“No,” Titus shook his head in resignation. “Chances are we will never know why they came.”
They had pushed on as soon as it was light enough to see six horse lengths ahead. And by the time the sun was rising they spotted the Blackfoot raiders and their stolen horses far off in the distance. No longer was it merely a trail of hoofprints they were following. Now they saw their quarry. He even imagined he could smell these enemies in his nostrils. Maybe it was the strong turpentine scent of the sagebrush crushed under each hoof as the enemy pushed toward the Judith Basin. Strong and wild, the wind in his face, this pursuit infused him with youth once more. Just seeing those warriors and their stolen herd out yonder in the distance felt as if years had been shaved off his old hide. This was meant to be, he thought.
This is the way it was meant to be.
It wasn’t long before he admitted to the pang he was feeling somewhere behind his breastbone—the pain of regret and remembrance, the faces of his children swimming before his eyes as he yanked on the long lead rope to the next horse, a strong, long-legged pinto. At first the wild-eyed pony protested and jerked back its head, but Titus eventually had it loping alongside the tiring claybank he had been riding ever since first light.
“Here, friend,” he called to Slays in the Night. “Hold my rifle for me.”
“A new horse?” asked the Shoshone as he urged his pony close, on the white man’s off side, and took Bass’s old flintlock.
It took a few moments, heartbeats really, to match the strides of the two horses as their hooves thundered across the iron-plated ground, heading up a long, long slope—the last before they reached the winding valley of the Judith. He knew this place well. Lo, the many times he had trapped these grounds, walked the thready paths of these feeder streams, fought grizzly here. If the Blackfoot were thinking to lose their Crow pursuers in this maze of hills and stands of cottonwood, to confuse those who followed in the tapestry of alder and chokecherry, willow and sawgrass, then they hadn’t reckoned on Titus Bass riding up on their tailroots.
He leaned over with his right hand, intertwined his fingers with a handful of the pinto’s mane—then held his breath and rose up to one knee on the claybank. Up and down, up and down he moved with both horses, then suddenly leaped across to that painted pony that ran with its rib cage brushing against the tired, lathered claybank. The pinto grunted at the man’s sudden weight landing on its back. He shifted slightly, his crotch sliding into that natural groove behind the withers. Then he played out the claybank’s long rein, letting the tired horse seek its own pace some yards behind them as Slays in the Night eased over to his side again.
“Here, you will need this soon,” the old Indian said, his eyes glistening with an inner peace.
Bass took his rifle. “Your turn for a new horse.” And he took the Shoshone’s smoothbore, clutching both weapons across the crook of his left arm.
When he looked ahead into the distance at the figures once more, Bass felt his heart leap in anticipation. He thought he saw that red blanket capote at the far right edge of the herd now. In the first dim, gray light of this cold morning the figures had all been black as sow beetles scurrying out from beneath an overturned cowchip. But now, with the coming of the sun, colors came alive. And in the fiery hue the sun gave this high, hard land, Titus finally saw the only one he had been chasing all along. The tails of the Blackfoot’s bright red coat fluttering out behind him in the cold wind that had quartered around to the northwest, smelling strong with the tang of coming snow.
The horizon far ahead looked heavy with it too. All the way north to the Missouri itself, where it was surely snowing already. That mighty, mythical river a man had to cross before he could make these legendary mountains his own. A fabled and fated crossing that few men would survive. Some who had reached this land had already gone back, recrossing the Missouri to what had been before. Still more had gone on until they reached the end of the land and the great salt ocean washed up at their feet. But Titus Bass had stayed here in this high land that few would believe ever existed. Surely the stuff of a schoolboy’s myth, legend, and tall tales. Not possible for a man to have lived out the life Titus Bass claimed he had, those stiff-backed settlement types would say.
It made no difference now. None of their nay-saying made a damn bit of difference. He was here, on the bare, narrow back of a young painted pony, and he had the cold, icy wind in his face … his enemy in view.
With the coming of the sun at their backs, he realized it had turned even colder. So cold it felt like it would never get warm again. The ground beneath him hard as hammered iron. The sky above so blue it hurt his one good eye. The bitter wind made it tear, making colors run and swim.
Turning to his old friend, Titus said, “Soon we will be close enough to see which one of those riders is your Red Paint Rock.”
For a long time, the Shoshone studied the figures, staring into the distance, but not as if he were trying to choose among the distant horsemen. When he finally turned to speak to the white man, his cheeks were wet with frozen tears. “No … our women are dead, Ti-tuzz. Both us have nothing left but the killing now. Our women—they both dead.”
“And soon our enemies will be too,” Titus spoke into the growing strength of the northern wind as the black belly of the horizon darkened, “unless they kill us before we can raise their scalps.”
The Shoshone smiled at that, his eyes brimming, then pounded a fist twice against his left breast and pointed that hand into the distance at the narrowing gap between the Blackfoot and their pursuers.
“Yes, two hearts,” Titus replied with a roar as he pounded his fist twice against his own breast and smiled at this old friend. “Two women. Two old warriors. And two scalps we must take.”
Just as they both shrieked with a feral cry at those icy-blue lowering clouds, the Blackfoot raiders suddenly boiled into action. The enemy horsemen reined this way and that into the captured herd, splitting the Crow ponies in half, then even more pieces, as the raiders divided and divided, and divided again—a few warriors taking a small bunch of the horses and slowly peeling off from the direction they had all been taking together.
“I must follow the Red Coat!” Titus shouted.
The Shoshone nodded. “It is good! You see the one riding beside your red coat?”
“The one wearing the headdress with one buffalo horn?”
Slays grinned, his eyes hard. “That one, I remember from the taking of my woman.”
“They go together,” Scratch cried happily.
“So will we!”
Five of them. That Red Coat. And the Buffalo Horn Headdress. In addition there was an elkskin painted an earth yellow. Then a faded, green-striped blanket. And finally a buffalo robe decorated with wide bands of earth-paint color running its full width. Five would not be so many that he and his old friend could not whittle them down once they caught these Blackfoot. Five had never been too many for a man who put his head down and kept on coming. Nothing else a man could do when he found he had nothing left to lose.
Magpie. His sweet little Magpie all growed up and married, a mother too. And that oldest boy of his. How he had already made his mother proud. One day soon he would cast his eye on a girl and take a bride—perhaps even this coming spring, when the days lengthened and the weather warmed and a young man’s blood pounded hot and strong in his limbs. Holds the Fight would father his own children. And so the blood of one tired old warrior would be reborn again and again and again, and again. If Titus had not made his son stay behind, chances were Holds the Fight would never have known the pleasure a woman could bring a man, never experienced the joy of holding his own newborn child naked in his arms, all arms and legs and screwed-up red face staring into his.