Ride the Moon Down (56 page)

“I never meant for any of that to happen …” His voice cracked with deep sorrow. He felt the salty burn at his eyes.

Strikes-in-Camp took a deep breath and looked squarely at the trapper. “I do not blame you for any of this. You are my brother, so you must try to understand: this is how I choose to die. We are going together to find our relations.”

“T-together?”

“This is not a quest of one man alone against the many.”

“No, you are right—this is not for me to do alone.” Titus reluctantly accepted the warrior’s offer, ripping his mitten off his right hand, holding out that painful, wounded arm between them.

“I will ride at your side, fight at your side,” Strikes-in-Camp declared courageously as he laid his forearm against the white man’s, gripping Bass’s wrist. “And when I can
no longer sit atop my horse … then … you will have to go on alone.”

The bastards hadn’t left much behind.

Blackfoot damn well poked through it all, deciding what they were going to load onto the packhorses, discarding the rest after they had ripped, crushed, or broken what remained in their destructive rage. Good thing the war party hadn’t wanted any of Bass’s medicines: small skin pouches of his medicinal plants they had tossed about the camp. But they had pitched his bundle of wiping sticks in the fire where the hickory wands had become nothing more than charred cinders, the way they had cut up what little they had left behind.

He couldn’t find his pelts. Nor the packsaddles he used on the extra ponies. The Blackfoot must have strapped the saddles onto the horses, lashing the beaver to the frames. They might be figuring to trade them off at Culbertson’s Fort Piegan.

Most everything of value had been ripped from him. Losing beaver again, the way he had when Silas, Bud, and Billy ran off with all that he had worked so hard to earn. But once more he realized it wasn’t so much those autumn plews … after all, he could replace them in another season, still have something to show for the year by rendezvous set for the Popo Agie.

It was his woman, the most important person in the world to him. And those children. There would never be another two who could compare to Magpie and Flea.

Bass realized he could put his possibles back together. He could make do with what traps he had left. And he could catch enough beaver to trade for what he needed across the next few seasons as he got himself back on his feet … but he never would be the same again if he didn’t get those three back.

And to do that, he could not delay in putting to the trail. Bass could not wait for more Crow warriors to join him. He and Strikes-in-Camp would have to leave at once and make their play against the war party alone.

Already on Samantha’s back was a robe and blanket,
what he had taken along when setting out to confront the Crow thieves in their village. From the looks of it, the Blackfoot hadn’t taken anything with them to keep Waits-by-the-Water, Magpie, and Flea warm during their ride, to wrap themselves in at sundown when they halted for the night to eat, to sleep, to celebrate their captives, to …

Damn, Titus reminded himself as he looked about the debris left of his camp. He would have to hold those thoughts at bay, or he’d drive himself mad thinking of what those warriors would do to his wife—make himself so crazed that he couldn’t plan and plot, and do it all carefully enough so the Blackfoot wouldn’t have time to kill their captives when he caught up to them.

He figured it had to be as if he’d stare straight down the barrel of his rifle, concentrating while he placed the front blade in the bottom notch of his buckhorn rear sight, blotting out everything else—he had to force himself to think about what to do, and when to do it, how to pull this off despite the odds … rather than how the Blackfoot would abuse a woman prisoner.

“We should go before it gets any later,” Strikes-in-Camp reminded him.

Bass realized he had been staring at the litter of their camp, the scattering of torn robes, canvas, and blankets. “Yes,” he answered quietly. “Those bushes—see if there is anything they left behind, anything we can use.”

The Crow turned without a reply, moving quickly to the timber, peering into the brush. Bass knelt at the fire pit, poking at that bundle of hickory ramrod cinders. They would be hardest to replace. He kept spare flints in his pouch. Some extra balls and three spare horns of powder in what he had packed on Samantha. But he didn’t have any spare wiping sticks should he break the one carried in the thimbles beneath the barrel of his rifle.

That was one thing a man couldn’t do without in these mountains. The bastards had burned them, either knowing full well what they were, or the Blackfoot had pitched the bundle into the fire just to destroy what they didn’t care to pack along—

He turned at the strange sound, finding Strikes-in-Camp,
staring into the warrior’s eyes … as if Titus believed the Crow had just made that muted, out-of-place noise. More of a whimper. Perhaps the warrior had been suddenly struck by the prospect of his own horrible death—

There it was again. But the whimper did not come from Strikes-in-Camp.

With his heart rising in his throat, Bass scrambled to his feet and sprinted to the rubble of blankets and robes scattered back among the brush across the camp from where he and the Crow had been talking. When Titus heard the next faint, muffled sob, he went to his knees, as if his own legs had been knocked out from under him. To left and right he tossed the scraps of wool blanket, the ruin of the buffalo robes, flinging them over his shoulders until he heard that unmistakable sound again. Clearer still.

Yanking the last scrap of robe back, Titus stared down at the tiny body.

Flea lay on his side, curled up, sucking on the knuckles of one hand, blinking at the cold, gray light as his father bent over him.

Bass started to weep as he gently stuffed his hands beneath his son’s small shoulders and hips, pulling the boy against his breast. A few feet from the white man’s elbow, Strikes-in-Camp knelt, on his face written the sadness that he could not reach out to touch his little nephew.

“Now we know they have only two,” Bass croaked his wife’s tongue, swallowing hard at the knot in his throat.

The Crow stood when the white man got to his feet. “What will we do with your son now?”

“We’ll take him with us.”

“No,” the warrior said firmly. “I am a father, like you. We cannot take a young child when we leave to trail the Blackfoot.”

“Then you must take him back to your village,” Bass demanded.

“I am going with you,” the Crow argued. “There are Blackfoot to kill, scalps to lift—because I am going to die
soon. I have vowed to take many of the enemy with me when I depart for the other side.”

“Then the boy must go with us.”

“You cannot take him,” he protested. “A young child does not belong when you are going on a war trail—”

“Neither of us are going back to the village,” Bass interrupted. “We are going after the Blackfoot. Flea will go with me.”

“Think of what you are doing. Let me go alone, and you can come along after you have taken him to the village. Bring the rest of the warriors Stiff Arm went to fetch.”

“Flea is going with me, and we are going now,” Bass turned, cradling the boy, searching the ground, kicking at the scraps of blanket and robe, hoping to find the remains of the cradleboard.

Strikes-in-Camp darted in front of the white man, stopping a dozen feet in front of him, throwing up his arms to get Titus to stop. “The child will catch the sickness. If not from me, your son will catch the sickness from the Blackfoot we are chasing.”

Looking down at his son’s face, Scratch said, “Maybe he will not die because he has some of my blood in him.”

The warrior asked, “Are you willing to risk that?”

For a long moment Bass stared down at the boy’s face. “It’s the best I can do, Strikes-in-Camp. If I go back to make him safe, then I won’t be able to help the other two.”

“Are you willing to risk the life of your son to get the others?”

“I think that is what my heart feels,” he admitted. “If Flea loses his mother, his sister too … then I don’t think he would want to go on living either.” Bass took a deep breath. “I know I will not want to go on if we cannot save the woman, the girl.”

“Then you have decided,” the warrior declared flatly, a look of determination written across his face. “A father, a husband, has made his choice for his family. As it should be.”

“Yes,” he said, looking up from the child’s face to
gaze into the Crow’s eyes. “I will bring all my family back … or I will die with them.”

He tied the last knot in the rawhide strings that bound the scraps of blanket around the boy’s body. After swaddling Flea with some small pieces of the buffalo robe, Bass had encased the child in a large scrap of blanket, then wrapped loops of rawhide around and around the makeshift cradle. From those strips of rawhide, he hung two loops. Now he stood with the bundle in his arms and carried the infant over to his horse where he dropped the loops around the large round pommel on his Santa Fe saddle.

Only the child’s face remained uncovered. Scratch bent, kissed the boy on the cheek, then tugged the folds of blanket over the tiny copper face to protect it from the cold and the wind.

“My dog,” he said to the Crow, turning from the horse—remembering. “You see any sign of him?”

The warrior hunched over some bushes, his arms stuffed into the brush, pulling branches aside. “No blood. No body. The dog is not here … but this is.”

He watched Strikes-in-Camp pull a trade gun from the vegetation.

“Is this yours?” the Indian asked, holding it out between them.

Bass took the weapon, examined it, and said, “Yes. I left several weapons with her. They were loaded.”

“My sister must have thrown it here.”

“Why didn’t she use them?”

The warrior bent over another clump of brush, fishing with an arm. “I can only think that Waits-by-the-Water believed she could not shoot the firearms without endangering her children. So she threw them away as the warriors rode into your camp—so the Blackfoot wouldn’t have the weapons, and protecting the little ones from the enemy.”

Strikes-in-Camp straightened again, this time holding one of the big horse pistols.

“There’s bound to be more,” Bass said, laying the
trade gun and pistol on a piece of the torn blanket. “Search—search it all. Maybe the war party didn’t steal any of the weapons before they ran away.”

Standing at some more bushes, the warrior asked, “Do you think we scared them away before they could search more carefully?”

“No,” and Bass wagged his head. “If they had someone watching, they would have seen there were only two of us. I don’t think we would have scared off so many. They would have waited for us.”

“Why did they go so quickly—before they found all the firearms, before they discovered the little boy?”

Scratch looked at Flea, wagging his head as he said, “Only thing I know is that finding my son and these weapons are a good sign the First Maker is ready to give me this one shot at getting my family back.”

He prayed it would stay cold, so cold it dared not snow.

Much more often here in the Northern Rockies than anywhere else in the central or southern mountains it grew too cold to snow. His prayer was far more than merely wishing against any snow that might fill in and hide the hoofprints left by the Blackfoot war party. Instead, Bass realized the deep temperatures would keep the tracks from melting during the day, then refreezing at night. What that sort of thing did to the top layer of snow could be cruel torture to their horses’ legs. Much better that it stayed so cold it didn’t snow.

After stuffing the trade gun and that English fusil under the rawhide whangs on Samantha’s packs, strapping the extra pistols across the mule’s withers, Titus and Strikes-in-Camp began their chase. Crossing the frozen river, the Blackfoot trail headed straight across the lowlands for the better part of that afternoon—a trail that put both the pursued and the pursuers right out in the open under a hard, gray sky.

There was no way for the two of them to hide right out in the open, the direction the trail took. If the Blackfoot
had chanced to leave a scout to watch over their backtrail, he would have spotted the two men coming behind. Nowhere to hide. But if the bastards did leave someone behind to watch for any pursuers, Scratch figured the Blackfoot would just scoff at two lonely riders trailing after them. They wouldn’t feel enough of a threat to lay any ambush.

But that didn’t mean the two of them could relax. It just didn’t pay not being wary when the trail they were following eventually headed off to the northwest, striking for the foothills. By sundown it was plain to see that the Blackfoot were intending to drive up the heights, crossing the high country to reach the Yellowstone on the far side. From there they would push on with their prisoners and plunder until they reached their homeland. They had killed some Crow warriors. And they had stolen some traps from a white man. Worst of all, the thieves had torn Bass’s life apart. They had his wife and daughter.