Jim Clyman’s blue eyes flashed as he looked over his shoulder at the fallen mustangs and mute mountain men, out to where the bear-mimicking brave lay over what was left of Aaron Stephens. “Them red devils. We’ll be back someday to collect damages for this.”
Jim Clyman led the way, with Augie Neill and Jim Anderson close behind, and Old Hugh coming along last and doing well for all his fifty-odd years.
The moment they leaped into view, howls of rage rose from the Rees behind the picket fence. Some ran out into the open on the sand bar and, kneeling, with bows and guns let fly at the running men. Arrows sleeted and balls streaked around the running men.
One shot caught Hugh, stung him in the thigh of his already game leg. It went in deep. His whole leg went numb. It threw him into a crablike unwieldy run. A yowl of triumph rose from the Arikarees.
Jim Clyman looked back. “Hugh?”
“Run, lad, save your hair. Don’t wait for me.” Hugh held his hand over the wound. Blood squirted between his fingers.
“You’re hit, Hugh, old hoss!”
“Just a nick, lad. Run! Don’t pay me no mind. Dive in!”
They ran up the sandy shore until they were well beyond the Rocky Mountains and then turned and ran into the water, splashing, hoping to make the boat despite the strong current.
Just before he went in over the hips, Hugh reached up and, barrel first, shoved his flintlock down inside his shirt along his backbone, thrust it down until it was well caught between his belt and body. Then he let himself down into the rushing tan water and swam out.
His numb leg dragged. He rode the water deep. His buckskin clothing bellied full of water after a while, and it dragged him down too. He had to work like fury to keep his nose above water. He puffed. His gray hair lay sleek over his head and neck. He nosed along like an old gray-whiskered muskrat.
Augie Neill and Jim Anderson, swimming like slim channel catfish, made it. Each caught hold of a rung on the near side of the Rocky Mountains and clambered aboard helped by the eager hands above.
Despite a numb leg and waterlogged buckskins, Hugh turned in the water to see what had happened to Jim Clyman. He couldn’t find him at first. On his third heave up out of the water he saw Jim. The lad was downstream from him and was having trouble staying afloat. His heels were out of the water; his head under. Hit in the head? Hugh lunged up in the water for a better look and at last saw what the trouble was. Jim Clyman had tried to slip his flintlock down inside his shirt along his backbone too. But something had gone wrong. Hugh watched him go somersaulting with the rushing current, heels, head, back, then heels again, all the while trying to get rid of the gun. Then finally Jim Clyman got rid of it and came up for air and started swimming along. Jim was too far along to catch on with the Rocky Mountains so he turned and headed for the Yellowstone Packet down river. Hugh waited until he was sure the lad would make it.
By that time Hugh himself was in danger of missing the Rocky Mountains. He’d waited just long enough for the coffee waters to push him toward the stern of the boat. Hugh let out a mighty bellow. “Throw out a rope, lads. Here I come!”
Augie Neill, leaning over the railing with a dozen other feartight faces, and still gasping from his swim and dripping wet, saw him. “Hugh!”
Hugh volved past, grizzly face and nose and stroking arms awash in the chasing tan surface.
Quickly Augie caught hold of a punting pole and, leaning, reached out as far as he could.
Hugh lunged for the end of the pole; missed it; went under. And going under, felt his rifle slide down his back and into the legging of his one good leg, making both his legs useless.
Hugh gave it one more try. He dug his way to the surface. He clubbed the water with powerful arms. Arrows and balls pelted the water all around him; hit the gray sides of the keelboat above him.
Augie ran down the polers’ walk and, once again, from the extreme stern of the punting pole as far as he could.
This time Hugh made it. He managed to get a good grip on the end of it and hung on with a bulldog’s grimness. Slowly Augie pulled him over to the rungs and then helped him climb up, helped him up over the top into the hold.
“Thankee, lad,” Hugh grunted, as he slid down under the polers’ walk and out of reach of arrow and shot, “thankee, lad. I was almost fishmeat that time, I was. Ye saved me me life. And at a risk too.”
“‘Twas nothin’, Hugh.”
“Ae, but this old hoss wouldn’t have made it to the other boat. Too old. I won’t forget, lad.”
“Ye all right, Hugh?”
“Tolerable. Just ham-shot a little. By a small ball.” Hugh ganted for breath. “The worst was that swim. For an old man it was some, it was.”
“Ye’d best rest now, Hugh.”
Hugh nodded. His tangled gray hair and matted gray beard dripped water. Drops ran down his neck. His floppy buckskins were sopping wet and as viscous as chewed-over fatback. “I’ll rest me a little after we’ve dug out the ball, lad.” Hugh breathed. “Lad, sharpen up me butcher knife on the hone, will you, and we’ll get at it presently.” Gritting his teeth against pain and a faint coming on, Hugh slid down until his head rested on a smelly bundle of beaver plew.
“I’d best get the doc, Hugh,” Augie said. “I wouldn’t trust myself with a butcher knife.”
“Who said ye was to do it? It’s me that will, lad. As soon as I’ve had me that rest.”
“I’d best get the doc, old hoss,” Augie said.
“Aw, let the doc help them that needs it. I ain’t hit bad.”
Hugh looked around after a while. To either side of him, propped up against barrels of gunpowder and stores of food and supplies, sat others who’d been wounded. They were bleeding; they were soaked through and through with dirty Missouri water; and they looked out at the world with bleary fatigue-gray eyes. There was mountain man David McClane, and Willis the Nigger, and pork-eater August Dufrain, and ned-hearted Joseph Monso. They lay staring vacantly at the golden morning sky arching high above them.
Hugh asked suddenly, “Where’s Johnnie?”
“Johnnie who?”
“Johnnie Gardner.”
“He’s dead,” Augie said. “Prayin’ Diah Smith prayed powerful over him, but the Lord took him just the same.”
“I feel mighty queersome,” Hugh murmured. “Is my topknot gone, lad?” And then Hugh slipped away into a faint.
The anchor had been cut and the keelboat Rocky Mountains was drifting downstream past the point of the island, with the Yellowstone Packet just ahead. General Ashley had ordered a regrouping of forces below the mouth of the Grand River.
Old Hugh sat amidships, ball removed and bandaged leg propped up on a pack of prime beaver. A hot sun shone on him. In places his buckskins already felt dry enough to be shingles, had shrunk enough to pinch him over the back and along the thigh of his good leg.
Slow talk rose and fell around him. One of the nearby wounded groaned and moved a trifle and groaned some more.
Presently Hugh heard General Ashley talking to Rose the halfbreed interpreter.
The two of them were standing near the mast, with General Ashley a good head shorter than ugly horse-faced Rose. Pain and shock crimped the general’s blue eyes. The general waved quick hands as his thin trembling lips mouthed the words. “I don’t understand it. I don’t understand it. Grey Eyes specifically promised me yesterday that there’d be peace between us, that he’d forget they’d lost a couple of their men at Fort Kiowa. That extra gunpowder I gave him was supposed to make up for that loss. Even though it was the rival fur company that did the shooting.”
“It did,” Rose grunted, looking at the wounded men. Rose’s dark skin glowed bluish red in the sun.
“What?” General Ashley snapped. “Oh. Yes.” General Ashley’s eyes flicked toward the wounded too. “Yes.” General Ashley looked at the golden sky overhead. “And anyway, what were they doing attacking Fort Kiowa, the fools? What did they expect, the other cheek?”
Rose’s heavy gu
ttural voice came in surges. “Never believe an Indian chief right after he’s just lost some of his men. It’s a disgrace for a chief to lose men, and he’s going to be an ornery cuss until he’s had himself some revenge.” Rose coughed up some Missouri water; spat over the side. “And he’s going to be specially ornery when he loses ‘em over a slave squaw.”
“A what?” General Ashley’s voice rose a little.
“A Sioux squaw. She was a slave of one of his men and she got away.”
“Oho! So that was why they dared tackle Fort Kiowa then.”
“That was why,” Rose grunted, thick lips drawn up in his usual habitual sneer.
“Good Lord.”
“Grey Eyes said they didn’t mean to shoot at the white men at Fort Kiowa. They only wanted the slave squaw back.” Rose’s eyes were evasive. He couldn’t quite look the general in the eye.
“All that fuss over a squaw. A slave squaw at that.” General Ashley stamped around in blue indignity, gold epaulets glistening in the morning sun. General Ashley looked with grief at the wounded men underfoot. “And we had to get the hell shot out of us because of another Sabine woman raped and ravaged. Damn.”
“Grey Eyes said she was a good squaw. Grey Eyes said his brave was very sad he’d lost her, that he had to have her back in his roundhouse to cook and sew for him. He said the white man was wrong to hold her. Bending Reed belonged to him.”
Old Hugh jerked up. What? Bending Reed.
Old Hugh called out. “Gen’ral, did Rose there say her name was Bending Reed?”
General Ashley gave Rose a look. “Was it?”
“Bending Reed,” Rose said, sullen redblack cherry eyes holding Hugh’s for a moment and then sliding off.
Hugh’s gray eyes lighted up with joy. “You say she’s at Fort Kiowa now?”
“That’s what Grey Eyes said.”
“Whaugh! So!” Hugh’s old eyes rolled. “But how in tarnation did she get in with them Rees? When I last saw her she was down on the Platte with the Pawnees. Well I never. That’s some, that is.” Hugh shook his head in amazement. “Well, well. This child is going to be mighty glad to see her again.”
“You know her?” General Ashley asked, inclining his head in friendly manner.
“Know her? By the bull barley, man, yessiree! I womaned up with her for three years when I was a half-slave myself on the Platte. She’s my wife. And there never was a better, white included. She cooked and made clothes for me with never a complaint or a sigh. Whaugh! Well I know how that Ree brave felt losin’ her. She was some, she was. Graybacks or no.”
2
IT WAS the Moon of Cherries Blackening, July. The minute Hugh stepped into her tepee within the gates of Ft. Kiowa, he knew it wasn’t the same Bending Reed. She was a changed squaw somehow.
For one thing, when she first spotted him, she didn’t quick put a hand over her mouth and look at him for a while in dead silence, something the Indians usually did to show they’d been surprised. For another, after a quick flash of blackcherry slant eyes at his bleeding game leg, she refrained from looking at it again, which was most unusual, since always in the past she’d been very attentive to his aches and pains. In the old days let him but scratch a callus and she was not only johnny-on-the-spot with her bag of herb medicines but also with whatever hocuspocus chanting medicine men that were handy. Nor had she spread out the welcome mat, her best buffalo robe, for him to sit on when he came in.
Carrying his rifle, Hugh crab-walked past the small fire of pyramided sticks burning in the center of the tepee and selected a woven-willow lazy-back and threw a musty brown buffalo robe over it and leaned back easy. It was a cool day and the robe felt good.
He tried to sit crosslegged but couldn’t. The bullet-torn thigh still hurt too much.
He got out his pipe, and with careful tamping forefinger filled up and then lit up with a burning fagot from the twig fire.
“Ahhh,” he breathed, puffing deeply on his old comrade pipe, stroking his grizzly beard, “ahh, doggone my skin if this ain’t livin’ again.” He patted Old Bullthrower, his flintlock, at his side and looked across at Bending Reed. “Good ‘bacca and a man’s two best friends right handy.”
He savored the smoke puff by puff, all the while taking in the effects of the tepee with roving musing eyes. Clerk Bonner in the fort had told him how she’d begged him for the tepee. It was an old leather one that her band had once given in trade for gunpowder and it was almost in shreds. But she had taken it and patched it up with a couple of freshly worked buffalo-bull hides and had cut some straight willows for its upright poles. From the dump near the river she’d dug up a couple of old pots and pans. Next she’d made a broom with some bulrushes bound around a stout ash stick. Then she’d gone out and gathered up some herbs and trapped some beaver in Medicine Creek behind Red Butte. Somehow, perhaps by stealing, she’d managed to get her hands on a bladder of pemmican and a bag of dried fruit and a leather sack of dried berries. And last, she piled up some surplus wealth by selling dressed moccasins to the men in the fort.
The tepee was spic-span clean. Not a mouseball in sight—when mice were one of the plagues of the plains. Everything was in its place and everything had its function. A medicine bundle hung over the doorflap, from which came protection against evil spirits. The door itself faced east, from whence came the power of the sun. The base of the tepee made a perfect circle, from which came life magic.
The food and the supplies had their appointed place too. Two jerks of buffalo-cow meat hung from an upright in the rising gray smoke of the fire. Buffalo-bull hide for making moccasin soles also hung toughening in the smoke. The rawhide case of dried fruit and the skin sack of dried berries stood neatly beside a huge shiny iron firepot. A set of old beaver traps well-smeared with beargrease hung from another upright nearby. Four packs of beaver plew stood square against the leather wall of the tepee deep in the back. Farther still in the back, the place of honor in the tepee, spread a bed of aromatic dried sweetgrass covered with a buffalo robe.
All the while that he carefully surveyed the tepee, Old Hugh felt Bending Reed busy trying to ignore him. Her slant eyes glittered in the half-dusk of the tepee. Her redstone face she held impassive.
He wondered what had happened to make her so indifferent to him. Maybe she had changed her mind about the Ree brave and was sorry she’d left him. Or maybe Clerk Bonner had claim to her charms in exchange for the old tepee. Hugh remembered that Clerk Bonner had given him a pair of fish eyes while they talked about her. Or maybe she’d turned against her Old Hugh—White Grizzly, as she’d once called him—just on general female principles, like some women did after a lengthy separation. Some women made a man fight his way back all over again. Or maybe she was mad he’d left her in the soup when he escaped the Pawnees. Well, now, for that she had no right to blame him. Not at all.
“Let’s see, how many years is it since I seen ee, Reed?” Hugh ciphered it off on his fingers. Last year he’d joined General Ashley. The year before he’d keelboated the Mississippi from St. Louis to New Orleans. The year before that he’d hunted for a party out on the Arkansas River. And the year before that he’d escaped the Pawnees. “Four years. Four years.”
Bending Reed moved to the front of the tepee. Afternoon sunlight coming in through the open flap silhouetted her legs and lower body, while light coming from the fire and from the leather smoke-smudged chimney overhead illuminated her bosom and face. Hugh, looking her over with critical eyes, thought her as handsome as ever. She was a little fatter under the chucklychin perhaps. And the pout of her lips had deepened some. And her Siberian-slanted blackcherry eyes seemed set a bit deeper in the redstone flesh over her high cheeks maybe. And her hair sleeked-down with beargrease and hanging in two long braids was not quite so glossy blueblack as in the old days. And her bosom under the white doeskin dress wasn’t quite so bunny-round as before. And her hands had broadened some, and maybe had picked up an extra callus or two. But otherwise she was as good as ever.<
br />
And like always, she had on good leathers. The best. Her dress was a tunic of deerskin which came well down below her knees, almost to her ankles. It had been worked soft with mashed deer brains and had been made white with a special kind of prairie clay. She’d ornamented it with gay figures done in blue and red and white porcupine quills. Long fringes dangled from the seams and hem. Fancy quill work also decked her ankle-high elkskin moccasins. White conch-shell pendants tinkled from her ears. A necklace of soft stones circled her neck.
Hugh nodded. Yessiree, the best, the best.
Bending Reed picked up her round broom of rushes and began sweeping up the dust and grass his dragging leg had shagged in. When she finished, the dirt floor was so clean it looked like flagging made of pale brown stone.
“Reed-that-bends,” Hugh said suddenly in a rough voice meant to be pleasantly gruff, “Reed-that-bends, sit at my feet. Your man, White Grizzly, wishes to have good words with you. Sit.”
Instead, Bending Reed darted for the door. The seashells at the ends of her heavy black braids clinked and bangled.
Hugh blinked. “Ho-ah! What’s got into you, Reed? Why so contrary all of a sudden?”
Bending Reed stared dully at his feet, blackcherry eyes blinking uneasily.
Hugh said, “I suppose if I told ye to run away ye’d sit down instead. Like most contrary squaws. Red or white.”
And amazingly she did sit down. Folding her legs to the right under her dress. At his feet. Head bowed demurely. Bowed so far over he could see in the smoky light how well and how thoroughly she’d rubbed vermilion all along the parting of her black horsetaillike hair.
“By the beard of bull barley, ye are the contrary one today, ain’t ye?”
She shook her head. Her heavy braids rustled on her shoulders.
“Oh, then you’re of a mind to be agreeable maybe?”
Again she shook her head.
“Reed, cut out the peedoodles. I’m back. It’s too bad I was gone so long, yes. But that I couldn’t help. I’m back. That’s it. Talk up like ye used to.”
Lord Grizzly, Second Edition Page 5
