“Some still alive!” shouted one of the laborers named Emile Vivie as Gamble scurried up with Bass on his heels.
“Only way is to burn ’em out,” Henri Rem warned.
“I’ll take the torch and some powder,” Paul Rem volunteered.
“Go to the northwest corner, brother,” Henri suggested as he handed Paul three pouches of the black-powder cannon charges and the sputtering torch.
“I go with him too,” Vivie shouted as he followed Paul away from the cannon.
A few futile shots followed them across the snow, but in a matter of moments the two had reached the side of the stockade where Paul handed the torch to Vivie while he ripped open the powder charges and spilled the grains at the base of the wooden pickets. As the sky brightened to presage the dawn, Titus watched the two Frenchmen leap back a few yards when Paul hurled the torch at the bottom of the wall. With a huge gush of flame and smoke the old, dried timbers of the stockade were on fire.
Inside the cabin men shouted in fury, cried out in terror, groaned in their death throes.
With the sun’s coming the wind stirred along the Missouri River valley, goading the flames over those next few electrifying minutes as the noise from the cabin rose to a crescendo, then fell off to silence.
Most of that bombarded stockade had been consumed-by flame by the time Gamble led the Rem faction toward the smoking walls. Behind them as the sun emerged over the prairie, more than half-a-hundred faces watched from atop the east wall of Fort Union, another sixty-some peering from behind the safety of their lodges in the Assiniboine camp.
Suddenly Scratch heard the sound of running footsteps and a man’s grunts as he fled the burning building, escaping his enemies.
“He’s going for the bastion!” Henri Rem announced.
“I’ll kill him myself!” Emile Vivie boasted.
The young engage was the first to reach the east bastion of the old Fort William stockade where he called out, “Which one of you do I get to kill this morning, eh?”
“That you, Vivie?” screamed the voice from within.
“Ah, it is you, Francois!” Vivie shouted back at the man cowering inside the bastion. “Baptiste Gardepie should have killed you the day he killed your father!”
“Hah!” he bellowed with mad laughter. “I got to see the eyes of Jacques Rem when I ran my knife through his guts. I killed him for my father!”
“Y-you killed Jacques?”
“Out! His blood is still on my hands, Vivie!”
“Arrrghgh!” Emile growled, whirling about to search for a narrow opening between the pickets through which he could shove his rifle.
But inside, the murderous Francois Deschamps had already discovered just such a tiny gap. The muzzle of his gun was waiting when Vivie stepped up to the wall. As Francois pulled the trigger on his rifle, the force of the ball picked Vivie off the snow, into the air, to land more than six feet away.
As the snow beneath Vivie turned to a brownish slush, his legs thrashed and wisps of steam spiraled from the hot blood rushing from his terrible wound. Then he lay still.
“Merciful God,” Henri prayed there at the wall near the bastion, and made the sign of the cross.
“God demands vengeance this day!” Paul Rem shouted as he whirled, waving at the engages. “Bring the cannon!”
A handful of fort employees finally managed to musele the fieldpiece across the crusty snow into position, aiming it at the bastion where Francois kept up some pitiful gunfire until his gun fell quiet.
“The bastard’s out of ball or powder,” Bass announced.
“No matter—he must die with the rest!” Henri growled.
At that moment Paul Rem touched the short fuse which sparked, sputtering its way down the touchhole an instant before the cannon leaped back, belching with a smoky roar. The ball tore through the side of the bastion with a clatter of old timbers and river rock, then a horrifying shriek from Francois Deschamps.
Then a hush fell.
The others stood around the Rem brothers for a few moments as the cannon’s roar faded in the dawn. Then Henri started for the bastion. Paul was right behind him.
In little time they were dragging the mangled body from the wreckage of the bastion, smearing the trampled snow with the dead man’s blood seeping from a dozen wounds. Around the corner of the stockade they pulled the body until they were within feet of the leaping flares busily consuming the cabins. As Henri grabbed the dead man’s arms, Paul seized Francois’s ankles—both of them heaving the body into the crackling flames.
“Now bring that old she-bitch over here!” Henri Rem demanded, his voice shrill with retribution and blood- lust.
Madame Deschamps was the last of her family the victors consigned to the flames that shockingly cold, clear dawn coming out of the east red as a butchered buffalo.
“That makes nine of ’em,” Levi announced in a harsh whisper as he stood beside Bass, watching the others dance and twirl, hearing them sing and shout their utter joy. “Let the devil do as he pleases with ’em now!”
Sensing that corona of warmth washing over him from the rising flames, Scratch turned to gaze at the eastern walls of Fort Union, thankful he did not find his wife’s face among those watching this funeral pyre.
But despite those waves of heat, Bass shuddered with the subzero chill, staring at the charred bodies as they were consumed.
“Revenge,” he told Levi, “be the cup a man best drinks cold.”
18
It brought some rest to a place inside her heart to return to her people. Two summers had passed while Waits-by-the-Water had been away, and a winter spent in that southern land of the Arapaho.
Days ago she and her husband had turned south from the white man’s fort at the mouth of the Yellowstone. It had not been a happy time for her there. So many half-breeds and Assiniboine, she never felt welcome. Better that a Crow woman stay safe inside the walls of that fort until Ti-tuzz could take them back across the Missouri and ride for Absaroka.
As they began their journey south, the weather turned mild for many days, but winter had resumed its fury by the time they found the village sprawled among the cottonwoods towering on a neck of land along the southern bank of the Yellowstone.
“It was near this place where we first talked,” she said as they halted to gaze at the welcome sight of those brown lodges.
Drawing in a long breath of the cold air scented with wood smoke and the fresh dung of hundreds of ponies, he looked about at the surrounding river bluffs—then gazed at her and smiled. “Yes. I remember. Now I want us to be even happier this winter than we were when we realized we needed each other.”
Over their seasons together Waits had grown even more patient with how slow he sometimes was to put his thoughts together in her tongue. She knew Magpie would have it easier than either of her parents, growing up with both languages spoken to her as they were.
Looking up, she found him staring at her still, his eyes twinkling. Then she realized he was watching her hand. She had been rubbing her huge belly unconsciously, thinking of this child to come.
“It will be born this winter, yes?” he asked.
With a nod she answered, “I think sometime in the next moon, perhaps.”
Urging his pony over beside hers, Bass tore off a blanket mitten and stuffed his bare hand beneath her buffalo robe, laying it upon that swollen belly beneath her capote. “You are so big—how many little calves do you have in there?”
She giggled. “I think there is only one, but it will be a big child.”
“A boy?” and his eyes sparkled.
“Perhaps,” she said. “If it is a boy, you will not forget your daughter?”
