it’s better for you and your family to stay here the night.”
“Thankee, Sam’l,” Scratch replied. “Gonna be dark soon.”
“You speak better Crow’n me—why don’t you tell them others they can bed down right here with us if they choose.”
After translating for the warriors, Scratch removed his buffalo-hide vest from his shoulders. Settling near the fireplace, he held out his arms to Magpie. A smile instantly blossomed on her face, her black-cherry eyes glowing as she trundled across the uneven floor, tripping once and catching herself before she reached her father’s arms, giggling as he smothered her face and neck in kisses.
Two of the Crow followed Waits over to the fire and squatted cross-legged on the ground as the woman leaned against Bass’s shoulder.
“You will have another child soon,” one of the Crow said, nodding toward Waits’s belly. “Perhaps it will be a boy.”
Smiling, Titus patted the rounding belly. “Yes. A boy, perhaps.”
“A good thing, this—your wife birthing a boy,” the second man commented. “He will become a Crow warrior.”
Scratch took his eyes from the young man and stared at the flames. “Better that the boy become a beaver trapper like his father.”
“Just who in hell’s asking for Levi Gamble?”
Gazing up at the man yelling down at him, Scratch craned his neck there beside the wall of that massive wooden stockade rising some twenty feet beside the hulking stone bastion erected at the southwestern corner of the fort. A second and third man now joined the first to stare over the top of those pickets near the bastion’s stone wall. All three studied the visitors in that cold swirl of a ground blizzard.
For much of the day he and Waits-by-the-Water had struggled through the storm, making no more than a half-dozen miles, fighting to reach the walls as the afternoon light waned.
“An old friend,” he shouted at the trio above.
“You speak good English, friend,” a voice called down, the words all but hurtled away before they reached Bass at the foot of the giant timbers. “Better’n any Injun I know can speak English.”
“Well, now—I figger you for a white nigger too,” Titus growled. “My wife an’ young’un near froze out here, so what say you crawl on down here and let us in a’fore we can’t move no more.”
“Said you was a friend of Levi Gamble’s?”
“From a long time ago,” he replied. Bass was relieved when he saw the speaker’s head disappear. The other two-faces peered at him for a few seconds more before they were gone as well.
The snow stung his eyes as it flung itself against the wall, ricocheted off with a glancing blow and a howl of fury, then hurled sharp, icy shards at him from several directions at once.
He heard Magpie whimper again inside his coat where he clutched her against his warmth. Patting her back with one hand, Scratch pulled the buffalo robe more tightly around her. The moment the storm had descended upon them that morning, he had stopped, turned the girl around so that she faced him, her little legs straddling him in the saddle. Untying the flaps of his elk-hide coat so he could admit her, he had Magpie loop her arms around him, burying her face and head into the furry warmth of the buffalo-hide vest. When he had retied the coat around her, Bass dragged a buffalo robe across the neck of the pony, positioning it over Magpie’s back, wrapping it securely around their legs as the wind began to shriek through the cottonwoods that lined the northern bank of the Yellowstone.
Able to see no farther than their ponies’ noses, they had taken the better part of the afternoon to locate a place where they could ford to the north side of the Missouri, upriver from the post. Now they stood waiting on the tall, barren bluff overlooking the muddy river, at the mercy of the cruel wind, their animals caked with a brutal mix of ice from the Missouri and frozen snow.
“Over here!” a voice called gruffly as the wind died momentarily. “Hurry, goddammit!”
Through the swirling, wispy gauze of the dancing ground blizzard, Bass spotted a dark rectangle appear in the solid bank of wall timbers. He blinked and the rectangle disappeared. But as that gust of wind died, the dark rectangle reappeared, beside it now a figure swathed in a furry coat, his head like a huge, disproportionate grizzly’s resting atop his shoulders.
“C’mon!” Scratch snapped at Waits, reaching for her reins.
Their head-bent, tail-tucked ponies and Samantha required some extra nudging, heels and yanking both, to encourage the animals to move.
Near the fur-wrapped figure at the gate Scratch dropped to the ground with the girl in his arms. “You got a place in there for these here animals?”
“How many you got?” the voice grumbled beneath the hood of fur.
“Six. Less’n I take ’em somewhere back down the bank outta the wind, they ain’t gonna make it.”
“Bring ’em in,” the man relented. “We’ll make room for the night. Soon as the storm lets up—”
“I’ll pay for their k-keep,” Bass stuttered, shifting the little girl in his arms when she whimpered with the cold.
“That your young’un you got in there, mister?”
“My daughter.”
Beneath the frost-glazed brow of his bear-fur cap the man peered up at the Crow woman now. “You better get them both in here outta this wind.”
Scratch watched the man reach out and seize the reins to Waits-by-the-Water’s pony, removing them from Bass’s thick glove. The stranger turned and led the woman’s horse into that narrow rectangle, pushing aside the huge gate only wide enough to admit the animal and its rider who sat hunched over in the howling fury of the storm.
Hoisting the small child into his arms, Titus struggled to clutch the buffalo robe around them both as he started forward, tripping on the robe and dropping it.
“Magpie?”
“Yes, popo?” she said in English, her voice faint, muffled against his chest.
“I’ll get you warm soon,” he told her as he turned to discover the mule and the other ponies slowly drifting away before the wind, angling from the wall toward the tall fur press, its top completely obscured in the foggy swirl of snow.
“Get in here, mister!” the stranger bellowed as he reappeared at the gate, waving violently.
As a gust of wind died, Bass cried out, “Samantha!”
He tried to whistle, but his swollen, bleeding lips would not cooperate. Instead he called her name a second time, then started for the dark slash in the wall where the man stood holding open the gate.
Magpie shivered against him. “Popo?”
“Said I’ll get you warm soon.”
“Cold. Cold,” she whimpered, shaking against him.
Of a sudden that word reminded him how Josiah had whispered in his ear in the bloody aftermath of chasing after an old friend, moments after killing Asa McAfferty.
“M-my wife?” he stammered as he inched through the gate the stranger held open.
“She’s safe. I put her in the trade room round the corner,” the man said, bracing his arm against the wall to his left, propping open the heavy gate. “Take your young’un round there too.”
His weary arms barely able to hold on to Magpie, his legs stubborn and leaden, Scratch shuffled through the door with Zeke at his heels. As the sudden warmth brushed his bare cheeks, Titus noticed how the shriek of the wind disappeared behind him. This place smelled of coffee and beeswax, gunpowder and new wood slats on the crates of every trade good imaginable.
“Leave the child with its mother,” the stranger ordered.
Waits sat side-legged on the floor, wiping the melting snow from her damp face as she pulled back her hood. When he stumbled toward his wife, she looked up, held out her arms. Waits pulled aside the flaps of his coat and vest, reaching inside to grab the child, murmuring at Magpie in Crow.
He eased the girl into her mother’s lap with a whimper, then turned slowly.
“C’mon, mister,” the stranger said. “Let’s get them animals put up or they’re lost.”
It took long minutes of struggle to account for the five horses and Samantha, cajoling them toward the walls,
