They also favored shell earrings. Bone-handled knives hung from sheaths on their hips and quivers were across their backs. All four had short bows fitted with sinew strings. All four had notched arrows to the strings and pulled the strings back to their cheeks.
“Have a care, Horatio,” Shakespeare cautioned. “We don’t want to provoke them if we can help it.”
Nate froze. He could have shot one or two, but at that range the others wouldn’t miss. “Let’s try talking to them and show them we’re friendly.”
The next instant the foremost warrior took a step and trained the barbed tip of his arrow on Nate’s chest.
The tapestry of life in the wilderness was woven of strands of both serenity and savagery. Times without counting Nate’s life had hung in the balance. It might be hostiles, it might be a marauding griz, it might be Nature’s tantrums or a menace as commonplace as a rattlesnake. It had happened so often in the past that when it happened in the present, he was seldom prone to panic. He felt fear, yes. He felt anxiety. But panic hardly ever.
Nate didn’t panic now. He met the gaze of the warrior with the arrow pointed at him. Ever so slowly, he raised his right hand, empty, as high as his neck. Then he slowly closed it, held his first two fingers straight up, and brought his hand in front of his face. It was sign language for “friend.”
The warrior studied Nate as if trying to decide whether to believe him. Lowering the bow, the man eased up on the string, raised his right hand, and mimicked Nate. He said something in a tongue Nate was unfamiliar with.
Shakespeare let out a long breath of relief. “Thank goodness. They thought we might be scalp hunters.”
“You speak their language?” Nate marveled. He had lost count of how many his friend knew. As one of the first white men to roam the vast lands west of the Mississippi, McNair had run into more tribes than practically any other white man alive.
“Barely at all,” Shakespeare responded. “But I know the tribe. They’re called the Pend d’Oreilles. They come from up near where my wife’s tribe lives, the Flatheads.”
“That’s a far piece.” Nate saw that the other warriors were lowering their bows and noted that each kept his arrow nocked to the string.
“They only get down this way once a year or so,” Shakespeare said.
“What are they doing here?”
“What else? They’ve come to trade at Bent’s.” Shakespeare resorted to sign language, and the warrior who had pointed his bow at Nate replied in kind.
Nate knew sign as well as his friend did. He translated the answer out loud, “They have come for guns and steel knives if they can get them, and have brought furs and shells to trade.” It was always the way, Nate reflected. Contact with whites stirred a desire for the white man’s weapons. Bows and lances weren’t enough when warriors had seen what guns could do. “Why in the world did they think we were scalp hunters?”
Shakespeare posed the question in sign. The answer provoked a frown. “You just saw. He says they met some Crows who warned them there are scalp men hereabouts.”
“That’s ridiculous.” Nate was aware that lifting hair had been a common practice back East, but that was long ago.
“They say the Crows heard it from the Cheyenne who heard it from a band of Pawnees.”
Nate scratched his chin. “What do you make of it? Do you believe them?”
Shakespeare nodded at the Pend d’Oreilles. “
The leader went on at some length.
“He’s sorry for disturbing us,” Nate translated. “That’s awful decent of him. But that business about scalp hunters is far-fetched.”
The leader let out a sharp cry. It wasn’t a war whoop; it was a signal to the rest of his party. Out of the trees filed eight more warriors leading their horses and pack animals.
Nate was doubly glad he hadn’t tried to fight his way out. He’d be bristling with arrows right about now. “Do we offer to ride with them or go on alone?”
Shakespeare put the question to them in sign. The leader answered that they would be happy to have the two white men ride with them.
Although Nate couldn’t recall hearing tell of any instance where the Pend d’Oreilles killed whites, he wasn’t entirely comfortable riding at the head of the band with all those bows at his back. He kept shifting and looking back.
Finally Shakespeare chuckled and said, “You’ll give yourself a crick in the neck if you keep doing that.”
“Do you trust them not to kill us if they have the chance?”
“Lordy, you have a suspicious nature.”
“I just like to breathe.”
“They could have done it back there at the creek if they wanted.”
“That doesn’t mean they might not try now.”
“ ‘By my troth,’ ” Shakespeare resorted to the Bard, “ ‘a man can die but once. We owe God a death. I’ll ne’er bear a base mind, an’t it be my destiny.’ ”
“You’re saying I worry too much.”
Beaming, Shakespeare bent toward Nate and clapped him on the shoulder. “You’re learning, Horatio. There’s hope for you yet.”
To Nate’s considerable relief, the Pend d’Oreilles didn’t badger them with questions about white ways. Some tribes would. To them the white man was a perplexing mystery. The things most Indians held dear, the white man didn’t. The things that white men held dear, the Indians couldn’t understand. Especially the whites’ lust for money and desire to possess land was another. Many tribes, like his adopted people the Shoshones, considered the land as there for all to use, humans as well as wildlife. The concept of owning it was added proof that whites had their heads in a whirl.
The two hours seemed a lot longer, but at last the winding Arkansas River came into view. The high adobe walls of Bent’s Fort were bathed in the afternoon sun. Nothing short of a cannon could break those walls down. They were impervious to lances and arrows and immune to fire. Small wonder that hostiles seldom attacked.
Nate had been here often. He was always impressed by its size: almost one hundred and eighty feet from front to back and nearly one hundred and forty feet from side to side.
The Pend d’Oreilles drew rein a hundred yards out. Indians were permitted into the post only at certain times and kept under close watch. Whites could enter any time but first had to go up to a gate in the south wall and wait while they were scrutinized through a porthole. The Bent brothers and their partner, Ceran St. Vrain, took every precaution.
No sooner did Nate come to a stop than the porthole opened and a voice thick with a brogue declared, “As I live and breathe, it’s Nate King, himself.” The bar on the inside rasped and the gate was hauled open, revealing a young man with a bristly red beard and a knot of red hair.
“It’s been a while, Finnan,” Nate greeted him.
“That it has,” the Irishman agreed, all smiles. “I haven’t set eyes on you since you had your dispute with that horrible Jackson fellow and blew out his wick.”
Nate didn’t need the reminder.
Finnan flashed his teeth at McNair. “And who might this ancient gentleman with all the wrinkles be?”
Shakespeare’s head snapped up. “Who are you calling ancient, you danged infant?”
“Here, now. Don’t take that tone. I was being friendly, is all.”
“I’ll friendly you,” Shakespeare said, and launched into another quote. “ ‘I find the ass in compound with the major part of your syllables.’ ”
