who can offer me many fine things … but you are the one who has won my heart. You are the one who can give me what no other man can ever give me.”
“Then you will be my wife?”
“Yes, Turns Back,” she said, starting to cry, smiling in spite of the tears. “I will be your wife … and bear your children … and I will wait for you when you ride off to make war on the enemies of our people … and—I will grow old with you, Turns Back. Like the seasons of the year, we will know our spring and summer, our autumn, and we will know our winter too. I will grow old with you … and I promise my heart will love you more each day of our life together.”
Tears spilled from Turns Back’s eyes as he looked over at the old prophet. He asked, “Real Bird, will you step over here and give us your blessing? Will you say a prayer for our union?”
Titus helped the old man shuffle closer, then pulled Waits-by-the-Water close, so that the three of them stood around the young couple, joining their arms to form a circle of love around Turns Back and Magpie as Real Bird began to sing, his high, reedy voice sailing on the breeze of that hot summer day.
The four of them were crying for joy, tears streaming from their eyes as the old prophet gave wing to his prayers for these young newlyweds, his own blind eyes closed as he raised his face and shouted at the sky.
“Creator Above! Hear me! Grant this man and his woman your every blessing. May he be strong in protecting your people … and may she be fruitful in bearing the generations to come!”
Opening his eyes he held out his thin, bony hands to the young couple. Slowly he raised their arms in the air with his and gave a wild, shrill cry. All around their small circle the many hundreds lifted their voices, drunk with triumph and celebration. Men yipped exuberantly, women trilled their tongues in victory calls, and children screamed and laughed, suddenly freed to dart in and out of the crowd, shrieking joyously in play.
Turns Back seized his new bride, clutching her against him tightly as they both gushed with laughter on this happy, happy day. Scratch leaned in to kiss his daughter on the cheek as Waits-by-the-Water kissed Magpie’s other cheek. Then the old trapper pounded his new son-in-law on the back of his war shirt, which was draped with black- tipped winter-white ermine tails and enemy scalp locks. Suddenly among them were Jackrabbit and Flea, the tall youth lifting up little Crane so the girl could give her big sister a congratulatory embrace.
“The feasting and songs will begin as soon as we walk down to the grove by the river!” Titus roared above the tumult as the throngs surged in to shout their wishes at the newlyweds.
Led by Don’t Mix, all of Turns Back’s loyal friends had been helping the white man over the last few days, hunting buffalo, digging long trenches, and dragging in a great store of firewood before they started roasting huge slabs of lean, red meat over the immense beds of coal they had begun firing day before last.
“I could not have done this without you, Don’t Mix,” Titus said to the young warrior as they reached the crowded grove, where Magpie’s girlfriends were helping to carve off chunks of buffalo for everyone pressing forward in a great wave.
“Everything is as it should be,
“Thank you for not standing in their way and making things hard on them when he finally went to her and spoke of the feelings in his heart,” Scratch confided. “And when Magpie came to you and told you she wanted to marry another.”
He smiled in that handsome face of his. “It is for the best! Now I have lots of time to look over the other girls in the village and pick one of them for my bride!”
“Titus Bass!”
He turned at the loud call, recognizing the voice of the old friend before his eye found Robert Meldrum threading his way through the milling crowd, a small brown jug suspended at the end of one arm, two tin cups looped in the fingers of the other hand.
“Round Iron!” he cried, using the Crows’ name for the American Fur Company trader, which referred to Meldrum’s blacksmithing abilities practiced here at Fort Alexander.
The trader had himself married into the Crow tribe, making him an invaluable asset to his employers. He had a long history in the fur trade, all the way back to ’27, when he first came west with William H. Ashley’s brigades, tramping across the Rocky Mountain West with the likes of Bridger, Carson, Meek, and Fitzpatrick.
“I brung some of the company’s special brandy for this very special day,” Meldrum announced as he stomped up in front of the old trapper and held out the cups to Bass. He winked at Waits-by-the-Water, who stood at her husband’s side, clutching Scratch’s arm. “This here’s for a very special father of the bride!”
“Brandy, eh?” Scratch growled. “You ain’t got no more hard likker buried in that hole under your bed?”
Meldrum brought the neck of the jug to his lips and bit down on the browned cork, quickly worrying it out of the top. Around the cork he said, “This here’s the finest I got. Never knowed you to pass up any alcohol, Titus Bass!”
“Shuddup an’ pour!”
When Meldrum had both of their cups halfway filled, he turned to Waits-by-the-Water and hoisted his tin, saying in Crow, “Here’s to the mother of the bride, who always has been one of the most beautiful women in all of Absaroka!”
“You still got a eye for the ladies, do ye?” Scratch roared, and then took a long drink of the thick and potent brandy, feeling its fiery burn coursing down the back of his throat.
Meldrum swallowed and bobbed his head from side to side, peering over the crowd. “My wife is here, somewhere. Over yonder—helping cut slices off that buffler. What I wanna know is—where that pretty daughter of your’n went. This child’s got a hankerin’ to kiss the bride!”
“She pretends she don’t mind getting a kiss from her dog-faced ol’ man, Meldrum!” Titus roared as he held his cup out for more brandy. “But I don’t think Magpie’s gonna want a thing to do with your hairy mug! Jehoshaphat, if you ain’t ’bout the ugliest man I ever knowed!”
“That puts me right next to you, Titus Bass!” he said as he hoisted his cup in toast again. “For you surely be the ugliest man I ever did see!”
Smacking his lips, Titus licked the tip of his tongue through the shaggy ends of his unkempt mustache, savoring every drop of the sweet fruit brandy the American Fur Company sneaked upriver only for the use of its post factors, but not in the robe trade itself. “Meldrum, you ol’ Scotsman,” Scratch grumbled, “you’re doin’ your damnedest to get me hooked on the company’s goddamned stuffed-shirt brandy!”
“What—you’re acquirin’ a taste for brandy, Titus Bass? Why, you ol’—”
“Mr. Meldrum!”
They both turned at the call, spotting one of the trader’s three employees riding toward them from the direction of their log-walled post. As the crowd stepped out of the way of the man’s horse, Titus spotted the five buckskinned riders close on the employee’s tail.
“Mr. Meldrum!”
The trader wiped his lips with the back of the same hand that held the cup, and his eyes narrowed on the newcomers as they approached. “What is it, James?”
“Visitors, sir! You got visitors from far away!”
By the time the six riders halted their horses several yards away, Scratch could see the five strangers weren’t Indians at all. Instead, they appeared to be French-blood half-breeds.
“Far away?” Meldrum asked as he took two steps closer to James.
Bass gently lowered his wife’s arm, then inched away from her so he could stay at the trader’s elbow.
“Fort LaRamee,” one of the strangers announced.
It suddenly struck him that Meldrum was an employee of the same company that Bordeau worked for down at Fort John on the North Platte—the site that was only now becoming better known as Fort Laramie. Quickly he peered at the faces of those five strangers, looking for a hint of someone familiar … perhaps one or more of them had been a part of that bunch who had tried to harm Magpie, who had made trouble for him and Shad Sweete back in the spring of ’47, bad blood more than four years gone now. If Bordeau had made it back to the post on his own hook, would he have carried a burning grudge this long? Finally tracking down Titus Bass and sending a handful of half-breed gunmen to kill the old trapper?
Meldrum demanded, “There’s trouble?”
With a shake of his head, the half-blood who had spoken waved his hand at the young white clerk. “Give him now.”
