Bass agreed as he stepped up. “If ronnyvoo wasn’t close—you’d all gone under.”
Then Scratch knelt suddenly, peering about him at that scene within the crude oval of rocks. More than a handful of half-breed children, at least that many Indian women, all huddled next to some of the white trappers as they helped their men reload weapons, these stoic mothers preparing to sell their lives dearly come a final assault on that narrow compound. Bass’s eyes stopped here and there, looking over the bodies sprawled on the ground within the fortress. Three of the dead had a blanket, a hat, or their own leather shirt pulled over their faces. At least three more were having their wounds attended to by comrades who washed off blood with water dipped from the trickle of a spring that issued within the rocks. A few others firmly held bloody compresses against their bright, bleeding injuries.
“W-would I know …” Then Daniel took a deep breath before gesturing at the dead and continued quietly, “Do I know any of these?”
With a doleful cloud passing over his face, Campbell replied, “You know every one of them, Potts.”
Immediately sinking to his knees, Daniel dragged back the edge of a greasy blanket, stared a moment at the familiar face, then gently replaced the blanket. His shoulders quaking in grief and rage, he suddenly tore at the bloody grass with both hands as a guttural cry burst from his throat.
“Damn these thievin’ bastards!” he roared.
Bass stepped up to stand beside the man, placing a hand on his trembling shoulder.
“Fools they were!” Daniel’s voice cracked. “Just like me, Scratch! Fools just like me for coming out here where there ain’t no God to watch over a man!”
“Damn right, Potts,” one of the wounded said in a small voice grown weak from loss of blood. He had a bandage wrapped around his head, the bloody cloth covering one eye and all but concealing half his face.
“That … that you, Scott?”
Hiram Scott nodded. “God don’t dare come out this side of the Missouri, Potts.”
Daniel looked up, eyes imploring as his clenched fists slowly opened, allowing the broken blades of bloody grass to spill from them. “I ain’t staying here no more, Cap’n Campbell.”
The brigade leader protested, “We get these Blackfoot run off, we’re moving on to rendezvous—”
“I don’t mean staying to ronnyvoo, dammit!” Potts spat to interrupt. “I ain’t staying out here in this country!”
Campbell started, “It’s natural for a man to be bitter—”
“God don’t look down from heaven on this country!” Potts shrieked. “Not for no white man, He don’t!”
On the ground the wounded Scott agreed, “Not a man gonna convince me God’s looking down on this land … this place fit only for the devil’s kind!”
Raising his face toward the sky, Potts roared in grief, “Man crosses the Missouri an’ leaves the settlements behind—there ain’t no angels watching his back then, and there ain’t no God to drive off Satan’s whelps clear away out here!”
“Look here around you, boys—there, there … and there. Look and you’ll see the proof of it.” Scott winced in pain as he straightened, then continued, “No God in this sky out here! No God a’tall!”
Bass watched the tears stream down the wounded trapper’s bloody face as he went to sobbing, quietly.
Why some were spared, and others heard their number called—Bass figured he would never know. Likely this was something only someone like his mother could answer, if not one of those circuit-riding preachers. No reason and no rhyme could he put to it … yet one thing was for certain: out here he had discovered that the choices were simpler and more sharply drawn than at any time in his life. And out here in this unforgiving wilderness, the consequences became all the more sudden and stark for those who chose to chance fate beneath this seamless dome of endless sky.
“Lookit ’em!” a man shouted nearby. “Bug’s Boys turning tail!”
In the middistance gunfire rattled as the onrushing horsemen fired their rifles at the retreating Blackfoot raiders, white man and Flathead alike, all whooping the moment they shot past the rocky fortress to the cheers of Campbell’s survivors.
“I see you brought us reinforcements, Titus Bass!”
Bass turned at the distantly familiar drawl to the voice, finding the tall, handsome mulatto stepping up through the tall grass, gunpowder smudged across his mud-colored face, that black shoulder-length hair tightly braided and wrapped in trade ribbon.
Titus asked, “Beckwith?”
“None other!” and he held out his hand. “Thought you was dead when we didn’t see you last summer.”
“Some tried!” Bass roared as he pumped the arm of that Virginia-born son of a white planter and a Negress that planter eventually married before moving his family to frontier Missouri. “Where you been in this fight, Jim? Laying low?”
“Right out there in the grass,” Beckwith explained, and pointed. “Didn’t like the feel of these here rocks. Never felt easy about being closed up in a fight. Always figure to have me a way out.”
“Look at ’em!” Campbell declared loudly as he waved both arms at the passing horsemen. “Look at all those lovely white faces.”
Scratch reminded, “Flathead too!”
“See how them devil’s sons scamper!” cried another man, pointing at the retreating warriors.
At that moment the enemy had begun their wholesale retreat from the fight, able to see they were soon to be on the losing side. Easy to realize that now was the time to get away with their stolen plunder and captured horses while they could.
“Sonsabitches got their hands on more than five thousand dollars in beaver!” Campbell fumed as he angrily dragged some fingers across the oozing cheek wound.
A clerk stepped up and added, “And two mules with some of our trade goods too, Cap’n!”
Robert Campbell whirled on him, glowering. “How many horses, they get?”
“They’re running off with more’n forty head.”
“Damn their black hearts!” Campbell cursed.
Then, as if to rally his own flagging spirits, the brigade leader quickly tore the shapeless hat from his head and waved it aloft at the last of the rescuers racing their way, those horsemen shooting past the little fortress like a spring torrent. Campbell joined the rest in clambering atop the low rocks to wave and whoop and whistle as the last of the Blackfoot hurriedly mounted and started to tear away with their booty, driving the brigade’s horses and mules before them.
“When’d they hit you?” asked one of the horsemen who had circled back, bringing his horse to a halt just outside the rocks.
“Not long after we put to the trail this morning,” Campbell explained. “All told, must’ve been more than two hundred of ’em dogging our backtrail for the last day or so.”
“Likely picked up your scent day before yestiddy.”
“Nearby, Hiram Scott added, “We made a run for it to get this far.”
“Lucky these rocks were here when we needed ’em,” Campbell added. “I spotted these willows and made for ’em. Then we found the spring. At least we’d have water. So I prepared the men for a long siege of it.”
The rider glanced over the dead and wounded. “You kill any of ’em your own selves?”
“Maybe a half dozen,” Campbell declared. “Knocked a bunch out of the saddle, but the others come in and rode off with every bastard we knocked off a pony.”
Titus turned back to say, “Wouldn’t have mattered to have you water in here, Booshway. Looks to be they was whittling your side down a mite fast.”
After a long sigh Campbell blinked his eyes as if they smarted and said, “When I sent the riders out, we were running low on powder and ball. Truth be, we were all preparing for the worst. If these Blackfoot had jumped us any farther from your camp—we’d been finished but good.”
“Not a chance you’d hung on again’ that many,” the rider said as he wheeled his horse about, giving it the heels to speed away after the rest of those chasing the retreating raiders.
Beckwith stepped up to Campbell. “There’s another one of our dead out in the grass. I made sure none of them Blackfeet got close enough to scalp him.”
“I know,” the brigade leader replied. “It’s Boldeau—a damned good cook he was too.” He nodded toward one of the women. “His Flathead wife made it in on the run, but Louis was just too old, just too slow. I watched him
