Ride the Moon Down

25

“Come no closer!” Strikes-in-Camp bellowed at the other Crow. “Stiff Arm, you must come no closer!”

The muscular warrior shuddered to a halt, bewildered by the command.

“See to the white man,” the taller Crow ordered. “He is wounded.”

For a moment Bass stared at his brother-in-law, wondering why he demanded the other warrior to stay back too. That didn’t make a damned bit of sense if Strikes-in-Camp’s bunch had been out stealing his traps. They had him two to one … but he suddenly remembered that this was his wife’s brother. All Scratch wanted was to have his traps returned. If these bucks just gave them back, he’d figure it was settled.

Then Scratch looked down at the shaft piercing the meat of his right arm and settled back into the snow with a grunt. As Stiff Arm came to a stop to stand over him with that dripping scalp in one hand, Bass grumbled, “Hold the end of the arrow. No—your hand must be near my arm.”

With the warrior bracing one end of the shaft, Titus seized the other end of the bloody arrow, gripping it where the cherrywood shaft protruded from the arm. He took a breath, held it in his lungs, and snapped downward with a loud crack.

“Pull!” he cried as the breath gushed from his mouth with a hot pain.

The younger man yanked the fletched end of the arrow through the white man’s arm.

It took a moment, but the wound’s fiery river subsided to the point where Titus dared to flex his wrist gently, slowly bend his fingers. Lucky that the shaft hadn’t cut anything but meat, he thought, relieved that everything still worked.

“We must see to Strikes-in-Camp,” he suggested as Stiff Arm helped him to his feet.

But Strikes-in-Camp held out his arm, gesturing for them to halt where they were as he himself took another step backward.

Both of them stopped, bewildered. Titus asked, “Just give me my—”

“This one,” Strikes-in-Camp interrupted as he pointed to the dead man lying at his feet, “you will see he has the disfiguring sickness. The other one too,” and he kicked the second Blackfoot’s body.

While Stiff Arm released Bass’s wrist and inched backward in trepidation, Scratch tried to make sense of this shocking news.

“You don’t know if they’re sick—”

“Both of them touched me,” the warrior argued. “This one who held me from behind, he rubbed his face against mine as we struggled—”

Bass swallowed, getting to his feet as he gripped that right forearm. “Let me see him.”

Now the tall Crow fell silent for a long moment, then said, “You white men, is it true you cannot get the disfiguring sickness?”

He had only doubt. “I have heard some white men become sick—but they do not die.”

“Like the Indian always dies?”

“It will not kill me,” Titus explained, taking a step toward the warrior. “Let me see the Blackfoot.”

Strikes-in-Camp took three steps to the side, away from the two bodies. Bass walked over, propping the wounded arm across his chest, then knelt beside the first body. The enemy’s sallow face was just beginning to erupt with angry red pustules. Not so bad, he thought. Perhaps the Crow had little to fear.

He knelt over the second dead warrior who lay on his belly. Turning him over with a toe, Bass jerked back the instant he got a look at the man’s face.

“He was already a dead man,” Strikes-in-Camp said woefully.

“Yes,” Bass replied, gazing down into that face of death—a ghastly, oozing death mask worn by a man with a day, perhaps little more, left to live.

“Stiff Arm, you must return to the village,” the tall warrior instructed. “Tell them what happened here. Bring men with you to see to our dead.”

“Y-you will stay here with the bodies until we return?” Stiff Arm asked.

He shook his head sadly. “No. I cannot be here when the others return. You tell them I have gone somewhere to think about the death that is coming to me.”

“Where?”

Strikes-in-Camp peered at Bass. “Perhaps I should go to see my sister and her children once more before I die.”

“That … that might kill them,” Bass warned. “Just as it would kill your own wife and children to be close to them.”

“Yes,” he admitted quietly. “I cannot be with any of my family while I die.”

“They would grow sick too—”

“Then I will have to die alone,” the warrior said.

“No,” Bass argued. “No man should die alone. We can go to my camp. We can make a shelter for you near ours, where you can be close enough to see your sister, but not so close you will make her sick. And I will care for you when you no longer can care for yourself.”

“That will be the hardest of all for me,” Strikes-in-Camp admitted. “A man unable to take care of himself.”

“I will tell your wife where to find you,” announced Stiff Arm.

“But no others,” Strikes-in-Camp ordered. “No one else must come … so there can be no chance of our people all dying.”

“Where is your camp?” Stiff Arm asked the trapper.

Bass turned, pointing at the hills to the northwest. “Half a day’s ride from this place.”

“Then it is a long day’s ride from our village,” Stiff Arm said. “I will bring them so they can look at you one last time.”

Strikes-in-Camp drew himself up and took a long, rattling sigh. “Bring them quickly, Stiff Arm. I want them to see me with my own face … not this face of a horrible death. Just look upon this one, the face of our enemy. That is no way for my family to remember me.”

She could hear her daughter whimpering. Magpie sobbed in their Crow tongue, softly muttering a few words at a time.

But it was difficult for Waits-by-the-Water to hear what the girl was saying somewhere behind her on another pony. The attackers had knotted a wide band of thick blanket material around her head, blinding her eyes, covering her ears with the heavy dark-blue wool.

“Water, Mother,” Magpie said. “Tell them to give us water.”

Then she heard a loud slap, immediately followed by her daughter’s shrill wail.

“Magpie—be quiet,” she chastised the child. “Be strong and do not do anything to make them hurt you.”

Just as she had to remind herself. Be strong.

Waits licked at her puffy, cracked lip, tasting the blood again. It reminded her that she had put up a fight before they subdued her. From the corner of her eye she had seen the stick swinging at her; then it all went black. When she awoke, there were at least four of them, more—all around her. One was on his knees between her legs, pulling his breechclout aside, pulling out his manhood.

She had screamed at what they were about to do. Someone slapped her hard with a flat hand. That’s when she tasted the first blood. In the background Magpie was shrieking. She could see her daughter being held back by one of the warriors who had a handful of the girl’s hair. Magpie would be forced to watch what was about to happen to her mother.

Suddenly, as the warrior rocked himself forward between her thighs, another attacker raced up on a horse—shouting, barking angrily at the rest. The warrior between her legs snapped back at the man on the pony—both of them speaking in a tongue she did not understand. Then those who had gathered around her to shame Waits-by-the-Water started to inch back, cowed by the anger of the one on the pony.

That’s the moment she bolted to her feet and lunged for Magpie, hoping the two of them could make it to the thick timber, where it might be hard for the enemy to follow them—

But the one on the horse wheeled his pony, stabbed his heels into its ribs, and caught up to her just before she reached the warrior yanking her daughter about by the hair. She heard the sound more than felt the impact.

Waits stumbled, tripped, and went to her knees near Magpie’s feet. Blinking to clear the brilliant shooting stars, Waits turned slightly when she heard the pony snort. That’s when she saw the rider swinging the bow again. It cracked against her cheek and across the temple.

She did not awaken until now, finding her wrists bound together and lashed to the pommel of the saddle she could feel with her fingertips. Around her ankles they had wrapped more bands of rawhide, tying her feet together beneath the pony’s belly. Why were they stealing her and her daughter? Who wanted the two of them alive—

Then she remembered, and her heart sank.

“Magpie,” she said, her puffy lip and swollen tongue making it difficult, “where is Flea?”

“Safe,” the girl whispered.

“One of these attackers stole him too?”

The girl was a long time in answering. “N-no.”

Magpie must have known how that news would stab her mother. Waits reminded herself to keep her voice quiet. In little more than a whisper, she asked, “Not with us?”

“No.”

Her greatest fear was realized—to lose another loved one. Especially her husband or a child. The tears began to gush, her nose running as she fought down the thoughts of doing something that would make these attackers kill her, just kill her now that they had murdered her son.

“They killed … killed your brother?”

“No—”

“W-where then?” Her heart wanted to believe. “Is he alive?”

“Yes.”

Her heart leaped. “Magpie—you must tell me now—”

“Safe.”

“Later, you will tell me where your brother is.”

Ti-tuzz wouldn’t know where to find them, could not know what had happened to them. And her husband surely wouldn’t realize what had become of Flea. The boy wasn’t with their attackers, yet he was safe….

How she prayed that her daughter wasn’t lying to her only to make her feel better. Oh, how she prayed that Flea was still alive.

“Waits-by-the-Water!” Scratch called out as he led Samantha and Strikes-in-Camp off the hillside toward his camp.

He wanted to give them warning that they were approaching, so that she could gather the children, keeping a safe distance from her brother. Bass realized how the suddenness of seeing Strikes-in-Camp, after the man had prevented them from entering the Crow camp for so long, would likely cause Waits to rush headlong to embrace her brother.

But that could not be.

“Waits-by-the-Water!” he cried again.

Simply could not be, since he dared not think of her becoming sick … dying horribly, in pain, doubled over with a fever, the flesh on her face pocked with scabrous pustules. Eyes sunken, lifeless even before a merciful death took her—

Through that last copse of trees he saw the camp.

Everything scattered. What wasn’t broken appeared to be torn, ripped, destroyed.

Their shelters toppled, canvas slashed. A sour ball collected in the pit of him.

“Where is she?” the warrior asked in a low voice as he came to a halt beside the trapper, his eyes looking over the ruin.

“Something happened … I don’t know—” Then he suddenly kicked out of the saddle and landed on the snow.

He was on his knees, studying the prints—ponies and moccasins.

“Here. Look,” he said to the warrior, motioning him down from his pony. “Tell me these are not Blackfoot.”

Joining the white man on the snow, Strikes-in-Camp studied the tracks, peered off to the northwest. Then looked at Scratch’s face. “Blackfoot.”

“Not just the warriors who attacked you?” It was starting to sink in. “More?”

The warrior stood. “Perhaps all belong to a large war party who came to Absaroka to make war on us.”

“And the warriors who attacked your hunting party when you …” Bass paused, his eyes narrowing, wanting to select his words carefully. “When your hunting party was on its way back to the village?”

“Only part of the raiders.”

“How many?” Bass demanded of the warrior.

“No more than ten here. Maybe less.”

He watched the Crow stand, follow the tracks to the far side of the camp where he stopped, gazing off through the trees. Bass joined him.

“Ten horses left here with riders on them, going in that direction. They took the rest of your ponies with them.”

Bass whirled, peered through the lodgepole at his makeshift rope corral. “Damn,” he sighed. “The rest of my ponies.”

“Only ten ponies have riders.”

After a moment of studying the hoofprints, Scratch stood. “I count only ten too. No matter: I will chop them off like limbs from the trunk of a tree—one branch at a time … to kill one each time they stop or make camp. When I have chopped off a few limbs, then I will attack the rest.”

“I am going with you.”

“But you are going to …”

“I am not sick yet,” Strikes-in-Camp protested.

“No,” the white man argued, wagging his head. “I can’t chance taking you along with me. When you do grow sick—too sick to ride—then you will be like a heavy stone that I must drag along as I chase the enemy.”

He watched how his words slapped the proud warrior. In his heart Bass struggled with the thorny dilemma.

“Strikes-in-Camp, you would force me to choose between staying to help you while you are dying a terrible death,” Scratch explained, “or leaving you behind to die all alone, when I ride off to find your sister and our children.”

“Your children, yes,” Strikes-in-Camp repeated bravely. “I am not sick now, Ti-tuzz. If we delay—then I just grow sicker each day I can be following the enemy.”

“Stay here and wait for Stiff Arm,” Scratch said, turning to place a hand on the warrior’s shoulder. “When he brings your family here, you can have him return to your village and bring a war party along behind me—”

“That would be the hope of a fool’s hen,” the warrior scoffed, shrugging the white man’s hand from his shoulder. “You want me to believe that they would have a chance of catching up to you when it won’t be until tomorrow evening before they reach here? Then Stiff Arm would need another day to return to the village, a third day to get back here again … they will be at least three days behind you—”

“I don’t have time to argue with you. I must leave now,” Bass interrupted sternly, wheeling around. He was bitter, angry—wanting only to find his family and draw the blood of those who took the loved ones from him. For now, all he could do was wound with his words. “I cannot wait on those who kept my wife from rejoining her people. Nor can I take a sick man who will be dying along with me.”

“Do you have any more guns?”

Titus stopped, slowly turned back to gaze at the warrior. “I left some for your sister to protect herself, our children. But the enemy probably—”

“Find them, white man.”

“Yes,” he said. It made a lot of sense. “I will need every gun I can carry when I catch up to those Blackfoot.”

“We will need every gun.”

“Fm not taking you!” Bass roared, remembering how twice he had told Josiah Paddock he wasn’t coming along on a journey into danger.

“No. This is not yours to decide,” the warrior said evenly. “I am a man. And a man chooses how he wishes to live. How he will die. She is my sister. Her children are my relations. Your family is my family, white man. Your people have killed the tribes along the Missouri with this sickness. Then your people sent their sickness into the Blackfoot nation … and now your people have killed me too—”

“I never meant for any of that to happen …” His voice cracked with deep sorrow. He felt the salty burn at his eyes.

Strikes-in-Camp took a deep breath and looked squarely at the trapper. “I do not blame you for any of this. You are my brother, so you must try to understand: this is how I choose to die. We are going together to find our relations.”

“T-together?”

“This is not a quest of one man alone against the many.”

“No, you are right—this is not for me to do alone.” Titus reluctantly accepted the warrior’s offer, ripping his mitten off his right hand, holding out that painful, wounded arm between them.

“I will ride at your side, fight at your side,” Strikes-in-Camp declared courageously as he laid his forearm against the white man’s, gripping Bass’s wrist. “And when I can no longer sit atop my horse … then … you will have to go on alone.”

The bastards hadn’t left much behind.

Blackfoot damn well poked through it all, deciding what they were going to load onto the packhorses, discarding the rest after they had ripped, crushed, or broken what remained in their destructive rage. Good thing the war party hadn’t wanted any of Bass’s medicines: small skin pouches of his medicinal plants they had tossed about the camp. But they had pitched his bundle of wiping sticks in the fire where the hickory wands had become nothing more than charred cinders, the way they had cut up what little they had left behind.

He couldn’t find his pelts. Nor the packsaddles he used on the extra ponies. The Blackfoot must have strapped the saddles onto the horses, lashing the beaver to the frames. They might be figuring to trade them off at Culbertson’s Fort Piegan.

Most everything of value had been ripped from him. Losing beaver again, the way he had when Silas, Bud, and Billy ran off with all that he had worked so hard to earn. But once more he realized it wasn’t so much those autumn plews … after all, he could replace them in another season, still have something to show for the year by rendezvous set for the Popo Agie.

It was his woman, the most important person in the world to him. And those children. There would never be another two who could compare to Magpie and Flea.

Bass realized he could put his possibles back together. He could make do with what traps he had left. And he could catch enough beaver to trade for what he needed across the next few seasons as he got himself back on his feet … but he never would be the same again if he didn’t get those three back.

And to do that, he could not delay in putting to the trail. Bass could not wait for more Crow warriors to join him. He and Strikes-in-Camp would have to leave at once and make their play against the war party alone.

Already on Samantha’s back was a robe and blanket, what he had taken along when setting out to confront the Crow thieves in their village. From the looks of it, the Blackfoot hadn’t taken anything with them to keep Waits-by-the-Water, Magpie, and Flea warm during their ride, to wrap themselves in at sundown when they halted for the night to eat, to sleep, to celebrate their captives, to …

Damn, Titus reminded himself as he looked about the debris left of his camp. He would have to hold those thoughts at bay, or he’d drive himself mad thinking of what those warriors would do to his wife—make himself so crazed that he couldn’t plan and plot, and do it all carefully enough so the Blackfoot wouldn’t have time to kill their captives when he caught up to them.

He figured it had to be as if he’d stare straight down the barrel of his rifle, concentrating while he placed the front blade in the bottom notch of his buckhorn rear sight, blotting out everything else—he had to force himself to think about what to do, and when to do it, how to pull this off despite the odds … rather than how the Blackfoot would abuse a woman prisoner.

“We should go before it gets any later,” Strikes-in-Camp reminded him.

Bass realized he had been staring at the litter of their camp, the scattering of torn robes, canvas, and blankets. “Yes,” he answered quietly. “Those bushes—see if there is anything they left behind, anything we can use.”

The Crow turned without a reply, moving quickly to the timber, peering into the brush. Bass knelt at the fire pit, poking at that bundle of hickory ramrod cinders. They would be hardest to replace. He kept spare flints in his pouch. Some extra balls and three spare horns of powder in what he had packed on Samantha. But he didn’t have any spare wiping sticks should he break the one carried in the thimbles beneath the barrel of his rifle.

That was one thing a man couldn’t do without in these mountains. The bastards had burned them, either knowing full well what they were, or the Blackfoot had pitched the bundle into the fire just to destroy what they didn’t care to pack along—

He turned at the strange sound, finding Strikes-in-Camp, staring into the warrior’s eyes … as if Titus believed the Crow had just made that muted, out-of-place noise. More of a whimper. Perhaps the warrior had been suddenly struck by the prospect of his own horrible death—

There it was again. But the whimper did not come from Strikes-in-Camp.

With his heart rising in his throat, Bass scrambled to his feet and sprinted to the rubble of blankets and robes scattered back among the brush across the camp from where he and the Crow had been talking. When Titus heard the next faint, muffled sob, he went to his knees, as if his own legs had been knocked out from under him. To left and right he tossed the scraps of wool blanket, the ruin of the buffalo robes, flinging them over his shoulders until he heard that unmistakable sound again. Clearer still.

Yanking the last scrap of robe back, Titus stared down at the tiny body.

Flea lay on his side, curled up, sucking on the knuckles of one hand, blinking at the cold, gray light as his father bent over him.

Bass started to weep as he gently stuffed his hands beneath his son’s small shoulders and hips, pulling the boy against his breast. A few feet from the white man’s elbow, Strikes-in-Camp knelt, on his face written the sadness that he could not reach out to touch his little nephew.

“Now we know they have only two,” Bass croaked his wife’s tongue, swallowing hard at the knot in his throat.

The Crow stood when the white man got to his feet. “What will we do with your son now?”

“We’ll take him with us.”

“No,” the warrior said firmly. “I am a father, like you. We cannot take a young child when we leave to trail the Blackfoot.”

“Then you must take him back to your village,” Bass demanded.

“I am going with you,” the Crow argued. “There are Blackfoot to kill, scalps to lift—because I am going to die soon. I have vowed to take many of the enemy with me when I depart for the other side.”

“Then the boy must go with us.”

“You cannot take him,” he protested. “A young child does not belong when you are going on a war trail—”

“Neither of us are going back to the village,” Bass interrupted. “We are going after the Blackfoot. Flea will go with me.”

“Think of what you are doing. Let me go alone, and you can come along after you have taken him to the village. Bring the rest of the warriors Stiff Arm went to fetch.”

“Flea is going with me, and we are going now,” Bass turned, cradling the boy, searching the ground, kicking at the scraps of blanket and robe, hoping to find the remains of the cradleboard.

Strikes-in-Camp darted in front of the white man, stopping a dozen feet in front of him, throwing up his arms to get Titus to stop. “The child will catch the sickness. If not from me, your son will catch the sickness from the Blackfoot we are chasing.”

Looking down at his son’s face, Scratch said, “Maybe he will not die because he has some of my blood in him.”

The warrior asked, “Are you willing to risk that?”

For a long moment Bass stared down at the boy’s face. “It’s the best I can do, Strikes-in-Camp. If I go back to make him safe, then I won’t be able to help the other two.”

“Are you willing to risk the life of your son to get the others?”

“I think that is what my heart feels,” he admitted. “If Flea loses his mother, his sister too … then I don’t think he would want to go on living either.” Bass took a deep breath. “I know I will not want to go on if we cannot save the woman, the girl.”

“Then you have decided,” the warrior declared flatly, a look of determination written across his face. “A father, a husband, has made his choice for his family. As it should be.”

“Yes,” he said, looking up from the child’s face to gaze into the Crow’s eyes. “I will bring all my family back … or I will die with them.”

He tied the last knot in the rawhide strings that bound the scraps of blanket around the boy’s body. After swaddling Flea with some small pieces of the buffalo robe, Bass had encased the child in a large scrap of blanket, then wrapped loops of rawhide around and around the makeshift cradle. From those strips of rawhide, he hung two loops. Now he stood with the bundle in his arms and carried the infant over to his horse where he dropped the loops around the large round pommel on his Santa Fe saddle.

Only the child’s face remained uncovered. Scratch bent, kissed the boy on the cheek, then tugged the folds of blanket over the tiny copper face to protect it from the cold and the wind.

“My dog,” he said to the Crow, turning from the horse—remembering. “You see any sign of him?”

The warrior hunched over some bushes, his arms stuffed into the brush, pulling branches aside. “No blood. No body. The dog is not here … but this is.”

He watched Strikes-in-Camp pull a trade gun from the vegetation.

“Is this yours?” the Indian asked, holding it out between them.

Bass took the weapon, examined it, and said, “Yes. I left several weapons with her. They were loaded.”

“My sister must have thrown it here.”

“Why didn’t she use them?”

The warrior bent over another clump of brush, fishing with an arm. “I can only think that Waits-by-the-Water believed she could not shoot the firearms without endangering her children. So she threw them away as the warriors rode into your camp—so the Blackfoot wouldn’t have the weapons, and protecting the little ones from the enemy.”

Strikes-in-Camp straightened again, this time holding one of the big horse pistols.

“There’s bound to be more,” Bass said, laying the trade gun and pistol on a piece of the torn blanket. “Search—search it all. Maybe the war party didn’t steal any of the weapons before they ran away.”

Standing at some more bushes, the warrior asked, “Do you think we scared them away before they could search more carefully?”

“No,” and Bass wagged his head. “If they had someone watching, they would have seen there were only two of us. I don’t think we would have scared off so many. They would have waited for us.”

“Why did they go so quickly—before they found all the firearms, before they discovered the little boy?”

Scratch looked at Flea, wagging his head as he said, “Only thing I know is that finding my son and these weapons are a good sign the First Maker is ready to give me this one shot at getting my family back.”