Wind Walker tb-9

by Terry C. Johnston

  “She likes, eh?”

  “Let ’er try it on, trader,” he demanded.

  Bordeau passed the shawl to her. With her father’s help, Magpie laid it over her shoulders while Bass lifted her long black hair. She clutched the shawl closed at her breast and spun this way and that. As he watched her twirl to make the tassels flutter, Titus suddenly spotted six faces pressed against the thick window glass, six pairs of eyes watching Magpie preen, the young girl lost in her own little world.

  Looping his arm over her shoulder, Bass quickly turned his daughter away from the prying eyes and faced her toward Bordeau. “You got ’nother of these here shawls?”

  “Same as the one she’s got on?”

  “Lemme see all of ’em so we can pick out three of ’em.”

  “Three?”

  “The other two for our wives.”

  “That’s awful good of you, Scratch,” Sweete said.

  “You damn well can’t go back to that lodge without presents for her, Shadrach.”

  “But I ain’t got nothing to repay you for ’em—”

  He whirled on Sweete. “Don’t ever say that to me again. I do this ’cause I wanna. Don’t take away the joy from me doing this for you.”

  “Aw … awright.”

  “Shell Woman don’t ever need to know it weren’t your money,” he explained. “Ever’ woman needs some geegaws an’ girlews to make their eyes shine and their hearts go warm.”

  “Popo!”

  He turned at Magpie’s exclamation, finding her running her fingers over eight different patterns of shawls. Bass told her, “Pick out one for yourself, and Shell Woman, and a real pretty one for your mother too. Shad an’ me gonna scratch through these here earbobs an’ foofaraw for some pretty hangy-downs to go with them shawls.”

  In the end, after they had argued over the worth of Mexican gold this far north of the old Spanish possessions, Bass finally relented and let go of two of his coins for a treasure trove of trinkets and jewelry, along with the three shawls, four more blankets, and a burlap sack filled with at least three of every sort of toy Fort Laramie had on its shelves.

  “An’ you said I had some left over for a little whiskey,” Bass reminded.

  “Yes, yes,” Bordeau answered in a gush as he scooped the two coins into a pocket of his drop-front britches.

  Shadrach asked, “Where’s your likker?”

  “Bring it out, trader!” Scratch demanded.

  “No drinking here in trade room,” Bordeau stated. “Other room for whiskey.”

  “Awright, show us,” Sweete said.

  They stepped from the trading room just ahead of Bordeau as the trader snuffed the lamps, then pulled and locked the door behind him. As the group followed the Frenchman down the side of the square, Bass turned to study that group of six curious employees stepping away from the shadows near the trade-room window, slowly following the Americans.

  “I dunno if there’s trouble brewin’, Shadrach,” he said in a low voice. “Maybeso there’s some nosy parley-voo niggers spotted my gold through the window.”

  Sweete glanced over his shoulder at the half dozen following them. “They’re small, Scratch. Frenchies too. They can’t cause us too much trouble. ’Sides, you allays had your back to that window. They couldn’t see your pouch or your gold.”

  “Then why you reckon they follerin’ us?”

  With a shrug, Shad said, “Bet they know we’re headed for the whiskey room. Pork-eaters like them figger to drink a horn or two on your money.”

  “Ain’t enough Mexican gold in my pouch to make me pay for a round of whiskey for one of their kind,” he growled as Bordeau stepped through a smudge of yellow light spilling upon the damp ground from a smoke-stained, dirty window and immediately flung open the cottonwood door beside it.

  “Alors!” the trader called out to the fat man behind the counter as they came in. “Four whiskeys for my friends here!”

  “For the petite fille?” the barman asked, his face drawn up in question.

  “Non!” Bordeau exclaimed with a snort. “These mixed-blood children do not drink the whiskey. Two whiskeys for the one-eyed one, and two for his tall friend.”

  “This Injun gal looks old enough for a cup of whiskey.”

  Bass froze at the counter and slowly turned at the sound of the voice. On instinct, he quickly glanced around the room, counting enemy, hopeful of finding another female. But as he had feared most, he found but one woman in this smoky room, dank with the mingled odors of sweaty bodies, spilled whiskey and brandy, as well as the stench of clothing and anuses gone too long unwashed.

  “Fill the cups, like the trader told you to,” Titus ordered the barman, then cleared his throat as he turned back to the stocky man who had called out with the loud voice.

  “I buy the woman a drink of my own, yes?” the badger-eyed one asked.

  Shaking his head as he felt his breath come hard, Bass growled, “This here ain’t no woman. My daughter she be, you gut-sucker of a parley-voo.”

  “What is this you say of me … gut-sucker?”

  Sweete immediately replied. “It ain’t good, what my friend called you.”

  Slowly the Frenchman’s eyes tore from Shad’s to look again at Bass. “So, she is your daughter. Still I think she looks old enough to drink the whiskey.”

  Bordeau slipped away from the counter, stepping behind the Americans and inching along the wall until he stood just behind the right elbow of his stocky employee.

  “She’s maybe a moon away from her thirteenth summer, you no-count dog.” Titus reached out and gently snugged Magpie against his hip. With his other hand he dragged a cup of whiskey his way and brought it under his nose for a sniff.

  “Me? A dog? That makes me laugh! You are the dog who sleeps with the Injeeans. Look at this half-blood girl. Now she is the best for a man like me, no? Half-blood women want a real man in the robes.”

  After smelling the strength of Bordeau’s whiskey, Bass took a long drink, enough to make his throat burn and his eyes water. If it was going to be the only drink he’d have this night, then he wanted it to be a deep one. He set the cup back on the counter. So far, the Frenchman hadn’t moved any closer. Made no threatening moves. Although the stocky man still leaned against the wall, Titus nonetheless knew it was but a matter of moments. Scratch turned, wiping his mustache with the back of his hand, and glared over at the antagonist. The man wore a pistol stuffed in his belt and one knife Bass could see over the right hip. Appeared to be a lefthander.

  “We come to drink our whiskey, part of a trade,” Shad began to explain as he set his first cup down on the counter behind Bass and tugged Magpie a step back from her father.

  “Trade? You want to trade, n’est-ce pas?”

  Bordeau leaned over to his employee, whispering something in the stocky man’s ear. The Frenchman listened, nodded once, but never took his eyes off either the American or the half-blood girl.

  “Awready done our trading for the night,” Bass said as he squared himself and laid a hand on Flea’s shoulder. “Son, move yonder toward the door now.”

  “Popo, I don’t want to go,” the boy said in Crow.

  “We aren’t going, not just yet,” he answered his son in the same language.

  Bordeau asked, “Does your daughter know the words that will drive a man wild in this same tongue you speak to the boy?”

  “Let’s not fight over her,” the muscular employee said with a mocking kindness. “I will bring some goodness to your poor family, old man.”

  “How could a gut-eater like you do that?”

  Sneering, he said, “Don’t marry your girl off to no Injeean warrior who picks the lice off his head. Non, marry your girl off to a real man like me who can get her out of those dirty Injeean clothes and put her in a fancy dress and hair combs.”

  The thought of such a life for his daughter turned his stomach. “I’d sooner see her married to a half-starved Digger than to have a scum-lickin’ parley-voo in my
family!”

  “Let her make her choice, old man,” the Frenchman demanded. “A Injeean life with lice, the life you choose … or a life as my woman—”

  “She’s just a girl, you French pig.”

  “Old enough to me,” the muscular man provoked. “Look at her ass. Is that not how you Americains say it—ass? And she has those little teats so small and hard now too.”

  “You’re a coward,” Titus growled, both hands flexing, wondering how much older he was than this bad-tongued bully, trying to calculate how many pounds of muscle the Frenchman had on him. “You stand here in front of a little girl and her father, talking bad with your pig tongue, only because you got all these other stupid gut-eaters around you. You’re no man, mon-sur. You’re just a soft-brained, scum-lickin’ parley-voo what works for Chouteau’s American Fur because you can’t do a real man’s job … an’ the most you can ever hope for is to die in your sleep somewhere out of the rain.”

  “Me? The coward, Americain?”

  “All you parley-voo bastards ain’t got the spine of a yap-pin’ prerra dog,” Titus declared. “You ever hear what happened to one of your kind when he bumped up against a fighting cock named Carson? Kit Carson?”

  The dark eyes narrowed. “Who is this?”

  “Carson’s the one killed the parley-voo called Shunar.”

  “Chouinard?”

  Bordeau leaned over and whispered something more into the man’s ear.

  “Thees Shunar, he was not as good as me, eh?”

  “You ain’t half the man Shunar tried to be,” Scratch said. “But … I figger you’re gonna be just as dead as him afore I leave this room.”

  “You talk so beeg for such old man.”

  “I can pin your ears back, slice ’em off, an’ feed ’em to you.”

  “No pistols!” Bordeau suddenly hollered as the employee reached for his belt weapon.

  “Fine by me,” Scratch replied, his heart thundering in his ears. He dragged the .54-caliber flintlock from his belt and clunked it on the counter.

  His antagonist asked, “When I kill you, I have to kill the other one too?”

  Before Bass could answer, Sweete announced, “I ain’t leaving here with you on your feet, pork-eater.”

  “Ah! You sweet on the girl yourself, eh?”

  “No,” Shad said as he nudged Magpie behind him at the bar. “I got me my own baby daughter too.”

  “She half-blood, like his girl?”

  “Yes,” Sweete answered.

  “Too bad now. She grow up with no papa.”

  Scratch slowly pulled his knife from its sheath, saying, “Is all you do is talk, mon-sur?”

  The Frenchman laughed mirthlessly. “Infant d’garce! You hurt me with your leetle knife?”

  “Big enough to open your gut.”

  “Non, thees is a real knife,” and the employee pulled the large butcher knife from its crude rawhide scabbard.

  “It’s big, s’all,” Titus said. “Big and stupid, like you, dung-head.”

  For a moment the Frenchman smiled, then said, “Thees will be fun. First I kill you. Then I kill your friend. And after some more whiskey … tonight I make a real woman of your leetle daughter. Tonight she will bleed from the hard rut I will give her—”

  All words and other sounds were suddenly muffled by the roar of blood rushing to his ears as he raced for the Frenchman, whose eyes snapped as big as the trader’s teacups. The man started to crouch as the American shot across the short distance that divided them. Without time to work his big knife into position, the Frenchman did his best to jab in toward his attacker, but Bass already had that figured out too.

  As the stocky man’s left arm stabbed forward with the wide blade, Scratch raked under the arm with his own thin-bladed skinner. At that same instant he felt the Frenchman’s calf crashing against his ankles. The room turned around as Titus spun into some crude stools and an empty wooden crate where playing cards and bone dominoes went flying.

  “Arrgggh!” the Frenchman cried in pain as he gripped his sundered left forearm in his right hand and slung about bright streamers of blood in anguish until he gritted his teeth and took the bloody knife into that empty right hand.

  “Bordeau!” Sweete cried in warning. “I’ll shoot any of your pork-eaters makes a move to help the bleeder! You understand I’ll kill ’em if they make one move toward my friend!”

  With a nod, Bordeau growled at the rest of the men in the room while Bass scrambled to his feet, his shins and right shoulder crying out in pain.

  “Lookee there, pork-eater,” he rasped. “You do bleed just like a fat pig.”

  With an ear-splitting cry, the enraged Frenchman lunged toward Titus, slinging blood and flashing the butcher knife in his weaving right hand. In a blur, Scratch sank to a crouch, leaning forward, then retreated in a half circle from beneath the attacker’s arm, all in the space of a heartbeat. Bass inched backward until he was stopped by the counter, then stood motionless as the Frenchman slowly gazed down at his lower chest. His shirt hung open the entire width of his body, blood oozing from the long, gaping wound. Small, dark pools began to collect on the clay floor around the toes of his moccasins.

  Shadrach stepped up right behind Bass’s left elbow. “You say the word, we’ll gut ’em all.”

  “You want me to finish you, pork-eater?” Titus asked his enemy. “Want me to kill you off so you won’t have to live with the memory of this night your tongue ran away on the wrong man’s daughter?”

  His mouth curled up, “I keel you now—”

  “Non!” bellowed Bordeau as he leaped in front of his bleeding employee. “You are losing too much blood already! You cannot win, and I do not want to lose you.” The trader turned and took a step toward the Americans. “No more fighting. You go. Take your goods and go from this fort—nevair to return—”

  “Popo!”

  Scratch whirled on his heel at Flea’s shrill call of distress. He found the boy sprawled on the floor right beside the door, holding a hand to his head. Then something suddenly awakened in him as the silence closed around the old trapper.

  Magpie was gone.

  * The mountain trapper’s term for a beaver pelt, borrowed from the French word plus, for a prime beaver skin.

  SIX

  “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 clu
ster 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.