences became all the more sudden and stark for those who chose to chance fate beneath this seamless dome of endless sky.
“Lookit ’em!” a man shouted nearby. “Bug’s Boys turning tail!”
In the middistance gunfire rattled as the onrushing horsemen fired their rifles at the retreating Blackfoot raiders, white man and Flathead alike, all whooping the moment they shot past the rocky fortress to the cheers of Campbell’s survivors.
“I see you brought us reinforcements, Titus Bass!”
Bass turned at the distantly familiar drawl to the voice, finding the tall, handsome mulatto stepping up through the tall grass, gunpowder smudged across his mud-colored face, that black shoulder-length hair tightly braided and wrapped in trade ribbon.
Titus asked, “Beckwith?”
“None other!” and he held out his hand. “Thought you was dead when we didn’t see you last summer.”
“Some tried!” Bass roared as he pumped the arm of that Virginia-born son of a white planter and a Negress that planter eventually married before moving his family to frontier Missouri. “Where you been in this fight, Jim? Laying low?”
“Right out there in the grass,” Beckwith explained, and pointed. “Didn’t like the feel of these here rocks. Never felt easy about being closed up in a fight. Always figure to have me a way out.”
“Look at ’em!” Campbell declared loudly as he waved both arms at the passing horsemen. “Look at all those lovely white faces.”
Scratch reminded, “Flathead too!”
“See how them devil’s sons scamper!” cried another man, pointing at the retreating warriors.