“’Less we blow you all up together!” Henri Rem bellowed.
From the distant walls came the muffled shouts of protest and cries of terror. Above them all rang the angry, profane curses of the Deschamps boys, and the shrill taunts of their matriarch.
Beneath the silvery light of a half-moon Bass and the rest watched the first dark silhouette appear. In a moment more spidery figures emerged from the rectangle.
“They opened the gate!” one of the engages announced.
One by one the distant figures slipped away from the wall, tearing pell-mell across the bluish snow, clumsily vaulting drifts and spilling over the far side, stumbling headlong for the cluster of lodges where a small band of Assiniboine had come to camp for the winter.
Paul Rem pointed into the moonglow with his rifle. “Go, Henri! The women and children can go free! But see no men get away!”
With a whoop Henri Rem bolted off, three others right on his tail. A rifle shot split the freezing air, its muzzle flash hot and white from a loophole in the stockade fence. All the French and German laborers hurled themselves to the ground, taking cover by the cannon carriage or diving behind snowdrifts as the Deschampses opened fire.
In a heartbeat Paul Rem leaped to his feet. “Shoot! Shoot! Kill them all! Shoot!”
In the distance the women and children were screaming as Henri and his followers caught up with them. As quickly as they had sought to scatter, they were herded back together, shrieking, imploring, crying piteously. From the stockade the Deschamps men were yelling at the women. Another shot rang out, a muzzle flash from one of the dark windows near the corral.
A voice bellowed a French curse at Henri as those around Paul Rem and the rest fired a few rounds at the dark squares along the stockade timbers, sure they were gun ports or windows.
“They just say to my brother he should hang on to his pecker,” Paul snarled. “Goddamn Deschamps tell Henri they cut it off while his heart still beats.”
“Not if we can pen ’em down till they’re all dead,” Gamble bellowed.
“Are all your women and children out now?” Henri hollered as he led his men back toward the cannon to rejoin his brother.
“You are cowards!” a female voice shrieked at them.
“Mama Deschamps?” Paul yelled.
“I will spit on your grave this night!”
“This is your chance to run, Mama Deschamps!” Henri explained. “Get out now before we kill all your family!”
“Non!” she screamed. “I stay to help them kill all of you!”
Gamble yelled now, “You don’t leave, eh?”
“My boys die, I die too, Gamble,” she yelled in reply from the darkness of the far stockade. “I watch my boys kill you!”
Paul shouted, “I am happy Gardepie kill your husband!”
“Oui!” the woman shrieked. “Me happy too! Now I can sleep—my sons have killed your father!”
“Shoot them!” Henri roared in fury. “Shoot the old she-bitch too!”
At that moment it grew so unearthly quiet that Levi got to his feet. “Listen!”
It seemed they all held their breath. Bass put his ears to the breeze, hearing the faint sound of scraping, the piercing of the earth’s hard crust with a metal shovel. “That’s digging, Levi. They know you’re bound to use the cannon!”
Gamble wheeled, crying, “You gonna shoot that gun, Paul—do it now!”
With a streak of light the older brother dipped the spitting torch to the fuse which stuttered as it threw off sparks for a moment before the cannon belched, spewing a muddy yellow tongue of flame into the freezing darkness, enough that they were all blinded momentarily. Titus was just beginning to see again when the hissing ball tore through the stockade wall with a clatter. Inside the main cabin men hollered and the aging matriarch swore profanely.
“May your mother couple with dogs in hell for all eternity!” she bawled at the Rem brothers.
“Reload the son of a bitch—now!” Gamble ordered.
As three of the laborers went to swabbing and reloading, the sounds of digging resumed.
“We blow down that wall,” Henri vowed, “we’ll go right on in and finish ’em all.”
While they were preparing that second charge, a scattering of shots came from the Deschampses. Bass knelt, selecting a black square where he had seen a muzzle flash. He held on it, released half his breath, held until he had about given up hope—then the moment that far opening lit up with another bright flash, Scratch squeezed the trigger. The ball struck bone and flesh with a loud, unmistakable smack accompanied by a shrill cry.
The twelve-pounder roared a second time. Then shots from the stockade. With more guns firing back at the Deschampses.
“Levi—they got any other way out?” Titus asked.
“Maybe we ought’n be sure they don’t try sneaking out the back of the corral where we can’t see ’em.”
Running in a crouch around the far side of those drifts the wind had sculpted near the river bluff, both Bass and Gamble managed to slip right up to the southeast corner of the corral without being spotted. Inside, the animals were already frightened, milling anxiously with the nearby gunfire, all the shouting and screams. In the distance the cannon roared a third time. Followed by shrieks and moans from the stockade, more curses from the Rem forces.
Back and forth the battle swung for the next three hours as Bass and Gamble waited out the fight—keeping their eyes trained on the back side of the stockade. Henri Rem lobbed shell after hissing shell into the tattered compound, ripping ragged holes through that western wall of the cabins. Though the cannon was causing a lot of damage, the Deschampses nonetheless managed to fire back from time to time in the midst of their interrupted digging.
“I don’t figger ’em for being smart enough to wanna escape,” Levi growled in a whisper, shivering with the intense cold and inactivity while the two of them lay prostrate in the snow.
Bass glanced to the east, finding the sky graying. “Hope this is over soon. My belly’s hollering for fodder awready.”
That next hour dragged by as the sky lightened and it seemed the stars were gradually snuffed out by the approach of dawn. Every few minutes the fieldpiece roared. Men yelled in the battered cabins; women screamed from the Assiniboine camp pitched far on the other side of the stockade. Back and forth the Rems hurled taunts at the Deschampses, and the Deschampses flung their curses at the Rems.
“Look!” Levi yelled, suddenly rising to a crouch, then darting away in a lope. “It’s the old woman!”
Bass bolted to his feet, following the moment he spotted the matriarch appear, emerging from the dark rectangle into the ashen light of dawn. Overhead at the end of her arms she held an object.
“Is that a pipe?” Titus asked as they trotted along the south side of the corral.
“That ol’ she-bitch!” Gamble snapped. “After all the thieving and murders, she wants to smoke the pipe with the Rems!”
As she walked away from the wall, Madame Deschamps continued shouting at her enemies. But instead of hurling down curses upon the Rems now, she was begging them for mercy, vowing she could keep the obligations of the pipe if only they would smoke with her—
A single rifle shot rang out, a bright jet of orange flame spewing from the muzzle of Henri Rem’s gun.
A cheer erupted the instant those with Henri and Paul could see that the old woman had stopped in her tracks. Slowly her arms came down as she started to stumble forward, a dark patch spreading over her chest. Just as she had the pipe at chin level, Madame Deschamps spilled forward, her open, speechless mouth closing around the end of the pipe. As she collapsed facedown onto the snow, dead where the bullet caught her, the bloody end of that pipe pierced the back of her throat and tore out the side of her neck.
The instant she spilled onto the bloody snow in that gray light, a cheer rose anew from the Rems and the engages. Men jubilantly jumped up and down around the cannon as Paul Rem stepped forward a few feet.
He stopped, shook his arm at the dead woman lying halfway between him and the stockade. “There’s the end to that mother of devils!”
New shouts and taunts erupted from the stockade, then a sudden volley that drove the Rems behind their snowdrifts.
