Wind Walker (14 page)

“Magpie!”

As he shrieked his daughter’s name in desperation, Titus Bass lunged across the clay floor to land on his knees beside his son.

“How bad you hurt, boy?”

Flea pulled his fingers away from the gash on his head, a trickle of blood oozing its way down to his left eyelid. “They steal my sister.”

Spinning around in a crouch at the sound of footsteps and clatter of wooden stools, Bass growled, “Shadrach! You hold these bastards here.”

As Titus began to stand at the doorway, Sweete protested, “I’m comin’ with you.”

“No you ain’t,” he growled. “Stay with the boy. They couldn’t get far—”

“There, Popo! There they go!”

Flea pointed out the open door at the open compound, where the five men dragged the kicking, struggling girl across the muddy ground illuminated only by starshine and some random splotches of lamplight spilling from smoke-smudged windows.

Titus hurled himself into the doorway and screamed, “Magpie!”

One of the handful of kidnappers yelped and wrenched his hand away from the girl’s snapping mouth as the other four continued to wrestle the child, who was proving to be a blur of flailing legs and whirling arms, very much like a snarling catamount.

“P-popo!” her thin voice called to him, the frantic pitch of it almost swallowed in the immensity of the mud walls the moment that hand was torn from her mouth—but another hand cuffed her, stifling her next cry.

For an instant he began to lunge on through the doorway, then suddenly wheeled about, dashing back to the counter to sweep up the belt pistol he had laid aside just before drawing knives with the stocky Frenchman. He quickly gazed down at the cluster of men doing what they could to stem the flow of blood from his wounded adversary.

Glaring into the man’s eyes, Titus vowed, “I’ll be back to finish you.”

Dragging the hammer back on the pistol as Sweete stepped forward with his own pistol and knife drawn, Scratch leaped through the door, racing across the soggy, barren ground for those men who were just then pulling the girl toward a line of dark shadows at the back of the fort, where no lamplight reflected from the murky puddles of rainwater.

“Let ’er go!” he bellowed like a herd bull challenged by a ring of prairie wolves.

Three of the five turned as his voice reverberated off the mud walls. One man’s face went white with fear. In an instant he turned to flee toward the shadows. In his wake fled a second.

“Popo!” she pleaded again.

One of the men immediately slammed his fist into the side of the girl’s face to silence her.

Without consciously thinking about it, Scratch slid to a halt and had the pistol up at the end of his arm. A noisy explosion rocked the square. Then the big lead ball caught the man between the shoulders just as he was raising his fist to strike Magpie a second blow. His arms flung outward as he tripped over his own feet and Magpie’s too, bringing the two
of them down together. A fourth man took that moment to dart away, but the fifth knelt over his bleeding companion, glanced at the American, then brutally yanked the girl to her feet.

He cackled, “You only had one shot in your pistol!”

Titus was already sprinting across those last few yards as the French-talker shoved Magpie ahead of him. Her feet slipped in the mud of a shallow puddle and she went down in a sprawl. As the Frenchman stumbled up to crouch over, yelling at the girl in a shrill voice, Bass wrenched the narrow, curved head of the tomahawk from the back of his belt, gripped the end of its worn handle in his right palm like the feel of an old and trusted friend, then cocked his arm and flung it through the air.

With that small head of the tomahawk piercing his back, the last of the attackers arched violently with a scream of agony, wrenching one arm backward as he attempted to claw at the weapon buried deep in flesh and bone … his legs went out from under him and he pitched into a puddle glazed with the black reflection of that starless night, splashing Magpie with mud and water as she began to crawl away, whimpering.

“Scratch!”

Bass did not turn at the sound of Shad’s voice until he had helped his daughter to her feet. Holding her quaking body against him, he turned to find the tall man backlit at the doorway.

“Flea there with you?” he demanded.

Shad reached out his arm and pulled the boy into the open doorway with him.

Pressing a moccasin down on the back of the man, Titus worked the tomahawk up and down several times to free it from the attacker’s back. As he cupped her chin in his bloodied hand, raising her face, Titus asked her, “Can you walk, Magpie?”

She bobbed her head with nothing more than a whimper, clutching her father for fear she might otherwise fall.

One at a time he stuffed his empty pistol and the damp
tomahawk into his belt, then bent over the dead man and pulled free the attacker’s two pistols. With one in each hand, he started back for the grogshop, eye scanning the shadows for more of the cowardly kidnappers. “Stay right beside me, darlin’. C’mon.”

“We’re lucky more of ’em ain’t wearin’ guns,” Sweete grumbled as Bass herded Magpie through the open door.

“If it was so, they’d made a rush and you’d blowed a hole through two of ’em with the same ball,” Titus declared with great confidence. “If’n I know you an’ that big sixty-two of your’n.”

Sweete grinned. “Maybe I ought’n still blow a hole through two of ’em afore we leave.”

“Yes, go! Get out!” Bordeau wailed. “You better run before more of my help comes for you.”

“Help?” Flea repeated the word.

Scratch’s eye quickly raked over the room, making a tally of those here with Bordeau and the wounded man, along with the four live ones who had fled into the shadows outside. “I don’t callate how you got any more
engagés
working for you this time o’ year, Bordeau. Way I see it, there’s them four cowards somewhere out there, waiting in the dark to back-shoot us—an’ there’s the rest of you parley-voo pigs in here.”

“How we gonna get the young’uns out of the fort an’ back to the women?” Shad inquired in a harsh whisper.

“Oui?”
Bordeau asked with a sneer as he knelt beside the wounded Frenchman again. “You kill two of my men, them both American Fur employees. Maybeso this third one too, eh?”

“I not die yet,” grumbled the wounded man who sat in a splatter of black that stained the clay floor. “I live,” and he coughed. “I live to keel this Americain!”

“Another day, mon-sur. Not this’un, you won’t.”

“We still gotta get outta here, Scratch,” Sweete reminded.

His eye fell on Bordeau. “C’mere, you parley-voo cock-bag.”

The trader stood slowly, but did not move.

“You c’mere now,” he growled as he slowly aimed a pistol at the wounded man on the floor, “or I’ll blow what li’l brains that weasel got in his head.”

“
Non
,” Bordeau protested.

He moved the muzzle of the pistol so that it pointed at the assistant factor. “Then I’ll blow a ball right through—”

“You kill me,
monsieur,”
Bordeau interrupted as he stood his ground, “Papin will not rest until you are dead.”

Titus grinned, his brain grinding on his extrication from the fort, making their escape from this North Platte country. “You’re important to Mon-sur Papin and the company?”

Bordeau jutted his chin with too much self-confidence, “
Oui
, very important.”

“Papin an’ all Chouteau’s money don’t mean a goddamned thing to me,” he declared as he stepped toward Bordeau and suddenly shoved the muzzle of his left-handed pistol under the trader’s chin. “But if you don’t come with me, I will splatter your brains all over the rest of your dog-sucking friends here.”

His eyes grew huge. “C-come with you?”

“You’re gonna get us outta the fort.”

“How I do that?” Bordeau asked as he shuffled away from the others, almost on his toes, that muzzle still shoved up under his chin as Bass slowly backed them toward the door.

Titus did not answer until they stepped into the light spilling out from the doorway. “Tell them, those four cowards of yours out there—tell ’em I’ll blow your shit-brains out the top of your head if they make any trouble for us getting outta the fort.”

“You cannot get away—”

With a sharp upward jerk of the pistol, Bass forced Bordeau’s chin toward the roof. “It’s up to you, parley-voo. If’n I kill you, I can grab another an’ another till I get my young’uns outta this mud hole. So you can come with me, or you can leave what you got left for brains in the mud at my feet. What’s it gonna be?”

“He’s cut up your li’l booshway,” Shad explained, sarcasm dripping from his words. “An’ there’s two more dead
out there in the dirt right now. You better listen to this’un. I ain’t got no control over him when he gets like this. The man’s lived through twenty year o’ Blackfoot, Comanche raiders, and Mex soldiers too. Killing another fat, pissant Frenchman like you won’t make no nevermind to my friend—”

“Oui! Oui!”
Bordeau stammered.

“Now,” Bass ordered and started them out the door, but suddenly stopped and wheeled about on his heel. “Flea, grab that sack with them geegaws and shawls in it. Bring Magpie two of them new blankets for her to carry too.”

Sweete helped the youngsters quickly gather up the trade goods, then Titus said, “Awright—let’s get outta this pigs’ hole. You bring up the rear, Shadrach. Put them young’uns atween us. Stay close, stay real close to me.”

His chin raised to the sky, Bordeau whimpered, “Wh-where you going with me?”

“To that gate. Shad, keep your eyes moving. You too, Flea. Watch the shadows—sing out if somethin’ moves. Watch those shadows behind us.”

Inside the tippling house arose a sudden clamor of voices, the scraping and clatter of wooden furniture. He glanced back over his shoulder, saw shadows flit the window, figures moving inside.

“Flea, wan’cha keep an eye on that door back there, son.”

When they finally reached the interior gate Titus ordered, “Open it.”

Bordeau slid back the iron bolt through its hasp with a grating rasp, dragged back one side of the gate, then took a step to the side. All through it Scratch never removed the pistol from under his chin.

His eyes grown hard once more, Bordeau hissed, “Now go.”

“Oh, no. We ain’t saying adieu, mon-sur. You’re gonna get us back to our camp.”

“You keeping him?” Shad said. “He’s a li’l booshway—worth something to the company. We can’t take him outta here, Scratch.”

“Reason I’ll take ’im is for what he is worth to ’em,” Titus replied, shoving Bordeau through the open gate.

“Non, non!
Please,
monsieur—
”

“Stay close to me, Magpie. Don’t you see, Shad—we leave this bastard here, we couldn’t make a run for it fast enough afore the rest’d be down at our camp, shooting up the women and young’ uns.”

Breathlessly frightened, Bordeau asked, “You let me go at your camp,
oui?
”

“Likely I ain’t gonna let you go till I know they ain’t follering us, mon-sur.”

As they stopped for a moment just inside the outer set of gates and peered into the darkness, Bordeau pleaded, “Your friend said it true—you can’t take me out of here! I am important to my employers—”

“You don’t shut up, I’ll shoot you in the foot and make it hard for you to hobble back to your goddamned fort when I’m done with you miles from here.”

“W-walk? Miles?”

“I sure as hell ain’t gonna let you ride back here on one of my horses!”

He started to struggle against the old trapper. “You can’t!”

But Bass shoved the muzzle of the second pistol into the small of Bordeau’s back.

“Maybe you’re right, mon-sur,” he growled as he shoved the trader toward the gentle slope that would take them down into the cottonwood bottoms. “Maybe I just ought’n gut you right here an’ now, then go back in there an’ finish off that mouthy one I started cuttin’ on. No matter what happens to me—we just finish off all you sonsabitches right now for what you was gonna let them others do with my daughter.”

“Les filles
… the girls,” and he paused a moment, “Injeean girls, they come with the tribes and maybe one of my mens, he takes a shine to one. He can buy her from her father—”