“Wait a minute. Do you have my guns?”
“No,” Simon replied. “You didn’t have any on you. Just your knife.”
“Did you look for them? Do you have a rifle?”
Simon shook his head, then realized his error and answered, “No on both counts. But don’t hold it against me. I wasn’t about to go off and leave you while you were lying there helpless. Who knows what might have come along? A bear, maybe, or a cougar.” He thought a moment and added as an afterthought, “Or hostile Indians, perhaps. Maybe those Blackfeet you were telling me about.”
Nate doubted that was the real reason. Ward had not left his side because Ward had been afraid to. It was as simple as that. But the Bostonian was right about one thing. Nate couldn’t hold it against him.
All too vividly, Nate could recollect his own anxious feelings when he first ventured to the frontier in the company of his uncle. There had been a time when every little noise had made him jump, when every shadow had been a concealed enemy. It had passed, as all things must. For a while, though, he had been just like Simon Ward.
“It couldn’t be helped,” Nate said. “After we fetch the horses, we’ll go look for my rifle and any others we can find.”
“But it will delay us even longer,” Simon protested.
“We need guns,” Nate insisted. “Unless you’d rather chuck rocks at the slavers if they catch us trying to free your wife.”
In silence they hiked for close to ten minutes. Simon was annoyed, but he had to admit that the mountain man had a valid point. Knives and pistols were no match for Hawken and Kentucky rifles.
So much time had gone by since they left the horses ground-hitched that Simon was dead certain the black stallion and his bay would be long gone. He figured the pair had drifted elsewhere while grazing and were now either halfway to Missouri or up in the high country somewhere. Which made him all the more surprised when he set eyes on them a few hundred feet away. They had strayed apart but were in the general vicinity of where they had been left.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” Simon declared, and told King what he saw.
“Horses usually won’t go far when ground-hitched,” Nate explained. “They keep stepping on the reins, and that stops them every time.”
Simon chuckled to himself. On the trip west he had always picketed the animals securely using iron picket pins he had purchased in St. Louis. It never had occurred to him to just let the reins drag the ground.
Nate stepped forward, stuck two fingers into his mouth, and whistled as shrilly as a marmot. The black stallion raised its head, flicked its tail, and nickered. Focusing on the sound, Nate slowly moved toward it.
The bay was not quite as glad to see Simon. It watched him approach, and when he was almost close enough to snag the reins, it snorted and shied, backing away from his hand. “Hold on, you,” Simon said gruffly, which only made it retreat farther. Angry, he dashed forward and clamped hold of the reins. “Enough of this nonsense,” he declared.
The bay had other ideas. Suddenly rearing, it tore the reins loose and went to flee. It only managed a few strides when a front leg stomped on the trailing reins, which brought the horse up short just as the trapper had claimed.
Changing his tactics, Simon smiled and spoke soothingly. “There, there fella. It’s just me, you idiot. The man who owns you. The one who rode you for hundreds and hundreds of miles, day in and day out for weeks. It seems to me that you ought to know who I am.”
The bay bobbed its head but did not attempt to run off a second time. Simon slowly took hold of the reins, then spent a while patting the animals neck and scratching it behind the ears as he often did so it would calm down. That did the trick. Simon was able to climb on without another incident. As he forked leather, he was mildly disconcerted to see King already on the stallion and waiting for him a short way off.
“Sorry,” Simon apologized. “This horse has the brains of a jackass.”
“That makes him special,” Nate responded. “Jackasses are smart animals. A few trappers I know own them, and they swear that jackasses can go longer without water and food than horses, and they’re more sure-footed on narrow trails.”
“Oh,” Simon said. Not wanting to appear totally ignorant, he threw in, “Well, horses can go faster.” Then he slapped his legs and trotted off. Once again he failed to keep in mind that the mountain man had been blinded, and when he realized his mistake and twisted to call out to King to follow him, he found the trapper only a few dozen feet behind the bay, riding along as if he did not have a worry in the world.
Simon didn’t see how King did it. The man might have permanently lost his sight, yet he went on with his life as if nothing out of the ordinary had transpired. If it had happened to Simon, he knew that he would have blubbered like a baby and would be an utter emotional wreck for months to come, if not years.
It made Simon wish that he could take things in stride as calmly as the mountain man. He wondered how King did it, whether the man had always had a level disposition or whether the trapper had somehow learned to take what life had to offer without complaint.
Unknown to the Bostonian, his companion was plenty disturbed. Nate kept hoping that his vision would clear, and as more and more time went by and nothing happened he became more and more discouraged. He could not abide the thought of being a burden to Winona and his children. It would be better to die, he reckoned, than to inflict himself on them.
Or so Nate thought until he remembered old Otter Tail. Once a venerable warrior, Otter Tail had been wounded in a battle with raiding Bloods. An arrow had glanced off his skull. Afterward, he could no longer see.
Where others might have given in to sorrow and feelings of helplessness, Otter Tail had determined to carry on his life. He had worked hard and long to reacquire many of the skills he had before, and to improve on them. He became adept at making bows esteemed as the best in the tribe. He had his wife teach him to sew and he became an expert shield maker, as well. It was not long before warriors from many different bands were coming to him for their bows and shields. In his own way, he became a legend among the Shoshones, a shining example of what a person could do if they only put their mind to it.
Maybe, Nate mused, he should follow Otter Tail’s example and make something of his life instead of throwing it away. But what could he do that others might benefit from? He certainly couldn’t make bows. And his sewing was downright pathetic. He couldn’t get the hang of using a sewing needle no matter how hard he tried. The last time he’d mended his own britches, he’d put more holes in his fingers and thumb than he had in the buckskin.
Nate was still mulling over his options when they reached the campsite. Simon reined up first and announced that they had arrived.
Swinging down, Nate said, “I’ll stay here. It wouldn’t do to have me clomping through the grass. I might ride right over a rifle and never know it.”
Simon’s first inclination was to insist that the trapper accompany him. Bears and buffalo roamed the high grass, and he didn’t care to bump into either while alone. But as he watched Nate King grope the stallion’s neck for the reins, he realized that the frontiersman would be of no help if a wild beast should appear.
“All right. I’ll try not to take too long.” Wheeling the bay, Simon rode into the grass, his hand on his pistol. He really thought that he was wasting his time. To his amazement, he had not gone ten yards when he came on Nate King’s Hawken lying right out in the open. He knew it was the mountain man’s because King had customized it with an inlaid silver plate engraved with his name.
Overjoyed, Simon went on. He was going to ride at random when it hit him that the search would be much more thorough if he adopted a regular pattern of working back and forth from east to west. Within five minutes he found another rifle and a pistol. The latter he nearly broke when the bay stepped on it. At the last moment he spotted the glint of metal and hauled back on the reins.
For quite some time after that, Simon’s search wa
s fruitless. When he looked up and saw that he had gone over 200 yards from the camp, he decided enough was enough and headed back. Partway there the polished stock of another pistol claimed his attention.
Beaming proudly, Simon rode back out into the open. Suddenly he stopped cold. Nate King was on one knee next to the three bodies, running a hand over the face of the dead Indian. It made Simon’s flesh crawl. Sliding down, he walked on over.
“What are you doing?”
Nate slowly rose. “I was a mite curious. This coon nearly did me in.” He absently placed a hand over the knife wound. “A few more inches to the left and I’d be worm food right now.”
“How did you know the bodies were here?”
“I smelled them.”
Simon took a long sniff and regretted it. There was a faint but distinctly foul odor he had not noticed before, which was bound to grow much worse before too long. “I’m surprised the coyotes and buzzards haven’t treated themselves yet.”
“The scent of the fire and all the slavers is still too strong,” Nate said. “Once it fades, they’ll feast.” He raised his head. “Did you have any luck?”
“Did I!” Simon handed over the rifle and one of the pistols. He expected to be praised for a job well done, but all King said was “I’m obliged.”
Not that Nate wasn’t grateful, but he was more concerned over whether the Hawken had been damaged. He gingerly ran a hand over it, closely examining the stock, the barrel, the trigger and hammer.
Hawkens were next to impossible to come by on the frontier. Everyone Nate knew who owned one had bought it from the Hawken brothers in St. Louis, and there wasn’t a trapper alive willing to part with his prize no matter how much he was offered.
Nate was glad to find his rifle intact. He set the stock on the ground, then uncapped his powder horn. Since he often measured how much black powder to use by pouring it into his palm until he had a pile a certain size, it was not that hard for him to do the same by touch alone. But tunneling the powder into the barrel took some doing, as he simply couldn’t upend his palm over the muzzle as he was wont to do. He had to cup his hand just so and let the grains trickle slowly.
Wedging the lead ball down on top of the powder proved to be no problem. All Nate had to do was take a ball from his ammo pouch, shove it partway in with his thumb, then slide the ramrod out of its housing, align it over the barrel, and push. When he had tapped the ball firmly into position, he replaced the ramrod.
“Not bad,” Simon said, impressed.
“Practice makes perfect, even when you can’t see what you’re doing, I reckon,” Nate replied. He reloaded the pistol, tucked it under his belt close to the buckle, and nodded. “I’m as ready as I’ll ever be. Lead the way. You’ll have to do the tracking.”
Simon was about to turn. “Me?” he blurted. “You can’t be serious.”
“Never more so. The tracks will be as plain as day. There are eleven slavers left, plus your wife, plus extra horses.” Nate mustered a wan grin. “They’ll leave a trail a blind man could follow.”
The frontiersman was proven right. Simon had not paid much attention to the tracks when he had hunted for the guns, but they were there and impossible to miss even though the slavers had ridden off in single file. The passage of so many horses had flattened a yard-wide path. Simon moved along at a trot.
Nate had no trouble keeping up. He was so used to riding the stallion that the two of them moved as one. Thankfully, there were no trees to dodge, no gullies to cross, just mile after mile of flat prairie.
The mountain man soon found that his other senses compensated to a degree for his eyes. He was able to gauge the passing of time by the warmth on his face. When it was warmest on his left cheek, Nate knew that the sun was to the east. When his forehead was warmest, the sun had reached its zenith. As the day waned, his right cheek warmed.
The breeze brought the strong smell of buffalo wallows to his nostrils. Nate also smelled the grass underfoot, the sweat on the stallion, and his own.
His ears told him exactly where Simon was, and enabled him to ride along without fear of colliding should the young man from Boston unexpectedly draw rein.
Toward evening the wind picked up, as it invariably did. Nate concentrated on the drum of the bay’s hooves and sped up just enough to pull alongside it on the left. “We have to talk, Simon.”
Ward had been thinking of all that had befallen him since his wife’s abduction. On hindsight, he considered it a miracle that he was still alive. Barging into the slaver camp as he had done was without exception the most boneheaded stunt he’d ever pulled. He would not make the same mistake twice, he vowed.
While Simon’s mother-in-law might be right about him having a head as dense as granite, he did know how to learn from his blunders.
On hearing his name, Simon glanced around. It took a few seconds for him to appreciate that the mountain man had actually called him by name this time, and not just ‘greenhorn.’ “About what, might I ask?”
“You have a decision to make.”
“I do?”
“Your wife is the one in jeopardy. So you get to decide whether we push on through the night or make camp. I’ll abide by whatever you choose to do.”
Simon did not see where it was much of a decision. He couldn’t abide the idea of Felicity spending another night in the clutches of the cutthroats. Who knew what they would do to her? But as he went to answer, he hesitated. King had been looking peaked the past few hours. Simon wondered if he should call a halt for the trapper’s sake.
Before the Bostonian could speak up, however, a rumbling snort sounded just eighteen feet away and an enormous shaggy bulk reared up out of the grass.
Simon Ward reined up and gaped in astonishment.
It was a bull buffalo. Worse, it was clearly annoyed at having its dust bath interrupted. And the next moment it lowered its massive head and pawed the ground, about to charge.
Nine
Felicity Ward did not get her chance that first day. She hoped and prayed that one of the slavers would be lax for the few seconds it would take her to snatch a pistol or knife. But they were skilled at their wicked craft and never let their guard down when close by.
It did not help matters any that the man called Gregor had evidently taken a fancy to her. The slaver leader kept her near him throughout the day. Repeatedly she found him ogling her on the sly. There was no misjudging his intent. It was the kind of look every woman knew all too well, the raw, bestial hungry look of a man in the fiery grip of lust. He wanted her. And knowing his temperament, it wouldn’t be very long before he took what he wanted.
Felicity grew queasy just thinking about it. She would fight for her womanhood tooth and nail, but against a giant like Gregor the outcome was preordained.
Toward evening the slavers called a halt. Since they had been on the go for almost twenty hours, men and animals were exhausted. They had stopped only twice, once at midday to give the animals a break and again in the middle of the afternoon when they came on a small stream.
Felicity would have given anything to be allowed to wash herself from head to toe, but she was not about to ask permission knowing that every man there would cluster around to whistle and make lewd comments. She had to tolerate being filthy, at least for a while yet.
Gregor had tossed her a blanket, told her to spread it out, and went off to arrange the camp to suit him. They were on the west bank of a narrow creek, in a clearing bordered by prairie grass and a few slender cottonwoods. Evidently the same site had been used by other travelers, because there were several charred remains of previous camp fires.
A burly slaver who was mostly Mexican but had blue eyes tended to their cooking. He was a wizard at mixing commonplace ingredients into savory meals. Throughout the day he had angled into the grass now and again, always returning with leaves or roots or tender shoots.
Now, with a stew thickened by chunks of rabbit meat boiling over the fire, Felicity sat on the blanket Gregor
had spread out for her and pondered her next move. Since getting her hands on a gun or blade was out of the question, she had to make do with whatever else was handy. She scoured the ground for something, for anything, that would suffice as a weapon.
Gradually, the sun sank, blazing the western sky with bold strokes of red and orange. Despite it being summer, a number of distant peaks were crowned by ivory mantles of snow. It was so magnificent a scene that it moved Felicity in the depths of her soul, soothing her for the few moments she admired the heavenly spectacle.
The tramp of heavy feet brought her back to reality.
Felicity swiveled and could not help gulping at seeing Gregor leer at her as if she were a dainty morsel he was about to bite into. She held her chin high, crossed her legs, and folded her arms. Her anger flared when this provoked lecherous laughter.
“It won’t do you no good to hide your charms, woman,” Gregor said. “When I want them, they’re mine. And there’s not a damn thing you can do about it.”
Locking her eyes on his, Felicity declared, “This I swear. I will kill you if you presume to lay a finger on me.”
Again Gregor was merely amused. “I’ve heard that threat a hundred times if I’ve heard it once. And I’m still here. That ought to tell you something.”
“It tells me that every rattlesnake has its day. But all things come to an end. Your time will come. I just pray to God that I’m there when it does.”
Gregor’s smirk changed to a scowl. “You have a mouth on you, woman. It will please me no end to tame you, to break you like I would a wild horse, to show you that the proper way for a woman to regard a man is as her master.”
An unladylike snort burst from Felicity before she could stop herself. “You like to delude yourself, I see. But what else should I expect from a man who has to beat women into giving him what they would never offer on their own? You’re worthless trash, Mr. Gregor. And nothing you say or do will ever make me change my opinion.”
Wilderness Double Edition 11 Page 9