running faster.
“Popo, oh, Popo!” she whimpered when she came slamming against him, as he captured her in his arms and clutched her tight.
They were both gasping as he brushed the hair out of her sweaty face, asking, “Where the boys?”
She pointed, gulping deeply for air.
“They hurt? Your brother get hurt?”
“Loo-kass … Popo,” she rasped in a gush. “Loo-kass.” Then she pointed impatiently at the group of youngsters again.
“Lucas?”
Her head bobbed and the tears spilled from her wide, frightened eyes as if a dam had been broken, so suddenly it scared him.
“What!” he yelled down at her, sorry for the harshness of it that same instant.
“S-sn-snake,” she sobbed.
“Lucas? The boy got bit?”
She was just starting to nod even as he tore himself away from her. By the time he approached that mute group of children, Titus had no recollection of leaping over or scampering around the sagebrush on his way to them. Nor that the unkempt, dust-coated dogs had turned around and scampered back with him, as if this was some exuberant play. When he came heaving up the youngsters backed away in silence, their white faces gone pale as school paste, eyes so big and every one filled with unimaginable terror. As his moccasins skidded to a halt on the sandy soil, he finally saw the two of them. Jackrabbit was kneeling on the ground, his dusty cheeks streaked with tears as he looked up and saw his father staring down at him in utter shock. Strange, but Titus froze a moment, gazing at the way a few wild strands of his son’s hair stuck to the boy’s dirty, tear-tracked cheeks.
Jackrabbit had both of his tiny brown hands wrapped around Lucas’s right leg, fingers interlaced and their knuckles pale with pressure, clamped just below the knee.
“P-popo,” he croaked, runny phlegm oozing from his nose as he cried.
Slowly kneeling to keep from collapsing under his own weight, Scratch settled on the opposite side of Lucas and looked first into his son’s eyes. “Sn-snake?”
His son nodded.
Then Bass looked into his grandson’s face, afraid—so afraid—of what he might see in those eyes. And his heart broke as he recognized the sheer terror in those half-lidded eyes the moment he leaned over Lucas and caused a shadow to pass across the child’s face. The eyes widened slightly, moved liquidly, eventually found him. That’s when all the terror disappeared from his grandson’s eyes, even though they continued to leak big teardrops from their corners, streams of them washing down the boy’s temples through the dust matted on his face, in his ears and his dirty, corn-silk hair.
“Gr-gran’papa,” he said weakly. “See, Jackrabbit? I told you it’s gonna be all right now …” Then he brought up a sharp, hacking cough. “Be all right now—Gran’papa’s here.”
Laying his hand on Lucas’s brow, Titus gently lowered the hand so that it closed those two lids and covered the eyes. He could no longer bear to gaze into them. Instead, he turned his attention to the leg.
“Your hands tired?” he asked Jackrabbit in Crow.
The boy nodded.
His heart surged with an immense pride for this small child, his youngest son. It brought tears to his eyes to think that the boy had done the only thing he could think to do for this friend, this playmate, this relation he was coming to know on this short journey and would likely never see again in his life.
“Y-you done real good, son,” he whispered as he reached down with his left hand and yanked on the long whang that tied a moccasin around his ankle. “Keep a good hol’t of your friend’s leg just a li’l more. You unnerstand?”
Jackrabbit nodded again wearily, his lips trembling as he gritted his teeth with exertion.
Yanking a second time, Titus finally freed the long leather whang from the holes in his moccasin, then took his hand from Lucas’s eyes, quickly dragging his skinning knife from the scabbard at the small of his back. With three short slashes, he managed to open a slice in the bottom of the boy’s cuff. Dropping the knife, he grabbed the two sides of the cuff in his hand and gave it a brutal yank, ripping that leg of the britches clear up to mid thigh.
“Gran’papa?”
“Y-you be quiet now, Lucas,” he whispered as he saw Roman and Amanda running their way with Magpie and Waits-by-the-Water right behind them. Farther back came Toote and Shad, Lemuel and Leah too. And from other directions came what seemed like a hundred other nameless, frightened folks.
“I be real quiet for you,” Lucas whispered back from his dry, cracked lips. “Gran’papa make it better now.”
“Yes, L-Lucas,” he vowed as he stuffed one end of that narrow strip of leather under the bony leg, dragged up both ends together, then looped them in a knot. Now he pulled for all he was worth on those ends. “Jackrabbit—get me a stick.”
“How big, Popo?”
“Big as a pin to close your mother’s lodge cover.”
Sweeping up his father’s knife, Jackrabbit hacked off a short branch from a nearby sage, no more than the diameter of his stubby little thumb. As he knelt again beside Lucas’s leg, Titus said, “Lay it on the knot. No, middle. That’s good. Hol’t it there, son. Keep hol’tin’ it.”
Quickly he flipped over the long ends of the leather strip and made a second knot atop the small stick. Then a third as Amanda came dashing up. She was about to spill toward Lucas when Roman caught her, held his wife back. Titus gazed up at his daughter, reading the fear on her face, not having seen her cheeks so bloodless since that moment she had plunged a pitchfork into a man intending to murder her father in Troost’s St. Louis livery.
“Pa?” she questioned, weak and winded like a frail animal as Roman held her up, kept her from collapsing.
That’s when Bass moved his gaze to his son-in-law’s face—reading the stoic pain registered there. The iron set of a man’s jaw when that man knows if he doesn’t clamp his teeth tight his chin is going to quiver and he will betray himself … when a man realizes he must be strong for everyone else even though his own heart is already crying out in bitter anguish. In Roman Burwell’s eyes showed the despair of a man who already knew.
“Snakebite, Amanda,” Titus declared.
Burwell cleared his throat and asked in a whisper, “Rattler?”
When Scratch nodded, Amanda stifled a shrill sob and twisted about to bury her face in Roman’s chest.
Titus looked down at the child as he stuffed his knife back into its scabbard with one hand, slowly continuing to twist the stick with the fingers of his left hand, tightening, tightening, tightening the tourniquet.
“Lucas,” he said quietly, bending low so his face was just inches from the boy’s, “we’re gonna take you back to the wagon, son.”
“Get me better there, Gran’papa?”
God, how he wanted to lie to the child, to tell Lucas everything the boy wanted to hear, deserved to hear … but instead he said only, “Jackrabbit, you help me help Lucas now.”
“Yes.”
“Take hold of the stick from me,” and he waited while his son seized hold of the stick. “Don’t let go of it. Keep hold of it—I’m gonna pick Lucas up.”
“I-I can help you, Titus,” Roman offered.
“No,” and he shook his long hair. “You keep hol’t of Amanda. Just keep hol’tin’ her real tight too.”
Once Jackrabbit had the ends of the stick steadied in his two tiny hands, Scratch quickly stuffed both his arms under the child. Raising first his narrow shoulders, Lucas’s long, corn-silk hair spilling over Bass’s forearm, Titus next raised the knees, then got his own legs under him and stood. Digger was the more inquisitive of the two dogs, rising on his back legs to momentarily sniff at the boy. He turned and slowly started through the sagebrush as the crowd peeled back from his path, he and everyone in that crowd on either side of him moving slow as a death march, both his loyal dogs easing along at his heels. Bending his face over the child’s, Bass was constantly vigilant that he not let the sun’s intense afternoon light touch the boy’s face.
His left moccasin finally worked its way off and he began to walk through the sage across that rough, rocky ground with one bare foot. Waits immediately scooped up the moccasin and dashed in front of him, holding up the
