Wind Walker (72 page)

“What’d he do with ’em?” Jim demanded as he gripped both of Flea’s broad shoulders.

“Put all in your lodge.”

“All of ’em?” Titus asked.

Flea nodded.

“How’d you get away?” Bridger inquired.

“I send Jackrabbit back to fort,” he explained. “Said to him: tell mama—tell her I go for you men folk. Be sure to tell her in Apsaluuke, brother. No word in American talk, I told him. Jackrabbit went slow from the trees to fort gate. Hickerman’s riders come out and jump around Jackrabbit, pulled him off horse, throwed him through gate … last thing I see—they pushed him on ground again.”

Titus felt his gorge rising. Those goddamned bastards abusing and muscling around a ten-year-old boy! Damn, but he’d hated bullies all his life—be it men like Silas Cooper or Phineas Hargrove, Bill Hickman or even Brigham Young his own saintly self.

Licking his lips in anger at the taste of bile drenching the back of his throat, Titus asked, “How you come from the fort?”

“Down the creek,” he answered in Crow. “These gun riders don’t see me for the trees and the brush. When they pulled Jackrabbit off his pony and into the fort, they didn’t see me in trees.”

“Did you watch Jackrabbit get to the cabin with the women and young’uns?”

“No,” Flea admitted. “Hickerman pulled Jackrabbit off ground by his hair at the gate, then I saw them no more. I led my pony to the water, got on and stayed in the creek till no eyes could see me from the fort.”

“Good,” Bass said. He turned to Bridger, his tone grave. “You an’ me go in there—don’t think we can count on doin’ any good agin’ more’n a hunnert fifty of Hickman’s gunners.”

“I don’t know what he’s fixin’ on doin’—come to take my post,” Jim groaned, desperation thick in his voice. “Or why he’s done it.” Then his eyes lit with hope and he said, “Maybeso you an’ me ought’n head to the ferry and get the rest o’ the fellas up at the Green.”

“Seven of ’em is all we could scrape together, Gabe,” Scratch declared. “That don’t make for good odds, even if we’re goin’ up agin’ bad-shot Marmons.”

Bridger snatched hold of the front of Bass’s shirt. “What the hell we gonna do? They got our women! Our young’uns too!”

Gently taking hold of Bridger’s shoulders, Titus said, “I dunno, Gabe. I ain’t never stared somethin’ like this in the eye, somethin’ where I had … no way out of it.”

Slowly, the trader released Scratch’s shirt. “Awright. How we gonna find out what Hickman wants and get our families out of there … ’thout gettin’ ourselves killed?”

“Only thing we can do is wait him out for a day or so—”

“Wait? They got our families in there!” Jim protested. “What’d you do if’n it were Injuns took hold of your woman an’ young’uns?”

“The Blackfoot done that to me once’t,” Titus reminded.

“You went after ’em too. Back when Waits got the pox and her brother was kill’t freein’ her from Bug’s boys with you.”

“Then you know there’s nothin’ gonna stop me from goin’ after Hickman once them Marmons light out for the Salt Lake with our families,” Titus vowed.

“We just sit?”

“No,” and he was struck with an idea. “We got Flea here. He looks ’bout as much a Injun as them Marmons ever see’d.”

“Flea?” Bridger echoed.

Scratch turned to his eldest boy. “Son, I want you to ride in there like you come to do some tradin’—”

“He ain’t got nothin’ to trade!” Bridger interrupted.

“Shit,” Titus grumped. “Awright. You just come ridin’ in there to have yourself a gander at all the shiny geegaws the trader got for sale. You unnerstand?”

Flea nodded. “No American talk?”

“Not one word, ’cept to say
Bridger
, an’ maybe the word
trade
” Titus explained. “That way them Marmons won’t know you unnerstand much American.”

Jim stepped up the youngster. “Can you do this?”

Unflinchingly, he answered in his harshest American, “I can damn well do.”

“This gonna be just ’bout the most important thing you ever done for your mother,” Scratch declared. “For your friends too.”

Flea looked his father in the eye steadily as he said in Crow, “I am a man now, Father. There are many ways for a warrior to fight to protect the ones he loves. Sometimes a man doesn’t have to raise a weapon to defend his family. Now is the time to show you I am a man.”

That declaration brought tears to the old man’s eyes. He blinked and swiped at his cheeks, then laid his arm around his tall son’s shoulders and brought the young man against him in a tight embrace.

When he took a step back and looked at Flea, Scratch said, “I-I didn’t realize how much you’d growed, son. Jupiter’s fire, if you ain’t shot up taller’n me in the last year or so. Yes, you’re a man by anyone’s ’count—an’ that makes your pa real proud.”

Bridger held out his arm and clasped wrists with the youngster. Then Flea snatched up the long buffalo-hair rein, a handful of mane, and leaped onto the pony’s bare back.

Titus stepped up, laying his hand on the lad’s bare knee, and asked, “You know them rocks way upstream what look like a mountain lion’s head?”

Flea nodded.

“That’s where you’ll find us when you got some news,” Scratch concluded.

In Crow, the youngster said, “I hope to rejoin you by sunset.” Then he spun his pony around and kicked it in the flanks to set off at a lope.

“What’d he say there at the last?” Bridger asked.

Bass watched the young man’s back until rider and pony disappeared around a brushy bend in the stream. “Said he’d come to us by sundown.”

Gazing at the sun blazing high at midsky for a moment, Jim growled, “Sundown. Damn, hot as it is right now, I’ll lay it’s gonna get cold for our old bones afore sunup tomorrow.”

“C’mon, Gabe. No sense thinkin’ ’bout what’s gonna be hard of it,” he cheered. “That Hickman’s got blood in his eye so he’s bound to put out searchers now that he ain’t found Jim Bridger sittin’ round home.”

“I s’pose you’re right,” and Jim yanked at the knot tying his horse to a willow limb.

Scratch swung into the saddle and stuffed his moccasins inside the big cottonwood stirrups. “We better scat into the hills afore Brigham Young’s bully-boys come beatin’ these bushes so they can get their hands on you.”

Which is exactly what the Danite posse did.

But those noisy Mormons didn’t search upstream far enough to get anywhere close to where Bridger and Bass lay in hiding, waiting for Flea to bring them some news as to who these interlopers were and what they wanted. Instead, two different groups of riders were spotted heading down one side of Black’s Fork, busting the brush for their wanted man, then crossing the creek to turn about for the fort by riding down the other side of the stream. The sun had just set behind them, but the sky was still radiant with an orangehued summer light when Titus spotted the lone horseman moving down from the hills through a narrow coulee, hugging the willow.

Damn if that didn’t make him proud of the boy. From the looks of things, Flea had come around the long way, climbing north toward the ridge before he made a long and circuitous loop back to the west. Now that he had reached Black’s Fork, every fifty yards or so Flea reined up his pony, turned around, and waited. Likely listening for the sounds of anyone dogging his back trail. Then he advanced a little farther before he stopped again and waited.

From their perch up on the rocks, the two old trappers could clearly see the Danites hadn’t followed the youth, or—better yet—that Flea had shaken any who had attempted to tail him by leaving the fort in the opposite direction before circling back around behind the low hills. The young man’s
face was a stony mask of determination mixed with utter hatred when the two men stepped out of the brush and made themselves known.

“What you find out, son?” Titus asked in American as Flea slid from the back of his pony and pulled off the thick saddle blanket he had been sitting on.

The youngster stuffed his head through a slit previously cut through the middle of it so that it hung from his bare shoulders like a greaser’s poncho. “I hear these men talk to my mother. They ask, she Bridger woman? She say other woman, point to The Fawn.” Then he looked at Jim to say, “Sheriff, he come for you.”

“One of ’em’s a sheriff?” Bridger asked.

But Titus interrupted to ask, “What’s a sheriff come to take Jim for?”

“Sheriff shake paper in hand. Say come take you away—you sell powder and guns to bad Injuns … Injuns gonna kill their people.”

“Injuns gonna kill Mormons?” Bridger asked.

“I s’pose that’s what they come to arrest you for, Gabe.” Then Scratch spat a brown stream at the dry grass near his moccasin toe. “We both know that’s horseshit.”

“Here I was the one what even warned ’em two year ago that the Bannocks was gettin’ a mite fractious an’ was comin’ to raid their settlements!” Jim grumped.

“None of this has to make sense to no one but that goddamned Brigham Young,” Titus said. “He’s the one wanted you out of here right from the start. Can’t you see that now?”

“Why the hell he’d want to get rid of me for?”

“Man like him—all his high-an’-mighty kind—these here mountains ain’t near big enough for him an’ the rest of us too,” Bass growled. “Way they’re showin’ their colors, Brigham Young an’ his Marmons ain’t no better’n a pack o’ plunderin’ Blackfoots. Come to steal away ever’thing they can … an’ what they can’t steal—they’ll kill.”

“You don’t think they’ll harm them women an’ young’uns in there?”

“I dunno,” Titus admitted. “Don’t know what to think
anymore now. The hull durn mountains is turned topsy on us, Gabe. The used-to-be’s don’t count for nothin’ anymore.”

Bridger’s hands flexed into fists as he asked, “What’s a man to do when that Lion of the Lord sends out a murderin’ bunch that outnumbers us the way they do?”

Scratch said, “Only thing I figger on us to do is get word over to Laramie.”

“Fort Laramie?”

He nodded. “Yep. Them soldiers is the only law you got to go to for help.”

Bridger shuddered. “Used to be, we settled things here ourselves. Took care to right a wrong on our own.”

“Don’t bet your last pair of wool drawers on it,” Scratch said, “but I’ll bet Brigham Young knowed you was the sort to take care of yourself. That’s why he sent more’n a hunnert an’ a half up here to steal your post away from you. With that many of them niggers swoopin’ down on your fort, that Marmon president knew damn well there was nothin’ you could do to fight back.”

He watched Bridger grind his teeth on the dilemma for a few moments, until Flea laid his hand on his father’s forearm.

“Popo, these raiders,” he spoke quietly in Crow, “they found Bridger’s whiskey.”

“They bust open the kegs, them gut-bait, high-talkin’ preachers?”

Flea shook his head. “No, they took down cups, poured the whiskey, passed it around. Drank up one barrel. Then opened a second barrel too.”

“They’re drinkin’ my goddamned whiskey?” Jim squealed after Titus translated. “That ain’t good for them women and our young’uns—”

“Maybe it might just be,” Scratch said, clutching at hope. “Could be, them Marmons gonna have themselves a hurraw on your free whiskey. I’ll lay a wager that Brigham Young is the sort of preacher what figgers whiskey is the devil’s own squeezin’s, so he told ’em to destroy all your whiskey they found.”

Bridget’s eyes gleamed. “So they’re destroyin’ it drop by drop in their cups?”

Titus nodded. “Right. An’ if I can put my faith in them gals of ours, they’ll slip off with the young’uns when them Marmons is drunk an’ our families got the chance to get away.”

“My mama, she told these sheriff men they don’t touch her or any child,” Flea explained. “Bridger woman, she told sheriff that he hurt her or any child, her father was the great chief Washakie. This great chief of Shoshone people hear they hurt her—then Washakie put ten-times-hundred warriors into battle to wipe out sheriff men … then go wipe out all the villages where sheriff men come from.”

Bridger grinned, “Damn if Mary didn’t tell ’em off!”

Still, Bass asked of his son, “W-what’d these Marmons say to The Fawn’s speech?”

Flea smiled. “Sheriff men good now. Said they want no trouble with Washakie people. Said they don’t hurt no woman, hurt no child either. Leave them alone in Bridger lodge—go drink on Bridger whiskey barrels, drink lots on whiskey barrels.”

“They put out guards?” Titus asked. “You see any guards when you rode off?”

He thought a moment, then held up some fingers.

To which Scratch said, “So Hickman an’ Brigham Young’s sheriff got less’n a dozen guards out for the night, while the rest of ’em are bathin’ their gullets with your whiskey, Gabe. I don’t think them women gonna sit over there in that fort of your’n for long tonight.”

“Likely Waits-by-the-Water can help Mary an’ all the young’uns slip off afore first light?”

Bass nodded with a grin. “I figger them preachy Marmons gonna be dead drunk by then, my friend.”

There was nothing better in the world than the feel of Waits in his arms, her head nestled in the crook of his neck—just the smell and sense of her as Waits-by-the-Water shuddered
against him in utter relief. For the first time in these past few months, Titus suddenly realized how big she had become, her belly swollen with their child she was carrying.

It was at that moment he noticed how his two youngest stood off to the side in the dim light of false dawn. Titus waved them close. Jackrabbit and little four-year-old Crane both came up to their parents, one arm hugging their father’s leg, the other arm hugging their mother’s leg.

“What kind of god do these white man worship?” she sobbed against him in Crow. “A god that is no better than the Blackfoot spirit that allows them to attack a woman’s home, to capture her children—the same god who commands all his evil followers to commit misdeeds in the name of the First Maker?”

“I haven’t figured that out,” he whispered quietly in the first hints of a coming sun. “But from what I’ve seen, the leader of these people is every bit as evil as any Blackfoot war chief I ever ran up against. Maybe even more evil, because he parades around in all the trappings of the one man God has picked to lead His chosen people.”