“The hell you’re not.” Geist shook his head. “No, you know too much.” He drew a flintlock and said to Dryfus, “Tie him up and throw him in the storeroom with the bitches. We’re getting the hell out of here at daybreak.”
“We’re tucking tail and running?” Petrie said.
“We’re being smart. This hasn’t gone anywhere near the way I planned. I should never have left the States. Out here there’s too much I can’t control.”
“We could head down Santa Fe way or off to Oregon,” Petrie said.
“And what? Rob people for a living? What kind of life is that? The pickings would be slim and we’d always be on the run.” Geist shook his head. “The States is where we belong.” He pointed the flintlock at Toad’s face. “Now do as I told you with this fat slob and we’ll get to packing.”
Dryfus prodded Toad in the back with his rifle and Toad moved down the hall to the storage room. Gratt was standing guard over the women. Dryfus and Berber shoved Toad inside, but it was Petrie who tied him.
“Better say your prayers,
“If there’s any justice in this world,” Toad said, “you won’t get away with this.”
“There isn’t,” Petrie said, and laughed.
Chapter Twenty-two
Not all warriors were good trackers. Bull Standing was the best of all the Crows; he could track a turtle across hard earth. Chases Rabbits was fair at it. He could track a buffalo if the ground was soft enough.
Zach King was as good as Bull Standing. And it was Zach who abruptly drew rein and announced, “There’s tracks here that shouldn’t be.”
When Zach stopped, so did the wolf.
“What kind?” Chases Rabbits asked. He had been thinking of how much he missed Raven On The Ground and had not been paying much attention.
Sliding down, Zach squatted and pointed. “See for yourself.”
“Moccasin tracks?” Chases Rabbits dismounted to study them better. Their size sent a jolt of consternation through him. “Those be women tracks.”
“And they were running.” Zach rose and led his dun, paralleling the prints. “Three of them.” He hunkered and touched a particularly clear print. “Definitely Crow.”
“Geist say Raven On The Ground and rest go to village. Why they use feet and not ride?”
Zach was bent over a series of large pockmarks. “Hoofprints,” he said. “Made by shod horses going in the same direction.”
“Shod means white men,” Chases Rabbits said, and scratched his head. “Me very confused.”
“Geist and his friends would be my guess,” Zach interpreted the tracks. “They were after the three women.”
“Why?”
“That’s what I’d like to know.” Zach uncurled. “Are you up for some spying?”
Chases Rabbits stared at the sky and then at the ground and said, “Me little bit up.”
“We’re going back and keeping an eye on the mercantile. It’ll be dark soon and I’ll sneak down for a look- see.”
“You think maybe something wrong?”
“That building burned down. And now we find these tracks. Then there was the way Toad was acting.”
“Toad?”
“You didn’t notice how nervous he was?”
“No,” Chases Rabbits admitted.
“Yes, I’d say something is wrong.”
The sun was roosting on the rim of the world when they came to just below the crest of the hill above the hollow. They crawled on their bellies to where they had an unobstructed view.
The wolf lay between them.
“Flatheads,” Zach said, and nodded at a knot of warriors and horses.
“No whites outside,” Chases Rabbits noted.
Soon the Flatheads departed. The mercantile’s shadow lengthened and the bright of day gave way to the spreading gray of twilight. Windows lit with the glow of lamps.
By the stream a frog croaked, and crickets began to chirp.
Chases Rabbits saw shadows flit across the windows. Faint to his ears came gruff laughter and loud voices.
“Sounds like they’re having a high old time,” Zach said. “They must be drinking.”
Something had been bothering Chases Rabbits since they found the moccasin tracks, and now he gave voice to it. “Why there only tracks of three women?”
“I don’t know.”
“You think they at village or down there?”
Zach nodded at the mercantile. “I’ll find out when I go down.”
“I go, too.”
“One of us should stick close to the horses in case we need them in a hurry.”
Chases Rabbits saw the logic, but he was troubled. “You did say we friends, yes?”
“I’m as good a friend with you as I am with anyone.”
“Then me have favor must ask. You stay with horses. I go see what whites do.”
“Why you?”
Chases Rabbits struggled with how to put into white words how much he cared for Raven On The Ground, and how if she was in trouble, it was partly his fault since he was the one who had suggested she come work for the whites, and how, as a Crow warrior, he had to protect the women. But that was a lot to express, so he simply said, “Raven On The Ground.”
“I savvy,” Zach said. “I have Lou. She’s as important to me as your sweetheart is to you.”
“Sweetheart?” This was new to Chases Rabbits.
“It stands for the woman you care for the most,” Zach explained.
“Sweetheart.” Chases Rabbits grinned. “That fit. Me like it.”
“The whites have a saying,” Zach said. “We can’t live with them and we can’t live without them. Or as Uncle Shakespeare puts it, we can’t live without them and we can’t chuck them off cliffs.”
“Chuck?”
“Throw.”
Chases Rabbits was lost. “Why we throw sweethearts off cliff? They maybe die.”
“Doesn’t Raven On The Ground ever get your dander up?”
“Dander?”
“Temper. Doesn’t she ever make you angry?”
“She mostly make me happy and warm.”
Zach suddenly switched his attention to the hollow. “One of the whites.”
The twilight had darkened, but there was sufficient light to reveal Petrie walking in a wide circle around the trading post.
“What him do?”
“Maybe he’s getting some fresh air,” Zach speculated. “Or maybe he’s making sure everyone has gone for the day.”
“Him never talk much, that one.”
“He strikes me as a sidewinder. The most dangerous of the bunch.”
“How you know that? You see him shoot or use knife?”
“It’s how he carries himself. It’s his eyes. He’s a killer. You stay shy of him, you hear?”
Chases Rabbits had learned to trust Zach’s judgment. It compounded his worry: his sweetheart in the hands of a killer. “The other whites like him?”
