Crack in the Sky

5

“Say, Mad Jack!” the fiery-headed trapper cried as he tottered up atop one good leg, the other a wooden peg, his face rouged with the blush of strong liquor.

“Tom! Ye ol’ she-painter!” Hatcher shouted back as he took the fiddle from beneath his chin. “Thought ye’d took off with Jackson or Bridger awready.”

“Nawww,” the peg-legged trapper said as he came to a weaving halt, his bloodshot eyes glassy. “Me and some boys are moving southwest in a few days. See for our own selves what lays atween here and California.”

“Yer favorite tune still be ‘Barbara Allen’?”

“Damn right,” Tom Smith replied. “That squeezebox feller know it good as you?”

Jack laughed. “Elbridge knows it better’n me!”

“Sing it for me, boys,” Smith said as he collapsed onto the grass, stretching out that battered wooden peg clearly the worse for frontier wear. “Sing it soft and purty.”

In Scarlet town where I was born,

There was a fair maid dwellin’,

Made ev’ry youth cry, “Well a day,”

Her name was Barb’ra Allen.

’Twas in the merry month of May,

When green buds they were swellin’,

Sweet William on his deathbed lay,

For the love of Barb’ra Allen.

“I ain’t never see’d a man stand so good having him only one good leg,” Titus whispered to Matthew Kinkead.

“Peg-Leg Tom?”

Scratch nodded. “How he come by it?”

Isaac Simms answered, “Cut it off hisself, Scratch.”

“The hell you say!” Scratch replied in amazement, staring at the crude whittled peg.

He sent his servant to the town,

The place where she was dwellin,

Cried, “Master bids you come to him,

If your name be Barb’ra Allen.”

Well, slowly, slowly got she up,

And slowly went she nigh him;

But all she said as she passed his bed,

“Young man, I think you’re dying.”

“Isaac speaks the bald-face truth,” Caleb Wood stated with one bob of his jutting chin.

“Injun’s rifle ball broke both bones in the leg, right here,” Kinkead declared as he bent over and tapped his own leg just below the knee.

Simms snorted, “Figger on how much that’d pain a man!”

She walked out in the green, green fields,

She heard his death bells knellin’,

And every stroke they seemed to say,

“Hard-hearted Barb’ra Allen.”

“Oh, father, father, dig my grave,

Go dig it deep and narrow.

Sweet William died for me today;

I’ll die for him tomorrow.”

“Lookit the man just sitting there easylike, tapping the end of that ol’ peg on the ground like it was his foot,” Solomon said.

Scratch prodded, “So tell me who really cut it off him.”

“Isaac tol’cha: Smith done it his own self!” Kinkead declared. “Well, most of it anyways. First off he got good and drunk afore starting down through the meat with his own scalping knife.”

“Shit,” Bass whispered with a shudder.

“Passed out by the time it was to cut on bone,” Simms took up the story. “Two other’ns had to finish the job for him. They burned the end of that stump with a red-hot fire iron to stop the bleeding, then went off and buried the leg far ’nough away that Smith could never go lookin’ for it.”

“Go looking for it?” Scratch repeated.

“Damn, if that ain’t what I seen happen with ever’ man lost a arm or leg,” Solomon Fish stated. “Like something pulling, an’ yanking ’em to find that missing part of themselves.”

They buried her in the old churchyard,

Sweet William’s grave was nigh her,

And from his heart grew a red, red rose,

And from her heart a briar.

They grew and grew up the old church wall,

’Til they could grow no higher,

Until they tied a true lover’s knot,

The red rose and the briar.

“Most ever’ man I know of in the mountains calls Tom by the name Peg-Leg Smith now,” Caleb said.

“Never have I seen a man get around so good on a peg,” Bass observed with fascination.

As Hatcher and Gray finished the song, Smith clapped and hooted, then asked, “How ’bout something a man can get up an’ stomp to, Jack!”

Hatcher thought a moment, then suggested, “Say, Tom—how ’bout a tune writ special for all of us bachelors?”

Smith asked, “Bachelors? What the hell’s that?”

“What we are, ye stupid nigger!” Hatcher roared. “Any man ain’t married, he’s a bachelor!”

“Then sing it, by God!” Smith cried merrily as he struggled to rise, clambering clumsily onto his leg and peg, clapping and hobbling about in exuberance. “Sing it for all us happy bachelors!”

Come all you sporting bachelors,

Who wish to get good wives,

And never be deceived as I am,

For I married me a wife makes me weary

of my life,

Let me strive and do all that I can, can, can;

Let me strive and do all that I can.

She dresses me in rags,

In the very worst of rags,

While she dresses like a queen so fine;

She goes to the town by day and by night,

Where gentlemen do drink wine, wine, wine;

Where the gentlemen do drink wine.

When I come home,

I am just like one alone;

My poor jaw is trembling with fear.

She’ll pout and she’ll lower, she’ll frown

and look sour,

Till I dare not stir for my life, life, life;

Till I dare not stir for my life.

When supper is done,

She just tosses me a bone,

And swears I’m obliged to maintain her;

Oh, sad the day I married; Oh, that I

longer tarried,

Till I to the altar was led, led, led;

Till I to the altar was led.

“Hooraw, niggers!” Tom cried as he spun round and round a few times, pivoting on the peg as his axis. “Let’s hear you beller for bachelors!”

Hatcher guffawed, “Ain’cha a marryin’ man, Peg-Leg?”

“You’re full of vinegar and prickly juice, Mad Jack—if’n you think any mountain man is the marryin’ kind!”

Caleb Wood spun up, grabbing hold of Smith’s left arm to do-si-do two spins round with him, shouting in glee, “Not too many Injun womens got ’em a hankering to bed theyselves down with that peg leg of your’n, eh?”

Balancing on the peg for a moment, Smith gave his wooden leg a sound kick with his moccasin, declaring, “This here peg ain’t the only thing on Thomas L. Smith them Injun womens know will stay stiff and hard as a tree trunk all night long!”

“Listen to this here ol’ firecracker head!” Matthew Kinkead crowed. “Spouting like he was the answer to every woman’s prayers!”

Puffing out his chest like a prairie cock on the strut, Smith snorted, “The hell if I ain’t!”

“I damn well know ye’d have women prayin’, all right!” Hatcher said.

“Prayin’ for mercy!” Smith shouted. “I’m a hard-user on the womens, I am!”

“No, Thomas!” Jack replied. “They’re prayin’ ye’ll just stay away from ’em with that li’l willer switch of yer’n when a real man like me carries round a oak stump in his britches!”

“I swear, Mad Jack Hatcher—you go spreadin’ talk like that, why—I’ll sit down right here, unbuckle my wood leg, and take after you with it! Whup you like a poor man’s field hand—whup you about the head and shoulders!”

“Ye take yer peg off, Smith—ye’ll never stand no chance of catchin’ a sprightly fella like me!”

“I can move when I wanna,” Peg-Leg argued, then smiled hugely in that flushed face. “In the robes an’ out!”

Fish roared, “Ain’t no way you’re ever gonna catch a squaw, Tom—less’n she wants to be catched.”

“’Nough of ’em still want me to catch ’em!” Smith gasped, his face red with easy laughter. He held out the peg and bent his good leg, collapsing again to the grass, where he rolled onto his back to thrash around, screaming as if in a fit, “Oh, me—I’m dyin’ o’ thirst, boys! Hoo-yoo! I’m dyin’ o’ thirst! Rum me quick! Rum me!”

Hatcher scissored his legs so he stood directly over the man, his fiddle and bow tucked beneath his left arm, peering down as somber as a settlement undertaker. “Maybeso ye ought’n dig poor Tom his grave, fellers. He’s sure to die of thirst, don’cha see?”

With a small whimper Smith asked, “W-why, Jack?”

“We ain’t got us nary a drop of likker left in our camp!”

Smith bolted upright like he’d been gut-shot, his eyes gone wide. “You ain’t g-got no more l-likker in camp?”

“Mad Jack said it true!” Caleb declared.

His eyes glaring in anger mixed with disappointment, Smith sputtered, “T-then what the hell are you f-fellers so gay about?”

Solomon Fish waved an arm toward the mountains, explaining, “Tomorrow we’re off for the high country and our autumn hunt!”

“That’s all?”

Hatcher nodded. “That’s all I need to make me happy.”

“Where you going this year, Jack?” Smith prodded, and he relaxed back on an elbow.

Jack chuckled. “We ain’t none of us tellin’.”

“Awww, c’mon now,” Peg-Leg pleaded. “Don’t reckon to foller you anyways—”

“I can’t be sartin of that,” Hatcher grumped.

“You know I’m headed to Californy, Jack.”

Isaac Simms inquired, “What’s way yonder in Californy, Peg-Leg?”

“Dark-skinned womens.”

“Hell, child,” Elbridge argued, “they got dark-skinned women where we’re headed to winter up in Taos.”

Gazing at the sky, Smith got a wistful look in his eyes as he said, “Not like the dark-skinned womens I heard tell of live out to Californy.”

“Ain’t they Mexicans just like the folks down to Taos and Santy Fee?” asked John Rowland.

Wagging his head, Smith said, “No, sir. Them down that way just be poor Injun and greaser half-breeds.”

“So tells us what sort of dark-skinned women they got in California,” Hatcher demanded.

“Womens there got royal Span-yard blood in ’em.”

Rufus said, “That so?”

Peg-Leg nodded. “The truth of it. And I hear them gals is looking to show a good time to any American rides their way.”

Jack roared, “Hell, the womenfolk down to Taos show an American a mighty fine time, Tom!”

“You boys go and winter up to Taos now,” Smith advised. “As for me and my band—we’re headed for Californy to see just how hot them high-toned Span-yard gals can get when a outfit of real men come riding into their country!”

“Hell, the real men will be riding into Taos come this winter!” Hatcher roared as he propped the fiddle under his chin.

“Real men?” Smith asked, cocking his head to the side and grinning as he looked around him at each of Jack’s trappers. “Real men would’ve saved a last drink for their old friend, Peg-Leg Smith! Afore we all hit the trail!”

“Har!” Jack snorted. “Any man claims he has a real wood peg for a cock wouldn’t come beggin’ in my camp for no last drink!”

His face turning sad and downcast, Smith puffed out his lower lip and moped, “Looks like you found me out, boys! I ain’t got no hardwood cock that will pleasure a gal all night long.” Then immediately he grinned as he began to boast, “But this here’s one child what can still outride, outshoot, outbeller, and outthump the lot of you weak sisters! Mark my words, fellers—there’s comin’ a time when all the fun will be gone in these here mountains. And on the day you sorry niggers come dragging your sorry asses into Californy—don’t ’spect Thomas L. Smith, the king of Californy, to be waiting there with open arms for any of you!”

“You gonna own all of Californy?” John Rowland asked.

He turned on Rowland, one finger jabbing at the sky. “I damn well will own it, child! When the Mexicans have everything south of the Arkansas, when Sublette’s company rules the Rockies and American Fur owns the Missouri, ’cause Hudson’s Bay lays its claim to everything else west of here … then all that’s left for likely fellers like me to do is plant my stake out to Californy, where the pickin’s is good.”

“But the price of beaver ain’t fallin’, Tom,” Hatcher argued.

“I see more niggers coming out here every year,” Smith replied in a quiet, grave tone. “Every summer they bring more trappers into these here mountains. One day they’ll bring a train of wagons. Then they’ll bring out white womens! And you boys know what comes next, don’cha?”

Isaac asked, “What, Tom? What comes next?”

“Everywhere white womens go, they build churches an’ towns, stores an’ schools! They bring in the constables an’ the lawyers—all of ’em telling men like us, ‘You cain’t do this! You cain’t do that!’”

“Too damn much room out here for to worry ’bout any of that,” Titus finally spoke his piece.

Smith turned to regard the stranger he did not know. “Maybeso, mister. Maybeso. But I do know there’s a passel of folks back east—likely enough to fill up all of this out here if’n the first ones come out and spread the word.”

“I figger a man can just keep moving ahead of ’em,” Scratch observed.

He hobbled toward Bass unsteadily, his eyes squinting in the bright summer light. “S-stay ahead of ’em, you said?”

Bass nodded. “Yep. Stay out front of all them what come west to raise their houses and towns.”

With a wag of his head Smith said, “What kind of life is that gonna be for niggers like us, boys? What good is life for a man just to be pushed on ahead of the crowds … knowing them settlement folks is ruining everything we left behind when we moved on?”

“Maybeso a man don’t have to turn around and see what they’re doing to what he’s left behind,” Bass protested.

“No,” Smith said quietly. “No, he don’t. Just like he don’t have to cry when he loses a good friend neither. A man just don’t have to give a damn when them farmers and white womens and towns come out here and ruin all this for the likes of us.”

“So that’s the reason ye’re haulin’ yer plunder to California, is it?” Hatcher asked.

“For the life of me, I don’t think I can bear to watch this country get ruin’t, Jack. I’ll go on to Californy, where there ain’t too many greasers, where I can steal some horses and trap me some beaver too.”

“Can’t make me believe it,” Titus said solemnly. “Look around you. There’s too damn much room out here for all this ever to get ruin’t on us.”

Smith wagged his head, a great sadness come into his eyes. “The folks are comin’, boys. They always have … an’ I guess they damn well always will.”

How long did they have? Scratch wondered.

He raised his eyes to gaze at the late summer blue and wondered, How long would it be before numberless columns of smoke would smudge the skyline the way it had in St. Louis? How long before the dust of wagon wheels and plowshares and thousands of feet and hooves would clog up a man’s nose and make it hard for him to breathe normal?

How long before what he had found out here was no more, and he had to climb higher and higher, up from these rolling prairies and plains, to escape those who always came in the wake of the first to open a land. Smith was right about that. They always came.

They always would.

The longhunters had pushed over the Cumberland, down into the canebrakes when the stalks stood twice as tall as a man, when the game was plentiful and the buffalo still haunted the eastern timber. But in the wake of those lonely individuals came men with their families following the same narrow footpaths and game trails into the virgin forests until they came to a meadow, a grove of trees by a stream—a place where those men and their women decided to set down their roots then and there. They built cabins and turned the soil, planted their seeds and fought off the Indians there beyond the edge of the frontier.

And eventually they watched others come, leapfrogging over them to inch back the dangerous edge of that frontier a few miles, a few more days farther to the west. Season by season, year by year, farm by farm. They had always come.

And there was no reason for Titus to believe that they wouldn’t always continue to come.

On his way west Scratch had seen them with their toes dug in, clinging fast to the country along the Missouri River. Settlers and widows, families and farms. Merchants and towns. How far would they push before they ran up against the buffalo country? And what then?

That land wasn’t fit for farming, he convinced himself, hopeful. That soil wasn’t rich and black like the ground he had turned over with a plow back in Kentucky. The domain of the buffalo was nothing more than poor grassland, not at all fit for raising corn or tobacco, hemp or squash or potatoes. The settlers who came to raise crops would eventually discover that they couldn’t grow anything in that ground and would therein refuse to venture farther.

So men like Tom Smith were wrong, Bass told himself.

Farmers would not dare probe very far beyond the hardwood forests. Surely the buffalo ground would serve as a buffer, as a no-man’s-land where the great plains blanketed by those shaggy beasts would forever protect these high prairies and tall mountains from the masses of humanity he had seen streaming across the Mississippi on their ferries, rumbling right on through the byways of St. Louis, hurrying their wagons west.

It just wouldn’t happen here.

This simply wasn’t a quiet, closed-in country like that back east of the river. This land was too damned wild, too open and unruly ever to be tamed the way that country had been. Like a horse broke to saddle or a mule to plow, like a man broke to marriage … that was the kind of country folks could tame.

Not this. Not here and surely not now.

This was a land no man could tame, and these were men every bit as tough to break to harness.

“We got visitors,” Fish announced just loud enough that the others could hear.

He didn’t point, but the others just naturally looked left to Solomon’s side of their march. Up the far side of a gentle slope Bass caught sight of them. He had been so wrapped up in lazily musing in the hot afternoon sun that he might well have been asleep on horseback.

“How many ye make it?” Hatcher asked.

“Maybe a dozen,” Fish replied. “But you can bet there’s more we don’t see.”

“That’s for sartin,” Caleb warned.

“Maybeso they’re just watching,” Kinkead said, faint hope in his voice.

“For now anyway,” Jack stated. “They’ll keep their eye on us and figger a place to make their play. If not today, then tomorrow.”

“What are they?” Titus asked.

For a moment they all looked at the horsemen sitting passively at the skyline atop their ponies, just far enough away that a rifle shot would not reach them, close enough to see the long, unbound hair lifting in the hot wind, some feathers and scalp locks fluttering beneath the chins of the horses.

“Bannawks,” Jack declared.

“Likely so,” Elbridge Gray agreed.

“This here’s Bannawk country,” Rufus Graham put in his vote.

“They good to Americans, like the Flathead?” Scratch asked. “Or they devilsome, like Blackfoot?”

“Man can’t allays callate that,” Hatcher explained. “But more times’n not, Bannawks don’t mind running off yer horses, taking yer plunder, and raising yer hair if ye give ’em a chance.”

Wood said, “You ask me, they ain’t to be trusted.”

“Bannawks ain’t as brave as Blackfoot,” Hatcher explained, “and they ain’t as sneaky as Crow. But this bunch is likely to make a run at us sooner’n later.”

“Two of ’em just turned off back of the hill,” Graham declared.

The rest of the horsemen continued to watch as the party of white trappers and their remuda of pack animals pushed on by, plodding slowly up and down the low swales in the rumpled bedsheet of this land baking under a late-summer sun. It raised the tiny hairs on the back of Scratch’s neck just to look up at those motionless statues … until as one the warriors reined their ponies to the right and disappeared from the skyline.

Dusk would arrive all too soon.

“We better be looking for a place to make camp and fort up,” Kinkead declared.

“We’ll find something ahead,” Hatcher said. “Keep yer eyes peeled for water.”

That was most important in something like this. No one had to explain that fact of life and death to these men. In seeking out a place to camp most nights on their journey south from Sweet Lake, they looked for a spot that promised wood and water and some open ground all round, not only for grazing their animals until dark when they would be brought in close, but open ground any enemy would be forced to cross in pressing their attack, making themselves good targets in the bargain.

A couple hours later as the sun was sinking toward the low range of western hills, they discovered a narrow stream issuing from a ravine where a small spring bubbled up from a green and grassy haven of thick brush and saplings.

“Likely this is the best we’re gonna find,” Hatcher stated after he had halted them and dismounted alone to explore the ground nearby. “Let the animals drink, then graze ’em close in. Hobble every one, and tie ’em up two by two.”

“You ’spectin’ trouble tonight?” Rowland asked.

“I figger they’ll make a run at our horses, first whack,” Hatcher replied. “With Injuns, the horses always come first. Whether they try for us and our plunder tonight, or wait till tomorrow morning, I’ll wager they try to run off the animals right after dark.”

Without a word the other eight swung down off their ponies and went about their business. Some stepped off a ways to relieve themselves, others squatted up and down on sore, trail-worn knees, loosening up kinks and cramps. No man had to ask what needed doing. Each of them had been through this sort of preparation before. And they all knew their mutual safety depended upon the weakest link in their chain being ready to protect the rest of the group with his life.

As it had turned out, Hatcher’s band was the last to abandon the Sweet Lake rendezvous site. They watched one company brigade head north, the other turn east, while small outfits of free trappers drifted off to the four winds. Every group had its own particular medicine to try for the fall hunt. A few of the bands had even paid for a private session with a Flathead shaman camped near rendezvous, in hopes of ascertaining a likely spot to find a rich lode of the flat-tailed rodents that were the currency of these mountains.

While the white men waited patiently, the dark-skinned diviner burned his smudge of sweetgrass, smoked his pipe, consulted his special buffalo bones tossed onto a piece of rawhide, or even peered into the gutted carcass of a badger or porcupine or rock gopher the trappers had brought in for just that purpose. There in the blood pooled at the bottom of the creature’s cavity the old man could fathom the best course for the white men to take, just as folks back east might pay to have their futures foretold by an all-wise soothsayer reading the pattern of damp tea leaves whorled at the bottom of a china cup.

So off the many groups had journeyed in just as many directions, by and large keeping their destinations to themselves, disclosing no more in their leave-taking than that fearless call, “Meet you on the Popo Agie!”

A fall, a winter, and then a spring but to come before then.

Another year of travel, trapping, and hanging on to one’s scalp before another rendezvous would bring them all together.

Hatcher’s outfit had tramped almost due south for several days before they struck the Bear River and from there headed east on a climb around the southern end of a range of low mountains, finally dropping over the hogback into an arid bottomland where they began to angle to the southeast. Striking the Green, and crossing to its east bank, they plodded south along the river’s path, stopping only to rest through the short summer nights, again to eat and graze the animals briefly at midday.

With the high green country beckoning to them, pulling them onward, Hatcher’s men kept their noses pointed toward the west slope of the Central Rockies. South of the Uinta Mountains they finally left the Green behind, and upon striking the ancient Strawberry-Duchesne Indian trail, the trappers turned directly east as the ground began to rise below them.

In that great basin lying at the western foot of the White River Plateau, the Bannock had found them.

Scratch sat in the tall grass, some drying clumps of brush right against his back—all but hidden from any intruders until that enemy would be on top of him. He had volunteered to wait here, some distance out from their camp as the sun disappeared and the light began to fade. When the raiders came for the horses, they would have to pass right by him. Then he would be at the enemy’s back—alone when the shooting started.

The worst that could happen, Titus figured, was that he would have to grab up a horse and race back to camp if things got tight.

As the air began to cool, the deerflies began to rise, buzzing and droning through the tall grass—seeking some fleshy creature to bite and bleed. As much of the springwater as he had swallowed upon reaching the spring, he found himself thirsty now, still parched from their long, dusty day. From his pouch he pulled a twist of dark tobacco leaf, cutting from it a small knot about the size of the end of his thumb. Just enough to stimulate his salivation. Stuffing it inside his mouth, Titus returned the twist to the pouch, then suddenly slapped his right cheek.

The sting, the burn, the heat of the deerfly’s bite spreading through that tiny knot of flesh—Scratch seized the painful site between a finger and thumb, pinching as hard as he could. It was about all a man could do when the devil creatures bit: squeeze for all he was worth to flush the poison back out. If he didn’t, the bite would go on stinging for days. Pinching the skin until it grew numb, Bass finally swiped a finger over the site, smearing what blood he had oozed out of the tiny wound into his brown beard.

He licked the blood from his fingers. And as he did, Bass remembered he hadn’t eaten since early that morning, just before light when they had prepared for another long day on the trail. Back among the two skimpy packs he had pulled off Hannah was his share of some meat they had dried yesterday after dropping two antelope. He chided himself for not bringing some along to chew on, if only to remind his stomach that he wasn’t forgetting to feed it.

There hadn’t been all that much in the way of supplies the company brigade leaders or Pilcher could lay out on blankets before those free trappers assembled there at the southern end of Sweet Lake. Only natural that they would hold back the lion’s share of most everything for their own. So he and Hatcher and the rest had looked over what was offered: the powder and bar lead, spare flints and hickory ramrods, some flour and a little coffee. No Indian trade goods here. Everything Sublette and Jackson brought out early last winter they intended their trappers to use firsthand.

As it turned out, Hatcher’s bunch ended up bartering with men who knew directly the value of a trapper’s labor. Jack and the rest traded for a little more of everything, enough perhaps to hold them over for several more months until they put the fall hunt behind them and reached the Mexican settlements far to the south beyond the Arkansas River.

“We still got furs we ain’t traded, Jack,” Rowland had complained.

“So we’ll keep ’em,” Hatcher declared. “These company men don’t have anything more what we can use to trade us, so it looks like we’ve got us a start on next fall’s hunt awready.”

Back at their camp that last evening before they would head out, the nine of them took serious stock of what would have to last them on this long trek to the Bayou Salade, and into a longer autumn trapping season.

“I can’t tell a man not to smoke or chew,” Hatcher began as he stood from looking over the packs with the rest of his men, “but as for me, I’m saving my ’baccy for fall. Most of my coffee too. Saving ’em both for a time when the air turns cool and I hear the first whistle of them elk in the high country.”

It was a damn good idea, Bass remembered thinking. A man didn’t really need tobacco and coffee until then. What a treat they both would be when the quakies began to turn gold on the hillsides of those high places, when a man finally saw his breath halo before his face, when the water began to ice up along the banks of the streams where they were laying their traps—

A bird called. With a sound that just didn’t belong.

Then he saw the first half dozen or so of them reach the brow of the hill just beyond him. They had no idea he was there, watching them as the warriors stealthily poked their heads above the gently waving crowns of grass so they could watch the rest of Hatcher’s men down in their camp far behind Scratch.

Bass felt just as he had back in Kentucky a time or two when he and friends were about to pull a prank on others. He grinned. This surprise would be good.

As the handful of Bannock turned and stealthily retreated back into the tall grass, Titus turned his face back to camp, cupped his hands around his lips, and whistled like a red-winged blackbird. In a heartbeat the gentle reply of a dark-eyed junco floated back to him from below on the long, gently falling slope. Although the others went about giving the appearance of being totally unaware of danger, that birdcall confirmed that the other eight were ready.

Scratch jerked around at the sudden hammer of the many hooves on the ground. As his eyes met the grassy skyline, some two dozen or more horsemen bristled against the blue dome like a mirage for no more than the instant it took for them to break over the hill, spread out in a widening formation. Not a sound had burst from their mouths as they poured off the high ground, racing toward him—strung out to his right. Only after they shot past him at the gallop did they start to holler and yelp, waving pieces of leather and rawhide and blanket, all those fluttering shapes raised to dance on the wind at the ends of their arms in the rose-lit air of dusk.

In another heartbeat they had torn past him.

He saw Hatcher come out from behind a tree, raising that big smoothbore to his shoulder. Kinkead was off to the left, already sighting down the long, heavy barrel of his rifle.

Bass shot to his feet, feeling his heart surge into his throat. As much as he had tried to calm himself while waiting in the grass, he knew it had done no good. Fighting was fighting. And killing was killing. Any man who approached such life-and-death struggles as these with anything less than fear was a man Titus Bass failed to understand.

Caleb Wood was the first to yell as he burst out of the grass halfway down the slope between Scratch and the camp. The first horseman reined aside as he bore down on the lone trapper, but Caleb blew him off the back of his pony.

Titus held on the narrow, copper-skinned back, squeezed on the set trigger, then eased his finger down on the front trigger. Through the pan and muzzle smoke he watched the warrior pitch forward, spinning slightly to the side as his legs came loose of his pony to go tumbling into the tall grass.

Immediately reversing his rifle, Scratch blew hard down the muzzle to clear the breech of any remaining powder embers—a thin, faint stream of smoke jetting from the touchhole. Yanking the plug from his powder horn with his teeth, he quickly poured enough of the coarse black grains up to the right crease in his left palm, then dumped them hurriedly down the muzzle. Bringing the muzzle back to his lips, he spat one of the four balls squirreled in his cheek down the barrel, at the same time dragging the long wiping stick from the iron thimbles at the bottom of the full stock, which he used to ram the unpatched ball home against the powder charge.

Grabbing up the small horn that hung from the strap to his shooting pouch, Bass quickly sprinkled some of the fine grains into the cupped recess of the pan and snapped the frizzen back over it.

The hair bristled on the back of his neck as he heard the yelps and cries behind him. There weren’t supposed to be any behind him.

But suddenly the skyline sprouted four, five … then six more—their arms raised, bows and clubs and axes in their hands as they pounded heels into their ponies’ ribs and rushed toward the fight in a second wave of terror.

Here he stood out in the open now, a good half of him poking above the tall grass, with nowhere to run for cover. The way they swerved as they burst over the top of the rise, Scratch was sure they saw him, sure they must have realized he had been part of a trap laid for them all.

Down below along the gentle slope three more rifles cracked, friends hollered, and those men hit with ball or pierced by arrow grunted and cried out.

Flicking a look at his belt, he saw the big horse pistol stuffed in the side of his wide belt, reassured. That would make two dead niggers, he figured as he slapped the gracefully curved rifle butt into the hollow at his shoulder. He had a tomahawk at the back of his belt, there beside the knife scabbard. That might account for two more when it came to the close and dirty of it.

But that meant there were two more who might swallow him up, fill his lights with arrows, hack off the top of his skull, or pound him beneath their ponies’ hooves as they rode right over him while he was busy fighting off the rest.

As a big-chested warrior leaned off the side of his pony a ways, raising the arm clutching a long shaft, over the top flat of his rifle barrel Scratch spotted the two knife blades planted in the end of that swinging weapon. Plunging downhill at him … he raised the front blade a little higher, there at the notch where the Bannock’s neck met his chest.

And pulled the trigger.

The Indian’s cry was shrill as he was shoved off the back of his pony. Scratch took the rifle into his left hand, letting it fall at his feet as his right yanked the big-bore pistol from his belt, dragging back the hammer to full-cock as it came up. The next one bearing down on him already had his bow strung, the arrow drawn back as he leaned off the side of his animal racing on a collision course for the white man standing alone in the grass, its onrushing eyes and nostrils wide.

Using both hands to steady the pistol, Titus held high on the chest, then pulled the trigger. The weapon bucked back and upward at the end of his arms. Again his left hand dropped the weapon as his right reached round for the small-bladed tomahawk he pulled from his belt.

Three of them were turning his way.

Where was the fourth?

His left hand emptied of the pistol, Bass filled it with the handle of the old skinning knife and dragged the weapon from its rawhide scabbard just at the moment his left leg burned. He looked down, feeling the gorge rise in his throat, knowing he was going to be sick from the pain of it—seeing the arrow stuck clear through the meat of his thigh. At the back of his leg the stone tip glistened in the falling light, bright with his blood. Against the front of his legging the shaft’s three rows of fletching quivered as his muscles tensed and shuddered in pain.

He wasn’t sure how long he could continue standing before his stomach revolted and he threw up. But swallow it down he did as a warrior bore down on him. Twenty feet …

Then, as the Bannock swung back a stone club, he was knocked sideways, the roar of a rifle surprising Scratch.

Jerking to his right, putting most of his weight on the one strong leg, Bass spotted Solomon Fish hurrying through the grass as he blew down his muzzle, reloading on the move. Behind them, on down the slope, those raiders not knocked off their ponies were ascending the far side of the shallow bowl, scattered and demoralized that their surprise had not succeeded.

“Bass! Behind you!”

Scratch whirled at the thunder of hooves.

A pure wonder, Bass thought. The son of a bitch boldly sat straight up atop his pony—drawing back the bow’s rawhide string with one hand, a cluster of arrows in the other that gripped the center of the horn bow.

All he could do now was wait—wait and anticipate when the bastard would release that arrow. When he saw the string snap, Bass lunged to the right, landing in the grass, tumbling over onto the wounded leg—crying out as the shaft broke at the back of the thigh and splintered at the front in his clumsy roll. It hurt so damn bad, he wanted nothing more than to get up and yank the rest of the shaft from his flesh.

Struggling to his knees, then raising himself on that good leg, Scratch heard one of them yell again. And the hoofbeats—

He only had time to get his arms up to catch the warrior flinging himself off his pony as the animal raced on by the trapper. Together Bass and the bowman pitched into the grass, tumbling over one another, grunting and groaning as the warrior struggled to dig fingers into his windpipe and gouge his eyes while Titus flailed away with his weapons.

The thick-chested warrior stuffed a thumb into the side of Scratch’s mouth and started to rip downward against the cheek and jaw. To his tongue that thumb tasted like smoke and dirt as Titus bit down hard, grinding the back of his teeth against the sharp pain as the enemy worked at ripping his jaw off.

Striking out with his clenched fist, the Bannock knocked the tomahawk out of Bass’s hand, then seized the white man’s upper arm in his grip.

Unable for the moment to make use of his knife, Scratch flung both arms around the powerful chest, locking his free hand around the other wrist, starting to squeeze as he bit down all the harder on the thumb.

With a shrill wail of agony the Bannock popped his head forward savagely, smacking his broad forehead against Titus’s brow. Bits of shattered glass and fractured, mirrored light spun outward from his eyes as he jabbed a knee into his enemy, again, and then a third time—hearing the man grunt with each blow, feeling each strike shudder through that bare, sweaty chest he gripped within his arms.

As the Bannock cocked his head back, Titus released his grip, the fingers on his free hand shooting past the Bannock’s hair, immediately snatching hold in time to yank back as the warrior tried again to smack his forehead.

At the same instant he felt the Indian’s fingers close around his ear. Digging, tearing with almost as much pain as there was in that quivering thigh of his as Scratch lumbered onto his knees, sweeping the knife in a huge arc toward his enemy’s back. He sensed the blade drag along a rib for a moment before it plunged on through the taut muscle there in the lower back.

Scratch yanked it free, then drove the knife downward again, this time fighting to drag it to the side as the warrior stiffened, his whole body gone rigid while Titus struggled to turn the weapon this way, then that, twisting the blade through the soft tissue below that hard-strap muscle.

The enemy pitched to the side suddenly, stared up at the white man with glazed eyes as he took three quick gasps of air, then breathed no more.

It was quiet for a heartbeat; then Bass became aware of the fading hoofbeats, the raucous shouts of the others as they trudged his way up the slope. Off to his right he watched Isaac Simms rise out of the tall grass, lift an arm with a tomahawk in his hand, then swing it down savagely.

“Ain’t none of these alive now, Jack,” Simms called when he finally stood fully.

Fish and Wood were the first to reach Scratch.

“Who … who else hurt?” he asked.

Solomon dragged up one of Bass’s arms, and together with Caleb, they lifted Titus out of the grass. “No one. You’re the only nigger got enough stupids to wait out here for ’em to ’sprise you the way they done.”

“Everyone awright?”

Wood replied this time, “Maybe a scratch or two.”

“The horses?” Titus asked. “An’ my mule?”

“They didn’t get a damn thing for their trouble,” Fish growled.

Bass tried to turn partway around in their arms. “Get my guns—”

“We’ll get yer guns,” Hatcher snapped as he came up out of the deepening gloom. “Get him down to the fire, boys.”

“Damn, if I ain’t the ailin’ one again, Jack.”

“That’s right,” Hatcher said quietly. “But this time we ain’t got time to sit around waiting for ye to heal up.”

Solomon asked, “What you aimin’ to do, Jack?”

“We’ll build us a big fire and cut that arrow out’n his leg—so we can be long gone afore morning light.”