cutting the third sapling into two pieces, he tied both sections across the wide vee formed by the others. Then, with his last piece of rope, Titus lashed his bedding and a small packet of dried meat to his improvised travois.
By then it was light enough to plainly see the trail left by the raiders. Time to move out.
Stepping into the vee just ahead of his bundle, Bass shoved the barrel of his rifle through two of the bedding ropes. He jabbed his pistol under another rope, then turned and adjusted the knife and tomahawk at his back, shifted the shooting pouch over his shoulder.
Then he stepped forward, bent down, and pulled the two saplings off the ground.
Surprised to find it wasn’t so heavy after all. And if he had left enough room at the base of the travois below that bottom crosspiece, the drag should ride well enough over the sagebrush and rocky ground, keeping his robes out of the ankle-deep powder.
Squinting into the west as the light began to balloon around him, he thought of Hannah.
Remembered how she had run off that day the Arapaho had jumped them. How she had come back later. How the mule had saved him, saved them both.
“I’m coming for you, girl,” he vowed in a cold, dry whisper.
Ain’t no red niggers gonna get you from me ’less I die trying to get you back.
The intense cold of that early dawn nearly froze the hot mist in his eyes as he set out on the trail, realizing just how warm a man could be when he nursed on revenge.
Stopping only long enough to blow and catch his wind or get a drink of water that first day, Bass didn’t eat until evening. After chewing on some dried strips of venison, he bent over the bank and cracked the thick scum of ice forming along the Yellowstone. He drank long and deep, knowing how vital it was to quench his thirst several times a day in this high, dry, cold land.
Every bit as important, if not more so, as it was to take in water during the heat of late summer—just as crucial as such a thing could be in Apache country. Water might mean the difference between his keeping up with the raiders or never even standing a chance of catching them … the difference between life and death, alone as he was in this winter wilderness.
He stood again, his weary bones protesting, pushing his face on into the brutal slash of that drying west wind.
A while after the sun went down ahead of him, the wind died, no longer tormenting the valley, nor rawhiding his leathery face. Throughout the day’s march he had stopped here and there long enough to swipe one mitten or the other over his face, scouring the frost from his eyebrows and lashes, scrubbing the icicles from his mustache and beard where they collected as his heaving gusts of breath froze in a coating over his face. All day hauling his little travois onward in the path of the falling sun.
Then, as twilight deepened the hues of that snow covering the nearby hills to shades of rose and lavender, he lunged to a stop, weary, exhausted, thirsty so quickly again … his heart rising to his throat in frustration and fear as he peered down the raiders’ trail.
The hoofprints turned sharply to the left, following the gentle slope of the bank toward the river. The trampled snow he had been following disappeared through a wide notch in the brush and cottonwood.
It would make a fine spot for an ambush. The sort of place where one or two of the warriors would lie back after the others had gone on, waiting there in hiding for the white man—if they suspected they were followed.
But the more he stared at that wide breach in the brush along the bank, at that gentle descent the slope made as it fell away to the shallow ford, as he studied the skeletal trees up and down the river, listening … Scratch grew all the more certain these warriors were so cocky they didn’t even give a good goddamn if they were followed by one lone trapper.
So maybe he should let the sonsabitches know he was coming.
“Hannah!”
He listened to the voice echo back at him from the low hills lying south of the river. The deepening cold swallowed that plaintive sound quickly as a mist began to form at the river’s surface.
Then Bass whispered, “I’ll find you yet, Hannah. I swear it, by God.”
At the river’s edge he stared across the Yellowstone. A thickening ice had rimed itself along both banks in a scum more than two feet wide. He bent and chopped himself a wide hole, then leaned out and drank. The drops froze on his face as he stood to swipe off that thin crusting with a mitten.
And, Lord, how that hurt too—merely rubbing his nose and cheeks with the stiffened wool of his mitten!
Hannah was somewhere on the other side now. And the thieves were on the south bank of the Yellowstone with her and the horses. How far ahead, he had no way of knowing. But if he hesitated here, one thing was certain: he never would get the mule back. He never would catch up to the raiders. He never would see the startled looks on their faces as he rained his retribution down upon them.
Just the way Asa McAfferty’s avenging angels would rain fire and brimstone down upon the unholy come their Judgment Day.
If he camped here, he might as well give up.
But if he crossed now, and pushed on into and through this night … he might just stand a chance of catching them somewhere west of the ford, catching them sometime tomorrow. Because red niggers as cocky as this bunch would most assuredly figure on stopping close to dark, making their beds around a warm fire, and sleeping out the night in warmth.
Bass listened to the river lap against the bank beneath that thickening rime of ice near his feet. And realized it was the only way.
He dropped the travois and turned around to the bundle of robes and blankets. Stripping off his mittens, he stuffed them under a top section of rope where he could grab them quickly, without fumbling. A man’s hands would have to be warm enough to grip a thin piece of char, hold a chunk of flint at the right angle, to sweep down with that gentle curve of the fire-steel without trembling if he was going to get himself a fire started on the far bank.
Next came the thick fur-lined buffalo moccasins he stuffed under the ropes, as well as an inner pair of fur- lined elk-hide moccasins. Bass decided to leave on the soft, smoke-tanned elk-hide moccasins he wore right against his flesh: he might well need that thin layer of protection against the river-bottom rocks, the grip they could give him as he raced across this ford of the Yellowstone.
Now came the leggings, one shivering leg at a time. After he had removed his shooting pouch and powder horn and laid them both alongside his rifle, he pulled the thick blanket capote from his arms and laid it atop the bedding bundle. Next he dragged the rifle from the ropes and set the weapon down within the coat, wrapping the leggings around the muzzle, clear back to the lock. By the time he pulled off the breechclout and his belt, his legs were shaking with the bite of intense cold.
Scratch clenched his chattering teeth together and yanked the long buckskin war shirt over his head, off his arms, and slapped it down on the rifle. Rolling it into a long tube that covered the lock and buttstock, he had one last item of clothing to remove.
His frozen fingers trembled as they fought the buttons loose from their holes on his faded red wool longhandles. Yanking it down off his arms, on down off his chest and belly, Bass tugged the dirty, smoke-stained cloth over each moccasin and stood again to drape it across the rifle and his buckskin clothing. He swaddled the sides of the coat over it all, rolled up his bundle, and wedged this long wool-wrapped packet under two sections of rawhide rope.
Pausing only long enough to take a deep breath, Titus whirled and seized the cottonwood saplings of his travois, rising from the snow with them. At the riverbank he hesitated a moment, gazing at the ice and the slow- moving water … his eyes eventually moving across the wide black ribbon to the far bank where the raiders’ trail disappeared into the brush…. Then he finally looked at the sky to the west.
Snow before morning.
If it stormed hard enough … and he hadn’t caught them by sunup, his chances ran somewhere between slim and none that he would have a trail clear enough to follow.
Titus stepped into that wide crack he had hacked through the layer of ice skimming the riverbank.
His breath immediately seized in his chest—so sudden and tight were the frozen bands around his ribs that Scratch doubted he would ever breathe again.
Already his feet and calves ached with the deep cold, just standing there….
“It ain’t nothing you haven’t felt afore,” he convinced himself as he stepped deeper into the water, the cold
