Ride the Moon Down (70 page)

For a long moment the wind breasted that hilltop before Joe Walker spoke. “I ain’t eager to spill a white man’s blood, Scratch. Since they got them horses on that island, I’m for slipping down there and stealing ’em back so none of us is forced to kill one of them thieving niggers.”

“I’ll go for that,” Meek responded. “Get them horses back without fighting them fellers.”

Walker turned to Bass. “What say you, Scratch?”

A gust of wind howled over the crest of that hill, then whimpered on its way. “I say a thief is a thief, no two ways to it. But … if we can get back them horses without a fight doing it your way, Joe—then I’ll be satisfied.”

“Glad we all agree,” Walker declared.

“Just mark my word, boys,” Bass snagged their attention again, “if one of them thieving niggers raises his gun at me, he’s damn well dead where he stands.”

For some reason a stretch of the Green down below them wasn’t frozen near as solid as the rest. Beneath a thin, riffled layer of icy scum Titus could make out the river’s sluggish current.

From the willows where he lay, Bass studied the far bank, listening for any sounds coming from the log stockade where three smoky spires rose slowly into the leaden sky. Off to his left lay the narrow grassy island where the thieves had corralled their horses. No more than a half dozen more grazed near the walls of Robidoux’s post.

He stared at the telltale color of that ice again. More times than he could count he had crossed frozen rivers, leading his horse and the mule. Times were Titus Bass had crossed the slurried Yellowstone itself bare-assed naked while a winter storm slammed down on that country. He damn well knew cold water as well as any man … likely because it scared the hell out of him like nothing else could.

The pale, translucent green of that ice indicated there had to be a spring feeding the river with a trickle of warm water, causing much of the ice around that spring to grow
about as soft as a cotton bale left out on the St. Louis levee in a spring downpour.

Back when Joe Walker led the two dozen down from the hills into the river valley, Sweete was the first to spot the nearby smudge of smoke hanging in an oily pall beyond the bare ridges. That smoke was a good sign either of a band of trappers camping nearby, or a village choosing to spend out the winter close to this trading post erected by men who frequently used Taos as their supply base. As much smoke as there was, Scratch figured it had to be Indians. Carson volunteered to have a look for himself.

By the time Bass, Walker, and Joe Meek had bellied their way down from the hilltop after glassing the fort and horse island, Kit was riding in from that solitary foray to scout the village downriver.

“I say they’re Yutas,” Carson explained, handing his reins to Dick Owens and promptly kneeling on the hard ground.

Dragging a knife from its scabbard, Carson traced a line to represent the river, scratched a small square for the stockade across the Green, then gathered up a handful of stones he positioned to indicate where the Indians had erected their lodges.

“How many fighting men?” William Craig asked in worry.

“Sixty, maybe seventy,” Carson said, dragging the back of a hand beneath his red, runny nose. “Twenty-some lodges.”

Walker turned to Craig, asking, “Why you figger we oughtta worry ’bout them Yutas? They never caused me no trouble.”

The trader shrugged. “It’s clear some Injuns don’t want other Injuns trading for powder and guns—”

“You s’picious them Yutas don’t like the idea of you trading with the Shonies up at Davy Crockett?” demanded Meek.

“I dunno how that bunch down there will act when we go riding in there to take them horses from Robidoux,” Craig admitted.

“Yutas ain’t never hurt no man I know of,” Bass interrupted
brusquely. “Less’n you shaved that bunch on some deal you ain’t told us about, trader—them Yutas won’t give our outfit no never mind. We only come for the horses them white men stole’t, so we ain’t got no truck with that village.”

“It’s plain as sun Thompson’s boys picked up more horses from somewhere,” Carson explained as he stabbed the point of his knife into the ground along that line representing the river. “There’s better’n fifty on that island now.”

“Ever’ last one of ’em will make a nice present for them Snakes,” Bass growled. “Less’n we get horses back for Rain, his warriors gonna do their damndest against ever’ white man in this country—guilty or not.”

Walker nodded. “No man here wants war with them Snakes. We got enough enemies awready.”

Meek knelt to lean over Carson’s shoulder, stabbing a finger at the shorter man’s drawing of the island. “A good thing Peg-Leg and the rest don’t have no guard on them ponies.”

“That’ll make it easy for us to get the horses started away,” Walker announced. “We won’t have to do no shooting at them boys.”

“You come up with a plan, Joe?” Newell asked.

Joseph R. Walker looked over the two dozen of them a moment before he explained. “Half of us gonna cross to the island and wrangle them horses across the ice toward the north bank. I want the other half of you to split off in two outfits. One go with Bass on the upriver end of the island and cross over just below the fort. The other’n go with Carson downriver of the island and make your crossing there. Both you boys’ll wait to show yourselves till we get onto the island and start the herd across the ice to shore.”

“Good,” Meek responded. “That way we’ll have them horses penned up a’tween the three outfits so they won’t go stampeding off if’n there’s shooting.”

Walker cleared his throat. The others got to their feet in an uneasy silence. Some coughed softly, others shuffled their moccasins in nervousness.

“Kit—you take your five men on downriver now,” Walker instructed, then waited while Carson turned, quickly and silently pointing to Dick Owens and four others. The six pushed from the group toward their horses tethered nearby.

“Take your men off too, Scratch.”

Bass peered over them, having already made his choices. Nodding to each man in turn, he picked Sweete, Meek, and Newell, along with two men he didn’t know well but who appeared to be weathered veterans of Indian scrapes. Leaving the remaining ten behind with Walker and William Craig, Titus released his horse from the brush and led it on foot toward the broad, shallow ravine that would take them down to the south bank of the Green.

He halted his outfit among the brush growing at the mouth of the ravine where they waited. Anxious to be atop the horse and moving, Scratch found this waiting hardest to endure. He checked the priming in the four pistols he had stuffed into his belt, then flipped back the frizzen to see the rifle’s pan was primed.

“There,” whispered Sweete.

Titus snapped his eyes to the island, saw Walker’s men reaching the grassy sandbar. “Let’s ride, boys.”

“Walker’s plan just may work after all,” Meek cheered as they went into the saddle and started their horses onto the ice.

“We get them ponies to the north bank,” Sweete declared as they picked their way toward the east end of the island, “we can start ’em off at a run and Thompson’s men won’t stand a chance of catching us.”

But by the time Walker had the first of the horses off the bank, the nervous animals were finding the ice so soft that their hooves were beginning to sink into the spongy surface. Some balked, halting and attempting to turn back as those horses behind them were goaded by Walker’s men waving rawhide lariats, or pieces of blanket and buckskin.

When that first frightened horse whinnied, Scratch knew their soup was shot. A handful of the ponies immediately neighed in fear or warning to the rest as they balled
up there on the ice that started to sink beneath their combined weight.

In surprise Bass looked down as his own horse suddenly shifted beneath him. They had reached that part of the river where the ice was being undercut by the warmer, spring-fed water. The pony jerked its head, fighting the reins as he jabbed heels back into its flanks. Around him the others struggled with their horses across the next few yards, every soggy step of the way as the riders continued to sink past the hooves, then the pasterns, and slowly up to the knees by the time they reached the middle of the river where the ice was clearly as soft as newly boiled oatmeal on a winter morn.

To their left Walker’s men were having a bad time of it, each of them in among the more than sixty horses—whipping, whistling, driving the animals across the river as they continued to sink on the cracking surface, water flooding onto the thick sections of rolling, pitching, floundering ice, splashing the men up to their thighs.

At the distant warning Scratch jerked, twisting to the right. A figure stood just outside the stockade gate, an arm pumping at those inside as he sent up the alarm.

“Wolf’s been let out to howl now!” Titus roared.

It was as if the six of them were moving sluggishly, every bit as slow as thick molasses poured over johnny-cakes. Sweete and the rest were just turning to look at the fort as both sides of the small gate were flung open and at least fifteen men belched out at once. Instantly angry, they were yelling to one another and bellowing at the horsemen floundering in the middle of the river with those stolen ponies.

“Keep a’coming!” Scratch hollered as they neared the north bank.

Twisting back to his left, he saw Carson’s men already on shore. In that next moment Walker’s horse was lunging off the ice, clawing its way among the leaders of the herd to clamber onto solid ground. Every animal was dripping, stopping briefly to shudder. But the moment Walker was joined by another four of his men, they had the horses turning.

A shot rang out. A puff of smoke emerged from a muzzle of one of those guns at the stockade as Scratch heard the ball pass his ear.

“Don’t shoot, goddammit!” Just outside the palisades a voice was shrieking, perhaps the one of their number shoving down the muzzles of nearby guns. “Them’r white men!”

Closing in on the north bank, no more than a hundred yards from the fort now, Titus could make out the angry clamor.

“Ain’t Injuns?”

“Don’t shoot—they’re white niggers!”

“What the hell they doing with—”

“They stealing our horses!”

Walker had those first horses turned east.

East?

Bass couldn’t figure it. Walker and his men had the horses running now—but instead of driving them west along that north bank of the Green, running them away from the fort … they were stampeding the wet, frozen, frightened herd straight for the stockade and Thompson’s horse thieves.

“Shoot ’em, I say!” a voice cried out at the wall.

“Ain’t gonna shoot no white man!”

“I’ll shoot any man what steals my goddamned horses!”

The thieves were arguing among themselves, some shoving one another in angry frustration, as Bass’s men reached the bank, their own half-frozen, waterlogged horses scratching with their hooves at the icy shore, lumbering onto the flaky ground covered by a thin layer of dead grass.

“C’mon, Scratch!” Walker was yelling off to Bass’s left, loping his way as he drove the herd toward Titus’s men.

They were no more than eighty yards from the thieves milling in front of the open gates.

“You heard the booshway!” Scratch hollered. “Keep them horses moving!”

Meek, Newell, Sweete, and the rest yipped and bellowed
as they kicked their weary, cold horses into motion, stringing out along both sides of the oncoming herd as it overtook them, joining in that gallop toward Robidoux’s post.

At the front of the ponies Walker stood in the stirrups, screaming, “Get outta our way, you sonsabitches! Get back! Get back outta our way or you’re hoof-jam!”

“What the hell’s he doing?” one of the thieves squeaked in a shrill, frightened voice as the horses bore down on them.

In the next instant every figure standing in front of those gates exploded left or right as they realized the herd was making directly for them. Scattering like a flushed covey of quail busted from the underbrush by a coyote, the thieves screamed, cursed, and shrieked in horror as they tumbled out of the way in a roiling mass of elbows and legs, grunts and yelps.

Walker hollered, “Don’t stop ’em now, Scratch!”

Before Bass realized it, he was among the lead horses as they shot through the opened gate. Unsure, he reined back quickly as the horses jostled and shoved against each other in this small space where they were suddenly corralled. Here, there, and over there too, men stood pinned against the low-roofed cabins built against the inside of the palisades. Outside the gate men were hollering angrily.

Slowly turning his horse in the milling madness, Bass spotted Carson and Owens reaching the gates, driving the last of the horses into the fort. Walker and three others were already out of the saddle, on their feet, and sprinting along the walls to reach the opening where they heaved against the huge gate timbers, quickly muscling those two sections together and sealing up the fort.