Wind Walker

THIRTY-ONE

A week later as they were nearing the Green River, they ran onto Washakie’s village marching south. Word of the troubles had reached Bridger’s father-in-law, and he was leading more than twelve hundred warriors south to spend the winter in the Black’s Fork country, if need be to drive off any more of the Mormon attacks.

But Gabe and the others had sat in that council circle with the headmen of the Shoshone nation while he tried to explain to them that he did not want them to take up his cause. Eventually the Indians came to understand in their own way that if they sought to protect this friend and relation from those white men who stole and murdered, then the white man’s dragoons would be called upon to come after Washakie’s people. And even if the Shoshone won the first few contests with the white soldiers, more and more would keep coming … just as the Snakes had watched more and more white men flooding through their country, heading for Oregon, California, and—the valley of Brigham Young’s Saints.

“I do not profess to understand the heart of the white man,” Washakie admitted sadly. “I do know the heart of other red men. I know if those hearts mean to do me good, or if they seek to do me evil. Their hearts are there for me to read.”

“Like the hearts of the Blackfoot who struck your people a few days ago?” Jim asked.

“Yes—a large war party of them,” Washakie said, nodding with pride. “They came far to the south to attack my people—because they did not expect us to be so strong. They have not been as powerful as they were since the spotted sickness wasted so many of them away like breathsmoke. So our fighting men ran them off, like yipping dogs with their tails curled between their legs. The mighty Blackfoot!”

“This is good!” Bridger exclaimed, and quickly translated again for the rest of the old trappers who did not understand the Shoshone tongue.

“But,” Washakie warned, “a hurt animal is a dangerous animal. And the war party may try to hurt others—the Flathead, Assiniboine, or even the Crow. But,” and now he smiled as he said, “I am assured they have learned never to come south again to raid Washakie’s people!”

He and Bridger were the same age, and between them had been a strong bond that dated back to when Jim’s trapping brigade was fighting off an overwhelming number of Blackfoot, slowly being bested, until Washakie and his warriors showed up and drove off the attackers.

“Sometimes I do not understand the things the white man does,” the chief continued. “The Grandfather far to the east, who told us to make peace with the white man and with the other tribes at Horse Creek, he tells us we must no longer steal ponies from our enemies.”

“That’s right,” Bridger said.

Washakie continued, “The Great Father tells us we must no longer raid and plunder and kill our enemies. Is this so?”

“When you put your mark on that paper, that is what you agreed to,” Jim declared.

Drawing himself up Washakie asked, accusingly, “Then where were these other white men when we put our marks on that paper and promised not to steal or kill? Where were they?”

“Who?” Bridger asked.

“The white men who came to your lodge, stole your horses and stock, drove my daughter and your children off into the cold, then carried everything else away before they burned your lodge? Where were those white men when we made our promises?”

Gabe wagged his head. “They did not sign the paper.”

“Why does the Grandfather and his soldiers allow this?” Washakie demanded, slamming a fist into an open palm. “How can this be right, for white men to steal from those who have been their friends? How can those white men come kill their friends?”

Bridger shrugged. Without an answer.

“You white men have a strange justice, my old friend,” Washakie replied sourly. “You are my son, you are my brother. So I will do what you ask of me, instead of driving these bad white people from our land forever. For your sake only, I will not draw my knife against them.”

Bass leaned over and whispered into Bridger’s ear, “You unnerstand what you just done?”

“What?”

“You just saved the life of the one man who’s set out to steal ever’thing he can from you,” Titus explained. “The man who’s set out to murder friends of your’n if they stood against him. You unnerstand you just saved the wuthless, flea-bit hide of Brigham Young hisself.”

Turning to his old friend, Jim’s eyes reflected the pain and frustration that Titus was himself feeling. Gabe said, “If’n it turns out that I saved Brigham Young’s life by savin’ these Shoshone from even more trouble, then that’s the way it’s gotta be, Scratch. One day, Brigham Young an’ me gonna square accounts. That’s as certain as sun.”

“I ain’t so sure of that,” Bass grumbled. “Brigham Young’s the wust cut of coward. He’s not man enough to stand an’ fight you square, Jim. He’s a yeller-backed, throat-cuttin’, weasel-gutted coward who’s gone high an’ mighty, hidin’ behin’t all his believers, lettin’ his army of Avengin’ Angels do his dirty blood work for him. No man I ever had respect for gone an’ hid behin’t a murderin’ mob the way Brigham Young does.”

Near the end of their council, Gabe explained to Washakie that he was going to spend the winter on the Green, and when spring arrived he and his friends would build a new ferry for the white-topped wagons heading west along the Great Medicine Road. Once the ferry was in operation, Bridger declared that he intended to take Mary and the children back east, as far as the settlement of Westport perhaps. There they should be out of harm’s way, either white or red.

“Will you keep my daughter far from her father for all time?” Washakie asked solemnly.

“Long as I see it’s safe out here, old friend,” he sighed, “I’ll bring her back one day. But I want my father-in-law to understand I’ve lost two wives already. I could not go on if I lost Little Fawn too.”

Nodding, Washakie said, “A woman goes the way of her husband. If he rides into trouble, she rides too. But if he takes his family far, far away from harm, then she must go with her husband. My heart will grieve for our separation, but I know you will take her where she will be safe.”

That was all any man ever wanted for his family, Titus thought that night through and on into the graying of the morning. Somewhere safe where a man could live out the last of his days in peace. Maybe in Absaroka.

Washakie’s camp was slow to awaken that cold morning as a few errant snowflakes bobbed and danced on a cold wind, scudding along an icy rime that coated the ground. But somehow Shadrach and Bridger sensed what was afoot. They awoke the other old friends early and kicked life into their fire, then set coffee on to boil before they pitched in to help bundle up what few possessions Waits-by-the-Water owned after the Mormons had burned or stolen everything from Jim’s post. Old friends joked and kidded one another, like they had in the old days, squatting around the fire, drinking the steamy coffee, and chewing on strips of lean, dried buffalo. But by the time the sun was rising low upon the southern horizon, Scratch knew he could no longer put off this one last crossing of the Green.

“We’ll be here all summer long,” Bridger reminded, “somewhere along this stretch of the river.”

Sweete stepped up with them, his eyes sad. “C’mon down for a visit.”

“You’re welcome at my lodge anytime, Titus Bass,” Jim said. “I figger we’ll make our home here till the army goes in down on Black’s Fork an’ throws Brigham Young off my land.”

Shad shrugged. “But it don’t sound like the dragoons gonna do that anytime soon, so I figger you’ll find us here when you mosey down for a visit.”

For a moment he looked over at the three women, always saying their good-byes while their menfolk stood off and stumbled through their own. It damn well had to be easier tearing yourself away when everyone believed you’d be seeing one another on down the trail, somewhere else, another time. Then again, maybe it was easier like this after all—just making the break clean and quick, not laying out any hope of the impossible.

Because Titus Bass was never coming back.

Scratch knew that now. It wasn’t so much a matter of his not wanting to see old friends ever again—hell, there was a passel of ’em he’d never lay an eye on now, dead they were. No, Titus realized he’d soon have a hankering to see old faces, hear familiar voices on his ear, feel their arms around him and their mighty hands lustily pounding him on the back. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to return to Green River, or go wherever the old free men might hunt in the seasons to come.

It was simply that he knew down in the marrow of him that it was never to be. Titus Bass was never coming back again. This was the last time he would look at these wrinkled, wind-scoured, sunburned faces. The last time he would gaze across this piece of country. He was going home for the last time. Every bit as well as he knew the aches in his bones and the scars on his body, Titus Bass accepted that he would never be back.

So he swallowed deep, working up the courage to explain it, and finally said, “Very ol’t man, name of Real Bird, some years ago, he said if’n I go back to Crow country this time, I can’t never leave again.”

“C-can’t leave?” Sweete echoed, worry graying his expression.

He patted his tall friend on the shoulder and said, “My heart’s telling me that’s awright, Shadrach. Because my spirit wants to get back north to the Yallerstone.”

As the others moved in close, forming a tight semicircle about the old man, Sweete cleared his throat and asked, “Th-that mean none of us ever see you again?”

Sensing the sting of tears, Scratch explained quietly, “Maybeso you niggers won’t ever see Titus Bass like this again, not like you see me standin’ here now. Gray, an’ ol’t, an’ awful tired. But … ever’ night when you boys close your eyes to sleep, close your eyes to dream—you’ll see them days that used to be.” He looked directly at Bridger then, smiling. “Gabe, you ’member back to that night at your post, round a fire, when I come back after takin’ them emigrants to Fort Hall?”

“I ’member the night.”

“You recollect I was in the cups, an’ how we talked of what was dream … an’ what was real?”

Bridger swallowed. “I ’member that too.”

“Them dreams you fellas will have of the used-to-be days are gonna be real … an’ all the rest of these seasons without beaver, these seasons when the unhonorable men come crushin’ in on us—why, that won’t be real a’t’all,” he told his friends. “Way I see it, the dreams is just about all we got to hang our hands on to now. So them dreams of what was our glory time are gonna be all the sweeter for it.”

Few of them could hold their eyes on him now, most of the old friends dragging hands beneath their cold, dribbling noses or smearing an eye here or there.

“I ain’t got no doubt you’re gonna see me again an’ again, over an’ over, in your dreams,” he explained with difficulty at putting the feelings into words. “But I don’t figger you’ll ever see me like this again. In your dreams I won’t be feelin’ all my war wounds an’ all these here battle scars.”

Quietly, Sweete said, “We lived through a high time when other’ns went under, Scratch.”

“That’s right,” he responded. “An’ in them dreams each of us gonna have in the seasons to come, we’ll all be fresh an’ brand-new again, boys. Can’t you see them dreams now? Why, we’ll be settin’ foot out here again for the first time—just like this land was brand-new. The day after God made this country for our kind, when we was the onliest white niggers to put down a mokerson track out here.”

Scratch could tell by the way tears were trickling from their eyes that most of these old friends were remembering those glory days already. Veterans of more than two decades of survival, countless seasons and battles, victories and losses. Friends moved on and friends gone under. These last holdouts were remembering those bright and shining times when this country was brand-spanking-new … and they had been the first.

The goddamned very first to walk this high and mighty land.

“I’m going back north to live out what I got left of days, fellas,” he confessed in a voice cracking with emotion. “Spend it with my family, up there with my wife’s relations. Now that it’s come my time to cross the river an’ go, I don’t want none of you to stare at this here ol’ nigger too good. Don’t want you to ’member his gray head or the tired way he moves in his ol’ bones.”

“Don’t look at you?” Sweete asked.

“I want you ol’ friends to do me honor,” he started to explain, “to remember me when we was all like young bulls come spring green-up: strong, an’ wild, an’ with the sap runnin’ through us so heady that no man dared stand agin’ any of us, red or white.”

Dragging his coat sleeve beneath his nose, Scratch quietly said, “That’s the Titus Bass I want you to ’member. When you boys close your eyes, I want you to dream on them glory days we had. An’ I’ll be there. No matter what happens to me from here on out, I swear to you under this great sky that them dreams are gonna be more real than us standin’ here right now.”

Shadrach impulsively threw his arms around the shorter man, hugging him fiercely. As Sweete took a step back, the others came up and embraced their old friend in turn. Until it was time for Bridger.

With a deepening melancholy, Scratch looked into Jim’s face and said, “Nothing lives long but the earth an’ sky, Gabe. Only the earth an’ sky.”

They hugged and pounded each other on the back, then stepped apart.

Smearing the back of his powder-grimed hand beneath both eyes, Scratch cleared his throat and told them with a strong voice, “That dream I tol’t you about … that’s where Titus Bass is gonna live for all time to come. That’s how Titus Bass is gonna stay with you.”

Quickly he turned on his heel and went to his gray pony before any of them could say or do something that would stay him any longer. Settling in the saddle, he gestured for his son to start the others down to the crossing. When his family were on their way toward the bank, Scratch turned for one last look at these old faces he would only see in dream from here on out.

“I’ll see you again—soon enough, my friends!” he cried out, his voice cracking with painful emotion. “Just dream of them glory days, by damn, you dream it in your hearts … for that’s where I’ll allays stay!”

They didn’t have all that much when they put Fort Bridger behind them and started for the Green River, not after the Mormons had stolen all the extra weapons, blankets, buffalo robes, even unto what extra clothing an old mountain man, his wife, and their children possessed.

But by the time Mary Bridger finished explaining to her people what had happened to all of them at the hands of Brigham Young’s Avenging Angels, Washakie’s Shoshone opened up their hearts and their hands to the family of Titus Bass. A blanket from this person, a buffalo robe from another, an old saddle someone wasn’t using, a worn kettle or dented coffeepot—nearly everyone gave something to the old mountain man, this good friend of Jim Bridger who had married the chief’s daughter.

Once again Titus was stunned by the generosity of these people who lived with far less than any Mormon family ever would own, yet were a people more than willing to share what little extra they had with this stranger and his Crow wife. On top of that, it had struck Scratch, the Shoshone and Crow held no undying love for one another. So it was with deep gratitude that he had watched as Little Fawn brought the first gift to place upon the ground in front of the brush shelter where Titus and his family were preparing to spend that cold night after running onto Washakie’s people near the banks of the Green River.

“While we menfolk was in council with Washakie’s headmen,” Jim had explained in a whisper as one person after another came forward with a gift for the Bass family, “that wife of mine went round the camp, tellin’ ever’one just what you an’ your’n been through to help us, Scratch. What you give up, what you lost just to be there to help a old friend like me.”

Scratch’s eyes brimmed as he looked over the goods given by people who did not have great wealth but were rich in spirit.

He said, “Don’t know how I’ll ever come to thank ’em all—”

“You awready have, Titus Bass,” Jim interrupted in a whisper. “These folks know you chose to stand by a friend against a whole damn army of thieves and murderers—an’ your family lost near ever’thing for it. These folks is honoring me by honoring my friend, Titus Bass.”

For a long time he could not speak, the lump so tight and raw in his throat. Instead, the old trapper stood on his tired legs, one arm wrapped around his wife’s shoulders, as they watched the procession of Washakie’s people bringing gifts to the family of that man they honored as a faithful friend.

Many times in the following days he squinted his eyes against the low winter light glinting off the icy skim of snow … and remembered back to that afternoon as the sun sank and the weather turned bitter. His wife and children had been doubly warmed with those gifts of clothing, blankets, and robes. From there on out, they had no fear of freezing before seeing Crow country. Enough robes to throw over a small shelter made of willow limbs he and Flea could tie together, forming a low dome. Two old kettles to boil the meat he and his son had somehow managed to scare up in the coulees and at the foot of the ridges as they plodded north for the Yellowstone. When at last they would reach the land of the Apsaluuke and found Pretty On Top’s people, they could crowd in with daughter Magpie, her husband, Turns Back, and what was sure to be their first child of their own. As soon as Titus, Turns Back, and Flea could, they would hunt for enough robes the women would flesh free of hair, grain to a smooth finish, then sew together to construct a small lodge for Waits-by-the-Water, replacing the one burned by the Mormon raiders.

By midwinter, life would return to normal. Something as close to normal as it could be for a man and his family who had lost a stillborn child, had everything else he had accumulated over the years either carted away to Salt Lake City or burned to uselessness in the cinder-choked ash heap that was Jim Bridger’s fort. What bright hope it had taken to raise those walls back in ’43, more than ten winters ago. The same hope that now carried Scratch and his family north through the short days, traveling between sunup and sundown, huddling through the long, bitter, winter nights as they chattered of the joy to come with seeing the faces of family and friends, gazing at familiar landmarks and that place a man called his home.

That used-to-be country where things might just stay the way they always had been for … just a little longer. A hope that it would be for all of them as it always had been for just … a little longer.

If that could be called a prayer, then it was the prayer of Titus Bass. The plea of a man who found himself caught in a world he did not recognize, a world where he felt lost and adrift. Better for him to flee that world the white man was changing into his own image. Far, far better for Titus Bass to strike out for what he knew, for what he remembered was tangible, for what he could embrace as the way things had always been, and might always be. That didn’t make him a coward, did it? he asked the First Maker. To escape all that he knew was wrong, to flee where he knew men still valued honor above all? As he considered it, Scratch tallied up every ill and evil wind that had befallen his family—from the attack by the Arapaho in Bayou Salade to the troubles for Magpie at Fort John, hired St. Louis killers to the devastation of the smallpox, Comanche kidnappers to a Taos uprising … against one travail after another they had prevailed, until Brigham Young’s Mormons came riding into their lives to kill their friends and steal everything Titus Bass had ever owned. And all of their troubles seemed to happen south of Crow country.

So this was the best a man could do—taking his family north away from all the trials they had ever encountered. Up there along the Yellowstone, back into the country of the River and Mountain Crow bands, life had remained virtually unchanged over these last twenty-some years. Few white men had ever come, fewer still had stayed on. The Blackfoot had their post up at the mouth of the Marias. The Assiniboine, their Fort Union at the mouth of the Yellowstone. And the Crow had “Round Iron” Robert Meldrum at Fort Alexander near the mouth of the Rosebud. Despite those far-flung outposts, few white men had come to stay … sure as hell not the way it was to the south, from the Sweetwater and Devil’s Gate country all the way down to troubled and bloody Taos. Once a man got on the north side of Shoshone land and was headed into Absaroka, he would find life was quieter, more predictable, this far north—

“Friend!”

Scratch jerked back on the reins and brought the old rifle up, realizing he had been dozing, daydreaming, not paying a goddamned bit of attention. Behind him he heard Flea’s hoofbeats as the youngster’s pony hurried him from the far right flank.

He blinked in the waning light of that windy winter afternoon. Blinked again, clearing the water from his one good eye, and found the figure emerging from the brush. He wasn’t sure what to think, what the devil to expect as Flea galloped closer, protectively vigilant in the face of any danger to his father. But, that was not the sort of term an enemy would use, was it?

“Who calls me friend?” he demanded of the figure bundled in a long capote and fur cap, heavy hide mittens.

“I am Slays in the Night!” the man cried. “You ’member me, Ti-tuzz friend?”

“Damn, if it ain’t you now!” he exclaimed as he reined up near the old warrior. He looked about quickly while the lone Indian scuffled over, his moccasins crunching through the ankle-deep snow, dodging clumps of sage and juniper. He gazed at the face of this old friend with wonder now as the Shoshone’s features took sharper focus. “What the hell you doin’ out this far from your stompin’ grounds, down south at the hot springs? A mite close to Crow country for your likin’, ain’t it?”

“I come looking …” he started to explain, then stared at the ground, as would a man searching for the words.

“Lookin’ for what? Where’s that woman of your’n? What’s her name? Painted Rock? Something such—”

“Red Paint Rock.” He looked up, his eyes filled with great pain when he interrupted. “She is gone.”

“That’s a damn shame, friend,” he said quietly, glancing at Flea as he struggled to find some words. “I know how that can cut a man to the marrow to have your wife die on you—”

“No die. She is gone.”

He squinted at the Indian for a moment, then dropped from the saddle. Waving his wife and family to close up and join him, Scratch asked, “Gone? She run off from you?”

“Blackfeet!” Slays snarled the word.

Of a sudden he remembered how Washakie had informed the party of old trappers that the Blackfoot were raiding, far south of their usual haunts. “You see ’em come through?”

His head bobbed. “North,” and he started to sign as well as speak his birth tongue to tell the story. “Big war party of Blackfeet. Sweeping north. Striking down the Bighorn River … riding strong. Very big war party, go for Crow country.”

“They hit Washakie’s camp,” Titus said. “But his warriors were too strong for them Blackfoot.”

“Washakie,” he repeated the chief’s name. “We were friends … long time ago.”

Stepping closer to the old Shoshone, Scratch noticed again just how gray the man’s hair had become in the last few years—the black streaked with the snows of many, many winters and more than his share of trials too. He laid a hand on the Indian’s shoulder. “They kill Red Paint Rock, or they run off with her?”

He swallowed. “Take her,” he signed, one hand suddenly sailing off the other. “She is not a pretty woman. She’s no good to them. Why take my Red Paint Rock from me?”

“They took her,” Scratch explained to his wife as Waits-by-the-Water and the children came to a halt behind him on foot, leading their horses. “That means she’s still bound to be alive.”

Suddenly the old Indian dipped his face into both of his hands and wailed, his shoulders trembling. Bass understood loss. Goda’mighty, did he ever understand loss. Quickly he folded his old friend into his arms and let the warrior quake against his shoulder.

“You been hidin’ since they took her?”

Stepping back, the Shoshone snorted and said with his hands, “Eight days now. This eighth day. They take her. I follow on foot. Blackfeet take my woman, my horses. They take everything else.”

And Scratch understood how it felt to have the Blackfoot swoop down and ride off with a man’s wife. How it felt to have the Mormons sashay off with everything he had accumulated in his life of wading crotch-deep into streams or punching all the way into California to steal some Mexican horses. Bass understood how a man could feel everything being jerked out from under him by forces he could not comprehend, much less control.

“The gun I give you?” Titus asked, hopeful.

Pointing back at the brush where he had been hiding, the Shoshone said, “I have the gun still. Balls and powder too. I go hunting.”

“Man’s gotta eat.”

But Slays shook his head. “I go hunting for Blackfeet. Eight days, I follow their horses down the river.”

“Was you gone when them Blackfoot come through?”

“Hunting antelope with my friend’s gun,” he replied with his hands. “I come back, see them riding away. Big, big war party. Dressed like Blackfeet. My lodge is empty. Horses gone. But I still have my gun, and my legs, and a small piece of buffalo robe—so I start following their trail down the Bighorn for the Elk River into Crow country.”

Scratch looked into the eyes of his wife. She nodded slightly to tell him she had understood the import of the Shoshone’s sign language. Then he glanced at Flea.

“Son, take the packs off that red horse there,” Titus instructed in Crow. “Spread those packs among the other three horses. Our friend can ride the red horse.”

He turned and explained to Slays in the Night, “Crow country is dangerous for one lone Shoshone man.”

Slays snorted. “I am old and the rest of my days are on my fingernails. Crow kill me if the Blackfeet don’t. This is all dangerous country now, when a man is ready to die for one he loves. It makes no matter. I am not running away from this one last fight.”

Bringing his hand down on the warrior’s shoulder, Scratch said, “Ride the red horse for now. Until we get your wife and your horses back from these Blackfoot. Maybe they don’t realize they’re headin’ right into the heart of where the Crow are probably killin’ buffalo for winter meat.”

“You want me to ride with you?” Slays asked. “With your family?”

“My friend will be safe with me,” Scratch reassured as Flea led the red horse over. “Now, let’s get movin’ again. My feet get cold standin’ here in this hard wind. We gotta scratch us up a place to stay for the night, somewhere the wind won’t find our old bones!”

“And in the morning?”

“With tomorrow’s sun,” Titus answered in sign, “we’ll follow those tracks to get your woman and horses back.”

But the cold wind that was picking up near sunset had brought with it new snow. Big, fat flakes the size of ash curls had started to fall not long after dark and continued past sunrise. Falling slow, except when the wind gusted like a frantic child, then rested before its next spasm of blustery fury.

Try as they did, neither of them could make out the trail, so snowed over and windblown it had become during that long winter night. But they forged on that following day, and the next two, continuing on down the Bighorn toward the Yellowstone. And by the middle of the fourth day they stopped on the high ground and gazed north into the narrow valley that lay off to the west, discovering a smudge of smoke laying low against the winter sky, hanging in among the leafless cottonwoods.

“That many fires would not be the war party,” Scratch observed. “Not this time of day.”

“No,” Slays in the Night remarked. “War party was riding off there.” He pointed to the northeast.

“The Rosebud, maybe the Tongue, maybe as far east as the Powder too,” Titus said. Then he looked back to the northwest at that smoke and the first dark hints of a pony herd slowly inching about on the white background. “That’s gotta be a Crow camp.”

“This where you go?” Slays inquired.

“Yes. And where you’ll go with us.”

“No,” and the Indian shook his head and pointed north-northeast. “The Blackfeet go that way. I follow them to the end.”

“Come with us to the Crow village, friend,” Bass pleaded, feeling hopeful that he could talk Turns Back and others into helping. “My son-in-law, he will gather friends—many warriors—we will go in search of the Blackfoot who came raiding this year.”

For a long time the Shoshone sat there on the red horse, clutching that old smoothbore Bass had given him seasons before. His breath streamed from his mouth and nose into the subfreezing air as the setting sun struck their backs, riding low in the winter sky. Finally he took his eyes off the north-northeast and they came to rest on Titus Bass.

“All right. We go to this Crow camp where you get help for us to find my wife. You, me—we ride together against the Blackfeet.” Then the Shoshone’s eyes brightened with moisture, glowed with fond remembrance. “You remember old time we fight Blackfeet together?”

He shook his head, failing to recall any time he and Slays in the Night had battled those implacable foes. “I don’t recall—”

Slays licked his lips and interrupted with a stammer as he gave voice to the white man’s words, “Pee … Pierre’s Hole.”

The long-forgotten scenes exploded into view there in his mind. Back in ’32. One of the biggest and finest of summer rendezvous ever held, company brigades and free men joined by many bands of mountain Indians, drawn by the trade goods and the nonstop gambling. A big band of Blackfoot had stumbled onto the white man’s trading fair, forted up, and been surrounded. Mountain men and their allied warriors dashed south down the valley to do their damnedest to wipe out every enemy they could.

“Yes,” he said with something close to reverence as he squinted his eyes and focused on the long-ago scenes. “I remember that now, old friend. A very long time ago—more’n twenty winters now.”

“Long time,” he repeated the white man’s words, then signed, “We were young.”

With a smile, Scratch asked, “How about you an’ me do this for the ol’t days, my friend? We go kill us some goddamned Blackfoot for the ol’t days?”

“Goddamn these Blackfeet!” Slays agreed in American. “We kill. You and me, we kill goddamn sonofabitch Blackfeet!”

With a whoop, Titus shoved heels into his pony and they all started off the high ground, down the first of the long slopes that would carry them toward the cottonwood-wrapped meadows where that Crow village stood. With enough help from Turns Back, Don’t Mix, and the rest of Pretty On Top’s warriors, they could confront any threat from a large Blackfoot war party, inflict a lot of damage, drive their old enemies out of Absaroka, and reclaim Red Paint Rock from her captors. Which would be right and square with the world as he saw it.

If them dragoons at Fort Laramie didn’t know how to exact a little justice from them murdering Mormons who did wrong by Jim Bridger and so many others, or the dragoons simply didn’t have the stomach for it, at least life was still sane and real up here in the north country … up here where a man could still right what wrongs had been done him and his friends.

Being able to right an injustice committed against him by either Brigham Young and his thieving mobs or by a plundering Blackfoot war party was something a man had to count on when there were few things in life that really mattered. Maybe the Trickster, Old Man Coyote, would be capricious enough to punish a man by not allowing him to right a terribly unfair iniquity … but Titus knew the First Maker would never turn His face from His people in a time of need.

“Who is this stranger you bring?” asked Don’t Mix as he led a small party of guards loping up to the newcomers.

“He is an old friend,” Titus explained in Crow. “He was treating me and mine with kindness even before you were born.”

With that characteristic smirk of his, the young warrior studied the old Shoshone. “Who are his people?”

“I am Snake,” Slays in the Night responded in sign without hesitation.

That he understood enough of the Apsaluuke tongue to understand what had been said around him surprised Scratch. Bass touched the rider at his knee and announced to the others, “This is my friend, Slays in the Night. Side by side, he and I fought Blackfeet more than two-times-ten summers ago.”

“He is still a fighter, this one?” Stiff Arm asked.

Just as Slays was opening his mouth to speak, Titus spoke up, “Many days ago my friend’s camp was raided by Blackfeet, not far to the south. His horses and his woman were stolen. I told him I would ride with him to reclaim what has been taken from him by our old enemies.”

Don’t Mix inquired, “Just the two of you are going after these raiders?”

Shaking his head, Titus replied, “No—I want you to come with me, war chief. And strong-hearted others. There are many, many raiders we must chase from Absaroka!”

Most of the other camp guards whooped at that call to action, causing some of their ponies to jostle and shimmy in nervousness. From the corner of his eye, Scratch saw how Waits signaled him with that particular look in her eye.

“Where is my son-in-law, Turns Back?” Titus asked.

“The last I saw of him,” Don’t Mix answered, “he had just returned from the hills with a deer and was dressing it out over beside his lodge.”

“And my daughter?”

Don’t Mix smiled as he looked first at Waits-by-the-Water, then back to the white man. “She is as beautiful as ever. More so now that she is a mother.”

Waits barely got her hand over her mouth to squelch a squeal of delight.

“This is good news!” Bass roared. “Tell me, have you taken a wife yet?”

With that sly look in his eyes, Don’t Mix said, “My heart was so wounded, and my soul hurt so bad after your daughter married Turns Back … I knew it would take me a long time to heal, a long time before I could ever give my heart to another. But, it wasn’t long after we returned from the big council at the white man’s warrior fort in the south country that I found a pretty girl to help me heal my heart!”

“Has there been the cry of a newborn heard in your lodge?”

“No—but it will be any day now,” Don’t Mix said with a proud smile. “Big as my wife has grown, she must be carrying two—”

“Ti-tuzz,” Waits impatiently interrupted their man-talk.

“Ah, yes,” Scratch said, realizing his mistake. He urged his pony into motion. “We must hurry on to the village to see our daughter … and my wife’s first grandchild!”