Titus grinned too. “That’s right—even if them Injuns run off Mex and parley-voo too … I say we owe them Injuns a li’l lesson in goodly manners.”
“An’ maybeso we’ll get them two greaser gals back for ourselves in the bargain!” Dick Owens cheered lustily.
“We got horses we don’t want run off by a pack of these here niggers,” Williams reminded harshly. “We come too damn far with ’em awready.”
“Bill’s right,” Scratch agreed. “Let’s see what we can do to run these brownskins off across the river. Maybeso they won’t get wind of our herd back yonder.”
“Shit,” Jack Robinson grumped. “How the hell we gonna hide more’n a thousand goddamned horses?”
Bass turned on the man and looked him squarely in the eye, saying, “I was figuring you was gonna come up with a idee, Jack. Only way you get to roll in the grass with one of the Mexican gals is to take her away from the warriors.”
Robinson looked sheepish a moment. “Didn’t figger on having to do that.”
“Just see you get them two senoreetas back for the traders,” Williams ordered. “Far as I can tell, them Yutas ain’t kill’t or shot up none of Robidoux’s parley-voos. So I don’t want you hurtin’ none of them Yutas.”
“Who’s coming with me?” Pete Harris asked, his voice rising an octave as his eyes raked over the rest. “You got some hair in you yet, Bass?”
He shook his head. “Nawww. I don’t need to hump no Mexican gals no more. So it’s up to the rest of you boys to go run off them Injuns and bring them whores back.”
“I’m coming!” Dick Owens volunteered.
Around Harris another three fell in with flushed enthusiasm. Harris bellowed like a spiked bull struck with spring fever and led them out of the trees for the fort. As the hell-bent-for-rawhide trappers burst from the timber, the Ute warriors suddenly reined up, appearing to take stock of their situation.
“They’re a bit light on the odds, Bill,” Titus suggested. “We oughtta show them brownskins the rest of us.”
Williams asked, “Hang back near the trees to show ’em there’s more of us?”
“That’s what I was thinking, Bill.”
“C’mon, boys,” Williams directed the others as he kneed his pony forward. “Let’s spread out and make ’em think there’s a hull shitteree of us back here gonna rub ’em out.”
The moment the rest of the horsemen came out of the shadowy timber alongside him and Bill, Bass set up a caterwauling akin to some disembodied spirit streaking back through that crack in the sky to haunt this world. In another two heartbeats the other trappers joined in—coyote yip-yipping, some of them trilling their tongues while others u-looed. A few let fly with a chest-popping screech.
Out in front, Pete Harris and his quartet of trappers took up the call and began to scream for all they were worth as they raced headlong across the narrow meadow for the Ute horsemen.
The sight of those nine trappers emerging from the timber, along with Harris’s four chargers, immediately put the warriors into flight. At the fort gates the half dozen Ute then on foot scrambled over one another to reach their ponies and get mounted. Ahead of the trappers, all of the Indians spun out of the meadow, heading for the bank and the river ford.
Into the shallow water the first of them leaped their horses, landing in a spray of water and nearly losing their balance. None of the warriors dared to look back over their shoulders until they had reached the north side of the river.
With the way this meadow ground sloped away toward the crossing, Scratch and those who had hung back with him couldn’t really see much of that crossing until the horsemen reached the other side, racing away. But they plainly did hear when Harris and the rest roared with laughter.
Trotting on foot into the ranks of Bill Williams’s horsemen, the post employees glanced up at the trappers as if to ask why the Americans were sitting there on their horses when there was a fort to be rescued.
“Awright, you pork eaters,” Scratch roared at them with a wave of his long rifle. “C’mon, let’s go see what plunder them Injuns run off with.”
As late summer crept its way into early autumn, the weather began to cool at the lower elevations—even more so in the high country where the horse thieves drove their herd from sunrise to slap-dark, clambering over one low range after another—plodding slowly up the western slopes until they reached a low saddle, then struggling to keep the eager horses together as they raced down the eastern side of the passes.
This was, after all, country that both Ol’ Bill and Scratch knew like the backsights of their guns.
At the tiny trading post, Antoine Robidoux’s grateful employees hadn’t hesitated in hauling out the clay jugs of
Not only the whiskey, but they were due those two Santa Fe whores they had just rescued from the Ute warriors. In a pair of nearby rooms, the women spent that long, bawdy night on their backs, entertaining an unending string of American suitors. Paying for their pleasure to the tune of a horse for every carnal crack they had at the two whores seemed reasonable enough to the Americans. Why, each man jack of them was rich, rich in horses! What were two, three, even four horses these hungry men would leave behind by the time Bill Williams barked out his marching orders the next morning?
Bass’s head hurt worse than ever that sunrise when he squinted into the graying dawn, then stared down at the mud-caked moccasin jabbing him in the ribs. He lay atop a thick mattress, its odor musty from old grass gone to molder, the faint stench of old puke, and more than one dousing in urine. Sometime last night he had managed to drag a blanket over him for warmth.
He found himself lying on the floor of the tiny stable where the post patrons tied up their most valuable animals, not at all sure how he had come to sleep with these horses.
“You ever close your eyes last night, Bill?” he asked, then hacked up the night-gather thick at the back of his throat. Hangovers caused him a little more pain with every year.
“Not once,” Williams boasted proudly. “Laid down a time or two—but it weren’t to sleep!” He snorted with boyish laughter, then asked, “Why’n’t you come get yourself a poke with one of them gals?”
“I’m a married man, Bill,” he answered, sitting up and grinding the heels of his hands into both eyes.
“Taking hisself a Injun woman never kept no man from greasing his own wiping stick, Scratch.”.
Bleary-eyed, he gazed up at Williams. “I don’t need to poke no woman bad as that.”
“Your woman, she back with her own people?”
“Yep.”
Williams watched Scratch stand and dust off the hay from his clothing. “Who’s to say she ain’t back there right now curled up with one of them Absorkee bucks?”
For an instant he flared with anger, then realized by the look on Bill’s face that, in his own way, Williams was just having his fun. “I didn’t know you better, maybeso I ought’n bust you atween the eyes for making a crack like that, Solitaire.”
Williams winked. “Never settled down my own self, mind you—but, I do know any woman can get lonely.”
“I don’t figger Waits-by-the-Water for that sort of woman.”
“You sure ’bout that?” Bill asked. “After all, you are getting a little long in the tooth, Titus Bass.”
Scratch looked his friend in the eye and said, “Maybeso you’ve never loved a gal like I love this’un, Bill. I’m sure of the woman she is. That’s why I’m going home to her and my young’uns soon as we get shet of these Californy horses.”
“Damn, if that don’t take the circle!” Williams snorted. “Who’d a-reckoned when I’d met you up to the Bayou that you’d ever fill out to be a family man?”
That morning after leaving Robidoux’s post, they crossed the Uncompahgre, then stuck with the south side of the Blue, gradually forced to lead their herd farther and farther from the water’s edge as the river cut its way through a deep, black canyon. Many days later when the channel split in two, they stayed with the south fork, a river the Ute called the
