out to the fight?”
“No booshway gonna order me to stay back to camp and nursemaid no cavvyyard when there’s Blackfeets to fight! Damn right I’m going!”
Bass cheered, “I’ll ride with you.”
“Be quick about it,” Daniel ordered. “I don’t want the others to have the jump on us!”
Splashing his way across the creek and sprinting into the meadow, Bass hurriedly freed the long halter rope from the iron picket pin he had driven into the ground near their camp, leaped atop the pony’s bare back, and loped it back to his blanket shelter at an urgent trot. After dropping his shooting pouch and horns over his right shoulder, then gathering up his pistol and the fullstock Derringer rifle, Scratch vaulted onto the warm, bare backbone of his saddle horse. This time he would ride far and hard without that secondhand Shoshone snare saddle. Without stirrups, he kicked his heels into the pony’s ribs.
“Hep! Hep-hawww!”
By the time the first of the trappers were streaming north along the eastern shore of Sweet Lake, Flathead warriors were mounting up at the edge of their village. Women and children darted here and there, bringing their men shields and bows and quivers filled with war arrows. Everywhere dogs were underfoot, barking and howling, somehow aware of the importance of this moment as the Flathead men quickly completed their personal medicine, got themselves painted and dressed for battle, then sprinted off to fight their ancient enemies.
What a sight that determined cavalcade made that summer morning! Beneath a brilliant sun the colors seemed all the brighter in the flash of wind-borne feathers and scalp locks and earth paint, the showy glint of old smoothbore muskets and shiny brass tomahawks and fur-wrapped stone war clubs waved high beside those long coup-sticks held aloft in the mad gallop just as any army would carry its hard-won banners before them as it rode against its foe.
Mile after mile Scratch raced at the head of a growing vee of horsemen as more trappers burst out of camp, mingling with the mounted Flathead warriors, the widening parade streaming behind Bass and Potts leading the rest at the arrow’s tip. Here and there the land rose gently, then fell again until they reached the bottom of a draw, where they had to leap their horses over each narrow creek feeding the long, narrow lake from the hills beyond. After urging all they could out of their horses for more than the hour it took them to cover the fifteen miles, those at the head of the cavalcade heard the first of the gunshots in the distance.
And moments later the rescuers galloping in heard the first war cries of the Blackfoot raiders.
As they reached the top of a gentle rise, the low plain spread out before them: less than a mile away the scene was easy to read. The Blackfoot already had possession of most of the trappers’ horses and mules, having driven them to the northwest, off toward the shore of the lake where the herd was protected by a handful of their warriors. On their broad backs were still lashed the fat packs of beaver—the fruits of two long, lonely seasons of back-breaking labor by Robert Campbell’s brigade.
The rest of the attackers clearly had the white men surrounded in a small cluster of rocks. It was hard for Bass to tell just how many men were hunkered down within that tightening ring he could see was drawing closer and closer.
Suddenly a lone warrior stood up in the grass, waving his arms wildly, pointing at the middistance. He had spotted the first few rescuers: more white men joined by Flathead horsemen.
One by one more than a hundred warriors quickly bristled from the brush and grass, beginning to sprint in an effort to meet boldly the new assault showing itself on that hilltop Bass had just abandoned as he and the first riders raced down the slope toward the raiders, toward that small ring of boulders and stunted brush where Bob Campbell’s men fought for their hides.
“Ride right through ’em?” Potts hollered at Titus.
With tears streaming from his eyes as the dry wind whipped them both in the face, Scratch glanced behind him at the dozen or so others, then nodded. “Don’t you dare pull back on that rein as we shoot through, Daniel!”
“Whooeee!”
“Heya!” Bass hollered himself at the sudden new surge of adrenaline warming his veins, kicking the tired horse in the ribs, leaning forward as they bounded over the tall grass, heading straight for the enemy, who began to clot together to form a phalanx on foot that was inching its way toward these new targets.
Scratch felt his empty stomach knot as more and more of the warriors joined the numbers already headed their way. His head pounded with more than the lack of sleep, more than a hangover from the potent grain alcohol, more than the hammering of the last hour’s race to lift this siege.
As he neared that wall of Blackfoot, Bass spotted the dark carcasses beyond the warriors in the tall grass— the bodies of dead horses lying here and there around those rocks where the trappers had just spotted the approach of their rescuers. Closer and closer he and Potts sprinted for the Blackfoot line … close enough now to hear their shrill war cries, close enough to hear the whooping of the trappers whose mouths O’ed in celebration as the first of them stood within their rocks, waving rifles and broad-brimmed hats.
Less than eighty yards remained between Bass and the Blackfoot.
A ball whined past, splitting the air between him and Potts. Then a flying covey of arrows arched out of the grass, bursting from half a hundred bows, speeding across the stainless blue of the summer sky, quickly reaching their zenith before they began to fall.
Fifty yards from the enemy.
The bowmen were many, but the horsemen were quicker. They were already ahead of those first arrows, which hissed into the grass at their heels.
No more than twenty yards remained as Bass leaned forward, pressing himself against the pony’s withers, laying his sunburned cheek along the damp, lathered neck, his toes digging into the animal’s ribs.
Ten yards … a matter of two swift strides.
And Bass was there before them—close enough to see paint and color and dark eyes beneath the greased hair tied up in a provocative challenge to raise a scalp lock.
Swinging clubs and bows and an old fusee, more than eight surged toward him as he burst into their midst. The frightened pony sidestepped, then lunged forward again as the warriors swung and leaped and cried out to frighten the animal, to scare their enemy. First one bow, then a stone club, smacked his legs, raked along the horse’s ribs, grazed along its bobbing neck as he shot past.
Suddenly Scratch became aware that he had plunged into the most dangerous moments of their dash through the enemy’s lines.
He twisted to look over his shoulder, beyond the pony’s flying tail. More than half of the Blackfoot had turned, stringing arrows to shoot at him and Potts and those first few Flathead warriors, to shoot them in the back at the moment they streamed through the enemy phalanx.
“Watch your backside!” Bass screamed, the words ripped from his mouth as the riders closed on the rocky fortress.
“Damned buggers!” Potts growled. “Gonna shoot us in the ass!”
Behind them streamed more than sixty mounted trappers, both free and company men. At least that many Flathead horsemen were mixed in among them as they galloped toward the Blackfoot, who were quickly realizing that the odds were beginning to tip from their favor. In the rocks ahead, black forms became men, and faces took shape beneath the shadow of hats. Sounds became words: cries of joy and shouts of challenge flung back now at the enemy.
As a handful of arrows clattered around them, Bass and Potts crossed the last few yards as three of the besieged trappers emerged from the rocks, hollering, reaching for the horses, eager to drag the horsemen to the ground and back to the safety of their tiny fortress.
“Potts!” a tall, full-faced man bellowed as he dashed up. His left cheek was bleeding, having been grazed by the stone tip of a war arrow. “Is that really you, Potts?”
“Campbell?”
“Aye—it’s me, lad!” the brigade leader shouted, jumping forward to seize Potts in both arms and pound him soundly about the shoulders.
“Good to see you standing, Booshway!”
“They’d had us all eventually,” Campbell said gravely as he stepped back toward the rocks. “Had all of you not shown up.”
