“He brung a goddamned army!” Jim growled.
Clamping a hand on his son’s bare shoulder, Titus asked, “They know you come to tell us?”
Flea shook his head. For a moment he sought the American for it, then broke into Crow. “I was in the trees with Jackrabbit. We heard horses coming. Everyone heard that many horses coming. Men with many guns. Guns here,” and he pantomimed stuffing his hand in his belt like a pistol. “And here,” he gestured for another pistol stuffed in the belt. “Lots of long weapons too.” Flea quickly raised an imaginary rifle to his shoulder.
Bridger’s eyes were wide and lit with flame as he lunged closer to Flea. “The women, the young’uns—they all right?”
Glancing quickly at his father, Flea looked at the trader and said, “Hickerman no hurt womens and youngs.”
“What’d he do with ’em?” Jim demanded as he gripped both of Flea’s broad shoulders.
“Put all in your lodge.”
“All of ’em?” Titus asked.
Flea nodded.
“How’d you get away?” Bridger inquired.
“I send Jackrabbit back to fort,” he explained. “Said to him: tell mama—tell her I go for you men folk. Be sure to tell her in Apsaluuke, brother. No word in American talk, I told him. Jackrabbit went slow from the trees to fort gate. Hickerman’s riders come out and jump around Jackrabbit, pulled him off horse, throwed him through gate … last thing I see—they pushed him on ground again.”
Titus felt his gorge rising. Those goddamned bastards abusing and muscling around a ten-year-old boy! Damn, but he’d hated bullies all his life—be it men like Silas Cooper or Phineas Hargrove, Bill Hickman or even Brigham Young his own saintly self.
Licking his lips in anger at the taste of bile drenching the back of his throat, Titus asked, “How you come from the fort?”
“Down the creek,” he answered in Crow. “These gun riders don’t see me for the trees and the brush. When they pulled Jackrabbit off his pony and into the fort, they didn’t see me in trees.”
“Did you watch Jackrabbit get to the cabin with the women and young’uns?”
“No,” Flea admitted. “Hickerman pulled Jackrabbit off ground by his hair at the gate, then I saw them no more. I led my pony to the water, got on and stayed in the creek till no eyes could see me from the fort.”
“Good,” Bass said. He turned to Bridger, his tone grave. “You an’ me go in there—don’t think we can count on doin’ any good agin’ more’n a hunnert fifty of Hickman’s gunners.”
“I don’t know what he’s fixin’ on doin’—come to take my post,” Jim groaned, desperation thick in his voice. “Or why he’s done it.” Then his eyes lit with hope and he said, “Maybeso you an’ me ought’n head to the ferry and get the rest o’ the fellas up at the Green.”
“Seven of ’em is all we could scrape together, Gabe,” Scratch declared. “That don’t make for good odds, even if we’re goin’ up agin’ bad-shot Marmons.”
Bridger snatched hold of the front of Bass’s shirt. “What the hell we gonna do? They got our women! Our young’uns too!”
Gently taking hold of Bridger’s shoulders, Titus said, “I dunno, Gabe. I ain’t never stared somethin’ like this in the eye, somethin’ where I had … no way out of it.”
Slowly, the trader released Scratch’s shirt. “Awright. How we gonna find out what Hickman wants and get our families out of there … ’thout gettin’ ourselves killed?”
“Only thing we can do is wait him out for a day or so—”
“Wait? They got our families in there!” Jim protested. “What’d you do if’n it were Injuns took hold of your woman an’ young’uns?”
“The Blackfoot done that to me once’t,” Titus reminded.
“You went after ’em too. Back when Waits got the pox and her brother was kill’t freein’ her from Bug’s boys with you.”
“Then you know there’s nothin’ gonna stop me from goin’ after Hickman once them Marmons light out for the Salt Lake with our families,” Titus vowed.
“We just sit?”
“No,” and he was struck with an idea. “We got Flea here. He looks ’bout as much a Injun as them Marmons ever see’d.”
“Flea?” Bridger echoed.
Scratch turned to his eldest boy. “Son, I want you to ride in there like you come to do some tradin’—”
“He ain’t got nothin’ to trade!” Bridger interrupted.
“Shit,” Titus grumped. “Awright. You just come ridin’ in there to have yourself a gander at all the shiny geegaws the trader got for sale. You unnerstand?”
Flea nodded. “No American talk?”
“Not one word, ’cept to say Bridger, an’ maybe the word trade” Titus explained. “That way them Marmons won’t know you unnerstand much American.”
Jim stepped up the youngster. “Can you do this?”
Unflinchingly, he answered in his harshest American, “I can damn well do.”
“This gonna be just ’bout the most important thing you ever done for your mother,” Scratch declared. “For your friends too.”
Flea looked his father in the eye steadily as he said in Crow, “I am a man now, Father. There are many ways for a warrior to fight to protect the ones he loves. Sometimes a man doesn’t have to raise a weapon to defend his family. Now is the time to show you I am a man.”
That declaration brought tears to the old man’s eyes. He blinked and swiped at his cheeks, then laid his arm around his tall son’s shoulders and brought the young man against him in a tight embrace.
When he took a step back and looked at Flea, Scratch said, “I-I didn’t realize how much you’d growed, son. Jupiter’s fire, if you ain’t shot up taller’n me in the last year or so. Yes, you’re a man by anyone’s ’count—an’ that makes your pa real proud.”
Bridger held out his arm and clasped wrists with the youngster. Then Flea snatched up the long buffalo-hair rein, a handful of mane, and leaped onto the pony’s bare back.
Titus stepped up, laying his hand on the lad’s bare knee, and asked, “You know them rocks way upstream what look like a mountain lion’s head?”
Flea nodded.
“That’s where you’ll find us when you got some news,” Scratch concluded.
In Crow, the youngster said, “I hope to rejoin you by sunset.” Then he spun his pony around and kicked it in the flanks to set off at a lope.
“What’d he say there at the last?” Bridger asked.
Bass watched the young man’s back until rider and pony disappeared around a brushy bend in the stream. “Said he’d come to us by sundown.”
Gazing at the sun blazing high at midsky for a moment, Jim growled, “Sundown. Damn, hot as it is right now, I’ll lay it’s gonna get cold for our old bones afore sunup tomorrow.”
“C’mon, Gabe. No sense thinkin’ ’bout what’s gonna be hard of it,” he cheered. “That Hickman’s got blood in his eye so he’s bound to put out searchers now that he ain’t found Jim Bridger sittin’ round home.”
“I s’pose you’re right,” and Jim yanked at the knot tying his horse to a willow limb.
Scratch swung into the saddle and stuffed his moccasins inside the big cottonwood stirrups. “We better scat into the hills afore Brigham Young’s bully-boys come beatin’ these bushes so they can get their hands on you.”
Which is exactly what the Danite posse did.
But those noisy Mormons didn’t search upstream far enough to get anywhere close to where Bridger and Bass lay in hiding, waiting for Flea to bring them some news as to who these interlopers were and what they wanted. Instead, two different groups of riders were spotted heading down one side of Black’s Fork, busting the brush for their wanted man, then crossing the creek to turn about for the fort by riding down the other side of the stream. The sun had just set behind them, but the sky was still radiant with an orangehued summer light when Titus spotted the lone horseman moving down from the hills through a narrow coulee, hugging the willow.