He studied her face in the dark for a long time until he answered, “I haven’t sorted that out just yet.”
“I love you, husband. I always will,” she promised. “But, more and more now, I am thinking that it was not a good day when the white man first came among my people.”
“I am wounded by your words—”
“I did not speak their truth to hurt you,” she said. “It is the other men of your white tribe who are evil and leave pain wherever they go. I know you are not like the rest of them. And, I know that this troubles you too.”
“There was a time not so long ago when I understood this world,” he told her as they rode into the dark. “I knew what to make of things. I could tell a friend from those who meant me no goodwill. But now my old life is gone like winter breathsmoke in a hard wind. I do not know people anymore, Indian or white. Perhaps you are right, woman: it is my people who have brought a great change to this land—but your red people have changed as well, changed over the summers since I left the land of the white man behind.”
She nodded and stared ahead into the night. “I know your words. While it is true that your kind brought the first shift in our way of life, many of the red people made wrong choices and became bad like those whites who came among us. Those like you and me are few—people caught between two worlds. I feel a danger growing around us like a thick fog. Where can our kind go to be safe again?”
“I don’t know where we ever will find us a place that will be safe from those who would crush in around this land—stealing what belongs to us, running off with those we love,” he sighed. “Those who are ruining everything we ever knew to be true.”
They had put trouble behind them before, but the trouble they were running from in Taos, or here along the North Platte, was unlike anything Bass had confronted before. This was not something that could be solved by simply escaping. Down to his toes, he was frightened that they would eventually discover they weren’t able to run from what he feared was coming, that the evil of it was growing more vast as they relentlessly put the miles and days behind them.
From that very night, Shadrach and his family took the lead, setting a course up the north bank of the La Ramee River, striking south by west instead of following the well-beaten road along the Platte that made for the Sweetwater and the Southern Pass. They realized they stood a much better chance of escape if they stayed off that hoof-hammered trail used by trappers and trading caravans. Riding south around the Black Hills would prove much harder on the women and the animals, but it would likely deter any halfhearted pursuit.
As twilight put a close to each of those early days of flight, they would stop and build a fire, cook a little meat, and warm some coffee before moving on another handful of miles, where they would picket the horses and shake out their sleeping robes. Without the warmth of a fire, the only illumination shed on that high, barren land was cast down by the stars—if the sky hadn’t clouded up and gone murky with the probability of rain. During their first stop each evening, Shadrach or Scratch would bring Bordeau the scraps after the rest had eaten their fill.
“You didn’t give ’im much,” Sweete commented after their first full night on the trail and the women had boiled some dried strips of elk shot the day before they had reached Fort William.
“Fat as he is, bastard won’t starve afore we set him out on his own,” Titus said without the slightest hint of mercy. “Stiff-necked parley-voo gonna have to use his wits to get back to the Platte. If’n he don’t—well, now … I hope what takes him down makes it slow an’ painful.”
Their third night of flight, low along the fringes of thick timber at the southern end of those low mountains, where they had been following the climb of the La Ramee, they were suddenly caught by a late snowstorm and ended up spending three days and nights around a fire, until the winds died and the sky cleared. Through it all, Shad and Titus spelled each other, one of them awake at all times, watchful for pursuers. By the time the heavens blued again, Scratch had grown certain the engagés from the fort had given up their chase in the face of the storm. Slowly they plodded on out of the hills, following the river until it turned due south. Only then did the men leave the La Ramee and strike out overland, continuing south by west toward that high, broad saddle between the Black Hills and the Medicine Bows where an inviting patch of blueing sky beckoned them onward. Here was a country of sage and cedar, juniper and dwarf pine. Immense patches of snow still cluttered the hillsides and especially the coulees too as the weather moderated and the high sun temporarily turned the desert into a sea of mud that sucked at hoof and moccasin alike.
“Gonna send you back to the teat of your awmighty American Fur Company, Mon-sur Bordeau,” Titus said one midday when they had stopped to water the horses at a small spring nearly hidden by a vast carpet of yellow-green juniper.
The Frenchman brought his dripping face out of the cold water. “Y-you set me free?”
“That’s right,” and Titus started working at the knots around the Frenchman’s wrists.
“I have nothing,” Bordeau whined. “You must give me a horse! A blanket and a gun too. Powder and shot. To stay alive—”
Yanking the rope from the trader’s wrists, Scratch took a step back. “Told you when we left Fort William: You ain’t wuth a red piss, much less one o’ my horses. I need ’em all—so you’re on your feet now.”
“These boots!” he whimpered. “They won’t last in this mud! Wh-what if it snows again!”
Sweete stepped up. “Give ’im a blanket, Scratch.”
He nodded at Shadrach. “My friend says to give you a blanket, keep you from freezing. And, I’ll let you have one of these here belt guns I took off the niggers was running off with my daughter.”
“Non—I need a big gun. Smoothbore! Please!” he cried, lacing his fingers together as he implored the Americans.
“You’ll get this pistol, some ball and powder,” Titus said, remaining untouched by the Frenchman’s plight. He tossed Bordeau a small horn of powder, then scraped out a dozen or so lead balls from his spare pouch. “Just don’t waste ’em all afore you get back to your friends.”
As Shad helped Shell Woman load up the children, Titus turned back to the trader. “You know where you are?”
His face was a gray mask of fear. “You can’t do this—w-we did no harm to your daughter!”
“That’s the only reason I left any of you alive, only reason I’m givin’ you this chance to warn them others,” he said flat and hard. “Now, do you want to know where you are?”
“Oui—yes.”
He bent before the Frenchman’s boot toes and pulled his skinning knife from its scabbard, using it to scratch out a crude map on the damp, flaky ground. “You foller our tracks back, you should make it fine in a week or so.”
“A w-week? Seven days?”
“’Pends how fast you walk in them boots o’ your’n. But you best watch your step when you get to them foothills off yonder where we was hit by the storm. Likely to be a mite confusing for you—all them tracks goin’ round and round the way we did till we finally found a place to make camp out of the storm. That’s when you best use your savvy and figger out the right direction.”
Bordeau was near to crying. “I can’t do this! I never was for the wilderness.”
Bass stood and stared a moment at the man. “The company brung you out to this country and they didn’t teach you nothin’ of how to last out here?”
Wagging his head, Bordeau started to reach out to touch Bass, imploring—but Titus took a step back and wiggled the skinning knife between them. “See this knife? It’s the one I used to cut your friend.”