wound was a nasty, slow way for a man to go. Bass divided that handful’s meager goods among the rest.
By late morning Fraeb’s ragtag bunch was ready to pull out. He had gotten the German’s men to agree that they would all take a turn at pulling the wounded man as they plodded north. His would be the heaviest travois.
“If you was bad off like him, I know you’d want the others to drag you outta here.”
There had been no dissent.
Kneeling within the narrow end of the vee he had constructed of the saplings, Bass stood, raising his travois to start forward. He took the head of the march, turning to look over his shoulder at the skyline where the warriors had dismounted now, watching the white men. Where the creek valley took a bend, Bass looked back at the hilltop one last time. The Sioux were gone.
Now this bunch could really start to worry.
Likely, those scouts had gone off to tell the rest of the village that the white men had abandoned their fort. From here on out, when the Sioux attacked, the horsemen would have an easier time of it riding over the trappers. With every step Bass worked to convince himself that they’d corral up quickly within what baggage and packs they had strung out on the many travois, doing their best to hold the warriors off any way they could. For as long as they could.
The sun seemed to hang in the sky that long afternoon, unmoving like a stubborn mule. That comparison made him remember. Step by painful step, damn—if it didn’t make him remember. Try as he might to squeeze out the hurt that first part of the day, Bass finally gave in and let the tortured remembrance of Hannah course through him like the burning sting of a poison coursing through his veins.
Even when he called for a halt and the bunch dropped their travois, every man collapsing into the dust and the sage, huffing and pulling at their canteens of tepid, alkali-laced water. The first few times he reminded them only to wet their lips, to wash their tongues and the insides of their mouths with one swish of water rather than guzzling at their dwindling supply of moisture. Especially since they had no idea where they would end up come sundown. Near a creek or not. Soon enough he gave up trying to convince them to conserve their water.
A mountain man wasn’t supposed to worry about water. But … a man didn’t have to if he had a horse to cover ground. However, the going was slow on foot.
No telling how far they had come by the time the sun had sunk and the long shadows were no more. That’s when they started searching in earnest for a place to wait out the night.
Scouring every crease lying between the hills, the trappers still came up dry—every creekbed nothing more than a sandy strip of dust. Then as twilight was sucking the last of the light from the sky, they spotted a dark hollow in the rolling tableland ahead. Dotting the hollow was a sprinkling of brush,-vegetation barely bigger than the sparse sagebrush that struggled to survive in this high desert. Spread out in a wide vee behind him, the trappers lunged step-by-step toward the dark, beckoning green.
Reaching the coarse grass and stunted willow, Bass dropped the travois from his weary hands turned to numb, stonelike claws. Then he went to his knees in weary exhaustion as the first of the others stumbled to a halt around him.
Crawling out of the vee, he stayed on hands and knees, searching for the source of the seep by sound, feeling along for the growing moisture beneath his fingertips. There it was, at last. No more than an oozy seep, and a little warm at that, but it was water.
Rocking forward, Bass put his face down into the shallow pan-sized spring and lapped at the wetness. It was bitter with salts, but it was water. And damn if it weren’t cool.
“Gimme your canteen,” he demanded of a half-breed Frenchman, the first to come up at his shoulder.
Once it was filled, he scrambled out of the way and let the others at the seep while he lurched over to the travois where the dying man lay groaning. His parched lips were swollen and cracked. His leathery face sunburnt and coated with a fine layer of alkali dust.
“I brung you some water.”
But the man didn’t open his eyes. Didn’t respond. Nothing more than the quiver of those lips as he mumbled unintelligible sounds. Kneeling over him, Bass pressed the narrow end of the gourd against the swollen lips and slowly poured the springwater into the man’s slack mouth. More than half of it dribbled down his bearded cheek, and he sputtered so badly on the rest that Bass gave up.
Poor fella wouldn’t be long now. Gut shot the worst way to go under. Man took a long, long time to die. Could be this one wouldn’t make it through another day of the bouncing, jarring ride as they pressed north by west for the Green River come morning.
He died quiet and merciful, sometime late on the afternoon of the second day’s march. That night at their waterless camp, the men took turns scraping out a shallow trough from the hard, flinty soil. The moon had risen by the time they rolled the body into its resting place, then covered the dusting of earth with what rocks they managed to find across the side of a barren hill.
Over low fires they broiled thin strips of the stringy horsemeat that was beginning to take on a sharp tang. What they had left wouldn’t spoil if they jerked it. Titus figured they’d be down to chewing on parfleche and eating their spare moccasins in another three or four days if they didn’t ration what little meat they had left among them.
In the cool air that third morning, they had themselves a bad scare.
“Shit,” one of the men grumbled as the whole bunch jolted awake in their blankets, “only see three of ’em.”
“Where there’s three watching—might well be three hundred waiting,” Bass declared.
Baker inquired, “What you figger ’em to be?”
For a moment longer he studied the gray hillside, then wagged his head. “Ain’t got no idea. But I don’t make ’em for Sioux still keeping an eye on us. They’d follered us, caught us in the open, and been done with us quick.”
“So who they be?” Elias Kersey asked.
They all watched as the trio slipped out of sight behind the far hilltop. “Don’t matter now,” Titus sighed. “They for certain ain’t the friendly kind.”
“Maybe Snake?”
“Maybeso,” Bass answered. “Or Yuta. Either way, what they see’d of us down here ’thout no horses, I reckon they figger us to be slim pickin’s. Ain’t worth stealing from, or worth killing.”
One of the younger trappers crawled over to ask, “That mean there’s a village close?”
“Likely it does.”
“Maybe we can find it today,” Rube Purcell said, enthused.
“Don’t set your sights that high,” he warned the angular man. “Best we can hope for is to find a trail and see if it might do to follow those tracks toward the Green.”
A pair of the Americans immediately set off for the distant hill in the predawn light. The rest waited in that waterless camp for them to return with their disappointing news that the riders had circled out of the southeast, and their trail led off to the southwest, a jumble of rolling hills.
Some of the men instantly began to grumble that they should have started for Fort Davy Crockett in Brown’s Hole, since that was likely the trio’s destination.
“Could be they were the last of the Sioux scouts keeping watch on us too,” Bass declared. “I’m making for the Green. There’s a lot I don’t mind gambling over—but walking right into that Sioux village again sure seems like short odds to me.”
When it came time to start out again a few minutes later, about half of the others didn’t immediately follow. He wasn’t going to let it matter to him if they had decided to take off on their own. Bass vowed to focus his efforts on cutting a fresh trail that might well mean finding a friendly village of Shoshone or Ute. At least Baker, Kersey, Corn, and Purcell were behind him—they were a steady lot.
A little later when he glanced over his shoulder, Titus discovered the rest of the bunch strung out behind him in a ragged procession, their moccasins and travois poles scuffing up small puffs of the yellowish dust. If the Sioux decided to hit the white men now, they’d be easy to roll on over.
It didn’t matter, he told himself. Just keep walking—every bone-jarring step was one more step closer to Waits-by-the-Water and the youngsters.
What the hell was he doing down here anyway? Had he come out of Crow country to trap beaver in the Wind
