For a long time the Shoshone sat there on the red horse, clutching that old smoothbore Bass had given him seasons before. His breath streamed from his mouth and nose into the subfreezing air as the setting sun struck their backs, riding low in the winter sky. Finally he took his eyes off the north-northeast and they came to rest on Titus Bass.
“All right. We go to this Crow camp where you get help for us to find my wife. You, me—we ride together against the Blackfeet.” Then the Shoshone’s eyes brightened with moisture, glowed with fond remembrance. “You remember old time we fight Blackfeet together?”
He shook his head, failing to recall any time he and Slays in the Night had battled those implacable foes. “I don’t recall—”
Slays licked his lips and interrupted with a stammer as he gave voice to the white man’s words, “Pee … Pierre’s Hole.”
The long-forgotten scenes exploded into view there in his mind. Back in ’32. One of the biggest and finest of summer rendezvous ever held, company brigades and free men joined by many bands of mountain Indians, drawn by the trade goods and the nonstop gambling. A big band of Blackfoot had stumbled onto the white man’s trading fair, forted up, and been surrounded. Mountain men and their allied warriors dashed south down the valley to do their damnedest to wipe out every enemy they could.
“Yes,” he said with something close to reverence as he squinted his eyes and focused on the long-ago scenes. “I remember that now, old friend. A very long time ago—more’n twenty winters now.”
“Long time,” he repeated the white man’s words, then signed, “We were young.”
With a smile, Scratch asked, “How about you an’ me do this for the ol’t days, my friend? We go kill us some goddamned Blackfoot for the ol’t days?”
“Goddamn these Blackfeet!” Slays agreed in American. “We kill. You and me, we kill goddamn sonofabitch Blackfeet!”
With a whoop, Titus shoved heels into his pony and they all started off the high ground, down the first of the long slopes that would carry them toward the cottonwood-wrapped meadows where that Crow village stood. With enough help from Turns Back, Don’t Mix, and the rest of Pretty On Top’s warriors, they could confront any threat from a large Blackfoot war party, inflict a lot of damage, drive their old enemies out of Absaroka, and reclaim Red Paint Rock from her captors. Which would be right and square with the world as he saw it.
If them dragoons at Fort Laramie didn’t know how to exact a little justice from them murdering Mormons who did wrong by Jim Bridger and so many others, or the dragoons simply didn’t have the stomach for it, at least life was still sane and real up here in the north country … up here where a man could still right what wrongs had been done him and his friends.
Being able to right an injustice committed against him by either Brigham Young and his thieving mobs or by a plundering Blackfoot war party was something a man had to count on when there were few things in life that really mattered. Maybe the Trickster, Old Man Coyote, would be capricious enough to punish a man by not allowing him to right a terribly unfair iniquity … but Titus knew the First Maker would never turn His face from His people in a time of need.
“Who is this stranger you bring?” asked Don’t Mix as he led a small party of guards loping up to the newcomers.
“He is an old friend,” Titus explained in Crow. “He was treating me and mine with kindness even before you were born.”
With that characteristic smirk of his, the young warrior studied the old Shoshone. “Who are his people?”
“I am Snake,” Slays in the Night responded in sign without hesitation.
That he understood enough of the Apsaluuke tongue to understand what had been said around him surprised Scratch. Bass touched the rider at his knee and announced to the others, “This is my friend, Slays in the Night. Side by side, he and I fought Blackfeet more than two-times-ten summers ago.”
“He is still a fighter, this one?” Stiff Arm asked.
Just as Slays was opening his mouth to speak, Titus spoke up, “Many days ago my friend’s camp was raided by Blackfeet, not far to the south. His horses and his woman were stolen. I told him I would ride with him to reclaim what has been taken from him by our old enemies.”
Don’t Mix inquired, “Just the two of you are going after these raiders?”
Shaking his head, Titus replied, “No—I want you to come with me, war chief. And strong-hearted others. There are many, many raiders we must chase from Absaroka!”
Most of the other camp guards whooped at that call to action, causing some of their ponies to jostle and shimmy in nervousness. From the corner of his eye, Scratch saw how Waits signaled him with that particular look in her eye.
“Where is my son-in-law, Turns Back?” Titus asked.
“The last I saw of him,” Don’t Mix answered, “he had just returned from the hills with a deer and was dressing it out over beside his lodge.”
“And my daughter?”
Don’t Mix smiled as he looked first at Waits-by-the-Water, then back to the white man. “She is as beautiful as ever. More so now that she is a mother.”
Waits barely got her hand over her mouth to squelch a squeal of delight.
“This is good news!” Bass roared. “Tell me, have you taken a wife yet?”
With that sly look in his eyes, Don’t Mix said, “My heart was so wounded, and my soul hurt so bad after your daughter married Turns Back … I knew it would take me a long time to heal, a long time before I could ever give my heart to another. But, it wasn’t long after we returned from the big council at the white man’s warrior fort in the south country that I found a pretty girl to help me heal my heart!”
“Has there been the cry of a newborn heard in your lodge?”
“No—but it will be any day now,” Don’t Mix said with a proud smile. “Big as my wife has grown, she must be carrying two—”
“Ti-tuzz,” Waits impatiently interrupted their man-talk.
“Ah, yes,” Scratch said, realizing his mistake. He urged his pony into motion. “We must hurry on to the village to see our daughter … and my wife’s first grandchild!”
THIRTY-TWO
“Enemies!”
Titus Bass did not need to be told.
He had heard those faint, out-of-the-ordinary sounds drifting to him through the cold of that winter’s dawn. Then the first distant cry of alarm. Followed by the muffled hammer of hooves reaching that ear he had lying against the ground in Magpie and Turns Back’s lodge. Had to be a lot of them from the thunder of their coming. That, or the thieves were running off with every horse Pretty On Top’s band owned.
Across the lodge, Flea was hurrying on with his winter clothing, tying one blanket legging to his belt, and then the other. Turns Back hugged Magpie, then touched the cheek of the infant between them, before he threw back the robes and began to dress in the cold stillness of that breathless lodge.
Yanking on the heavy, furred buffalo moccasins over his others, Scratch quickly dragged on the capote, buckled a wide belt around his waist, then pulled the coyote fur hat over his ears. Into his belt with the two knives went his only pair of pistols. Then he turned to the side of the lodge over the bed where he and Waits had slept for the first time last night. Two leather thongs were knotted in loose loops from the narrow rope that held the liner to the lodgepoles. He freed his old flintlock from the loops, bent to scoop up his shooting pouch, then touched her face with his bare fingertips before stuffing his hands in his blanket mittens—
The first gunshot roared from somewhere on the far side of camp.
He bent to kiss her mouth, recognizing the unspoken fear in her eyes.