This was his hair.
Those brown, wavy locks more than a foot long clinging to that shriveled circle of a topknot were crudely stitched to the front of that belt bag. Like some of the fringe, many strands of the hair had been gathered and decorated with tarnished brass beads.
He shoved aside two strands of animal sinew loosely stitching the scalp to the bag and slipped a single finger beneath the dried flesh. It was hardened to a rawhide stiffness with age. Nothing much left of his topknot now but this coup of a dead warrior.
He gently caressed those long waves of brown hair lying across his palm. This scalp had nearly cost him his life. And it might well have saved his life too.
So Bass stared at the dead man for a long time before he flipped the body over with his foot. With the warrior resting on his stomach, Scratch carefully laid the long fringed bag across the dusty small of the bare back. He squatted beside the Indian’s shoulder, picking up that big knife he had wrestled off the second warrior. Looping his fingers through the long black hair, Scratch tugged back on the head, laying the big blade against the bare flesh of the forehead an inch below the hairline.
There his hand froze a matter of heartbeats, his breath coming quicker.
Suddenly he decided to lay the Indian’s knife aside, placing it atop the buckskin bag. Instead, Titus pulled the head back again and slipped his old skinning knife from its scabbard at the back of his belt.
Only fitting, he figured.
What he clutched in his hand was the only knife left him, back when this warrior took nearly everything from him. Its curved skinning blade had been sharpened so much by ol’ Gut Washburn that the metal had gradually been worn down over years of use until it was no more than an inch in width.
Laying his right index finger along the top flat of the blade, Bass again pressed the sharpened edge on the warrior’s brow. Slicing through that thin layer of flesh, he quickly dragged the old skinning knife back toward the temple, right on through the middle of the right ear, and after tugging aside the warrior’s long hair, Bass finished that first cut just below the hairline at the nape of the neck. Yanking the long hair aside, he pulled the head over so it rested on the right cheek. Again he dragged the knife from the brow, down across the middle of the left ear, and on back to the incision he had left at the base of the skull.
This would be a full scalp, complete with the tops of his dead enemy’s ears. No mere topknot as this warrior had taken from him. This day was clearly the doing of strong medicine.
Bracing his knee at the back of the Arapaho’s neck, Bass gathered the hair in both hands and started pulling from the brow back. Slowly, the scalp began to give way, peeling from the skull with a crickling sound as it tore loose, tops of the ears and all, until there wasn’t much flesh left on the bloody cranium—nothing much left on the dead man’s head at all.
Standing again, Scratch stared down at the scalp hanging limp from his hand, then gazed at his own scalp sewn to that belt bag while the warrior’s dripped the last of its blood and sticky gore across the toes of his moccasins. With the flush of a sudden impulse he began to whirl the fresh scalp vigorously round and round at the end of his arm, slinging off the last of the thick fluid and blood from the drying flesh.
Remembering how he had awakened in that thick, hot fog. How he had watched the Indian scraping his scalp with the edge of his knife through the blood oozing into his eyes.
There and then Bass knelt beside the Arapaho’s body, just as the warrior had knelt beside him on that river bank so long ago. Laying the whole scalp, flesh side up, atop one of his thighs, Titus began to carefully drag the side of the skinning knife’s sharp blade back and forth across the flesh, scraping it clean the way he fleshed an animal’s hide.
Twilight continued to deepen as he worked at his task, the air cooling until he finally stood again, turned, and looked in the direction where he had left the second Arapaho.
Unable to see the warrior, Bass narrowed his eyes, fingers tightening on the scalp. And he listened.
The son of a bitch was trying to crawl away through the grass, slipping into the buckbrush bordering the creek. Quiet as the Injun was, Bass still heard him. Swapping the scalp to his left hand, taking the knife into his right, Titus moved along the creekbank, finding the warrior’s horse grazing on the far side of some bramble. Then he saw him.
“You fixing to make it to your pony?”
In the middle of pushing himself across the grass, the warrior jerked his head around, discovering the trapper coming up behind him. His eyes instantly filled with a dangerous mix of fear and hatred, the Arapaho tried to lunge forward in escape, grunting in pain as he dragged his broken ribs across the ground.
“Come back here, nigger,” Bass growled, slamming his moccasin down on the warrior’s ankle.
Clearly in agony, the Arapaho attempted to twist back far enough to grab hold of the trapper’s foot, to swat it off his leg. Amused at that effort, Titus cocked his foot back and slammed it under the Indian’s jaw. The warrior crumpled back on the grass, groaning low as blood oozed from his lips.
“Easy, now—I ain’t gonna kill you,” Titus said quietly as he knelt, realizing how much it hurt where the ax had smacked his shoulder minutes ago. “That’d be too damned easy, don’t you see?”
He leaned down and rolled the warrior onto his back. The eyes fluttered a little, as if the man as struggling to stay conscious.
“I wan’cha alive, you red bastard. Just enough alive so you can earn your miserable life back.”
With that he raised his right foot into the air, momentarily suspending it directly over the warrior’s lower leg, then slammed the foot down with savage force halfway between knee and ankle, shattering both bones.
The sudden, excruciating pain wrenched the warrior off the ground in an arch of agony—screeching. Half-coagulated blood spewed from his mouth as he sputtered some garbled oaths, whimpering in pain and spitting out pieces of his teeth and blood to clear his mouth.
“Good,” Scratch muttered as he knelt beside the warrior’s head. “I want you wide-awake for what comes next.”
As the Arapaho writhed, Bass held the scalp inches above his face and shoved the bloody skinning knife right under the man’s nose—pressing up, up, up as crimson drops beaded along the blade. The warrior quickly stopped writhing.
“That’s better,” he said as he got to his feet. “Now you’re coming with me.”
Laying the skinning knife in his left hand with the scalp, Bass filled his right with the warrior’s hair, dragging up the man’s head and slowly bringing the body around in a wide circle to begin slowly, foot by foot, tugging the Arapaho’s deadweight through the grass. Towing him back toward the dead scalper.
Each time he tugged the warrior forward with a lunge, the Indian grunted low in his throat, a guttural sound of deep pain that always ended with a quiet, shrill whimper. Then Bass would drag him another three or four feet through the tangle of grass, the man’s head suspended by his long hair, and he would groan in pain again. On and on, until they crossed better than sixty feet of creekbank to stop at the outflung arm of the dead warrior.
“This here’s the son of a bitch what scalped me,” Scratch told him, releasing the man’s hair.
Then he knelt where the wounded warrior could watch his pantomime of removing the Indian’s scalp. That done, Bass reached up and took the blue bandanna from his head, turning slightly to point to his own bare skull—tapping the bare bone to be certain the wounded man understood. Next he pointed his gnarled finger to that brown hair stitched to the dead warrior’s belt bag. Back to his skull his finger went a second time, then once more to the bag. Over and over that blood-crusted finger moved slowly as he continued to gaze straight into the Arapaho’s hate-filled eyes.