Crack in the Sky (6 page)

“Damn right we are!” he said, turning his head slightly. “A goddamned sit-up, straight-on ride-through!”

Cautiously, Bass loosened the hold he had with his right hand and slid it between himself and Hatcher until he filled his hand with the butt of the flintlock pistol.

“Hold tight, son!” Jack warned. “We’re about to do-si-do!”

What few war cries the Blackfoot raised were swiftly drowned out by the hammer of hooves on the flaky hardpan of the earth’s crust as the horses and trappers galloped into the open, heading right for their enemy who waited among the sage and buckbrush in the day’s new light. Hatcher’s men shouted back with their own bravado, hurtling through the few who had dared to follow them.

A lone gunshot. Bass figured it had to be one of the
boys. The Blackfoot simply didn’t have that many weapons, and chances were good they wouldn’t dare try to shoot their weapons from horseback anyway. What Jack had said was true: Indians simply weren’t much in the way of marksmanship.

“Take a lookee there, Scratch!” Hatcher called.

He turned his head, immediately catching sight of the warrior racing toward them at an angle—putting himself on a collision course not that far ahead. In one hand the Blackfoot held the elk-antler quirt he used to whip the pony’s rear flank. And in the hand that clutched the pony’s rein, the warrior also held a long wooden club from, the end of which protruded a long, wide knife blade. Two feathers streamed back from his long, unfettered hair while the pony raced around and over the stunted sagebrush.

“Maybe I should ride right into him?” Jack mused.

“You do, you’ll knock me off,” Scratch replied.

“I’ll wager that’s what he’s fixin’ to do.”

All the jarring, jolting, side-to-side hammering inflicted on his wound was about to overwhelm Bass. For a moment he bit down on his lower lip again, then said, “You pull up—I’ll shoot the son of a bitch.”

“I ain’t stoppin’ for nothing! Not when I got a head of steam behind me!”

It was like a nausea that threatened to surge up his gullet, a blackness doing its best to put an end to the torment in his side. And out of the shrill ringing in his ears, Bass heard the other pony. Opening his eyes, he struggled to focus: discovering the warrior racing just behind them, just over his right shoulder.

“Hatcher!”

“I know, goddammit!”

Bass watched the Blackfoot switch the reins into his free hand, beginning to swing his left arm back. “Can you shoot him, Jack!”

“It’s all I can do to keep us on top of this damned horse!”

With a sudden swerving lurch, the warrior brought his pony sharply to the left as he swung the long club forward.
Both Hatcher and Bass ducked out of the way as the knife blade hissed past their heads—that sudden shift of weight causing the horse below them to stumble and sidestep at full stride. Both trappers barely held on as the animal dodged through the sagebrush: Hatcher locked on to the saddle, Titus locked on to him.

Bass cried, “Son of a bitch’s coming back for another go!”

“He’ll keep it up till he gets one of us,” Hatcher growled, “or he drops us both!”

“Can you ram your horse into him?”

“S’pose I can,” Jack admitted grittily. “But it might spill us!”

“He comes close enough—just give ’im the idea you’re gonna.”

For the next few moments Bass was able to watch the look of grim determination on the warrior’s face as the Blackfoot inched his animal closer and closer to the white man’s horse. He saw how the man’s hair was cut with long bangs that tossed in the wind, the hair on the top of his head tied up with a few feathers, like a bold challenge to try taking that topknot. And he saw how those black-cherry eyes glittered with hate.

Titus wondered how anyone could ever possess such hate like that for someone he didn’t know. Besides the horses—why would these warriors carry such rage for the white men? After all this time, were they still licking their wounds after being driven off by the Shoshone last spring? To Scratch’s way of thinking, even that could not account for the unadulterated hatred and contempt he read in the Blackfoot’s eyes as the warrior drew closer and closer.

“Now!” Bass screamed.

Hatcher was right on the money, yanking hard on the rein. Their horse twisted suddenly, just as Jack yanked back to the left to correct it. That sudden lunge did the trick: enough to make the warrior pull off.

And when the Indian realized what the white men had done, even more rage clouded his face.

“I gotta get rid of the son of a bitch,” Jack grumbled.

“This horse ain’t gonna last long under us both,” Bass
said into the back of Hatcher’s neck, feeling himself breaking into a fevered sweat. “Maybe we get a chance, you get us stopped, tie me on another horse. This’un can’t carry us much—”

“Shuddup! I ain’t about to trust ye to make it on yer own.”

Off to the right, the warrior was coming at them again as they reached more open ground, the land falling away gently toward the distant river valley, that beckoning vale rushing at them with its wide border of green disclosing its meandering course to these battle-weary travelers.

“Then gimme a chance to shoot him,” Bass demanded.

“How in the devil’s eggs are ye gonna shoot ’im?” Hatcher snorted, getting a new grip on the horse’s rein. “Ye can barely hang on to me as it is, child!”

“J-just … g-get him on the other side of us.”

“Don’t let go of me, Bass!”

“I ain’t, Jack,” he vowed weakly. “Just get him on our left. Cross over, hard and sharp.”

“An’ put him on our left,” Jack repeated. “If what ye got in mind don’t work—that nigger likely to take off the top of yer head with that club on his next go-by.”

“You just keep us both on this here horse—I’ll do the rest, Hatcher.”

Whooping and wagging his head in astonishment, Jack kept looking over his right shoulder as the Blackfoot urged his pony closer and closer to their horse, and when he figured the warrior was close enough, Hatcher yanked hard to the right.

But the Blackfoot figured this was another feint and didn’t go for the bait. Instead, he spurred forward, the nose of his animal nearly crashing into the rear flank of the trappers’ horse as it shifted sides. As the startled enemy straightened himself on his war pony, Bass found that Hatcher had done it. The warrior was now inching up on them from their left.

Closer.

He struggled to bring the pistol out of his sash in a sweating palm.

Closer still.

They were lashed so tightly together that he grew scared the weapon might go off wedged there between them. Kill one of them, if not the horse under them both.

Close enough now that he could see the ribbons of sweat coursing down the enemy’s face.

Freed at last—he felt the muzzle move between them, tight against his belly as he pushed his hand forward.

Swinging the club back, the Indian grinned, his teeth glittering as he closed on what had to be a sure kill. Two white men at once. What a prize—

Shoved across his body, the pistol suddenly popped out between the two men as Titus raked back the hammer with a thumb.

The club had already begun its arc downward as the Blackfoot’s eyes suddenly locked on the pistol just then popping into view between his enemies.

In his sweat-slickened hand the pistol nearly bucked itself loose as Bass pulled the trigger. The ball slammed into its target midchest, right under the warrior’s arm that held the war club aloft. As if disbelieving, the Blackfoot kept the arm and club frozen there, reluctantly tearing his eyes off the white men as he looked down at his side … weaved—then pitched off the back of his straining pony.

“Sumbitch!” Hatcher cried exuberantly.

Drops of salty sweat stung Bass’s eyes as he blinked, trying hard to clear them, straining to see if there were any other pursuers who might pose a threat now that he had emptied his only weapon of the only bullet it had held. Behind them two other warriors slowed and brought their ponies to a halt in the sagebrush, circling back for the body of their fallen comrade.

“Maybeso the niggers are giving up,” Titus said, more hopeful than certain.

“Not Blackfoot,” Hatcher snorted. “Bug’s Boys don’t give up.”

“How long they gonna keep after us?”

It was a moment before Hatcher answered. “Till they take all the horses they can from us, and they got our scalps hanging from their belts, Scratch.”

“Ain’t healthy for a man up here—this hard by Blackfoot country—is it?”

“No, I don’t reckon it is.”

Weakness was like a thick cloud overtaking him now that the hot adrenaline was no longer surging through his veins. “Tell me, Jack: is the beaver so good up here that you’re willing to put your hide on the line ever’ day you got left in your number?”

“What say when we get back to Isaac and Rufus—we all talk about working our way south to more friendly country?”

“South … south is good.”

“Rest of them niggers been after our hair won’t be follering all that quick—seeing how we put ’em afoot the way we done,” Hatcher said. “So we can see to Kinkead and you proper and get this outfit ready to tramp south back to the Windy Mountains after we g’won to ronnyvoo at Sweet Lake. How’s ronnyvoo sound to Titus Bass?”

Jack waited a minute for an answer from Bass, and when he didn’t get one, he turned slightly to peer at the man roped behind him. “Scratch? Hyar ye—Scratch?”

Up ahead of them the others were driving the horses across the wide creek, threading the animals through the young cottonwood saplings and between stands of willow. How beautiful were the drops of water spraying up from each hoof, countless glittering gems iridescent in the bright spring sun as the four other horsemen shouted and urged the horses across.

“Ronnyvoo … just the sound of it shines,” Bass finally said as he closed his eyes again, so heavy had
they
become that he could no longer keep them open.

“There’ll be whiskey, Scratch!” Hatcher cheered as he slowed the horse in nearing the ford. “And womens!”

His side burned with a terrible, prickling pain. And for a moment Titus wondered on just how much blood he had lost. Would he make it to rendezvous? Or would he be one of those who went under? Then Scratch couldn’t fight it any longer.

“Just lem’ … lemme sleep now, Jack.”

Not all that far overhead the calliope hummingbird’s wings blurred in frenetic flight—hovering, darting, then hovering once more as it sought out its nectar.

Bass froze, motionless there in the icy water, the five-pound steel trap and float-stick in hand. Enthralled with the bird’s dance on the gentle spring breeze, he watched the hummingbird bob and bounce from flower to flower until it was long gone down the streambank. He sighed in contentment. And arched his back, feeling the tug of tight new flesh slowly knitting along the bullet’s path through his left side. Especially taut across those two small puckers of wrinkled skin. It was good to be back working the banks of these streams. Good for a man to know where he belonged.

For days following that scrap with the Blackfoot horse thieves, the others had joshed about keeping him around for no other reason than that Titus Bass was a good omen, perhaps even the old Shoshone soothsayer’s most powerful charm.

“I had me a uncle once said to me that a few folks is like cats,” Solomon Fish had said beside a campfire one twilight as Hatcher’s brigade made their way south toward the Owl Mountains, working to put more and more country between them and the Blackfeet who seemed determined in their chase.

“Merciful heavens,” Caleb Wood grumbled as he swayed up with another armload of wood. “How people like cats?”

“Never had me a cat was wuth a red piss,” John Rowland observed. “Only good for mousin’.”

“Go ahead on with yer story, Solomon,” Jack prodded.

With an indifferent shrug Fish nudged some of his blond ringlets out of his eyes and said, “Ain’t much of a story, really. Just my uncle said some folks got ’em nine lives, just like cats s’pose to have.”

Hatcher turned to Kinkead. “What ye think of that, Matthew?”

“Sounds like Solomon’s uncle kept hisself filled with bilge water to me.”

“Maybe not a fella like you,” Fish snorted testily. “But just think about Titus Bass here.”

Hatcher grinned across the fire, asking, “Say, Scratch—figger ye used up any of yer nine lives?”

“Damn right I have,” he answered, feeling the certainty of it down to his marrow. “Figger I had a few whittled off me back in St. ’Louie, back to the time when I was doing my best to spit in death’s eye.”

“How ’bout with them Arapaho down near the Little Bear?” Elbridge Gray asked.

“Them,” Scratch replied, painfully shifting his position, “and a few times since.”

Jack turned back to Kinkead, asking, “So don’t it sound like Bass got him a cat’s nine lives?”

“Solemn,” Matthew used his favorite expression, then spit a brown stream of tobacco into the fire, where it hissed. “But if Scratch truly be a man with nine lives, I reckon he’s just ’bout used ’em all up, Jack.”

“Long as he don’t use that last one afore ronnyvoo at Sweet Lake!” Hatcher roared.

Time was drawing nigh when the company brigades and bands of free trappers would begin to gather, marching farther to the west every few days, stopping now and again when the sign along the streams convinced Hatcher’s men the trapping might be worth their efforts. Wandering slowly as the days lengthened and warmed, they neared the southern end of the Wind River Mountains—where a man jumped west by southwest over that easy, sloping divide to find himself in a country where all the waters now flowed toward the Big Salt far, far beyond the horizon.