Ride the Moon Down (39 page)

A single rifle shot rang out, a bright jet of orange flame spewing from the muzzle of Henri Rem’s gun.

A cheer erupted the instant those with Henri and Paul could see that the old woman had stopped in her tracks. Slowly her arms came down as she started to stumble forward, a dark patch spreading over her chest. Just as she had the pipe at chin level, Madame Deschamps spilled forward, her open, speechless mouth closing around the end of the pipe. As she collapsed facedown onto the snow,
dead where the bullet caught her, the bloody end of that pipe pierced the back of her throat and tore out the side of her neck.

The instant she spilled onto the bloody snow in that gray light, a cheer rose anew from the Rems and the engagés. Men jubilantly jumped up and down around the cannon as Paul Rem stepped forward a few feet.

He stopped, shook his arm at the dead woman lying halfway between him and the stockade. “There’s the end to that mother of devils!”

New shouts and taunts erupted from the stockade, then a sudden volley that drove the Rems behind their snowdrifts.

“Some still alive!” shouted one of the laborers named Emile Vivie as Gamble scurried up with Bass on his heels.

“Only way is to burn ’em out,” Henri Rem warned.

“I’ll take the torch and some powder,” Paul Rem volunteered.

“Go to the northwest corner, brother,” Henri suggested as he handed Paul three pouches of the black-powder cannon charges and the sputtering torch.

“I go with him too,” Vivie shouted as he followed Paul away from the cannon.

A few futile shots followed them across the snow, but in a matter of moments the two had reached the side of the stockade where Paul handed the torch to Vivie while he ripped open the powder charges and spilled the grains at the base of the wooden pickets. As the sky brightened to presage the dawn, Titus watched the two Frenchmen leap back a few yards when Paul hurled the torch at the bottom of the wall. With a huge gush of flame and smoke the old, dried timbers of the stockade were on fire.

Inside the cabin men shouted in fury, cried out in terror, groaned in their death throes.

With the sun’s coming the wind stirred along the Missouri River valley, goading the flames over those next few electrifying minutes as the noise from the cabin rose to a crescendo, then fell off to silence.

Most of that bombarded stockade had been consumed-by flame by the time Gamble led the Rem faction toward
the smoking walls. Behind them as the sun emerged over the prairie, more than half-a-hundred faces watched from atop the east wall of Fort Union, another sixty-some peering from behind the safety of their lodges in the Assiniboine camp.

Suddenly Scratch heard the sound of running footsteps and a man’s grunts as he fled the burning building, escaping his enemies.

“He’s going for the bastion!” Henri Rem announced.

“I’ll kill him myself!” Emile Vivie boasted.

The young engagé was the first to reach the east bastion of the old Fort William stockade where he called out, “Which one of you do I get to kill this morning, eh?”

“That you, Vivie?” screamed the voice from within.

“Ah, it is you, Francois!” Vivie shouted back at the man cowering inside the bastion. “Baptiste Gardepie should have killed you the day he killed your father!”

“Hah!” he bellowed with mad laughter. “I got to see the eyes of Jacques Rem when I ran my knife through his guts. I killed him for my father!”

“Y-you killed Jacques?”

“Out! His blood is still on my hands, Vivie!”

“Arrrghgh!” Emile growled, whirling about to search for a narrow opening between the pickets through which he could shove his rifle.

But inside, the murderous Francois Deschamps had already discovered just such a tiny gap. The muzzle of his gun was waiting when Vivie stepped up to the wall. As Francois pulled the trigger on his rifle, the force of the ball picked Vivie off the snow, into the air, to land more than six feet away.

As the snow beneath Vivie turned to a brownish slush, his legs thrashed and wisps of steam spiraled from the hot blood rushing from his terrible wound. Then he lay still.

“Merciful God,” Henri prayed there at the wall near the bastion, and made the sign of the cross.

“God demands vengeance this day!” Paul Rem shouted as he whirled, waving at the engagés. “Bring the cannon!”

A handful of fort employees finally managed to musele
the fieldpiece across the crusty snow into position, aiming it at the bastion where Francois kept up some pitiful gunfire until his gun fell quiet.

“The bastard’s out of ball or powder,” Bass announced.

“No matter—he must die with the rest!” Henri growled.

At that moment Paul Rem touched the short fuse which sparked, sputtering its way down the touchhole an instant before the cannon leaped back, belching with a smoky roar. The ball tore through the side of the bastion with a clatter of old timbers and river rock, then a horrifying shriek from Francois Deschamps.

Then a hush fell.

The others stood around the Rem brothers for a few moments as the cannon’s roar faded in the dawn. Then Henri started for the bastion. Paul was right behind him.

In little time they were dragging the mangled body from the wreckage of the bastion, smearing the trampled snow with the dead man’s blood seeping from a dozen wounds. Around the corner of the stockade they pulled the body until they were within feet of the leaping flares busily consuming the cabins. As Henri grabbed the dead man’s arms, Paul seized Francois’s ankles—both of them heaving the body into the crackling flames.

“Now bring that old she-bitch over here!” Henri Rem demanded, his voice shrill with retribution and blood-lust.

Madame Deschamps was the last of her family the victors consigned to the flames that shockingly cold, clear dawn coming out of the east red as a butchered buffalo.

“That makes nine of ’em,” Levi announced in a harsh whisper as he stood beside Bass, watching the others dance and twirl, hearing them sing and shout their utter joy. “Let the devil do as he pleases with ’em now!”

Sensing that corona of warmth washing over him from the rising flames, Scratch turned to gaze at the eastern walls of Fort Union, thankful he did not find his wife’s face among those watching this funeral pyre.

But despite those waves of heat, Bass shuddered with the subzero chill, staring at the charred bodies as they were consumed.

“Revenge,” he told Levi, “be the cup a man best drinks cold.”

It brought some rest to a place inside her heart to return to her people. Two summers had passed while Waits-by-the-Water had been away, and a winter spent in that southern land of the Arapaho.

Days ago she and her husband had turned south from the white man’s fort at the mouth of the Yellowstone. It had not been a happy time for her there. So many half-breeds and Assiniboine, she never felt welcome. Better that a Crow woman stay safe inside the walls of that fort until Ti-tuzz could take them back across the Missouri and ride for Absaroka.

As they began their journey south, the weather turned mild for many days, but winter had resumed its fury by the time they found the village sprawled among the cottonwoods towering on a neck of land along the southern bank of the Yellowstone.

“It was near this place where we first talked,” she said as they halted to gaze at the welcome sight of those brown lodges.

Drawing in a long breath of the cold air scented with wood smoke and the fresh dung of hundreds of ponies, he
looked about at the surrounding river bluffs—then gazed at her and smiled. “Yes. I remember. Now I want us to be even happier this winter than we were when we realized we needed each other.”

Over their seasons together Waits had grown even more patient with how slow he sometimes was to put his thoughts together in her tongue. She knew Magpie would have it easier than either of her parents, growing up with both languages spoken to her as they were.

Looking up, she found him staring at her still, his eyes twinkling. Then she realized he was watching her hand. She had been rubbing her huge belly unconsciously, thinking of this child to come.

“It will be born this winter, yes?” he asked.

With a nod she answered, “I think sometime in the next moon, perhaps.”

Urging his pony over beside hers, Bass tore off a blanket mitten and stuffed his bare hand beneath her buffalo robe, laying it upon that swollen belly beneath her capote. “You are so big—how many little calves do you have in there?”

She giggled. “I think there is only one, but it will be a big child.”

“A boy?” and his eyes sparkled.

“Perhaps,” she said. “If it is a boy, you will not forget your daughter?”

Bass twisted round to gaze back at the girl who sat behind him, clinging to his elk-hide coat. Patting the child’s leg beneath that half robe he had wrapped securely around her, he said, “This little one? I could never forget what she means to me! Tell me, daughter: by spring when the snows melt, will you be ready to learn to ride on your own?”

“Ride a pony by myself?” she asked in Crow.

“Yes,” he answered her in English, the way many of their conversations took place: mixing the two tongues together while they conversed, as if it were as natural as could be. “I think you will be old enough to learn, Magpie.”

“How old was my mother?” she asked in Crow.

Bass turned to look at Waits. “When did you have your first lesson on a pony by yourself?”

“My father …” Then Waits suddenly felt the sharp ball of sadness spring to life again in the middle of her chest. Of an instant her eyes were welling up. Waits barely got the words out of her mouth. “He taught me when I was almost f-five summers.”

“Should we come here to be with your people, to see your family?”

She nodded and wiped the tears from her cheek, trying bravely to smile. “It hurt when I remembered my father.” And she looked at Magpie sitting behind her father. “Remembered how he held me on his lap, how he smelled when he hugged me … I never want Magpie to forget anything about her father.”

“What?” he protested in English with a grin. “I’m not going anywhere! I don’t plan to die for a long, long time!”

But she knew a man never did.

It always came suddenly, unexpectedly—as it had with her father’s death in Blackfoot country. And Ti-tuzz could have died last spring when those Arapaho attacked him. Waits had learned about that when she’d discovered the two scalps and the weapons hidden among some green pelts he’d brought back to their camp one cold spring day. And he could easily have been killed when the Frenchmen and half-breeds had fought outside the big fort at the mouth of the Yellowstone.

How many times would she say good-bye to him before she could finally accept that he might not return one day?

Waits looked into his face as he laid his hand on her arm.

He said, “It is good to come back to your people.”

“I am happy to see my mother.”

“My heart is glad to bring you back here,” he said, looping his arm around Magpie to pull the small girl over his hip and into his lap where she quickly gripped on to the round pommel with her tiny blanket mittens.

“Let me have the reins, popo?”

“Here,” and he laid them inside those tiny mittens.
Then he turned to Waits, saying, “My family is very far away. It has been a long, long time since I saw them—when I was a very young man and ran away from them. I do not think my father and mother are still alive. Maybe my brothers, or sister, still live. But that family did not want me to belong to them very much, so I left them long ago. Now you have become my family.”

“Me too, popo?” the girl asked in his tongue, pushing back against him.

“Yes, Magpie. You, and even your little brother too.”

“My little brother? Where is little brother?” she asked as she peered on one side of the horse, then the other.

“Perhaps your little brother who is hiding in your mother’s belly will come out soon so you can play,” he told Magpie.

“When, Mother?”

Waits-by-the-Water looked at him with mock disapproval and scolded, “See what you have started, husband? Now she thinks I am carrying her playmate inside me!”

“It will be good to give Magpie a little brother,” he told her as they put their animals in motion once more. “To have a family that loves one another is a good thing. I cannot remember having much of that. My mother worked hard, cooked for us and sewed our clothes. And my father worked very hard too, brought us food, kept us warm and dry—but I do not remember being touched by them, do not remember being held.” He squeezed Magpie there at the end of his words as his voice cracked.

“It is important that a child is held and touched, especially by its father,” Waits declared.

His eyes brimmed with moisture. “I know you must miss He-Who-Is-Gone very much. I can never take his place in your heart, nor will I try, but—I never want you to forget that I will protect you, provide for you, watch over you till the end of my days, woman. That is my promise.”

She felt stunned, sensing how his words made her heart pound faster in surprise as she turned to look at him. “Ti-tuzz, those are words I never knew a man would say to a woman.”