Ride the Moon Down Read Online Free PDF

of that beaver is yours.”
    He leaned to the side so he could gaze closely at her face. “You trying to stir up some trouble between me and that big Englishman?”
    With a smile she replied in Crow, “No. I am only trying to make sense of why you do what you do sometimes. Make sense of what you don’t do at times. You Americans and the Englishmen are confusing to me: you say you don’t want this country out here, but you both want to be free to take what you want from the land.”
    Beginning to fuss, the child began a muted squawl from the bank.
    “You’re right, woman,” Bass admitted. “This land ain’t mine, but the beaver I take with my own sweat, with my hands—they’re mine. I don’t allow I have any right to fight for this country because it’s not mine. But I will fightfor what is mine: my beaver, my animals and traps, my family. No man will ever take them from me.”
    She turned slightly and kissed him, then pulled away, wading to the bank. He stood too, allowing the water to sluice off his cold white flesh, marveling at just how pale he was now that the sun had climbed fully above the ridge to the east.
    As she pulled her dress over her head and tugged it down over her hips, Waits-by-the-Water laughed again. “I am happy a strange fish like you is the father of my child.”
    “Even if you don’t understand me at times?”
    The woman nodded, dragging the cradleboard into her lap and stroking the infant’s cheek with a fingertip. “I may not always understand the way things rumble around inside your head, husband. But I always know just how your heart works.”
    “Is that the back of Jarrell Thornbrugh’s head I’ve got my pistol pointed at?”
    At first the tall Englishman froze, daring not to turn his head, his eyes instead glancing at the other company employees nearby, hoping to find them ready to defend him.
    “And you’re the booshway of this here bloody Hudson’s Bay bunch, ain’cha?”
    With his pounding heart rising to his throat and his hands held out from his body, Thornbrugh turned just enough to level his eyes at his antagonizer.
    Plain to see that the man had no pistol trained on the back of his head.
    Jarrell’s eyes climbed to the stranger’s face.
    “By the stars! It can’t be!” Thornbrugh roared as he whirled around, his booming voice like the clangor on a huge cast-iron bell.
    Bass slapped both his open hands on his chest, then spread his arms wide. “In the flesh, you god-blame-ed Englishman!”
    They crashed together, hugging fiercely, slapping backs and shoulders, dancing side to side and around and around.
    “I’ve asked after you,” Thornbrugh admitted breathlessly as they ground to a halt, their forearms locked fraternally. “No one heard evidence of you since last summer on the Green. No one’s come across you in their travels.”
    “I stayed south ever since ronnyvoo,” Bass explained. “And I went east for a time too.”
    “The States?” and Jarrell rocked back a bit, closely studying his friend’s face. “You didn’t think of giving up the mountains?”
    “Hell, I couldn’t give up the mountains,” he declared with a reassuring smile. “Wouldn’t be happy anyplace else.”
    Then he spotted the left eye and leaned close to have himself a look at it. “So tell me about this eye of yours.”
    “Don’t rightly know what to think of it, Jarrell. Just come on me few months back. Been seeing stars shootin’ out of it for some time, howsoever. But this last spring it got so ever’thing’s real fuzzy.”
    He peered closely at the milky film over the iris and pupil. “Looks cloudy. You see anything with it?”
    “A little,” Bass answered. “I can tell light from dark. Not much else. For most part, I ain’t in a bad way, what with this other eye doing more’n its share.”
    “Tie your horse off and come on in here, you old one-eyed reprobate,” he said with relief, gesturing for Titus to follow him beneath the canvas sheeting