Wind Walker (64 page)

The trader had himself married into the Crow tribe, making him an invaluable asset to his employers. He had a long history in the fur trade, all the way back to ’27, when he first
came west with William H. Ashley’s brigades, tramping across the Rocky Mountain West with the likes of Bridger, Carson, Meek, and Fitzpatrick.

“I brung some of the company’s special brandy for this very special day,” Meldrum announced as he stomped up in front of the old trapper and held out the cups to Bass. He winked at Waits-by-the-Water, who stood at her husband’s side, clutching Scratch’s arm. “This here’s for a very special father of the bride!”

“Brandy, eh?” Scratch growled. “You ain’t got no more hard likker buried in that hole under your bed?”

Meldrum brought the neck of the jug to his lips and bit down on the browned cork, quickly worrying it out of the top. Around the cork he said, “This here’s the finest I got. Never knowed you to pass up any alcohol, Titus Bass!”

“Shuddup an’ pour!”

When Meldrum had both of their cups halfway filled, he turned to Waits-by-the-Water and hoisted his tin, saying in Crow, “Here’s to the mother of the bride, who always has been one of the most beautiful women in all of Absaroka!”

“You still got a eye for the ladies, do ye?” Scratch roared, and then took a long drink of the thick and potent brandy, feeling its fiery burn coursing down the back of his throat.

Meldrum swallowed and bobbed his head from side to side, peering over the crowd. “My wife is here, somewhere. Over yonder—helping cut slices off that buffler. What I wanna know is—where that pretty daughter of your’n went. This child’s got a hankerin’ to kiss the bride!”

“She pretends she don’t mind getting a kiss from her dog-faced ol’ man, Meldrum!” Titus roared as he held his cup out for more brandy. “But I don’t think Magpie’s gonna want a thing to do with your hairy mug! Jehoshaphat, if you ain’t ’bout the ugliest man I ever knowed!”

“That puts me right next to you, Titus Bass!” he said as he hoisted his cup in toast again. “For you surely be the ugliest man I ever did see!”

Smacking his lips, Titus licked the tip of his tongue
through the shaggy ends of his unkempt mustache, savoring every drop of the sweet fruit brandy the American Fur Company sneaked upriver only for the use of its post factors, but not in the robe trade itself. “Meldrum, you ol’ Scotsman,” Scratch grumbled, “you’re doin’ your damnedest to get me hooked on the company’s goddamned stuffed-shirt brandy!”

“What—you’re acquirin’ a taste for brandy, Titus Bass? Why, you ol’—”

“Mr. Meldrum!”

They both turned at the call, spotting one of the trader’s three employees riding toward them from the direction of their log-walled post. As the crowd stepped out of the way of the man’s horse, Titus spotted the five buckskinned riders close on the employee’s tail.

“Mr. Meldrum!”

The trader wiped his lips with the back of the same hand that held the cup, and his eyes narrowed on the newcomers as they approached. “What is it, James?”

“Visitors, sir! You got visitors from far away!”

By the time the six riders halted their horses several yards away, Scratch could see the five strangers weren’t Indians at all. Instead, they appeared to be French-blood half-breeds.

“Far away?” Meldrum asked as he took two steps closer to James.

Bass gently lowered his wife’s arm, then inched away from her so he could stay at the trader’s elbow.

“Fort LaRamee,” one of the strangers announced.

It suddenly struck him that Meldrum was an employee of the same company that Bordeau worked for down at Fort John on the North Platte—the site that was only now becoming better known as Fort Laramie. Quickly he peered at the faces of those five strangers, looking for a hint of someone familiar … perhaps one or more of them had been a part of that bunch who had tried to harm Magpie, who had made trouble for him and Shad Sweete back in the spring of ’47, bad blood more than four years gone now. If Bordeau had made it back to the post on his own hook, would he have carried a burning grudge this long? Finally tracking down Titus
Bass and sending a handful of half-breed gunmen to kill the old trapper?

Meldrum demanded, “There’s trouble?”

With a shake of his head, the half-blood who had spoken waved his hand at the young white clerk. “Give him now.”

The employee reached inside his belt and pulled out a folded piece of foolscap about as big as a man’s palm. As he held it down to Meldrum, Titus saw it had been sealed with a huge dollop of dark blue wax, at the center of which was imprinted a seal. “Here, sir. This is what they brung for you.”

“When they get here?” Meldrum asked as he reached up to take the folded packet.

“Just now,” the young man explained. “Give me the note—but I didn’t want to open it. Brung it to you right away.”

“Good man,” he said, gazing down at the symbol hardened in the wax. “Who’s this from?”

Clearing his throat, the clerk said, “These here couriers said it’s very important, Mr. Meldrum. They’ve come all the way north from Fort Laramie, carrying this here letter from a man they called Fitzpatrick.”

Scratch took a step closer now, studying the dark, swarthy faces of those five strangers. That name of an old companion from their beaver days just did not fit into the scenario he was constructing with Bordeau tracking him all the way to Fort Alexander—

“Thomas? Thomas Fitzpatrick?” Meldrum asked.

The half-blood who had spoken before now nodded, echoing the name. “
Oui
, Thomas Fitzpatrick. He is … my booshway.”

The trader held his finger beneath the dollop of wax as he inquired, “Your booshway?”

“Hay-gent, In-gee-an hay-gent for all the mountains,” he said in a thick, barely understandable accent.

“If that don’t beat all,” Titus said with apparent relief that this special day would not be marred by the eruption of violence. “You hear that, Meldrum? Ol’ Broken Hand’s a’come the Injun agent out in these parts!”

“I heard tell of that last year, as I recollect,” the trader explained as he turned to the trapper. Then he looked back at the half-breed. “That ol’ white-headed boss of your’n sent this note to me?”

The half-breed nodded. “Is your name Meel-drum?”

“Close enough, it is.”

“Thomas Fitzpatrick write it for you,” the horseman declared. “You name on dis let-tair.”

Meldrum immediately turned over the folded paper. There it was, written in a strong hand.

He immediately flipped the folded paper over and dragged his index finger beneath the folds held down by that thick dollop of cracked and faded blue wax. Quickly he spread the paper with his hands, and his eyes danced over the neat swirls of ink made upon the foolscap. When he was done reading it in silence a third time, his lips moving soundlessly, Meldrum raised his eyes from the paper, gazing up at the older trapper.

“How you feel about making a journey with me, Titus Bass?”

He glanced at his wife, then asked, “What sort of journey?”

“South to Fort Laramie.”

“That’s where Fitzpatrick wrote you from?”

“Yes. You’ll come?”

“I … I dunno,” Scratch said. “Like I told you couple years back … last time I was there, I left ’thout good terms. Bordeau an’ some of his Frenchies—”

“That was long, long ago.” Meldrum interrupted. “I don’t even think Bordeau’s around anymore. ’Sides, you’ll be with me—I’m part of the company too.”

“Be with you?”

The trader nodded. “I want you to make this important journey with me.”

Despite Meldrum’s enthusiasm, it still didn’t sound all that good: the two of them riding off with these five half-breeds who might have been put up to some murder by an old antagonism. “Just you an’ me goin’?”

“Hell, no!” Meldrum exclaimed with his engaging smile, shaking that stiff sheet of wrinkled foolscap.

“I ain’t never trusted the Frenchies—”

“Them?” asked the trader. “They’ll be outnumbered all the way south.”

“Outnurnbered?”

He stuffed the paper inside his shirt and poured a little more brandy in their cups. “I’m s’posed to bring along the chiefs and headmen of the Crow nation: Pretty On Top, Flat Mouth, Falls Down, and young Stiff Arm, all of them comin’ with us. And more too.”

He wagged his head in deliberation, holding out his arm for his wife to come stand by his side. If the chiefs and headmen were coming along, then it made sense that his family could ride along with the delegation as well. Titus asked, “What in tarnation for?”

“Sounds of it, Fitzpatrick is callin’ in all the tribes to join him for talks at Laramie,” Meldrum said dramatically, patting the paper he had placed between the folds of his shirt. “Broken Hand says he’s gonna sit down with all them chiefs, and he’s gonna make ’em all smoke a pipe with their enemies.”

“Fitzpatrick figgers he’ll get all them war bands to make peace, one to the other?”

Meldrum nodded. “So I want you to come with the leaders of the Crow.”

Turning to Waits-by-the-Water, Scratch asked her, “You understand what Round Iron’s sayin’?”

“Yes.”

“We’ll go together?”

She nodded. “Yes.”

Turning back to the trader, grinning, he said, “Looks like we’ll go see for ourselves if ol’ Broken Hand gonna make a good peace with all them bad cases. Now, pour me some
more of that there booshway’s brandy—I got me a wedding to celebrate!”

He didn’t awaken until the early afternoon of the following day, his head pounding like a hammer on an anvil as the sun finally slipped in beneath the bottom of the upturned lodge cover, making his flesh hot and causing his head to swim. When he eventually sat up and opened his eyes, Titus realized there wasn’t much left in the lodge. Someone had come and stolen most everything that belonged to his wife. His wife—

“Waits?”

She bent to her knees and stuck her head under the rolled-up lodge cover. “You are awake? How is your head?”

“Pounding like a drum,” he moaned, cradling his temples in both hands.

“Little wonder,” she scolded him in Crow. “You stayed up most of the night dancing and singing and pounding on any drum someone would loan you.”

“Don’t talk so loud,” he growled. “I can hear you just fine if you’d talk softer.”

“Go back to sleep until you feel better,” she said with a giggle. “I have too much work to get done before we leave for me to sit and argue with a drinker man—”

“Leave?”

“With Round Iron and the chiefs,” Waits reminded.

“Oh … right,” and he remembered foggily. “When?”

“Tomorrow at sunrise. Before then, I have to finish packing what we will take along for the children, and leave the rest with Magpie.”

“M-Magpie, yes.” He remembered her wedding too. And for some reason, that really saddened him. “She … doesn’t live with us anymore.”

“She has a husband, and they have their own lodge now.”

“Are they going with us?”

“No,” she answered. “Turns Back and those war chiefs staying behind are leading the people into the mountains—
the Baby Place,
Baah-puuo I-sa-wa-xaa-wuua
, where there are the children’s footprints. They will find it cooler there, until autumn.”

“Right … the mountains,” he said as his head sank back onto the horsehair pillow. “The children’s footprint mountains, where the Little People live?”

“Yes. They might run into some of our holy friends, the Little People.”

Closing his eyes, Titus heard her shuffle off and felt himself drifting back into a blessed sleep. The idea of cool, shady mountains sounded damned good to him; at that moment he wasn’t so sure the air was moving at all. Heavy and hot. Maybe if he prayed right now the sacred Little People would answer by blowing with their breath, causing a breeze to drift down from their mountains that lay off to the southwest. He’d never seen one for himself, but the Crow steadfastly believed in these beings who were half human, half furry creature. Ever since the Apsaluuke people had come to this land from the Missouri River, they had been visited by the Little People. The beings came to heal the sick and wounded when the Crow healers could not. They came to protect the faithful who believed in them. And, they sometimes portrayed their sense of humor too—often making off with some small object or another that they took a liking to. From time to time a Crow man or woman might realize they were missing something shiny and explain that the Little People had taken it. Then, years later, they would find the missing object lying on a prominent rock, or hanging from a tree branch beside a well-used trail somewhere in those mystical “children’s footprint mountains,”
^*
always in plain sight where a shiny trinket would sparkle, catching the rays of the sun.

He tried to imagine what shape the creatures took, how they looked—because while every one of the Crow believed in the Little People, few, if any, had ever had themselves a good look at one of the mysterious and sacred creatures.
Most times, the elders and prophets, seers and healers caught no more than a glimpse of the Little People out of the corner of their eyes. The hint of a shadow, the mere suggestion of fleeting movement … because the legends always told of the Little People doing their good in secret, away from the eyes of man.

Titus felt himself dreaming at last. Floating up the mountainside toward the cool and inviting darkness lit by a bright full moon and innumerable stars that seemed so close he felt he could reach out and tap each one, even set his big-brimmed hat right down on top of that gauzy, gibbous moon. He heard a rustling on either side of him and stopped, looking down to realize the horse that had been between his legs was somehow gone … and he was standing barefoot in the cool grass, the breeze nuzzling his long, graying hair. He turned to the side at the sounds of tiny feet scampering, but glimpsed only a half dozen shadows as they disappeared behind the trees.

From his right he heard more faint rustling and turned that way to look. All he saw was the tail end of some flickering movement as the creatures vanished before he ever saw them.

When he held his breath and concentrated, Titus heard the whispers. Straining into the black of that night, he listened intently, straining to make out the sounds. Voices, but not quite human. And the language they spoke … not anything he had ever heard spoken before in his fifty-seven winters on earth. For sure not American, but not Ute or Snake, Comanche or Crow either, not even what little Blackfoot or Mojave had fallen about his ears, and not a thing like Mexican talk.