The Scalp Hunters by David Thompson

life long and no one ever lifts a finger against you. There isn’t a bear over every mountain or a war party over every hill. A body can go about their business in perfect peace.” Evelyn bit off more pemmican. “That’s partly why I wanted to move back there for so long. I was sick and tired of always having to look over my shoulder. It grates on the nerves.”
    Dega had noticed that while the mountains were wonderlands of beauty, perils lurked in the shadows. He couldn’t go anywhere, even in King Valley, unless he was armed.
    â€œHere I wanted this trip to be fun,” Evelyn said quietly. “We’d shoot a buff and peel the hide and take enough meat back to last your family a couple of months or more. I never counted on anything like this.”
    Another shadow fell across her. This time it was Plenty Elk. He pointed to the east.
    Evelyn looked and didn’t see anything. Only the grass and the sky and the summer haze. Then her eyes narrowed. A speck had appeared, a speck in motion, miles away yet but there was no mistaking the fact it was smack on their back trail. “Their tracker,” she guessed.
    â€œThe black man, you think?” Dega asked.
    Evelyn nodded and stood. “The others can’t be farbehind. We’ll have to ride like the wind to stay ahead of them.”
    â€œI tell my family,” Dega said.
    Plenty Elk signed, ‘Question. You want do with black man?’
    There was no sign for “what.” Evelyn had to fill it in mentally. She responded with, ‘Question. You want do?’
    Plenty Elk mimicked drawing his bowstring and releasing an arrow.
    â€˜You me think same,’ Evelyn signed, and grinned.

Chapter Eleven
    Rubicon liked being a scalper. He got to track, and tracking was something he was good at. He also got to kill Indians, of whom he was not all that fond.
    Rubicon had been born and raised in Rhode Island. Most people assumed he was a former slave or the son of a slave, but he was neither.
    His father was a minister. Reverend Rubicon made the circuit of the state’s Freewill Baptist churches. Some of Rubicon’s earliest memories were of sitting in hardwood pews and fidgeting and squirming, wishing his father would get done with the sermon so they could leave. His father was also prominent in the American Anti-Slavery Society and high in the ranks of the Temperance Society. It kept him so busy that Rubicon rarely got to see him. Which was fine by Rubicon.
    They had lived in a small frame house on the outskirts of Coopersville, with miles and miles of woodland out their back door. As a boy Rubicon spent every spare moment he could in those woods. He learned the ways of the animals. He learned to hunt and fish. His father didn’t approve, but the good reverend prided himself on being fair-minded and on letting the young grow as they saw fit, with theresult that shortly after he turned sixteen Rubicon packed his few belongings, bid his father and those church pews good-bye, and headed west.
    Rubicon had heard a lot about the frontier, about mountains that reared to the clouds and prairies as vast as the sea and deep woods where no man had ever set foot. All that turned out to be true. Unfortunately, though, while he was adept at living off the land, he still needed money. He refused to make his own clothes when he could buy them. Then there were things like guns and ammunition and coffee and blankets.
    A few scrapes with hostiles gave Rubicon the opinion that the whites were right and the only good red man was a dead red man. So when fate drew him and Venom to the same card table at a cantina in Taos, their small talk led to Rubicon becoming a scalp hunter.
    If his reverend pa could see him now, Rubicon reflected, it would put him in his grave. Provided his father wasn’t already six feet under. It had been a dozen years since Rubicon struck off on his own, and for all he knew both his parents were dead. He