Sweete helped the youngsters quickly gather up the trade goods, then Titus said, “Awright—let’s get outta this pigs’ hole. You bring up the rear, Shadrach. Put them young’uns atween us. Stay close, stay real close to me.”
His chin raised to the sky, Bordeau whimpered, “Wh-where you going with me?”
“To that gate. Shad, keep your eyes moving. You too, Flea. Watch the shadows—sing out if somethin’ moves. Watch those shadows behind us.”
Inside the tippling house arose a sudden clamor of voices, the scraping and clatter of wooden furniture. He glanced back over his shoulder, saw shadows flit the window, figures moving inside.
“Flea, wan’cha keep an eye on that door back there, son.”
When they finally reached the interior gate Titus ordered, “Open it.”
Bordeau slid back the iron bolt through its hasp with a grating rasp, dragged back one side of the gate, then took a step to the side. All through it Scratch never removed the pistol from under his chin.
His eyes grown hard once more, Bordeau hissed, “Now go.”
“Oh, no. We ain’t saying adieu, mon-sur. You’re gonna get us back to our camp.”
“You keeping him?” Shad said. “He’s a li’l booshway—worth something to the company. We can’t take him outta here, Scratch.”
“Reason I’ll take ’im is for what he is worth to ’em,” Titus replied, shoving Bordeau through the open gate.
“Non, non! Please, monsieur—”
“Stay close to me, Magpie. Don’t you see, Shad—we leave this bastard here, we couldn’t make a run for it fast enough afore the rest’d be down at our camp, shooting up the women and young’ uns.”
Breathlessly frightened, Bordeau asked, “You let me go at your camp, oui?”
“Likely I ain’t gonna let you go till I know they ain’t follering us, mon-sur.”
As they stopped for a moment just inside the outer set of gates and peered into the darkness, Bordeau pleaded, “Your friend said it true—you can’t take me out of here! I am important to my employers—”
“You don’t shut up, I’ll shoot you in the foot and make it hard for you to hobble back to your goddamned fort when I’m done with you miles from here.”
“W-walk? Miles?”
“I sure as hell ain’t gonna let you ride back here on one of my horses!”
He started to struggle against the old trapper. “You can’t!”
But Bass shoved the muzzle of the second pistol into the small of Bordeau’s back.
“Maybe you’re right, mon-sur,” he growled as he shoved the trader toward the gentle slope that would take them down into the cottonwood bottoms. “Maybe I just ought’n gut you right here an’ now, then go back in there an’ finish off that mouthy one I started cuttin’ on. No matter what happens to me—we just finish off all you sonsabitches right now for what you was gonna let them others do with my daughter.”
“Les filles … the girls,” and he paused a moment, “Injeean girls, they come with the tribes and maybe one of my mens, he takes a shine to one. He can buy her from her father—”
“No good, lazy bastards, sellin’ off their own blood kin,” he snarled. Jabbing the second pistol into Bordeau’s kidney, Titus said, “I ain’t the sort of nigger to trade my daughter to no stiff-necked parley-voo what ruin’t the hull goddamned beaver trade, Bordeau.”
“This night,” the Frenchman whispered, “the men think maybe to have some fun with you, is all.”
“Naw, this ain’t no fun. Dead serious to me: takin’ a man’s family—you an’ your weasel friends thinkin’ they was gonna use up my daughter, tradin’ her off from man to man like you fort loafers do down here.”
“Please, we make a big mistake!” Bordeau pleaded as they reached the cottonwood and he spotted the beckoning glow of the firelight inside the small lodge. “Cannot we be friends and you go your way?”
“More I think about it, the more this whole shebang sours my milk, Shad.”
“What’s that, Scratch?”
“You heard it: these bastards figgerin’ I’d sell off my own kin to ’em.”
Thirty yards ahead, a figure emerged from the lodge, a shadow taking shape as the sky began to mist.
“Ain’t that what the Injuns do?” Sweete suggested. “I s’pose I bought Shell Woman from her family—”
“She weren’t no li’l girl!” he snapped.
Shad swallowed, suddenly contrite. “Awright. Ain’t the same thing, not the same at all.”
“No it ain’t,” he growled. “Flea—g’won ahead. Tell your mother start packin’ in a hurry.”
“We go from here?” Magpie asked.
“Far away from here as we can,” Titus said. “Seems what trouble run us out of Taos been doggin’ us north. You go on with your brother. Help your mother and Shell Woman pack for the trail.”
“Scratch, I … I didn’t mean nothin’ by what I said just now,” the tall man apologized. “’Bout it bein’ what a man does with Injuns.”
“You got a daughter of your own gonna grow up one of these days, Shadrach.”
Sweete nodded as he turned his head this way and that, peering into the darkness. “I thought of that too. Thought how I’d feel if’n she was Magpie.”
“Maybeso it’s that way with most Injuns: sell off their daughters to the nigger can put up the biggest cache of goods,” Bass said as he jerked Bordeau to a halt near the lodge, where excited voices murmured and noises clattered.
“I s’pose white folk do it back east too, most times,” Shadrach observed. “Folks fix up a marryin’ for their daughters to the richest feller they can.”
“I ain’t back east, Shadrach. Left that all behind a hull lifetime ago,” he said, his voice almost a hush now. “An’ I ain’t like no Injun neither. Never gonna sell Magpie off for a stack of trade goods.”
“So where do fellas like us go, Scratch?” he asked. “Now that this country ain’t the same as it was an’ ever’thing’s changed on us?”
“We keep running till we get to the next place, Shadrach,” he admitted. “We can give up to their kind and give in to all the ruin they’re bringin’ to the mountains … or we keep runnin’ till we drop in our tracks. Man does one or the other. Let the ruin eat ’im up alive, or he does his best to stay one jump ahead.”
Much to Bass’s surprise, none of the French engagés showed up in the cottonwood bottoms to spoil their escape.
Between the two women and Magpie, the bedding was tied up and the lodge torn down, all of it thrown on the travois and packhorses while Flea untied the dogs and helped Shadrach get Bordeau trussed up for his ride with a length of hemp rope. It wasn’t until they were mounted and on their way out of the valley that Waits-by-the-Water finally began to sob, quietly.
“No bad come to her,” Titus reassured in English.
Yet she said in Crow, “This time. What of the next? Will you be there? Will there be too many for you?”
“She’s a pretty girl,” he whispered, trying to explain it. “Bees will always flit around the honey.”
With a long, stern glare at her husband, Waits said, “You don’t understand. Other white men, they are not like you. Not like our friend Sweete. The other pale eyes, they will always buy what they can, and steal everything else.”
Wagging his head, Titus argued in her tongue, “It isn’t just white men. For generations and generations, your people raided for ponies and scalps, taking women and children too. It isn’t only white men who steal what they want.”
She sighed, her eyes getting even more sad. “Then where will we go to protect our daughter until she chooses a man of her own—the way I chose you, Pote Ani?”