At that moment the enemy had begun their wholesale retreat from the fight, able to see they were soon to be on the losing side. Easy to realize that now was the time to get away with their stolen plunder and captured horses while they could.
“Sonsabitches got their hands on more than five thousand dollars in beaver!” Campbell fumed as he angrily dragged some fingers across the oozing cheek wound.
A clerk stepped up and added, “And two mules with some of our trade goods too, Cap’n!”
Robert Campbell whirled on him, glowering. “How many horses, they get?”
“They’re running off with more’n forty head.”
“Damn their black hearts!” Campbell cursed.
Then, as if to rally his own flagging spirits, the brigade leader quickly tore the shapeless hat from his head and waved it aloft at the last of the rescuers racing their way, those horsemen shooting past the little fortress like a spring torrent. Campbell joined the rest in clambering atop the low rocks to wave and whoop and whistle as the last of the Blackfoot hurriedly mounted and started to tear away with their booty, driving the brigade’s horses and mules before them.
“When’d they hit you?” asked one of the horsemen who had circled back, bringing his horse to a halt just outside the rocks.
“Not long after we put to the trail this morning,” Campbell explained. “All told, must’ve been more than two hundred of ’em dogging our backtrail for the last day or so.”
“Likely picked up your scent day before yestiddy.”
“Nearby, Hiram Scott added, “We made a run for it to get this far.”
“Lucky these rocks were here when we needed ’em,” Campbell added. “I spotted these willows and made for ’em. Then we found the spring. At least we’d have water. So I prepared the men for a long siege of it.”
The rider glanced over the dead and wounded. “You kill any of ’em your own selves?”
“Maybe a half dozen,” Campbell declared. “Knocked a bunch out of the saddle, but the others come in and rode off with every bastard we knocked off a pony.”
Titus turned back to say, “Wouldn’t have mattered to have you water in here, Booshway. Looks to be they was whittling your side down a mite fast.”
After a long sigh Campbell blinked his eyes as if they smarted and said, “When I sent the riders out, we were running low on powder and ball. Truth be, we were all preparing for the worst. If these Blackfoot had jumped us any farther from your camp—we’d been finished but good.”
“Not a chance you’d hung on again’ that many,” the rider said as he wheeled his horse about, giving it the heels to speed away after the rest of those chasing the retreating raiders.
Beckwith stepped up to Campbell. “There’s another one of our dead out in the grass. I made sure none of them Blackfeet got close enough to scalp him.”
“I know,” the brigade leader replied. “It’s Boldeau—a damned good cook he was too.” He nodded toward one of the women. “His Flathead wife made it in on the run, but Louis was just too old, just too slow. I watched him drop—praying he was playing rabbit.”
“His woman’s gotta grieve proper, in the way of her own people,” Bass said, turning to Beckwith. “Why’n’t you take her to the man’s body, Jim.”
With a nod the mulatto stepped over to the Flathead woman and made sign for her to follow him. Bass watched them scramble over the rocks and hurry out through the tall grass.
“Let’s get what horses we have left and see how best to get our wounded and dead into camp,” Campbell ordered, directing some of the men to bring up the few horses they still possessed. He turned to Bass. “How far to camp?”
At the moment Titus opened his mouth to speak, the Flathead woman raised a mournful wail from the prairie. With the hair prickling on the back of his neck, Scratch turned to see her crumple down to her knees, bending over the body of Louis Boldeau. There she rocked back and forth as Beckwith stood nearby, his hat held in both hands. For the life of him, Bass didn’t know what was a more pitiful sight: Potts mourning over the body of an old friend, or the squaw keening over the body of her man.
“Not far, Booshway,” Bass finally answered, tearing his eyes from the woman yanking her knife from its scabbard, dragging it across the first clump of hair she held out in the other hand as she hacked it from her head. This she held up toward the sky, slowly opening her left hand to let that hair spill into the wind. “You ain’t far from camp now.”
Then, as the other survivors began to pick their way out of the rocks, Scratch turned his face to gaze at the sky so immense overhead, wondering—wondering just how far a man was from God out here now.
“Mind my word, boys: I ain’t gonna pay these scalpin’ prices to no man, no booshway, no goddamned company!”
Scratch stepped up to the outer fringe of that gathering of free trappers who were loosely circled around a bareheaded older man intently haranguing the swelling crowd beneath a hot summer sun that late morning four days after their scrap with the Blackfeet.
“Damn the mountain prices!” someone called from the crowd.
“But that’s just what they are!” Jack Hatcher bellowed as Bass stopped at his elbow. “These here are mountain prices, Glass—and a free man pays or a free man don’t dance!”
“You … you say his name is Glass?” Scratch asked in a whisper.
From the side of his mouth, Hatcher said with an admiring grin, “Yep. Glass be that ol’ wolf-bait’s name.
“Turning and taking a step closer to Mad Jack, Glass-grumbled, “I’ll wager you’re the kind what riggers it’s fair for the traders to charge us twice or three times what things is wuth just for ’em bringing the goods all the way out here to us, eh?”
“Every man’s entitled to have hisself paid for his labor,” Jack argued. “Even a damned double-backed, gobble-necked trader!”
Glass wagged his head, sputtering, “B-but, you’re a free man!”
Bass whispered, pursuing his question, “That really Hugh Glass?”
“And I’ll die a free man! A free man what don’t pay no tariff to no company, and no tariff to you neither!” he hollered back at Glass. Then Hatcher quickly turned his head to look Titus square in the face. “Ye heard tell of that ol’ coon?”
“I do,” Scratch replied in a hush. “First heard of him clear back to St. Louie. Friend of mine told me ’bout that ol’ feller dragging hisself back to the Missouri after a sow grizzly chewed him up an’ he was left for dead by the bunch he was traveling with.”
Hatcher grinned. “That’s the man awright. One and the same. Have him show ye his scars after he steps down from preachin’ hellfire to this short pew of sinners.”
“What’s the rub he’s greasin’?” Scratch asked.
“Like Glass is saying: all these here men ought’n take a stand against being dangled at the mercy of the traders. Him and a few others trailed in here with him yesterday and called all the free men together out of the camps to grouse about the tall prices we’re faced with payin’ to Smith, Jackson, and Sublette.”
“For the life of me, sounded there like you was coming down on the other side of this fight,” Scratch replied.
“Nawww,” Jack explained with a widening grin. “Hell, Glass does have him a good point. An’ he’s right on most every count. I’m just the nigger what likes to argufy with that ol’ buzzard ever’ now and then ’cause it gets him so riled—’bout as steamed as a unwatched tea kettle over the fire.”
“So what’s Glass figger we can do about what toll the traders charge us for their goods?”
“And for what they give us for our plews,” Hatcher added. “Don’t forget they got us two ways of Sunday!”
“Like I told you—them three friends of mine got rubbed out with my furs last summer, they figgered to float downriver to the first post they come onto and trade there, ’stead of packing our plew into ronnyvoo, where a trader can skelp us both top and bottom.”