Bass pulled back on the old horse’s reins. As the rest of his family came to a halt on either side of the old trapper, he felt his wife’s leg press against his as her pony snorted a gauzy mist.
Waits-by-the-Water tugged the thick woolen scarf below her chin so she could speak, exposing the cheeks scarred with the white man’s pox. She asked, “This is where the seeing was taken from your eye so many winters ago?”*
Leaning off his horse, Scratch rubbed the small of her back a moment, then answered with a thick voice, “Yes. I come here to find Cooper, afore I finished my journey back to you and little Magpie.”
With a flick of her eyes, Waits glanced at their oldest child. “She is not so much a child anymore. Look and you will see!”
He chuckled, then said, “Soon enough Magpie’s father will have to sleep by the door of your lodge with his gun in his lap.”
“Why would you sleep with a gun in your lap, Popo?” Magpie asked as she urged her pony closer.
Instead Waits answered, “To frighten off all the young men who will be strutting around you like noisy mosquitoes on a summer evening.”
The girl’s eyes went to her father’s face. “Do you … you really think the young men will find me … pretty?”
How he laughed at that, his face raised to the sky as he roared, “Magpie! You are as pretty as any woman I have ever seen, in either world I have lived in. Why—you are as pretty as your mother was when she was your age and her own father had to start beating the boys away from their lodge door with a long coup stick!”
“We will be safe here?” Waits asked, the sound of her words more solemn.
His eyes crinkled with reassurance when he recognized the worry on her face. “Yes, we will be safe here. The only reason there was danger here so many winters ago was that I came looking for it.”
“These horses are tired, Popo,” his oldest son reminded. “And they need water too.”
“We’ll take them down to the river and let them drink their fill,” Titus suggested. “Then I’ll take my family into the trader’s mud lodge.”
At the north bank of the Arkansas while Waits-by-the-Water sat with the other children, Scratch and Flea clambered out of their saddles and trudged to the river’s edge with their short-handled camp axes. Together they chopped a long slot in the ice while Magpie and her mother dismounted and started the animals toward the bank.
As the horses drank, Titus laid his arm across his wife’s shoulder and turned her to look at the distant golden walls. Softly he said, “It will be a good thing to get these children out of the cold for the night.”
She gazed up at him, then laid her cheek against his chest as the noisy horses nuzzled the water behind them. “For these children of ours, this little cold does not bother them, Ti-tuzz. I have never heard them complain.”
“You are right,” he whispered with his chin resting atop her blanket hood. “The winter is much, much colder in our home country far to the north.”
“But a fire will feel very good to my feet,” Flea said as he brought their three Cheyenne packhorses up the bank to where his parents stood.
“Yes. It is time you show us this big mud lodge that shines red as a prairie paintbrush flower here at sunset!” Magpie goaded him with giddy excitement.
“You too, Jackrabbit?” Titus asked of his four-year-old son still sitting his saddle, his short legs swaddled inside a buffalo robe that was tucked under his arms.
“Go with Popo,” the boy answered, a smile brightening his whole face. “My belly wants to eat!”
Squeezing his wife’s shoulder, Bass turned to his red horse and said, “Woman, we best go feed this boy before he starts gnawing on my moccasins!”
He loved how their eyes widened the closer they got to the tall mud walls. Approaching from the southwest they reined for the circular bastion that stood more than twenty-some feet above the snowy plain. Extending to the right of that bastion stood two of the three corral walls, the top of all bristling with thorny cactus. Try as he might to squeeze his mind down on it right now, Titus could not remember this corral connected to the fort on his first trip here in the spring of ’34, and he couldn’t claim he’d paid all that much attention to its presence back in the autumn of ’42 when he had traded off most of his Mexican horses for more than a thousandweight of jangly foofaraw and shiny girlews.
“Where is the door to this lodge?” Flea asked, a little perplexed as they continued to plod north along the west wall.
“Soon you will see, my son.”
As they turned their horses at the far corner, he spotted a nesting of some three dozen lodges erected back among the riverbank cottonwood several hundred yards from the fort. More than two hundred ponies pawed at the frozen ground between the camp and the mud walls—
Suddenly an iron bell began to clang inside the fort, and a head appeared over the top above them. The man’s face disappeared as quickly.
“The Mexicans are here too?” Waits asked him. “This bell rings for their holy meetings?”
He knew she was referring to how the Taosenos followed the dictates of the great iron bell rung in its tall church steeple. He said, “I don’t figger we’ll find many greasers here now.”
“No holy meeting?” she repeated.
Wagging his head, Scratch said, “That bell rings only to announce the evening.”
“Why, Popo?” Flea inquired. “I can look at the sun falling, and know for myself that it is evening!”
Halfway on down the mud wall three men suddenly belched from the wide gate and halted as soon as they spotted Bass’s party. One of them waved an arm to the others, ordering the two on toward the small wheeled cannon while he stayed in place, shading his eyes as he inspected the new arrivals, calling out, “Howdy, stranger!”
“Ho, your own self!”
“What Injuns you brung with you, mister?”
“My family—wife and young’uns.”
That man turned away and trudged over to the cannon the other two had begun tugging back toward the wall. As he helped pushing on one of the huge wheels, he inquired, “You folks fixing on staying inside for the night?”
Bass cleared his throat. “I reckon—if’n there’s room.”
“Just barely,” he replied. “Got us more’n two dozen sick soldiers getting nursed.”
Titus brought his horse to a halt as the man stopped pushing the cannon. Together they watched the other two heave the weapon on through the open portal toward the inner plaza.
“Who’s nursin’ them soldiers?” Titus inquired as his family halted their horses around him. “Charlotte Green her own self?”
The man twisted suddenly and squinted up at Bass. “How you know Charlotte?”
“I been here years ago,” he confessed, quickly glancing at his pair of dogs sniffing along the base of the mud walls for interesting scent. “Meeted her and husband Dick back then. Good folks. Bought these here two dogs off Charlotte—back when they was wee pups. That was just afore I got skinned by Savary. He here—Savary?”
“Naw,” the man explained. “St. Vrain’s been off to Santa Fe—gone last fall. I figger he’s in the thick of things in Taos by now.”
“Who’s trader here?”
“Goddamn Murray. You hear of him?”
“Hell if I ain’t!” Bass replied. “Did a piece of business with him that fall I come in here with some Mex horses from Californy. He’s a square man.”
“You was with the bunch what come in with Bill Williams back in forty-two?” the man asked, stepping right over to Scratch’s knee to peer up at the white-bearded man, the old trapper’s ruddy face all but hidden beneath the coyote fur cap.
“That was a time,” Bass sighed. “Mex soldiers chased us down to the desert, then the Diggers up and spooked our whole herd.”*
“Story was you fellas lost more’n half them horses on the way here.”
Titus glanced at his wife, then grinned down at the stranger. “The things a man won’t do when he’s young
