Forty-two

Blood Talon studied the throngs of people. Many were packed around the plaza immediately west of the Rainbow Town palisade. Must have been quite the celebration. While many of the participants were drifting away, the town and its surroundings remained crowded. The grass had been trampled, the thick ash lens left in the wake of a bonfire smoked in the middle of the stickball field.

Despite that, a pickup stickball game was in progress, the teams avoiding the hot spot as if it were but another hazard in the play.

Surely, here, among all these people, he would find some kind of word about Night Shadow Star. The woman couldn’t have just up and disappeared. Red Reed, and the Traders who accompanied her, had to be somewhere on the river.

Despite the number of searchers he had lured, threatened, and wheedled out of the chief at Red Bluff Town, no hint had come as to his quarry’s location.

So, had Night Shadow Star given up? Headed back to Cahokia? Perhaps slipped over to the Southern Shawnee River? Or had she just gone to ground, hiding somewhere along some backwater where she hoped she wouldn’t be spotted?

Given the manpower he’d turned loose on the sprawling waterway, he should have heard.

Beside him, Nutcracker chuckled.

“Something funny?”

“Just thinking of that sassy Tenasee Trader. I think I’ll dream of her tonight. Nice one, that. You should have felt her rear. Solid, muscular. Just the thought of wiggling my shaft inside her makes me so hard a dog couldn’t chew it.”

“You could find out,” Split Limb told him. “She said she’d warm your shaft in return for the war canoe. Suits the rest of us. We can always find another canoe to get our sorry hides back to Cahokia.”

Blood Talon shot them an irritated glance. “No one is going anywhere unless it’s after Night Shadow Star. We’ve been given a task to complete, we’re going to finish it. Even if we have to go all the way to Cofitachequi to hunt her down.”

“Long way,” Nutcracker said as he watched three young Yuchi women pass. They were all giggling, sharing something either humorous or salacious, given the way they shot dark-eyed sidelong glances at Blood Talon and the rest of the warriors.

His men were back to uttering ribald comments, which, fortunately, the young women found as incomprehensible as he and his warriors found Yuchi.

“All right, let’s get about it. The best source of information is going to be in the palisade. This place has to have a chief, and he has to have an interpreter. Time to see what we can pry out of these barbarians.”

He turned, leading the way past a camp of Yuchi who were seated around a large stewpot. Apparently it was their last meal because they were ladling out the dregs of what had been a feast of hominy.

Even as he did, he couldn’t help but remember the expression on that river Trader’s face as Nutcracker grabbed her nicely rounded rear. That look of absolute shock and disbelief. Woman like her, as worldly as she’d sounded, she should have been used to being groped. So why the stunned expression?

He just couldn’t get it out of his mind.