Buffalo Palace (78 page)

The man they called Ol’ Frapp twisted round on that leg he was kneeling on, spitting a ball out of his gopher-stuffed cheek into his sweaty palm. “Gottammit! Don’t you rink I know ebbery wund of you niggurs?”

“We’ll make ’em come, Frapp!” Elias Kersey shouted from the east side of their horse-and-mulc breastworks.

“Don’t you worry none ’bout us!” another growled from Bass’s right.

“Here they come again!” arose the alarm.

Titus rolled on his hip, gazing behind him at the far side of the narrow oval, where some of the defenders hunkered behind a stump here or there. Then his eyes slowly climbed over the heads of these twenty-three other beaver trappers as they all sat entranced, eyes fixed on the half-a-thousand. Sure was a pretty sight the way they had been forming themselves up over yonder after every charge, gathering upon that wide breast of bottom ground where the horsemen knew they were just out of range of the white man’s long-barreled flinters.

About as savvy as Blackfoot, Bass ruminated as he watched the naked riders spill out in two directions, like a mountain torrent tumbling past a huge boulder plopped squarely between a creek’s banks. Foaming and roiling, building up force as it was hurtled into that narrow space between the boulder and the grassy bank itself, huge drops and narrow
sheets of mist rising from the torrent into shafts of shimmering sunlight—

“Shoot when you’re sure!” Jake Corn reminded them.

“One nigger at a time!” Reuben Purcell cried out as the hoofbeats threatened to drown out every other sound in this river valley. “One red nigger at a time, my mama Purcell allays said!”

Sure as spit, these Indians were getting smart about the white man’s guns, maybe hankering to have a white-man gun for their own.

From their hair, the way they made themselves up, Bass figured them to be Sioux. He knowed Sioux. A bunch of them had jumped him and Sweete, Waits-by-the-Water, and their young’uns couple summers back when they were returning down the Vermillion, making for Fort Davy Crockett on the Green. In that scrap Titus had been close enough to see the smeared, dust-furred colors of their paint, close enough to smell the old grease on their braids and forehead roaches. Not till then—no, he’d never seen a Sioux before.

But he and Shad had hacked their way out of that war party and made a desperate run for the fort.

Sioux.

If that didn’t mean things was changing in the mountains, nothing else did. To think of Sioux on this side of the divide. Damn, if that hoss didn’t take the circle—

Titus picked one out. Made a fist of his left hand and rested the bottom of the full-stock flintlock on it as he nestled his cheekbone down in place and dragged the hammer back to full cock.

Down the barrel now, that one didn’t look to be Sioux. Most of them on this end of their grand, fronted charge didn’t appear to be similar to the warriors who had jumped him and Shad two years back. He guessed Cheyenne.

The way they started to stream past, peeling away like the layers of the wild onion Waits gathered in the damps of the river bottoms, he could lead the son of a bitch a little. The warrior took the outside of the procession, screaming and shaking his bow after each arrow he fired.

Titus held a half breath on that bare, glistening chest—finding no hair-pipe breast ornament hanging from that horseman’s neck. Instead the warrior had circled several places on his flesh with bright-red vermilion paint. Likely his
white, puckered hanging scars directly above each nipple, where he’d strung himself up to a sundance tree. And a couple more, long ones, though, down low along his ribs. Wounds from battle he proudly marked for all to see. Let his enemies know he was invincible.

Bass held a little longer, then raised the front blade of his sights to the Indian’s head and eased off to the right a good yard. What with the way the whole bunch was tearing toward the white man’s corral at an angle, there was still a drop in the slope—he was surprised when the gun roared, and felt the familiar slam of the Derringer’s butt plate against his right shoulder.

What with the muzzle smoke hanging close in the still, summer air, Bass didn’t see if his shot went home. But as the parade of screaming horsemen thundered past his side of the breastworks, he did notice that a handful of ponies raced by without riders. One of those animals had likely carried the big fella with the painted scars.

Other horsemen farther back in the stream were slowing now, reining this way and that to avoid a horse that had plunged headlong and flipped, pitching its rider into the air. Other horsemen slowed even more; two by two they leaned off their ponies to scoop up a wounded or dead comrade, dragging his limp body back across the coarse, sun-seared grass that crackled and snapped, through the powdery dust that rose in tiny puffs with each hoofbeat, the dead man’s legs flopping over every clump of sage, feet crazily bouncing, wildly sailing against the pale, pale summer-burnt-blue sky.

Few of their arrows made it all the way to the breastworks they had formed out of those sixty or more animals. The half-a-thousand clearly figured to make this a fight of bravery runs while the waterless white men slowly ran out of powder and lead.

At first some of the trappers had hesitated dropping all the horses and mules. They bunched the nervous animals together, tying them off nose to nose, two by two. But in those first frantic, wholesale charges, the Sioux and Cheyenne managed to hit enough of the outer ring of animals that the saddle horses and pack mules grew unmanageable, threatening to drag off the few men who attempted to hold on to them. Arrows quivered from withers and ribs and bellies and flanks.

Then the first lead balls whistled in among Fraeb’s men.
Damn, if they didn’t have some smoothbore trade guns, fusils, old muskets, English to be sure. Maybe even some captured rifles too—taken from the body of a free man killed here or there in the mountains. One less free trapper to fret himself over the death of the beaver trade.

Arrows were one thing, but those smoothbore fusils were a matter altogether different. While they didn’t have the range of the trappers’ rifles, the muskets could nonetheless hurl enough lead through their remuda so those Indians could start whittling the white men down.

There were a half-dozen horses and mules thrashing and squealing on the ground already by the time the St. Louis-born German growled his thick, guttural command.

“Drop de hurses!” Fraeb shouted. “Drop dem, ebbery one!”

Many of those two dozen mountain men grumbled as they shoved and shouldered the frightened animals apart in a flurry. But every one of them did what they knew needed doing. Down the big brutes started to fall in a spray of phlegm and piss as the muzzles of pistols were pressed against ears and the triggers pulled. A stinking mess of hot horse urine splashing everyone for yards around, bowels spewing the fragrant, steamy dung from that good grass the horses were on two days back.

In those first moments of sheer deafening terror, Bass even smelled the recognizable, telltale odor of gut. Glancing over his shoulder, he watched as the long coil of purple-white gut snaked out of the bullet hole in that mule’s belly where the animal and other horses tromped and tromped and tromped in nervous fear and pain, yanking every last foot of gut out of the dying pack animal’s belly.

He had quickly poured some powder into the pan of his belt pistol, lunged over a horse already thrashing its way into eternity, and skidded to a halt beside the very mule that had been his companion ever since that momentous birthday in Taos.

Stuffing his left hand under the horsehair halter, his fingers white as he jerked back on the mule’s head, he shouted out in what he hoped would be a familiar voice, a calming voice. As a horse went down behind him, a slashing hoof clipped him across the back of his calf and he crumpled to his knees. Gritting his teeth with the pain as he got back on his
feet, Bass pulled on the mule’s halter again and shouted as he pressed the muzzle of the short-barreled .54 just in front of the mare’s ear.

“Steady, girl,” he whimpered now. Tears streaming. Anger. Regret, too. Lots of regret. Then pulled the trigger.

He held on to the halter as she pitched onto her forelegs, her back giving a few kicks until she rolled onto her side. Nestled there in the shadow of her body lay the dirty, grass-coated rumple of her gut.

Titus knelt down at the head, staring a moment at the eyes that would soon glaze, watching the last flexing of the nostrils as the head slowly relaxed, pulling away from him.

“Good-bye, girl,” he whispered, the words sour on his tongue.

Bass patted the mule between the eyes, then quickly vaulted to his feet and wheeled around to reload. To continue the slaughter that was their only hope of living out this day.

He remembered another mule, the old farm animal that had grown old as Titus had grown up on that little farm back near Rabbit Hash, Boone County, Kentucky, beside the Ohio River. And then he felt the cold stab of pain remembering Hannah. The best damned four-legged friend a free man could ever have in these here mountains. Hannah—

The trappers dropped them all. Fraeb and some others hollering orders above the tumult. They all knew what was at stake. The resisting, dying animals must have smelled the dung and the piss, smelled the blood of their companions already soaking into the dust and sun-stiffened grass of this late-summer morning. They dropped them one by one, and in twos as well. Until there was a crude oval of carcasses and what baggage the men could tear off the pack animals and throw down in those gaps between the big, sweaty bodies that would begin stinking before this day was done and night had settled upon them all.

Twenty-four of them pitted against half a thousand Sioux and Cheyenne. Not to mention a hundred or more Arapaho who showed up not long after the whole shebang got kicked off with the first noisy, hoof-rattling charge. They must have been camped somewhere close and come running with all the hurraw and the gunfire.

Titus grinned humorlessly and pushed aside the one narrow braid that hung at his temple. The rest of his long, graying
hair spilled over his shoulders like a shawl. Tied down with a faded black silk bandanna, holding a scrap of Indian hair over that round patch of naked skull from long ago. He thought on the bunch that had caught him alone many, many summers before—and stole his hair. Remembering how he eventually ran across the bastard who had taken his topknot—and lifted that small circle of hair from the crown of the warior’s head. Recalling how good it had felt to take his revenge.

So he grinned: maybeso some of the bastard’s relatives were in that bunch watching the Sioux and Cheyenne have at the white man’s corral. And pretty soon those Arapaho would figure it was time to grab some fun of their own.

Glancing at the sky, Bass found the blazing sun and figured it was not yet midmorning. That meant they had a long, long day ahead behind these packs and stinking carcasses. And with the way the first of the women were bristling along the crest of that hilltop yonder, the warriors weren’t about to ride off anytime soon, not with the whole village showing up to chant and sing them, on to victory, on to daring feats of bravery, on to suicidal charges that would leave the body of one warrior after another sprawled in the grass and dust of that no man’s land all around the white man’s corral. Bodies too close to the rotting breastworks for other riders to dare reclaim.

Titus blinked and wiped the sweat out of his eyes with the sleeve of his faded, grease-stained calico shirt. And saw the flecks of blood already dried among the pattern of tiny flowers. The mule’s blood. Bass glanced quickly at the sun once more, wondering if this was the last day he would ever lay eyes on it.

Would he ever see the coming sunset, as he had promised himself summers and summers ago when he rode away from that scalping, a half-dead shell of a man clinging to Hannah’s back? Would he ever see another black mountain night with its brilliant dusting of stars as he lay by the fire, staring up at the endlessness of it all, Waits-by-the-Water’s head nestled into his shoulder after they had just coupled flesh to flesh? Would he ever again see the children when they awoke each morning, clambering out of their blankets and tottering toward him as he fed the fire and started the coffee—eager to fling their little arms around his neck and squeeze him with
what he always took to be utter joy in having another day to share together.

Together.

How he wished he was with the three of them now.

How thankful he was that he had compelled Waits to remain behind with the little ones. If the three of them were here with these twenty-four fated men now …

With the breakup of that last pitiful gathering of a few holdouts in the valley of the Green River, Bass had watched old friends disperse on the winds. Some just gave up on the mountains and pointed their noses back east to what they had been. Others, like Meek and Newell, set a new course for Oregon Country, where the land was fertile and free. But a hardy few had determined they would hang on, clinging to the last vestige of what had been their finest days. What had been their glory.

No more would the big companies dispatch their trapping brigades into the high country. There was no money to be made in trading supplies for beaver pelts at a summer rendezvous on the Wind, the Popo Agie, or some fork of the legendary Green. Bridger and Fraeb formed a new partnership and brought out that last, undersized packtrain from St. Louis. Afterward, while Bridger led a small band of trappers north, Fraeb and Joe Walker started for California with a few men.

Bass had marched his family north with Gabe’s undermanned bunch. And when Bridger turned off for Blackfoot country, Bass had steered east for Absaroka and the home of the Crow. There would always be beaver in that country—even if he had to climb higher, plunge deeper into the shadowy recesses than he had ever gone before. And, besides, traders like Tullock were handy with their post over at the mouth of the Tongue. He’d continue to trap close to the home of his wife’s folk, trade when he needed resupply, and wait for beaver to rise.