Scratch heaved upward, dragging himself onto the top where he lay on his belly, planting his two elbows against the flinty ground, leveling the pistol at the warrior who appeared surprised to find the white man there.
Yanking back on his rein so suddenly that he almost lost his balance, the horseman struggled to hang on to his pony as it reared, then reared again. Bass fired the pistol as the warrior was catapulted into the air. The pony staggered aside, spilling onto its forelegs. Dragging its muzzle out of the sage, the wounded horse struggled back onto its legs, spinning into a retreat.
Titus immediately wished he had used the lead ball on the warrior who clambered to his feet now and staggered away, dragging a leg painfully, clutching a hip with one hand.
“Where are you, Scratch?”
The moment he twisted to crane his head over the edge of the wash, Bass heard another boom from the mouth of the draw. Below the spreading patch of oily gun smoke, Sweete handed the woman the empty weapon and took a loaded rifle from her. Below him he could make out Flea’s inconsolable whimper and Magpie’s voice attempting to soothe her little brother.
Realizing his mouth was dry, that he was breathing fast and shallow, Scratch quickly surveyed their plight. While the coulee had given them some temporary shelter the moment the war party had charged, that coulee might well be their mass grave if the horsemen were able to take up positions above them. Like shooting fish in a rain barrel.
There were six or seven of them retreating from the open ground where Sweete had spilled another warrior from his pony. Six of them, he counted carefully now—a half dozen reining up at the tree line. Likely the horsemen didn’t know they were still within range of the trappers’ big guns … then again, they might well realize it but figure the white men weren’t going to empty one of their guns attempting to shoot at them across this distance. It appeared the milling warriors were arguing, pointing, planning. Far off to the left he watched the unhorsed warrior hobbling toward the creek, the wind shoving a black braid across the middle of his face.
“Goddammit, Scratch!” the big man’s voice called out. “You alive?”
Rolling to his left, Bass noisily slid down the side of the coulee. Magpie choked off a sob in her throat as he skidded to a stop before her, crouched, and hugged the children.
“Stay here,” he whispered in Crow. “You’re safe right here.”
“Hush! Father needs you to be quiet, Flea,” she reminded the boy as Titus continued to the mouth of the draw.
“Damn you, Bass!” Sweete growled. “Least you could’ve done was answer me—”
“I was a little tied up with two of ’em, Shadrach,” he snapped.
Sweete’s eyes instantly flicked to the deep interior of the brushy wash, up to the bare rim of the gully. “What you figger we can do?”
Glancing down at the blood smear across the big man’s blanket capote, he gazed into Sweete’s eyes. “I don’t figger you’re much for getting around right now.”
Shad reluctantly shook his head.
“Best you stay here,” he explained, motioning Waits to come over. “Tween the two of you, keep them rifles loaded—always have two of ’em ready.”
For a moment Sweete studied the middistance, staring at the horsemen gesturing and yelling among themselves. One of them broke from the group and started toward the north, racing to reach the warrior who hobbled across the sage on foot.
Shad said, “Two guns. That still leaves four of them niggers. They split up and slip around on top of the hill up there—”
“That’s four we know of,” Bass interrupted, worried to the soles of his feet. With a burst of inspiration it came to him. “I dropped one of their horses up there, Shadrach. Maybeso I can hunker down behind that carcass where they won’t see a thing till they’re right on top of me, and I can throw some lead at ’em while they skedaddle back out of range.”
“You’re only gonna have one chance at it,” Sweete warned. “Once they know you’re up there, them Injuns either stay shy of you or … they’ll come ride you into the ground.”
“Here I figured you had some faith in me, Shadrach.”
His lips pressed into a grim line, Sweete nodded. “I do got faith in you, Scratch. Don’t you ever doubt it.”
“Waits-by-the-Water,” he said in Crow, turning to the woman, “are all the weapons loaded?”
She nodded. “Give me your belt guns and I will load them too.”
“When you do, keep them for yourself,” Bass said. “If things turn out badly”—and his eyes flicked at the children—“make sure the young ones do not suffer from these enemies.”
Laying a hand on top of his, Waits said, “We have seen one another through worse than this, husband. None of us are afraid.”
Those words reassured him, perhaps because he himself was damned scared.
“There are five loaded pistols in my saddlebags,” he said, squeezing her cold hand. “Get them. I will take two with me and leave the others with you.”
Then he turned to his partner and said in English, “Soon as she’s loaded these here two pistols, you’ll have five. I’m taking two with me, and three of them rifles.”
Nodding once, Sweete said, “Between us, we oughtta cut down the last of these bastards purty quick.”
Bass glanced at the sky, finding the pale, buttermilk-yellow globe sinking toward the west beyond the hills on the far side of the creek. “I’d sure like to drive them off a’fore nightfall. Maybe we could slip on in to the post when it gets good and dark.”
“How far you figger it to the fort?”
After calculating a few moments, he sighed. “Don’t know. Maybe ten miles.”
“That’d take half the night, less’n we run flat-out.”
“You figger it better to lay here waiting till morning—when more of ’em might show come sunup, or try to slip off and make a run for it?”
Shrugging, Sweete answered, “I don’t figger we got anything but bad choices to make right now.”
He laid a hand on the big man’s shoulder. “Then let’s see how many of them red niggers we can knock down a’fore it gets dark.”
For a moment Sweete laid his bloody paw atop Bass’s hand. “You watch your topknot, Scratch.”
With a grin he started away for the rifles. “Keep ’em busy as you can out front, and I’ll doe-see-doe with the rest.”
“Bass?”
Titus stopped in a crouch and turned there on the floor of the wash.
Shad blinked once, then asked, “Who you s’pose they are?”
Peering past the mouth of the draw, Bass eventually said, “From what them Snakes was telling that feller named Sinclair—I figger you and me just been interduced to the Sioux, Shadrach.”
“Then I reckon we should teach these niggers they better watch their manners around us free men.”
“That’s right, Shadrach,” he replied, taking two of the loaded pistols from his wife’s hands, stuffing them into his belt. “No Injun better go stirring up trouble with the likes of us two.”
As he stopped by the stack of rifles to select three of the long weapons, Titus thought how good it was that Shadrach Sweete should now regard himself as a free man. After all these years in the mountains, every one of them endured as a company trapper—from those youthful days as an Ashley man, through that golden era reigned over by the various incarnations of the Rocky Mountain Fur Company, and on to these final days as the huge St. Louis monopoly strangled the last breath out of the beaver business—Sweete was at last his own man.
Not that Titus had ever heard the man complain of his lot. Quite the contrary, for Shad, like Joe Meek, enjoyed a reputation as a merry soul, always seeking the bright side of every dire situation.
Titus sensed a genuine feeling of immense satisfaction that by quitting the company at rendezvous more than four months ago, Sweete now regarded himself as a free man at last. Only trouble was, with a partner, there wasn’t any well-manned brigade to scare off war parties. More often than not free men died alone and in pairs. Anonymous. No others to know where their bones lay for the magpies and the wolves to scatter.
Angrily he shut his eyes a moment, opening them to look at his daughter and son. Flea waved innocently to
