Crack in the Sky

1

Just like the bone-numbing scream of the enemy, the wind tormented those branches of the towering spruce overhead.

Titus Bass jolted awake, coming up even before his eyes were open.

He sat there, sweaty palm clutching his rifle, heart thundering in his ears so loudly that it drowned out near everything but that next faint, thready scream emanating from somewhere above.

The frightening cry faded into no more than a gentle sough as the gust of wind wound its way on down the canyon, sailing past their camp, farther still into the river valley fed by the numberless streams and creeks they were trapping that spring.

As his breathing slowed, Titus swiped the dew of sweat from his face with a broad hand—remembering where he was. Remembering why he was here. Then peered around at the other dark forms sprawled on the ground, all of them radiating from the ember heap of last night’s fire like the hardwood spokes on a wagon wheel. Downright eerie, quiet as death itself were those eight other men. Not one of them snoring, sputtering, or talking in his sleep. Almost as if the eight shapeless cocoons of buffalo robes and thick wool blankets weren’t alive at all.

Only he—finding himself suddenly alone in this suddenly still wilderness. Alone with this clap of dark gathered here beneath the utter black of sky just beyond the tops of the tall pines. Alone with the remembrance of those cries and screams and death-calls from the Blackfoot warriors as the enemy charged forward, scrambling up the boulders toward the handful of American trappers who had taken refuge there in the rocks, preparing to sell their no-account lives just as dearly as any men ever would dare in that high and terrible country where the most hated band of red-skinned thieves and brigands roamed, and plundered, and murdered.

It had been that way for far longer than he had been in the mountains. And sitting right then and there in the dark, Titus Bass had no reason to doubt that the Blackfoot would still be raiding and killing long after his own bones were bleaching beneath the sun that rose every morning to burn away the mists tucked back in every wrinkle in the cloud-tall Rocky Mountains.

Rising in a slow crescendo, the cry began again above him, like a long fingernail dragged up a man’s spine. Looking up against the tarry darkness of that sky pricked only with tiny, cold dots of light, he watched the blacker branches sway and bob with the growing insistence of the wind, blotting out the stars here and there as they weaved back and forth. Groaning, whining—those branches tossed against one another, rubbing and creaking with the frightening cry that had brought him suddenly awake.

With the next swirling gust of breeze, Titus discovered he was damp, sweating beneath the robe and thick woolen blanket. After kicking both off his legs he sat listening to that noisy rustle of wind as it muscled its way through the tops of the trees overhead and hurtled on down into the valley, descending from the slopes of that granite and scree and bone-colored talus above their camp. A wind given its birth far higher in the places where the snow never departed, above him across that barren ground where even trees failed to grow. Those high and terrible places where if a man had the grit or were fool enough, he could climb and climb and climb until he reached the very top of the tallest gray spire, there to stand and talk eye to eye with whatever fearsome god ruled from on high.

Such a feat was for other men. Not the likes of Titus Bass. The spooky nearness of that god and the sky he ruled was close enough from right here. It had been ever since he had first come to these mountains, running from all that was, racing headlong to seize all that could be.

This coming summer it would be three years since he first laid eyes on that jagged purple rip stretched across the far horizon—three years since Titus Bass had journeyed eagerly into these high places. That would make this … spring of twenty-eight.

In many ways, that was a lifetime spent out here already.

Twice now he had been spared. First with those Arapaho who’d hacked off his topknot and left him for dead. Had it not been for the young mule carrying him out of enemy country, Bass was certain his bones would be bleaching beneath the sun of uncounted days yet to come. Then a second time—only a matter of weeks ago—that Blackfoot raiding party had tightened their red noose around a last-stand where Titus and the others had prepared to sell their lives dearly. Nine men who saw no real chance of coming out on the winning side of the bad hand dealt them.

There in the dark now, Titus wondered just how many times a man might be given another chance, another go at his life. How often could a reasonable person expect to have the odds tipped in his favor? Once? Maybe. Twice? If a man were near that lucky, then Bass figured he might well be inching closer to that day when his luck had just plain run out … gone like the tiny grains of sand that slipped through the narrow neck of an hourglass, one by one by one in a tumble of seemingly insignificant moments lost to the ebb of time.

The days of a man’s life eventually reaching the end of his ledger. Come the call for him to pay the fiddler.

As he turned to glance at the heap of ash in the fire pit, Bass heard one of the animals snuffle out there in the darkness. He strained his eyes to peer into the inky gloom. After listening intently, he finally stared at the faint, glowing embers—wondering if he should throw some more wood on, or just curl down within his bedding and try falling back to sleep.

Absently digging at an itch nagging the back of his neck, he decided he would forget the fire. This was high season for ticks, tiny troublesome creatures who only weeks ago had killed one of the men already with the fever they carried. But his fingers reassured him that this itch was no tick, not even the lice he had played host to when he had first reached these Shining Mountains—digging so often and voraciously at his hide that the trio who happened upon Titus came to call him Scratch.

The name stuck, through all the seasons. With the coming and going of all those faces. Scratch—

Another snuffle from the horses.

They’re restless with the wind, he thought, shoving the blanket down off his legs and reaching for his moccasins. Horse be the kind of critter gets itself spooked easy enough in the wind, unable to smell danger. What with all this night moving around them, rustling—

One of them snorted loudly, in just that way the Shoshone cayuses did when all was not well.

He rose without knotting the moccasins around his ankles and snatched the pistol from beneath the wool blanket capote he had rolled for a pillow, then swept up the long, full-stocked flintlock rifle he curled up with between his legs every night. After that deadly battle with the Blackfeet, Scratch had even given the weapon its own name, calling it Ol’ Make-’Em-Come.

One of the other men stirred, mumbling as he turned over within his blankets, and fell quiet again.

Bass stepped from the ring of bodies, around the far side of their camp rather than heading directly for that patch of ground where they had driven their animals and confined them within a rope corral before turning in for the night.

“Better for a man to count ribs than to count tracks,” explained Jack Hatcher.

Far more preferable that a careful man’s animals should go without the finest grazing possible than to discover those animals were run off by skulking brownskins. Putting a feller afoot in a hostile wilderness. Forced to cache most all his plunder, then follow those horses’ tracks with only what a man could carry on his own back.

Was that hiss more of the wind soughing through the trees up ahead? Or … could it have been a whisper?

In the darkness, and this cold, Scratch knew a man’s ears might well play tricks on him.

Scratch stopped, held his breath, listened.

Behind him in camp he thought he heard one of them stir, throwing back his bedding, muttering now in a low voice that alerted the others. They were coming out of their deep sleep as quiet as men in a dangerous land could.

From beyond the trees the wind’s whisper grew insistent now. Then a second whisper—and the gorge suddenly rose in Bass’s throat. Whoever was out there realized the camp was awakening. He brought up the long rifle and stepped into the gloom between the tall trees, cautiously.

With a shriek the uneasy quiet was instantly shattered. A boom rocked the trees around him, the dark grove streaked with a muzzle flash.

The bastards had guns!

One of the trappers in camp grunted as the rest shouted and cried to the others, all hell breaking loose at once as shrill voices screeched battle calls from the dark timber.

In a crouch, he lunged forward. Not back to camp as more guns began to boom. But making for the horses.

The red niggers were after the remuda!

Behind him the voices of his friends grew loud as they met the assault—an instant before the dark shapes of the animals took form, congealing out of the darkness. Milling four-leggeds … then a two-legged took shape, and a second, he saw among the stock: slapping, yelling, driving some of the horses out of the rope corral. More of the huge shadows hopped within their sideline hobbles, attempting to break to freedom, straining to join those captured animals the raiders goaded into the darkness.

He recognized Hannah’s bawl. That high, brassy cry the mule gave when frightened—like that day Silas Cooper was about to kill the mare, or that day Bass lost his scalp and was left for dead.

Stepping to the edge of that copse of trees, he recognized her big, peaked ears on a nearby shadow. One of the raiders struggled to keep his hold on the mule’s horsehair halter. Scratch stepped sideways, close enough to make out the warrior’s body, seeing how young he was.

“Let go of ’er!”

Whirling around in a crouch, the youngster reached for the tomahawk at his belt, the metal head glinting with starshine as it flashed out at the end of the arm he swung back over his shoulder.

At Scratch’s hip the rifle boomed, its flash bright as midday—temporarily blinding Titus as he shoved the rifle into his left hand, snatching the pistol from his belt with his right. Ahead of him the raider crumpled in half, hit low in the gut with a ball of lead more than a half-inch round. Flopping to his side, the wounded man struggled to reach for the tomahawk that landed inches from his fingertips, the other arm clutched across his abdomen.

Bass leaped out of the trees, landing with a foot on the raider’s wrist. Instantly the Indian took the free hand and struggled to reach the knife scabbard flopping at his hip. Hannah snorted, bobbing her head, yanking back at her picket rope with that recognition of blood.

Not about to waste another shot on the thief, Scratch stuffed the pistol into his belt, raised the rifle above his head in both hands, then savagely drove the metal butt plate straight down into the warrior’s face. And a second time as the Indian twisted and thrashed, his last ragged breaths spewing from the crushed hole in his head like frosty streamers. After a third and harder blow, he no longer moved.

Stepping over his victim, Bass pulled the pistol free, crouched slightly, and slipped forward again into the darkness. To this side and that he shoved the frightened, chivvied animals, forcing a path through their midst. A hobbled horse clumsily lunged out of his way, and into that gap suddenly leaped another warrior, a long dagger clutched in one hand, a tomahawk held in the other. From side to side he rocked, gazing wickedly at the white man with a crooked smile.

Bass squeezed the trigger as he brought the pistol up. When the ball struck the warrior high in the chest, it drove him backward off his feet to land among the legs and hooves of the hobbled animals.

“Simms!”

It was Hatcher’s voice somewhere behind his right shoulder.

“Here, goddammit!”

“Ye see Bass?”

“He ain’t with me,” explained the voice coming from a different side of camp.

How he wished he had picked up his powder horn and shooting pouch before he’d left his bedding. Unable to reload, Titus instead leaned down and pulled the knife and tomahawk free from the warrior’s hands, then straightened and yelled, “Jack! I’m over here!”

“Bass?” Hatcher cried. “Was that Scratch’s voice?”

“Sounded like him—”

The voice had to be Kinkead’s, nearly muffled with the gunshot.

“Goddammit!” that booming voice screamed.

“Matt!”

A new voice asked, “You see Bass over by you, Rufus?”

While the trappers called to one another back in camp, no more than fifteen feet in front of him, Titus watched a warrior appear out of the night and those shadows clinging among the trees. The Indian crouched, stopping long enough to study the small clearing where the trappers had made their camp. From there it was plain to see that the horse thief had John Rowland’s narrow back all to himself. Raising his short horn bow, the warrior drew back on the string.

On instinct Bass flung his arm back, hurling the knife at the target. Too quickly. Off its mark, the weapon clattered against a nearby tree. The enemy jerked to the side, wheeling to find the white man behind him. Drawing back on his bow string once more, he now aimed the arrow at Scratch.

Startled at the noise, Rowland turned. “Shit!”

As he leaped to the side, Titus grumbled, “Never was any good with stickers—”

And with that he flung the tomahawk at the raider, striking the horse thief low in the chest.

“Scratch is over here!” Rowland sang out as the warrior crumpled forward onto his face.

Behind them on the far side of their camp, four of the trappers squatted behind some baggage. Among them Hatcher rose. He intently watched the night shadows as Bass emerged from the trees, his eyes raking the meadow for more of the enemy.

“That the last of ’em?” Hatcher asked.

“Dunno,” Elbridge Gray admitted below him, squatting there as he shoved the ramrod down the muzzle of his rifle.

“Keep yer goddamned eyes peeled on that line of trees,” Hatcher commanded, slapping Solomon Fish on the shoulder as he turned. “Kinkead? Where the hell’re you?”

“I don’t see him nowhere,” Caleb Wood cried with fear in his voice.

From across camp Rufus Graham shouted, “He go out with them horses?”

“Horses,” Bass muttered angrily at himself, whirling around. Then he turned back suddenly to yell at Rowland. “Your gun loaded, Johnny?”

“Yeah, why?”

“Come with me,” Bass growled, growing more angry with himself as he dashed away. “The goddamned horses.”

As the two white men drew close, the animals neighed and whinnied—some recognizing their smell, others still frightened. They milled nervously in what was left of their rope corral strung in a wide circle, looped tree to tree to tree. That one section cut by the raiders was not enough for the horses to dare snatch at their freedom: with a hand still clutching the end of the rope he had cut, one of the warriors lay dead. The foreign smell of the Indian, perhaps that faint hint of his blood on the wind, kept the rest of their nervous animals from bolting past the body sprawled on the forest floor.

“How many you figger the niggers got?” Rowland asked as he moved among the horses, quieting them—patting necks, stroking withers and flanks.

“Likely a handful,” Bass replied, worried. For he still hadn’t seen her among the others.

Simms was suddenly at the far side of the corral, ducking under the rope. “Mule’s over here, Scratch!”

“Damn,” he croaked thickly, shoving his way through the rangy Indian cayuses, fighting his way to the mule. He stopped, finding he could breathe again just at the sight of her.

Reaching Hannah’s side, Titus laid an arm affectionately over her neck, hugging the animal.

“Kinkead’s hurt,” the stocky Simms said as he came to a halt beside Bass. “Hurt bad.”

“He gonna make it?”

“Hatcher don’t know yet,” Simms admitted, his pale, whitish-blond hair aglow in the night.

“Damn.” Scratch turned toward the far side of the corral. His eyes found Rowland. “Me and Johnny stay here while you get some more rope.”

“They cut through more’n one place?”

“No,” he answered Simms. “We’re lucky. Who was they anyway?”

Isaac shrugged. “From the quick look-see I got of the two of ’em we dropped … likely they was Blackfoots.”

He swallowed hard. Blackfoot again. “G’won—get the rope, Isaac.”

Simms turned and moved away without a word.

Blackfoot.

What were the chances this had been a different raiding party from the one that had struck Hatcher’s outfit weeks ago as they were trapping their way northwest from Shoshone country? Slim chance, if any. When Goat Horn had brought his warriors across those days and nights of hard riding to pull the trappers’ fat out of the fire, reaching the white men as the Blackfoot raiders were circling in tighter and tighter to make the kill … what were the chances that those angry, defeated Blackfoot had been driven on north, back to their own country?

And what were the chances they had doubled back to try again?

“They was Bug’s Boys awright,” the rail-thin Rowland said behind him.

Turning, Bass saw John standing over one of the bodies.

“You get this’un, Scratch?”

Titus stepped over to the Indian lying sprawled on the ground. “The first’un,” Bass admitted. “Didn’t kill him right off with a ball. Not much more’n a boy.”

“Ain’t much left of the young’un’s face.”

Swallowing, Titus declared, “He come on a man’s errand.”

“Damn if he didn’t. Looks of it—this here boy was ready to chop you into boudin meat.”

Shaking his head, Bass turned away, watching Simms approaching. “It don’t make the killing any easier, Johnny.”

“By jam—these niggers’re wuss’n animals,” Isaac declared as he came to a halt. “Blackfeets is like painters and wolves, Scratch. No better. A little smarter mayhaps. But they ain’t wuth no more’n a critter.”

“Isaac’s right,” Rowland said, bobbing his head of unkempt hair. “And your hand put two of ’em outta their misery this night.”

“Two?” Simms echoed with interest, stroking at his long, pale beard.

Jabbing a bony thumb over his shoulder, Rowland explained, “’Nother’un’s back there—nigger was fixin’ to lay me out when Bass finished him.”

“Damn. If that don’t take the circle!” the overly solemn Simms said with uncharacteristic enthusiasm. “Two of ’em. C’mon, let’s get this here rope up quick. Jack wants us back in camp so we can figger what’s to do about them horses the others got off with.”

In minutes Bass was kneeling at Kinkead’s feet with some of the others. Titus asked Hatcher, “How he be?”

“I’m fit as any the rest of you sonsabitches,” Kinkead grumbled as he pulled out the thick twig he had been clenching between his teeth. For the moment this stocky man was sitting propped back against a pack of beaver, Caleb Wood behind one shoulder for support. Matthew turned his chin toward the other shoulder and growled, “Leave me be, Mad Jack! You never was any good with a knife—”

“Shuddup, child,” Hatcher ordered. “An’ quit yer hitchin’! Ye’re making this wuss’n it has to be.”

Kinkead gasped in pain, flung his head back with a groan, and shoved the twig back between his teeth as Hatcher proceeded to dig into the dark, moist wound on the big man’s muscular chest. From it fluttered the long shaft of a Blackfoot arrow—buried deep in the right breast.

“Hold him still, goddammit!” Hatcher ordered, exasperated. “Help me, Bass. Hold him down!”

Now there were three restraining that bull of a man almost as wide as he was tall.

“You gonna finish it sometime afore the damn sun comes up?” Bass eventually asked in a grunt as he tried to stay atop Kinkead’s strong legs.

“I can feel the goddamned arrow point,” Hatcher admitted, shifting the knife blade this way, then that, with one hand, his other gently tugging now and then on the shaft. “I don’t wanna pull the goddamned thing free ’thout the arrow point. Hold him down, or I ain’t gonna get this done afore a month of sunrises!”

Kinkead growled like a wounded bear, hissing around his twig at Hatcher as Jack rose to his knees above the man, brought back his arm, and suddenly slammed a fist against Kinkead’s jaw.

Spitting the twig free, the wild-eyed Kinkead almost succeeded in getting up despite the other three. Unfazed by the blow, he angrily spat, “What the hell you go and do that for—”

Jack swung his fist again, harder this time, connecting with a crack like a cottonwood popping in the dead of winter. Kinkead’s eyes rolled back, and his head sagged to the side, all that dead weight propped back against Caleb Wood.

“Now I can get done what needs doing ’thout him jabberin’,” Hatcher said as he resituated himself over Kinkead. “You boys can’t keep him still … by bloody damn I’ll put him to sleep my own self.”

In a matter of moments Hatcher’s deft touch had extracted the arrow. All that probing and digging left a mess of Kinkead’s chest, but both shaft and arrow point were free. “Get yer medeecins, Isaac,” he ordered. “Patch him up and get him covered quick.”

Simms turned away toward his bedroll.

Jack rose, wiped his skinning knife across his legging, and shoved it back into the scabbard at his hip. “The rest of ye, gather round.” He looked among them until he spotted Rowland. “How many they get away with, Johnny?”

Rowland shrugged and nodded to Bass.

Titus answered. “Maybe half a dozen, Jack.”

“Damn.” Hatcher was deep in thought a few moments. “Every man make sure yer loaded. Leave behind any extra guns ye got with Rufus and Isaac”

“Me?” Simms asked as he returned with his parfleche of herbs.

“You and Rufus gonna stay behind here with Matt,” Hatcher ordered. “Drag up some cover, case they double back to make another go at us.”

“Where you going?” Graham asked with that slight lisp of his as he started to drag a bundle of pelts over.

“Me and the others,” the tall, angular Hatcher said, “we’re going after them horses.”

Domesticated four-legged critters were worth their weight in beaver plews in this country. Horses or mules, it made little difference to this small band of American fur trappers.

Yet this was more than a matter of having a few of their animals stolen from them. The thieves had been Blackfoot—likely some of the same bunch who had struck them earlier that spring. Had that whole raiding party come at them this time, they could have run right over the white men like a herd of elk trampling across a meadow of wildflowers.

This had become a matter of honor. A matter of a warrior’s pride. It didn’t take very many seasons surviving in these mountains before a trapper came to understand that blood was the only language the Blackfoot understood. Force, and might, and blood.

If they let a small band of the enemy get away with a handful of horses …

Hell, there was never the slightest debate. The six saddled up and rode north toward the far-off spine of the distant mountains, feeling their way in the darkness, hoping that their guess was right. They could wait until first light to circle around camp and locate the enemy’s trail. Or they could push out now in the dark, gambling that they would pick up the trail a few hours from now when dawn finally overtook them—without wasting that time and miles by sitting on their hands.

As the first ballooning of light emerged out of the east, they reached the foothills on the southern slopes of the range, Hatcher riding at the head of the others, who were strung back from him in a vee like the long-necked honkers that had been winging their way north overhead for weeks now, returning to summer haunts.

“There!” Hatcher hurled his voice over his shoulder, throwing up an arm to stop the others as he reined up.

Clattering to a halt, the rest gazed down the open, grassy slopes broken by stands of timber, cut here and there with narrow freshets flowing bank-to-bank with spring runoff fed from the snowfields far above them.

“They’re covering ground,” Bass declared as he studied the distant figures.

“Damn if they ain’t,” the beefy Fish agreed.

Hatcher turned his horse around, his half-feral eyes moving from man to man to man accusingly, “Ye boys figger us to go on? Or do we cut our losses and turn back now?”

“It’s a long shot,” Rowland said almost apologetically.

“Yeah,” Wood stated. “Ain’t no guarantee we’ll ever catch up after all this riding—”

“They can’t run forever,” Bass grumbled, exasperated at their second-guessing. “I’m fixin’ to go, even if the rest of you don’t.”

“Just you?” Rowland squeaked. “You’d be teched—”

With a shrug Titus interrupted, “If’n it’s just me, I’ll wait till dark one night soon and crawl in, cut them horses loose. Ride back this way … ride back like hell itself.”

“Eegod, boys! Just like a Injun would do it his own self!” Hatcher said, a grin of admiration beginning to crease his face.

“Damn straight,” Bass said, grinning too, determination bright in his eyes.

A half-wild look in his eyes, Hatcher glanced over the others, the grin fading from his mouth as he said, “Bass is right. Those sumbitches can’t run forever. They’ll have to stop one day soon—for graze, or water, or just to climb down from the bony backs of our god-blessed ponies.”

“And then we’ll have ’em,” Gray said with sudden enthusiasm. He wore a cap he had stitched together himself from a scrap of old wool blanket, sewn with a peak on either side to crudely resemble wolf ears.

Rowland shook his head. “If’n we ain’t dead in the saddle afore then our own selves.”

Hatcher nudged his horse up close to Rowland. “Ye comin’, Johnny?”

“Ain’t a thing wrong in you turning back to help Isaac and Rufus see to Kinkead,” Bass declared protectively. “No man can fault you there.”

For a moment Rowland appeared to consider that option. Then he sighed, “I come this far awready.”

Titus quickly slapped Rowland on the back and turned to Hatcher. “C’mon, Jack—let’s go see this through.”

Dawn came and went, then midday with it. In the early afternoon they crossed a wide, shallow creek, tarrying only long enough to water their horses a little, not enough to make the animals loggy. No more than a few moments for man and beast to gulp down the cold, clear mountain runoff, enough to give the saddle horses a burst of newfound energy. They pushed on into the afternoon and watched as the sun began to tumble toward the horizon behind their left shoulders.

“How many more you figger?” Solomon Fish asked the others who were stretched on their bellies with him, all six having left their animals tied in a copse of trees far below them before they scrambled up the slope to the top of the rimrock that color of old, sun-dried blood.

Eyeing the warriors below, Elbridge Gray replied, “Baker’s dozen, at least.”

The lean-faced Rowland stared down at the two hands he held up, flipping up fingers slowly, then folding them back down as he mouthed his numbers. “That makes more’n … oh, shit! We ain’t got us—”

“Hush yer face, Johnny!” Hatcher snapped.

“Way I see it,” Bass declared, “with that other bunch what just come in to join up with them horse thieves, looks to be they evened up the odds now.”

Rowland gulped, “Even … evened up the odds?”

“Yepper,” Titus replied. “I figger things is about a draw now.”

Mad Jack cackled low, wagging his head, eyes merry in the deepening twilight. “Eegod—if’n ye don’t take the circle, Titus Bass! With us having even-up odds, just what ye got in mind for to get our horses back from that camp they’re making down there?”

“Wh-what I got in mind?” Scratch asked with a snort. “You’re the one with all the notions, Jack. I’m just here to help out. I ain’t no smart nigger now.”

“I was hoping ye was gonna show us ye was a lot more dad-blamed smarter’n me, coon,” Hatcher said. “’Cause I ain’t got no plan neither. No way. Nothing ’cept my hankering to sashay in there quiet as can be come slap-dark, cut loose what’s ours, an’ run the rest off so’s they can’t trail us.”

“Gotta be quick and brassy ’bout it,” Titus added.

“Pick yourself a strong one to ride out with,” Solomon advised gravely.

Caleb Wood finally spoke up, “Chances are good these red niggers gonna come fair boiling after us, on horse or foot.”

“No two ways about it, boys,” Jack reminded the rest, “we gotta drive off all their ponies.”

“Don’t know about you,” Bass said as he started scooting back down the slope, a bone-deep weariness penetrating to his core, “but this here’s one child gonna grab him a few hours shut-eye till it’s time to go crawling in there and kill us some Blackfoots.”

“Dead on my feet, my own self,” Hatcher agreed, flinging his arms back and stretching like a skinny, long-legged cat. “C’mon, boys. It’s been a long day awready. And from the looks of things, we’re fixin’ to lose some more sleep tonight.”

Bass lay curled up in the frosty, fireless dark with the others, listening to the men snort and clear their throats, turn about and flop over, doing their best to root around and get themselves comfortable on the cold, cheerless ground. He wondered if the others were thinking on the Blackfoot and their fire. Likely the rest were all thinking on the same thing he had on his mind. Women.

He brought his hand up and gently touched the long braid tied in what hair hung in front of his right ear. Thinking about Pretty Water—how she had braided it for him the first time, then taught him to do it for himself.

For some reason tonight, he couldn’t get her out of his thoughts. That Shoshone gal who had taken on the boldest share of his nursing after buffalo hunters had discovered Bass near the spot where they had killed the sacred white medicine calf. According to that band of wandering Snake Indians, Scratch was responsible for bringing them that calf—a powerful, mystical symbol of the Creator’s blessing, a promise of plenty after so many, many weeks of want.

A damned lucky thing it had been for Titus Bass too. A hole in his chest from an Arapaho bullet, the scalp ripped from the crown of his head, grown weak as a newborn beaver kit after days of wandering half-conscious clinging to the back of his steadfast Hannah … never before had Scratch been so close to death’s door as he was that day last summer when Hatcher’s bunch and the Shoshone hunters happed onto him.

Suddenly become hero to the tribe if not their savior—Bass was treated like a chief, picked from the ground by the hunters and laid upon downy soft buffalo robes. Dragged on a travois back to the huge camp where Titus was descended upon by the women of the tribe, every last one of them clucking and chattering at once as they hoisted him into a huge buffalo-hide lodge where he would stay for the next two weeks while he was knitting up.

As he began to put back on the weight he had lost in his ordeal, the Shoshone women started out to care for him in relays, coming and going to change the noxious, slimy poultices they compressed into his bullet wounds, supporting him gently against their fragrant softness as they poured rich, greasy soup past his lips, or bathed him with scraps of cloth dipped in cool water. There had been nothing remarkable about any of those hovering faces, or the healing hands, or the gentle chatter he did not understand in the least … until one morning he awoke to the soft, lyric humming of a new woman he found sitting by the low flames warming the fire pit.

With her back turned toward him, for the longest time Bass contented himself to watch her sway gently back and forth in time to her half-whispered song as she repeatedly poked her bone awl through a piece of smoked leather, then drove the end of some sinew through the hole, down and through over and over again, tightening each stitch with a tug of her deft fingers.

He so surprised her the moment he asked for water that she stabbed herself with the awl.

But as soon as she whirled on him with a startled jerk, placing that bleeding fingertip to her lips where she licked at the blood—Bass’s mouth went dry. Finding himself pasty-tongued as he looked into those eyes that reminded him so much of Marissa Guthrie’s, that settler’s daughter back along the river south of St. Louis.

“What’s her name?” he had asked Hatcher later.

“Like that’un, eh?” Jack had said, his merry green eyes twinkling with devilment. “Some punkins, I’ll say.”

Now he was growing testy. “Her name, dammit.”

“Pretty Water,” Hatcher answered with a grin forming. “Got stabbed, did ye?”

“Stabbed?”

“Yer heart, nigger. Got stabbed in yer heart!”

As Titus lay there now in the cold and the dark, listening to the discomfort of the others on the ground, to the night sounds of their horses and the closeness of wild critters who owned this forest, Bass had to admit she had stabbed him in the heart.

Women. They had long been his weakness. How they preyed upon his heart, pierced him to his soul. Time and again hadn’t they loved holding a mirror up to his life, showing him just how weak he truly was. Not strong at all … oh, no. Women—like Amy, and Abigail, and Marissa. Then Fawn had renewed his faith in himself and the gentler sex—the sort of woman who unconditionally gave more than she got. Strange how she hadn’t expected any more from him than what he was prepared to give during their brief time together that first winter with the Ute.

A sudden lick of shame flushed through him.

What right had she to expect that he would stay on when spring freed the mountain passes and softened the ice clogging the high country streams where the flat-tails were awaiting the beaver men and their iron traps? A man simply didn’t pack along a woman, not a beaver man like Titus Bass. Come winter, was the time for bedding down with a woman, lying back in a lodge … maybeso a quick tangle or two with some likely gals come rendezvous when the sun was summer-high. A fella just had no business, no real need, to pack along a full-time night-woman. Looking after himself and his animals, his weapons and his traps, was truly more than enough to keep a man’s attention. That, and constantly watching over his shoulder, or the skyline ahead, for brownskins.

Man didn’t need no woman giving him the willies the way they sometimes did, taking his mind right off of what he should be keeping his mind to.

And Pretty Water was just that sort of woman. The kind that would steer a man’s mind off of near everything but coupling with her.

He felt his flesh stir here in the darkness at this remembrance of her. Of lying with her beneath blankets or robes as he healed from his wounds that terrible autumn. Her gentle touch mending all those places where his flesh was slowly knitting. And by the time she had come to ask him why he did not want her for his wife, he knew a smattering of Shoshone—just enough to really botch his trying to explain to her why he could not marry her.

How those big cow eyes of hers had pooled and spilled before she’d bit her trembling lower lip, turned, and dived out the lodge door.

For days Pretty Water did not return, her place taken by others who politely pretended not to hear when he asked of her. At last one of the old women told him he was healed. Time for him to rejoin the white men who had returned that very day to follow the Shoshone village through winter while Bass grew stronger. Time, the old woman told him, to forget about Pretty Water. She would never be his.

But how he longed for her again this night.

Wasn’t a man really a fool for allowing a woman to entangle herself around him so tightly? Damn—but why had God made them the sort of creatures what smelled so good, their fragrant flesh like downy velvet, all the soft and rounded curves of them rising and falling through hills and valleys?

He craved a woman, but of a time he convinced himself he didn’t want one. Oh, how maddening God had made this clumsy dance between the sexes! And in the end, how truly weak a man proved to be in the face of all the tricks and ploys a woman could pull on him.

Those last weeks among the Shoshone had been particularly hard without her. As the days passed, he had grown more and more restive, eager to take to the trail, to be gone from her, anywhere. Keeping to himself by and large so he would not have to chance upon her, until at last that morning arrived when Hatcher had moved out with his small brigade.

Someone stirred there in the black of night. Bass opened his eyes. Hatcher stood, blotting out part of the starshine above them. Nearby Fish and Wood slowly peeled themselves off their beds of cedar boughs and sagebrush. Sleeping right against the cold ground itself could stove up a man, stiffening his joints, paining his bones. Better for him to put some cushion between himself and the cold, bare ground.

What a fool he had been, Titus brooded as he sat up and volved his shoulders slowly. Remembering how ashamed he was when Goat Horn had brought his Shoshone warriors to pull the trappers’ fat out of the fire, pitching into the Blackfoot raiders who had the white men surrounded. Ashamed that he had been so demented to actually wonder if Pretty Water might have come along with the Shoshone war party. How reasonable it had seemed—since the village knew the warriors were coming to rescue Hatcher’s men, she might well choose to ride along to see for herself that Bass was still alive … for a few moments at least he could hope.

But within heartbeats all hopes were dashed. No woman had accompanied the war party. And not one of the Shoshone came up to explain to him that Pretty Water had reconsidered her actions, that she was worried about his safety. That she cared enough—

“Let’s get those cinches tightened,” Hatcher whispered, puffs of vapor streaming from his lips as he straightened and worked the kink out of a bony knee.

Without a word the others came up from the dark, cold ground, stepped over to their horses, where they threw up the stirrup straps so they could retighten the cinches. Bass shifted the Indian style chicken-snare saddle the others had given him last fall, snugging its high pommel up against the withers before he tugged up on the buffalo-hair cinch and locked it down.

“How you figger this, Jack?” Wood asked.

“We’ll ride on down to the stream they camped by,” Hatcher began as if he had given it all the thought in the world. “Feel how the wind moves, then see if we can find where them red-bellies put their horses out to graze.”

Fish asked, “Come onto ’em from downwind?”

“Only way,” Jack replied. “Afore that, best we give some thought to taking care of ary a horse guard they throwed out.”

“How many you wager they might have out?” Bass inquired.

“Two, maybe. You?”

“That sounds about right,” Scratch answered. “I want one of ’em for my own self afore we put them ponies on the run.”

“Awright,” Jack said, his eyes glinting with starlight as he stared coldly at Bass. “You and me, Scratch. We’ll take care of the horse guard afore the rest of the boys here move in on them others.” He stuffed a foot into a stirrup and flung himself into the saddle. “I’ll lead out. Single file. Keep quiet as the dead.”

He reined away toward the far timber.

Bass rose to the saddle with the others, brought his horse around, and watched Hatcher’s back disappear into the dark. “Damn, if it ain’t quiet as the dead,” he repeated, in a whisper.

None of the rest saw how he shuddered in the dark as a lone drop of cold sweat spilled down his backbone.

By the time they had dropped off the ridge and worked their way down to the creek, Scratch could tell how old the night had become, those early hours of morning when the temperature was at its coldest. When both man and animal normally slept their soundest.

Not this night.

The six moved slowly, cautiously, feeling their way upstream through the tall, horseman-high willow and buckbrush so they wouldn’t rustle or snap branches, alerting the enemy to their approach. Time and again they stopped, signaling back down their file with an arm thrown up, every man jack of them listening and smelling. More than half a dozen times already they had halted like that, when Hatcher finally cocked his head and sniffed at the cold wind more than usual, then swung his horse around sharply.

When he dropped to the ground, it was clear they had come as far as they were going to in the saddle until the moment arrived to escape with the horses. Jack stepped up to Caleb Wood, handing him the reins to his mount.

“Ye’ll see to my horse. Solomon, take the reins to Scratch’s pony. Things go the way I plan—the two of us rub out the herd guard—we’ll circle back here to join up with the rest afore we all ride in to whoop up a scare in them horses together.”

“You smell ’em, Jack?” Gray asked.

“I make the horses off yonder,” he answered, pointing north, away from the stream. “But I ain’t smelled no Blackfoot yet.”

“Mayhaps they’re camped on the far side of the herd,” Wood replied.

“Things’ll sit pretty if they are,” Hatcher stated. Then he fixed Bass with his eyes for a moment before he went on. “The rest of ye know what to do … if’n one or the both of us don’t come back in a bit.”

“We get the hell out of here,” Rowland declared. “There’s more Blackfoot camped in spitting distance than I ary wanna see—”

“No!” Hatcher snapped as he took a step closer to Rowland. “Don’t none of ye dare run off if things go mad. Ye finish just what we set out to do miles and miles ago.”

“We come for the horses,” Gray explained.

“Damn right we did,” Hatcher agreed. “Something happen to me—ye don’t leave ’thout them horses.”

Rowland wagged his head, saying, “But if they kill’t the two of you—”

“Then that just means they got their hands full for the time being,” Bass interrupted. “If them brownskins are busy taking what’s left of my scalp, boys—you damned well better see to riding off with their horses.”

Hatcher looked a moment into each face. “Ye all understand what Bass is saying? Hell breaks loose, me and Scratch here are on our own. Ye boys just get, and get fast. Ye drive off the ponies, why—Bug’s Boys in there won’t have ’em nothing to ride and no way to keep up with ye.”

“Can we count on you meeting us back to camp?” Wood asked hopefully.

Hatcher shook his head. “Something goes wrong—don’t count on seeing my mud-ugly mug again, Caleb. Just have ye a drink for me come ronnyvoo this summer.”

Caleb stepped forward, held out his hand to Hatcher in that sudden, shy sort of way. “Don’t do nothing stupid, Jack.”

“Like jumping more’n thirty Blackfoots by ourselves?” Hatcher snorted with a grin that always made the man’s mouth a wide and friendly bow. “Ain’t nothing stupid ’bout that, is there, boys?”

The four shook hands with the pair, who silently turned and disappeared into the willow on foot. Bass followed Jack, a slow step at a time, careful of their footing, toes feeling their way along in the dark, working this maze through the brush a yard at a time until Hatcher stopped and turned.

“This gonna be close-up work.”

“I know,” Titus whispered. He pulled the old knife from its rawhide sheath.

“Ye done this afore?”

Bass shook his head. “No. Not really.”

“Just like sneaking up ahin’t someone,” Jack explained. “Nothing much to it.”

“I figger there’s allays a first time,” Scratch said.

Hatcher smiled. “Just make sure ye’re around for a second time, friend. I come to like ye, Titus Bass.”

He laid his hand on the tall, thin man’s shoulder. “I come to like you some myself, Mad Jack.”

Hatcher held out his hand, and they shook swiftly, suddenly conscious once more of what lay before them. “I’m gonna work on past the herd to yonder where I figger they got ’em a second guard.”

“Where’s the first gonna be?”

Pointing, Jack said, “Not far, over by that ledge, I’d wager.”

“You want me to wait for you to get to the far side?”

“No. Ye kill that son of a bitch, and kill him quick. Sooner he’s dead, sooner we’re sure that one won’t make a sound to rouse the others.”

“Meet you back with the rest?”

“Less’n something goes wrong, Scratch,” he answered. “Then ye get the hell out of there the best way ye can.”

“Same goes for you, Jack. Something haps to me—see yourself that the boys split up what little I got to my name.”

He smiled quickly. “I awready got call on yer rifle, Scratch.”

“And my mule too?” Titus asked with a grin.

“Hell no, ye lop-eared dunderhead. Who the hell’d want that cantankerous bitch?”

An uneasy moment of quiet fell between them; then Titus said, “Watch your back, now, you hear?”

“Ye watch yer’n.”

Bass stared at the black hole among the tall willow where Hatcher had disappeared for what seemed like a long time. The breeze rustled the leafy branches around him as he endlessly tried to sort out sounds, like picking mule hair off a saddle pad, staring now and again at the dim form of the rocky ledge not all that distant. Then back again at the hole in the night Hatcher had punched through to disappear.

Scratch wondered, if it was so cold, then why in hell was he sweating the way he was?