Wind Walker (73 page)

Within minutes of their emotional reunion with their wives and children, Mary Bridger began to tell her husband about the conversations she had with Hickman, as well as the Mormon sheriff and a few of the 150-man posse sent from Salt Lake City with Brigham Young’s orders to arrest the trader for providing powder and lead and firearms to Indians who were reportedly hostile to the Mormon settlement of the Great Basin. Mary went on to confirm Flea’s story of how she had cowed the posse leaders and protected the fort’s occupants by immediately telling them in her best English that she was the daughter of the great chief Washakie—so that if these raiders dared hurt anyone her father would see to it that a thousand Shoshone warriors swept the land clear of all Mormon outposts.

“One of them Saints told her they had nothin’ but the deepest friendship for Washakie’s Shoshone,” Bridger declared. “But they said they still had orders to take me down
to Salt Lake City with ’em so I could stand trial for my crimes against the territory of Utah.”

“What’d she tell ’em then?”

“Mary lied an’ told ’em she hadn’t see’d me for a few days—I was out huntin’,” Jim replied. “So that’s when they sent out them four search parties to look for me in the hills.” Then he grew pensive, staring at the thin red line across the far horizon, where a new day was coming. A new day.

“What is it, Gabe?”

“Mary said there was a bunch—forty men she counted—ordered north to the Green River,” Bridger stated grimly. “From the house where she an’ Waits locked themselves in, she heard the orders give to them forty Mormons to ride straight for the ferry on the Green an’ take it by force.”

“Shadrach’s up th-there,” Bass stammered. “An’ more’n another ten ol’ hivernants we know—friends of ours workin’ that ferry till the river freezes up for the winter. Them Marmons go to shootin’, I don’t know how long them boys can hold out.”

“That’s where we oughtta go first,” Bridger declared firmly.

“Awright. I figger them Marmons down in your post won’t be risin’ real early this mornin’—seein’ how Mary let ’em all get a real snootful of her husband’s whiskey,” Titus said. “We’ll light out for Green River to see if we can help Shad an’ the rest hold off them snake-belly, back-stabbin’ thieves.”

“Who the hell’s out there?” a harsh voice called from the night.

“That you, Jack?” Titus hollered, having shushed Bridger. He did not want Gabe announcing his presence to anyone now that Jim was a wanted man. “Uncle Jack?”

“Yep—who’s askin’?”

He located Robinson’s shadow blackened against the backdrop of starshine. “Titus Bass.”

“Why the hell you didn’t come on in, Titus?” Robinson said with some irritation.

But Scratch did not move. Instead, he stayed in hiding beside Bridger and asked, “Who else here with you, ’cept for your woman, Jack?”

“Wasn’t you down to Bridger’s post, Titus?” Jack hollered.

“I was, sometime back,” he answered, wanting to trust the old mountain man, who had squatted on Ham’s Fork even before Bridger and Vasquez built their post on Black’s Fork.

“Jim with you?”

“Why you askin’ that, Jack?” Bass demanded, suspicion squirming in his belly. “You see’d a bunch o’ Marmons come through day or two back?”

Robinson did not answer immediately. Rather, there arose
the rustle of unseen movement, the crunch of sandy ground beneath rawhide moccasin soles.

“Scratch—it’s Shadrach. C’mon in—”

“Shad, you’re awright?”

“Big as life,” Sweete answered. “Bring your mangy face over.”

Before he did, Bass wanted to assure himself that Sweete didn’t have a Danite gun to his back. Maybe he should ask first to see just how Shad answered. “We heard trouble was headed your way at the ferry.”

“Mormons?” Sweete asked. “Damn if they didn’t hit us yesterday. The bastards got—”

That was enough proof for him. Titus scrambled to his feet, whistled into the night, then started for Robinson’s earthen dugout, hearing Flea whistle back to Bridger, who had stayed in hiding with the women and their children.

“Who’s that with you, Scratch?”

“I brung Gabe,” he answered as he started toward the two figures. “Our families got out of the post after Mary set them Saints to swillin’ down Jim’s whiskey like they’d never heer’d of Brigham Young’s temperance sermons at all.”

Shad embraced him quickly, and Robinson grabbed his wrist to shake. Then Titus started to ask, “Any more of the fellers get away from the crossin’—”

That’s when the figures came out of the brush, or bent low as they made their way through the low doorway of Robinson’s hut. He quickly counted six of them.

“This all?” Titus asked as he heard the hoofbeats and footsteps coming up behind him. Suddenly, he remembered, a panic rising in him as he asked, “Where’s Shell Woman? Your two young’uns, Shad?”

“They’re inside with Jack’s woman,” Sweete replied. “Good thing was, they was over here visitin’ when the Mormons come down on us. No tellin’ who’d got hurt, the way the bastards was shootin’ us up—”

“How many was up there with you, Shad?” Titus asked now. “How many workin’ when the sonsabitches come down on you boys?”

“Twelve, countin’ me,” Sweete admitted. “Them Mormons had us surrounded afore any of us got up in the mornin’. Kill’t the first one of us got out to take a piss. Shot down two more through that day. Night come an’ the rest of us we slipped off one at a time—every one of us makin’ tracks for Uncle Jack’s diggin’s.”

Bridger came up and embraced both Sweete and Robinson. Then he asked, “Them Saints shot three of my men?”

“Maybe more,” Shad replied. “Don’t know for sure. Only seven of us made it here—on foot.”

Titus had been working it on his fingers. He said, “That leaves two more what ain’t made it yet.”

“Likely dead,” Robinson advised sourly. “We been waiting for them shooters to show back up here to ambush the rest of us, way they did on the Seedskeedee.”

“Goddamned murderers!” Bass growled menacingly. “Five men murdered, Gabe! I tell you—we should let Washakie’s Snakes tear right on through them Marmon settlements, right on through their God-blessed Utah Territory, an’ be done with the lot of ’em. We can hang back, waitin’ for Brigham Young hisself to try sneakin’ out from the safety of his city … then we can be done with that evil son of a bitch—”

“We can’t do that,” Jim interrupted. “Not just yet.”

“How come they didn’t get their hands on you two?” Shad suddenly asked.

Titus snorted without a lick of humor, “Me an’ Gabe been hunted down by Diggers an’ Blackfoot, Sioux an’ Cheyenne. You wanna stand here an’ tell me you think some flatfooted Marmons gonna find Titus Bass or Jim Bridger in these hills?”

“Wouldn’t give ’em a snowflake’s chance in hell!” Robinson roared, setting the other old mountain men to laughing.

Sweete suggested, “With them Mormons come up to take the ferry outta our hands, maybe all the rest of us can move on down to your post an’ take it back. You got plenty of powder an’ lead for us to hold off—”

“There’s more’n a hunnert of the bastards still down there at Gabe’s fort,” Titus snarled. “Not countin’ the bunch ambushed you pilgrims, that’s still some ten-to-one odds agin us goin’ up agin them oily Marmons.”

After a moment of reflection, Shadrach wagged his head and laid a hand on Bridger’s shoulder. “What to do now, Gabe?”

“I ain’t for certain sure,” Bridger admitted, his face long and sad. “But somethin’ tells me I got to have a look at things down there on Black’s Fork.”

Titus could not believe his ears. “You mean—head back to your post where all them Marmons is waitin’ for you to show back up in that country?”

Resolutely, Jim nodded once. “I reckon I better see what’s become of them Saints, what they’re doin’ to what’s mine.”

“No tellin’ what’11 happen, they catch us out in the open, Gabe,” warned Shad.

“You can stay here, any of you,” Bridger suggested. “I ain’t askin’ you to come back with me to my post.”

“Your mind’s made up?” Titus inquired.

“This here’s my country,” Jim answered. “I was here long afore Brigham Young. So as long as the mountains is free, I’ll be here long after Brigham Young an’ his Saints is gone. Just as long as these here Rocky Mountains stay free—”

“I’ll ride with you, Jim,” Titus vowed as he stepped up to his old friend. “I’ll even ride with you to Salt Lake City so you can lay your hands on Brigham Young hisself. Don’t you ever doubt me, Jim Bridger. You can count on Titus Bass to ride into hell with you.”

Ghostly tendrils of gray smoke still rose from the half-burned timbers.

The valley of Black’s Fork stank, the late-summer air heavy with the stench of those smoldering piles of hides the Mormons had set ablaze.

But nowhere they looked as they slowly advanced on the blackened gates of Fort Bridger did they see a sign of life.
Not one of Brigham Young’s Saints. Not a single horse or mule. Not even so much as a wagon or a milk cow left in the paddock of the corral.

“They cleared out, Jim,” Shadrach Sweete said as they all came to a halt at the edge of the cottonwood in the chill of that early morning.

“Appears to me them Marmons put great stock in what your Mary told ’em ’bout her papa bein’ Washakie, chief of the Snakes,” Titus observed. “I figger they woke up with their achin’ heads, an’ got to thinkin’ they didn’t have the stomach for fightin’ the Shoshone. Their kind allays gonna skeedaddle when they gotta fight men even up.”

Sweete said, “I bet they scared themselves, Jim. Once they found Mary gone, figgered she went off to fetch her pa an’ his warriors.”

Bridger said nothing but continued to wag his head as he started slowly toward the smoldering walls of what had been his peaceful bastion in the wilderness. An uneasy silence hung over the valley … not at all the sort of silence the man had settled here to enjoy. This was the utter lack of sound after a piece of ground had been gutted of all life. Not the twitter of a sparrow, the caw of a magpie, or the shriek of a robber jay. Only the occasional whisper of the breeze that kept the last of the embers glowing, their smoke rising, an oily-black stench filling their nostrils as they stopped at the open maw where the double gates had once hung. The charred ends of those timbers lay in a heap on which a small fortune in buffalo, bear, and other skins had been sacrificed to the flames of a bonfire.

A sudden creak made them all spin about, their hearts leaping to their throats … but it was only the dawn breeze nudging what was left of one half of the broken corral gate as it swung on a huge iron hinge. A lonely, forlorn sound. Where once this place had reverberated with life unleashed, now it felt like it was the empty pit of a man’s belly, gone hungry three days or more.

“You cache anything, Gabe?” Titus asked quietly as he stopped at Bridger’s elbow.

“No. Did you?”

Bass shook his head. “S’pose we ought’n look to see if the sonsabitches left anythin’ behind when they set fire to the place.”

Jim sighed, his face long and gray with despair. At least half of every low hut was burned, the logs tumbled to the ground, charred and smoking. About a third of the outer stockade still stood, but the rest had burned nearly to the scorched earth, both the walls around the fort itself and the adjacent corral.

“The wagons’re gone,” Bridger said. “No sign they burned ’em.”

“They took them too,” Sweete declared.

“After they loaded ’em with ever’thing they wasn’t gonna burn,” Jim growled, a fury finally beginning to glow behind his eyes. “After they stole ever’thing right out from under me for Brigham Young.”

“This ain’t right,” Jack Robinson said in a weak voice. “This just ain’t right. Even if they said they come to arrest you for sellin’ weapons to the Injuns … it ain’t right they just up an’ steal ever’thing from you an’ your family.”

“From me an’ my family too,” Titus reminded him.

Robinson muttered, “Stealin’ an’ murder ain’t right—”

“These folks ain’t like you an’ me, Uncle Jack,” Titus interrupted. “Ever’thing these Marmons do agin us an’ our kind … why, they figger it’s the work of their god and his awmighty prophet, Brigham Young.”