“You went after ’em too. Back when Waits got the pox and her brother was kill’t freein’ her from Bug’s boys with you.”
“Then you know there’s nothin’ gonna stop me from goin’ after Hickman once them Marmons light out for the Salt Lake with our families,” Titus vowed.
“We just sit?”
“No,” and he was struck with an idea. “We got Flea here. He looks ’bout as much a Injun as them Marmons ever see’d.”
“Flea?” Bridger echoed.
Scratch turned to his eldest boy. “Son, I want you to ride in there like you come to do some tradin’—”
“He ain’t got nothin’ to trade!” Bridger interrupted.
“Shit,” Titus grumped. “Awright. You just come ridin’ in there to have yourself a gander at all the shiny geegaws the trader got for sale. You unnerstand?”
Flea nodded. “No American talk?”
“Not one word, ’cept to say
Jim stepped up the youngster. “Can you do this?”
Unflinchingly, he answered in his harshest American, “I can damn well do.”
“This gonna be just ’bout the most important thing you ever done for your mother,” Scratch declared. “For your friends too.”
Flea looked his father in the eye steadily as he said in Crow, “I am a man now, Father. There are many ways for a warrior to fight to protect the ones he loves. Sometimes a man doesn’t have to raise a weapon to defend his family. Now is the time to show you I am a man.”
That declaration brought tears to the old man’s eyes. He blinked and swiped at his cheeks, then laid his arm around his tall son’s shoulders and brought the young man against him in a tight embrace.
When he took a step back and looked at Flea, Scratch said, “I-I didn’t realize how much you’d growed, son. Jupiter’s fire, if you ain’t shot up taller’n me in the last year or so. Yes, you’re a man by anyone’s ’count—an’ that makes your pa real proud.”
Bridger held out his arm and clasped wrists with the youngster. Then Flea snatched up the long buffalo-hair rein, a handful of mane, and leaped onto the pony’s bare back.
Titus stepped up, laying his hand on the lad’s bare knee, and asked, “You know them rocks way upstream what look like a mountain lion’s head?”
Flea nodded.
“That’s where you’ll find us when you got some news,” Scratch concluded.
In Crow, the youngster said, “I hope to rejoin you by sunset.” Then he spun his pony around and kicked it in the flanks to set off at a lope.
“What’d he say there at the last?” Bridger asked.
Bass watched the young man’s back until rider and pony disappeared around a brushy bend in the stream. “Said he’d come to us by sundown.”
Gazing at the sun blazing high at midsky for a moment, Jim growled, “Sundown. Damn, hot as it is right now, I’ll lay it’s gonna get cold for our old bones afore sunup tomorrow.”
“C’mon, Gabe. No sense thinkin’ ’bout what’s gonna be hard of it,” he cheered. “That Hickman’s got blood in his eye so he’s bound to put out searchers now that he ain’t found Jim Bridger sittin’ round home.”
“I s’pose you’re right,” and Jim yanked at the knot tying his horse to a willow limb.
Scratch swung into the saddle and stuffed his moccasins inside the big cottonwood stirrups. “We better scat into the hills afore Brigham Young’s bully-boys come beatin’ these bushes so they can get their hands on you.”
Which is exactly what the Danite posse did.
But those noisy Mormons didn’t search upstream far enough to get anywhere close to where Bridger and Bass lay in hiding, waiting for Flea to bring them some news as to who these interlopers were and what they wanted. Instead, two different groups of riders were spotted heading down one side of Black’s Fork, busting the brush for their wanted man, then crossing the creek to turn about for the fort by riding down the other side of the stream. The sun had just set behind them, but the sky was still radiant with an orangehued summer light when Titus spotted the lone horseman moving down from the hills through a narrow coulee, hugging the willow.
Damn if that didn’t make him proud of the boy. From the looks of things, Flea had come around the long way, climbing north toward the ridge before he made a long and circuitous loop back to the west. Now that he had reached Black’s Fork, every fifty yards or so Flea reined up his pony, turned around, and waited. Likely listening for the sounds of anyone dogging his back trail. Then he advanced a little farther before he stopped again and waited.
From their perch up on the rocks, the two old trappers could clearly see the Danites hadn’t followed the youth, or—better yet—that Flea had shaken any who had attempted to tail him by leaving the fort in the opposite direction before circling back around behind the low hills. The young man’s face was a stony mask of determination mixed with utter hatred when the two men stepped out of the brush and made themselves known.
“What you find out, son?” Titus asked in American as Flea slid from the back of his pony and pulled off the thick saddle blanket he had been sitting on.
The youngster stuffed his head through a slit previously cut through the middle of it so that it hung from his bare shoulders like a greaser’s poncho. “I hear these men talk to my mother. They ask, she Bridger woman? She say other woman, point to The Fawn.” Then he looked at Jim to say, “Sheriff, he come for you.”
“One of ’em’s a sheriff?” Bridger asked.
But Titus interrupted to ask, “What’s a sheriff come to take Jim for?”
“Sheriff shake paper in hand. Say come take you away—you sell powder and guns to bad Injuns … Injuns gonna kill their people.”
“Injuns gonna kill Mormons?” Bridger asked.
“I s’pose that’s what they come to arrest you for, Gabe.” Then Scratch spat a brown stream at the dry grass near his moccasin toe. “We both know that’s horseshit.”
“Here I was the one what even warned ’em two year ago that the Bannocks was gettin’ a mite fractious an’ was comin’ to raid their settlements!” Jim grumped.
“None of this has to make sense to no one but that goddamned Brigham Young,” Titus said. “He’s the one wanted you out of here right from the start. Can’t you see that now?”
“Why the hell he’d want to get rid of me for?”
“Man like him—all his high-an’-mighty kind—these here mountains ain’t near big enough for him an’ the rest of us too,” Bass growled. “Way they’re showin’ their colors, Brigham Young an’ his Marmons ain’t no better’n a pack o’ plunderin’ Blackfoots. Come to steal away ever’thing they can … an’ what they can’t steal—they’ll kill.”
“You don’t think they’ll harm them women an’ young’uns in there?”
“I dunno,” Titus admitted. “Don’t know what to think anymore now. The hull durn mountains is turned topsy on us, Gabe. The used-to-be’s don’t count for nothin’ anymore.”
Bridger’s hands flexed into fists as he asked, “What’s a man to do when that Lion of the Lord sends out a murderin’ bunch that outnumbers us the way they do?”
Scratch said, “Only thing I figger on us to do is get word over to Laramie.”
“Fort Laramie?”
He nodded. “Yep. Them soldiers is the only law you got to go to for help.”
Bridger shuddered. “Used to be, we settled things here ourselves. Took care to right a wrong on our own.”
“Don’t bet your last pair of wool drawers on it,” Scratch said, “but I’ll bet Brigham Young knowed you was the sort to take care of yourself. That’s why he sent more’n a hunnert an’ a half up here to steal your post away from you. With that many of them niggers swoopin’ down on your fort, that Marmon president knew damn well there was nothin’ you could do to fight back.”
He watched Bridger grind his teeth on the dilemma for a few moments, until Flea laid his hand on his father’s forearm.
