Buffalo Palace tb-2

by Terry C. Johnston

  Titus blinked and wiped the sweat out of his eyes with the sleeve of his faded, grease-stained calico shirt. And saw the flecks of blood already dried among the pattern of tiny flowers. The mule’s blood. Bass glanced quickly at the sun once more, wondering if this was the last day he would ever lay eyes on it.

  Would he ever see the coming sunset, as he had promised himself summers and summers ago when he rode away from that scalping, a half-dead shell of a man clinging to Hannah’s back? Would he ever see another black mountain night with its brilliant dusting of stars as he lay by the fire, staring up at the endlessness of it all, Waits-by-the-Water’s head nestled into his shoulder after they had just coupled flesh to flesh? Would he ever again see the children when they awoke each morning, clambering out of their blankets and tottering toward him as he fed the fire and started the coffee—eager to fling their little arms around his neck and squeeze him with what he always took to be utter joy in having another day to share together.

  Together.

  How he wished he was with the three of them now.

  How thankful he was that he had compelled Waits to remain behind with the little ones. If the three of them were here with these twenty-four fated men now …

  With the breakup of that last pitiful gathering of a few holdouts in the valley of the Green River, Bass had watched old friends disperse on the winds. Some just gave up on the mountains and pointed their noses back east to what they had been. Others, like Meek and Newell, set a new course for Oregon Country, where the land was fertile and free. But a hardy few had determined they would hang on, clinging to the last vestige of what had been their finest days. What had been their glory.

  No more would the big companies dispatch their trapping brigades into the high country. There was no money to be made in trading supplies for beaver pelts at a summer rendezvous on the Wind, the Popo Agie, or some fork of the legendary Green. Bridger and Fraeb formed a new partnership and brought out that last, undersized packtrain from St. Louis. Afterward, while Bridger led a small band of trappers north, Fraeb and Joe Walker started for California with a few men.

  Bass had marched his family north with Gabe’s undermanned bunch. And when Bridger turned off for Blackfoot country, Bass had steered east for Absaroka and the home of the Crow. There would always be beaver in that country—even if he had to climb higher, plunge deeper into the shadowy recesses than he had ever gone before. And, besides, traders like Tullock were handy with their post over at the mouth of the Tongue. He’d continue to trap close to the home of his wife’s folk, trade when he needed resupply, and wait for beaver to rise.

  The way beaver had before. The way it would again.

  They had a fair enough winter—cold as the maw of hell for sure, but that only meant what beaver he brought to bait were furred up seal-fat and sleek. When the hardest of the weather broke, he took a small pack of his furs down to Fort Van Buren, only to find that Tullock couldn’t offer him much at all. So Titus bought what powder and lead he needed, an array of new hair ribbons for his woman, a pewter turtle for Magpie to suspend around her neck, and a tiny pennywhistle for Flea.

  How Bass marveled at the way that boy grew every time he returned to the village. At least an inch or more for every week Titus rode off to the hills. Even more so when he returned from the long journey to the Tongue. He was four winters old now, his beautiful sister to turn seven next spring, looking more and more like her mother with every season.

  When it used to break his heart at how Waits-by-the-Water first hid her pox-ravaged face,* it now gave him comfort that she had made peace with what the terrible disease had cost her: not only the marred and pocked flesh, but the loss of her brother. Every time Bass returned from the hills, came back from the wilderness to his family, he quietly thanked the Grandfather for sparing this woman, the mother of his children. And he never neglected to thank the All-Maker for the days they had yet to share.

  With the coming of that spring following the last rendezvous, he decided to mosey south, taking a little time to trap, if the country looked good—but with the primary intention of being in the country of the upper Green come midsummer, when Bridger planned to reunite with Fraeb. Last year, before going their separate ways, there had been serious talk of erecting a post of their own.

  Damn, if that news didn’t stir up a nest of hornets! Old hivernants the likes of Gabe and Frapp ready to give up on trapping beaver, them two turning trader!

  Bass chose trapping and hunting over the mindless chores of a cabin-raising sodbuster. He figured he’d pounded enough nails and shingled enough roofs to last him the rest of his days.† So when Henry Fraeb’s twenty-two rode out for the Little Snake, Titus went along. He reckoned on sniffing around some country he hadn’t seen much of since he lost hair to the Arapaho. Might just be a man might find a few beaver curious enough to come sniffing at his bait.

  Besides … among the old German’s outfit were some of the finest veterans still clinging to the old life in the mountains. This hunt into the coming fall might well be the last great hurraw for them all.

  The long days of late summer seeped slowly past. There wasn’t much beaver sign to speak of, and where the men did tarry long enough to lay their traps, they didn’t have much success. The hunting wasn’t all that fair either. Game was pushed high into the hills. Bass and others figured the critters had been chivied by the migrations of the Ute and Shoshone.

  Turned out the game was driven away by the hunting forays of this huge village of wandering Sioux and Cheyenne, not to mention that band of tagalong Arapaho.

  The sun had been up a good three hours that morning when one of Fraeb’s outriders spotted a half-dozen horsemen on the crest of the hill across the Little Snake.

  “If’n they was Yuta, them riders be running down here first whack,” Jake Corn snorted. “Begging for tobaccy or red paint.”

  “Snakes too,” Rube Purcell added. “Poor diggers they be.”

  “Ain’t either of ’em,” Elias Kersey growled. “That’s for certain.”

  “Lookit ’em,” Bass remarked. “Just watching us, easy as you please. Ain’t friendly-like to stare so, is it, Frapp?”

  The old German hawked up the last of the night-gather in his throat and spat. “Trouble is vhat dem niggers lookin’ at.”

  Fraeb picked four men to cross the river ahead of the rest, making for the far slope and those unfriendly horsemen. Then the rest started their animals into the shallow river just up the Little Snake from the mouth of a narrow creek. The trappers had the last of the pack animals and spare horses across right about the time the first muffled gunshot reached them.

  Every man jack jerked up in surprise, finding their four companions returning lickety-split, like Ol’ Beelzebub himself was right on their tails, one of their number clinging the best he could to his horse’s withers as they lumbered down the slope. Behind them came the six strangers. And just behind that half-dozen … it seemed the whole damned hillside suddenly sprouted redskins.

  “Fort up! Fort up!” came the cry from nearly every throat as the four trappers sprinted their way.

  The twenty spun about, studying things this way, then that—when most decided they would have to make a stand for it right there with the river at their back.

  “Pull off them packs for cover!” one of them bellowed.

  But Bass knew right off there weren’t enough packs to make barricades for them all. Not near enough supplies lashed to those pack saddles, and sure as hell not any beaver bundles to speak of. One last-ditch thing to do.

  “Put the horses down!”

  One of the bold ones gave voice to their predicament.

  “Shoot the goddamned horses!” another voice trumpeted as the four scouts reined up in a swirl of dust.

  That’s when Titus could make out the yips and yells, the taunts and the cries—all those hundreds of voices rising above the dull booming thunder of thousands of hooves.

  A tall redheaded youngster next to him came out of t
he saddle and was nearly jerked off his feet when his frightened mount reared. From the look on the man’s pasty face Bass could tell this might well be the most brownskins he’d ever seen.

  “Snub ’im up quick and shoot him!” Bass grumbled as he lunged over to help the redhead.

  “Pistol?”

  “Goddamned right.” Then Titus turned his back and double-looped his own mule’s lead rope around his left hand as he dragged the pistol from his belt with his right.

  “Drop de goddamned hurses. Ebbery one!” Fraeb repeatedly roared, as the first animals started falling.

  From the corner of his eye, Bass watched the redhead obey. As the mount’s legs went out from under it, the horse nearly toppled the trapper. But the redhead scrambled backward in time, spilling in a heap atop Titus’s thrashing horse.

  “You got a pack animal?” Bass demanded.

  The redhead lunged onto his feet, craning his neck this way and that, then shrugged.

  “Get down and make ready to use that rifle of your’n,” Titus ordered, then turned to bid farewell to the mule just a breath or two before the screeching horsemen dared to break across the flat into range of their big, far-reaching rifles.

  He laid a hand on the mare’s neck as she breathed her last, stroking the hide until she no longer quivered. Gazing out over the slopes where the warriors gathered just beneath the ranks of their women, children, and old men—he saw her.

  Clearly a woman. Dressed in the short fringed skirt that exposed her bare copper legs draped on either side of her brown-spotted pony. A short, sleeveless fringed top hung from her shoulders, where her unbound hair tossed on every hot breeze. Make no mistake: that was a woman. While the warriors were stripped to their breechclouts and moccasins, wearing medicine ornaments and power-inducing headdresses, the one intently watching the action from the hillside was clearly a woman—and probably a powerful one to boot.

  Around her stood more than a double handful of attendants, young women and boys, all on foot. Together they joined in her high-pitched chants. She must be imploring the warriors to fight even harder, dare even more with each renewed assault.

  “You see dat she-bitch?” the gruff voice asked in a masked whisper.

  Bass turned to see Fraeb settling in beside him between the horse’s fore-and hind legs.

  “Who she be, Frapp?”

  The old German stared at the hill for a moment before answering. “She der princess.”

  “Princess?”

  “Ya. Princess dey fight for.”

  Titus couldn’t quite believe it. “She’s giving the orders to all the rest?”

  “Make medicine for them win.”

  And Titus had to agree. “Yeah, medicine. I’ll bet if one of us knocked her down—these bucks see their own medicine shrivel up like salt on a green hide.”

  “She come close your side—you knock her down, ya?” Fraeb asked as he rocked back onto his hands and knees to crawl off.

  Licking his dirty thumb and brushing it over the front blade at the end of his rifle barrel, Bass vowed, “See what I can do for you.”

  Back over at the far end of the oval, after the horsemen had made their third deafening rush on the corral, Henry Fraeb once more was squealing out orders, ordering some men to hold off—thereby making sure they would have at least half the guns loaded at all times. No more than a dozen were to fire at once, he reminded them again and again. No less than a dozen had to be ready should the whole hillside decide to make a great rush for them.

  Charge after charge, the five hundred thundered down the long slope and across the river bottom toward that maze of deadfall and tree stumps, daring to ride ever closer to that corral of buffalo robes, blankets, and bloating carcasses. As the morning wore on, the ground in front of the dead stinking horses and mules reminded Bass of a field of barren cornstalks. Just as many arrow shafts quivered in those huge animals the mountain men had sacrificed to make this stand.

  Well before the sun had climbed to mid-sky, two of the trappers lay dead, and the rest were grumbling with thirst. The river lay seductively close at their backs. Its gurgle almost close enough to hear—were it not for the grunts of the sweating men as they reloaded their rifles or hurriedly refilled their powderhorns from the small kegs among the scattered baggage. A peaceful, bucolic gurgle as the creek trickled over its gravel bed … were it not for the rising swell of war cries and the soul-puckering power of the coming thunder of those hooves.

  “Dey comin’ again!” Fraeb would announce what every last one of the twenty-one others could see with their own eyes as the summer sun beat down on that corral of rotting horseflesh and desperate, cornered men.

  “Remember,” Bass turned to whisper at the redhead nearby. “Wait till you got a target.”

  “What’s it matter?”

  He turned and looked at the youngster’s face. “It’ll matter. Each of us takes one of the bastards out with every run they make at us … it’ll matter to ’em.”

  Titus watched the redhead swallow hard and turn away to stare at the oncoming horsemen. Sweat droplets stung his eyes. Grinding the sleeve of his calico shirt across his forehead, Bass calmly announced, “They call me Scratch.”

  “Scratch?” the redhead repeated. “I heard of you.” His eyes went to the black bandanna covering Bass’s head. “Word has it you lost hair.”

  Grinning, Bass nestled his cheek along the stock of his rifle, squinting over the front rank of horsemen. “That was a long time ago, friend.”

  He found another likely target: tall, muscular youth brandishing what appeared to be an English trade gun in one hand as his spotted pony raced toward their corner of the corral. The Sioux and Cheyenne were clearly going to make another long sweep across a broad front again, tearing up grassy dirt clods as they streaked past the long axis of the barricades where most of the trappers lay or knelt behind the carcasses.

  The redhead’s rifle boomed. Then it was Scratch’s turn to topple his target.

  “Name’s Jim. Jim Baker,” the redhead turned to declare. “I’d like to say I’m glad to meet you,” he explained as he rolled onto his back to yank up his powderhorn and started to reload. “But I don’t figger none of us gonna get outta here anyways.”

  “You listen here, son,” Bass snapped. “I been through more’n any one man’s share of scraps with red niggers—from Apach’ on the Heely, to Comanch’ over in greaser country, clear up to the goddamned belly of Blackfoot land itself. We ain’t beat yet—”

  “How the hell we gonna get outta here?” Baker demanded as he jammed a ball down his powder-choked barrel. “We ain’t got no horses to ride—”

  “We’ll get out, Jim Baker. You keep shooting center like you done so far … these brownskins gonna get tired of this game come dark.”

  “G-game?”

  “Damn straight, it’s a game to them,” Bass explained, then tongued a ball from among those he had nestled inside his cheek. As he pulled his ramrod free of the thimbles pinned beneath the octagonal barrel, he laid another greased linen patch over the muzzle and shoved the wiping stick down for another swab. Only when he had dragged out the patch fouled with oily, black powder residue did he spit the large round hall into his palm and place it in the yawning muzzle.

  Baker glanced at the body nearby—a hapless trapper who had raised his head a little too far at the wrong moment and gotten an arrow straight through the eye socket for his carelessness. Penetrating to the brain, the shaft had brought a quick, merciful death. “This damn well don’t appear to be no game to me.”

  “No two ways to it, Jim: this here’s big medicine to these brownskins,” Bass explained as he re-primed the pan. “White men ain’t been hurrooed by Sioux and Cheyenne much afore this, you see. Lookit their women up on that hill, singing and hollering their songs for ’em, telling their men to rub us out, all and everyone.”

  “They can,” Baker groaned with resignation. “Damn well ’nough of ’em.”

  “But they won’t,” Ti
tus argued. “Ain’t their way to ride over us all at once. Sure, they could all come down here an’ tromp us under their hooves. They’d lose a few in rubbing us out, but they’d make quick work of it.”

  “W-why ain’t they?”

  “There ain’t no glory in that, Jim.” And Bass grinned, his yellowed teeth like pin acorns aglow in the early afternoon light. “Them are warriors. And the only way a warrior gets his honors is in war. This here’s war—a young buck’s whole reason for livin’. Wiping us out quick … why, that ain’t war. That’s just killing.”

  Baker shook his head and rolled onto his knees again to make a rest for his left elbow on the ribs of his dead horse. “I don’t rightly care what sort of game them Injuns is having with us. I figger to do my share of killing.”

  Bass rocked onto his rump and settled the long barrel atop the fist he made of his left hand, which rested on the horse’s broad, fly-crusted front shoulder. He was surprised to find that the woman had moved. Damn, if she wasn’t coming toward the bottom close enough that he might just have a chance to knock down Fraeb’s warrior princess.

  Closer, closer … come on now, he heard himself think in his head as she and her unmounted courtiers inched down the slope, their shrill voices all the more clear now in the late afternoon air. If he held high and waited for that next gust of hot wind to die … he might just hit her. If not the warrior princess, then drop her horse. And if not her spotted pony, then one of them others what stood around her like she was gut-sucking royalty.

  He let out half a breath and waited for the breeze to cease tugging on that thin braid of gray-brown hair that rested against his right cheek. Bass set the back trigger, then carefully slipped his fingertip over the front trigger, waiting—

  When the rifle went off, he bolted onto his knees to have himself a look, not patient to wait for the pan flash and muzzle smoke to drift off on the wind.

  Her brown-spotted pony rocked back onto its haunches, suddenly twisting its head and neck as the double handful of courtiers scattered—diving and scrambling off in every direction. As if plucked into the sky, the warrior princess herself sprang off the pony the moment its forelegs pawed in the air a heartbeat, then careened onto its side.