“Damn. If that don’t take the circle!” the overly solemn Simms said with uncharacteristic enthusiasm. “Two of ’em. C’mon, let’s get this here rope up quick. Jack wants us back in camp so we can figger what’s to do about them horses the others got off with.”
In minutes Bass was kneeling at Kinkead’s feet with some of the others. Titus asked Hatcher, “How he be?”
“I’m fit as any the rest of you sonsabitches,” Kinkead grumbled as he pulled out the thick twig he had been clenching between his teeth. For the moment this stocky man was sitting propped back against a pack of beaver, Caleb Wood behind one shoulder for support. Matthew turned his chin toward the other shoulder and growled, “Leave me be, Mad Jack! You never was any good with a knife—”
“Shuddup, child,” Hatcher ordered. “An’ quit yer hitchin’! Ye’re making this wuss’n it has to be.”
Kinkead gasped in pain, flung his head back with a groan, and shoved the twig back between his teeth as Hatcher proceeded to dig into the dark, moist wound on the big man’s muscular chest. From it fluttered the long shaft of a Blackfoot arrow—buried deep in the right breast.
“Hold him still, goddammit!” Hatcher ordered, exasperated. “Help me, Bass. Hold him down!”
Now there were three restraining that bull of a man almost as wide as he was tall.
“You gonna finish it sometime afore the damn sun comes up?” Bass eventually asked in a grunt as he tried to stay atop Kinkead’s strong legs.
“I can feel the goddamned arrow point,” Hatcher admitted, shifting the knife blade this way, then that, with one hand, his other gently tugging now and then on the shaft. “I don’t wanna pull the goddamned thing free ’thout the arrow point. Hold him down, or I ain’t gonna get this done afore a month of sunrises!”
Kinkead growled like a wounded bear, hissing around his twig at Hatcher as Jack rose to his knees above the man, brought back his arm, and suddenly slammed a fist against Kinkead’s jaw.
Spitting the twig free, the wild-eyed Kinkead almost succeeded in getting up despite the other three. Unfazed by the blow, he angrily spat, “What the hell you go and do that for—”
Jack swung his fist again, harder this time, connecting with a crack like a cottonwood popping in the dead of winter. Kinkead’s eyes rolled back, and his head sagged to the side, all that dead weight propped back against Caleb Wood.
“Now I can get done what needs doing ’thout him jabberin’,” Hatcher said as he resituated himself over Kinkead. “You boys can’t keep him still … by bloody damn I’ll put him to sleep my own self.”
In a matter of moments Hatcher’s deft touch had extracted the arrow. All that probing and digging left a mess of Kinkead’s chest, but both shaft and arrow point were free. “Get yer medeecins, Isaac,” he ordered. “Patch him up and get him covered quick.”
Simms turned away toward his bedroll.
Jack rose, wiped his skinning knife across his legging, and shoved it back into the scabbard at his hip. “The rest of ye, gather round.” He looked among them until he spotted Rowland. “How many they get away with, Johnny?”
Rowland shrugged and nodded to Bass.
Titus answered. “Maybe half a dozen, Jack.”
“Damn.” Hatcher was deep in thought a few moments. “Every man make sure yer loaded. Leave behind any extra guns ye got with Rufus and Isaac”
“Me?” Simms asked as he returned with his parfleche of herbs.
“You and Rufus gonna stay behind here with Matt,” Hatcher ordered. “Drag up some cover, case they double back to make another go at us.”
“Where you going?” Graham asked with that slight lisp of his as he started to drag a bundle of pelts over.
“Me and the others,” the tall, angular Hatcher said, “we’re going after them horses.”
Domesticated four-legged critters were worth their weight in beaver plews in this country. Horses or mules, it made little difference to this small band of American fur trappers.
Yet this was more than a matter of having a few of their animals stolen from them. The thieves had been Blackfoot—likely some of the same bunch who had struck them earlier that spring. Had that whole raiding party come at them this time, they could have run right over the white men like a herd of elk trampling across a meadow of wildflowers.
This had become a matter of honor. A matter of a warrior’s pride. It didn’t take very many seasons surviving in these mountains before a trapper came to understand that blood was the only language the Blackfoot understood. Force, and might, and blood.
If they let a small band of the enemy get away with a handful of horses …
Hell, there was never the slightest debate. The six saddled up and rode north toward the far-off spine of the distant mountains, feeling their way in the darkness, hoping that their guess was right. They could wait until first light to circle around camp and locate the enemy’s trail. Or they could push out now in the dark, gambling that they would pick up the trail a few hours from now when dawn finally overtook them—without wasting that time and miles by sitting on their hands.
As the first ballooning of light emerged out of the east, they reached the foothills on the southern slopes of the range, Hatcher riding at the head of the others, who were strung back from him in a vee like the long-necked honkers that had been winging their way north overhead for weeks now, returning to summer haunts.
“There!” Hatcher hurled his voice over his shoulder, throwing up an arm to stop the others as he reined up.
Clattering to a halt, the rest gazed down the open, grassy slopes broken by stands of timber, cut here and there with narrow freshets flowing bank-to-bank with spring runoff fed from the snowfields far above them.
“They’re covering ground,” Bass declared as he studied the distant figures.
“Damn if they ain’t,” the beefy Fish agreed.
Hatcher turned his horse around, his half-feral eyes moving from man to man to man accusingly, “Ye boys figger us to go on? Or do we cut our losses and turn back now?”
“It’s a long shot,” Rowland said almost apologetically.
“Yeah,” Wood stated. “Ain’t no guarantee we’ll ever catch up after all this riding—”
“They can’t run forever,” Bass grumbled, exasperated at their second-guessing. “I’m fixin’ to go, even if the rest of you don’t.”
“Just you?” Rowland squeaked. “You’d be teched—”
With a shrug Titus interrupted, “If’n it’s just me, I’ll wait till dark one night soon and crawl in, cut them horses loose. Ride back this way … ride back like hell itself.”
“Eegod, boys! Just like a Injun would do it his own self!” Hatcher said, a grin of admiration beginning to crease his face.
“Damn straight,” Bass said, grinning too, determination bright in his eyes.
A half-wild look in his eyes, Hatcher glanced over the others, the grin fading from his mouth as he said, “Bass is right. Those sumbitches can’t run forever. They’ll have to stop one day soon—for graze, or water, or just to climb down from the bony backs of our god-blessed ponies.”
“And then we’ll have ’em,” Gray said with sudden enthusiasm. He wore a cap he had stitched together himself from a scrap of old wool blanket, sewn with a peak on either side to crudely resemble wolf ears.
Rowland shook his head. “If’n we ain’t dead in the saddle afore then our own selves.”
Hatcher nudged his horse up close to Rowland. “Ye comin’, Johnny?”
“Ain’t a thing wrong in you turning back to help Isaac and Rufus see to Kinkead,” Bass declared protectively. “No man can fault you there.”
For a moment Rowland appeared to consider that option. Then he sighed, “I come this far awready.”