brings your family here, you can have him return to your village and bring a war party along behind me—”
“That would be the hope of a fool’s hen,” the warrior scoffed, shrugging the white man’s hand from his shoulder. “You want me to believe that they would have a chance of catching up to you when it won’t be until tomorrow evening before they reach here? Then Stiff Arm would need another day to return to the village, a third day to get back here again … they will be at least three days behind you—”
“I don’t have time to argue with you. I must leave now,” Bass interrupted sternly, wheeling around. He was bitter, angry—wanting only to find his family and draw the blood of those who took the loved ones from him. For now, all he could do was wound with his words. “I cannot wait on those who kept my wife from rejoining her people. Nor can I take a sick man who will be dying along with me.”
“Do you have any more guns?”
Titus stopped, slowly turned back to gaze at the warrior. “I left some for your sister to protect herself, our children. But the enemy probably—”
“Find them, white man.”
“Yes,” he said. It made a lot of sense. “I will need every gun I can carry when I catch up to those Blackfoot.”
“We will need every gun.”
“Fm not taking you!” Bass roared, remembering how twice he had told Josiah Paddock he wasn’t coming along on a journey into danger.
“No. This is not yours to decide,” the warrior said evenly. “I am a man. And a man chooses how he wishes to live. How he will die. She is my sister. Her children are my relations. Your family is my family, white man. Your people have killed the tribes along the Missouri with this sickness. Then your people sent their sickness into the Blackfoot nation … and now your people have killed me too—”
“I never meant for any of that to happen …” His voice cracked with deep sorrow. He felt the salty burn at his eyes.
Strikes-in-Camp took a deep breath and looked squarely at the trapper. “I do not blame you for any of this. You are my brother, so you must try to understand: this is how I choose to die. We are going together to find our relations.”
“T-together?”
“This is not a quest of one man alone against the many.”
“No, you are right—this is not for me to do alone.” Titus reluctantly accepted the warrior’s offer, ripping his mitten off his right hand, holding out that painful, wounded arm between them.
“I will ride at your side, fight at your side,” Strikes-in-Camp declared courageously as he laid his forearm against the white man’s, gripping Bass’s wrist. “And when I can no longer sit atop my horse … then … you will have to go on alone.”
The bastards hadn’t left much behind.
Blackfoot damn well poked through it all, deciding what they were going to load onto the packhorses, discarding the rest after they had ripped, crushed, or broken what remained in their destructive rage. Good thing the war party hadn’t wanted any of Bass’s medicines: small skin pouches of his medicinal plants they had tossed about the camp. But they had pitched his bundle of wiping sticks in the fire where the hickory wands had become nothing more than charred cinders, the way they had cut up what little they had left behind.
He couldn’t find his pelts. Nor the packsaddles he used on the extra ponies. The Blackfoot must have strapped the saddles onto the horses, lashing the beaver to the frames. They might be figuring to trade them off at Culbertson’s Fort Piegan.
Most everything of value had been ripped from him. Losing beaver again, the way he had when Silas, Bud, and Billy ran off with all that he had worked so hard to earn. But once more he realized it wasn’t so much those autumn plews … after all, he could replace them in another season, still have something to show for the year by rendezvous set for the Popo Agie.
It was his woman, the most important person in the world to him. And those children. There would never be another two who could compare to Magpie and Flea.
Bass realized he could put his possibles back together. He could make do with what traps he had left. And he could catch enough beaver to trade for what he needed across the next few seasons as he got himself back on his feet … but he never would be the same again if he didn’t get those three back.
And to do that, he could not delay in putting to the trail. Bass could not wait for more Crow warriors to join him. He and Strikes-in-Camp would have to leave at once and make their play against the war party alone.
Already on Samantha’s back was a robe and blanket, what he had taken along when setting out to confront the Crow thieves in their village. From the looks of it, the Blackfoot hadn’t taken anything with them to keep Waits- by-the-Water, Magpie, and Flea warm during their ride, to wrap themselves in at sundown when they halted for the night to eat, to sleep, to celebrate their captives, to …
Damn, Titus reminded himself as he looked about the debris left of his camp. He would have to hold those thoughts at bay, or he’d drive himself mad thinking of what those warriors would do to his wife—make himself so crazed that he couldn’t plan and plot, and do it all carefully enough so the Blackfoot wouldn’t have time to kill their captives when he caught up to them.
He figured it had to be as if he’d stare straight down the barrel of his rifle, concentrating while he placed the front blade in the bottom notch of his buckhorn rear sight, blotting out everything else—he had to force himself to think about what to do, and when to do it, how to pull this off despite the odds … rather than how the Blackfoot would abuse a woman prisoner.
“We should go before it gets any later,” Strikes-in-Camp reminded him.
Bass realized he had been staring at the litter of their camp, the scattering of torn robes, canvas, and blankets. “Yes,” he answered quietly. “Those bushes—see if there is anything they left behind, anything we can use.”
The Crow turned without a reply, moving quickly to the timber, peering into the brush. Bass knelt at the fire pit, poking at that bundle of hickory ramrod cinders. They would be hardest to replace. He kept spare flints in his pouch. Some extra balls and three spare horns of powder in what he had packed on Samantha. But he didn’t have any spare wiping sticks should he break the one carried in the thimbles beneath the barrel of his rifle.
That was one thing a man couldn’t do without in these mountains. The bastards had burned them, either knowing full well what they were, or the Blackfoot had pitched the bundle into the fire just to destroy what they didn’t care to pack along—
He turned at the strange sound, finding Strikes-in-Camp, staring into the warrior’s eyes … as if Titus believed the Crow had just made that muted, out-of-place noise. More of a whimper. Perhaps the warrior had been suddenly struck by the prospect of his own horrible death—
There it was again. But the whimper did not come from Strikes-in-Camp.
With his heart rising in his throat, Bass scrambled to his feet and sprinted to the rubble of blankets and robes scattered back among the brush across the camp from where he and the Crow had been talking. When Titus heard the next faint, muffled sob, he went to his knees, as if his own legs had been knocked out from under him. To left and right he tossed the scraps of wool blanket, the ruin of the buffalo robes, flinging them over his shoulders until he heard that unmistakable sound again. Clearer still.
Yanking the last scrap of robe back, Titus stared down at the tiny body.
Flea lay on his side, curled up, sucking on the knuckles of one hand, blinking at the cold, gray light as his father bent over him.
Bass started to weep as he gently stuffed his hands beneath his son’s small shoulders and hips, pulling the boy against his breast. A few feet from the white man’s elbow, Strikes-in-Camp knelt, on his face written the sadness that he could not reach out to touch his little nephew.
“Now we know they have only two,” Bass croaked his wife’s tongue, swallowing hard at the knot in his throat.
The Crow stood when the white man got to his feet. “What will we do with your son now?”
“We’ll take him with us.”
“No,” the warrior said firmly. “I am a father, like you. We cannot take a young child when we leave to trail the Blackfoot.”
“Then you must take him back to your village,” Bass demanded.
