hear—but when one of the Cheyenne horses nickered in that gentle, contented way of their species, Bass finally let the air out of his chest again.
“You been watching me, ain’t you?” Titus asked, more to let the Blackfoot understand he was awake than any attempt at language or hope for an answer.
“This here snow means we ain’t goin’ nowhere, not till it’s passed.”
So you just as well settle in till the weather breaks, he thought as he scratched Ghost behind an ear. The dog had its muzzle laid on his thigh.
Easing onto his knees, he crabbed closer to the fire and laid on some more wood. Glancing at what wood he had dragged into camp the night before, Scratch prayed he had enough to last them that day and even into the coming night. With the big, fat flakes coming down the way they were, all too soon it would be next to impossible to find a lot of the small, loose squaw wood. So if he carefully marshaled what he already had, they might just stay warm enough, might not freeze before they could ride out of there and look for the Crow—
“What the hell are you thinking?” he scolded himself under his breath. “Your brains must’ve gone soft! What the blazes we gonna do ’bout that boy?”
Bass realized he couldn’t ride into the Crow camp with this enemy. Soon as his wife’s people recognized his dress, the quillwork pattern on his leggings, his hairstyle too, the Crow would drag him to the ground and begin to beat him. They’d inflict a thousand wounds on him, none alone enough to kill the youngster. But as they warmed to their fury, the men would turn the prisoner over to the Crow women. They would be the ones to carefully trim off the Blackfoot’s eyelids, ceremoniously castrate him, build a slow, smoky fire on his genitals, then … carve off an arm, quite possibly a leg—slowly, slowly, like butchering an antelope or mule deer. Until there was little left that would resemble a human being—nothing more than a scalped head with its eyes poked out positioned atop a slashed, bloody torso—its flailed skin blackened by countless hot embers.
An involuntary shudder washed over him as he brooded on the horror that might await this young enemy at the hands of those women he knew in Yellow Belly’s band. Women he knew as mothers and grandmothers, sisters and aunts. Women who were the soul of the Apsaluuke nation. If men were its heart and muscle and bone, then the women were its soul. But … times before he had watched those same women grow increasingly more cruel and vindictive as they wrung every drop of retribution and revenge out of a prisoner.
“If’n I let you go, I couldn’t give you no weapon,” Titus confessed as he settled the buffalo robe back around his shoulders and leaned against the tree again. The two dogs stretched out beside him and yawned.
He was surprised his thoughts had already reached that point: setting the youth free. The Blackfoot might use whatever weapon the white man provided to take his revenge on the white man who had killed three of his companions. Then it struck him: Maybe one of the dead men lying here, or there, was a father. An uncle. Or a brother. Chances were very good that this boy was related to one of those Scratch had killed last night—if for no other reason than, for most of the mountain tribes, this was the way a boy stepped into the world of manhood: invited to ride along as pony holder on a raid conducted by an older relative.
One of these dead men was shepherding this bad-eyed youngster into adulthood, Titus brooded as he watched the boy slowly work at the ropes strangling his wrists. After drifting off a little while, Scratch awoke, thinking he deserved to know if he was wrong about the boy. Or if he was right.
“I kill your father here?” he asked as he stood and started toward the first body.
Kneeling by the dead warrior, Scratch grabbed a handful of the man’s hair and yanked up the Blackfoot’s head, pressing the sharp edge of his skinning knife into the skin of the brow, right at the hairline. All while studying the youth’s reaction.
The boy’s eyes filled with even more hate as he redoubled his efforts to free his hands from the knotted rope.
“Naw. I don’t think this’un’s the one.” And Titus let go of the hair, dropping the head onto the crusty snow.
One at a time, he went and knelt at the next two bodies—threatening to scalp them too. While the youngster did growl in a feral way, Scratch nonetheless figured it had to be the last one. Especially when he watched how the youth’s eyes widened as he knelt next to that third corpse.
Rolling the body over so that the youngster could plainly see the dead man’s face, Titus filled his left hand with hair and pulled the head off the trampled snow. The instant his scalping knife flashed into view there beside the low flames, the boy started howling like a pup without its mother. He stopped his knife, then examined the dead man’s face.
“He ain’t old ’nough to be your papa. Maybeso your uncle?” After a long, quiet moment while the fat flakes fell upon the leafless branches of the cottonwood around them, Scratch sighed, “But I bet he was your older brother. He was gonna show you what it took to be a man.”
Slowly rising, Bass stuffed the skinning knife back into its scabbard as the look of loathing and fury disappeared from the youth’s face. Replacing it was sudden confusion, bewilderment, maybe even a little fear as the boy stared at the white man’s every move.
“They was all brave men, son. Just like you was gonna be too.”
He shook the coffeepot, heard some liquid sloshing inside it, so he sat the pot at the edge of the low flames.
“Like I said afore: can’t cut you loose with no weapon … an’ I damn well can’t let you go ’thout no weapon neither.”
That would be certain death. He might as well kill the boy here and now. Not that he hadn’t killed youngsters before—but none of that had been in cold blood. Shit, some Crow, Flathead, maybeso someone else, would run this youngster down inside of three days and butcher him.
What the hell was he gonna do with him?
As the dim light swelled into the pewter glow of a snowy dawn, Titus decided that he didn’t have to sort it out today. He could wait, thereby giving the right answer time to stew and cook, then bubble to the surface in its own good time. Sometimes weighty matters were best left to the closest deliberation he was known to ever give anything of concern.
He’d think on it now and again while the day passed. Which meant one more day he was forced to put off his search for the Crow of Yellow Belly.
At midmorning when the wind died a little, Titus awoke with a start and clambered to his feet. As soon as the white man made noise, the youngster snapped awake, awkwardly pushing himself back into a sitting position, glaring anew at his enemy.
And that was just how Scratch felt as he stepped around the opposite side of the fire pit, watching the boy’s eyes. These Blackfoot had long been his enemy. How many of them had he killed over the seasons? Maybeso he’d have to scratch at that knotty problem sometime tonight after dark. For now, he bent and grabbed one of the stiffening corpses by the back of the warrior’s collar. Raised him up and dragged the dead man out of the copse of trees through the snow that had fallen deep enough to fill most of the hoofprints and moccasin tracks around his camp.
He returned for the second attacker, dropping the contorted body next to the first, downwind and next to a three-foot-high snowdrift. As he stepped back into the trees he watched the youngster’s eyes and stopped in his tracks. Something different there now—no longer the unmitigated hatred. Titus wondered if he was a damn fool to think the boy’s eyes might be softening, almost pleading with him.
That third body was the boy’s blood. Family. Kinfolk. While Titus had given up on his own people, had abandoned his cold and distant parents, his sister and brothers back in Boone County, he had come to possess some strong notion of just what family could mean to a body. Over time, his woman and their young’uns—they had come to be the family he had long wanted to hold close, the family he felt he deserved.
The boy began growling again, a wild, raspy sound at the back of his throat when Bass stopped at the third corpse and bent over to grab hold of the half frozen carcass.
This time Scratch did not turn around in his tracks and trudge out of the trees. Instead, he took the dozen steps that brought him to the youngster’s shoulder, where he gently, slowly laid the cold body beside the boy’s hip. The youngster’s eyes followed the white man as he stepped away to some of his baggage, dusted off some snow with the side of his woolen mitten, then threw back the oiled sheeting and began to unknot a pile of red blankets. More than likely, red would be of special significance.
Dragging the Russian sheeting back over the blankets and trade goods to protect them from the unrelenting
