“Something like that.”
“Well, then. We’ll go to where they camped last night and track them down. It will be them or us.”
“Not us. Me.”
“I have my orders, remember.”
Nate went in search of Jeremiah Blunt. The captain was busy overseeing the transfer of crates and goods from the wagons to the cabins. Tools, salt, flour, blankets, the Shakers had enough of everything to last years. Nate tapped Blunt on the shoulder. “We need to talk.”
“I’m listening,” Blunt said, and in the next breath bellowed, “Williams! Careful with that. It has china plates and dishes. Drop it and you’ll wish you hadn’t.”
“The Texan,” Nate said.
“What about him?” Blunt asked, and turned to a man carrying a pack. “That one goes in the women’s quarters. You’re not to go in yourself. Just hand it to them at the door.”
“Call off your shadow. I have something to do and I’m doing it alone.”
“Can’t,” Blunt said.
“Why in hell not?”
“Now, now. Don’t lose your temper. I can’t and I won’t because I like your daughter.”
“What does Evelyn have to do with this?”
Blunt faced him. “The night before she left with McNair, she asked me to watch out for you.”
“She did what?”
Blunt grinned. “She’s your daughter. She loves you. All that talk about the Valley of Skulls worried her so much, she took me aside and asked if I would do what I could to make sure you get back to your family safe and sound.”
Nate sighed. It sounded like something Evelyn would do. Behind his back, no less. In that, she was much like her mother. Winona, too, had a mind of her own and was not shy about having her say and doing as she pleased.
“A promise is a promise,” Jeremiah Blunt said. “Where you go, Maklin goes. What you do, he does. That’s how it will be until we part company.”
“Why him out of all your men? Just because he’s killed?”
“I figured you had a lot in common. You’ve lived with Indians. He’s lived with Indians. You like the wilds. He likes the wilds. And when I asked for a volunteer he raised his hand.”
“Why?”
“You’d have to ask him.”
Nate cradled his Hawken. “I’m putting my foot down. He’s not to come with me. I mean it.”
“You can’t stop him short of shooting him, and you won’t do that. It’s not in you.” Blunt clapped Nate on the arm. “Cheer up. You’re a good man, Nate King. A decent man. You put your family before all else. You treat others with respect so long as they respect you. You don’t drink much and you hardly ever swear. Truth is, you’re different from about every other mountain man I’ve met.”
“There must be a lot of men like me.”
Blunt sobered and shook his head. “I wish there were. A lot of men find goodness boring. They’d rather drink whenever they want and bed any woman they want and they don’t give much of a damn about anyone but themselves.”
Nate had more to say, but just then hooves clomped and up rode Maklin leading the bay by the reins.
“I’m ready to shed blood when you are, pard.”
Chapter Fourteen
The Pawnee camp was deserted, the charred embers of their fire long gone cold.
Nate expected as much. Still, he took precautions. He drew rein a quarter of a mile below and climbed the rest of the way on foot, Maklin at his side every step.
“Where do you reckon they got to?”
Nate cast about for sign. Their horses had left plenty. The tracks pointed to the southwest.
“That’s damn peculiar. I thought Pawnee country is to the east.”
“It is.”
“Then why the blazes are they heading southwest?” the Texan wondered.
Nate wondered, too. Given Kuruk’s wily nature, there was no predicting what he was up to.
They retraced their steps to their mounts and began the hunt in earnest. And what a difference the sun made. Nate could hold to a rapid gait with little threat from logs and boulders and low limbs.
The Pawnees had ridden hard, which mystified him. They weren’t running away. Kuruk wouldn’t give up so long as breath remained in his body, and the other warriors would want revenge for their fallen friends. It was almost as if they were in a hurry to get somewhere.
Nate had assumed they didn’t know the country, but maybe he was wrong. Maybe they had been there before.
Another possibility occurred to him. Maybe after last night Kuruk expected Nate and a lot of other whites to come after them. Maybe the Pawnees were riding hard to find a spot to spring an ambush.
The tracks entered a dense forest of mainly spruce. A thick carpet of fallen needles muffled their hoof falls. No other sounds pierced the quiet. Not the warble of a bird or the chatter of a squirrel.
A disturbing sign. Nate held the Hawken across his saddle. Here was as good a place as any for the Pawnees to strike. Maklin evidently felt the same; he rode with a hand on one of his silver-inlaid pistols.
Nothing happened. They emerged from the shadowed woodland into a sunny meadow. Several blacktailed does fled. Two cow elk stared and then imitated the does.
The tracks led across the meadow into tall firs. Here, the shadows were deeper. Once again the wild creatures were unusually quiet.
The short hairs at the nape of Nate’s neck prickled. He would almost swear unseen eyes were watching. They went another mile and came on a clear ribbon of water. The tracks showed that the Pawnees had stopped to let their horses drink. Nate did the same. He scoured the brush, ready to seek cover at the first hint of danger. But all he saw moving was a butterfly.
“I don’t like this, hoss,” Maklin commented.
“Makes two of us.”
“I have the feeling we’re being led around by the nose like a bull on a rope.”
“Makes two of us,” Nate said again.
The Pawnees had stuck to the stream bank even though the waterway twisted and turned like a crazed snake. It made for slow going, another puzzlement given that until now the Pawnees had been riding like Mohawk-topped bats out of Hades.
Nate began to have second thoughts. There was just him and the Texan against seven warriors. Many a man had fallen prey to his own overconfidence, and he could be another.
The firs were so close together that at times there was barely space for the bay to pass between them. It gave Nate a feeling of being hemmed in. He never knew but when a Pawnee might pop out from behind one of the trees and let fly with a barbed shaft.
Another mile, and still nothing happened.
Maklin cleared his throat to ask a question. “Do you reckon this Kuruk wants to take you alive?”
“He’s said as much,” Nate said. “The better to torture me. Why?”
“Less chance of you taking an arrow between the shoulder blades.”
The tracks climbed. In due course they were out of the firs and at the edge of a broad tableland dotted with stands of pine and deciduous trees interspersed with grassland. A park, the old-timers would call it. As picturesque as a painting.
“This makes no damn sense,” Maklin grumbled.
Nate relaxed a bit. There was nowhere for the Pawnees to hide except the stands, and the track didn’t go anywhere near them. In one a robin was singing. He spied movement in the high grass, but it was only a gray fox running for cover.
A mile more brought them to an unusual sight that high up in the mountains: a buffalo wallow. At one time buffalo had been common in the mountains. Shaggier cousins of their prairie brethren, they hid in deep thickets during the day, coming out at dawn and dust to graze. The wallow was old and had not seen use in a long time.