The victorious Crow stood over the bowman with a jerk, screaming in triumph as he held aloft the dripping trophy just ripped from the head of his enemy.
Scratch gazed down at his right forearm. From his fingertips all the way to the shoulder, the arm quivered as if with shocking cold. Instead he found this a searingly hot pain, so much so that he swallowed to control his stomach from revolting as he stared down at the arrow piercing the upper part of that forearm. Of a sudden the nausea vanished as he looked up at the second Crow warrior.
“Ti-tuzz!” the young man called as he lumbered off his hands and knees, rising onto his feet to step back from the white man.
“Str … Strikes-in-Camp,” he said, his mouth gone dry and pasty. There was fear in his brother-in-law’s eyes.
“Stay away!”
Bass started to get to his feet. “I don’t want to kill you.”
“Stay back, I tell you!”
Then he stopped where he was, on his knees, heaving breathlessly. “All right—I won’t come any closer. Just … just as long as you give me back what your warriors stole from me.”
25
“Come no closer!” Strikes-in-Camp bellowed at the other Crow. “Stiff Arm, you must come no closer!”
The muscular warrior shuddered to a halt, bewildered by the command.
“See to the white man,” the taller Crow ordered. “He is wounded.”
For a moment Bass stared at his brother-in-law, wondering why he demanded the other warrior to stay back too. That didn’t make a damned bit of sense if Strikes-in-Camp’s bunch had been out stealing his traps. They had him two to one … but he suddenly remembered that this was his wife’s brother. All Scratch wanted was to have his traps returned. If these bucks just gave them back, he’d figure it was settled.
Then Scratch looked down at the shaft piercing the meat of his right arm and settled back into the snow with a grunt. As Stiff Arm came to a stop to stand over him with that dripping scalp in one hand, Bass grumbled, “Hold the end of the arrow. No—your hand must be near my arm.”
With the warrior bracing one end of the shaft, Titus seized the other end of the bloody arrow, gripping it where the cherrywood shaft protruded from the arm. He took a breath, held it in his lungs, and snapped downward with a loud crack.
“Pull!” he cried as the breath gushed from his mouth with a hot pain.
The younger man yanked the fletched end of the arrow through the white man’s arm.
It took a moment, but the wound’s fiery river subsided to the point where Titus dared to flex his wrist gently, slowly bend his fingers. Lucky that the shaft hadn’t cut anything but meat, he thought, relieved that everything still worked.
“We must see to Strikes-in-Camp,” he suggested as Stiff Arm helped him to his feet.
But Strikes-in-Camp held out his arm, gesturing for them to halt where they were as he himself took another step backward.
Both of them stopped, bewildered. Titus asked, “Just give me my—”
“This one,” Strikes-in-Camp interrupted as he pointed to the dead man lying at his feet, “you will see he has the disfiguring sickness. The other one too,” and he kicked the second Blackfoot’s body.
While Stiff Arm released Bass’s wrist and inched backward in trepidation, Scratch tried to make sense of this shocking news.
“You don’t know if they’re sick—”
“Both of them touched me,” the warrior argued. “This one who held me from behind, he rubbed his face against mine as we struggled—”
Bass swallowed, getting to his feet as he gripped that right forearm. “Let me see him.”
Now the tall Crow fell silent for a long moment, then said, “You white men, is it true you cannot get the disfiguring sickness?”
He had only doubt. “I have heard some white men become sick—but they do not die.”
“Like the Indian always dies?”
“It will not kill me,” Titus explained, taking a step toward the warrior. “Let me see the Blackfoot.”
Strikes-in-Camp took three steps to the side, away from the two bodies. Bass walked over, propping the wounded arm across his chest, then knelt beside the first body. The enemy’s sallow face was just beginning to erupt with angry red pustules. Not so bad, he thought. Perhaps the Crow had little to fear.
He knelt over the second dead warrior who lay on his belly. Turning him over with a toe, Bass jerked back the instant he got a look at the man’s face.
“He was already a dead man,” Strikes-in-Camp said woefully.
“Yes,” Bass replied, gazing down into that face of death—a ghastly, oozing death mask worn by a man with a day, perhaps little more, left to live.
“Stiff Arm, you must return to the village,” the tall warrior instructed. “Tell them what happened here. Bring men with you to see to our dead.”
“Y-you will stay here with the bodies until we return?” Stiff Arm asked.
He shook his head sadly. “No. I cannot be here when the others return. You tell them I have gone somewhere to think about the death that is coming to me.”
“Where?”
Strikes-in-Camp peered at Bass. “Perhaps I should go to see my sister and her children once more before I die.”
“That … that might kill them,” Bass warned. “Just as it would kill your own wife and children to be close to them.”
“Yes,” he admitted quietly. “I cannot be with any of my family while I die.”
“They would grow sick too—”
“Then I will have to die alone,” the warrior said.
“No,” Bass argued. “No man should die alone. We can go to my camp. We can make a shelter for you near ours, where you can be close enough to see your sister, but not so close you will make her sick. And I will care for you when you no longer can care for yourself.”
“That will be the hardest of all for me,” Strikes-in-Camp admitted. “A man unable to take care of himself.”
“I will tell your wife where to find you,” announced Stiff Arm.
“But no others,” Strikes-in-Camp ordered. “No one else must come … so there can be no chance of our people all dying.”
“Where is your camp?” Stiff Arm asked the trapper.
Bass turned, pointing at the hills to the northwest. “Half a day’s ride from this place.”
“Then it is a long day’s ride from our village,” Stiff Arm said. “I will bring them so they can look at you one last time.”
Strikes-in-Camp drew himself up and took a long, rattling sigh. “Bring them quickly, Stiff Arm. I want them to see me with my own face … not this face of a horrible death. Just look upon this one, the face of our enemy. That is no way for my family to remember me.”
She could hear her daughter whimpering. Magpie sobbed in their Crow tongue, softly muttering a few words at a time.
But it was difficult for Waits-by-the-Water to hear what the girl was saying somewhere behind her on another pony. The attackers had knotted a wide band of thick blanket material around her head, blinding her eyes, covering her ears with the heavy dark-blue wool.
“Water, Mother,” Magpie said. “Tell them to give us water.”
Then she heard a loud slap, immediately followed by her daughter’s shrill wail.
“Magpie—be quiet,” she chastised the child. “Be strong and do not do anything to make them hurt you.”
