Wind Walker (85 page)

He’d already killed the bastard who killed his woman. And before he died he’d finish off the one who had scalped Slays in the Night. That done, it didn’t matter what Green-Stripe Blanket did behind him. Hell, his mind rumbled with the thought, he was halfway to dead already. More’n that now … ’cause he was already halfway to dead when he put the Crow camp behind him and rode after these raiders, knowing in his marrow this was the last time he would ride away from his wife’s people.

Real Bird had forewarned him, told the white man of that awful dream. But across the last three days there wasn’t a one of the Crow warriors who remembered the old prophet’s vision of doom for Titus Bass. There was simply too much misery and loss, too much blood someone must atone for, that any man who had long ago heard of Real Bird’s vision would think to warn the old trapper that he best stay in the village with his children and protect the camp. But here the old rattle-shaker’s dream was, come to pass—

He wearily pulled back on the trigger, heard the
klattttch
of the hammer as it fell against the frizzen. But the pistol didn’t fire. Nothing more than a muffled
phfffft
of what little powder lay in the pan. For an instant he stared down at it, finding the black grains mixed with icy flecks of snow, realizing everything had been ruined when he tumbled off his horse into the trampled snow beside the frozen beaver pond—

The warrior’s cry caused him to jerk up, but not in complete surprise. He had expected this.

Already Painted Robe was lunging his way … then suddenly stopped no more than five feet away and, for some crazed reason, stood staring down at the white man. His eyes wild, he yelled something to Green-Stripe Blanket, but Bass did not care enough to worry about the one still behind him. He heard that wounded warrior trudging on the crusty snow, heard his steps as that unseen one, who wore the skullcap of a wolf tied around his head, circled to his left until he stood far back of Painted Robe’s shoulder. That’s when Painted Robe raised the scalp up at the end of his arm, held it straight out from his shoulder, shook it, and cursed. Finally he spit on the hair, a second time, then flung it aside into the beaver pond.

With his one good eye, Bass watched the scalplock sail through the snowy air, land among those stalks of dried, frozen rushes, tangled among them and suspended for a moment before it fell to the thin layer of dirty ice.

“You stupid, ignernt idjit,” Titus growled, finding himself renewed as he spoke for the first time to these enemies. “You figger that’s a Crow scalp, don’cha?”

Painted Robe’s eyes narrowed as he shifted the tomahawk in his right hand.

With a snort of wild, unrestrained laughter, Titus pulled free the tomahawk from the back of his belt and roared, “Joke’s on you, nigger! Joke’s on you!”

As he was attempting to raise his tomahawk and heave himself onto one foot, Painted Robe snarled and lunged forward, the warrior’s tomahawk cocking back in an arc as the
Indian loomed over him. The handles of their weapons clattered together an instant before the two men collided. Bass spilled backward, Painted Robe atop him, the Blackfoot doing his best to swing the tomahawk at the end of his wrist. Suddenly Bass flung his head forward, slamming his forehead against the side of the warrior’s jaw. Painted Robe hesitated.

And Scratch swung with his tomahawk, connecting with the back of the Indian’s head, but only a glancing blow with the side of the blade, stunning the warrior.

With a pained grunt, the Blackfoot roped his left arm around the back of the white man’s neck and yanked Bass’s head off the ground as he raised the tomahawk in his right hand, preparing to slam it down into the trapper’s face. But Titus shoved his open mouth right against the warrior’s chin, clamping down with all he was worth, feeling his teeth grinding through the thin layer of flesh and muscle, tightening on bone.

He heard the man crying out, felt the Indian’s hot breath there on his forehead as he chewed and clamped harder still, trying all the while to swing his own tomahawk with what strength he had left as the Blackfoot struggled, wriggled, thrashed—

Then Scratch felt it tear him in half.

As the white man released his grip on the Indian’s chin, he cried out in shock. The lower half of his face smeared with blood, the warrior pulled back slightly. Like the bullet wound, Bass did not want to look. He knew already. Even though he had yet to feel the pain of it, he realized he had been dealt a second mortal wound. The terrible cold seemed to envelop his whole belly as he willed his left arm to squirm free from where it was imprisoned between their two bodies, so it could rise into the air clutching his tomahawk.

One of their voices screamed as he brought down the weapon in the last, desperate act of a doomed man, driving the bottom point of the blade into the crown at the back of the Blackfoot’s head. Perhaps it was Green-Stripe Blanket
who had cried out a warning to his friend. Bass wasn’t for sure. He couldn’t see the other warrior.

Or, it might have been Painted Robe himself who screamed as he saw the tomahawk on its way and could not get his head out of its path. Or, perhaps he yelled in surprise and pain the instant the sharp blade was being driven through his skull and into his brain. Bass felt the hot splatter of blood and brain. …

But none of that mattered now as Painted Robe collapsed backward, his legs tangled with the white man’s as all strength drained out of the trapper. The Blackfoot spilled one way, Titus slowly sank onto his elbow, rolled onto his back away from the warrior, and let out a long raspy sigh.

Hard to breathe, growing harder still. His chest filling up with blood. Shot in the lights.

Gradually the fingers of his right hand crawled to his belly, feeling the amazing warmth, the gushing wetness, the bubbles of gut spewing from the deep, long, ghastly wound that had opened him up from side to side. Scratch closed his eyes, wishing he could have held Waits one more time. Wishing he could have spent just one more night lying against her before this last day had been given them both. Just one more night with her—

Sensing a presence, Scratch slowly opened his eyes, blinking his one good one until it focused on the hazy form that moved over him, then stopped. Green-Stripe Blanket stood frozen over the old man for a long, long time. Staring down at the white man. Then the Blackfoot’s hand started down for the trapper’s throat.

In a futile move, Bass seized the Indian’s wrist, held it as tightly as he could while the Blackfoot used his other hand to pull himself free of the trapper’s grip. It wasn’t hard; almost all Scratch’s strength was gone. His head flopped back into the bloody, trampled snow. Titus knew he was too weak to delay, much less stop, what was to come. But a strange calmness seeped through him as he realized death was now. Assured of it all the more when Green-Stripe Blanket
reached around the back of the white man’s head and seized hold of the collar of Bass’s greasy warshirt.

Ain’t you got a surprise comin’?
Scratch thought as he was rolled onto his side.
Figger to tear off my hat to scalp me now … an’you’re gonna find I awready been scalped!

He felt his fur hat get torn off, then started to snort with this one last joke on his murderers when the Indian suddenly dropped to a knee so he could stare intently into Bass’s face. The young warrior reached out tentatively, as if unsure of what he was about to do, then gently tugged the faded black silk bandanna off the old trapper’s head. The Blackfoot’s eyes widened … but not in fear or surprise. Instead, in something like … like recognition.

For a moment the Blackfoot’s eyes grew big with wonder, even awe, as he looked this way, then that—as if afraid the Crow war party would come racing over the brow of the nearby hills and discover him … but eventually his dark eyes came back to rest on the white man’s face once more. Not near as wide now, no longer filled with amazement. Strangely, they had grown soft.

Titus gagged, felt his riven stomach lurch as he did his best to turn his head aside, puking up a great glob of blood onto the Blackfoot’s arm, the one that still gripped him by the back of his collar. Sensing how weak he was becoming, how much the temperature had fallen since he had ridden down on these five raiders, Scratch watched with dulled senses as the Indian scrambled onto his feet, turned, and with that hand still gripping the back of Bass’s collar … started to drag the white man across the crusty snow.

Slowly, yard by yard, lunge by lunge, the young man got the old trapper turned. As the Blackfoot started up the long, shallow slope toward the stand of some saplings and taller timber, away from the rushes and willow, escaping the dirty ice of that frozen beaver pond, one of the white man’s useless legs at a time slowly straightened out and trailed along behind him. He was helpless now. No matter what the Blackfoot decided to do with his body, it could not matter. He was good as dead already.

That dirty trench of new snow he was leaving behind told the story, smeared with gobs of his blood. How he struggled to maintain enough strength to hold in the long, warm, greasy coils of his own sundered gut, warm, steaming intestine that squirted out between his hands, escaping the pressure of his arms, spilling to his left side where Painted Robe had opened him like one of his grandpap’s Christmas hogs … trailing beside him in the snow. Oh—how he didn’t want his guts to be dragged through the bloody trench up this long, sagebrush-covered slope as the fat, frozen, fluffy flakes of snow collected on his coupled arms, steaming on the purplish coil of his warm gut that he could no longer contain.

With a grunt from them both, the Blackfoot stopped. Shifted his position, then yanked on the white man once more. Then again. Finally a last time. And eventually came around in front of the trapper, seized both of Bass’s shoulders, and tugged him up into a sitting position.

He struggled to focus that one good eye on the warrior as the Blackfoot gently nudged him back now. Without protest, unable to fight, Titus sensed the trunk of the tree press between his shoulder blades. He let his head relax back against the rough bark and sighed. Listening to the sounds of the warrior as the Blackfoot moved off on the icy snow.

Titus coughed and spewed up some bloody phlegm. Nothing left in his belly to bring up but more blood. Hell, he didn’t have a belly left to hold anything—

Suddenly the warrior was kneeling close again, unfurling the red capote as Bass watched the swimming of the colors and motion. Must be the murderer’s coat, he thought. But why?

Green-Stripe Blanket gently spread the red capote over the white man’s bloody body. He tugged it down Bass’s legs and tucked it under them. Watching this ceremony with complete disbelief, Bass finally brought his one good eye again to the man’s face. The smeared paint, the high cheekbones … like so many other brownskins he had fought and killed in all his seasons in this high and terrible land.

But this man’s eyes were soft. Not like the chertlike eyes
of Yellow Paint Elkskin, or Buffalo Horn Headdress. Not at all like Painted Robe’s eyes filled with such hatred and fury. “Old man,” the Indian’s lips said.

Bass thought he shook his head slightly, heavy as it was, befuddled that he understood the Blackfoot’s language. And he tried to speak, but no sound came from his own tongue.

“Don’t talk, old man,” the warrior said, his words clear and distinct inside the white man’s head again. As if the Blackfoot spoke a passable American. “Save your breath for what must come next. You must save your breath to start your walk on the wind.”

“W-walk?” he finally uttered in a moist whisper. “Wind?”

With a nod, the Blackfoot stuffed a hand inside his blanket, reaching inside the sleeveless buffalo-hide vest he wore, where two of his fingers snagged the long, thin leather loop that was draped around his neck. Bending his head slightly, the warrior tugged the thong free of his otter-wrapped braids, on over the top of his head where he had tied a big handful of the hair at the front of his brow into a grease-crusted sprig that stood straight up, the sort of hairstyle a warrior would adapt when riding into battle, a symbol that any fighting man would understand: he was daring all his enemies to attempt to take his taunting scalplock.

With a tug, the Blackfoot finally pulled an object free from beneath the front of that buffalo-hide vest Bass could now make out was sewn from the reddish skin of a young buffalo calf. Straining, his vision fixed on what the warrior held out between them, the object just inches from the white man’s eyes.

An eagle wingbone whistle, suspended from its thong and gently nudged by the icy wind that spat sharp snowy arrow-points against their exposed flesh.

But … not just any eagle wingbone whistle. The half breath seized inside what Titus had left of his lungs. This … this whistle appeared familiar. Wrapped in porcupine quills of oxblood red and greasy yellow. A simple pattern of flattened, colored quills that he could not help but recognize.

Eventually his moist, swimming eye climbed to the warrior’s
face. Something like a smile seemed to cross that face as the Indian realized the old man was studying him. The Blackfoot reached up
to
his chin, yanked on the thong that tied the wolfhide cape on his head, and pulled it off.

“Do you know me now, old man?”

There it was again. That perfect white man’s American talk he magically heard inside his head when the Blackfoot opened his mouth, moved his lips and tongue. Even though other, foreign sounds came out of the warrior’s face, like the garbled tangle of some foreign language … what Bass heard inside his head was nonetheless American talk he understood perfectly.

“I-I don’t know you,” and he hacked up more of the thick blood congealing at the back of his throat. Finally he stared at the whistle, and whispered, “But … I know th-that.”

“It was my brother’s,” the warrior said inside Bass’s head. “You killed him many, many winters ago.”

He stared at the whistle, realizing what the Blackfoot said must surely be true. That was where he had seen it before, having taken it off the dead man he had eventually buried in a tree, wrapped in a warrior’s red blanket.