By the time it was slap dark that frigid autumn evening, Silas, Scratch, and Tuttle were asleep. Each in turn would be awakened through the long night to stand his watch: to listen to the distant call of the owls on the wing, the cry of the wolves on the prowl and the yapping of the nearby coyotes; to sit alone and feed the fire while the others snored. Alone in one’s thoughts of women and liquor, remembrances of old faces and young breasts and thighs. To think back as the cold nuzzled more and more firmly around a man, here in the marrow of the Rocky Mountains.
The following morning they awoke to a lowering sky. The wind that had been puffing gently out of the west quickly quartered around, picking up speed as it came out of the north. With no other choice they walked into the brutal teeth of that wind until early afternoon when the clouds on the far horizon began to clot and blacken, hurrying in to blot out the sun. Within an hour icy sleet began to pelt them, coating everything, man and animal and all their provisions alike, with a thin, crusty layer of ice.
By sundown they were exhausted, forced to stumble on foot across a slippery terrain, leading the mule and horse up and down creekbanks and coulees, forced to search for more open ground where the footing wouldn’t be so treacherous—but where they knew they might be easy to spot by the horse thieves. It turned out to be the sort of day that reminded Titus just how quickly the cold could rob a man of his strength, the sort of icy cold that might even come close to stealing his resolve and will to go on.
Nearly at the end of their worn-out rawhide whangs, the four hobbled into a grove of cottonwood near the lee side of some low hills and tied off the weary animals. While two of the trappers kicked around in the snow to gather up deadfall, another brought in water from the nearby stream, and the last of them brushed snow back from the ground where they built their night fire.
“I’ll take first watch,” Scratch volunteered as they chewed on their dried meat and drank their scalding coffee.
“Best by a long chalk,” Tuttle said, “than for a man to get hisself woke up when he’s dead asleep, smack in the middle of the dark an’ the cold.”
Better was it to stay awake, he thought as the night deepened, and stand to first watch. But when he had turned Billy Hooks out and crawled off to his robes and blankets, Titus found he could not sleep. Instead he lay shivering beside the crackle of their small fire for the longest time—unable to escape his fear of just what might become of them out here without the rest of their animals, in the middle of a wilderness where the brownskins came and went as they pleased, taking what they wanted from a white man.
Damn well didn’t seem near fair, it didn’t—when he hadn’t come to stay among these hills, beside this stream, after all. Only to take a few beaver and move on to new country. No more than passing through. So them Injuns had no right to have call on taking what wasn’t theirs. No right at all.
Nothing like Silas Cooper, no it wasn’t. The man took what Scratch grudgingly admitted was his share—but Cooper hadn’t taken it for naught. No, it was his rightful share in exchange for saving Bass’s life, for keeping Bass alive, for teaching Bass day in and day out. By damn, to Titus that was a fair exchange between two men.
But this stealing of a man’s horses and mules. Putting that man afoot as a blue norther bore down on these high plains and uplands. And the worst part of it was that the new snow had eventually blotted out the trail the farther north they walked. Still, the four of them had a good notion the thieves were leading them north, right into the teeth of the coming weather.
That day the trappers had even agreed that they would find the thieves up yonder, in that. Yellowstone country. No matter that they didn’t have a trail to follow. All they would have to do was keep watch from the high ground, a ridgetop or the crest of a hill, straining their eyes against all that bright and snowy landscape—searching for some sign of a pony herd, a cluster of brown lodges nippling against the cold skyline … and if nothing else, maybe they’d spot some ghostly smudge of firesmoke trickling up into the autumn sky.
That’s how they found the Indian camp, far, far off the next afternoon.
From a distant ridge they could make out the lighter brown of the buffalo-hide lodgeskins scalded black at the smoke flaps, each cone raising its gray offering of heat, and food, and shelter from the cold. Ponies grazed beyond the lodges on what grass they pawed free or snow. People came and went on foot among the lodges, down to the thick groves of tall cottonwoods, or to the narrow stream meandering in its crooked, rocky, springtime-wide creekbed.
“Who they look to be?” Tuttle asked anxiously as they huddled there on the ridgetop as the wind came up.
Hooks prodded, “They ain’t Blackfoots, is they?”
“Blackfoot would’ve rubbed us out first—then took the horses,” Bass reminded them, feeling exposed and vulnerable against the skyline. “Maybeso we ought’n get ourselves down off this ridge, Silas.”
Cooper didn’t say a thing for the longest time, studying not so much the village as he looked here and there across the valley for horsemen. Then he watched the way the men acted in camp, for it ought to be plain if they were a hostile bunch or not.
Scratch agreed when Silas explained to them as much.
“Maybeso this bunch showed us they didn’t mean us no harm but for takin’ our animals.” Titus looked this way and that, growing more nervous what with the way they were backlit by the afternoon’s light.
Cooper glared at Bass, saying, “But we come here to get them horses back. Then—maybeso I’ll mean them some harm.”
“Only us again’ all of them?” Tuttle squeaked.
Shaking his head, Silas admitted, “Nawww—it don’t have to be a fight, boys. We just wait till dark—sometime after moonset. Then we’ll slip in and get what’s rightfully ours.”
“J-just like that?” Hooks asked. “We ain’t never … not ever gone an’ stole horses from Injuns, Silas.”
“A first time for ever’thing, Billy.” Having snarled the rest into the silence of their own private thoughts, Cooper gazed off into the valley for a few minutes. “Looks to be a likely place off down yonder where we can lay up and wait till it’s good and dark—”
With the sudden appearance of the horsemen, the others were doing the same—but in the span of three heartbeats they realized their four guns were little match for the two dozen or more who burst from the trees on one side, breaking over a nearby hilltop on the other.
“We gonna take what we can of ’em with us afore they cut us down, Silas?” Billy asked in a harsh whisper.
“Just hold your water,” Cooper cautioned, suspicion in his voice. “Don’t unnerstan’t why they coming in so slow—”
“Cooper’s right, Billy,” Scratch confided, the short hairs at the back of his neck bristling. “Just don’t let ’em get in here too close.”
At times like these a man remembered the lessons in life learned the hard way—clear as rinsed crystal. And right at this moment Titus recalled the way the Chickasaws glided up silently on the black-and-silver Mississippi, then rushed Ebenezer Zane’s boatmen out of the night … recalled how the Arapaho laid waiting in their ambush for the Ute hunting party last winter—then sprang like a cat coiled for the attack.
Bass continued, “But it do seem a mite contrary, don’t it, fellas? If’n this bunch wanted our hair here and now—likely they’d come at us on the run.”
As it turned out, the horsemen brought their wide-eyed ponies to a halt at a respectful distance, completely circling the trappers. Turning slowly, Bass looked each one over quickly. A handsome outfit they were, fine of form and every one decked out in their feathers and teeth, hair tied up atop their heads with stuffed birds and scalp locks fluttering from coats, robes, and shields. A few of them talked among themselves quietly, but for the most part, the ponies made the only noise, restless and restive as they snorted in the cold, pawing at the hard ground beneath the thin skiff of new snow.
“By doggee!” Hooks exclaimed only so loud. “Them ponies of their’n don’t like our smell.”
“Come to think of it,” Tuttle agreed, “I don’t think any white person with a good nose would like
“Hush your yaps!” Cooper snarled as one of the horsemen inched out from the others in the circle. He began to make sign with his hands. “By damn, I think we might be able to talk to these here boys after all.”
Without reservation he suddenly handed his rifle back to Tuttle and quickly began to make sign.
