Wind Walker (80 page)

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.”

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!”

“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—