Buffalo Palace

1

Reining away from Troost’s Livery, Titus Bass gave the jug-headed Indian pony urgent taps of his heels, pointing it down the muddy, rutted ruin of Second Street.

Puddles of rain glittered as the sun continued its leisurely rise, the surface of each tiny pool left behind by last night’s rain reflecting rose light like broken panes of glass scattered here and there among the heaps of wheel-cut ruts and piles of dung gone cold. Shadows still cloaked nearly all of St. Louis, save for the tallest rooftops gently steaming as they warmed.

Instead of heading directly north, he hurried south out of town, downriver some four miles until he reached the shady glen far from the clutter of settlement and folk. Far from the clatter of man’s comings and goings. Someplace far from being underfoot. After all this time Titus was again gratified at the utter peace he sensed there as he halted, dismounted, and tied the two animals off to one of the trees ringing the glade. Plodding quietly in his thick-soled boots across the grassy carpet grown lush already this early spring, he had no trouble locating the mound. Stopping a few feet away, he took it in, finding many of the wildflowers he had transplanted nearly a year before budding once again with renewed life here above the old trapper’s resting place.

Down in this grove the shadows lingered long of a morning. And the damp mist clung in among the trees, wispy among the climbing ivy and grape. Eventually, Titus inched forward, stopping at the foot of the grave.

“Isaac. It’s me: Titus,” he said barely above a whisper, the way a man might first address someone he found sleeping. “I come … come here to tell you my fare-thees, Isaac. I’m bound away—for where the two of us was counting on going together. Out yondering to them prerras and far mountains you told me of again and again.”

Then he realized and suddenly snatched the floppy felt hat from his head, dropping his eyes as if in apology for his discourteous oversight.

“Wish you was going along,” Bass continued. “Probably asking yourself why I ain’t gone already, ain’cha? So let me tell you that you being here—dead and buried—that’s the onliest reason I ain’t gone afore now. There I was, planning all the time on tagging ’long with you … then you go and get yourself kill’t. That was—hell, it felt just like one of them old brood mares I was shoeing for Troost gone and kicked me right in the gut.”

He dropped the hat onto the foot of the grave there among the profusion of newly emerging wildflowers and slowly went to his knees. Placing one palm flat on the grave, Titus continued.

“Took me some time to get over your dying, Isaac Washburn. Pained me like few other things ever pained me afore in my life. I was counting on something so hard—then you go and act the idjit and you’re gone … gone along with my dreams of ever getting to them Shining Mountains you seen with your own eyes.”

He felt that first sting of tears burn, and swiped at his eyes with a single cold finger as a ray of sun burst through the canopy overhead, the first to streak into the glade.

“Took me a long time to get over the loss of you and my dreams both, Isaac. Didn’t get over it till I up and figgered out I could damn well go on my own. I didn’t need you like I figured I did. Got me a fine gun of my own now. The rest of our plunder and truck tied up in them bundles over yonder on them horses. And I’m riding your pony my own self. Taking it back to the prerra where I figure it belongs.”

Slowly he dragged a sleeve of his blanket coat beneath his dribbling nose and sighed.

“At first I hated what you done to both of us, Isaac. For killing yourself and killing my dream of going to them far mountains by way of the Platte with you. Nursed on that hate for too damn long—so long that I didn’t ever come back here to speak at you … not since I buried you in this pretty place. I’m glad to see you ain’t kill’t the flowers I planted over you, you sour-assed son of a bitch.”

Then he gradually rose to his feet, sweeping up his hat and snugging it down upon his thick; curly brown hair, glancing at the single shaft of sunlight streaming into the glade, slowly marching across the nodding grass toward the grave.

“Best be going now, Gut. Wanted to come to tell you I was on my way out yonder. Don’t know if I’d ever get back this way. And … and I come to tell you I owe you more’n I’d ever be able to pay you. So”—and he swallowed hard, tasting the ball of sentiment at the back of his throat—“so I figure the only way I’ll ever come close to repaying you for what good you done me … is to go on out yonder and live the way your kind was meant to live. The way I callate I was meant to live out my days too.”

Swiping the palm of his hand across his whole face, smearing tears and his blubbering nose, Titus bent quickly and patted the top of the grave mound with a hand, then straightened.

“I’ll fare well, Isaac Washburn,” he whispered, barely above a harsh croak. “Thanks to you, I’ll fare well.”

Hurrying back to the horses, he untied them quickly and vaulted onto the pony’s back, glanced once at the shaft of sunlight just then touching the old trapper’s resting place, the wildflowers grown luminescent with that first blush of dawn’s light.

Tapping the pony’s ribs, he moved out once more. North this time. Back four miles to St. Louis. By the time he reached town and Second Street once more, the day was birthing to the east across the mighty river.

Titus Bass hadn’t felt this new in more years than he cared to remember.

While he owned far less than his pap had owned at thirty-one, far less than his grandpap before him, at this moment Titus now possessed more than he had ever claimed before in his life. Not much in the way of prize stock: not this hand-me-down Indian pony he was riding, nor Hysham Troost’s gift of an old dun mare to use as a packhorse. And there sure as hell wasn’t all that much strapped in two modest blanket-wrapped bundles lashed on the back of the mare as he was taking his leave of this place. Yet in that moment as the sun rose at his shoulder, Titus Bass realized he was a wealthy man nonetheless.

Most men would simply never be this free.

Second Street ended at the far edge of town where the muddy, rutted road northwest to St. Charles began. The sun had climbed above the tops of the leafing trees by the time he left the last huts and shanties behind. No more did the air reek of offal and refuse pitched carelessly into the streets. No more did his nose discern the tang of woodsmoke on the damp dew of the morning. It lay behind him now. So much lay behind him now.

While the rest of his ever-living life was spreading itself before him.

Turning in the saddle to watch the last of the hovels disappear behind him, Titus gazed at the smoke columns rising from hundreds of chimneys and stacks above the thick green canopy. Then he took a deep breath. And a second, his eyes half closing as it sank into his lungs. No morning had ever tasted sweeter.

That early spring morn, in the year of 1825, Titus Bass was barely thirty-one. Not a youngster by any means. He’d been broke to harness more than once. Time and again in his life he had come to know the value of hard work. And, too, Titus realized he was near twice the age of a few of those fellows who had been hiring out to the fur companies pushing their keels up the muddy Missouri River lo these past four-odd years. While he might be green at what he’d set his course to do, he sure as the devil wasn’t wet behind the ears.

By damn, those years under his belt ought to count for something besides mere seasoning. Why, a hiring man would be hard-pressed to find any new hand more eager to pit himself against those prairies and plains, those high and terrible places that now lay before Titus Bass.

Where the well-traveled road twisted itself up the long, gradual slope and emerged from the oak and elm, Bass reined up and turned about to gaze back at the riverside town. Stone estates hid behind high walls where the French protected themselves from the lower classes. Those long rows of warehouses along Wharf Street, tiny shops of all descriptions pressed elbow to elbow along Main. And on the outskirts lay the smoke-blackened shanties where the whiskey and rum was poured, where the women of all hue and size plied their ancient trade.

In many a way it felt as if he had only lived there but a brief time. In other ways, it seemed as if he had been there nearly all his life.

“That’s right, girls—gonna take myself a last look,” he spoke quietly to the animals. “Don’t have much a notion I’ll ever see St. Lou again. Leastways, not for a long, long time to come.”

He watched as the sun tore itself fully from the edge of the earth across the great, brown, meandering swath of the Mississippi, then nudged the horses into motion and put the place behind him. Turning his back on the scars and the women too. Those years of pain as he did his damnedest to waste away to nothing at the bottom of one mug after another of metheglin, sweet rum, or apple beer. Not that he didn’t figure he would ever escape that good, clean hunger for a woman, or suppress that honest thirst for something heady and raw washing down his gullet from time to time. Just that Titus realized that out where he was heading, such hungers and thirsts might not trouble a man the way they did with so many folks living damn well on top of one another, breathing the same air.

Out where away he was bound, there would surely be other lures.

He drank in another long draft of morning cold as he pointed his nose toward St. Charles and the Missouri. Yes-siree. A whole new batch of temptations waited out there to dangle themselves before a man.

By the time he felt the sun strike his back, warming the long, unkempt curls that spilled across his shoulders, Titus suddenly thought of Eli Gamble. A tall, lanky backwoodsman who had been traveling down the Ohio on his journey to St. Louis and beyond some fifteen summers before. Those long, warm days of the Longhunter Fair when the hill folk gathered to celebrate another planting season, peruse the cart vendors’ and drummers’ wares, drink and dance, and compete in tests of skill.

“Wonder if you’d beat me if we had us a shooting match today?” Titus asked out loud, surprised at the sound of his voice after so many miles of virtual silence put behind him.

That summer of 1810 he had been a green sixteen-year-old youth shooting in competition with the menfolk for the first time, pitted in that final relay of the fair against a frontiersman bound away to St. Lou for to join up with the Spaniard Manuel Lisa, trading and trapping for furs on the Upper Missouri. While Titus went on to ply the great waters of the Ohio and Mississippi aboard a Kentucky flatboat, Eli Gamble disappeared into the west, determined to go where Lisa was luring frontiersmen eager to see for themselves the tall peaks and open country.

Bass wondered if Eli ever made it.

And now he regretted never asking Isaac Washburn if he’d ever heard tell of a man called Eli Gamble. Chances were they had to know of one another—what with both of them attached to Manuel Lisa’s outfits. But then … maybe Eli never made it upriver with Andrew Henry that season of 1810–11—the same Andrew Henry who a decade later led Ashley’s brigade overland to the northern rivers.

“The Bighorn.” Titus repeated that magical name as he had so many times across this past year … after Washburn had shown up at Troost’s Livery to kindle that flame of yondering. One after another the names of other rivers came rolling out like mystical, even mythical, places, so far from everything Bass had ever known.

“The Powder,” he sighed this morning. “And Tongue. Yallerstone too.”

Yet first he had to reach the Platte. And that’s when he remembered Hugh Glass. How Washburn and Glass had crossed the Platte River country after they were put afoot by Pawnee, the pair eventually stumbling into Fort Lookout on the Missouri. Glass went one way—back to the mountain country to pit himself against fate once more—and Isaac Washburn turned south to St. Louis to have himself a well-deserved spree.

If Gamble weren’t up there still, was Glass? Nigh onto fifteen years now for Eli, but not anywhere near that long since Hugh Glass turned back to the Rockies—alone.

The French and American settlers in St. Charles paid Bass little mind as he entered their village of squat huts and tiny stone houses, many thatched with hay in the old French style, others roofed with cedar shakes split when the sap was down to be sure they did not curl. Smoke whispered up from every chimney here as the day began to age. Smells assaulted his nostrils in this muddy lane leading through town to the Missouri River itself. And the sounds of folk and farm animals grew loud upon his ears.

How might total silence feel about him?

Even in those forests where he had grown into a man, especially on the mighty rivers, there was always some noise. Wings flapped and birds called out. The wind soughed through the trees. Water lapped against the yellow poplar side of Ebenezer Zane’s broadhorn Kentucky flatboat as it floated down the great eastern rivers.

So naturally he wondered how would it be to find himself out where Washburn claimed the land went on for days and days beneath an endless blue dome of sky, a distance so immense that it seemed to swallow all sound itself—a piece of country so quiet that a man could hear his own thoughts rattle noisily about inside his head.

“I damn well don’t believe it!” Titus had protested to the cantankerous fur trapper one night as they sat over their brown bottles of sugared rum freighted upriver from New Orleans, brought there on high-masted ships from the islands of the far Indies.

“You don’t gotta believe me just how quiet it be,” Gut Washburn said matter-of-factly. “Hell, coon—you’re gonna find out for yerself one day soon.”

Here he was, for God’s sake! On his way to find out for certain. Had it not been for Washburn showing up at Troost’s Livery that rainy night a year back, Titus himself might well be dead by now and laying in a pauper’s grave. As it turned out, Bass had been the one to lay Isaac to his eternal rest.

Now he was heading west … alone.

At St. Charles he had turned southwest with the Missouri. At times the road lay wide in spots, other times it narrowed. Barely enough room through the trees and brush for a single wagon to pass, slashing its iron rims down into the rich black loam. This was plainly a farmer’s land, Titus thought to himself. Good land, this—for a man such as his father, Thaddeus.

So it was he thought on his mother, back across these many years. Fifteen winters already since last he had seen those gray sprigs in her hair; heard her voice soothing one child or another; felt the sure touch of her hand upon his shoulder, warm at the back of his neck whenever he felt unsteady of himself. After all this time he thought now on those biscuits she had baked that last night and left out for him. And the new shirt just finished for Thaddeus, lying there on the rough-hewn plank table. As certain today as he was that autumn morn as he slipped off from hearth and home—that she had left the shirt out for him to take in his leaving.

Little settlements, each one, he rode through as the Missouri River Road led him past St. Albans, then Labadie, and after more than a week he put Gasconade behind him. Two days later he passed Bonnots Mill. Eventually the river meandered back to the northwest. By the time he reached the tiny settlement of Rocheport, Titus found himself growing more comfortable with the long stretches of country wherein he did not lay eyes on another human. Each day becoming content with the Indian pony and the dun mare, with the company of nothing more than the sounds of the hardwood forests where he arose every morning and hurriedly ate what was left of the meat he had cooked for last night’s supper. Finding himself content with those nightsounds in the timber—calls of owls and all the tiny animals that hid from those wide-winged predators as the sun went down and the stars winked into view overhead through the leafy branches where the smoke from his fire rose and dispersed.

Never did he go hungry—in fact, his belly had never been so full with the rich, fat meat of the field. Here in this country of thick timber he encountered more game than he thought possible. Better hunting was it here than it had ever been for him back in Kentucky.

Then he sorted through to the reason for that: surely there were far fewer people here to stir up the critters, to drive them this way and that, to harry them and deplete their numbers. Clearly this was country where a man could provide for his family, live off the land without ever slashing a plowshare through the earth’s crust. Yet as good as that might be for some, Titus pushed on west.

For three cents he was ferried across the river to the settlement of Franklin, which sat on the north bank.

“Right here you’re standing where the Santa Fe Trail begins,” explained the stocky, pockmarked storekeeper. “Takes a man a little south of west, eventual to the land of them greasers.”

“Greasers?”

“Mex,” came the reply. “Some of the fellers travel the trail last few trading seasons call ’em sun-grinners. Damn, but from the sounds of what I been told, they’re a people ain’t worth a shit but for their handsome women.”

Titus swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing as he thought back on those hungers he had been pushing down, like an aggravating tickle. “W-women.”

“Dark-skinned they be—so I’m told by them what pass through here bound for Santa Fe.” The man scratched at a two-day growth of patchy whiskers sprouting on his cheeks, eying the slight stranger who stood just shy of six feet on that rough-plank floor. “Greaser women what wear they’s skirts up to the knees, and their shirts clear down to here: so they all but hang right out for a man to see near ever’thing.”

“This trail you’re talking about,” Titus asked, hopeful, “it go west by way of the Platte?”

The fat jowls waddled as the man shook his head, eyes squinting as they took measure of the newcomer. Dirt and smoke stained every one of the storekeeper’s deep pockmarks and the crow’s-feet wrinkling both corners of nis bloodshot eyes. “That be too far north of here, mister—the Platte would. Like I tol’t you, Santa Fe Trail takes a man off southwest from here.”

“Sounds to me that this be the place a man makes up his mind, don’t it?”

The jowly storekeeper nodded. “Head south to the land of the greasers. Or push on upriver.”

“And the Platte?”

“Still upriver a goodly piece.”

“Was hoping to run onto it afore now,” Titus said with disappointment. “Seems like I been riding forever already.”

“Something on the order of two hunnert thirty miles.”

“What’s two hundred thirty miles?”

The man scratched at his chin absently and replied, “That’s how far you come from the mouth of the Missouri.”

“Happen to know how long I got to go to reach the Platte?”

“Hmmm,” the man considered. “That’s a handsome piece.”

“Farther’n I come already?”

“Dare say, mister. Yep, a good bit farther’n you come already.”

That depressing news sank within him like a stone tossed into the swimming pond back in Rabbit Hash, Boone County, Kentucky. For a moment he wondered on another option. “How’s the country lay on that trail to Mexico?”

With a sudden, broad smile the storekeeper said, “Now, that’s something to show you’ve got a good head about you. I can outfit you for such a trip right handily.”

“The country. Tell me ’bout the country.”

“Halfway there, I’m told—you’ll run onto a desert that lasts near the rest of your journey.”

“A d-desert?”

“Sand and lizards and sun, mister. All it’s fit for, so they say.”

“Why would any man wanna go there—if’n that’s all he’s bound to come across?”

“I told you awready.” The wide-shouldered shopkeeper grinned with teeth the color of hickory shavings. “They set their eye on that greaser country for the womens. Most trade for mules, and bring back the greasers’ gold.”

“Say a man don’t want none of that. How’s the land lay up in that Platte country?”

With a shrug the man answered, “Ain’t worth a spit for building—you ask me. Not much timber like we got here.” He pointed. “A feller runs out of trees a bit west of here.”

Watching the man chew at a fingernail, Titus asked, “Then?”

“Then you find yourself in nothing but grass. Taller’n your horse’s belly it grows. Miles and miles, and it goes on for longer’n I care to know. Country ain’t fit for a decent man to settle his family in—what with no wood and the Injuns all about.”

“Pawnee.”

That caused the shopkeeper to raise an eyebrow. “You heard of ’em?”

“I heard,” Bass answered.

“Leave that godforsaken country to the likes of them, I say,” the man snarled sourly. “Ain’t fit for nothing but what Injuns and buffalo out there—all that can live in them parts—”

“Buffalo?” he interrupted almost too quietly. “B-buffalo, you said.”

For a moment the storekeeper studied Bass’s face with the first real interest he had shown all afternoon. “You’re looking for to find them buffalo, is it?”

His head bobbed every bit as eagerly as a young boy’s. “Yes. I aim to see me them herds of buffalo I heard tell was out there on the Platte.”

“They’re there all right, mister. Them, and the thieving, murdering Injuns too. If I was to do it—I’d lay my sights on greaser country.”

“Looks to be I’m pushing on north.”

With a snort of derision the shopkeeper said, “To see them buffalo and have your ha’r lifted by the Pawnee?”

“I figure a fella can watch hisself and stay out of harm’s way.”

With a sudden, low blat of laughter that reminded Titus of a peal of some faraway thunder, the storekeeper erupted, slapping a flat hand down on the counter so as to rattle a nearby display of tin cups. “If that ain’t some now! Why, from the way you was talking—I’d wager you and your outfit ain’t ever been out in that country off yonder.”

“Ain’t,” Bass admitted.

“So how you fellas figure you’re gonna keep from getting sideways with the Pawnee, seeing how you’ll need be crossing so much of it to get to that far country? Best pray there’s a whole bunch of sharp-eyed sonsabitches with y’—”

“J-just me,” Titus bristled, annoyed at the storekeeper’s amused smirk and downright nosiness. “Ain’t no one else along. Ain’t no outfit of us.”

Like the passing of a cloud, the pockmarked face went grave as the storekeeper leaned forward on the plank counter, suddenly inches from Bass’s nose. Something of great import rang in the tone of voice as he said, “Tell me now you’re fixed for lead and powder?”

“Got me all I figure a man ought’n carry on a packhorse.”

Leaning back with a smug smile, the man suggested, “Might well think about packing you all you can. Where you’re headed, it won’t be no desert trail what’ll kill you with thirst or p’isenous lizards. No, sir—it jest might be them god-blame-ed Pawnee!”

As the last few words tumbled dramatically out of his mouth, of a sudden the storekeeper went silent, his eyes snapping to the narrow doorway, where Titus watched a middle-aged woman and a brood of children appear out of the sun, shuffling into the cooler shadows of the shanty store.

“You keep your hands to yourselves, hear me now?” she instructed the young ones as they came to a halt on either side of her, like a brood of chicks clustered around their hen. “Don’t make me scold you again like last time we was here.”

Titus studied her in that instant: the way she turned aside to one batch of children, then to the others as she instructed them all in a sure tone of voice. Her well-seamed face, tanned to the color of a native pecan even at this early season of the year, showed more than the simple ravage of time. That sallow countenance registered the toll of many live, and a few still, births, reflected the slash of ceaseless wind and the scouring of a life suffered beneath the unrepentant sun—all those countless days spent at her man’s shoulder … the two of them pleading with the ground, the sky, and ultimately to their God again and again to grant them enough of a crop to feed themselves and thereby survive one more year.

Then, as she finished instructing her flock in those quietly stern directives, the woman looked up at last: her bright, fiery, optimistic eyes seeming to come directly to Titus, dawdling just enough as they halted there to cause him to swallow hard. As a child or man, he’d never been what anyone could dare call handsome—fact was, Bass considered himself firmly on the homely side—so when her eyes appeared to take their measure of him, Bass felt his cheeks redden. He was relieved when the woman’s gaze turned aside to land on the storekeeper.

“Bailey,” she began in a loud, sure voice she flung across the shabby, low-roofed store, “what’s cornmeal these days?”

“This time of year it’s twenty-five dollar the hundredweight, Mrs. Grigsby.”

She drew her lips into a wrinkled purse, licked them quickly in grave thought, then replied, “Gimme ten pounds. Got coffee?”

“Some come in just last week.”

The woman asked, “You tried it your own self?”

“The missus made some for us just this morning.”

“And?” she prodded, nudging her head to the side, out of the way of some ironmongery hanging from the rafters as she took two steps forward, her brood shuttling hurriedly to stay at the hem of her dress.

“As fine a cup as I’ve ever had on either side of the river, ma’am.”

Drawing her shoulders back, Mrs. Grigsby declared, “Should have known you’d claim it was nigh onto being the nectar of the gods, Bailey Henline. How much you want for this grand coffee of your’n?” Then, almost in afterthought, she wagged her head and commented, “’Tis a curse when a woman cain’t seem to wean a man from his coffee.”

With a smile the storekeeper answered, “Land, but I know he’s a one to drink it morning, noon, and evening too—was it that you had it always brewed for him. Tell you the honest, for this last shipment, I gotta have fifty cents the pound.”

“Lord bless and preserve me!” she exclaimed, suddenly snagging the wrist of one of the younger children and taking from the hand something the offending youngster had been closely inspecting behind her mother’s back. She replaced the waxed parcel back among the display on the rough plank shelving and turned back to Henline. “Will you see fit to give us five pounds of your coffee on account?”

He sighed. “I can add it to the books for you, Mrs. Grigsby. You’re good folks—and I’ll stand by honest stock like you and the mister.”

“No one can say you ain’t stood by us these last two troublesome seasons, Bailey,” she declared with the sort of undisguised gratitude that was hard for a proud woman to let show. “You know we’re good for it. And … if it’s all right, I’d like to get each of the young’uns a little treat out of your jars over here. We don’t get in here much as I’d like—”

“Go right ahead, ma’am. Let ’em each pick what they want. Ain’t no trouble to just put their treats on the books too.”

With a meaningful nod she said, “Thank you, Bailey.”

Bass watched her turn away with her children as she bent her head and murmured to them softly. One by one they began to approach the shelf where rested the immense, odd-colored jars and small wicker baskets filled with rock candy and other sugared delights. Taking a step back toward the counter, Titus grew thoughtful as he cupped the small skin pouch inside the worn blanket satchel slung over his shoulder—fingering what he had left in the way of hard coin.

Titus cleared his throat, drawing Henline’s attention and said, “Best have me some of that cornmeal and your coffee too my own self.”

“Good thinking, mister,” the storekeeper replied, rubbing the palms of both hands down the front of his sweat-stained shirt that had likely been the better part of a month without a scrubbing. “’Cepting for the army sutler upriver, this here be the last place you’ll run onto such victuals. What’ll it be of the cornmeal?”

“Fifty pound,” Bass said, swallowing down the sudden flush of apprehension he felt at spending the last of his money.

Turning aside to move off, Henline asked, “And your coffee?”

“Maybe best I have us count what I got left after you get that cornmeal,” Bass replied. “We’ll see how much coffee I can do with.”

“You have American?” Bailey asked, eying him up and down.

“Yes. I have American.”

With an approving nod the storekeeper continued about his chore of scooping cornmeal from a large oaken hogshead into linen sacking.

It was money, Titus reminded himself as he fretted. Only money. Never had he been captive of it, because his whole life had either been feast or famine: Titus at times had earned all the money he wanted at Troost’s Livery and had survived nicely; while at other times he had none to speak of in his empty pocket, and had survived just as well. Maybe money was just like whiskey and women. All three were the same: when a man had ’em—he best drink up while the drinking was good … lay while the women were spreading their legs for him … or spend that money before it wore a hole in his britches. Many were the times he’d gotten by without the whiskey, or the whores, and more often than not he had survived without coins jangling in his purse.

Besides, he suddenly decided, like the storekeeper said—west of here there wasn’t but one more goddamned place to spend one’s money anyhow. Why would a man want to carry anything west when it weren’t going to do him any good out there?

Then and there a candle’s flicker of impulse made him suddenly decide to empty his purse. This would be the last in the way of hard currency he figured he would see for many a season to come. While some men buried their money away against some greatly feared lean time like squirrels hoarding their store of nuts for the coming winter, Titus no longer saw any need to have the feel of it stitched up in his waistband the way he and the rest of Kingsbury’s boatmen had carted their gold specie north from New Orleans on up the Natchez Trace. And he was surely not the sort who had ever needed the reassuring jangle of coins at his side, the feel of specie caressing his palm.

Money was to be used, he had come to believe with certainty. Not something to be hoarded. And where he was going, money sure as hell was something a man could not use. This was, he realized of that moment, the very edge of the world as he had known it: the border between all that he had been, and all that he wanted his life to be. Money, like so many other things, was clearly a part of the world he was leaving behind. Best to leave here what little money he had left. Leave it behind with all the rest of his old life he would no longer need take with him.

They settled up on what Titus owed for the cornmeal and coffee, the three bags sitting there on the dusty counter, in their midst the stack of coin, which now belonged to the storekeeper. The few that remained with Titus he turned over and over in his palm.

“Something more I can do for you, mister?” Henline asked expectantly, an eyebrow raising.

He licked his lips, gazing down at the few coins left him. “What you got in the way of tobaccy?”

The fleshy eyes studied the whipcord-lean wayfarer again, as one might regard a person of questionable sanity. “Don’t wan’cha no powder, or lead? Don’t need you no axes or knives?”

Shaking his head, Titus declared, “That tobaccy there,” and he pointed to the large cedar crate on the plank counter, the top of which had been pried off to expose the dark carrot twists of dried tobacco leaf. “How much is the asking?”

“You a chewing man, are you?”

“I am, a’times. What’s the toll for a plug?”

“Ten for a dollar.”

“That’s steep.”

“It’s American—and it’s come a fur distance, mister. Kentucky, I’m told. Freighted down the Ohio, then up the Missouri.” Henline scratched at a fleshy jowl again as he eyed the coins Titus set one by one down on the meal-dusted counter. “Tell you what I’ll do: with what you got left there … I can make you a good trade—fifteen for the dollar.”

“How much ’baccy that gimme?” he asked suspiciously.

With his beefy hands Henline began to pull out the carrots, counting out loud as two of the woman’s children inched close, intently studying the process, their eyes just above counter level. When he was done, the storekeeper again rubbed his hands down the front of his dirty pullover shirt and said, “Sixty of them twists—makes for four dollars’ worth. So that should just about use up the last of what you got left there.”

Instead of agreeing immediately, Titus regarded the immense pile of dark twists of fragrant burly. Taking one from the stack, he brought it to his nose and sniffed in appraisal. “Kentucky, you said?”

“So I’m told. Fine smoking. Even finer a chew—if I do say so my own self.”

“And this here sixty twists will finish me off?”

“Less’n you got more money hid on you,” Henline replied, a fat paw beginning to sweep the last of Bass’s coins toward his side of the counter, “there ain’t no more you can spend.”

Firmly, yet without a hint of malice, Titus quickly clamped his hand down on the storekeeper’s wrist, looking Bailey Henline in the eyes. “That what you got under this hand pays for the tobaccy—”

“I done said that,” Henline interrupted with irritation that mottled his cheeks in anger.

“And,” Bass continued, “… pays off all the candy for them young’uns there.” Titus nodded once toward the far end of the counter where the woman and the children stood watching like a gaggle of wide-eyed geese, frozen for the moment beside the colored jars of sugared treats.

Immediately shaking his head, Henline uttered the first sounds of protest—but they were squeezed off as Titus clenched the wrist all the harder.

“Listen, mister: you’re making a fine profit on me this day,” Bass said with quiet assurance. “Enough a profit you can give these here young’uns their treat ’thout it weighing down this woman’s account.”

For a long moment the shopkeeper looked down at the hand holding his wrist prisoner, then glanced over at the woman. Reluctantly, he nodded. “Awright. The treats is on you, mister.”

Taking his hand off the storekeeper, Titus glanced quickly to the side, not sure if he read gratitude in the woman’s eyes, or scorn because she wanted none of his pity.

“This here’s American all right,” Henline declared as he finished sweeping up all the coins together and shoving them deep within the side pocket on his drop-front button britches. “Cain’t ever be too sure out here in this country—what’s good money and what’s not. Guineas, pistoles—”

“My money was always good, Mr. Henline. Worked hard for it, and I was always one to give a man my sweat for a day’s pay.”

“Franklin’s damn well the last place on the road you chose to take,” the shopkeeper emphasized with a roll of his eyes in that direction. “On west of here is Fort Osage. Only other place yonder’n that is Fort Atkinson. At Osage the river changes course, runs north from there up to Atkinson, you see.”

The name pricked him. Titus leaned in a little to ask, “Ain’t that the place, the fort you just said—the one they built at the mouth of the Platte?”

“That’s right, mister. You figure to ride through Pawnee land, by the time you reach Atkinson—a man turns himself left and heads due west as the sun goes.”

With a shake of his head Bass replied, “I ain’t got me any plans to be riding nowhere close to Atkinson.”

“Maybe for the best,” Henline declared as he stuffed the last of the tobacco twists into a fourth and fifth linen sack and began to tie off the tops with length of twine cordage. “Up and down this part of the river, word is that the army don’t want no one in that yonder country out there … no man but soldiers and them fur companies.”

“I heard such, yes.”

With a smile creasing the fleshy jowls, Henline ventured, “Hell, maybe it’s better you spend some time behind the bars in that army pokey up at Fort Atkinson than you lose your hair to them bugger Pawnee.”

Sweeping the first of the satchels from the storekeeper’s counter, Bass replied, “I don’t plan on spending no time with the army or leaving my hair with the Pawnee. Thank you just the same for the meal, coffee, and tobaccy.” He hefted the last of his goods across both laden arms and turned toward that doorway patch of bright sun splaying a fan of its bright saffron into the shop’s cool shadows.

Just as Titus reached the door, he stopped to step aside for a pair of mud-caked men who eyed the newcomer before striding dutifully over to the row of wooden dowels driven into one wall where stood several tall, two-man saws.

“Thank you, mister,” the woman said suddenly, blurting it out as if honor bound to express her gratitude, but then her eyes softened as she tugged a child to her hip beneath each arm. “Tell the man thankee, children.”

They all shyly muttered their appreciation—every bit as prideful as their mother—eyes watching the stranger shuffle his feet self-consciously, his arms sagging beneath the weight of the last worldly goods he would buy for hard cash money.

“I was … I’m glad to do it,” Titus replied, glancing over the faces of the children as they licked and sucked on their treats. How they reminded him of Amy’s brothers and sisters back in Rabbit Hash.

Then Henline intruded. “Stranger—since you’re of a mind to go out yonder to that saint-forsaken land on your lonesome—you mind my asking one more thing?”

“What’s that?” Titus responded, turning his head from the young eyes to look at the storekeeper. At that very moment Bass became aware the two men had ceased their talk and their noisy handling of the saws behind him.

Scratching at the side of his pockmarked nose, Henline inquired, “Mind telling me if … well, if you’re a praying man?”

For but a moment Titus glanced at the mud-plastered pair who interrupted their appraisal of the saws so they could study him critically. Plain enough to see they were settlers. Farmers. Had the same look to them that Thaddeus Bass had himself.

When Titus brought his eyes back to the storekeeper, finding himself suddenly irritated at the way Henline’s jaw hung open smugly, Bass almost wished one of the big bottle-green flies buzzing about the low-roofed shanty would flit its way right into that gaping hole in Bailey Henline’s face.

Titus repeated the question. “A praying man? Well, now. I s’pose any fella what takes off where I’m heading all on my lonesome better be a praying man, mister. That—or he’s plain crazy.”