white men at all.
He had swung into the saddle cinched on Samantha’s back, pitching his leg over the thick bedroll of two robes and a blanket, and was just settling his left foot in the wide cottonwood stirrup when a screech jerked him completely around—his heart suddenly in his throat as more than two dozen warriors on snorting ponies broke from the brush thirty yards ahead of him. Smack-dab between him and the brigade camp.
It was die right there, or go under making a stab at pulling his hash out of the fire.
Without thinking, Titus had banged his heels against the young mule’s flanks. Samantha bolted away, eyes big as beaver dollars, ears standing straight and peaked as granite spires in the nearby Beartooth Mountains.
Damn, if he hadn’t surprised the bastards by charging right at them. They had milled a moment, ponies whirling as they reined up, then split in as many directions as there were horsemen. Bass had Samantha into the brush again, whipping the mule back and forth through the cottonwoods before the warriors could regroup and turn around to pursue him. But there had been more ahead of him before he’d made it to the end of the gauntlet— wondering every step of the way what the hell he would have-done if he had decided against charging on into that camp, or if he hadn’t had those old friends to run to.
“Hol’cher fire!” some man had bellowed as Bass burst from the willows and buckbrush, lying low along Samantha’s neck, clinging like a fat tick to the mule that carried him on a collision course for the piles of deadfall, logs, and leafless brush Bridger’s men were stacking up on all sides of their compound at that very moment.
“It’s a g-goddamned white man!”
“Bridger!” Scratch had screamed as he neared the breastworks. “Sweete! Ho, Meek!”
“Damn betcha it’s a white man!”
Of a sudden a half-dozen of them had shoved their way into the buckbrush wall they had been throwing up, suddenly heaving against the thorny barrier to force open up a narrow path just wide enough for a man to slip through sideways … then forcing it a bit wider … and finally just wide enough that he knew Samantha would make it.
It seemed as though a many-armed creature had reached up to drag him out of the saddle, so many hands were raised as he brought the mule skidding to a halt inside the brush corral … a sea of faces, all of them fuzzy and out of focus, blurred by the wreaths of frost that clung about every head.
“I’ll be the devil’s whore if it ain’t Titus Bass!” growled Joe Meek.
Standing just that much taller beside Meek was Shad Sweete. “Come to pay us a social call, have you?”
Bass had gotten his land legs back there on the frozen, compacted snow, working his knees a moment to assure himself they would hold his weight after the long, cold ride. “Nawww, you soft-brained niggers! I come to tell you boys you’re plumb surrounded by Blackfoot!”
Wrinkling his brow with the gravest look of worry Titus could remember ever seeing, Sweete had replied, “Blackfoot? Blackfoot? Where the Blackfoot?”
“We don’t see no dram-med Blackfoot!” Bridger roared with laughter as he had come stomping up, holding out his bare hand.
“You niggers are lower’n a bull snake’s belly, thinking you’re so goddamned funny!” Titus had grumbled as he’d knocked Bridger’s hand aside and they embraced quickly. “Man comes riding in here to help you boys, Blackfoot stuck on his tail like stink on a polecat … and all you can do is rawhide him like you’re doing to me?”
“Don’t take no offense,” Sweete pleaded with a grin as big as sunrise. “Me and Joe didn’t mean nothing by it. Glory, if we ain’t all pleased to see your butt-ugly mug, Titus!”
“And his guns,” Joe added, slapping the thin man on the back. “If’n there’s a man what shoots center and kills Blackfoot, it be Titus Bass.”
“We can sure stand to have us ’nother gun, Scratch,” Bridger observed grimly, much of the good humor gone.
“From what I saw back yonder, you boys need ever’ gun you can get,” Bass replied.
Sweete shrugged. “Last we figgered a while ago, Gabe and me cipher we’re on the downside of odds twenty to one.”
With a low whistle, Scratch wagged his head.
“Good thing you didn’t catch these’r arrers yourself,” George W. Ebbert commented as he stepped up behind Bass.
He turned, finding “Squire” Ebbert stopping at the rear of a prancing Samantha, three arrows quivering from her bloody flanks. Quickly he snagged hold of her halter, holding it tight just below her jaw as he stroked her muzzle, scratched a moment between her eyes and ears, cooing at her. Then he stepped back to her hindquarters, inspecting the three wounds.
“I figger I can quit all three of ’em outta her,” Titus proposed. “Ain’t a one too deep the shaft’ll pull off.”
Bridger winked, commenting, “Just didn’t give ’em a good ’nough target, Scratch.”
“Don’t ever plan to, neither.” He stood at Samantha’s head again, stroking her neck. “You boys got your stock in here with you?”
“All of our critters,” Sweete explained.
“I’ll drop my bedroll and possibles off yonder by those trees—then I’ll cut these here arrows out. Please tell me you’ll have some hot coffee for me when I’m done.”
Dick Owens poured him a cup as Scratch walked up more than a half hour later. The sun had gone down before Bass had begun his bloody work on the mule’s flanks, and it had grown cold as all get-out. He sipped at his coffee, holding it under his face to let the steam warm the frozen rawhide of his cheeks and nose, sensing the painful return of feeling to his fingertips as he clutched the tin cup in both hands.
Finally he asked those close by, “How you fellers get yourselves in such a fine fix as this?”
Around that fire Shad Sweete and some others began to relate the story of how forty of Bridger’s brigade had run into a small band of Blackfoot, some twenty of them sniffing around in Crow country, a few weeks back. Those forty trappers had rushed off to ambush the war party, pinning them down on a narrow, timbered island in the middle of the Yellowstone, then nearly wiped them out.
“But something tells me a few of them niggers got away,” Scratch declared, “and they rode hard for home to bring the rest of these devil’s whelps.”
Squire Ebbert nodded. “They left the dead ones behind—four bastards the rest shoved under the ice covering the river. But from all the patches of blood on the snow and the scratches of them travois they made when they hauled off their wounded, easy to tell we cut ’em up purty bad.”
“I’ll say we cut ’em up real bad,” Shad snorted. “Next day when we had us a look where they forted up, we found plenty of brains and blood.”
“That war party didn’t have a horse left between ’em after we run off their stock,” Meek explained by the fire. “So they was dragging them travois outta there on foot.”
“Way we tallied it,” Sweete reckoned, “there wasn’t but a handful got outta there ’thout a scratch.”
“Don’t look like it matters now,” Bass grumped. “If’n only one got away to bring the others, you’re still in the soup, boys.”
“Look who’s in the soup with us!” Ebbert bawled, slapping his knee.
“I’m glad he is,” Sweete observed.
After sipping some more of his steamy coffee before it went cold with the rapid drop in temperature, Scratch asked, “So how long you fellas been hunkered down here?”
“Three days now,” Meek disclosed. “Ever since we run off them Blackfoot, Gabe’s been like a nervous ol’ woman: ever’ day he’d go up on that bluff yonder with his spyglass. Looked over the country far and wide.”
“Only a matter of time afore they come to even the score,” Sweete groaned.
Early that next morning on his climb to the bluff, Bridger discovered the plain downriver boiling with Blackfoot, with even more warriors streaming across the ridges. Hurrying back to camp, he started his men building the breastworks of deadfall and buckbrush, laboring long and hard to hack clear a wide no-man’s-land completely around their fortress. Inside, the trappers chopped down nearly every cottonwood for the walls.
Then yesterday Bridger had slipped out to learn what he could of the Blackfoot, discovering that even more of the enemy were arriving, seeing that the warriors had moved their camp no more than two miles from where the white men waited out the brutal, subzero cold.
By that third day the sixty-man brigade had a bulwark that stood almost six feet high, enclosing a square some two hundred fifty feet to a side. If they were going to die there, they sure as hell planned on making it tough
