Buffalo Palace (49 page)

“Ought’n make that Ashley trader’s eyes shine to see all the packs we’ll have to trade ’im come summer—right, Silas?” Tuttle exclaimed.

Cooper’s face turned grave as he explained, “Lately I been thinkin’ of just where we go come summer.”

“Wh-where we go?” Serious concern crossed Billy’s face as he continued sputtering, “Ain’t w-we headin’ down to Sweet Lake to m-meet them company boys for ronnyvoo?”

With a shrug of a shoulder and scratch at his chin, Silas replied, “Once’t I got it all worked out up here in my noggin’, then I figger it’s time to tell y’ three the way it’s gonna be for summer trampin’.”

“Trader’s likker and all them niggers joinin’ up after a long winter of it,” Tuttle mused. “Ronnyvoo is what I been thinkin’ on more an’ more ever’ day my own self, Silas.”

“G’won now an’ don’t none of y’ worry a lick ’bout it,” Cooper confided with that mouthful of big yellow teeth. “When I figger out just what we’re gonna do—I s’pect my idee’ll damn well make sense to the hull durn lot of y’.”

So it was that the three continued to let the one do their thinking for them. Where to go for the beaver, and when to move on to the next camp. Which bands to winter with and what Injuns to avoid. All the trails and passes, every inch of the routes they had traveled, moseying down one stream and wandering up the next, all across this last year and a half—how quickly Titus had learned that Billy and Bud left nearly everything requiring a decision squarely in Cooper’s lap.

And that’s how they had come to spend this past winter
with the tall and haughty Crow, a season known among that tribe as
baalee
, “When the Ponies Grow Lean.”

From that mountain valley where Titus learned all he ever cared to know about grizzlies last autumn, the white men had continued easing their way on north, down into the fertile lowlands, where many of the streams draining the high country were dammed here and there, the timbered and sheltered places converted into deep ponds where the industrious flat-tails constructed their beaver lodges. There, too, late one autumn day, they had spotted the first Indian they had seen since rendezvous.

It had started off snowing earlier that morning, no more than an inch or two of fine, dry flakes. Nothing at all like the heavy, wet, icy snow that Titus had known back east. By afternoon, as the four of them saddled up once more and set out to check their traplines, the thick charcoal blanket of clouds had even begun to scatter and lift. A few shafts of brilliant light touched the valley here and there with gold, shimmering against the new, pristine snow.

“How far you figger it is till we reach this here Yallerstone country we aimin’ for?” Hooks asked as the horsemen eased up out of the willows and onto the flats again, across the narrow creek from their campsite.

Cooper wagged his head, staring off. “Got no idea how much farther it be. Just that it still lays north some.”

“A handful of days,” Bass offered abruptly with such conviction that he even surprised himself. It took a moment before he noticed the way the other three had turned to regard him in wonder. A bit self-conscious, he added, “No more’n a week.”

“That true, Silas?” Tuttle inquired, eyeing suspiciously.

“How the hell’d I know? I never come through this way!” Cooper snapped; then he glared at Bass. “So tell us just how the hell y’ think y’ know.”

“Don’t,” Bass answered. “Not for certain. Just feels like it ain’t all that far.”

Turning back around in his saddle, Silas grumbled, “I s’pose we’ll just have to see about—”

“L-lookee there, Silas!” Hooks interrupted with a sputter.

The other three looked where Billy was pointing. Off to the north on the brow of a hill sat a half-dozen horsemen, something on the order of a mile away, maybe a little more. They sat there motionless as statues, as if they had always been there on the crest of that rise.

Tuttle whispered hoarsely, “W-where’d they come from?”

“Keep moving,” Cooper said, his voice gone quiet despite the great distance between the two parties.

“We just let ’em know we see ’em, eh?” Bud asked.

“I s’pose that’s the make of it,” Cooper agreed.

Billy dragged the greasy wool of his capote sleeve across his lower face and asked, “What you make ’em to be, Silas?”

“They ain’t Blackfoot,” Titus declared instead.

Flicking the younger man a glare, Cooper answered, “They ain’t Blackfoot—that’s as plain as paint.”

Tuttle asked, “How come you say not?”

“Blackfoot wouldn’t let us see ’em,” Silas replied.

To which Bass added, “Damn right: Blackfoot’d just sit off somewhere and watch us, maybeso wait to lay onto us somewhere up the trail.”

“You figger it that way, Silas?” Hooks said, turning to Cooper for confirmation.

“I figger this young’un here might be right on that, first whack.” Then for a moment Cooper studied the distant figures there against the backdrop of that lifting gray sky: loose-hair and feathers, scalp locks and fringe tussled with the tease of every little gust of breeze that crossed that hilltop. “Yeah—Scratch likely be right, fellas. This here got the feel of Crow country. And I figger them Crow just lookin’ us over to see what we’re all about.”

Bass inquired, “Ever you been to Crow country?”

“Not this far south,” Cooper explained. “We come on down the Yallerstone with Henry’s bunch many a year back. Got as far as the mouth of the Bighorn. But I ain’t never been south from there.”

Billy nodded. “Yessirreebob—this here’s new country to us all!”

“What you s’pose is up now?” Tuttle asked.

They were watching as the half-dozen horsemen all turned away together and slowly disappeared over the backside of the hill.

“I figger we’ll find out soon enough,” Cooper answered, his words doing damned little to allay any apprehensions.

But to play things smart, Silas sent Billy and Tuttle back to camp with orders to bring in the pack animals and sideline them—just in the event those six horsemen decided to romp on through and drive off a few mules and horses for themselves.

For the rest of that afternoon Cooper and Bass never strayed from eyeshot of one another: most often Silas was the one to stay in the saddle, watching and listening, attentive to the middistance, while Titus checked each one of the group’s sets, pulling out a beaver here and there if one of the wary animals had stretched his rodent luck enough. They were back at their camp to rejoin the others well before twilight as the temperature began to slide rapidly and the western sky became a burnished autumn umber—bringing with it cold enough to cause a man’s thoughts to turn to buffalo robes and warming his feet by a fire.

For the next three days, as watchful as they were, not one of them saw a telltale sign of any horsemen. It was almost enough to make a man disbelieve he’d seen anything of horse-mounted warriors that winter afternoon as the sky cleared and the sun broke through.

Then came the fourth morning.

As was usually the case, Bass awoke before the others in the dark, cold stillness of predawn. Dragging the buffalo robe and blankets around him as he shifted closer to the fire ring, he punched life back into the coals, filled the coffeepot with icy water from the trickle still flowing in the nearby creekbed, then nudged the others before he moved off to the mouth of a nearby ravine where he had picketed Hannah and his horse right in camp. Being the first up most every morning just naturally saddled Titus with the responsibility of freeing up the stock from their picket pins, usually put out to graze on the downwind side of camp some distance away, taking the animals to water while the coffee heated.

After returning from the creek with Hannah and his saddle mount, tying them to a span of rope strung between two trees where he had made his bed, Titus headed off toward the copse of old timber where the rest of the stock had been picketed for the night.

He was breathless by the time he sprinted back into camp to find the others just sitting up in their blankets, rubbing grit from eyes and scratching one place or another on their dirty anatomies.

“The horses! They’re gone!”

Cooper rose to one knee as the robe slipped off his shoulders, turning to stare right at the mule and horse. “Pray y’ tell me what the hell those are!”

Huffing to a halt, Bass braced his hands on his knees, heaving for air at the same time he tried to explain. “Not them … I didn’t … put mine down … with your’n.”

“What’re y’ trying to say?”

“Rest of the stock’s gone.”

“Gone?” Cooper repeated. “Y’ mean y’ found they all just pulled up their pins an’ moseyed off last night?”

“Unh-uh,” Titus replied. “They didn’t pull up pins and mosey off—”

Silas leaped off the ground, fists working and angry. “Goddammit! Tell me!”

“They was took!”

Squinting hard as he stood glowering down at the shorter Bass, Silas demanded, “How the hell y’ so sure they was took?”

“I see’d tracks.”

“Horse tracks?”

“No,” Titus answered. “Mokerson tracks. Lots of ’em.”

The three of them had followed Scratch to the nearby grove, where they read what story the hard, brittle grass and flaky soil had to tell them. More than a dozen of them by a reasonable count—at least ten, anyway … all crept into the stand of trees together, spread out, and began silently cutting the picket ropes from the pins driven securely into the hard ground. One by one the horses and mules had been led away in the direction the thieves had come on foot—until they reached a spot about a mile
away, where it was plain to see the warriors had tied their own ponies.

Back and forth over the ground the four of them moved, bent at the waist, stopping to kneel from time to time, studying. But not one of them studied the ground as much as Titus Bass. The way the moccasins curved tightly down from the big toe along the tops of the other toes at a sharp angle. Except for the size of each print, and perhaps the depth of each print and the length of stride—those factors accounting for the varying height and weight of the thieves—the moccasins were all made the same: although sewn by different women, they all appeared to be cut from some very similar pattern.

“Lookee here, fellas,” Bass said as he laid his own right foot down beside a clear impression of a thief’s right foot.

As the others came up, Titus slowly lifted his own moccasin.

“What the hell y’ got to show me?” Cooper snapped.

“Look,” Bass repeated, squatting to point at the thief’s print. “See how this’un’s shaped like this, here an’ here.”

“Yeah,” Hooks replied. “So?”

“See here on my print I just made,” Bass instructed. “It don’t look the same, does it?”

“I be go to hell and et for a tater!” Tuttle gushed, kneeling beside Bass and pointing. “It ain’t the same, Silas.”

Wheeling on Bass, Cooper spat, “S’pose y’ go and tell me what good that’s gonna do us, Scratch.”

With a shrug Bass said, “No earthly good a’tall.”

Fuming, Cooper declared, “Then why all the preachin’, y’ weasel-stoned pup?”

“Just showin’ you something I figgered out,” he said as Cooper wheeled away angry. “Figgered out … all on my own.”

Titus stood there watching the backs of the other two join Silas Cooper’s as all three stomped off for camp—on foot. The wind punched right out of his sails, and with no one wanting to share in the joy of his personal discovery, his shoulders began to sag as he followed in their wake.

For the rest of that morning the four of them worked
feverishly at hiding from view and prying eyes what beaver they had taken that season, caching the packs of plews and what excess plunder they couldn’t pack off now, stowing all of it here and there within the thickest clumps of willow and alder—as out of sight as they could make it. Then they covered their sign the best they knew how, dragging branches over their footprints so no tracks would point the way to their cache of beaver and camp goods.

With Hannah and that lone saddle horse swaybacked beneath all their blankets and robes, along with their cooking gear, some coffee, flour, beads, and vermilion, in addition to several extra pounds of powder and a few bars of bullet lead, the four finally set out on foot shortly after midday … following the backtrail of the horse thieves.

Most all day Cooper muttered under his breath until they made camp that first evening. As twilight sucked the last warmth out of the sky, Scratch took Hannah’s long picket rope and tied it to the wide leather belt holding his capote around his waist when he curled up in the robes and blankets, his feet toward the fire. Billy Hooks did the same with the saddle horse. They were not about to chance losing these last two animals to whatever thieves roamed that country. That first tug, even a faint tussle on the ropes, would serve as the alarm.

By the time it was slap dark that frigid autumn evening, Silas, Scratch, and Tuttle were asleep. Each in turn would be awakened through the long night to stand his watch: to listen to the distant call of the owls on the wing, the cry of the wolves on the prowl and the yapping of the nearby coyotes; to sit alone and feed the fire while the others snored. Alone in one’s thoughts of women and liquor, remembrances of old faces and young breasts and thighs. To think back as the cold nuzzled more and more firmly around a man, here in the marrow of the Rocky Mountains.

The following morning they awoke to a lowering sky. The wind that had been puffing gently out of the west quickly quartered around, picking up speed as it came out of the north. With no other choice they walked into the brutal teeth of that wind until early afternoon when the clouds on the far horizon began to clot and blacken, hurrying
in to blot out the sun. Within an hour icy sleet began to pelt them, coating everything, man and animal and all their provisions alike, with a thin, crusty layer of ice.

By sundown they were exhausted, forced to stumble on foot across a slippery terrain, leading the mule and horse up and down creekbanks and coulees, forced to search for more open ground where the footing wouldn’t be so treacherous—but where they knew they might be easy to spot by the horse thieves. It turned out to be the sort of day that reminded Titus just how quickly the cold could rob a man of his strength, the sort of icy cold that might even come close to stealing his resolve and will to go on.