Wind Walker Read Online Free Page B

journey back to you and little Magpie.”
    With a flick of her eyes, Waits glanced at their oldest child. “She is not so much a child anymore. Look and you will see!”
    He chuckled, then said, “Soon enough Magpie’s father will have to sleep by the door of your lodge with his gun in his lap.”
    “Why would you sleep with a gun in your lap, Popo?” Magpie asked as she urged her pony closer.
    Instead Waits answered, “To frighten off all the young men who will be strutting around you like noisy mosquitoes on a summer evening.”
    The girl’s eyes went to her father’s face. “Do you … you really think the young men will find me … pretty?”
    How he laughed at that, his face raised to the sky as he roared, “Magpie! You are as pretty as any woman I have ever seen, in either world I have lived in. Why—you are as pretty as your mother was when she was your age and her own father had to start beating the boys away from their lodge door with a long coup stick!”
    “We will be safe here?” Waits asked, the sound of her words more solemn.
    His eyes crinkled with reassurance when he recognized the worry on her face. “Yes, we will be safe here. The only reason there was danger here so many winters ago was that I came looking for it.”
    “These horses are tired, Popo,” his oldest son reminded. “And they need water too.”
    “We’ll take them down to the river and let them drink their fill,” Titus suggested. “Then I’ll take my family into the trader’s mud lodge.”
    At the north bank of the Arkansas while Waits-by-the-Water sat with the other children, Scratch and Flea clambered out of their saddles and trudged to the river’s edge with their short-handled camp axes. Together they chopped a long slot in the ice while Magpie and her mother dismounted and started the animals toward the bank.
    As the horses drank, Titus laid his arm across his wife’s shoulder and turned her to look at the distant golden walls. Softly he said, “It will be a good thing to get these children out of the cold for the night.”
    She gazed up at him, then laid her cheek against his chest as the noisy horses nuzzled the water behind them. “For these children of ours, this little cold does not bother them, Ti-tuzz. I have never heard them complain.”
    “You are right,” he whispered with his chin resting atop her blanket hood. “The winter is much, much colder in our home country far to the north.”
    “But a fire will feel very good to my feet,” Flea said as he brought their three Cheyenne packhorses up the bank to where his parents stood.
    “Yes. It is time you show us this big mud lodge that shines red as a prairie paintbrush flower here at sunset!” Magpie goaded him with giddy excitement.
    “You too, Jackrabbit?” Titus asked of his four-year-old son still sitting his saddle, his short legs swaddled inside a buffalo robe that was tucked under his arms.
    “Go with Popo,” the boy answered, a smile brightening his whole face. “My belly wants to eat!”
    Squeezing his wife’s shoulder, Bass turned to his red horse and said, “Woman, we best go feed this boy before he starts gnawing on my moccasins!”
    He loved how their eyes widened the closer they got to the tall mud walls. Approaching from the southwest they reined for the circular bastion that stood more than twenty-some feet above the snowy plain. Extending to the right of that bastion stood two of the three corral walls, the top of all bristling with thorny cactus. Try as he might to squeeze his mind down on it right now, Titus could not remember this corral connected to the fort on his first trip here in the spring of ’34, and he couldn’t claim he’d paid all that much attention to its presence back in the autumn of ’42 when he had traded off most of his Mexican horses for more than a thousandweight of jangly foofaraw and shiny girlews.
    “Where is the door to this lodge?” Flea asked, a little perplexed as they continued to plod north