Ride the Moon Down

19

“I think you should’ve hightailed it outta here while you had your chance, Scratch,” Jim Bridger huffed as he scurried up in a crouch.

Bass watched his old friend settle in beside him at the breastworks. “And leave you boys to have all this fun?”

At Titus’s other elbow Shadrach Sweete said, “Maybeso we ought lay back on Titus, Gabe. I been jab-bin’ him ’bout it since he come running in here.”

“I don’t rightly think you’re an idjit,” Bridger declared with a grim smile. “Just figgered you for more sense when it comes to fighting Blackfoot.”

“I fit my share of the bastards, that’s for certain,” Titus said. “Ain’t had a year in these mountains what Bug’s Boys hasn’t troubled me and mine.”

“I tol’t Titus he could still slip off when it gets dark tonight,” Sweete explained.

“Shadrach,” Bass said with a grin and a doleful wag of his head, “you goddamn well know them red niggers got us surrounded, so there ain’t no slipping off come dark for any coon.”

“The man’s right, Shad,” Bridger agreed. “There ain’t gonna be no leaving for any of us now. If there’s gonna be a fight with all these here bastards—I for one am sure as hell glad to have Titus Bass and his guns here with us.”

Scratch nodded at Gabe with appreciation. That simple gesture was all the thanks he needed to express for those words from an old friend. Sweete himself patted Bass on the shoulder, then turned to the side, staring over the brush and log breastworks the brigade had hastily thrown up the day before.

The very day Titus had ridden into the brigade camp, making a midwinter’s social call on old friends.

For hundreds of miles around, the land lay locked in winter, frozen and silent. From time to time over the last couple of months Scratch had ventured out to try trapping one river or another, believing that he would find some beaver out of their lodges. But with the hard freeze that held on week after week, even the Yellowstone had turned to ice.

Restless as a deerfly in high summer, Titus finally decided he would mosey upriver to visit Bridger’s camp. Before the hard freeze had descended upon this country, Scratch had bumped into some of Gabe’s men scouting for sign of beaver a few miles up Pryor Creek from the Crow village. They had informed him where the brigade had made its camp on the north side of the Yellowstone, just west of the mouth of Rock Creek—no more than a long day’s ride from the mouth of the Pryor.

A week later he had hugged Magpie, kissed Waits-by-the-Water, and given the little boy-child a squeeze before he was off. Sometimes a man just needed to move.

At first Scratch had smelled the wood smoke, then spotted the gray tatters of it clinging among the tops of the leafless cottonwoods upriver. From the sideslope of a hill he had spotted the brigade’s camp no more than two miles ahead. It was late of the afternoon, which meant he was saddle weary, hungry, and half-froze for coffee, not to mention how keenly he anticipated the palaver and storytelling they’d do around the fire that night.

He had nudged Samantha into a brisk walk, reining her down the gentle slope toward the bottomland where he lost sight of the camp as he emerged from the brush along the south bank of the Yellowstone and dismounted. He had dropped the reins and stepped onto the ice by himself. A good ten yards out he stopped, then jumped and stomped, assured the stuff was thick enough for them both.

Skirting some spongy patches, Bass had gotten the mule to the north bank, the wood smoke grown all the stronger in his nostrils, when his ears caught a sound that shouldn’t have been on that cold wind. Not that trappers didn’t yelp and whoop and holler themselves when they took a notion to … but those voices sure didn’t sound like white men at all.

He had swung into the saddle cinched on Samantha’s back, pitching his leg over the thick bedroll of two robes and a blanket, and was just settling his left foot in the wide cottonwood stirrup when a screech jerked him completely around—his heart suddenly in his throat as more than two dozen warriors on snorting ponies broke from the brush thirty yards ahead of him. Smack-dab between him and the brigade camp.

It was die right there, or go under making a stab at pulling his hash out of the fire.

Without thinking, Titus had banged his heels against the young mule’s flanks. Samantha bolted away, eyes big as beaver dollars, ears standing straight and peaked as granite spires in the nearby Beartooth Mountains.

Damn, if he hadn’t surprised the bastards by charging right at them. They had milled a moment, ponies whirling as they reined up, then split in as many directions as there were horsemen. Bass had Samantha into the brush again, whipping the mule back and forth through the cottonwoods before the warriors could regroup and turn around to pursue him. But there had been more ahead of him before he’d made it to the end of the gauntlet—wondering every step of the way what the hell he would have-done if he had decided against charging on into that camp, or if he hadn’t had those old friends to run to.

“Hol’cher fire!” some man had bellowed as Bass burst from the willows and buckbrush, lying low along Samantha’s neck, clinging like a fat tick to the mule that carried him on a collision course for the piles of deadfall, logs, and leafless brush Bridger’s men were stacking up on all sides of their compound at that very moment.

“It’s a g-goddamned white man!”

“Bridger!” Scratch had screamed as he neared the breastworks. “Sweete! Ho, Meek!”

“Damn betcha it’s a white man!”

Of a sudden a half-dozen of them had shoved their way into the buckbrush wall they had been throwing up, suddenly heaving against the thorny barrier to force open up a narrow path just wide enough for a man to slip through sideways … then forcing it a bit wider … and finally just wide enough that he knew Samantha would make it.

It seemed as though a many-armed creature had reached up to drag him out of the saddle, so many hands were raised as he brought the mule skidding to a halt inside the brush corral … a sea of faces, all of them fuzzy and out of focus, blurred by the wreaths of frost that clung about every head.

“I’ll be the devil’s whore if it ain’t Titus Bass!” growled Joe Meek.

Standing just that much taller beside Meek was Shad Sweete. “Come to pay us a social call, have you?”

Bass had gotten his land legs back there on the frozen, compacted snow, working his knees a moment to assure himself they would hold his weight after the long, cold ride. “Nawww, you soft-brained niggers! I come to tell you boys you’re plumb surrounded by Blackfoot!”

Wrinkling his brow with the gravest look of worry Titus could remember ever seeing, Sweete had replied, “Blackfoot? Blackfoot? Where the Blackfoot?”

“We don’t see no dram-med Blackfoot!” Bridger roared with laughter as he had come stomping up, holding out his bare hand.

“You niggers are lower’n a bull snake’s belly, thinking you’re so goddamned funny!” Titus had grumbled as he’d knocked Bridger’s hand aside and they embraced quickly. “Man comes riding in here to help you boys, Blackfoot stuck on his tail like stink on a polecat … and all you can do is rawhide him like you’re doing to me?”

“Don’t take no offense,” Sweete pleaded with a grin as big as sunrise. “Me and Joe didn’t mean nothing by it. Glory, if we ain’t all pleased to see your butt-ugly mug, Titus!”

“And his guns,” Joe added, slapping the thin man on the back. “If’n there’s a man what shoots center and kills Blackfoot, it be Titus Bass.”

“We can sure stand to have us ’nother gun, Scratch,” Bridger observed grimly, much of the good humor gone.

“From what I saw back yonder, you boys need ever’ gun you can get,” Bass replied.

Sweete shrugged. “Last we figgered a while ago, Gabe and me cipher we’re on the downside of odds twenty to one.”

With a low whistle, Scratch wagged his head.

“Good thing you didn’t catch these’r arrers yourself,” George W. Ebbert commented as he stepped up behind Bass.

He turned, finding “Squire” Ebbert stopping at the rear of a prancing Samantha, three arrows quivering from her bloody flanks. Quickly he snagged hold of her halter, holding it tight just below her jaw as he stroked her muzzle, scratched a moment between her eyes and ears, cooing at her. Then he stepped back to her hindquarters, inspecting the three wounds.

“I figger I can quit all three of ’em outta her,” Titus proposed. “Ain’t a one too deep the shaft’ll pull off.”

Bridger winked, commenting, “Just didn’t give ’em a good ’nough target, Scratch.”

“Don’t ever plan to, neither.” He stood at Samantha’s head again, stroking her neck. “You boys got your stock in here with you?”

“All of our critters,” Sweete explained.

“I’ll drop my bedroll and possibles off yonder by those trees—then I’ll cut these here arrows out. Please tell me you’ll have some hot coffee for me when I’m done.”

Dick Owens poured him a cup as Scratch walked up more than a half hour later. The sun had gone down before Bass had begun his bloody work on the mule’s flanks, and it had grown cold as all get-out. He sipped at his coffee, holding it under his face to let the steam warm the frozen rawhide of his cheeks and nose, sensing the painful return of feeling to his fingertips as he clutched the tin cup in both hands.

Finally he asked those close by, “How you fellers get yourselves in such a fine fix as this?”

Around that fire Shad Sweete and some others began to relate the story of how forty of Bridger’s brigade had run into a small band of Blackfoot, some twenty of them sniffing around in Crow country, a few weeks back. Those forty trappers had rushed off to ambush the war party, pinning them down on a narrow, timbered island in the middle of the Yellowstone, then nearly wiped them out.

“But something tells me a few of them niggers got away,” Scratch declared, “and they rode hard for home to bring the rest of these devil’s whelps.”

Squire Ebbert nodded. “They left the dead ones behind—four bastards the rest shoved under the ice covering the river. But from all the patches of blood on the snow and the scratches of them travois they made when they hauled off their wounded, easy to tell we cut ’em up purty bad.”

“I’ll say we cut ’em up real bad,” Shad snorted. “Next day when we had us a look where they forted up, we found plenty of brains and blood.”

“That war party didn’t have a horse left between ’em after we run off their stock,” Meek explained by the fire. “So they was dragging them travois outta there on foot.”

“Way we tallied it,” Sweete reckoned, “there wasn’t but a handful got outta there ’thout a scratch.”

“Don’t look like it matters now,” Bass grumped. “If’n only one got away to bring the others, you’re still in the soup, boys.”

“Look who’s in the soup with us!” Ebbert bawled, slapping his knee.

“I’m glad he is,” Sweete observed.

After sipping some more of his steamy coffee before it went cold with the rapid drop in temperature, Scratch asked, “So how long you fellas been hunkered down here?”

“Three days now,” Meek disclosed. “Ever since we run off them Blackfoot, Gabe’s been like a nervous ol’ woman: ever’ day he’d go up on that bluff yonder with his spyglass. Looked over the country far and wide.”

“Only a matter of time afore they come to even the score,” Sweete groaned.

Early that next morning on his climb to the bluff, Bridger discovered the plain downriver boiling with Blackfoot, with even more warriors streaming across the ridges. Hurrying back to camp, he started his men building the breastworks of deadfall and buckbrush, laboring long and hard to hack clear a wide no-man’s-land completely around their fortress. Inside, the trappers chopped down nearly every cottonwood for the walls.

Then yesterday Bridger had slipped out to learn what he could of the Blackfoot, discovering that even more of the enemy were arriving, seeing that the warriors had moved their camp no more than two miles from where the white men waited out the brutal, subzero cold.

By that third day the sixty-man brigade had a bulwark that stood almost six feet high, enclosing a square some two hundred fifty feet to a side. If they were going to die there, they sure as hell planned on making it tough on the Blackfoot to rub them out.

“Goddamn ’em and their war songs,” Sweete grumbled beside Scratch now. “They been playing them drums ever’ day they had us surrounded.”

While the intense cold settled into his every joint this evening of his second day within the breastworks, Titus had to admit those never-ending drums were starting to bother him too as the trappers sat in the fading glow of that winter twilight. Listening to the distant singing, shouts, and high-pitched shrieks, Bass chuckled and said, “You’re ’bout as grumpy as a bear ’thout your sleep, ain’cha?”

“Cain’t none of us sleep much since they showed up,” Bridger explained as he came up at a crouch. “Shad’s got good reason to be grumpy—he’s allays been the one made sure we always had half the boys awake while the rest got some shut-eye.”

Night fell on the Yellowstone valley, a second coming of darkness for Bass here among Bridger’s sixty. Men came and went around the fires burning at the bottom of pits scooped out of the sandy soil so none of them would be backlit as they moved about their fortress. More than two dozen of the men had already curled up in their robes near one or another of the ten fires, desperately trying for some sleep because they were scheduled to go on watch later that night.

Bass lay there in a cocoon of his own robes and blanket, shuddering until the fur finally warmed with his body’s heat. For the longest time he could not get comfortable enough to sleep, listening to the low voices of those keeping a watch at the walls, the snuffling of the cold animals gnawing on scraps of peeled cottonwood bark nearby, the crunch and whine of footsteps made upon the trampled snow. And through it all he thought of Waits-by-the-Water, how she was faring with Magpie and her newborn brother.

He wondered when the First Maker would show him a name for the child, then brooded that he might never make it back to the Crow village to give that name to the boy.

There wasn’t a man among those sixty-two of them who didn’t know the deck was stacked against them. At his last count Bridger announced there had to be more than a thousand Blackfoot ready to charge the breastworks. Chances were the warriors had worked themselves up with the singing and dancing and drum pounding for better than three days so they’d attack in the morning—the fourth. Plenty of horses and guns, powder and blankets to win as the spoils of battle when they wiped out the white men.

He thought about how grim the mood had become just that afternoon as the sun sank in the west and the trappers saw just how clear that terrible night would be, driving the temperatures far below zero. It grew so cold the water in the trees froze, and they began to pop. From time to time through the night a big cottonwood split as the cold continued to plummet—booming like that throaty twelve-pounder at Fort Union when it had raked through the cabins where the Deschamps clan took cover. Smaller trees popped like the smoothbores these Blackfoot traded off the English north in Canada.

How he wished he were back beside his woman. Smelling her skin, feeling himself grow hard and hot against her flesh. How he missed her. How he would miss her if this were the end.

Scratch knew he had to stay there among friends who were glad to have one more man, one more gun. If these men were going to hunker down to the bitter end, taking as many of the bastards as they could with then) when the end came … then Bass decided he belonged there.

After all, there was no better place for a man to reach the end of his string than among his fellows. No better time to have his candle snuffed out than in giving his life while protecting his friends—

“Bass!” the voice whispered sharply in his ear.

Instantly coming out of the thick fog of sleep, blinking his eyes, ripping back the buffalo robe, and poking his face into the cold blackness, he found Osborne Russell kneeling over him.

“Bridger sent me for you.”

His mouth was as pasty as the scum of bear tallow at the bottom of a week-old kettle. “Yeah,” he groaned. “Bridger—”

Suddenly Titus realized something was different.

The whole damned fortress was bathed in an eerie crimson light. The pale-red glow shimmered and pulsed, turning Russell’s face, his squat beaver hat, the upturned collar of his buffalo coat … everything tinged red as fresh blood.

Titus was scared right down to his marrow. But it wasn’t the cold that made him shiver as he kicked off the robes and blanket to stand.

“W-where’s he?” His teeth chattered, clacking more from fright than cold. Scratch admitted he hadn’t been this scared since Asa McAfferty had first chattered about hoodoos and malevolent spirits slipping through that crack in the sky from the other side of existence.

“C’mon,” Russell said as he snugged his hat down over his ears.

There wasn’t a man asleep now. Every one of the sixty-one either stood watching the sky, or sat dumbfounded in his robes, having been awakened by the others.

“How long this been going on?” Titus asked with a gulp.

Meek turned at his approach. “Just started.”

“Damn, it’s almost purty,” Scratch whispered quietly. “If’n it didn’t scare the piss outta me.”

Then he realized he did need to relieve himself and turned away to the breastworks. He urinated on the brush, not once taking his eyes off the dancing, shimmering lights that slowly extended their crimson paint across more and more of the northern sky.

“Ever you see something like this?” Sweete asked as Bass stepped up beside him.

He wagged his head.

“Neither’ve I,” Bridger agreed.

“Damn! Lookee there!” Levin Mitchell exclaimed nearby.

At the very center of the corona the lights no longer merely pulsed. Now to the east of north, bands of crimson lights began to stream skyward from the edge of the earth—brilliant fingers of red, rust, orange, and blood-tinted gold. Every streamer of color wavering, pulsing, expanding, and diminishing, then expanding again as the trappers murmured among themselves.

“Listen,” Bass said after a long time of watching the heavens.

“To what?” Meek asked.

“I don’t hear a thing,” Russell commented.

“That’s just it,” Titus told them. “I ain’t heard them goddamned drums since you come woke me.”

“I believe Scratch is right,” Bridger declared. “Sons of bitches ain’t pounding and dancing no more.”

“They see’d this sky too.”

“Bound to, Scratch,” Shad said. “Lookee there—them red lights are brightest over in their part of the sky, off to the east yonder.”

For a long time Titus brooded on the heavenly show, then said, “This here gotta be some big medicine to them Blackfoot, fellas. The way Injuns read sign—this bound to be ’bout the biggest medicine any of them niggers ever laid eyes on.”

In all his natural-born days, this eerie display of the northern lights had to be the most frightening exhibition of celestial fire he had ever witnessed. Up to this moment the most dramatic night phenomenon he had seen had been back in the autumn of thirty-three, when the sky rained fire. One shooting star after another, a handful at a time, almost from the moment the sky grew dark enough to spot the starry trails right on till dawn when the coming light made the sky grow so pale the meteor shower was no longer visible.

Remembering how Josiah’s little boy had cried with wonder and fear that night … Joshua.

Bass wondered on him now. The child would be … close to four years old. Walking and talking, likely riding a horse too. How he hoped Josiah had fared well down there in Taos with Matthew Kinkead and that free man, Esau.

Safer there were they all than he up here in Crow country where the damned Blackfoot had come to raid.

He whispered a curse on that thousand surrounding Bridger’s brigade, a breathless curse on their women and children, on their old and on their young who would grow into warriors, an especially hearty curse on their women—for it was they who gave birth to generations of fighting men.

“What did you say?” Sweete asked, stepping over.

He immediately realized he had been muttering in a whisper. “Just asking God to do something for me is all.”

“Never knowed you to be a religious man,” Shad replied.

“I ain’t, not like most.”

“You was asking God to do what?” Bridger inquired.

Scratch sighed. “I asked the same God what made that bloody sky up there to wipe out all them red niggers.”

“You a praying man, Titus Bass?” Meek asked when he stepped close.

Titus thought a moment, then said, “I s’pose I am when it comes down to it, Joe. Leastways—like I said—I’m praying God rubs all them sonsabitches off the face of the earth.”

“I figger ary man can pray for that too,” Bridger added quietly.

And quiet was just the way it remained inside those breastworks for the rest of the night. So quiet, a man could swear he could hear the hum of that northern sky as it pulsated and wavered red as blood. From downstream floated the distant songs and chants, the hearty rhythms as some of the Blackfoot pounded sticks on rawhide parfleches serving in place of drums. They too had to be watching the portent of this terrible sky.

Gradually the east began to lighten, and with the coming of dawn the brilliance of the northern lights softened from crimson to a pale rose. Eventually there were no more streaks of red in the sky as the sun made its appearance downriver. And with that newborn light Titus saw how the frightening cold had settled along the Yellowstone itself, seeping among the trees, its foggy mist clinging in dirty-white smears through the bonelike cottonwood and brush.

“Here they come!”

At the warning cry the sixty-two were instantly jerked into motion, crowding toward that wall of the breastworks where the call had been raised. No longer were these fur men quiet. First they muttered to themselves, then talked low to others nearby.

As those first ranks of Blackfoot emerged from the swirling, icy mist downriver, several of the trappers cursed. Two hundred yards. More and ever more filed behind them. It had to be just as Bridger pronounced. A thousand. Mayhaps even more than a thousand. The enemy ranks filled the wide riverbed from bank to bank, trudging toward the white man’s fortress on foot through the snow, using the Yellowstone’s unobstructed frozen surface to make their approach.

“This be the day, boys!” Bridger bellowed.

“Take some of them niggers with you!”

All around Bass the trappers were screwing up their resolve now—yelling at one another with that sort of encouragement doomed men give to friends and comrades as the end looms near. At the center of the breastworks the trappers’ squaws began to keen quietly, the young half-breed children whimpering pitifully.

“Hell is where I’ll send as many as I can!” Shad roared.

Popping a half-dozen lead balls into his mouth for the coming fight, Titus vowed, “By God, I’ll see my share in hell a’fore noon!”

On the Blackfoot came. At the center of that first column walked a figure in a heavy white wool blanket, wearing a headdress constructed of numberless white ermine skins to which had been attached polished buffalo horns. Attached to the narrow cord of sinew between the horn tips was a single eagle feather that trembled on each wisp of cold breeze.

No more were any of the Blackfoot hidden by the fog. Now the whole of them paraded in full view of the white men waiting behind the bulwark of their brush fort. What an impressive sight they made: their faces clearly painted, feathers and scalps streaming from lances, bows, and shields, war clubs and rifles at the ready.

“You ever faced anything like this?” Meek asked.

“Shit.” And Bass shook his head. “I ain’t ever see’d this many Blackfoot in one place a’fore.”

Then, just beyond a hundred yards, the one in the white blanket waved an arm, shouting something to those around him, and that first rank of warriors turned aside. Slogging onto the snowy bank, they pushed on through the brush until they reached the open prairie as the wind kicked up old snow around their ankles and calves.

“You figger ’em to work around us, Gabe?” Ebbert hollered.

“I can’t figger ’em for nothing,” Bridger answered. “No telling what they’re about.”

It did indeed mystify the trappers to watch the succeeding ranks of the warriors follow the first. Instead of some going this way while others went that in what Scratch had assumed would be their attempt to surround the breastworks, the Blackfoot all followed the one in the white blanket. Eventually the entire war party had abandoned the frozen river for the open prairie more than a hundred yards from where the trappers stood waiting the attack.

By then the first warriors to reach that open ground were starting to sit. As the hundreds arrived in waves, they too settled into the snow around their leaders, forming a huge council circle in that open-air amphitheater.

“Don’t that take the chalk!” Scratch cried.

“What you callate they’re up to, Gabe?” Sweete asked.

“Can’t say as I know,” Bridger replied.

“Yellow-backed sonsabitches!” Bass flung his voice over the breastworks at the enemy.

Suddenly emboldened, other trappers began to taunt the Blackfoot. “You’re women!”

“Cowards!”

“Can’t fight us like real men!”

Titus screamed with the others, “You ain’t got no manhood!”

“Come on and fight!” Sweete bellowed.

Louder and louder the white men became in their insults. But still the Blackfoot remained in their huge war council just beyond rifle range.

“You want we should fire some bullets at ’em?” Squire Ebbert inquired.

“Just a waste for now,” Bridger declined.

Scratch agreed, “You’ll need your lead soon enough, boys.”

“Damn,” Sweete growled, “I’ll bet there ain’t one of them niggers knows any American talk.”

“Too bad they can’t unnerstand what we’re calling ’em,” Meek added.

With a grin Bass passed his rifle off to Osborne Russell. “Hold this for me.”

“What you fixing to do?” Russell asked.

Turning to Meek and Sweete, Scratch gave instructions, “You two ’bout the biggest niggers there is out in these here mountains. Both of you pull aside some of that brush wall over there.”

“What the hell for?” Meek demanded.

“Them Blackfoots don’t speak no American, so they don’t unnerstand us, right?”

“Right,” Sweete replied, still mystified.

“So I’m gonna talk to ’em in sign so they damn well know what I think of ’em.”

“Shit,” Bridger grumbled, “they too far off! None of them red niggers gonna see you talking in hand sign!”

Smiling hugely now, Scratch shook his head and said, “Them bastards bound to see my sign, Gabe!”

“C’mon, Joe!” Sweete cried, bolting away. “Help me pull this here brush back!”

The moment the two of them had muscled the logs and branches apart, Scratch lunged through. Right behind him Meek and Sweete popped through the narrow opening as every last one of the trappers surged to that wall to have themselves a good vantage point to watch Bass’s “sign making.”

Instead of stopping just outside the breastworks, Scratch kept right on going, halting only after he was more than ten yards beyond the wall—alone and in the open, where he began to attract the attention of those warriors on the outer flank of the council.

Emerging from the breastworks empty-handed, the lone white man unbuckled his belt and flung it to the ground beside him, then yanked off his elk-hide coat. Spinning about in the swirling ground-snow to face the fortress again, Bass dropped the coat and dragged up the long tail of his war shirt, tugging aside the blue wool breechclout to expose his rump. With one cold bare hand he slapped the faded wool longhandles.

From afar came the first shouts of fury. He was certain they understood his sign.

“Come kiss my ass, you yellow dogs!” he screamed as he bent over, staring between his legs at the Blackfoot. “Come kiss my ass!”

Behind Titus, both Meek and Sweete were doubled over, roaring with laughter. At the walls of the brush fort, every one of those sixty-some trappers were screaming at the Blackfoot now, many gasping for breath as they guffawed and yelled, guffawed and bellowed some more. This was damn well about as much fun as a man could have before he went under.

When his rump and bare hands grew numb from the terrible cold, Bass finally stood, wheeled about, and raised the front tail of his war shirt, grabbing his crotch.

“This here’s a man!” he shrieked at the enemy. “You ain’t got a pecker like me ’cause you’re all women!”

“Women afraid to fight!” Sweete cried behind him.

Eventually Titus picked his coat out of the snow, buckling the belt around it, then turned again, bent over, and gave his rump one last slap before he slowly trudged back to the breastworks—accompanied by the hoots and hollers and uproarious cheers of those sixty-one other men.

At the walls Meek and Sweete slapped him on the shoulders, teary-eyed, they were laughing so hard. “Up with him!” Shad ordered.

With that the two of them firmly seized the smaller man and hoisted Titus high into the air. Confused for a moment, Bass thrashed as Meek and Sweete stepped directly under him, settling the skinny man atop their shoulders where he caught his balance.

The cheering grew even louder as two dozen more emerged from that narrow gap in the breastworks, pushing back on it to carve an entrance wide enough for those who carried Bass aloft. Many of the trappers were already growing hoarse from shouting and laughing so lustily in the dry cold air, surging around Meek and Sweete, some bending over and slapping their own rumps to copy how Bass had taunted the enemy.

Back inside the breastworks, Sweete and Meek started around in a wide circle, still carrying Titus on their shoulders, when Bridger suddenly hollered above the clamor.

“Someone’s fat is in the fire, boys!”

The noise ended abruptly and Scratch leaped to the snow, hurrying to the wall with the others.

The warriors were parting slightly, allowing that warrior in the white blanket to step through their numbers. Halfway between the Blackfoot and the breastworks he came to a halt and began to wave his arms.

First one, then another, of the white men translated the chief’s gestures.

“Says they ain’t gonna fight!”

“Can’t fight us today.”

More signs were made.

“Gonna go back to his village now!”

Shaking his head in wonder, Scratch reflected, “You s’pose them Blackfoot figgered that red sky over their camp was bad medicine for ’em?”

Sweete snorted with a gust of raw mirth and said, “It sure weren’t your skinny ass what scared ’em off!”

As the white men watched in fascination, the chief turned aside and started across the bottom ground for the slopes bordering the valley, starting west for the Three Forks of the Missouri. At the same time less than half of the warriors began to move away in the opposite direction, marching downriver to the east.

“That bunch ain’t going back home,” Meek commented sourly.

“This gotta be a trick,” Ebbert said.

“We’ll wait ’em out and see,” Bridger declared.

A few minutes later, as the last of the Blackfoot were disappearing around a bend in the Yellowstone, Sweete came up and threw his arm around Bass’s shoulder. “You scared ’em off with that bony ass of your’n, Scratch.”

Thin-lipped and melancholy, Bass wagged his head. He pointed downriver. “Not that bunch, Shad. They ain’t running off for home. Them niggers is making for Crow country.”