came back up on his hip and brought the pistol up, aimed at the warrior moving in a blur to pull a second arrow from the same hand that clutched the bow.
Jerking back on the pistol’s trigger, he felt the weapon jump in his hand. A great gray puff of smoke issued from the short muzzle as Bass swapped the pistol to his left hand and with his right pulled the last weapon he could use for his defense.
With the knife held out before him he leaped upon the bowman who clutched his upper arm—a red, glistening ooze seeped between his fingers as his face showed surprise the moment the white man collided with him.
Titus seized a hunk of the Indian’s hair in his left hand, drew the skinning knife back at the end of his fully extended right arm, and slashed downward with all the fury he could muster. It hurt so to feel the warrior wrenching away from his left arm … then suddenly his right hand felt warm. Flecks of warmth spat against Bass’s face as the blood gushed.
No longer able to hold the struggling warrior with his weakened left arm, Titus flung the Indian backward as the enemy quivered and thrashed—his throat slashed so completely that his head keeled to the side, nearly severed from his body.
“That’s the way to shine, nigger!”
Bass jerked up with a feral growl, finding Silas Cooper scuttling toward him out of the shadows. Behind the tall man there were muffled shouts and the whinny of horses. Cooper went to his knees beside Titus.
“That red nigger’s skelp is yours, Scratch!” he cried out in exultation, slapping Bass on the back.
Wincing in pain, Titus grunted as icy shards filled the base of his skull, Sent shooting stars exploding behind his eyelids as he struggled to maintain consciousness.
“Damn nigger!” Cooper’s voice called out above him. “Scratch’s hurt. Billy!”
For some time Titus struggled to keep from losing his breakfast, then remembered they hadn’t really stopped for a noonday meal. Only a little yellow bile spilled up as his empty stomach revolted and he retched on the snow.
“You’ll be awright,” Hooks was saying over him somewhere.
Then someone was wiping cold snow on his face. Bass’s eyes fluttered half-open so that he could look up into Billy’s face.
Of a sudden, there beside Hooks’s hairy face, was Turtle’s, both of them staring down at Bass like masks suspended in the air above him.
“It’s over, Scratch,” Bud confided softly.
As much as he tried to listen to the silence of that rocky lodgepole clearing, Titus couldn’t hear anything. Maybe the silence meant that it really was over.
“Looks to be the greenhorn got two his own self!” Cooper suddenly bawled in triumph, appearing behind the other two, who continued to stare down at Bass. “How’s he gonna fare, Billy?”
“Get me his coat off and I can tell you better, Silas.”
They yanked and jerked, pulling his belt and sash off, then parted the blanket coat so that they could drag it down the left arm enough to look at the shoulder wound.
“It’s deep,” Hooks said solemnly.
“But clean enough,” Tuttle added. “She’ll knit up in time.”
Bass’s eyes opened now and then, fluttering in pain as the others prodded and pulled; then a great pressure was added to the source of his pain. He closed his eyes and wished they would just cut the arm off—it hurt so damned much.
“Don’t you go to sleep on us,” Tuttle commanded about the time Titus felt more cold snow rubbed on his cheeks, across his forehead, some of it spilling against his eyelids.
He blinked the cold away, trying to say something—to tell them to leave him sleep—but no words came.
“Think he wants us get him his skelps, Silas!” Billy roared over his shoulder at the tall man.
“By damn—this here pilgrim’s got his first Injun ha’r, this’un does!” Cooper bellowed lustily. Then he stuffed his face right in between Hooks’s and Turtle’s, saying in a softer voice, “Don’t y’ worry none, Scratch. I’ll go right off an’ fetch up them two skelps of your’n my own self for y’-”
“Silas,” Tuttle spoke through that thick, suffocating blackness slipping down over him, “I don’t think Scratch heard you none.”
There were pieces of it that came to him from time to time, like the ragged, painful consciousness that brought him awake with startling suddenness, yelping in protest before he would pass out again.
Yet, thankfully, Bass was able to pass through most of the homebound journey suspended in that blessed blackness where pain will take a man when it becomes more than he can bear.
Three of the injured Ute were dragged back to the village in improvised travois, like Scratch. The rest of the wounded stoically rode their ponies back to Park Kyack’s southern reaches.
Four of those warriors who had been at the very lead of the hunt that terrible day returned to their people slung over the backs of their ponies.
Once again the Ute had paid an awful price in their ages-old warfare with the Arapaho, who season after season continued to contest any trespass onto land they considered their own, on either side of the great tall mountains scraping the undergut of the winter-blue sky. None of the old Ute warriors were ready to give in and move off, leaving the Arapaho the freedom to roam that country. And with this loss of four young, healthy men, the entire village was now even more resolved to resist the violent encroachments of a people who had only recently begun to push up from the eastern plains into the fastness of the Rocky Mountains.
To the Ute way of thinking, the Arapaho were the interlopers, nothing more than unwanted trespassers, dangerous and deadly newcomers … at the same time what white men the Ute had run across had posed no danger—after all, the trappers were far too few, showing up infrequently at best, then moving on quickly enough without setting down roots. In short, the pale-skinned beaver hunters posed no real threat to Ute sovereignty of these high mountains, parks, and pine-ringed valleys.
But, like the Apache and Navajo to the south, like those Comanche raiding out of the southeast, now the Arapaho and the Cheyenne were threatening along the borders of Ute land from their traditional haunts on the eastern plains.
Within days it would be time for the Ute chiefs to deliberate and argue where best to move their winter camp to another site with better grazing for their ponies, more wood for their fires, a place where the winds did not carry so much of the stench of human offal and rotting carcasses of game brought in to feed the many hungry mouths.
But Bass knew none of this.
Titus slept fitfully that first night he was dragged through the doorway and deposited upon the widow’s blankets. Here at last, he told himself, he could try sleeping through the sharp pain as the edges of his wounds rubbed one another with the manhandling, the crude travois jouncing over uneven ground. To lay in one spot and just sleep. But the male voices were no sooner gone than the woman herself was busy above him.
Unable to get his coat off, Fawn did only what she could do. For a few minutes there he was somewhat conscious of hearing the heavy blanket wool being cut, sliced, hacked away with her cooking knife. Then it felt as if she were slowly, delicately, slashing along the seam of the left arm, down the left side of the shirt she had made for him weeks earlier. Finally he felt her tugging where the smoked leather of the shirt crossed over his left shoulder.
By cutting the shirt half off the left side of his body, Fawn was able to pull it off the right side, for the first time fully exposing the three deep gashes, blue and purple and a deep brown against his startling white flesh. So swollen, so oozy, were the wounds that she gasped and began to sob.
It might have been only the cold still air or the sudden silence there within the lodge, or it might have been her stifled sobs—but something made Titus open his eyes at that moment, finding it hard to focus in the dim light, the fire’s reflection flickering on the lodge skin behind her. Then his eyes found her crumpled over beside him, her head pressed down in her hands, her tiny shoulders shuddering as she did her best to stifle the sobs that racked her.
She nearly jumped when his right hand reached out and gently touched her arm.
“I … I ain’t gonna die,” he said in English—forgetting himself—his mouth as dry as it had ever been.
Bass watched her eyes pool as she brushed fingers down his hairy cheek. The moment he licked his dry,
