that he would be going back. And he made sure she knew why.
“I’d ’spect any friend to do the same for me if’n it were you to die,” he said quietly. “Any man what’s got him a woman. Any man what’s ever lost him his woman. I’m going back to do my best by Joe Meek.”
After tying Zeke to a tree with a length of rawhide lariat, Bass filled up three more horns of powder and snatched up another two pouches of balls from his possibles. First he bent to kiss wide-eyed Flea on the forehead, then knelt to sweep Magpie into his arms, holding her aloft as he kissed both her cheeks.
Setting her back on the prairie, Scratch handed his rifle to the little girl who stood only half as tall as the tall weapon. He turned to embrace his wife. Pulling back from her, he said, “Close your eyes.”
When she did, Bass kissed each eyelid gently.
She opened them and he said, “That’s until those eyes see me coming back to you.”
He turned, took up the rifle, and leaped into the saddle again. Bass heard Zeke howling as he galloped away, the hot moisture streaming down his cheeks. And he thought he heard Waits crying far behind him where he had left her.
A sound that made the guard hairs stand at the back of his neck.
21
They ended up pinning the Bannock down on that island for another two days and nights. Through those hours of darkness when they could not see their enemies, the trappers smoked their pipes and talked about their chances of wiping out that band of lying thieves.
“Why they ain’t getting hungry?” George Ebbert growled with dismay. “We had ’em trapped in there for better’n three days!”
“They’re killing their ponies,” Bass explained matter-of-factly.
Shad Sweete agreed. “They got enough horses in there to last ’em a long, long time.”
“Water ain’t no problem neither,” Joe Meek observed resentfully. “Bastards can hole up in there just as long as we can hold out up here.”
“I always knowed the Bannawks was about the stealingest red niggers,” Scratch observed, “but I never knowed ’em to be near so stupid that they’d sashay right on into a white man’s camp just as bold as you could be and try to steal some horses!”
“Only way to write a treaty with their kind is in blood,” Jim Bridger grumbled.
“That’s right,” Osborne Russell declared, patting his half-stock percussion rifle. “Best way to write a treaty with them Bannock is with this here rifle. It’s the only pen what will write a treaty the bastards will keep.”
Sometime after the moon had set that third night and men were snoring around him, Bass sat in the brush remembering a summer night long ago when he had remained behind with Josiah and a few others who were maintaining their vigil around those Blackfoot they had surrounded in Pierre’s Hole. But unlike that band of thieves and murderers, these Bannock hadn’t all slipped away the first night.
“Scratch!” came the sharp whisper from that chunk of shadow crawling his way out of the gloom.
“Who’s that?”
Sweete’s big grin took form in the starshine. “Something I wanted to tell you ever since this little fight got rolling—but Joe’s always been close by.”
“He sleeping?”
Sweete nodded and settled in beside Titus with a sigh as one of the trappers fired a shot at the island. “Think it’s the first time he’s shut his eyes in the last three nights.”
“That man’s taking this real hard,” Scratch commented in a whisper. “Can’t blame him none.”
“That’s why I figgered I wouldn’t tell you the story ’bout Joe and his Mountain Lamb till he wasn’t around,” Shad declared.
“She was the woman these Bannock killed?”
“Yep. And late last winter he killed a Crow nigger on count of her too.”
“Crow?”
“Thought you might’n heard tell of it—what with you being up there, married to a Crow gal and all.”
Titus shrugged. “Didn’t hear a peep of it. There’s two bands of them Crow. Since I didn’t hear tell of the trouble, I figger it was Long Hair’s bunch.”
“Yep—one of Long Hair’s band. Happened up the Bighorn a ways. Some time after you turned off from us, we run onto their village. They had that trader from Fort Van Buren with ’em—”
“Tullock?”
“That’s him. He’d come out from the Tongue and hooked up with ’em late that winter. Was doing some trading,” Sweete explained. “But that big war party what come along with Tullock to visit us weren’t good Crow.”
“Trouble?”
“Sonsabitches brung the devil right into our camp. While Tullock had his blankets out and most of them young bucks was trading with him or with Bridger, one of ’em takes a shine to Mountain Lamb of a sudden.”
“That’s bad,” Scratch clucked softly. “Don’t ever wanna get wrong-ways with Joe Meek.”
“That crazy buck walked over to Mountain Lamb’s shelter, strutting his best to get her attention,” Sweete declared. “When she wouldn’t look up from the moccasins she was sewing up for Joe, that Crow bastard took to walking back and forth in front of her—sure he’d get her to look at just how purty he was.”
“So Joe got jealous when she looked at that Crow buck?”
“No,” and Sweete wagged his head. “Mountain Lamb never did give that son of a bitch a look-see. Fact was, Joe was sitting right inside their shelter, watching it all—and getting a real tickle from it too, what with the way that bastard kept trying harder and harder to get Mountain Lamb’s eye.”
“So what caused the trouble?”
“When the gal kept on refusing to look up at that buck, it burned his powder so bad that he walked back on over to her and slapped her ’cross the face with his rawhide quirt.”
“Damn!” Bass moaned. “Sure as rain, that red nigger picked the wrong woman to play Injun with.”
“Yep—Joe pulled up his fifty-eight and shot the bastard where he stood right over Mountain Lamb holding that quirt in his hand,” Shad said. “I don’t figger he ever knowed what hit him at that range.”
“But I reckon all hell broke loose then.”
With a wag of his head Sweete said, “The wolf was let out to howl—right there in our camp. By the time Bridger and Tullock got the shooting stopped, we had one man dead, and there was two more Crow rubbed out. The trader finally got them red niggers out of our camp when Gabe passed out a bunch of presents to pay for them dead Injuns.”
“When it was a goddamned Crow buck what started it?”
“That were their country, Scratch,” Shad replied. “We was on the Bighorn, right in the heart of Crow country.”
“Ain’t never a call for bad manners,” Scratch said softly. “No matter they be a cocky Crow or not.”
“Time was a white feller could count on folks in that tribe,” Sweete said, regret heavy in his voice. “Past winter or two, I ain’t so sure no more.”
“Time was we all counted on the beaver staying seal fat and sleek,” Titus whispered with some of that same regret. “We counted on the price of plews staying high. But the years has changed things, Shad. The years gone and changed us too.”
For the most part they sat in silence the rest of that night, taking turns curling up to catch some sleep while the other kept watch. All along that riverbank some slept while the rest stared at the island, a few even firing an occasional shot at the brushy sandbar just to let the Bannock know the white man hadn’t cashed in his chips and pulled out.
Bass shivered slightly in the gray light of dawn-coming and rubbed both of his gritty eyes. How he wished for some coffee, some whiskey, something that would cut the awful taste in his mouth. He hacked up some of the night-gather clogging his throat and turned toward the island to spit into the willow. That’s when he spotted the movement.
