With an ear-splitting cry, the enraged Frenchman lunged toward Titus, slinging blood and flashing the butcher knife in his weaving right hand. In a blur, Scratch sank to a crouch, leaning forward, then retreated in a half circle from beneath the attacker’s arm, all in the space of a heartbeat. Bass inched backward until he was stopped by the counter, then stood motionless as the Frenchman slowly gazed down at his lower chest. His shirt hung open the entire width of his body, blood oozing from the long, gaping wound. Small, dark pools began to collect on the clay floor around the toes of his moccasins.

Shadrach stepped up right behind Bass’s left elbow. “You say the word, we’ll gut ’em all.”

“You want me to finish you, pork-eater?” Titus asked his enemy. “Want me to kill you off so you won’t have to live with the memory of this night your tongue ran away on the wrong man’s daughter?”

His mouth curled up, “I keel you now—”

“Non!” bellowed Bordeau as he leaped in front of his bleeding employee. “You are losing too much blood already! You cannot win, and I do not want to lose you.” The trader turned and took a step toward the Americans. “No more fighting. You go. Take your goods and go from this fort—nevair to return—”

“Popo!”

Scratch whirled on his heel at Flea’s shrill call of distress. He found the boy sprawled on the floor right beside the door, holding a hand to his head. Then something suddenly awakened in him as the silence closed around the old trapper.

Magpie was gone.

* The mountain trapper’s term for a beaver pelt, borrowed from the French word plus, for a prime beaver skin.

SIX

“Magpie!”

As he shrieked his daughter’s name in desperation, Titus Bass lunged across the clay floor to land on his knees beside his son.

“How bad you hurt, boy?”

Flea pulled his fingers away from the gash on his head, a trickle of blood oozing its way down to his left eyelid. “They steal my sister.”

Spinning around in a crouch at the sound of footsteps and clatter of wooden stools, Bass growled, “Shadrach! You hold these bastards here.”

As Titus began to stand at the doorway, Sweete protested, “I’m comin’ with you.”

“No you ain’t,” he growled. “Stay with the boy. They couldn’t get far—”

“There, Popo! There they go!”

Flea pointed out the open door at the open compound, where the five men dragged the kicking, struggling girl across the muddy ground illuminated only by starshine and some random splotches of lamplight spilling from smoke-smudged windows.

Titus hurled himself into the doorway and screamed, “Magpie!”

One of the handful of kidnappers yelped and wrenched his hand away from the girl’s snapping mouth as the other four continued to wrestle the child, who was proving to be a blur of flailing legs and whirling arms, very much like a snarling catamount.

“P-popo!” her thin voice called to him, the frantic pitch of it almost swallowed in the immensity of the mud walls the moment that hand was torn from her mouth—but another hand cuffed her, stifling her next cry.

For an instant he began to lunge on through the doorway, then suddenly wheeled about, dashing back to the counter to sweep up the belt pistol he had laid aside just before drawing knives with the stocky Frenchman. He quickly gazed down at the cluster of men doing what they could to stem the flow of blood from his wounded adversary.

Glaring into the man’s eyes, Titus vowed, “I’ll be back to finish you.”

Dragging the hammer back on the pistol as Sweete stepped forward with his own pistol and knife drawn, Scratch leaped through the door, racing across the soggy, barren ground for those men who were just then pulling the girl toward a line of dark shadows at the back of the fort, where no lamplight reflected from the murky puddles of rainwater.

“Let ’er go!” he bellowed like a herd bull challenged by a ring of prairie wolves.

Three of the five turned as his voice reverberated off the mud walls. One man’s face went white with fear. In an instant he turned to flee toward the shadows. In his wake fled a second.

“Popo!” she pleaded again.

One of the men immediately slammed his fist into the side of the girl’s face to silence her.

Without consciously thinking about it, Scratch slid to a halt and had the pistol up at the end of his arm. A noisy explosion rocked the square. Then the big lead ball caught the man between the shoulders just as he was raising his fist to strike Magpie a second blow. His arms flung outward as he tripped over his own feet and Magpie’s too, bringing the two of them down together. A fourth man took that moment to dart away, but the fifth knelt over his bleeding companion, glanced at the American, then brutally yanked the girl to her feet.

He cackled, “You only had one shot in your pistol!”

Titus was already sprinting across those last few yards as the French-talker shoved Magpie ahead of him. Her feet slipped in the mud of a shallow puddle and she went down in a sprawl. As the Frenchman stumbled up to crouch over, yelling at the girl in a shrill voice, Bass wrenched the narrow, curved head of the tomahawk from the back of his belt, gripped the end of its worn handle in his right palm like the feel of an old and trusted friend, then cocked his arm and flung it through the air.

With that small head of the tomahawk piercing his back, the last of the attackers arched violently with a scream of agony, wrenching one arm backward as he attempted to claw at the weapon buried deep in flesh and bone … his legs went out from under him and he pitched into a puddle glazed with the black reflection of that starless night, splashing Magpie with mud and water as she began to crawl away, whimpering.

“Scratch!”

Bass did not turn at the sound of Shad’s voice until he had helped his daughter to her feet. Holding her quaking body against him, he turned to find the tall man backlit at the doorway.

“Flea there with you?” he demanded.

Shad reached out his arm and pulled the boy into the open doorway with him.

Pressing a moccasin down on the back of the man, Titus worked the tomahawk up and down several times to free it from the attacker’s back. As he cupped her chin in his bloodied hand, raising her face, Titus asked her, “Can you walk, Magpie?”

She bobbed her head with nothing more than a whimper, clutching her father for fear she might otherwise fall.

One at a time he stuffed his empty pistol and the damp tomahawk into his belt, then bent over the dead man and pulled free the attacker’s two pistols. With one in each hand, he started back for the grogshop, eye scanning the shadows for more of the cowardly kidnappers. “Stay right beside me, darlin’. C’mon.”

“We’re lucky more of ’em ain’t wearin’ guns,” Sweete grumbled as Bass herded Magpie through the open door.

“If it was so, they’d made a rush and you’d blowed a hole through two of ’em with the same ball,” Titus declared with great confidence. “If’n I know you an’ that big sixty-two of your’n.”

Sweete grinned. “Maybe I ought’n still blow a hole through two of ’em afore we leave.”

“Yes, go! Get out!” Bordeau wailed. “You better run before more of my help comes for you.”

“Help?” Flea repeated the word.

Scratch’s eye quickly raked over the room, making a tally of those here with Bordeau and the wounded man, along with the four live ones who had fled into the shadows outside. “I don’t callate how you got any more engages working for you this time o’ year, Bordeau. Way I see it, there’s them four

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