Wind Walker (36 page)

Sweete stood over them, casting a wide shadow on Titus. “How they get him down?”

“Back of his head’s crusted with blood. They laid him out with a gun butt, maybe whacked ’im with a rifle barrel. Only way them bastards make a big corncracker like this to drop to his knees.”

“I’ll be back quick’s I can,” Shad promised.

Titus only nodded, watching his friend jump astride the big horse and saw the reins around in a tight circle, the animal lunging away with a grunt.

When he looked back down, he saw that the new sunlight was starting to reach Burwell’s eyes. He shifted a little so he could keep the face in some shade. Swollen, cracked lips. Puffy eyes. Tiny cuts on the brow and cheeks, blood crusted in the six-day-old stubble on his chin. The wounds had hardened, their dribble almost completely dry. Hadn’t been that long ago the attackers had approached the farmer, likely claiming they had come to help him find the cow that was already drawing flies and dung beetles farther up the draw.

As he held Roman Burwell across his thigh, out there a few yards away Titus saw the scuffed ground where the struggle had taken place. Likely one had come up behind Roman as he struggled with one or more of them at his front, at least from the way the ground was trampled. And it was easy to see from the knees of his britches that the farmer had his legs knocked out from under him. But he was still alive.

That’s when Titus looked back at the aching blue of that
midsummer sky, cloudless, flawless, pristine, and pure. He had never asked anything of the First Maker, of his mother’s Creator, from the God of Brigham Young’s Saints, nothing for himself. Never had he asked, much less pleaded and begged the way he had this morning. When it came down to asking on behalf of someone else, Titus Bass would not hesitate to plead and beg. He was not ashamed as he cradled his son-in-law in his arms and shooed the annoying flies from the oozy wounds. He was not ashamed that he had asked for the help of a power far greater than he. Too many of those he had known did believe—be they the women of his Johnston clan back in Boone County. Or be they the shamans and rattle-shakers of the Ute, Shoshone, or Crow clans he had wintered among. They had a different One, but he figured it had to be the same One in the end.

More and more of late, he had felt the presence of something greater than himself.

In his coming to this country, Titus Bass had first sensed how his heart sang with the endlessness and exquisite beauty of the land, both plains and mountains. For a long time, he hadn’t realized that the feeling making his heart swell had really been the One talking to him, those first simple words he could not recognize, much less understand. It was only the utter freedom, the timelessness of each new bend in a creek or the view from the crest of a hill just topped. For a long time, Scratch had only thought the music he felt in his heart was merely the fact that he was here and now in a place few would ever see.

But there was the God-talkers, old friends like Asa McAfferty and Bill Williams—circuit-riding preachers who, although they had strayed from the path, nonetheless laid claim to the impossible, so much of the impossible that Titus Bass could only have doubted all the more the presence of any spiritual force in all of this wildness … be it the nature of the wilderness itself before the coming of man, or the nature of man alone and unfettered in that wilderness. Those who claimed to believe, be they white or red, they were merely
superstitious, and maybe to be pitied for their scary beliefs. He himself was not helpless in the face of what might confront him. He had stood tall and bold against the wind—and survived without clinging to a superstitious belief in something he could not see.

Then he had held his baby daughter in his hands. And over the next few weeks he listened to Waits-by-the-Water tell him more and more about the One Above, the First Maker, the Grandfather, each day as they plodded north from Taos, making for that next rendezvous on Ham’s Fork of the Green in ’34. By the time he had truly heard his daughter’s name whispered in the softness of the breeze that caressed his face, Titus Bass had taken that first step in admitting to himself that there was something far more powerful than man himself, something far greater than this wilderness that challenged his courageous breed. Perhaps … just perhaps there was some force that had created him and this land, a power that had pulled him west into this uncompromising garden of beauty and sudden death where he could no longer deny its existence.

How, he thought, could he have ever gazed up at the tall and hoary peaks of these Rocky Mountains, still mantled with snow in the heat of summer here far below, and not admit that there was some great life force that had created all of this? How could he have ever lain on his back, elbow curled beneath his head, and stared up at the night sky with its countless, numberless, infinite tally of stars and not accept that some great hand was at work in this world, if not at work in the tiniest recesses of his own insignificant heart?

While a younger man, a man more prone to squinting out at the world around him through a cynical eye, might have determined that any belief in the spiritual was nothing more than a weak-minded person’s attempt to explain away a magician’s tricks or the vagaries of unexplainable happenstance … Scratch had simply had too damn much happen right before his eyes for him not to admit the presence of some all-powerful might at play here in this wilderness,
where the trappings of civilized man and his society had not sullied this high and pristine world the way they had contaminated most everything back east. Leave it to others to refute the existence of a power outside themselves.

Titus Bass had seen how a white buffalo calf robe told the old sightless Porcupine Brush that Scratch and the rest of Mad Jack Hatcher’s men were sorely in need of rescue from the Blackfoot days before the white men were attacked, telling Goat Horn’s Shoshone warriors they must ride hard and fast to save their trapper friends.
^*

And Titus Bass had seen how some all-powerful spirit had worked its healing through Shell Woman to save Shadrach Sweete’s life. Even to turning that bloodied black hump fur carved off a buffalo cow into a strip of creamy-white hide—the color of which was more sacred than anything else to Shell Woman’s people.

How could Porcupine Brush, blind and nearly deaf as well, have known the white men needed help, if he hadn’t been told by the First Maker through that sacred buffalo calf hide? And how was it that Shad’s unstoppable bleeding was healed and that makeshift wrap turned white if not through a power that answered Shell Woman’s fervent prayer, if not as an answer to Scratch’s own prayer to spare the life of his old friend? The two of them hadn’t talked about it much at all since that stormy night down on the South Platte. Some things a man found hard to describe, much less explain, even to himself, especially to others … no matter that they had gone through the very same experience together.

So if not a man to pray for himself, eventually Titus Bass had begun to pray for others. To ask that the power of that great hand be brought to bear on the fortunes of those he loved and cared for. How he had asked to get Waits back from the Blackfoot. Prayed that the pox would not take her from him. Asked to be freed from the grip of the desert, and the Diggers, and the distance too. And how he had begged that Roman Burwell be spared to his family.

In the end this simple man realized that what blessings were showered upon his loved ones would be showered upon him too.

By the time they got Roman back to the wagon, even the train’s dust had disappeared from the horizon. By then, the two old friends had put hours of work behind them.

Upon his return to the coulee, Shad explained he hadn’t wasted a lot of time when he rode up, yelling for their wives to fetch him the spare rope from the pack animals while he himself untied six of the hardwood ridgepoles from beneath the wagon box where Burwell kept them secured. They, and eight shorter poles, had been brought west with a large section of oiled Russian sheeting—kept in the event they needed additional shelter and had to erect a wall tent, or might use the extra canvas for repairs to the main wagon cover. With the two long poles tied into a V and four shorter ones quickly strapped across them, he laid the two buffalo robes over the back of the pack animal, then climbed into the saddle once more. That’s when he said Amanda had come running up, pleading with him to take her back to Roman.

“I’ve got to see him!” she begged, gazing up at the tall man in the saddle.

“Can you ride?”

“I can ride.”

As he began to turn, prepared to have his wife fetch up one of their saddle horses, Amanda pulled herself up atop that packsaddle frame to which he had lashed the improvised travois. “You ever ride ’thout a saddle?”

“No,” she answered with determination. “But, I’ve never had my husband near get himself killed neither. Let’s go.”

As soon as Shad and Amanda had neared the scene, Titus watched her pull back on the reins of that packhorse and leap off, her skirts a’swirl as she bounded to the ground and started leaping over the sage, dodging around the wind-stunted cedar.

“Pa! Pa!” she cried, her cheeks streaked with moisture as she came sliding to her knees beside him. “Oh … Roman.”

Gently, Titus pulled himself out from under Burwell and held Roman’s head up while she fit herself beneath his bare, bloodied shoulders. Bass got to his feet, feeling the cramped muscles protest in one leg where they had gone to sleep while he did what he could to shade his son-in-law from the cruel midsummer sun.

“Here,” Shad called, then tossed Scratch an old oak canteen. “I brung that for Roman.”

In turn Titus handed it over to Amanda and stepped back as he watched her drag up the end of her dress, then the bottom of her dirty petticoat. Onto a corner of this she carefully poured some water from the canteen, then dabbed it on the first of his cuts and puffy bruises.

“How far they ahead of us, by the time you got back?” Scratch asked.

“Can’t see nothin’ of ’em no more,” Sweete admitted.

Titus wagged his head, all the more angry for it. “Hargrove gonna make sure he covers ground today.”

“Make it so we can’t catch ’em today, fast as he’s driving ’em,” Shad agreed.

With a nod of recognition, Bass took a step toward Amanda, but Sweete caught his elbow and dragged him back.

“Stay here with me awhile, Scratch. Ain’t nothing you can do for ’im right now.”

“You’re right. But these hands what wanna choke those bastards need somethin’ to do,” Titus explained. “We need to be tying up a travois for Roman.”

As they bent over their work repositioning the cross members, then started tying on the cradle of a double thickness of buffalo robes in which they would place the injured man, Sweete confessed, “I wanted to keep you over here, where your daughter couldn’t hear.”

“Hear what?”

“Hear us talk on what we’re gonna do about Roman an’
Hargrove, an’ them badger-eyed bastards done this to
your
daughter’s husband.”

His hands stopped working at the series of knots and he stared at Sweete. “You’re in for making ’em pay for what they done to Roman?”

“Even if I wasn’t your friend, I’d throw in with you just to have a chance to see their faces when they realize they ain’t getting away with treatin’ folks like this.”

Bass grinned hugely. “While you was gone, I was thinkin’ my own self.”

“Your notion gonna happen tonight?”

“Soon as we get these three families caught up to the train.”

Shad wagged his head. “That’ll take some doing.”

“Then we’ll do it tomorrow night.”

It was all but dark when they had to admit that the oxen just weren’t going to be goaded into any more speed, any more miles that day. Reluctantly, they made camp as the stars winked into view and the women scrambled around to build a fire there beside the Little Muddy. At least they had some water. And some scrub oak, cedar, and sage for their fire—enough to last out the night.

Amanda steadfastly remained inside the wagon with Roman, day and night. She and Lucas budged from the wounded man’s side only to trudge into the brush and relieve themselves, once they crawled into the crowded box and settled in beside him. Mercifully, the farmer hadn’t come to as the travois bounded and jostled over the sage on the way back to the wagon, or as the two trappers hoisted the big man onto the tailgate. Burwell had grunted a time or two, and groaned in some misery, but he never did awaken that first day, even though his eyelids fluttered from time to time as he was jostled about. Waits-by-the-Water brought Amanda a half-full bucket of water and a dipper. Toote brought them a kettle of her hot soup.

Not long after the moon came up and Titus had Lemuel put his little brother and two sisters to bed beneath a low
awning strung from the side of the wagon, Waits came to find her husband talking with Shad as the two sat just outside that ring of light given off by the flames.

“Ti-tuzz,” she said softly as she approached the two men.

He turned, seeing her, and smiled. “Your soup was good,” he said in English.

“Toote make,” she responded in his tongue. “Come now.”

“Come?”

She pointed back at the wagon. “Call for you. Amanda.”

“She needs me to come?”

Waits nodded. “Tell you come—Roman, he awake.”

Bass scrambled to his feet quickly. “Stay here and keep a sharp ear to the night, Shadrach.”

“I’ll be right here.”

Then Titus stopped and stood there a’swell with feelings and all fumble-footed. “Shad—I … I …”

Sweete bolted to his feet and held open his arms. They briefly pounded one another on the back. Shad said, “It’s good news. Him awake an’ all.”

With a nod, Scratch pulled away from their embrace and said, “Tomorrow night, we’ll cull a few outta Hargrove’s herd for what they done to Roman.”

Hurrying with Waits back to the wagon, he handed her his rifle and stepped to the rear pucker hole, pulling aside the curtain and peering over the tailgate. In a whisper Titus asked, “He awake?”

Amanda turned, smiling at her father. “Yes, Pa,” she whispered, yet with some undisguised excitement in her voice. Then she leaned over her husband. “Roman, my pa’s here.”