Wind Walker

by Terry C. Johnston

  Amanda was already reaching for his empty rifle, passing him the loaded gun. “That’s one of ’em, Pa.”

  “You any good with one of these?”

  She shook her head. “Roman, he taught me how to load, and shoot too. But, I didn’t hit much when we went hunting. Everything was so far away I never did any good—”

  “This time, things gonna be much closer, Amanda—”

  A loud voice interrupted him, “Did he get Ohlman?”

  Another voice, closer still, shouted in reply, “Dropped ’im. Ohlman’s out of it.”

  “All right, Corrett, you an’ Jenks work in on him.”

  “Remember you promised,” a new voice was raised, “promised I could kill ’im.”

  “That’s right, Jenks—you get to do the honors this time since you messed things up so bad for Hargrove before.”

  “Jenks?” Scratch hollered. “You the one I beat like a half-growed alley cat a few nights back?”

  “Goddamn you, old man!” the voice shrieked in fury.

  “I’m here for you, Jenks,” he needled the young bully. “Just waiting for you, boy. You an’ me here now. So you even the score with me … since these other niggers saw how bad I whupped you—”

  A ball splattered against the rocks.

  “Jenks!” the leader’s voice shouted. “Don’t be a damn fool like that!”

  “Yeah, Jenks,” Titus prodded as he watched Amanda pour priming powder into the pan. “Don’t be doin’ anything stupid like that again!”

  “You hear that?” she asked in a rough whisper.

  “Yeah.”

  Another one of them was coming. This time from the north side of their rocks, where they were more vulnerable. He waited, and waited, listening carefully each time the angry voices paused. Listening for the sounds of the man’s approach. Then the voices fell silent. And he heard the sound of them coming from the south too. Three of them now. Two behind the rocks, one in front.

  “Amanda, you just might have to show me you can hit something up close here real soon.”

  She swallowed hard, her mouth firm and determined though doubt showed in her reddened eyes, and nodded once.

  “Gimme that pistol you loaded.”

  Passing him the second pistol, Amanda leaned back against the rock and clenched her eyes shut.

  “Just like I told you when Lucas was passin’, this here’s come a time when you gotta be strong. Take a deep breath an’ hold on the target. You’re gonna be strong for me, ain’cha?”

  Her eyes popped open. “Y-yes, Pa.”

  “Get ready for the third one behind us, that way. I’m takin’ on the other two.”

  He popped up with that rifle, afraid he didn’t give himself enough time to aim before he snapped off the shot. The ball went wild as the two men ducked aside, then immediately got their feet under them and started running at a full gallop for the rocks. Bass let the rifle slip out of his grip as he heard her gun roar behind him.

  “You hit ’im?” he asked as he slapped the pistol into his right hand.

  “I-I dunno,” she whimpered. “I don’t see him!”

  Bass double-handed the pistol, held for a breath, and pulled the trigger as the man zigged through the brush. The ball caught him in the leg, spun him around a half turn as he flopped to the ground. But the second man kept coming at a crouch through the sage. With no time to reload, he’d have to use the only weapon they had loaded.

  “Pa!” she shrieked as he was turning in a crouch to scoop up the pistol.

  He saw him. The fourth attacker. Side of his belly was bloody, but he was back on his feet and still coming, that rifle held low in his hands, lunging toward them from the north side of the rocks. And the one who looked like Benjamin—advancing on horseback at a lope from the south.

  “Reload me, Amanda!”

  “Go on an’ get ’em, Jenks!” the horseman yelled. “They ain’t got a loaded gun between ’em now!”

  Back and forth he looked, then decided on Jenks. Closer than Benjamin. Bass swallowed down the burning pain in his hip, setting the butt of the pistol on top of the rocks. Hunching up behind the weapon, he aimed it right as Jenks brought up the muzzle of his rifle and fired an instant before Bass’s ball slammed into the bully’s chest, just below the throat.

  Titus was sinking to the ground and dragging the pouch toward him, sensing in the pit of him that one of the bastards would get him now. He didn’t want her to see it—lose a son, then her father too.

  “Now you’re mine, old man!” promised that disembodied voice of the horseman.

  Plug came out of the powder horn, and he spilled the black grains down the muzzle of the pistol.

  The hoofbeats slowed, then stopped. Then there were footsteps as the voice came at him again. “Hargrove wants you real bad—had everything going his way till you came in the picture.”

  Desperation overtook him as his fingers scrambled for a ball from his pouch. Pushing it into the muzzle with his thumb, he yanked out the ramrod and drove it home just as another voice yelled.

  “Outta the way!”

  Whirling with the pistol, he found the wounded man standing just outside the rocks, his rifle wavering as he growled at Amanda. Something in the bully’s desperate eyes told Bass he was going to shoot anyway—

  But Titus fired his pistol instead, sending ball and that short ramrod both toward the target.

  “That means you’re empty now, old man!”

  He spun around with the empty weapon, realizing Benjamin was right. Dead right. Shifting the pistol to his left hand, Titus reached at the small of his back for a knife.

  With a wicked and broadening smile, Benjamin stopped, as if enjoying this moment. When the bully brought the rifle to his shoulder and took aim at Titus down the long barrel, he laughed and said, “Looks like you just run outta chances—”

  With the rest of his words swallowed by a sudden gunshot that made Titus flinch in surprise.

  NINETEEN

  The sun blazed down hot as a new blister now that it had ducked below the wide brim of his old felt hat.

  Late afternoon and it was beginning to feel as if Shadrach had been dragging him for days already. Titus shifted his head slightly to get the sun out of his eyes and spotted Amanda bouncing on the horse she was riding off to the side of the travois. The whole bottom half of her would be sore by the time they reached the wagon camp, Bass thought with an anguished sigh. He’d never known a white woman who rode back east—the only ones were rich and fancy ladies perched atop their sidesaddle rigs as if they were the queens of all they chanced to survey. Every other gal he could lay a memory on had preferred a buggy, carriage, wagon, or cart to straddling a thousand-pound beast. Poor girl—she got herself into this just so’s she could spend a little more time at her boy’s grave … ended up having her hash pulled out of the fire by Shadrach Sweete.

  Scratch gritted his teeth again as the travois poles chattered over the rough ground and bounced across the stumps of sagebrush Shad did his best to avoid as he led Scratch’s horse northwest through the ancient lava fields, following the rutted tracks of this trail of dreamers and schemers, sojourners and sodbusters making for Oregon country. Near as he could recollect, the last time he was shot as bad as this was back in the early spring of ’34, the doing of Silas Cooper. Bents’ big adobe lodge down on the Arkansas River.

  But over a multitude of seasons, round balls, knife steel, stone and iron arrowtips … they had all profaned his flesh. Yet, he had healed, his body becoming a veritable war map of his adventures, a litany of his hairbreadth escapes from the long reach of death.

  Closing his eyes, he swallowed down the acid taste of gall that came from the continued hammering his hip was taking … and wondered how long he could manage to be so goddamned lucky. Just how much longer would it be before the last of his luck ran out? Scratch felt so damned old, more so now that he was unable to fork a saddle horse, deeply insulted that he need be carried on this bouncing travois. Luck
? That was a laugh! Many were the times that another had stepped in to pull his ass from the fire. Likely there’d come a day when no one would be around to yank the hand of death from Titus Bass’s throat.

  He clenched his eyes shut against the throbbing pain and remembered the others who had saved his hash. At its best, dying would someday be a one-man job no one else could do for him.

  “What the devil you doin’ here, Shadrach?” he had sputtered when the big man clambered down from his perch atop the rocks, from where he had knocked Benjamin down with his big .62-caliber flintlock.

  Sweete knelt to provide his friend a little shade. His eyes grinned. “Come back ’cause I was getting a mite lonely for you.”

  “Ain’t you the honey-tongue sweet talker now,” he had said, shifting position slightly, gritting his teeth.

  “Hurt bad?”

  “Pains me like hell,” he admitted as Amanda settled next to him in a rustle of petticoats.

  “You bleedin’?”

  Titus shook his head and grinned. “Cain’t tell, not rightly—ever’thing’s behint me.”

  “Ball broke any bones?”

  And he shook his head again. “Nothin’ broke but my pride, Shadrach. Bastards shot me where I sit.”

  That got a big smile from Sweete. “Lemme take a look at you.”

  The two of them had rolled him over onto the good hip before Shad took to prodding.

  “Maybeso Amanda could turn her head away” he grumbled, “while you got my bare white ass pointin’ at the sky!”

  “It’s nothing I haven’t seen a thousand times before,” she had scolded.

  Sweete chuckled at that, which had made Titus all the more grumpy.

  “Don’t appear you can fork a saddle, Scratch.”

  He squinted in the bright morning light. “What you got in mind?”

  With a shrug, Sweete stood. “I’ll fetch you some water, then I’ll go see what I can find for to make you a drag.”

  When he again closed his eyes to the jarring pain of each bounce the travois took, Titus remembered how he had waited a heartbeat after that faraway shot, sensing it hadn’t come from the attacker. Then cautiously inched his head up to find Benjamin stopped in his tracks, staring down at the blood starting to gush from the big exit wound in his chest while his knees turned to water. Pasty-faced with shock, he spilled forward, his nose in the sand, fingers twitching as he let out his last explosive breath.

  Back among those rocks Scratch had warned the children to avoid, he had watched the shadow move, then a figure emerge: tall and shaggy, his shoulders almost wide enough to take the span of a hickory ax handle. Shadrach Sweete stepped through the sparse shadow provided by some low brush, emerging into the intense light of midmorning. Reloading as he moved toward his old friend.

  Relief washing over him, Titus had sunk to the ground. “We’re gonna be fine now, Amanda.”

  While he was out fetching some of that sulfurous water for Scratch to wet his tongue, Shad said he had looked over the attackers. “Your aim gettin’ poor?” he asked as he knelt over Bass.

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Had to finish one of ’em off,” Sweete announced. “You didn’t hit ’im clean.”

  But there were four bodies, and that meant four horses. So Shad and Amanda started in cutting up three of the saddles to make short strips of leather they used to lash together a narrow travois, just wide enough for one man—a contraption that bounced even rougher because its poles weren’t wide. After stringing together a network of short crosspieces, they laid on the four saddle blankets, all they had to put under Bass when they were ready to set off. On his one good leg, he had hobbled next to Sweete, out of the cluster of low rocks, reaching the drag, where he stopped and turned, then slowly sank across the travois on that one good hip of his. His side was growing numb by the time the sun reached midsky, dead from the waist down by the time Shad boomed that they were approaching the wagon camp.

  “You got a grand woman,” Sweete declared. “That Waits-by-the-Water is a grand woman.”

  “H-how’s that?” he grunted between teeth-jarring bounces.

  “Here she comes, runnin’ out from the rest.”

  Titus twisted, although he still could not see her—but in moments he heard her moccasins padding on the sandy ground—then she was there in a swirl of sunset light and calico and flapping fringe. Her eyes shiny with worry as she started babbling ih Crow at him, the young ones rustling up on either side of the jostling travois, only a step or two behind their mother. Then he had heard Roman’s voice loud over the others, calling for Amanda. The dogs yip-yipping, aware of the humans’ elation. The three Burwell children cried out for their grandfather. And behind it all lay the sound of voices shouting the news of the attack by Hargrove’s bully-boys, the excitement and commotion beginning its relay through camp. Soon the ground thundered with several hundred feet, all come to hear the story of how this man came to be dragged into camp when they had last seen him standing with his arm around his daughter’s shoulder early that morning, both of them waving good-bye to their families with a promise to catch up before early afternoon.

  And here it was almost nightfall. Supper was on the boil, bedsacks being shaken out, and stock picketed on the good grass before moonrise.

  With help he hoisted himself off the travois and hobbled between the two taller men to the spot Waits-by-the-Water had chosen for their shelter. There Magpie had her mother’s medicines out for the second time in less than a day. The two of them began ministering to that oozy wound that had crusted and bled, crusted and bled repeatedly across the aggravatingly slow hours of that arduous journey to catch up to the train. First Waits cleaned both wounds with hot water that stung like wasps as he gripped the edge of the blankets. She chattered constantly at him, or to Magpie, telling her how lucky Magpie’s father was that he had not been crippled by the ball that had torn in, through, and out his body without striking a bone.

  “Big bones, there—yes,” he had muttered, wincing as she kneaded some softened roots into the holes.

  But he didn’t need convincing to realize just how fortunate he had been. Just from the touch of her hands on the spots where she was working, he knew how an inch this way or that, things could have turned out far different. As it was, the lead ball had entered just behind his hip, missing the femur and the hip cradle too, as it tore its way through the fatty part of his buttock, emerging near the crack of his ass. Which made him laugh again.

  “What is funny?” she asked him in Crow as she pulled the flap of blanket back over his bare, bony rump.

  He quickly glanced about, finding their children hovering near. “I just remembered,” he explained in her tongue so the curious whites clustered nearby would not understand, “back down the trail, I told Shadrach the shooter almost gave me a new asshole.”

  She giggled with Magpie and the boys at the ribald joke, covering her mouth with her fingertips, her eyes twinkling in gratitude that he still possessed his unusual, off-kilter sense of humor. “One asshole is enough for my people,” she said with a tinkle of laughter. “Why would you white men even want a second?”

  For two of the next three days it took the train to reach Fort Hall Scratch was too sore to even consider climbing atop a saddle. Instead, Amanda and Roman insisted he ride inside their wagon, where Burwell had nested on comforters as he healed from his near-fatal beating. It proved a damn sight more comfortable than that travois Shadrach had dragged him back on. Still … there were times in those next half a hundred miles that the springless wagon nearly jarred his back teeth loose as it clattered over a rough patch of ground. But these sojourners kept their heads down and pushed through every tough stretch along the way.

  They had been hardened by the trail, had to have been, Bass thought. Pressing wagons and stock hard now that the next important stop was almost within hailing distance. Farmers were that way, these folks who moved only of a purpose. People who had been born and raised, lived out their
adult lives in the same small fifty-mile area … and now they were venturing to the end of the earth—leaving behind everyone and everything they had ever known. Sad thing was, that sort of person never could savor the journey for itself. No, for these emigrants the journey was merely something to be done, gotten through, conquered. Once in Oregon, they would get on with what came next: the making of a life in a new country, building homes, plowing fields, raising corrals and fences and hayricks. There was a stoic, even pragmatic order to these emigrants; going somewhere had to serve the almighty god of purpose—the gathering of communities, the organizing of schools, the forming of their new governments. Once the trail was behind these farmers, they were on to the next phase of their lives, and the journeying would no longer be a part of them.

  Why, he even had begun to wonder if these ham-handed sodbusters laid their women down in the dark with this same sort of get-it-over-with-and-on-to-the-next-chore brand of single-mindedness. This was simply not the way it was for him, who enjoyed the flesh-to-flesh journey and was not at all concerned with the hurry-up-and-get-there.

  Lying there, his arms bracing him between crates and chests as the wagon jostled and rocked, Scratch hoped he still had enough rough edges that could never be smoothed down by the sands of time. The sheer, sweet wildness of those early days after he had come to this land. Ho, for the Snake! The Wind and Bighorn! The Musselshell and Judith too! Ho, for adventure so wild and forbidden only the half crazed and certifiable came west a’seeking it! Adventure only those insane ones who could live nowhere else would truly savor and did their damnedest to suck dry!

  Was it only that he and the others had been young back then? For the short-horned bulls were always hard to frighten with what they hadn’t yet confronted … hard to frighten when danger and challenge stirred adrenaline into the blood, heady as any trader’s whiskey! Despite the unknown dangers and the unheralded challenges, back in those days they’d all thought they would never grow old, that the beaver would last and last, that these high times would only shine on and on … and on.