Bass peered over them, having already made his choices. Nodding to each man in turn, he picked Sweete, Meek, and Newell, along with two men he didn’t know well but who appeared to be weathered veterans of Indian scrapes. Leaving the remaining ten behind with Walker and William Craig, Titus released his horse from the brush and led it on foot toward the broad, shallow ravine that would take them down to the south bank of the Green.
He halted his outfit among the brush growing at the mouth of the ravine where they waited. Anxious to be atop the horse and moving, Scratch found this waiting hardest to endure. He checked the priming in the four pistols he had stuffed into his belt, then flipped back the frizzen to see the rifle’s pan was primed.
“There,” whispered Sweete.
Titus snapped his eyes to the island, saw Walker’s men reaching the grassy sandbar. “Let’s ride, boys.”
“Walker’s plan just may work after all,” Meek cheered as they went into the saddle and started their horses onto the ice.
“We get them ponies to the north bank,” Sweete declared as they picked their way toward the east end of the island, “we can start ’em off at a run and Thompson’s men won’t stand a chance of catching us.”
But by the time Walker had the first of the horses off the bank, the nervous animals were finding the ice so soft that their hooves were beginning to sink into the spongy surface. Some balked, halting and attempting to turn back as those horses behind them were goaded by Walker’s men waving rawhide lariats, or pieces of blanket and buckskin.
When that first frightened horse whinnied, Scratch knew their soup was shot. A handful of the ponies immediately neighed in fear or warning to the rest as they balled up there on the ice that started to sink beneath their combined weight.
In surprise Bass looked down as his own horse suddenly shifted beneath him. They had reached that part of the river where the ice was being undercut by the warmer, spring-fed water. The pony jerked its head, fighting the reins as he jabbed heels back into its flanks. Around him the others struggled with their horses across the next few yards, every soggy step of the way as the riders continued to sink past the hooves, then the pasterns, and slowly up to the knees by the time they reached the middle of the river where the ice was clearly as soft as newly boiled oatmeal on a winter morn.
To their left Walker’s men were having a bad time of it, each of them in among the more than sixty horses —whipping, whistling, driving the animals across the river as they continued to sink on the cracking surface, water flooding onto the thick sections of rolling, pitching, floundering ice, splashing the men up to their thighs.
At the distant warning Scratch jerked, twisting to the right. A figure stood just outside the stockade gate, an arm pumping at those inside as he sent up the alarm.
“Wolf’s been let out to howl now!” Titus roared.
It was as if the six of them were moving sluggishly, every bit as slow as thick molasses poured over johnny- cakes. Sweete and the rest were just turning to look at the fort as both sides of the small gate were flung open and at least fifteen men belched out at once. Instantly angry, they were yelling to one another and bellowing at the horsemen floundering in the middle of the river with those stolen ponies.
“Keep a’coming!” Scratch hollered as they neared the north bank.
Twisting back to his left, he saw Carson’s men already on shore. In that next moment Walker’s horse was lunging off the ice, clawing its way among the leaders of the herd to clamber onto solid ground. Every animal was dripping, stopping briefly to shudder. But the moment Walker was joined by another four of his men, they had the horses turning.
A shot rang out. A puff of smoke emerged from a muzzle of one of those guns at the stockade as Scratch heard the ball pass his ear.
“Don’t shoot, goddammit!” Just outside the palisades a voice was shrieking, perhaps the one of their number shoving down the muzzles of nearby guns. “Them’r white men!”
Closing in on the north bank, no more than a hundred yards from the fort now, Titus could make out the angry clamor.
“Ain’t Injuns?”
“Don’t shoot—they’re white niggers!”
“What the hell they doing with—”
“They stealing our horses!”
Walker had those first horses turned east.
Bass couldn’t figure it. Walker and his men had the horses running now—but instead of driving them west along that north bank of the Green, running them away from the fort … they were stampeding the wet, frozen, frightened herd straight for the stockade and Thompson’s horse thieves.
“Shoot ’em, I say!” a voice cried out at the wall.
“Ain’t gonna shoot no white man!”
“I’ll shoot any man what steals my goddamned horses!”
The thieves were arguing among themselves, some shoving one another in angry frustration, as Bass’s men reached the bank, their own half-frozen, waterlogged horses scratching with their hooves at the icy shore, lumbering onto the flaky ground covered by a thin layer of dead grass.
“C’mon, Scratch!” Walker was yelling off to Bass’s left, loping his way as he drove the herd toward Titus’s men.
They were no more than eighty yards from the thieves milling in front of the open gates.
“You heard the booshway!” Scratch hollered. “Keep them horses moving!”
Meek, Newell, Sweete, and the rest yipped and bellowed as they kicked their weary, cold horses into motion, stringing out along both sides of the oncoming herd as it overtook them, joining in that gallop toward Robidoux’s post.
At the front of the ponies Walker stood in the stirrups, screaming, “Get outta our way, you sonsabitches! Get back! Get back outta our way or you’re hoof-jam!”
“What the hell’s he doing?” one of the thieves squeaked in a shrill, frightened voice as the horses bore down on them.
In the next instant every figure standing in front of those gates exploded left or right as they realized the herd was making directly for them. Scattering like a flushed covey of quail busted from the underbrush by a coyote, the thieves screamed, cursed, and shrieked in horror as they tumbled out of the way in a roiling mass of elbows and legs, grunts and yelps.
Walker hollered, “Don’t stop ’em now, Scratch!”
Before Bass realized it, he was among the lead horses as they shot through the opened gate. Unsure, he reined back quickly as the horses jostled and shoved against each other in this small space where they were suddenly corralled. Here, there, and over there too, men stood pinned against the low-roofed cabins built against the inside of the palisades. Outside the gate men were hollering angrily.
Slowly turning his horse in the milling madness, Bass spotted Carson and Owens reaching the gates, driving the last of the horses into the fort. Walker and three others were already out of the saddle, on their feet, and sprinting along the walls to reach the opening where they heaved against the huge gate timbers, quickly muscling those two sections together and sealing up the fort.
Beyond the walls, just on the far side of those gate timbers, men cursed, some calling out the names of those they had recognized among Walker’s outfit.
Of a sudden they were hushed by one voice, a voice that hollered out as the horses snorted around Walker and the rest.
“Billy? That really you, Billy Craig?”
“I’m in here, Phil,” the trader answered Thompson.
“What you pulling with our horses, you stupid son of a bitch?”
This time Walker yelled. “I’m the son of a bitch, Thompson.”
“Thort that was you, Joe Walker!” a new voice cried.
“It’s me, Peg-Leg,” Walker announced.
“Best you tell us what’s going on with our horses a’fore we bust in there and spill some blood!” Thompson warned.
“Try your damnedest!” Bass hollered. “Them gates is barred shut, boys!”
