Dance on the Wind

16

The more Titus looked over those young half-breed Colbert women, the more he realized these dusky-skinned maidens of the wilderness appealed to him.

Something about the high, pronounced cheekbones not only seemed a deeper rose in contrast to the rest of their facial color, but also accented those big almond-shaped eyes. Dark as rain-polished chert, large and expressive, doelike in the way they took his measure. And every last one of those five daughters knew how to use those eyes on their male visitors to their advantage, every one of them—from the oldest at nineteen down to the youngest just turned twelve. None had taken after their mother, a squat, rotund woman; it seemed all had their father’s blood when it came to the matter of height: even the youngest already taller than her pear-shaped mama.

When Titus and the rest reached that point on the trail where the Natchez Trace emerged from the timber on the side of the hill overlooking the river crossing, they could see family patriarch George Colbert working with two of the girls beside their big cabin below.

“That’s Colbert’s Stand,” Heman Ovatt announced as the entire party came to a halt and looked down at the clearing, which extended to the river’s edge, that large cabin joined by a small barn and four huts all clustered around an open yard.

“Seems he’s got two of ’em chopping wood for him,” Reuben Root declared, his flat hand shading his eyes. The afternoon sun was just then slipping out of the belly of the low clouds—its first appearance in more than three days.

“The man’s got the kind of help I could use,” Kingsbury said, then quickly glanced over to find Beulah glaring at him. “I mean to say—”

“I know damned well what you meant,” she growled in a huff.

“Let’s go get us some victuals,” Reuben suggested, going around Titus and Hezekiah on the worn trail, starting off down the last fifty yards of slope that would take them to the cleared, open ground where stood Colbert’s Ferry.

By the time the boatmen reached the packed earth of that great yard, George Colbert stood waiting to greet them—flanked by his wife and all their daughters, in addition to three young men, all in their early twenties.

Down there Titus finally saw the large main cabin was in fact two smaller cabins that stood some fifteen feet apart. Each had its own door facing the yard, as well as a door that fed into a covered hallway or dog run, which joined the two. Both roofs sprouted an unusually large chimney, although a trail of gray smoke billowed from only one at this hour. It was plain to see that in places the logs fit tightly together; in others there was as much as four inches in gap where they had been chinked with wood chips held in place with dried clay. Like most cabins on the frontier, Colbert’s had planed oak doors—hung without a single piece of hardware in evidence. Instead, they were held together with pegged cross braces and swung on wooden hinges.

Even as cold as it was, three of the girls stood in the damp breeze that afternoon without benefit of jerkin or coat. One by one Titus quickly appraised each one from the corner of his eye as Kingsbury and Colbert discussed the terms of their lodging for the night—finding that it excited him to see how those cold, hardened nipples pressed against their blouses. Three of the five wore long skirts gathered at the waist beneath wide, colorful sashes. But the two who most captured Titus’s admiring attention preferred men’s britches. Never before had he seen a woman wear a man’s clothing.

“What ye want done with your Negra for the night?” asked Scottish-born George Colbert, his brogue heavy with the mist of the moors.

Kingsbury turned and regarded Hezekiah for a moment, seeming to cogitate on it until Bass grabbed the bald man’s arm and declared, “He stays with us.”

“That right?” Colbert turned from the youngster to gaze at Kingsbury. “The Negra staying with ye?”

“I s’pose—”

Colbert suggested, “I can have my boys see to him: lock him in one of the cabins, or we can tie him up outside.”

“L-like he was no more’n a dog?” Titus demanded.

Appearing taken aback by the brassy youngster, Colbert rocked on his heels, saying, “Why, lad—he’s barely more’n a animal himself. An’ ye don’t want him running off while the bunch of you’re sleeping, now—do ye?”

“He’ll stay with me,” Titus protested, glaring at the Scotsman.

Kingsbury nodded with a shrug. “The Negra stays with us.”

“Suit yourself,” Colbert replied with a raise of one disapproving eyebrow. He turned to point at the two huts directly across the yard from the cabins. “Them two. C’mon—I’ll show ye where the woman can stay. And the men can stay in the cabin aside her.”

“I’ll sleep in with them,” Beulah said, glancing at Hames.

“Now, that’s up to the bunch of ye. I only be offering the woman a private place of her own.”

“We’ll take the two cabins,” Kingsbury said firmly, glancing quickly at Beulah. “The rest can bunk in together, and I can allays bunk in with the woman here—making sure she feels safe, having someone around at night.”

“Like I said before: suit yourself. Them two the best cabins we got. Bear robes and grass pallets to lay your wee bodies down tonight. Won’t find nothing softer, all the way down to Natchez.” Colbert turned to wave away his eight offspring, saying to them, “Ye children know what needs doing—now, be off and do it. Look yonder,” and he pointed. “Seems we got folks coming down to the landing on t’other side.”

With the rest Titus peered across the Tennessee River to the north shore where a half-dozen mounted men appeared from the timber and came to a halt by the water’s edge where Colbert had cleared away the brush and graded the bank to form a landing for his ferry.

“I’ll be off to see these fellows across,” he explained. “Ye make yourselves at home in those first two cabins.”

“They’re brazen women,” Beulah murmured a moment later when Colbert had turned away to march down to join his sons poling the ferry across the river toward the waiting horsemen. Ovatt, Root, and Titus ducked inside the first of the two small huts, while Hezekiah stood outside and waited dutifully. Kingsbury and Beulah went to inspect the other. Each structure stood some ten feet square, and like the main cabins were constructed of chinked logs.

“Least there’s a fire pit in the corner, and a hole up over it in them shakes on the roof,” Kingsbury commented minutes later as he emerged into the fading sunlight to find Titus waiting beside Hezekiah, with that two-cornered cap of black silk twill perched upon the slave’s bald head. The pilot turned to the woman, asking, “What you mean they’re brazen women?”

“Them Colbert girls: they get more daring with their eyes every time I come through here,” Beulah clucked. “Did you see the way they held themselves for all you men to gander?”

“One thing I’m sure of—Titus here saw all he wanted to,” Kingsbury said with a grin and a wink in Bass’s direction.

They peered down the low bank to the ferry, which was just then reaching the far side. One of the young men on board leaped onto the bank as the flatboat came close enough, carrying a long hawser over his shoulder, which he looped round and round a tree stump, tying up to take on passengers.

Kingsbury laid an arm over Beulah’s shoulder without a complaint from her.

Heman Ovatt said, “What daughters Colbert ain’t married off likely make him a good living—sold out by the night to keep travelers warm.”

“Just like a livery owner,” the woman said under her breath.

“He do that?” Titus asked innocently.

“Shit,” Kingsbury grumbled. “There you two go, giving this youngster the wrong ideas. No, Titus—I don’t think his girls are whores.”

“They’re just as brazen as them poxy trollops what work that gunboat you boys raided at Natchez,” Beulah replied.

The pilot scoffed at that. “Now, you all been by here enough to know Colbert makes a good ’nough living on that ferry of his ’thout putting his own daughters out like common lay-down women.”

“Damned pretty, ain’t they, Titus?” Root strode up from the other dirt-floored hut.

“Glass windows and a glass pane in every door,” Beulah clucked, turning to regard the cabins again. “I should say this family’s making a fine living off travelers like us.”

“I’d rather pay my fifty cents and ride over on his goddamned ferry,” Kingsbury retorted, “than ever again have to ford the Tennessee on foot in the winter.”

“Or summer,” Heman agreed.

“For the devil!” Root exclaimed. “With the money I’m carrying, sure as hell I’d sink like a rock.”

“The man’s due what he’s got, Beulah,” Kingsbury tried soothing her. “He come out here to the wilderness many a year ago to trade with the Chickasaws in these parts—an’ he’s worked hard for everything he’s got him today.”

“Looks like the man married smart, though,” the woman said sourly.

“Who put the goddamned bee under your bonnet?” Hames said, wagging his head. “The tribes got ’em a treaty says if full-bloods don’t run the stands, then only half-breeds and squaw men like Colbert can make their living on Injun land.” Kingsbury turned away to regard the last of the six riders urging his skittish horse onto the ferry. Hames quickly patted the waistband of his canvas britches, saying, “Can’t ever blame a man for wanting to get enough money ahead to make life easier for hisself, now—can you, Beulah?”

“See there,” Root said. “He’s just made himself six dollars, bringing over them riders and their horses.”

Beulah squinted at the landing in the fading light. “Who you s’pose pushing south on the Trace this time of year?”

They all turned their attention to the ferry heaving away from the north bank beneath the thick rope strung from shore to shore, each end attached to a great tree on either bank, while the ferry itself was hooked to that rope with another that slid along it, which prevented the flat, unwieldy craft from being swept downriver by the force of the Tennessee’s current.

“Maybe just some folks looking to find some warmer weather,” Kingsbury commented with a shudder as a biting wind came up. “C’mon, fellas. Let’s get us some of that wood took inside afore they call us all to supper.”

While most stands along the Natchez Trace offered both bed and board for the night, which included a supper of such questionable taste that it was guaranteed to deaden even the hungriest man’s appetite, Colbert’s Stand was a different matter altogether. Over time the old man’s squaw had learned something about the proper feeding of a white man from her Scottish husband, combining that knowledge with her native Chickasaw recipes. Although the family patriarch had gone so far as to nail down a rough-hewn puncheon floor in the family’s sleeping cabin, the floor in the combination kitchen-dining room was in no way fancier than the floors of those sleeping huts provided their guests: bare earth pounded as smooth and solid as any clay tile beneath thousands of feet across the years.

“I’ll pay you good money for that Negra of yours,” one of the horsemen offered over a dinner of white beans and corn cakes, some slabs of salted pork simmered in the beans for a hearty flavor.

“Not selling,” Kingsbury replied around a mouthful of the savory beans.

“Ain’t you ’fraid that Negra’s gonna run off on you?” asked another of the horsemen as he swabbed his corn cake across the bottom of the wooden trencher to soak up the last of his bean juice.

“He ain’t the kind tends to run off,” Titus answered testily this time, then dragged the back of his hand across his mouth. He pushed his trencher back, finished with supper, although he did hunger for another cup of that coffee, especially if it would be poured by any one of those smiling, doe-eyed half-breed Colbert girls. He wasn’t the only one giving his eager attention to the old Scotsman’s daughters—what with those six horsemen hungrily sizing them up. He raised his cup, signaling the pair nearest the huge kitchen fireplace.

“All Negras gonna run off,” the first man said with a slit-eyed smile on his lips. There was an angry fire in those eyes.

“James here oughtta know,” a third horseman spoke up for the first time, indicating that first speaker with a thumb. “He’s ’bout the best man-hunter there is in this country.”

“Man-hunter?” Ovatt asked.

The second horseman nodded, saying, “We all of us hunt down runaways. Make a pretty fair living by it, we do.”

Now James spoke again. “Always plenty of work for us, you see. Lots of folks pay a good reward for bringing back a runaway Negra.”

Kingsbury finished a swallow of coffee and asked, “Why’ll folks pay you such good money just to get one Negra back?”

James held up his cup, signaling the daughter filling Titus’s. “It ain’t just the one Negra that may happen to run away from a man’s plantation that causes worry for that owner. It’s all the others still back at his place, you must understand.” He set his full cup down and adjusted the pair of huge horse pistols he carried in the wide woven sash tied around his waist.

“All the others,” the second man repeated for emphasis.

“We’re talking about a lot of money,” James continued. “Because if that plantation owner doesn’t get back that one runaway Negra—chances are damned bloody good some of the rest are going to try running off too.”

“And no rich plantation owner wants that to happen,” added the third talkative horseman.

“That’s why rich land barons will pay such good money to get back just one poor Negra what dreams his foolish dreams of freedom,” James said with a wry grin. “So my men here and me afford to drink the finest whiskey, we smoke the best cigars, and lay with the best whores … pardon me, ladies, for my thoughtless tongue. We work hard for our money, and the money is very, very good.”

“Bet you’re tracking some Negra now, ain’cha?” Ovatt asked.

“You’re a smart fellow, boatman,” James said after he drank some of his coffee. “I’m being paid well right now as we speak. A man by the name of Lewis Robards—biggest slave trader in Mercer County, Kentucky.” Then he smiled immensely, saying, “Tell me, was your journey south a successful one?”

Kingsbury’s eyes touched his crew, then he answered, “Same as any year. But prices for near everything are down. Hard to make much of a fair living anymore. Not nowhere near the money you fellas make in your line of work.”

“I’m sure you’re not going north empty-handed,” James commented with a disarming smile. “Enough perhaps to build you another Kentucky boat, to load it with goods for another trip south. That’s always the way of things for rivermen, isn’t it, now?”

“The way it’s s’pose to work ain’t allays the way it does work,” Kingsbury replied.

“We run onto some trouble in Natchez.” Beulah suddenly entered the conversation. “This crew can be foolish a’times—not ones to walk away from a real hoot of a celebration. They tore up a gunboat and dramshop.”

James leaned his elbows on the table, slit eyes narrowing even more. “What’s that got to do with—”

“To get these boys out of that miserable jail,” the woman explained, “they had to pay a judge practically all we made for the trip—just for the damages their spree cost ’em.”

“And vow we wouldn’t show our faces back in Natchez for a year,” Kingsbury added, taking up Beulah’s fanciful story.

“A full goddamned year,” Root echoed dolefully.

“Not much a man can do, is there?” James asked. “When he gets thrown out of a town—a real shame. You fellas must be hellions.”

“Regular ring-tailed swamp panthers,” Kingsbury boasted. “Every last one of this crew is half horse, half alligator.”

“Even the young’un here?” asked the second horseman, pointing at Titus with the knife onto which he was scooping the last of his beans.

“Him? Oh, he just got his first trip down under the belt,” Kingsbury answered. “He might have the makings for a riverman.”

“As for the Negra?” James inquired. “What you plan on doing with him?”

“Told you,” Titus snapped, banging his coffee cup down on the plank table. “He ain’t for selling.”

His face hardening, James turned to Kingsbury. “I’m sure as leader of this group, you are the sort who recognizes a good offer when you see one.”

“What you talking about?” the pilot asked.

“I’m certain I can sell that Negra for a good dollar,” James instructed. “In fact, I know plantation owners who would snatch him right up for top dollar tomorrow—and all I’d have to do is show up with that big buck in tow.”

“Tell him he’s wasting his breath,” Titus growled at Kingsbury.

Grim-lipped, the river pilot replied, “The Negra belongs to the young’un here. So if’n he says he ain’t for sale, he ain’t for sale.”

The cool smile returned to James’s face as he leaned closer to the table, rocking on both elbows, clunking the big curved butts of those flintlock pistols against the tabletop. “I’m sorry to hear that, my good man. Since your trading venture downriver in New Orleans didn’t turn out very well and you spent nearly everything you had just to get out of Natchez—why, I was certain you might be interested in turning a quick and tidy profit on that Negra out there.”

“We ain’t talking about this no more, Kingsbury,” Titus snarled angrily as he stood, pushed back his end of the bench, and stepped over it. He moved to the open doorway, which allowed fresh air into the heated kitchen, then stopped before he would move into the splash of torchlight just beyond the dining room.

“You heard him,” Hames repeated. He turned to Beulah, saying, “I s’pose we ought’n be off to bed now. Morning will come awful early.”

James leaned back, pulling from inside his shirt a buckskin pouch he had hanging around his neck. From it he pulled a thick cigar. “Traveling in a hurry, are you?”

“Winter’s coming strong,” Kingsbury said. “Want to cover ground. January be here afore too long.”

“Tomorrow, in fact.”

Titus turned in the doorway. “Tomorrow? It’s January?”

“A new year, lad. The first of 1811,” James said. “Which makes this a night for us all to celebrate and fittingly frolic—to see in the new year in proper fashion.”

“My birthday,” Bass said quietly.

“Your birthday, is it?” Beulah exclaimed. “Why, yes! We ought to all celebrate that, even if we don’t celebrate the coming of the new year!”

Turning to the proprietor seated in his cane-backed chair beside the fireplace, James declared, “Mr. Colbert, be good enough to bring us your finest libations—whiskey, rye, what have you.”

The Scottish Colbert bowed graciously, saying, “My wife brewed us a good batch of potato beer not long ago. Perhaps you’d like to give that a try.”

“Yes, yes,” James replied, stroking one side of his mustache. “Along with any sweets you might have about. And see to it that your daughters stay close until the new year has arrived in all its glory … for I’m sure these boatmen love to dance even more than do my men.”

* * *

Those first hours of the new year brought with them the black belly of midnight as clouds bubbled across the heavens on the heels of distant thunder.

Lying there in that tiny hut with the two boatmen, sharing his blanket with that slave who had skin the color of rich, fertile humus, Titus listened wide-eyed to each celestial peal as it rumbled toward Colbert’s Ferry on the Tennessee River. In the throaty dying of every bark of that thunder he heard the raucous laughter of the horsemen as they reveled ever closer to dawn.

Eager to see in his birthday among real grown folk for the first time—especially since Bass fancied himself just as grown-up as the next man—he held out and wearily stayed up well past the ebbing of his own candle. Always before it had been parents and siblings, in later years some visiting friends come from across the county to celebrate that momentous day. They would bunk in and stay over, making for quite a time of it … but never anything as bawdy and uproarious as had been the merrymaking that began right after supper when all of them pushed back the long tables and benches, clearing the center of that packed-earth floor while Reuben Root scurried off to fetch his wheezing concertina.

“No matter what them others ask you to do when it comes the new year,” Kingsbury warned in a hush against Bass’s ear as everyone else hurried here and there, “don’t go showing ’em your guns.”

“M-my guns? What’re you talking—”

“Keep ’em hid, Titus. Better that way.”

“Why’s it better?”

The others had drawn too close for more talk then. “Just better we don’t ever have to find out.”

It wasn’t long before Heman Ovatt purloined a pair of pewter spoons, which he clacked against thigh, knee, and elbow, while one of the horsemen produced a jaw harp, and George Colbert pulled out his Tennessee mouth-bow, both of which added the right rhythmic twang to accompany the sweating, heaving dancers as they jigged and clogged, pranced and stomped, the ten male wayfarers keeping the Colbert daughters whirling nonstop, while the old man’s three sons took turns spinning across the tiny dance floor with Beulah and their beaming, dark-skinned mother. Hezekiah squatted in a corner near the warmth of the fireplace, clapping, bobbing his head, and near grinning his face loose.

As midnight approached, the one called James announced the advent of the new year by his watch and ordered everyone out into the yard beneath the darkening skies as the first clouds rolled in to obliterate all traces of the moon and the far-flung stars. At the proper moment the horsemen and Colbert’s sons all pulled free their heavy armament and let roar at the deepening black of the heavens. In response to that gunfire, and what hooting and shouting accompanied the momentous hour, those oxen in the nearby corral bellowed while the nervous horses set loose their own shrill protest.

Not long after they all crowded back into the Colberts’ dining hall, Bass had grown bone weary and begged off, paying his respects to the ladies. He had made it to the open doorway when his hand was caught up and he was spun around, flung back into the arms of one of those tawny-skinned daughters. She led him spinning around the dance floor, bumping into some, bouncing off others as the unattached horsemen glared their jealousy while clapping in time with the wheezing music’s frenetic pace.

Before they circled the floor a fourth dizzying time, Titus realized he was smitten. Hard-bodied and rawboned, this tall half-breed girl smiled eye to eye at him, her cheeks flushed with excitement and energy and all that she put into her dance as they swung round and round. Almost more than anything, he liked the way the sweat glistened on her tawny skin, drops captured in that shallow cleft at the bottom of her neck, the way the rivulets of it streamed down to converge within the salty heave of her cleavage. Already the dancing lather plastered her blouse against those breasts, sticking to the flat of her belly. While she might not have been the best-looking of Colbert’s five, the one who seized hold of him at that moment did have one definite advantage over her sisters: she made no bones about just who it was she wanted to pair herself with.

As much as she threw herself into the dance, it did not surprise Titus that a short time later she asked him to take her outside for a breath of the cool night air. Once immersed in those shadows playing against the wall of the cabin near the dog run, she pressed her mouth right against his. Stunned, he stumbled back, wide-eyed as one of her arms trapped his waist, slamming his hips against hers until she bumped him back into the wall. He was pinned as her free hand roamed up his belly to the neck of his shirt, then wandered across that bare skin drawn taut over his shoulder.

Of a sudden she had her tongue pressing against his lips. This was new, an unsettling sensation. As his lips relaxed, she pressed hard with her tongue, separating his teeth, searching out his tongue, exploring his mouth voraciously. Every bit as hungrily he swallowed the taste of her, the flavor of her father’s potato beer on her tongue, still so fresh on his own. Each time he closed his eyes, his head swam, sensing again a great tingling that swept over him like the lick of a burning flame.

Then his eyes flew open when he felt her hand tugging at the waistband of his britches—more than eager: the girl was downright hungry.

“Ho—… hold on,” he sputtered, seizing her hands in fear she would discover the coins sewn there where she fumbled in her hurry to get at his engorged flesh. “L-lemme.”

“Now,” she whispered. “Jest do it now.”

The girl pulled away from him, moved back beneath the covered dog run where the shadows lurked even deeper. As he fought those buttons out of their holes, Bass lurched close behind, nearly falling over her clumsily as she dropped to her knees, rolled over on her back, and hiked up her long cloth skirt. Placing himself between her outflung legs, he fumbled to get his flesh freed from his longhandles and the nankeen britches, feeling those two big pistols spill from the back of his waistband as his pants fell open. At that moment he cared little for what became of them.

Quickly he went to feel along her bare legs, surprised to find they were covered with what he felt were buckskin britches much like his. When she seized hold of his hot, rigid flesh in one hand, the girl grasped one of his hands and guided it between her legs. It was then he discovered the britches were instead leggings. His appetite rising, Titus danced his fingers over the bare flesh of her loins, seeking that moist patch of hair where she wriggled as soon as he brushed his hand against her heat.

Roughly she dragged his engorged flesh forward as if it weren’t attached to him at all, forcing him to rock over her as she planted him within her moistness. Certain was he that he would spend himself right then and there—exactly as he had that first night at the swimming hole with Amy Whistler. But just as he began to tense and shudder, she suddenly stopped moving, reaching down to grab his scrotum, pulling on it gently, but insistently, until he sensed that overwhelming need to explode slowly dissipate.

He welcomed that wash of relief by immediately throwing himself back into his energetic thrusts. Likewise she imprisoned him with her legs, locking his head in a death-grip with both arms, flinging her hips up against him in a clumsy dance by this half-dressed two-headed beast.

When she began to groan—low at first—he quickly stopped and reared back in wide-eyed surprise: mystified, more afraid than anything. Great God, if he went and hurt her, what the devil would her brute of a father and halfbreed brothers do to him?

“No! D-don’t stop!” she ordered, squeezing her legs about his hips even tighter, dragging his head back down as her hips gyrated insistently.

Obedient was he, willing captive that Titus was. A prisoner of his own sudden appetite, aroused to a fever pitch by those patches of smooth flesh he stroked beneath the crumple of her dress pulled high above her waist, compelled by the moistness he had penetrated, made dizzy by the strong smell of fragrant wood chips, sweat, and potato beer clinging to her like hickory smoke clung to his pap’s hams suspended above the smoldering fires in the smoking shed.

It wasn’t long before her groan became an insistent whimper. As the sound grew in volume at his ear, the primal grunt of it began to hammer at him every time they collided. Then she nearly scared him out of his skin when she suddenly grabbed one of his hands and clamped it over her own mouth as she thrashed back and forth. He ripped the hand away.

“Keep … keep it there!” she huffed in a high-pitched whine.

Seizing his hand again, the girl slapped it back over the bottom of her face as she went back to lunging up at him. He’d never had a woman throw herself into this mating with such fight, at the same time wanting him to keep her quiet.

Then he knew why she had clamped his hand where she had.

The instant she began that muffled scream, he stopped his thrusts and started to pull the hand away. Terrified at the wild shriek from the beast below him, he clamped the hand back down over her mouth as she threw herself into a hissing, snarling tantrum there in the shadows of the dogtrot. Titus jerked his head this way, then that, afraid to his core that at any moment the elder Colbert would appear at the corner of the cabin and find him not just rutting with his daughter—but bodily harming the frightened young girl to boot.

Why, it sounded as if someone were killing her!

Then, as her hips slowed their lunging gyrations, she reached up and took a bunch of his hair in each hand, dragging his face down so she could lather it with her wet mouth.

“Ain’cha ready?” she huffed breathlessly at his ear.

“I … got so scared—”

“Do it. Just do it now,” and she let go of his hair, locking her hands on his buttocks poking above the wide waistband of his britches like two bare hillocks rising above a line of timber below.

She clawed and scratched them, kneading his skin while thrusting herself up to him. No longer did she have her eyes closed. Now they were intense, snakelike slits. Her lips pressed together in a line of determination.

Again she asked, “You’re ready, ain’cha?”

For the moment he could not answer. Suddenly everything above and below his groin seemed shut off from all sensation, incapable of any function aside from assisting what eruption was about to occur. And with his first explosion she moaned and whimpered beneath him again—small, feral yelps of pleasure.

As he ground to a halt, fully spent within her, the girl slowly, softly stroked those bare mounds she had been pulling tight against her.

The next thing he grew conscious of was her voice in his ear.

“We cain’t sleep here all night.”

“No … no, we can’t.” His mouth tasted pasty, as if he’d been sucking on a trencher filled with lye ash.

Groggily Titus raised his head. The air was cold, damp too of a sudden, on the bare flesh of his buttocks. He was surprised to find that she and he lay just as they had finished—fallen asleep locked in that final embrace of afterglow.

But then she was pushing him to the side, rolling the other way herself. The cold shocked him all the more as his limp flesh flopped against his belly, shrinking quickly.

Scrambling to her feet, the girl tugged down her skirt, shuffled that loose blouse back into place, and smoothed it over those young breasts he had wanted to taste so badly while they had been dancing. He realized he wanted her again. When he reached up for her, the girl pushed his hands down.

“Get your britches pulled up,” she ordered in a harsh whisper.

“C’mere. I wanna—”

“No,” she answered harshly. “Maybe ’nother time. My father come out looking for me if I’m gone too long.”

“Just go let him see you, then come back.”

“Maybe you go on to your bed. Your cabin yonder,” she countered coyly. “Maybe I’ll come find you later. You was good, boy. Better’n a lotta the men I had me.”

That raised his ire. “I’m every bit a man like them.”

Behind her hand she giggled, turning away. “Like I said, better’n most every one I had.”

The shadows absorbed her so quickly, he never got another plea out. It took a few moments more before the cold breeze brushing his bare flesh seeped back into his consciousness. Hobbling to his knees, Titus heaved himself from there to his feet, hopping about while yanking up the britches.

With them buttoned he slipped around the side of the cabin, stole a long last look in the open door. There he found everyone still in full revel. Kingsbury turned, saw him, and motioned Bass back in.

Titus shook his head, pointing to the hut. After the pilot nodded, Bass moved out of the splash of flickering torchlight as the wind picked up. The night air smelled rank with rain as he reached the second of the two huts where the boatmen had stowed what blankets and belongings they were packing north to the Ohio. Inside the shanty, out of the wind, his nose pricked with the smell of another. Eyes were slow growing accustomed to the dark as he searched the walls, while dancing torchlight from across the yard spilled in through the hut’s single, small window.

“Hezekiah?”

“Yes. Me.”

“You’re awake.”

“Not sleep. The noise. Guns.”

“Yeah,” he said, searching the floor with his hands. “You got both our blankets?”

“Right here.”

Titus settled in beside the big slave as Hezekiah held up both blankets. “Cold night.”

“Sure is,” the slave agreed. “Warm now.”

He let out a sigh and closed his eyes, sensing the body heat from the big man’s back beginning to warm him.

“Ask you question, Titus?”

“What’s that?”

“You with woman tonight?”

“How you mean?”

For the longest time there was no reply. Then Hezekiah said, “With woman: like you was with Nina back to Miss Annie’s boat.”

“Yepper,” he answered, remembering Ebenezer Zane always answering in the affirmative just that way.

“Thought me so. Goo’night, Titus.”

For a moment he wanted to ask the slave how he knew, then decided he wouldn’t. Eventually Bass said, “Good night, Hezekiah.”

Sometime later he had awakened, hearing that first roll of thunder come their way from across the ridge to the west, the same heights they had struggled up, over, then down to reach this ford on the Tennessee River. For the longest time he lay there in the dark, feeling the Negro snore with a rumble like dull thunder itself, listening to the other two boatmen snore.

He was just slipping back into sleep when he heard footsteps outside. Sensing immediate alarm, he laid a hand on one of his pistols as the small oak door creaked open on its own swollen wood hinges, grating across the pounded clay floor beneath it.

“Reuben!” Kingsbury’s voice whispered harshly like the rending of new canvas. “Heman! Ho, Titus! Pull yourselves up.”

Then a sudden flare of lightning backlit the river pilot, stoop-shouldered in the half-opened doorway. At the crack of thunder he vaulted into the hut, stumbling over a pair of feet before catching himself against the far wall.

“That you down there, Titus?”

“My feet, yes.”

“Get you and that Negra up,” Kingsbury ordered as he straightened. “We gotta be off now. Up, up—be quick about it now.”

“By the devil—it ain’t even light yet, Hames,” Root hissed as he sat up, rubbing grit from his eyes.

“Gonna be soon enough,” he replied with an urgent bite. “I wanna be long gone from that bunch afore dawn. Now, up with all of you and get down to the ferry. I’m off to fetch Colbert and his boys now to haul us away to the far shore afore this storm breaks.”

The first drops fell as they were nearing the north bank of the Tennessee, hauled across by the power of the Colbert muscle. The half-dozen wayfarers hurried off the rough planks of the unwieldy craft as rain slicked the wood and bare ground where they turned momentarily to watch the old man bark orders at his three boys. The sky chose that moment to open up as the ferry disappeared behind shifting sheets of rain. When they struggled up the slick bank to huddle beneath the first of that canopy of trees sheltering the well-worn groove of the Natchez Trace, another flare of that terrifying electrical storm lit up the whole of Colbert’s Landing.

In that daylike brightness it was plain to make out the main cabins, the wayfarer huts. The corral.

“Shit,” Kingsbury growled.

“Them horses ain’t there,” Titus said.

“Jesus God,” Ovatt added his own oath.

All six of them stood there, soaked and chilled, staring across the river as another flash of lightning starred the far settlement of crude buildings. The post corral was empty—not one of the eight horses the six slave hunters had brought with them still there.

“Where you figure they gone?” Root asked, something pinching his voice into a taut string.

As Bass hunched over, squinting in the sudden flares of the storm, searching the muddy ground for some clue, Kingsbury shouted against the roar of approaching thunder.

“Wherever they gone—it’s for no good.”

“W-why you say that?” Beulah asked.

The pilot turned on her, gripped her shoulders firmly. “They ain’t gone to bed—pulled out afore us. None of that’s no good.”

“What we do now?” Ovatt asked.

They looked at one another for a moment, then Beulah said, “There ain’t no ferry coming to fetch us, fellas. We just sit here, or get on down the way home like we ’tended.”

“Woman’s right,” Kingsbury said. “Maybeso the dark help us more’n them sonsabitches.”

Root grabbed hold of Kingsbury’s soppy coat. “How you so sure they ain’t just gone looking for runaways?”

“They’re coming after us, Reuben,” the pilot answered with a wag of his head. “Didn’t you see it plain as paint?. They want this here Negra.”

Root whirled on Hezekiah. “I say we get rid of the son of a bitch right here and now. Let ’em have him.”

“No!” Titus bellowed against a clap of thunder.

Root turned to Bass, snagging up a big handful of his oiled jerkin in both hands, shaking the youth. “That bunch hunts down men for money. Likely they kill’t their share.”

“So have we,” Ovatt replied.

“But they’re the paid killers,” Kingsbury argued. “And we mean nothing to ’em but money.”

Root flung Bass back from him. “Get rid of the Negra right now!”

“Maybe Reuben’s right.” Ovatt aligned himself with Root. “We give ’em the Negra—they’ll leave us be.”

The wind came up, strong in Titus’s face as if it were siding against him too. “You can’t—”

“It won’t help a damned thing,” the woman suddenly interrupted Bass. “Hames, you know damned good and well they ain’t after just the Negra here.”

Nodding with some reluctance, his skinny face glistening with rain as the next bolt of lightning lit up the countryside, Kingsbury said, “She’s right. It ain’t only the Negra. They’re coming after the money.”

Ovatt scoffed, “They don’t know we got no money.”

“They goddamn well do know!” the pilot replied. He seemed to square his narrow shoulders as he turned to Bass. “Best keep our guns under our coats—right, Titus?”

He swallowed hard, seeing the rest of those wet faces staring intently at his. “Yeah. Keeps your pan powder dry, out of the rain.”

“Not just that,” Kingsbury added morosely, gazing up the dark corridor of the Natchez Trace, “that bunch never did see for sure that we was armed, the hull lot of us. Maybeso they show up, that ignernce’ll count for something.”

“I pray it does count for something, Hames,” Beulah agreed. “When it comes down to the killin’.”

The horsemen had gone sometime in the night. It had to be after that gal had finished with Titus and he looked in to find everyone still celebrating—going off to bed himself. Had to be after Kingsbury, Ovatt, and Root had limped across the yard to their blankets. When the one called James had ordered his men into the saddle only then.

Bass wished he knew more about horses, to know how far and how fast an able man could travel on one. Then he would have some idea how far the boatmen had to go before counting on bumping into those slave trackers.

But then—he thought, with his teeth chattering like a box of ivory dominoes in an ox-horn cup—the how far didn’t really matter, did it? Because once a man was out ahead of you, he no longer had to travel any great distance. He could pick his place. A spot most favorable to acting on his plans. Just hunker down and wait for you to come along at your own pace.

They could be waiting up there no more than a hundred paces. Or as much as a hundred leagues. That was the thing about not knowing that scared him down to his roots. This wasn’t like any of the dangers he had faced before. Oh, he had been scared in having to face the Falls of the Ohio, just as scared of the prospect of running the Devil’s Raceground or the Devil’s Elbow on the Mississippi. Deep water had always frightened him.

Still, he had confronted his fear time and again—staring it in the eye, and not giving an inch. But this … Titus had never had to stew in his own juices over the very real possibility of staring down danger in the form of another man driven by deadly intent.

Not even when that Chickasaw hunting party had caught him alone in that timber. Not when that war party had slipped down the river to surprise Ebenezer Zane’s flatboat crew. Not when Titus had been so crazy drunk he couldn’t even get his pecker excited and that eye-gouging fight had broken out on Annie Christmas’s gunboat.

On every occasion Bass had suddenly found himself thrust into the vortex of events. With no time to fret, or worry, much less get himself scared until all of it was damned well over and done with. And—by God—there really was a tangible advantage to not having to put one soggy moccasin in front of the other, minute by minute, yard by yard, worrying all the while when and where in the rain-soaked darkness of this wilderness they were going to strike.

“I don’t like this,” Root grumbled after they had moved something more than a mile up the trail.

“Reuben’s right,” Ovatt said when Kingsbury halted and turned around. He glanced back at Titus and Hezekiah before continuing, “I say we make fine targets, all of us bunched up the way we is.”

For a brief moment the bony pilot appeared to heft that around as he stared at the wet leaves and dead grass beneath his feet. “Awright. Maybeso you’re right. Beulah, you wanna stay on with me?”

“Told you I was,” she replied with a sharp edge, her tone a bit haughty in her confusion.

“Then you and me’ll go on down the road first,” he said, then turned to Root and Ovatt. “Give us a short bit—just when you see us get to the far shadows, then you two move out. Titus, you wait and do the same after these fellas go, then bring that Negra with you.”

Bass glanced quickly at Hezekiah, fear pricking the small of his back. “We’re breaking up?”

“Maybe they won’t do no good in catching us all if’n we ain’t all together,” Root explained.

No longer was it fear. Now his anger rose in him like a case of hives: sudden, and hot. “I know what this is,” Bass snapped. “You’re just getting rid of me an’ him ’cause I won’t let you get rid of him.”

Kingsbury took a step forward, offering his hand in the misty rain. “We ain’t leaving you behin’t.”

Swinging an arm, he pushed the pilot’s hand aside. “G’won, then—if it’s gonna be this way. Git. All of you.”

Beulah moved up beside Bass. The lightning filled the sky overhead with a yellowish phosphorescence. “You’ll be right behind us.”

A clap of thunder raised the hair on the back of Titus’s neck. He felt the small hairs on his arms rise as the odor of riven ozone burst through the canopy of trees while the rumble died off in the distance.

“We can’t run off from you,” Ovatt declared.

“I know you can’t,” Titus snarled. “You might try, but I can still catch up—”

“No,” Ovatt interrupted. “We can’t run off from you, ’cause you’re one of us, Titus.”

Kingsbury came closer to the angry youth. “You proved you was one of us ever since you said you’d ride through the chutes with us back to Louisville. You didn’t have to, young’un—but you did. Right then and there Ebenezer figured you was part of his crew. And now … well—you been a part of us through it all. You say so, we’ll all stay close together. Just to prove we ain’t running out on you.”

In the teeth of that raging storm he looked from one face to another, all three of those boatmen. Of a moment he felt ashamed. With no call to judge these men who had watched over him like uncles, protected him like older brothers, and scolded him like fathers. But even more, he again experienced that deep regret he had swallowed down ever since losing Ebenezer Zane, that shame that told him he was to blame for the riverman’s death.

Skin prickling, Bass waited for the next peal of thunder to rock the ground where they stood, causing all of them to shudder with its nearness, knowing he owed these Kentucky men more than he could ever repay—simply because it was his fault Ebenezer was taken from them.

“The rest of you, g’won now,” Titus said quietly. “Me an’ Hezekiah, we’ll bring up the rear.”

Bass watched Kingsbury and Beulah, then Root and Ovatt slip from view up the footpath, really nothing more than a game trail beneath the skeletal overhang of beech-nut and pin oak, black ash and chinkapin. When the next muzzle flash of lightning came, Titus could no longer see them. He nudged the slave into motion. It seemed colder now. The rain falling somehow harder, more insistently. Perhaps it only seemed that way because he felt all the more lonely. Down to just him and a big, black Negra who Annie Christmas paid for down at the slave pens in New Orleans and brought north, teaching him to speak a little of the white folks’ tongue so he could serve liquor and throw any unruly customers off her gunboat.

But at that moment Titus put one moccasin in front of the other, listening to the rain hammer the forest around them, the thunder voice coming in a mighty roar before it slipped off in a whimper, only then able to hear the slog of the Negra’s old, worn boots on last autumn’s dead leaves lying in a black mat of decay on that ancient buffalo trail.

But the buffalo were no more. How well he had learned that from his grandpap. Big critters like the buffalo were all but gone when the first settlers had moved over the mountains from Virginia into the canebrakes of the land they would one day call Kentucky. Farmers—driving the Indian, like the buffalo, before them.

Anymore, most all that was left for a man to hunt in Kentucky were a few deer, and the smaller game: turkey, squirrels, rabbits, coon, and the like. Not like the olden times his grandpap used to talk on and on about. Time was when a man had nothing more to feed his family but wild game.

In that rainy forest, where it seemed the sun refused to rise of a dark and deadly purpose, Titus remembered how his grandpap seemed caught between what had been and what was. The old man used to say that now it was a good thing the settlers could provide for their families with all that they could grow, along with raising those domesticated farm animals a man could slaughter when times grew lean and desperate—simply because the big animals had all moved on.

This hunger to see what lay beyond the Mississippi was like a nettle poked into the seam of his moccasin—working its tiny barb into his flesh so that he was always shy of being comfortable when he set that foot down. Too, it was a remembrance that again released a great remorse in him, just like an oozy boil festering around that nettle worked down into his flesh. How dearly he missed that old man who had seemed to understand his grandson far, far better than did Thaddeus.

Titus did not have long to dwell on his loss.

Hezekiah clamped Bass’s arm in one of his great hands, pressing a finger to his lips. The rain poured mercilessly from the black man’s smooth head as he blinked. Then he motioned Titus to follow. They left the footpath, twisting through the broom pine and dogwood trees as the lightning flared, igniting the whole of the sky above them like midday every few moments. Then the slave stopped him and pointed.

Out there in the sodden darkness left behind by a retreating peal of thunder, a familiar voice growled, “Where’s that boy?”

He could not remember ever feeling cold like that: the sudden chill splash down his backbone like January snow-melt spilling off the cabin roof.

“He didn’t come with us,” Kingsbury answered, staring up into that ring of slavers.

One of the horses moved, sidestepping with fright, jostling another at a new clap of thunder. Nearly all of the animals fought their bits. Titus could see them wide-eyed in the excruciating flare of each tongue of lightning as the maw of the storm settled over them.

The slave hunters had his four friends surrounded. Clearly outgunned and caught dead-footed. Like the pilot and Beulah, Ovatt and Root had their hands raised as they stood at the center of that wide circle of horsemen.

“You’re telling me he’s back at Colbert’s Stand?”

“We left him sleeping,” Kingsbury lied. “He … he didn’t wanna sell that goddamned useless Negra to you, so the rest of us up and figured to leave him behind for good. Son of a bitch has been too much trouble to us already.”

The leader named James rocked back in his saddle as if he was considering something. Then he looked down the backtrail. “He still have that slave with him?”

“They was cuddled up back to back, like bedbugs,” Ovatt declared.

“Yep,” Root added, his voice edgy. “Didn’t wanna get up and move out when we did—so we left ’em.”

“Goddammit,” James growled. He waved one of his pistols down the trail. “You—Harrison—take McCarthy with you. Get back there and hold those two. I don’t want them going nowhere.”

“You coming on later?” Harrison asked.

“Yeah. Soon as I figure out what to do with the rest of these.”

The two horsemen peeled away from the rest, parting a pair of led-horses as they set off back to the ford. At first the eight hooves clopped away on the soggy ground and fallen leaves, but that leaving was quickly swallowed by another loud rumble of thunder that followed the next lightning hurled from the low clouds suspended like black coal right over their heads. He watched the pair of horsemen disappear in the dark, then turned back to study the four who remained.

“The Trace has it quite a reputation,” James was saying. “Murderers and thieves. All sorts of vermin been known to haunt this road. And they all share one thing in common: every last one of them leaves their victims speechless.”

“That’s what we’ll do with ’em, right?” one of the others asked.

“Yes,” James said, an edge of resignation in his voice. “I suppose we have no other choice.”

“Leave the woman go,” Kingsbury pleaded, taking a small step to move in front of Beulah protectively.

The slaver must have enjoyed that, for James laughed, throwing his head back lustily. Then he said, “Shit, now. I never knew a man who could hold a candle to a woman when it come to dangerous talk. No—a woman wags her tongue sooner, and a lot faster’n any man I ever knowed. The bitch’ll die with the rest of you.”

“Let’s just get it over with,” another of the horsemen growled.

“Not just yet,” James snapped, his horse sidling nervously, fighting the bit. “Not before I see if these three rivermen are carrying what I think they’re carrying.”

The trio of boatmen backed closer together, Beulah between them.

“What about her?”

“Yes,” James answered one of his men. “She might just be carrying some of the money too.” He looked hard at the woman, saying, “You’ve got it under your clothes, don’t you?”

“Haven’t got nothing of no value,” Kingsbury said bravely, his teeth chattering with cold.

Bass’s heart whimpered with a twinge of sympathy for that brave man as he tapped on Hezekiah’s shoulder, nudging him toward the horsemen. Leaning over to speak into the slave’s ear, Titus whispered, “Grab you something big and long. Get you a branch off the ground.”

While he kept his eyes on the horsemen, Hezekiah hunched over, creeping off in search of a limb among the dark, decaying leaves.

“You first,” James said, wagging his pistol at Kingsbury. “Open your shirt.”

He did as he was told. And the horseman James had ordered out of the saddle to search the river pilot found nothing.

Wagging his pistol again, the slaver thundered, “Off with your britches!”

“You heard him!” the man beside Kingsbury growled, pounding him on the back. “Take ’em off.”

Kingsbury pulled free his wide leather belt from its buckle, allowing it to drop to the sodden ground. He yanked at the fly buttons, shinnying them down to hop out of his soggy pants.

The slave hunter snatched them up from the ground, shook them, then tossed the britches up to the leader. “They feel heavy, James.”

“Aye, they do at that,” the leader replied. “The rest of you, off with yours. Now!”

“And you, woman.” The thief on the ground whirled on Beulah, reaching out and stuffing his hand inside the neck of her blanket coat, flinging open the flaps. “You I’ll search my own self.”

The moment he grabbed hold of the top of her blouse and rent it in half, Kingsbury lunged for him. The thief brought up his pistol in a backswing, catching Hames across the temple. The river pilot stumbled backward. Root caught him as the thief hurled the woman down into the mud. Standing over her, his pistol in one hand, he fought his belt and britches with the other. Kingsbury came to and tried to fight off Root and Ovatt, struggling to reach Beulah, who refused to let out a cry.

“Stay where you are, boatman!” James ordered, urging his horse forward a yard, wagging his pistol at the three rivermen. “This ought to be a pretty sight to watch.”

“I swear—I’ll kill you,” Kingsbury growled. “I’ll hunt you down. I’ll see you hang—”

James’s pistol barked in that hammer of rain, spinning Kingsbury around. He crumpled from the grasp of his two companions, spilling back into the leaves and dead grass beneath the bare branches of a hickory tree.

Beulah scrambled to the side, attempting to crawl to her feet and reach him, crying out only when the thief struck her across the jaw with a flat hand. She sprawled back, and once more he stepped over to straddle her, exposing himself as the two other horsemen dismounted and slogged over.

“I get some’a that next.”

“Hell with you! I was on the ground afore you.”

The first shoved the second. The second reached out to grab for the first, squabbling.

“Stop it!” James bellowed in the dying growl of thunder. “Just take her and be done with it! And you,” he said to one of the two on the ground, “get back in the saddle and keep your gun on the rest of these here.”

“I’ll damn well be next,” the man grumbled in disappointment as he stuffed a boot into the stirrup and rose to the saddle.

Wincing, Kingsbury slowly rose to his elbow as Ovatt and Root knelt beside him.

“You hit?” Reuben asked.

Touching the top of his shoulder, the river pilot nodded. “I’ll live,” he huffed, clearly in pain, glaring up at James, who was pulling a second pistol from the sash at his waist. “Long enough to find you.”

The man climbing back onto his horse guffawed nastily. “You ain’t gonna live nowhere near that long, you dumb son of—”

In that next flare of lightning the man began swinging a foot over the rump of his horse—when he suddenly pitched sideways from his saddle, his horse bounding away from the falling body, colliding with another riderless horse.

That’s when a piece of that black night tore out of the bowels of the forest and flung itself like a crazed, demonic shadow right into the midst of those two dismounted horsemen.