Wind Walker

SIXTEEN

As soon as that bloody night had begun to gray into false dawn, Hargrove and his trio were out on horseback. It hadn’t taken them long to find Frakes tied to the tree not far from the grassy patch of ground. They brought the eviscerated body back into camp, slung over the bare back of a horse for all to see.

“Look at this—everyone!” Hargrove demanded with an indignant roar. “Look right here at the lawlessness I did everything I could to protect you people from! One man’s dead for sure. Maybe three more!”

He came to a stop near the center of that largest cluster of wagons, shouting at the settlers as they interrupted their breakfast and early-morning chores. “We’ll hold a funeral for this man in fifteen minutes. I want every one of you there to pay your respects, then I want you men, the able-bodied among you, to saddle up with me and my men. We’re going in search of the others those old fur men must have killed too. And when the dead are buried, we’re going to hold us a trial before we hang these guilty ruffians, then get on our way.”

For a moment it seemed the whole train—man, woman, and child—were staring right at Titus and Shadrach.

Hargrove started away—but suddenly stopped and wheeled about. He glared hard at Hoyt Bingham. “You, Bingham. You’ll bring your shovel to help dig this man’s grave.”

But before the emigrant could speak, another voice boomed behind Titus.

“He ain’t digging no grave for any of your hired trouble.”

Slowly, Hargrove turned and found Roman Burwell standing as straight as he could, on his own feet beside the tailgate of his wagon.

“I gave Bingham an order, Burwell,” the captain snarled. “Since you’re in no condition to help him dig this man’s grave, Bingham will dig it for the both of you—”

“I ain’t going,” Hoyt said, taking a bold step away from his wife at their breakfast fire.

Hargrove’s cold eyes narrowed menacingly as Benjamin shifted on his saddle, preparing for what violence loomed. “Trouble happens, Bingham. Folks get hurt, sometimes through no fault of their own. Then there’s folks like you and Burwell—they get hurt because it’s their own stupid undoing.”

“You ain’t gonna bully an’ beat us, not from here on out.” Burwell stood bravely, one arm braced against the bandage that was wrapped tightly around his broken ribs.

That sudden show of bravery appeared to buoy Bingham and some others with renewed courage. Turning back to Hargrove, Hoyt Bingham declared in a clear voice, “Don’t you remember what happened a few days back?”

“You do remember that council meeting you called real clear, don’t you, Hargrove?” Truell asked as he stepped up beside Roman Burwell.

“You was voted out,” Bingham reminded with new backbone.

“Maybe you and what you got left of these toughs oughtta get outta our camp!” cried the smooth-jawed Fenton.

Iverson stepped up to the line slowly being formed against Hargrove and Benjamin. “You and the rest shouldn’t travel with our company no more!”

“You can’t do this to me!” Hargrove bellowed like a wounded bull surrounded by gaunt and hungry wolves. “You said we could accompany your train till we reach Fort Hall!”

Surprising them all, Roman Burwell unsteadily pushed himself away from the wagon’s tailgate, wincing a bit with the movement. “Don’t you hear what these men are saying?” he asked. “That’s the voice of the people saying you been voted out. Now it’s time you got out.”

When Hargrove reined his horse aside so he could look squarely at Burwell, both of Scratch’s dogs growled where they were restrained at a wagon wheel, their neck hair ruffing, as Amanda stepped under her husband’s arm, attempting to support him on her shoulders. Roman gently pushed her away, wagged his head at her, and stood there alone.

The ousted wagon boss jutted his chin out and told the wounded emigrant, “Not one of you farmers here is man enough to go against me—”

“We aren’t gonna force you an’ your hired men out, less’n you make us,” Burwell interrupted. “As for the rest of them who want to go to California with you, all of you can stay with us till we get to Fort Hall. We’ll see your bunch is safe till you get to the Snake. But you ain’t our captain no more.”

At the edge of the gathering crowd a man named Rankin grumbled loudly, “I say the California folks go their own way from here on out!”

“No!” Burwell cried, wincing with a spasm of pain. “We aren’t gonna become the sort of people Hargrove is.”

Titus glanced at his daughter as she stood easily within reach of her weakened husband but gave Roman his stand. Amanda’s cheeks glistened with tears, her eyes shiny with pride in her husband. A pride that had long lain dormant until Hargrove’s unremitting cruelty had reawakened it.

“Why not, Roman?” asked a man named Winston. “He damn well tried to do the same to you!”

“Maybe that’s the way things was for folks back there in the East,” Roman said steadily. “Fact is, that’s the way it was for most all of us. Them with money had the power to rule over the rest. If we was so happy with that way of things back there—why’d any of us decide to strike out for Oregon in the first place?”

“Better lives!”

“That’s right!” Burwell responded to the anonymous cry from the crowd. “But, are any of us gonna have better lives if we all act like Hargrove and his kind when we get where we’re going? What have we made better for our families if we still fight to grab money and power for ourselves?”

Bingham started for the wounded emigrant, saying, “How’re you saying we’re supposed to make things different?”

“This here journey to a new land is our chance to do something good for our women and our children,” he explained to the hushed gathering. “We can make a new life for ourselves—not just new homes and new farms. But a new life! We’re not going to Oregon to end up the same sort of folks that Hargrove and them others are! Let him and his kind go to California. We’re going to start a new life in Oregon for our families. For our children’s children.”

Bingham stepped to Roman’s side and laid a hand on the big man’s shoulder. “My fellow captain is right! We must make new homes in a new land—not live things the way they were back east. We’ll let those who are happy with the Hargroves of the world stay back there and live out their lives, or let them follow Hargrove to California. As for us, we’re on to Oregon!”

Iverson leaped up and shouted, “The Bingham-Burwell Oregon Company!”

“Oregon or bust!” shouted Murray.

Pushing her way through the crowd that immediately surged toward Roman, Amanda threaded her way to his side, grabbed his face in both her hands, and pulled it down to her mouth as she raised herself on her toes. Watching them together at this pivotal moment, Titus felt his heart grow light, weighing far less than it had ever since that day at Bridger’s forge, when she told him about her husband and the troubles they were running from back in Missouri. For days now Scratch had been consumed by the fear that they would never outrun their mistakes, never get beyond the failures of Roman Burwell. Fear that Amanda had married a man who would one day plunge his whole family into disaster, if not with Phineas Hargrove on the road to Oregon, then surely once they had reached the mouth of the Willamette.

But instead, his son-in-law had stood up for the right, as Titus saw it. He had stood up to power, greed, and bullies. Here with the coming of the dawn, Scratch had realized his son-in-law was not so simple a man as one might suspect at first blush. Roman Burwell was as loving a husband as any he could hope for Amanda, as good and kind a father as he himself could be to his own children. The farmer was, in the end, the sort of man Scratch believed he could call friend. And to the old trapper there was no finer distinction than that.

“Oregon or bust!” the crowd echoed again as they washed forward, forcing the two horsemen back from their rejoicing in a swell of noise and a surge of bodies.

Amanda and Roman were going to be all right. For the first time in days, Titus felt that clear to his marrow. They and their children were going to be all right. The family would get to Oregon, and that country would indeed prove to be their promised land.

He felt his eyes sting as he watched that crowd of jubilant men, women, and children tighten around Burwell and Bingham, clapping and singing trail songs of Oregon. How proud he was to witness this moment. Strong, simple, good people—the sort who could surely make that new land thrive the way nothing back east ever would again.

Titus Bass felt as if he was witnessing the birth of a whole new country.

Off in the distance there was no mistaking that narrow, winding tangle of emerald green, luring and seductive against the sere and sunburned sienna of the summer landscape.

“That’s the Bear,” Titus said to Waits in English, holding the first two of those fingers left on his right hand in front of his mouth, pointed down as if they were the mighty canines of the beast.

She repeated in his native tongue, “Bear.”

“You said that good,” he sighed with contentment. “Off in that country, south aways, I first met Jim Bridger.”

“How long?”

“Hmmm,” he considered. “That’s some. Must be … goin’ on twenty winters now.”

“Too-wen-tee?” she mimed. Then asked again, “How long?”

So he balanced his longrifle across the tops of his thighs as the horse rocked beneath him, and held up both hands, fingers extended. Then he quickly closed his fists once and extended the fingers again. “Twenty.”

“Old man, this Ti-tuzz now!”

“Yeah,” he admitted. “Some days, I feel so goddamned old I wonder why I’m still livin’.”

She looked at him with worry creasing the crow’s-feet at her eyes. In her own tongue she asked the difficult question, “Your heart … it’s ready to die?”

With a shake of his head, Titus answered, “No. Not ready to die.”

He recalled that her people believed very strongly that every man would know when he was about to cross over. That same mighty power was what had prompted, provoked, and inspired Jack Hatcher to warble his favorite song as he lay mortally wounded in battle against the Blackfoot in Pierre’s Hole.^* And the very same spirit that compelled Asa McAfferty to pick his own time and his own place to make what Asa realized was coming down to his final stand. To these warrior peoples of the High Plains and the tall mountains, a man knew in his bones when his time had come to cross over that last, high, and lonely divide. Alone … for dying was at best a one-man job.

“You stay with me a long, long time still,” she said, the worry gone from her face.

“Woman—ain’t none of us know what’s in store,” he admitted. “Much as I’d love to die in my blankets with you and our children at my side, a passel of grandpups crawlin’ on the floor of our lodge … in this here country nothin’ lives long but the rocks and the sky.”

Her eyes misted a little, gone cloudy as a stormy day when she turned away from him and nodded once in agreement. “Only the rocks and sky live long, husband.”

“But—just look at you!” he exclaimed with good cheer, leaning over in the saddle and grabbing hold of her elbow. “Why, you ain’t ever gonna grow old, are you, woman?” He gazed deeply into her eyes.

“Many winters have come and gone since you first looked at me,” she said in Crow, gazing at him from beneath those black eyelashes with a profound gratitude for his compliment.

“But you don’t look no differ’nt than the day you come to sit with me aside the Elk River.”^*

“But, what of the … sickness that ravaged my face?”

“I don’t see that,” he confessed. “When I look at you I never have seen the sickness scars.”

“How long … you and me … was together?” She struggled some with his American tongue.

“Fourteen. This’ll be fourteen winters since you come to talk with me on that rock beside the river.”

She smiled at him. “You give me four good children.”

“Four?” As suddenly as he spoke the question, Bass realized his mistake and grinned at her, roaring, “Yes! Number four is comin’ this winter near my own birthin’ day!”

How he wanted to be back up in Absaroka long before then. Before the hard winds blew the yellow leaves off the cottonwood standing so stately along the Yellowstone, the Bighorn, on north to the winding valleys of the Judith and the fabled Musselshell. By the time the trembling aspen on the high slopes had begun to shed their leaves of gold and the snowline crept down, down, down toward the rolling prairie where the buffalo had begun to put on winter coats and take shelter in the lee of the mountains. How he hungered to be back among the places where the white man did not come with his women and wagons, with his ways meant to change everything that had been into what those stiff-backed folks demanded it must be.

To be back among a people living generations beyond count in a land that had always been. All a man could do was pray that the soft ones back east would never find a way to change that on him. For, if they did … then life would no longer be worth the living.

If a man could no longer hear the shrill whistle of a red-tailed hawk circling overhead but for the noisy clatter of mankind and his wagons, if he could no longer make out a wolf’s howl drifting down from the nearby hills because the aching stillness of night had been ruined by the nearness of one dirty, stinking settlement after another … then life no longer was sweet. Life was no longer worth the living. Till then, he’d go higher, and higher still, farther and farther back—all to stay away from those who came to take what they could from each new place before they ruined it and moved on. Men like Phineas Hargrove and his kind.

But then, there had always been that kind.

Yet wasn’t he much the same sort? Hadn’t the beaver men come to take until there was little left to take? Perhaps it was so … and it made his heart ache with the weight of that realization.

Still, he brooded, there was a marked difference between the him he was in those early years and the him he had slowly become. When the bottom fell out of beaver and there was no earthly reason to wade ice-cold streams in search of the elusive flat-tails, most all the old trappers had given up and fled: east for what once was, and west in the hope of what might be. But only a handful stayed on, clinging to what could never be again. Maybeso, that proved he was not like the rest, not the sort who came, used, and moved on when they had taken all that could be dug up, cut down, or carried off.

Which got Scratch to wondering just how white a man he was anymore. Gradually, inexorably, more and more with every year, he had come to think of himself as a man in between, someone who could never become a part of his wife’s Crow people, someone who would never again be considered completely white by his own kind. If most of the white trappers had fled back east to old jobs and old ways, and other white folks fled the East in their wagons, desperate to make a new start and new lives for themselves far to the west beyond these mountains … being neither white nor red anymore, just what the hell was he? Merely some mule-stubborn old man refusing to let go of a way of life that was in its death throes?

And all the more important: He worried about what the devil a man would do as he realized he would never fit into that world he saw coming down the trail.

Titus stood at the lower edge of a crusty patch of ground where the sulfur-laden waters had soaked into the earth over the eons, relentlessly leaving behind one thin layer of mineral sediment on top of another.

“That’s boiling water?” asked young Leah.

“Hotter’n your mama has in her kettle,” he explained to his grand-daughter.

As Ghost and Digger traipsed away to sniff at new and intriguing smells off in the sagebrush, both young boys accompanied the old trapper on this excursion to witness a true wonder of nature. Jackrabbit gripped one of his gnarled hands, and Lucas clutched the other. On both sides of him stood the other children, all of them a little in awe at the sight. As soon as the first steamy gush of water spewed from the geyser,^* more than a hundred excited, enthralled emigrants came racing out of the camp they were setting up that afternoon near Soda Springs.

Young Lucas asked, “Can I touch it?”

“Don’t you dare,” his mother warned as she stopped behind the child and rested her hands on his narrow shoulders. “That’ll burn you good.”

“Like fire burn me?”

“Wuss’n that,” Titus told his grandson. “Fire just burn you up and kill you quick. That there water burns so you die slow an’ hurtful, Lucas. That ain’t no way for a li’l man like you to go under.”

Leaning forward, Lucas peered around the front of Bass’s legs to get Jackrabbit’s attention. “We can’t go there to play.”

Little Jackrabbit, about the same age as Lucas, shook his head with understanding and confirmed, “No go.”

“No is right,” Amanda said gravely. “You boys play close to the wagon while we’re getting settled for the night. Over there, that side of camp, away from this here hot spring.”

“Where, Popo?” Jackrabbit asked, gazing up at his father.

“You boys play yonder where Lucas’s mama said,” he explained and pointed. “In the sage there, but don’t go far as them rocks.”

The boys started to let go of the old man’s hand as Amanda reminded them, “You two boys stay where I can see you! Hear?”

Lucas was darting off, Jackrabbit at his side in nothing more than a tiny breechclout and moccasins, as the white boy flung his tiny voice over his shoulder. “I heard you, Mama!”

Six and a half days after they had left behind Hargrove’s California-bound party and the headwaters of what the emigrant maps were already calling Bridger Creek on the Bear River Divide, the Bingham-Burwell Oregon Company reached Soda Springs high on the gentle, looping, northward curve of Bear River. From here the train would strike out north-northwest, leaving the river behind, striking overland as they made the last stretch for Fort Hall on the Snake.

Most afternoons all Titus or Shadrach had to do was turn about and look back along the far horizon for a low column of dust rising lazily in the air more than a full day behind, telltale sign of the Hargrove California Company. The ousted wagon master and his faithful supporters had begun to fall farther and father behind every day across the last week, moving at a more leisurely pace now that the Bingham-Burwell party was pushing on ahead without them. As the sun began to slip into the last quadrant of the sky, off behind their left shoulders, the time had come for one of the old trappers to select a camping ground for the night. A spot near wood and water, with enough dry, brittle grass available that the stock would not become too restless because of the lack of forage by morning.

More than four and a half days had passed since Roman Burwell pulled himself out of that wagon bed and rose on his own two shaky legs, standing up to Hargrove long enough for the rest of them to get up their gumption too. Not that any of these farmers weren’t man enough. Just, sometimes, most men need others to prod them, to give them permission to stand up for themselves. If Roman wasn’t the sort who would ever make a charismatic leader, at least he was the kind of man who had inspired others to be what any new land needed.

For those first two painful days after the train broke apart, Burwell had remained in the back of his wagon as it bounced and rumbled through the valley of the Bear River. And for the last four and a half agonizing days, Roman had mustered the strength to walk beside the plodding oxen, grumbling that as much as it hurt to trudge through the rocky soil, it still was nowhere near as painful as the hammering he had taken in the back of that wagon box, no matter how many comforters Amanda piled around him. The wounded farmer ended up covering the last eighty miles to Soda Springs on foot.

“Pa!” Amanda cried. “Get outta that food box!” She and the Indian women were going about preparations for supper.

“I’m just lookin’ for something,” he admitted as he retreated a step back from the rear gate of the wagon, bumping against his accomplice, Shadrach Sweete. “One’a them sugar bags o’ your’n.”

She eyed him suspiciously as Roman hobbled up, asking her father, “You got a sweet tooth I didn’t know about?”

“Not really. Just thought I’d make the young’uns a treat,” he confessed.

“Sugar? For what?” Roman asked.

“Shad an’ me gonna go fetch some of that soda water in our cups,” Titus explained with a playful grin. “We come back, gonna stir some sugar in.”

Sweete added, “Makes a tasty drink, it does.”

The pair were back at the wagon within minutes, each of them holding two pint tin cups filled with the bubbly water. Scratch asked, “You got my sugar ready?”

Amanda set an enameled-tin bowl on the gate, filled with a mound of sugar. “Here you go, Pa. Something to soothe that sweet tooth of yours.”

“I ain’t got a sweet tooth,” he snapped at her as he dipped a big pewter spoon into the bowl and dragged the scoop over to dump it into the first of the four cups.

Shad watched Scratch stir and stir before he took a sip of the effervescent liquid.

“Needs li’l more,” Titus admitted.

After another heaping spoon of sugar was stirred in, he tried it again. “That’s more like it!” And he handed Shadrach the spoon. “Waits! C’mere an’ try this treat I made for you.”

His wife took the cup from him, sniffed at it, then wrinkled up her nose with a giggle. In Crow she said, “It tickles me!”

“Taste it,” he prodded in English. “Sweet.”

“Like me!” Shadrach said as he finished tasting his and handed the cup to Shell Woman.

Bass took the spoon and began to mix some sugar into the other two cups. “Call them young’uns over here,” he suggested. “All of ’em.”

“You’re gonna make some for every one?” Roman asked.

“Got all the water we’d ever need,” Titus said with a wink. “How much sugar you got for me to drink up tonight?”

Amanda relented and said, “Go ahead on and use the rest of that bag for the children. I figure I’ve got enough left for coffee and baking till we get to Fort Hall.”

“Sugar there gonna be high as a silk top hat!” Bass exclaimed.

“So if we can’t afford the price and have to run out before we get to Oregon,” Burwell commented, “then we’ll drink our coffee straight and eat our biscuits sour!”

“Lemuel,” Titus called the youngster over. “Go fetch us this kettle full of water at that spring yonder where we brung the cups from.”

It wasn’t long before they were all standing at the tailgate, dipping cups in the kettle of cold, bubbling water—mixing in sugar and stirring, taking a drink before passing the cups around—wriggling their noses and giggling with the burst of tiny bubbles.

Scratch looked over the jostling of the children all around them. “Magpie? You see’d your li’l brother and that Lucas?”

“They play out there, Popo,” she said in a passable American, pointing out into the sage bottoms that extended toward the lava flats.

“Maybeso you better go fetch ’em both back here to have a treat with us afore all this sugar gets poured down our bellies an’ it’s gone!”

Titus watched Magpie get in one last long drink before she turned away for the open ground beyond the last wagon, out where the happy shouts of emigrant children rang out.

“How’d you ever find out to mix some sugar in with this water, Titus?” asked Burwell.

“Been so many years ago, I can’t rightly recollect,” he confessed. “You had it fixed like this afore, Shadrach?”

Smacking his lips, Sweete declared, “Many a time I come here, but never had no sugar mixed in. This is some!”

“Years and years ago, ever’ mountain man knowed of Sody Springs,” Titus explained as he cast his eyes around this beautiful, lush camping ground. “When a trapper an’ his outfit was anywhere near, they come camp here and drink all this water they could. This here’s some of the best medeecin a man could want going through him. Works its good right on down my gullet, into my paunch, an’ all the way on out.”

“You’d drink this without the sugar?” Roman inquired of Sweete.

Shad answered, “But this here sugar makes the sody a toothsome treat—”

“Popo!”

Scratch whirled at Magpie’s shrill yell, the sound of it making the hair on his arms stand on end. Something about it that instantly spelled danger and trouble. Everyone around him fell silent too and turned with him to watch the girl dashing toward them, the dogs bounding around her legs. Every few steps she took she twisted the top of her body halfway around to point behind her at the open ground where a small knot of children had gathered, all of them bending at the waist, as if looking down at something on the ground. From all directions, more and more of the children were converging on that tiny group.

“Po-po!”

As she screamed for him a second time and lunged closer and closer, more and more adults at the nearby wagons stopped and watched the girl with grave curiosity.

“She hurt herself?” Amanda said as she stepped around the end of the tailgate, dusting her hands on her apron, then bringing both to her brow, shading her eyes from the late-afternoon sun.

Something in his belly immediately told him Magpie wasn’t the one who was hurt. Not the way that girl was bounding over the sage like a doe antelope, all brown legs and fringed skirt flying. So he looked beyond her, to that wide-open patch of rocky sagebrush flat where the small boys had gone to play. No, he was relieved to see that they hadn’t ventured anywhere close to the boulders as he had warned them not to do. So were the two boys in that handful of youngsters knotted around something on the ground? From this distance, Titus could not make out either one of them in that group as the sun slanted its light from the last quarter of the sky.

He started toward Magpie at a walk, leaving the others standing behind without a word of explanation—acting on a gut-hunch that something was terribly wrong. Everyone in this valley seemed frozen, motionless, just watching. Everyone still but for him and Magpie.

“Popo, Popo, Popo!” she was gasping as her knee-length buckskin dress flapped at her skinny copper legs each time she leaped over some brush instead of dodging around it.

With his next breath Titus broke into a trot for her, suddenly aware of the murmuring voices of those emigrants he was leaving behind at their wagons on both sides of the sagebrush bottom. He still could not make out either of the boys in that bunch of youngsters. Worry became dread and began to claw at him. Titus started running faster.

“Popo, oh, Popo!” she whimpered when she came slamming against him, as he captured her in his arms and clutched her tight.

They were both gasping as he brushed the hair out of her sweaty face, asking, “Where the boys?”

She pointed, gulping deeply for air.

“They hurt? Your brother get hurt?”

“Loo-kass … Popo,” she rasped in a gush. “Loo-kass.” Then she pointed impatiently at the group of youngsters again.

“Lucas?”

Her head bobbed and the tears spilled from her wide, frightened eyes as if a dam had been broken, so suddenly it scared him.

“What!” he yelled down at her, sorry for the harshness of it that same instant.

“S-sn-snake,” she sobbed.

“Lucas? The boy got bit?”

She was just starting to nod even as he tore himself away from her. By the time he approached that mute group of children, Titus had no recollection of leaping over or scampering around the sagebrush on his way to them. Nor that the unkempt, dust-coated dogs had turned around and scampered back with him, as if this was some exuberant play. When he came heaving up the youngsters backed away in silence, their white faces gone pale as school paste, eyes so big and every one filled with unimaginable terror. As his moccasins skidded to a halt on the sandy soil, he finally saw the two of them. Jackrabbit was kneeling on the ground, his dusty cheeks streaked with tears as he looked up and saw his father staring down at him in utter shock. Strange, but Titus froze a moment, gazing at the way a few wild strands of his son’s hair stuck to the boy’s dirty, tear-tracked cheeks.

Jackrabbit had both of his tiny brown hands wrapped around Lucas’s right leg, fingers interlaced and their knuckles pale with pressure, clamped just below the knee.

“P-popo,” he croaked, runny phlegm oozing from his nose as he cried.

Slowly kneeling to keep from collapsing under his own weight, Scratch settled on the opposite side of Lucas and looked first into his son’s eyes. “Sn-snake?”

His son nodded.

Then Bass looked into his grandson’s face, afraid—so afraid—of what he might see in those eyes. And his heart broke as he recognized the sheer terror in those half-lidded eyes the moment he leaned over Lucas and caused a shadow to pass across the child’s face. The eyes widened slightly, moved liquidly, eventually found him. That’s when all the terror disappeared from his grandson’s eyes, even though they continued to leak big teardrops from their corners, streams of them washing down the boy’s temples through the dust matted on his face, in his ears and his dirty, corn-silk hair.

“Gr-gran’papa,” he said weakly. “See, Jackrabbit? I told you it’s gonna be all right now …” Then he brought up a sharp, hacking cough. “Be all right now—Gran’papa’s here.”

Laying his hand on Lucas’s brow, Titus gently lowered the hand so that it closed those two lids and covered the eyes. He could no longer bear to gaze into them. Instead, he turned his attention to the leg.

“Your hands tired?” he asked Jackrabbit in Crow.

The boy nodded.

His heart surged with an immense pride for this small child, his youngest son. It brought tears to his eyes to think that the boy had done the only thing he could think to do for this friend, this playmate, this relation he was coming to know on this short journey and would likely never see again in his life.

“Y-you done real good, son,” he whispered as he reached down with his left hand and yanked on the long whang that tied a moccasin around his ankle. “Keep a good hol’t of your friend’s leg just a li’l more. You unnerstand?”

Jackrabbit nodded again wearily, his lips trembling as he gritted his teeth with exertion.

Yanking a second time, Titus finally freed the long leather whang from the holes in his moccasin, then took his hand from Lucas’s eyes, quickly dragging his skinning knife from the scabbard at the small of his back. With three short slashes, he managed to open a slice in the bottom of the boy’s cuff. Dropping the knife, he grabbed the two sides of the cuff in his hand and gave it a brutal yank, ripping that leg of the britches clear up to mid thigh.

“Gran’papa?”

“Y-you be quiet now, Lucas,” he whispered as he saw Roman and Amanda running their way with Magpie and Waits-by-the-Water right behind them. Farther back came Toote and Shad, Lemuel and Leah too. And from other directions came what seemed like a hundred other nameless, frightened folks.

“I be real quiet for you,” Lucas whispered back from his dry, cracked lips. “Gran’papa make it better now.”

“Yes, L-Lucas,” he vowed as he stuffed one end of that narrow strip of leather under the bony leg, dragged up both ends together, then looped them in a knot. Now he pulled for all he was worth on those ends. “Jackrabbit—get me a stick.”

“How big, Popo?”

“Big as a pin to close your mother’s lodge cover.”

Sweeping up his father’s knife, Jackrabbit hacked off a short branch from a nearby sage, no more than the diameter of his stubby little thumb. As he knelt again beside Lucas’s leg, Titus said, “Lay it on the knot. No, middle. That’s good. Hol’t it there, son. Keep hol’tin’ it.”

Quickly he flipped over the long ends of the leather strip and made a second knot atop the small stick. Then a third as Amanda came dashing up. She was about to spill toward Lucas when Roman caught her, held his wife back. Titus gazed up at his daughter, reading the fear on her face, not having seen her cheeks so bloodless since that moment she had plunged a pitchfork into a man intending to murder her father in Troost’s St. Louis livery.

“Pa?” she questioned, weak and winded like a frail animal as Roman held her up, kept her from collapsing.

That’s when Bass moved his gaze to his son-in-law’s face—reading the stoic pain registered there. The iron set of a man’s jaw when that man knows if he doesn’t clamp his teeth tight his chin is going to quiver and he will betray himself … when a man realizes he must be strong for everyone else even though his own heart is already crying out in bitter anguish. In Roman Burwell’s eyes showed the despair of a man who already knew.

“Snakebite, Amanda,” Titus declared.

Burwell cleared his throat and asked in a whisper, “Rattler?”

When Scratch nodded, Amanda stifled a shrill sob and twisted about to bury her face in Roman’s chest.

Titus looked down at the child as he stuffed his knife back into its scabbard with one hand, slowly continuing to twist the stick with the fingers of his left hand, tightening, tightening, tightening the tourniquet.

“Lucas,” he said quietly, bending low so his face was just inches from the boy’s, “we’re gonna take you back to the wagon, son.”

“Get me better there, Gran’papa?”

God, how he wanted to lie to the child, to tell Lucas everything the boy wanted to hear, deserved to hear … but instead he said only, “Jackrabbit, you help me help Lucas now.”

“Yes.”

“Take hold of the stick from me,” and he waited while his son seized hold of the stick. “Don’t let go of it. Keep hold of it—I’m gonna pick Lucas up.”

“I-I can help you, Titus,” Roman offered.

“No,” and he shook his long hair. “You keep hol’t of Amanda. Just keep hol’tin’ her real tight too.”

Once Jackrabbit had the ends of the stick steadied in his two tiny hands, Scratch quickly stuffed both his arms under the child. Raising first his narrow shoulders, Lucas’s long, corn-silk hair spilling over Bass’s forearm, Titus next raised the knees, then got his own legs under him and stood. Digger was the more inquisitive of the two dogs, rising on his back legs to momentarily sniff at the boy. He turned and slowly started through the sagebrush as the crowd peeled back from his path, he and everyone in that crowd on either side of him moving slow as a death march, both his loyal dogs easing along at his heels. Bending his face over the child’s, Bass was constantly vigilant that he not let the sun’s intense afternoon light touch the boy’s face.

His left moccasin finally worked its way off and he began to walk through the sage across that rough, rocky ground with one bare foot. Waits immediately scooped up the moccasin and dashed in front of him, holding up the limp moccasin and quickly pointing at his foot. He shook his head and resolutely continued for the wagon. On both sides of him the crowd quietly murmured in wonder and fear, explaining to one another what they heard had happened; in that way a story was told in but a matter of a half dozen compelling words from one mouth to the other, to another, then to the next, on and on as they shuffled through the sagebrush on either side of him and the boy’s gray-faced parents.

He could hear Amanda sobbing behind him, could make out Roman talking softly to her as he continued to clutch his big arm around her quivering shoulders, holding her up, helping her walk, getting her back to the wagon for the sake of their youngest. Eight-year-old Annie suddenly pushed through the crowd and stopped right in front of her grandfather, staring at her little brother Lucas, her eyes never so wide. She stood rooted to the spot as Titus approached. He realized she needed something to do.

“Annie, go lay some more wood on the fire for me.”

In an instant the child had whirled about on her heels and darted back through the edge of the throng that made way for her. Titus took a deep gasp as his bare foot found some tiny cactus hidden among the dried bunchgrass. And kept walking with that boy cradled in his arms.

“Waits,” he called out to his wife in Crow. “Gather your medicines.”

She stared into his eyes a long moment, then understood. Her eyes fell to the ground.

“Everything you have,” he choked in his wife’s tongue as she turned aside. “We’ll need it all … so we can do everything we can.”

^* Carry the Wind

^* Yellowstone River.

^* Today’s Steamboat Springs.