Wrath of the Savage (16 page)

“What the hell are you grinnin' at, old man?” the corporal asked as he moved down the bar to face them, his two companions walking close behind.

“You'll see,” Coldiron said, still grinning.

Bret, fully irritated now, glanced at the bartender and asked, “How much for that full bottle of whiskey?”

“Twelve dollars,” Hank replied quickly, having seen the roll of bills earlier when Bret paid for the drinks.

“I'll take it,” Bret said, and grabbed the bottle by the neck. If the last-minute transaction puzzled the corporal, he didn't show it, for he took a square stance con- fronting the two strangers. Bret took one deliberate step forward, bringing the full bottle of whiskey sharply up against the side of the corporal's head to land with a sickening thud. The surprised soldier's knees buckled under him and he dropped to the floor.

With no intention of missing out on the fun, Coldiron grabbed the soldier closest behind the fallen corporal, and lifting him in one powerful move, like a sack of grain, he threw him over the bar to land crashing against the wall. Seeing what had happened to his friends, the third soldier turned to run, once again a misjudgment of the big man's quickness. The chuckling monster caught him within three strides, grabbed him by his collar and the seat of his pants, and used his momentum to hurl him out the door, landing him in the street next to the horse trough. He wasted no time scrambling to his feet and heading toward the fort, passing an astonished Myra, who was standing by the horses.

“I guess we can go now,” Bret said when Coldiron came back to have his drink. He was still holding the bottle, which had not broken when it thudded against the side of the corporal's face. He held it up to make sure it was not cracked. “A damn expensive bottle of whiskey,” he commented as he stepped aside to allow the soldier who scrambled out from behind the bar to run past him to the door.

“You can have it for six,” Hank Lewis said, having enjoyed the altercation, even though some of his shelves behind the bar had been knocked down by the flying body.

“What about him?” Coldiron asked, nodding toward the body still not moving on the floor in front of the bar. “Want me to drag him outta here?”

“Murdock?” Hank replied. “No, just leave him there. He'll wake up directly and drag his ass back to the post. This'll give him a chance to see how the shoe fits on the other foot. It's usually him that leaves some poor feller on the floor. Maybe this'll take some of the orneriness out of him.”

They said “so long” to Hank, promising to stop in again if they came back this way. “What in the world was going on in there?” Myra asked when the men returned to the horses. She looked from one of them to the other, questioning, as Coldiron tucked the bottle of whiskey inside one of the packs.

“Nothin' much,” Coldiron answered her. “We was just havin' a little drink with some soldiers. We even brought along a bottle, so you can have a little drink tonight with your supper.”

“Well, you wasted your money if you bought it for me,” she retorted. “I wouldn't drink the evil stuff.”

“I know what you mean,” Coldiron said, stepping up into the saddle. “It's nasty-tastin' stuff. I wish I had a barrel of it.”

Bret gave her a boost up onto her horse. “Did you find anything you could use in that store?” he asked.

“I did. Thank you very much.”

In the saddle again, they rode past the fort and the collection of buildings around it, to follow the river once more and look for its confluence with the Marias.

•   •   •

They reached the Marias early in the afternoon and stopped to rest the horses there before starting what they anticipated to be at least a forty-mile trip following that river. Since it was already too late to cover the entire distance that day, they only drove their horses for another few hours along the winding river before making camp for the night.

The spot they picked was at a sharp bend where the river almost doubled back on itself. It afforded them plenty of wood for a fire and grass for the horses. All three seemed to be tired that night, so when Myra produced flour for pan bread that she had bought with some of the money Bret had given her, it raised the spirits of them all.

Soon there was a good hot fire and pan bread baking in the skillet. Bret had to wonder at this point if all souls were still enthusiastic about the search for Lucy Gentry. It had been many days now, with no realistic reason to expect success in their search. Even if they finally found her, would it be too late to salvage the poor girl's sanity? These were troublesome thoughts, yet both Myra and Coldiron claimed there was no lessening of their determination to find the captured woman. As for Bret, he felt they had invested too much time and money in the search to turn back now that they were supposedly approaching the Piegan camp.

•   •   •

They were on their way again after a restful night of pan bread and smoked venison for supper, and a couple more drinks from the bottle Bret had used to get Corporal Murdock's attention. Spirits were high because they were closing in on the village where Lucy might be held. At the same time, their nerves were more than a little edgy because of the danger of being discovered. For the latter reason, Myra had put her foot down during the evening when the bottle was produced.

“I'm putting a limit on you two,” she had informed them. “Two drinks each, and that's all for the night. I'll be damned if I'm gonna be left to defend myself from savage Indians while you two are lying around here drunk.”

“The lady is surely talking sense,” Bret had said, “so fine by me.”

He had no intention of drinking more in the first place. The only reason he would participate at all was to make sure Coldiron didn't consume the whole bottle. As a result, all three set out on this morning with clear heads and alert brains.

The farther up the river they rode, the more signs they saw of tracks left by hunting parties, crossing trails made by people coming to and from the village. Finally they decided they were getting too close to continue riding in the open.

“Maybe we'd best find us a place to get outta sight till it gets a little closer to dark. That village can't be much farther. I'm gonna ride up that ridge over yonder, and take a look around.”

“We'll ride around that point where the trees come down close to the river and pick a spot to rest the horses,” Bret told him.

Coldiron untied the lead rope from his saddle and handed it to Bret, so he could take his packhorse with him and Myra. Then he wheeled the buckskin and headed for the ridge at a lope. Bret and Myra continued on along the bank to the point where the snakelike river took another turn.

“That looks like a good spot,” Bret said, pointing to an opening in the trees that came down close to the water. “We can build our fire there, and nobody could see it unless they were on the other side of the river, and that's pretty rough-looking rock on that bank.”

By the time Coldiron returned from his scouting, Bret had unburdened the packhorses and unsaddled his and Myra's horses, while she was in the process of starting the fire.

“There's tracks all over that valley between here and the ridge,” Coldiron reported. “I didn't see no sign of anybody, but I'm willin' to bet that their village is right ahead of us. From the top of that ridge, I could see a ring of hills, makin' a half circle next to the river. There's more'n likely open range inside the hills—perfect place to make a camp.”

“Then I expect we'd better go have a look after it gets a little darker,” Bret said. “That's gonna be a while yet, so we might as well fix something to eat while we've got the chance.”

“If we see Lucy, how are we going to get her?” Myra asked. “Like you did me? I was tied outside a tipi. She might not be somewhere that'll be easy to get to her from.”

“I don't know,” Bret answered her. “We'll just have to wait and see what we find.”

He didn't voice it, but he had his own doubts about the likelihood of successfully stealing the woman back. He felt the urgency of rescuing Lucy Gentry, but also the responsibility to ensure the safety of all of them. He could not forget that he had Myra to concern himself with. He had come to admire her willing spirit to persevere, no matter what the circumstances or conditions. But he would never forgive himself if he caused anything to happen to her.

When the sun dropped below the chalky cliffs on the other side of the river, they put out their fire and packed up the camp. In the silvery twilight, they set out once again, moving at a casual pace, so as to give the evening a chance to settle in. They approached the southern end of the ring of hills as darkness began to soften the edges of the rocks and ridges. Coldiron was a little puzzled as they guided their horses to climb up the slope of the hill.

“It's plenty dark enough now. We oughta see a little campfire glow in the sky from a village that size. Maybe I ain't so smart as I thought.”

At the top of the hill, they stopped to look down in the valley below them. There was no village, nothing but a darkened prairie floor. Coldiron prodded the buckskin and started down the slope to the grassy meadow at the foot of the hills. His vindication came at the bottom when they reached the huge clearing and discovered rings where tipis had once stood and the remains of many campfires.

“Well, you were right,” Bret said. “They were camped here, and quite a while from the looks of it.”

“They ain't been gone long,” Coldiron said, now on one knee brushing his hand back and forth over the grass. “This grass has been grazed down—ain't started to grow again.”

He then went over to the ashes of a large fire in the middle of the circle of tipi impressions in the grass. Digging his hands in the ashes, he said, “Down a few inches, these ashes are still warm. They ain't been gone from here more'n a day or two. If we move fast, we oughta be able to catch up with 'em, as slow as a village moves.”

“You need daylight to be able to see their tracks,” Bret said.

“That'd help, right enough,” Coldiron replied. “But a whole village leaves a helluva big track, even across grass, so we oughta be able to see enough to make sure which direction they're headin', and start after 'em right now. Common sense oughta tell us that they're most likely gonna follow the river. They ain't gonna be lookin' to set up their village away from the water. I just need to see which direction they headed.”

Bret didn't comment for a moment, during which he exchanged questioning glances with Myra. “Well, common sense also oughta tell us that they headed north,” he said. “If they had headed south, we would have run smack into them.”

Coldiron hesitated, taking a long pause while he thought about it, then responded, “Well, yeah, there's that, too, come to think of it. That was what I was gonna point out next.”

“So I guess we'd best get started north,” Bret said, his grin unnoticed in the dark. “Are you up to it, Myra?”

“Hell yes,” she replied at once, feeling a new sense of excitement, when it seemed they were drawing closer to Lucy. She pointed to a quarter moon climbing over the ridge behind them. “That'll help.”

Back in the saddle, they started toward the hills in the northern end of the valley. As Myra suggested, the light from the moon was enough to allow them safe footing for their horses. They continued along the Marias until they had to stop to rest the horses, at which point they decided to camp until morning.

•   •   •

A little before noon on the next day, they spotted the camp stragglers in the distance ahead of them. Their first reaction was to hold up and hang back to keep the Indians from discovering them.

“Well, looks like we caught 'em,” Coldiron said. “Ain't much we can do now but follow along behind 'em till they stop somewhere to rest.”

“I'd like to get around in front of them,” Bret said. “That way, we can find a place to watch them when they get on the move again, and we'd have a better chance of spotting Lucy Gentry as they're passing by us.”

“I like that idea,” Myra said.

Coldiron agreed. “This line of ridges beside the river will give us plenty of cover to get around 'em. Probably best to wait till they stop to rest and eat. Then we'd have plenty of time to ride up in front of 'em, find us a good spot, and rest our horses while we wait for them to get on the move again. If we're lucky, maybe they ain't already stopped this mornin'.”

So they continued to trail along behind the Piegan camp for another hour before they realized the stragglers were catching up with the rest of the village. “I think they're stopping,” Bret said.

“I think you're right,” Coldiron agreed and immediately turned his horse toward a narrow ravine that split the ridge to the east of them.

Once through the ravine, they turned back to ride a parallel course to that of the Indian camp, with the ridge between them and the Blackfeet. Pushing their horses into a comfortable lope, they continued at that pace for half an hour before stopping to check their progress. Bret and Coldiron rode partway up the hill, then dismounted and crept carefully up to the top. Lying on their bellies, they looked down on the river valley to discover the forward part of the village directly below them. “We didn't ride quite far enough, did we?” Coldiron whispered. “We're damn lucky they don't see no use to have scouts ridin' out to the side and in front.”

“I don't reckon they think they've got any reason to worry about anybody bothering them,” Bret replied. “They're stopping, all right,” he said when some of the boys circled around to turn the herd of several hundred ponies back to the river. “Maybe they're going to settle here for a while.”

“I don't think so,” Coldiron said. “There ain't enough grass here to feed a herd that size for more'n a week. They'll be on the move again after they rest a bit. We'll find us a place up ahead where we can watch 'em good when they go by.” They remained where they were for another half hour while the Piegans built cook fires and prepared food. Both men strained hard to see every woman they could, but they could see no sign of a captive white woman. It was discouraging, but they had to give up and make sure they found a good place to watch the Piegan procession when the camp got started again. “We'll have a better chance of spottin' that woman when they're all walking by us,” Coldiron said.