Wind Walker

SIX

“Magpie!”

As he shrieked his daughter’s name in desperation, Titus Bass lunged across the clay floor to land on his knees beside his son.

“How bad you hurt, boy?”

Flea pulled his fingers away from the gash on his head, a trickle of blood oozing its way down to his left eyelid. “They steal my sister.”

Spinning around in a crouch at the sound of footsteps and clatter of wooden stools, Bass growled, “Shadrach! You hold these bastards here.”

As Titus began to stand at the doorway, Sweete protested, “I’m comin’ with you.”

“No you ain’t,” he growled. “Stay with the boy. They couldn’t get far—”

“There, Popo! There they go!”

Flea pointed out the open door at the open compound, where the five men dragged the kicking, struggling girl across the muddy ground illuminated only by starshine and some random splotches of lamplight spilling from smoke-smudged windows.

Titus hurled himself into the doorway and screamed, “Magpie!”

One of the handful of kidnappers yelped and wrenched his hand away from the girl’s snapping mouth as the other four continued to wrestle the child, who was proving to be a blur of flailing legs and whirling arms, very much like a snarling catamount.

“P-popo!” her thin voice called to him, the frantic pitch of it almost swallowed in the immensity of the mud walls the moment that hand was torn from her mouth—but another hand cuffed her, stifling her next cry.

For an instant he began to lunge on through the doorway, then suddenly wheeled about, dashing back to the counter to sweep up the belt pistol he had laid aside just before drawing knives with the stocky Frenchman. He quickly gazed down at the cluster of men doing what they could to stem the flow of blood from his wounded adversary.

Glaring into the man’s eyes, Titus vowed, “I’ll be back to finish you.”

Dragging the hammer back on the pistol as Sweete stepped forward with his own pistol and knife drawn, Scratch leaped through the door, racing across the soggy, barren ground for those men who were just then pulling the girl toward a line of dark shadows at the back of the fort, where no lamplight reflected from the murky puddles of rainwater.

“Let ’er go!” he bellowed like a herd bull challenged by a ring of prairie wolves.

Three of the five turned as his voice reverberated off the mud walls. One man’s face went white with fear. In an instant he turned to flee toward the shadows. In his wake fled a second.

“Popo!” she pleaded again.

One of the men immediately slammed his fist into the side of the girl’s face to silence her.

Without consciously thinking about it, Scratch slid to a halt and had the pistol up at the end of his arm. A noisy explosion rocked the square. Then the big lead ball caught the man between the shoulders just as he was raising his fist to strike Magpie a second blow. His arms flung outward as he tripped over his own feet and Magpie’s too, bringing the two of them down together. A fourth man took that moment to dart away, but the fifth knelt over his bleeding companion, glanced at the American, then brutally yanked the girl to her feet.

He cackled, “You only had one shot in your pistol!”

Titus was already sprinting across those last few yards as the French-talker shoved Magpie ahead of him. Her feet slipped in the mud of a shallow puddle and she went down in a sprawl. As the Frenchman stumbled up to crouch over, yelling at the girl in a shrill voice, Bass wrenched the narrow, curved head of the tomahawk from the back of his belt, gripped the end of its worn handle in his right palm like the feel of an old and trusted friend, then cocked his arm and flung it through the air.

With that small head of the tomahawk piercing his back, the last of the attackers arched violently with a scream of agony, wrenching one arm backward as he attempted to claw at the weapon buried deep in flesh and bone … his legs went out from under him and he pitched into a puddle glazed with the black reflection of that starless night, splashing Magpie with mud and water as she began to crawl away, whimpering.

“Scratch!”

Bass did not turn at the sound of Shad’s voice until he had helped his daughter to her feet. Holding her quaking body against him, he turned to find the tall man backlit at the doorway.

“Flea there with you?” he demanded.

Shad reached out his arm and pulled the boy into the open doorway with him.

Pressing a moccasin down on the back of the man, Titus worked the tomahawk up and down several times to free it from the attacker’s back. As he cupped her chin in his bloodied hand, raising her face, Titus asked her, “Can you walk, Magpie?”

She bobbed her head with nothing more than a whimper, clutching her father for fear she might otherwise fall.

One at a time he stuffed his empty pistol and the damp tomahawk into his belt, then bent over the dead man and pulled free the attacker’s two pistols. With one in each hand, he started back for the grogshop, eye scanning the shadows for more of the cowardly kidnappers. “Stay right beside me, darlin’. C’mon.”

“We’re lucky more of ’em ain’t wearin’ guns,” Sweete grumbled as Bass herded Magpie through the open door.

“If it was so, they’d made a rush and you’d blowed a hole through two of ’em with the same ball,” Titus declared with great confidence. “If’n I know you an’ that big sixty-two of your’n.”

Sweete grinned. “Maybe I ought’n still blow a hole through two of ’em afore we leave.”

“Yes, go! Get out!” Bordeau wailed. “You better run before more of my help comes for you.”

“Help?” Flea repeated the word.

Scratch’s eye quickly raked over the room, making a tally of those here with Bordeau and the wounded man, along with the four live ones who had fled into the shadows outside. “I don’t callate how you got any more engagés working for you this time o’ year, Bordeau. Way I see it, there’s them four cowards somewhere out there, waiting in the dark to back-shoot us—an’ there’s the rest of you parley-voo pigs in here.”

“How we gonna get the young’uns out of the fort an’ back to the women?” Shad inquired in a harsh whisper.

“Oui?” Bordeau asked with a sneer as he knelt beside the wounded Frenchman again. “You kill two of my men, them both American Fur employees. Maybeso this third one too, eh?”

“I not die yet,” grumbled the wounded man who sat in a splatter of black that stained the clay floor. “I live,” and he coughed. “I live to keel this Americain!”

“Another day, mon-sur. Not this’un, you won’t.”

“We still gotta get outta here, Scratch,” Sweete reminded.

His eye fell on Bordeau. “C’mere, you parley-voo cock-bag.”

The trader stood slowly, but did not move.

“You c’mere now,” he growled as he slowly aimed a pistol at the wounded man on the floor, “or I’ll blow what li’l brains that weasel got in his head.”

“Non,” Bordeau protested.

He moved the muzzle of the pistol so that it pointed at the assistant factor. “Then I’ll blow a ball right through—”

“You kill me, monsieur,” Bordeau interrupted as he stood his ground, “Papin will not rest until you are dead.”

Titus grinned, his brain grinding on his extrication from the fort, making their escape from this North Platte country. “You’re important to Mon-sur Papin and the company?”

Bordeau jutted his chin with too much self-confidence, “Oui, very important.”

“Papin an’ all Chouteau’s money don’t mean a goddamned thing to me,” he declared as he stepped toward Bordeau and suddenly shoved the muzzle of his left-handed pistol under the trader’s chin. “But if you don’t come with me, I will splatter your brains all over the rest of your dog-sucking friends here.”

His eyes grew huge. “C-come with you?”

“You’re gonna get us outta the fort.”

“How I do that?” Bordeau asked as he shuffled away from the others, almost on his toes, that muzzle still shoved up under his chin as Bass slowly backed them toward the door.

Titus did not answer until they stepped into the light spilling out from the doorway. “Tell them, those four cowards of yours out there—tell ’em I’ll blow your shit-brains out the top of your head if they make any trouble for us getting outta the fort.”

“You cannot get away—”

With a sharp upward jerk of the pistol, Bass forced Bordeau’s chin toward the roof. “It’s up to you, parley-voo. If’n I kill you, I can grab another an’ another till I get my young’uns outta this mud hole. So you can come with me, or you can leave what you got left for brains in the mud at my feet. What’s it gonna be?”

“He’s cut up your li’l booshway,” Shad explained, sarcasm dripping from his words. “An’ there’s two more dead out there in the dirt right now. You better listen to this’un. I ain’t got no control over him when he gets like this. The man’s lived through twenty year o’ Blackfoot, Comanche raiders, and Mex soldiers too. Killing another fat, pissant Frenchman like you won’t make no nevermind to my friend—”

“Oui! Oui!” Bordeau stammered.

“Now,” Bass ordered and started them out the door, but suddenly stopped and wheeled about on his heel. “Flea, grab that sack with them geegaws and shawls in it. Bring Magpie two of them new blankets for her to carry too.”

Sweete helped the youngsters quickly gather up the trade goods, then Titus said, “Awright—let’s get outta this pigs’ hole. You bring up the rear, Shadrach. Put them young’uns atween us. Stay close, stay real close to me.”

His chin raised to the sky, Bordeau whimpered, “Wh-where you going with me?”

“To that gate. Shad, keep your eyes moving. You too, Flea. Watch the shadows—sing out if somethin’ moves. Watch those shadows behind us.”

Inside the tippling house arose a sudden clamor of voices, the scraping and clatter of wooden furniture. He glanced back over his shoulder, saw shadows flit the window, figures moving inside.

“Flea, wan’cha keep an eye on that door back there, son.”

When they finally reached the interior gate Titus ordered, “Open it.”

Bordeau slid back the iron bolt through its hasp with a grating rasp, dragged back one side of the gate, then took a step to the side. All through it Scratch never removed the pistol from under his chin.

His eyes grown hard once more, Bordeau hissed, “Now go.”

“Oh, no. We ain’t saying adieu, mon-sur. You’re gonna get us back to our camp.”

“You keeping him?” Shad said. “He’s a li’l booshway—worth something to the company. We can’t take him outta here, Scratch.”

“Reason I’ll take ’im is for what he is worth to ’em,” Titus replied, shoving Bordeau through the open gate.

“Non, non! Please, monsieur—”

“Stay close to me, Magpie. Don’t you see, Shad—we leave this bastard here, we couldn’t make a run for it fast enough afore the rest’d be down at our camp, shooting up the women and young’ uns.”

Breathlessly frightened, Bordeau asked, “You let me go at your camp, oui?”

“Likely I ain’t gonna let you go till I know they ain’t follering us, mon-sur.”

As they stopped for a moment just inside the outer set of gates and peered into the darkness, Bordeau pleaded, “Your friend said it true—you can’t take me out of here! I am important to my employers—”

“You don’t shut up, I’ll shoot you in the foot and make it hard for you to hobble back to your goddamned fort when I’m done with you miles from here.”

“W-walk? Miles?”

“I sure as hell ain’t gonna let you ride back here on one of my horses!”

He started to struggle against the old trapper. “You can’t!”

But Bass shoved the muzzle of the second pistol into the small of Bordeau’s back.

“Maybe you’re right, mon-sur,” he growled as he shoved the trader toward the gentle slope that would take them down into the cottonwood bottoms. “Maybe I just ought’n gut you right here an’ now, then go back in there an’ finish off that mouthy one I started cuttin’ on. No matter what happens to me—we just finish off all you sonsabitches right now for what you was gonna let them others do with my daughter.”

“Les filles … the girls,” and he paused a moment, “Injeean girls, they come with the tribes and maybe one of my mens, he takes a shine to one. He can buy her from her father—”

“No good, lazy bastards, sellin’ off their own blood kin,” he snarled. Jabbing the second pistol into Bordeau’s kidney, Titus said, “I ain’t the sort of nigger to trade my daughter to no stiff-necked parley-voo what ruin’t the hull goddamned beaver trade, Bordeau.”

“This night,” the Frenchman whispered, “the men think maybe to have some fun with you, is all.”

“Naw, this ain’t no fun. Dead serious to me: takin’ a man’s family—you an’ your weasel friends thinkin’ they was gonna use up my daughter, tradin’ her off from man to man like you fort loafers do down here.”

“Please, we make a big mistake!” Bordeau pleaded as they reached the cottonwood and he spotted the beckoning glow of the firelight inside the small lodge. “Cannot we be friends and you go your way?”

“More I think about it, the more this whole shebang sours my milk, Shad.”

“What’s that, Scratch?”

“You heard it: these bastards figgerin’ I’d sell off my own kin to ’em.”

Thirty yards ahead, a figure emerged from the lodge, a shadow taking shape as the sky began to mist.

“Ain’t that what the Injuns do?” Sweete suggested. “I s’pose I bought Shell Woman from her family—”

“She weren’t no li’l girl!” he snapped.

Shad swallowed, suddenly contrite. “Awright. Ain’t the same thing, not the same at all.”

“No it ain’t,” he growled. “Flea—g’won ahead. Tell your mother start packin’ in a hurry.”

“We go from here?” Magpie asked.

“Far away from here as we can,” Titus said. “Seems what trouble run us out of Taos been doggin’ us north. You go on with your brother. Help your mother and Shell Woman pack for the trail.”

“Scratch, I … I didn’t mean nothin’ by what I said just now,” the tall man apologized. “’Bout it bein’ what a man does with Injuns.”

“You got a daughter of your own gonna grow up one of these days, Shadrach.”

Sweete nodded as he turned his head this way and that, peering into the darkness. “I thought of that too. Thought how I’d feel if’n she was Magpie.”

“Maybeso it’s that way with most Injuns: sell off their daughters to the nigger can put up the biggest cache of goods,” Bass said as he jerked Bordeau to a halt near the lodge, where excited voices murmured and noises clattered.

“I s’pose white folk do it back east too, most times,” Shadrach observed. “Folks fix up a marryin’ for their daughters to the richest feller they can.”

“I ain’t back east, Shadrach. Left that all behind a hull lifetime ago,” he said, his voice almost a hush now. “An’ I ain’t like no Injun neither. Never gonna sell Magpie off for a stack of trade goods.”

“So where do fellas like us go, Scratch?” he asked. “Now that this country ain’t the same as it was an’ ever’thing’s changed on us?”

“We keep running till we get to the next place, Shadrach,” he admitted. “We can give up to their kind and give in to all the ruin they’re bringin’ to the mountains … or we keep runnin’ till we drop in our tracks. Man does one or the other. Let the ruin eat ’im up alive, or he does his best to stay one jump ahead.”

Much to Bass’s surprise, none of the French engagés showed up in the cottonwood bottoms to spoil their escape.

Between the two women and Magpie, the bedding was tied up and the lodge torn down, all of it thrown on the travois and packhorses while Flea untied the dogs and helped Shadrach get Bordeau trussed up for his ride with a length of hemp rope. It wasn’t until they were mounted and on their way out of the valley that Waits-by-the-Water finally began to sob, quietly.

“No bad come to her,” Titus reassured in English.

Yet she said in Crow, “This time. What of the next? Will you be there? Will there be too many for you?”

“She’s a pretty girl,” he whispered, trying to explain it. “Bees will always flit around the honey.”

With a long, stern glare at her husband, Waits said, “You don’t understand. Other white men, they are not like you. Not like our friend Sweete. The other pale eyes, they will always buy what they can, and steal everything else.”

Wagging his head, Titus argued in her tongue, “It isn’t just white men. For generations and generations, your people raided for ponies and scalps, taking women and children too. It isn’t only white men who steal what they want.”

She sighed, her eyes getting even more sad. “Then where will we go to protect our daughter until she chooses a man of her own—the way I chose you, Pote Ani?”

He studied her face in the dark for a long time until he answered, “I haven’t sorted that out just yet.”

“I love you, husband. I always will,” she promised. “But, more and more now, I am thinking that it was not a good day when the white man first came among my people.”

“I am wounded by your words—”

“I did not speak their truth to hurt you,” she said. “It is the other men of your white tribe who are evil and leave pain wherever they go. I know you are not like the rest of them. And, I know that this troubles you too.”

“There was a time not so long ago when I understood this world,” he told her as they rode into the dark. “I knew what to make of things. I could tell a friend from those who meant me no goodwill. But now my old life is gone like winter breathsmoke in a hard wind. I do not know people anymore, Indian or white. Perhaps you are right, woman: it is my people who have brought a great change to this land—but your red people have changed as well, changed over the summers since I left the land of the white man behind.”

She nodded and stared ahead into the night. “I know your words. While it is true that your kind brought the first shift in our way of life, many of the red people made wrong choices and became bad like those whites who came among us. Those like you and me are few—people caught between two worlds. I feel a danger growing around us like a thick fog. Where can our kind go to be safe again?”

“I don’t know where we ever will find us a place that will be safe from those who would crush in around this land—stealing what belongs to us, running off with those we love,” he sighed. “Those who are ruining everything we ever knew to be true.”

They had put trouble behind them before, but the trouble they were running from in Taos, or here along the North Platte, was unlike anything Bass had confronted before. This was not something that could be solved by simply escaping. Down to his toes, he was frightened that they would eventually discover they weren’t able to run from what he feared was coming, that the evil of it was growing more vast as they relentlessly put the miles and days behind them.

From that very night, Shadrach and his family took the lead, setting a course up the north bank of the La Ramee River, striking south by west instead of following the well-beaten road along the Platte that made for the Sweetwater and the Southern Pass. They realized they stood a much better chance of escape if they stayed off that hoof-hammered trail used by trappers and trading caravans. Riding south around the Black Hills would prove much harder on the women and the animals, but it would likely deter any halfhearted pursuit.

As twilight put a close to each of those early days of flight, they would stop and build a fire, cook a little meat, and warm some coffee before moving on another handful of miles, where they would picket the horses and shake out their sleeping robes. Without the warmth of a fire, the only illumination shed on that high, barren land was cast down by the stars—if the sky hadn’t clouded up and gone murky with the probability of rain. During their first stop each evening, Shadrach or Scratch would bring Bordeau the scraps after the rest had eaten their fill.

“You didn’t give ’im much,” Sweete commented after their first full night on the trail and the women had boiled some dried strips of elk shot the day before they had reached Fort William.

“Fat as he is, bastard won’t starve afore we set him out on his own,” Titus said without the slightest hint of mercy. “Stiff-necked parley-voo gonna have to use his wits to get back to the Platte. If’n he don’t—well, now … I hope what takes him down makes it slow an’ painful.”

Their third night of flight, low along the fringes of thick timber at the southern end of those low mountains, where they had been following the climb of the La Ramee, they were suddenly caught by a late snowstorm and ended up spending three days and nights around a fire, until the winds died and the sky cleared. Through it all, Shad and Titus spelled each other, one of them awake at all times, watchful for pursuers. By the time the heavens blued again, Scratch had grown certain the engagés from the fort had given up their chase in the face of the storm. Slowly they plodded on out of the hills, following the river until it turned due south. Only then did the men leave the La Ramee and strike out overland, continuing south by west toward that high, broad saddle between the Black Hills and the Medicine Bows where an inviting patch of blueing sky beckoned them onward. Here was a country of sage and cedar, juniper and dwarf pine. Immense patches of snow still cluttered the hillsides and especially the coulees too as the weather moderated and the high sun temporarily turned the desert into a sea of mud that sucked at hoof and moccasin alike.

“Gonna send you back to the teat of your awmighty American Fur Company, Mon-sur Bordeau,” Titus said one midday when they had stopped to water the horses at a small spring nearly hidden by a vast carpet of yellow-green juniper.

The Frenchman brought his dripping face out of the cold water. “Y-you set me free?”

“That’s right,” and Titus started working at the knots around the Frenchman’s wrists.

“I have nothing,” Bordeau whined. “You must give me a horse! A blanket and a gun too. Powder and shot. To stay alive—”

Yanking the rope from the trader’s wrists, Scratch took a step back. “Told you when we left Fort William: You ain’t wuth a red piss, much less one o’ my horses. I need ’em all—so you’re on your feet now.”

“These boots!” he whimpered. “They won’t last in this mud! Wh-what if it snows again!”

Sweete stepped up. “Give ’im a blanket, Scratch.”

He nodded at Shadrach. “My friend says to give you a blanket, keep you from freezing. And, I’ll let you have one of these here belt guns I took off the niggers was running off with my daughter.”

“Non—I need a big gun. Smoothbore! Please!” he cried, lacing his fingers together as he implored the Americans.

“You’ll get this pistol, some ball and powder,” Titus said, remaining untouched by the Frenchman’s plight. He tossed Bordeau a small horn of powder, then scraped out a dozen or so lead balls from his spare pouch. “Just don’t waste ’em all afore you get back to your friends.”

As Shad helped Shell Woman load up the children, Titus turned back to the trader. “You know where you are?”

His face was a gray mask of fear. “You can’t do this—w-we did no harm to your daughter!”

“That’s the only reason I left any of you alive, only reason I’m givin’ you this chance to warn them others,” he said flat and hard. “Now, do you want to know where you are?”

“Oui—yes.”

He bent before the Frenchman’s boot toes and pulled his skinning knife from its scabbard, using it to scratch out a crude map on the damp, flaky ground. “You foller our tracks back, you should make it fine in a week or so.”

“A w-week? Seven days?”

“’Pends how fast you walk in them boots o’ your’n. But you best watch your step when you get to them foothills off yonder where we was hit by the storm. Likely to be a mite confusing for you—all them tracks goin’ round and round the way we did till we finally found a place to make camp out of the storm. That’s when you best use your savvy and figger out the right direction.”

Bordeau was near to crying. “I can’t do this! I never was for the wilderness.”

Bass stood and stared a moment at the man. “The company brung you out to this country and they didn’t teach you nothin’ of how to last out here?”

Wagging his head, Bordeau started to reach out to touch Bass, imploring—but Titus took a step back and wiggled the skinning knife between them. “See this knife? It’s the one I used to cut your friend.”

“Gaston?”

“That’s his name? Gaston. I’ll remember it,” Scratch vowed. “I figger he’ll remember me too.” Wiping the dirt and mud from the tip of the blade across his greasy legging, Titus said, “Should’ve cut his throat an’ scalped him. Them other two grabbed my Magpie, just the same. But I wanted to get my girl and boy away from the sight of your kind quick as I could, Bordeau. ’Sides, what’s Gaston’s scalp to me anyways? I’d only spit on it afore I throwed it down at your feet.”

“Don’t leave me out here without a horse! I beg of you, monsieur!”

“Just stay on the high ground and you’ll keep your boots purty dry.” Scratch passed off the man’s plea and took a step backward. He glanced up at the sky quickly. “Got a half dozen hours of daylight, so you can cover ground if you get after it.”

Bordeau’s face slowly changed from a look of fear to one of undisguised contempt. “From this day—your life is not worth the poor beaver pelt now, monsieur. There are plenty men to look for you too. I make sure they look for you.”

“Only way you do that is keep yourself alive, Bordeau.” He turned away to take up the reins of his horse. “None of your kind ever belonged out here … but I’ll bet one day your kind will run all over this country, stinkin’ it up—”

“The company will not forget this murder!”

“Your company be damned!” Titus snapped as he stuffed his muddy moccasin in the cottonwood stirrup and raised himself into the saddle.

Shaking his muddy fist at the old trapper, Bordeau shrieked, “You do not do this to the American Fur Company!”

Pulling his horse around, Titus took a moment to watch Shad start away with the others as Flea herded their pack animals at the rear of the march.

“Your company put its murderin’ hands around the beaver trade—choking the breath an’ blood out of my way of life, makes me wanna put my hands around your throat an’ choke it outta you.”

Bordeau laid a hand at his throat. “You nevair get away with what you do to me!”

Suddenly Bass kicked his horse in its ribs, galloping back across those few yards toward the trader. Bordeau shrank backward, putting both arms up and crossing them over his face protectively. Wrenching back on the reins, Scratch stopped just a yard short of the Frenchman. He leaned over in the saddle, looming over Bordeau.

“Maybe your kind has gone and kill’t most ever’thing I hold dear, you parley-voo windbag,” he growled as he straightened in the saddle once more and nudged his horse around in a half circle. “But I’ll be damned if I let your kind kill me!”

Scratch didn’t rein up and look back at Bordeau until he had reached the top of a low rise. The trader was still standing there, unmoved, as if he intended to watch the old mountain man ride away until he finally disappeared from sight. But the moment Bordeau saw the horseman stop and turn around, he scooted into the sage and crouched as if he could actually hide himself among that skimpy brush.

“I hope that scared fool won’t come follering us,” Titus sighed. “Maybeso he does, he’ll find out soon enough there’s no way he’s gonna keep up on foot—not him wearin’ them fancy St. Louie boots of his.”

The sun was out for three more days before the next soaking storm forced them to huddle out of the wind in the lee of a ridge for a night and all of the following day. When it was plain that the sun would be rising into a cloudless sky the next morning, Bass and Shadrach got everyone up early and had Magpie cook them all a big breakfast while Waits and Shell Woman tore down the lodge and packed the travois. When he was given the word, Flea tugged on the lead rope tied around the neck of the friendly lead mare and started their extra horses toward the next wide gap, plodding ever westward.

“That the Winds?” Sweete asked late that afternoon, pointing at the jagged line of white-capped purple lying low along the horizon far to the north-northwest of them.

“Southern Pass be a long, long ride from here, that’s for sure,” Scratch said. Then he asked, “How long it been since you was up there in that country?”

“Back when ronnyvooz died,” Shad admitted. “How many winters is that?”

“I cipher it’s goin’ on seven, Shadrach.”

Sweete chuckled, “So I can figger you know the way you’re leadin’ us west?”

“I only tromped over parts of this,” he confessed. “See’d other parts of it from on high.”

It was long before Sweete asked, “Maybe we should’ve took the old trail by the Platte to the Sweetwater, across the pass and down to the Sandy.”

“Helluva long ways to get to Black’s Fork. I’ll lay we’ll be at Bridger’s back door afore Bordeau ever walks back into Fort William.”

The grin disappeared from the tall man’s face. “You know you cain’t ever show your face on that side of the mountains again, Scratch.”

Bass pursed his lips thoughtfully for a moment, then said, “I can’t think of anything ever gonna pull me back to that side of the mountains anyway, Shadrach.”

“I’ll go back, eventual’,” Sweete admitted.

“You will?”

“The woman—she’s got family,” Shad explained. “That means them young’uns got family down on the plains.”

“But that’s south of Fort William,” Titus assured him. “You won’t have to go nowhere near that post when you take Shell Woman back to see her kin down toward Bents’ big lodge on the Arkansas.”

Wagging his head slightly, Sweete said, “There I was—happy as a sow bug under a buffler chip, living the life of a Cheyenne warrior … and you have to come along an’ pull me away for a long ride right into a mess o’ trouble.”

With a snort, Bass said, “Man like you only gonna waste away in the life of a Cheyenne warrior, Shadrach! Slowly go crazy bein’ a layabout with nothin’ to do an’ nowhere to go.”

“I go huntin’,” Shad argued, bristling. “And I been on a few raids for Ute horses.”

“You got lazy an’ soft, way you been livin’ the last few years, child.”

They burst out laughing together, loud enough it made both women turn and gaze back at them a moment before the wives looked at one another in that way women do when men act in some new and bewildering way.

“Man needs to get out, breathe the air,” Titus explained. “See some new country, a far land, just like the ol’ days, Shadrach.”

Sweete drew in a long, deep breath of the chill air as some sage grouse whirred away from their path. “How—how long you figger can a man hold on to the old days, Scratch?”

He thought for but a moment, then reflected, “Just as long as that man dares to hold on, my friend. Long as he dares to hold on.”