“Who calls me friend?” he demanded of the figure bundled in a long capote and fur cap, heavy hide mittens.
“I am Slays in the Night!” the man cried. “You ’member me, Ti-tuzz friend?”
“Damn, if it ain’t you now!” he exclaimed as he reined up near the old warrior. He looked about quickly while the lone Indian scuffled over, his moccasins crunching through the ankle-deep snow, dodging clumps of sage and juniper. He gazed at the face of this old friend with wonder now as the Shoshone’s features took sharper focus. “What the hell you doin’ out this far from your stompin’ grounds, down south at the hot springs? A mite close to Crow country for your likin’, ain’t it?”
“I come looking …” he started to explain, then stared at the ground, as would a man searching for the words.
“Lookin’ for what? Where’s that woman of your’n? What’s her name? Painted Rock? Something such—”
“Red Paint Rock.” He looked up, his eyes filled with great pain when he interrupted. “She is gone.”
“That’s a damn shame, friend,” he said quietly, glancing at Flea as he struggled to find some words. “I know how that can cut a man to the marrow to have your wife die on you—”
“No die. She is gone.”
He squinted at the Indian for a moment, then dropped from the saddle. Waving his wife and family to close up and join him, Scratch asked, “Gone? She run off from you?”
“Blackfeet!” Slays snarled the word.
Of a sudden he remembered how Washakie had informed the party of old trappers that the Blackfoot were raiding, far south of their usual haunts. “You see ’em come through?”
His head bobbed. “North,” and he started to sign as well as speak his birth tongue to tell the story. “Big war party of Blackfeet. Sweeping north. Striking down the Bighorn River … riding strong. Very big war party, go for Crow country.”
“They hit Washakie’s camp,” Titus said. “But his warriors were too strong for them Blackfoot.”
“Washakie,” he repeated the chief’s name. “We were friends … long time ago.”
Stepping closer to the old Shoshone, Scratch noticed again just how gray the man’s hair had become in the last few years—the black streaked with the snows of many, many winters and more than his share of trials too. He laid a hand on the Indian’s shoulder. “They kill Red Paint Rock, or they run off with her?”
He swallowed. “Take her,” he signed, one hand suddenly sailing off the other. “She is not a pretty woman. She’s no good to them. Why take my Red Paint Rock from me?”
“They took her,” Scratch explained to his wife as Waits-by-the-Water and the children came to a halt behind him on foot, leading their horses. “That means she’s still bound to be alive.”
Suddenly the old Indian dipped his face into both of his hands and wailed, his shoulders trembling. Bass understood loss. Goda’mighty, did he ever understand loss. Quickly he folded his old friend into his arms and let the warrior quake against his shoulder.
“You been hidin’ since they took her?”
Stepping back, the Shoshone snorted and said with his hands, “Eight days now. This eighth day. They take her. I follow on foot. Blackfeet take my woman, my horses. They take everything else.”
And Scratch understood how it felt to have the Blackfoot swoop down and ride off with a man’s wife. How it felt to have the Mormons sashay off with everything he had accumulated in his life of wading crotch-deep into streams or punching all the way into California to steal some Mexican horses. Bass understood how a man could feel everything being jerked out from under him by forces he could not comprehend, much less control.
“The gun I give you?” Titus asked, hopeful.
Pointing back at the brush where he had been hiding, the Shoshone said, “I have the gun still. Balls and powder too. I go hunting.”
“Man’s gotta eat.”
But Slays shook his head. “I go hunting for Blackfeet. Eight days, I follow their horses down the river.”
“Was you gone when them Blackfoot come through?”
“Hunting antelope with my friend’s gun,” he replied with his hands. “I come back, see them riding away. Big, big war party. Dressed like Blackfeet. My lodge is empty. Horses gone. But I still have my gun, and my legs, and a small piece of buffalo robe—so I start following their trail down the Bighorn for the Elk River into Crow country.”
Scratch looked into the eyes of his wife. She nodded slightly to tell him she had understood the import of the Shoshone’s sign language. Then he glanced at Flea.
“Son, take the packs off that red horse there,” Titus instructed in Crow. “Spread those packs among the other three horses. Our friend can ride the red horse.”
He turned and explained to Slays in the Night, “Crow country is dangerous for one lone Shoshone man.”
Slays snorted. “I am old and the rest of my days are on my fingernails. Crow kill me if the Blackfeet don’t. This is all dangerous country now, when a man is ready to die for one he loves. It makes no matter. I am not running away from this one last fight.”
Bringing his hand down on the warrior’s shoulder, Scratch said, “Ride the red horse for now. Until we get your wife and your horses back from these Blackfoot. Maybe they don’t realize they’re headin’ right into the heart of where the Crow are probably killin’ buffalo for winter meat.”
“You want me to ride with you?” Slays asked. “With your family?”
“My friend will be safe with me,” Scratch reassured as Flea led the red horse over. “Now, let’s get movin’ again. My feet get cold standin’ here in this hard wind. We gotta scratch us up a place to stay for the night, somewhere the wind won’t find our old bones!”
“And in the morning?”
“With tomorrow’s sun,” Titus answered in sign, “we’ll follow those tracks to get your woman and horses back.”
But the cold wind that was picking up near sunset had brought with it new snow. Big, fat flakes the size of ash curls had started to fall not long after dark and continued past sunrise. Falling slow, except when the wind gusted like a frantic child, then rested before its next spasm of blustery fury.
Try as they did, neither of them could make out the trail, so snowed over and windblown it had become during that long winter night. But they forged on that following day, and the next two, continuing on down the Bighorn toward the Yellowstone. And by the middle of the fourth day they stopped on the high ground and gazed north into the narrow valley that lay off to the west, discovering a smudge of smoke laying low against the winter sky, hanging in among the leafless cottonwoods.
“That many fires would not be the war party,” Scratch observed. “Not this time of day.”
“No,” Slays in the Night remarked. “War party was riding off there.” He pointed to the northeast.
“The Rosebud, maybe the Tongue, maybe as far east as the Powder too,” Titus said. Then he looked back to the northwest at that smoke and the first dark hints of a pony herd slowly inching about on the white background. “That’s gotta be a Crow camp.”
“This where you go?” Slays inquired.
“Yes. And where you’ll go with us.”
“No,” and the Indian shook his head and pointed north-northeast. “The Blackfeet go that way. I follow them to the end.”
“Come with us to the Crow village, friend,” Bass pleaded, feeling hopeful that he could talk Turns Back and others into helping. “My son-in-law, he will gather friends—many warriors—we will go in search of the Blackfoot who came raiding this year.”