Ride the Moon Down

2

“Maybe I should catch this strange-looking fish!”

At her giggle Bass turned his head to find his wife standing among the willows on the creekbank. “You already caught your fish, woman. Come in with me—the water feels almost as good as you this morning.”

Before ever worrying about breakfast this morning, he had tagged along with her to a secluded part of the stream where she would have a little privacy to bathe the baby. There he tied off their two horses while Waits-by-the-Water pushed through a gap in the willows to reach the edge of the creek where she found a small strip of open ground covered with grass, shaded by some young cottonwood saplings.

As she began to unwind all the swaddling wrapped around the child, he pulled off his grimy calico shirt, moccasins, and leggings, then dropped his breechclout on the bank before tiptoeing into the cool water. Finding it cold enough that morning to make him shiver with those first few steps, Titus finally eased himself beneath the surface until he sat submerged, water lapping up to his shoulders.

But he was standing now, scrubbing his skinny legs with creek-bottom sand, when she called him an odd-looking fish.

Scratch stopped, peered down, studying himself a moment there in the new day’s light. “You afraid to come in here and swim with this fish you caught?”

“Never did I realize how truly white you are for a white man!” she snorted, putting her fingers over her lips to stifle a giggle.

Looking down at himself again, Titus had to agree. His legs might see the sun only once a year, come his annual rendezvous scrubbing. From his neck up and his wrists down, the man was tanned brown as a twice-smoked Kentucky ham. But the rest of his skinny, scarred, bony body was about as pale as a translucent winter moon.

“Downright stupefying, ain’t I?” he said in English as he worked at scrubbing that second leg before settling back into the stream.

Waits had finished pulling off all the fouled grass and moss she had packed around the baby’s genitals at sundown the night before, and now held the girl just above the surface of the water to gently wash the child’s skin. Finally she laid the infant back on the blankets, patted the child dry, then leaned over to yank up long blades of summer-cured grass from the bank. These clumps of dry stalks she placed under the girl’s bottom, packed them between the child’s legs, then methodically rewrapped the long sections of cloth and, finally, an antelope hide around her daughter’s body.

Once done with that, Waits-by-the-Water returned the bundled child to the open flaps of the small cradleboard as the girl began to fuss. Watching her care for their child there on the bank, Titus smiled, enjoying the round fullness of her rump as it strained against her leather dress, the way her full breasts swayed against the buckskin yoke as she knotted the cradleboard strings.

“You coming, woman?”

Picking up the cradleboard, then settling cross-legged on the bank, Waits pulled aside the loose dress sleeve and partially exposed a breast, guiding it into the girl’s mouth. “As soon as she has eaten some more breakfast.”

“By the stars, woman—that child eats more than … more than—”

“More than you?” she interrupted with a big grin.

He slapped at the water with one hand. “Seems she’s eating most all the time.”

“That’s what babies do, husband. They eat and sleep, and mess their cradleboards too.” She looked at him a long moment, then gazed up- and downstream before she added, “As soon as she is asleep, I’ll join you. If no one will see me, I will come in to swim with you.”

That delicious anticipation was enough to slowly arouse him.

Once she had set the cradleboard aside to let the child sleep with her full tummy, Waits quickly yanked off her moccasins. Taking a moment to glance both ways along the creek, she hurriedly pulled her dress over her head and stepped off the bank, sucking in a gush of air as the sudden cold shocked her.

“You’ll get used to it. Come on over here,” he begged.

She settled beside him, then turned so that he could pull her back against his chest. There they sat in the middle of the creek as the valley gradually came alive on all sides of them. In the quiet of this early morning, it took little effort to hear sounds drifting from far-off trapper camps and Indian villages too: grumbling, hungover men, mothers scolding children in foreign tongues, the whinnying of horses and braying of mules, the crack of axes and the occasional boom of a rifle against the far bluffs where someone had gone in search of game.

Time was he had never seen a rendezvous sunrise unless he was stumbling back to his robes after a long, long night of liquoring and devilment. Many were the summers he drank himself into oblivion, hardly rousing from his stupor to vomit right where he lay, then passing right out again—repeatedly convincing himself he was having a fine time of it. After all, weren’t the rest of his friends doing the very same thing, day after day until the rendezvous was over and the traders headed east, or at least until he and his friends ran out of money and pelts and it was time to face down their hangovers, time to haul their aching heads back to the high country where they would work up enough plews to pay for another summer spree?

The last real drunk he’d given himself was no more than two summers before, back to Pierre’s Hole in thirty-two. By then the hangovers had begun to hurt him something terrible. And last year both he and Josiah took it easy on the whiskey, choosing not to punish the barleycorn that much, what with their both having new wives with them.

Wives. Most white folks just wouldn’t ever understand, he figured. There’d been no ceremony between him and Waits-by-the-Water. Hell, when he’d ridden off for the western sea more than a year and a half ago, Titus had gone to sulking and licking his wounds, figuring her vows of love weren’t worth much at all. But come the next spring—there she had been, tagging along with Josiah his own self, clearly intending to find Titus, to show him just how devoted she truly was.

No, there had been no civil-folks preacher to say the proper words over the two of them as they stood before their families and friends as they did back among the settlements. Such folks in the States would likely mule up their eyes and scrunch their lips in a sneer at the very thought that a man like him and a creature such as Waits could be so much in love that they would privately vow to one another every bit as strong as any white folks’ ceremony, promising they would be there until death ultimately parted them.

One more reason why he figured he’d made his last trip back east. St. Louis was in the past, and all those white folks too. Titus figured he wouldn’t live long enough to ever want to see settlements again, their sprawl stretching farther and farther west the way they always had.

Maybe he wouldn’t live long enough to see settlers and wagons, white women and preachers, reach the high plains, much less make it to the Shining Mountains. Why—a mountain man sure as hell ought’n die a’fore he had to witness such a goddamned confabulation as that! Damn if it wouldn’t likely pull the heart right out of a feller to see all this get ruin’t with settlers and civilizing.

By bloody damn, he prayed there’d still be plenty of wild in the wilderness, enough to last him all the rest of his days.

“You are going to see your tall friend this morning?” Waits asked him in a whisper as she gently scrubbed his grimy fingers one by one, scratching at the layers of grease and blood, grit and camp-black that had encrusted itself down deep into every knuckle, hardened into dark crescents at the base of every fingernail.

“Yes. Jarrell,” he said in English.

“Jer-rel,” she repeated.

“Jarrell Thornbrugh,” he completed the friend’s name with just the proper burr to the last name. “A John Bull Englishman.”

“That is more of his name?”

He chuckled and explained in Crow, “Just Jarrel Thornbrugh. Englishman is where he’s from, what he is. Like I’m American from the States, and you’re a Crow from Absaroka.”

“It was good to have a friend near when death loomed close last summer,”^* she reflected.

“He saved our lives,” Bass agreed. “Saved Josiah’s life. Mine too.”

“This man, he comes to trade his furs like you?”

“No. Last summer Jarrell told me that his boss, a man I met out to the western sea, sent him to rendezvous all alone only to look things over. That boss, a white-headed eagle named McLoughlin, had plans to send a brigade of men here this summer.”

“More of the English white men?”

“Yes, woman—all sent by a man who wants to carve off a piece of this rendezvous trade for himself.”

Worry tinged her voice. “Will the English push the Americans out of these mountains?”

Bass snorted, shaking his long, damp hair. “Not a chance of that. If the English know what’s good for them, they’ll stay to their own country and leave this to the rest of us.”

“You will go this morning to throw the tall white man out of this country?”

After some hesitation Bass said, “I don’t figure I got the right to throw any man out of what country isn’t mine.”

“But many times you’ve told me this land is your home.”

“True, woman. But it still isn’t mine, the way folks put down claims on the ground back east. No, I’m content to live out here where none of this is really mine, to pass on through a lot of country where I’m only visiting.”

“There is Crow country farther north,” she tried to explain as she wrapped his arms over the tops of her heavy breasts. “And this country is the land of the Shoshone and Bannock. All fight to keep the powerful Blackfoot from taking away their lands. So why aren’t you going to fight the English now that they have come to take this country from you?”

“I don’t think they have come here to take any land from me,” he declared.

“But they came for the beaver,” she maintained. “And some of that beaver is yours.”

He leaned to the side so he could gaze closely at her face. “You trying to stir up some trouble between me and that big Englishman?”

With a smile she replied in Crow, “No. I am only trying to make sense of why you do what you do sometimes. Make sense of what you don’t do at times. You Americans and the Englishmen are confusing to me: you say you don’t want this country out here, but you both want to be free to take what you want from the land.”

Beginning to fuss, the child began a muted squawl from the bank.

“You’re right, woman,” Bass admitted. “This land ain’t mine, but the beaver I take with my own sweat, with my hands—they’re mine. I don’t allow I have any right to fight for this country because it’s not mine. But I will fight for what is mine: my beaver, my animals and traps, my family. No man will ever take them from me.”

She turned slightly and kissed him, then pulled away, wading to the bank. He stood too, allowing the water to sluice off his cold white flesh, marveling at just how pale he was now that the sun had climbed fully above the ridge to the east.

As she pulled her dress over her head and tugged it down over her hips, Waits-by-the-Water laughed again. “I am happy a strange fish like you is the father of my child.”

“Even if you don’t understand me at times?”

The woman nodded, dragging the cradleboard into her lap and stroking the infant’s cheek with a fingertip. “I may not always understand the way things rumble around inside your head, husband. But I always know just how your heart works.”

“Is that the back of Jarrell Thornbrugh’s head I’ve got my pistol pointed at?”

At first the tall Englishman froze, daring not to turn his head, his eyes instead glancing at the other company employees nearby, hoping to find them ready to defend him.

“And you’re the booshway of this here bloody Hudson’s Bay bunch, ain’cha?”

With his pounding heart rising to his throat and his hands held out from his body, Thornbrugh turned just enough to level his eyes at his antagonizer.

Plain to see that the man had no pistol trained on the back of his head.

Jarrell’s eyes climbed to the stranger’s face.

“By the stars! It can’t be!” Thornbrugh roared as he whirled around, his booming voice like the clangor on a huge cast-iron bell.

Bass slapped both his open hands on his chest, then spread his arms wide. “In the flesh, you god-blame-ed Englishman!”

They crashed together, hugging fiercely, slapping backs and shoulders, dancing side to side and around and around.

“I’ve asked after you,” Thornbrugh admitted breathlessly as they ground to a halt, their forearms locked fraternally. “No one heard evidence of you since last summer on the Green. No one’s come across you in their travels.”

“I stayed south ever since ronnyvoo,” Bass explained. “And I went east for a time too.”

“The States?” and Jarrell rocked back a bit, closely studying his friend’s face. “You didn’t think of giving up the mountains?”

“Hell, I couldn’t give up the mountains,” he declared with a reassuring smile. “Wouldn’t be happy anyplace else.”

Then he spotted the left eye and leaned close to have himself a look at it. “So tell me about this eye of yours.”

“Don’t rightly know what to think of it, Jarrell. Just come on me few months back. Been seeing stars shootin’ out of it for some time, howsoever. But this last spring it got so ever’thing’s real fuzzy.”

He peered closely at the milky film over the iris and pupil. “Looks cloudy. You see anything with it?”

“A little,” Bass answered. “I can tell light from dark. Not much else. For most part, I ain’t in a bad way, what with this other eye doing more’n its share.”

“Tie your horse off and come on in here, you old one-eyed reprobate,” he said with relief, gesturing for Titus to follow him beneath the canvas sheeting Thornbrugh’s men had strung up for shade in the middle of their encampment.

He watched the American ground-hobble his animal where it could graze nearby, then patted the blanket beside him. “Sit.”

“You John Bulls got any tobaccy wuth smoking?” Bass inquired.

“Get me some tobacco for this guest with such terrible manners,” Thornbrugh roared, laughing.

As the American filled his pipe, Jarrell said, “As soon as I arrived here, I asked after you. But as the days slipped past, I feared more and more you’d lost your hair.”

“Wagh! If’n that half-breed giant named Sharpe couldn’t raise this nigger’s hair last summer, ain’t a Injun gonna take what’s left of this poor scalp!”

He slapped Bass on the leg, sensing such an exquisite joy in seeing this friend after a long, long year of separation. “You’ve brought many pelts to trade?”

“Nope, I ain’t got but a few left to barter off.”

“Not a good year for you and young Paddock?”

The American smiled. “It was a damn fine year for the two of us, Jarrell. But I left most all of them plews behind in Taos with Josiah.”

“Taos,” he repeated, confused. “Josiah’s not here with you?”

Having puffed on his pipe to get it started with a twig from the nearby fire, Titus Bass began to tell the story of all that had taken place since last summer’s raucous trading fair. From that chase after an old Shoshone friend turned horse thief, through their deadly hunt for an Arapaho war party in the Bayou Salade, on to those Christmas and New Year’s celebrations in the little village of San Fernando de Taos, where Scratch had run onto an old friend believed dead. A chance meeting that spurred Scratch all the way back to St. Louis through the maw of winter, then off to the west again for the massive mud fort the Bent brothers had erected beside the Arkansas River—completing that deadly journey in hopes of putting some old ghosts to rest.

“This Silas Cooper shot you?”

The American tugged up the hem of his cloth shirt to show the vividly pink bullet wounds.

A dark-skinned stranger stepped beneath the shady bower, leaning in to inspect one of the puckers as he commented, “You got nothing better to do, Jarrell—but go and look at this man’s bullet holes?”

Thornbrugh snorted, “By the stars, the bullet made that wound came a hairsbreadth from killing my friend here. Introduce yourself proper, Thomas.”

“Thomas McKay,” the man declared, holding his hand out as he backed a step.

Watching the American grab McKay’s hand, Jarrell explained, “This be Titus Bass—”

“Yes, I’ve heard of you,” McKay replied, his dark Indian eyes narrowing. “You come to Vancouver to visit the Doctor.”

“Two winters back it was,” Bass stated. “A good man, the Doctor. He is what you see of him.”

“Thomas here is leading the Doctor’s brigade this year,” Thornbrugh explained.

“We ain’t been doing much in the way of trading,” McKay confessed as he took a dipper of water from one of the company’s laborers and drank. Wiping the dribble from his chin, he said, “But we didn’t figure to scare up much trading from you Americans anyway.”

Bass looked at Thornbrugh. “Company men bound to deal with their own traders. Them what trap for American Fur gonna trade for company supplies. And Rocky Mountain Fur gotta trade with Sublette.”

“Last year them Rocky Mountain Fur partners had contracted with that Yank named Wyeth to buy supplies off him this summer,” McKay said. “But Sublette come in a couple days ahead of Wyeth, so Fitzpatrick started trading off pelts even before Wyeth got to the valley.”

Thornbrugh wagged his head. “So now Wyeth has all those goods Rocky Mountain Fur said they’d take off his hands, with no one to trade with.”

“How ’bout the free men?” Bass inquired. “Where they been trading their furs?”

Jarrell could tell by the set of Scratch’s jaw that the unfairness of Sublette’s actions didn’t sit well with his American friend. “Sadly, from what I have been witness to myself, it appears most of your American free men are conducting their business with Sublette.”

“Damn ’em,” Bass growled, his brow furrowing. “But it don’t s’prise me none. Most of ’em knowed Sublette for years now. Some trapped with him back when, or they been trading with him for the last few ronnyvooz. Natural, I s’pose, for ’em to stick with what they know. But it damn well sours my milk to see a man break his vow with another, like Fitz and the rest done to Wyeth.”

“Is there no honor among you Americans?” McKay inquired with a wry grin.

“Not when you’re speaking of prime pelts and beaver country,” Bass confessed. “For years now there’s been a war on between Rocky Mountain Fur and Astor’s company.”

“From what I’ve learned over the past few days,” Thornbrugh injected, “no longer is there any war between them. Instead, they’ve divided up the fur country on the east side of the mountains.”

Bass bellowed, “Divided it between ’em!”

Finally settling on the ground beside Thornbrugh, McKay declared, “Astor’s retired and turned his business on the upper Missouri over to Pierre Chouteau in St. Louis—so that Upper Missouri Outfit’s gonna run things up there from here on out.”

“They’ll have that country all to themselves now that Sublette and Campbell are pulling out,” Thornbrugh continued. “In turn, American Fur won’t give Sublette’s company any competition for a year down here in these central and southern mountains.”

Bass wagged his head as if it was incomprehensible to him. “They made ’em a truce? Dividing up the beaver country a’tween ’em … and here it was not so long ago the free men were hoping McKenzie would come on down here from his American Fur post to give Sublette some competition—his prices were so goddamned high!”

“Still are,” Jarrell replied. “And what he offers for fur is terribly low.”

“So Sublette’s got this cat skinned two ways of Sunday, don’t he?” Bass observed.

McKay explained, “McLoughlin sent us here to sell our goods at prices lower than what any American trader sells for, and to buy beaver at a price higher than Americans would pay.”

Bass looked around him a moment. “Don’t see no crowd lining up to sell you their beaver, fellas.”

Scratching at his cheek, the bearded Thornbrugh said, “Appears your Americans will trade with Sublette, no matter how black-hearted his business ethics.”

“You gotta dance the way Sublette dances: ain’t you offered them trappers any of your whiskey?” Bass inquired.

McKay exploded in laughter. “We didn’t bring any liquor! The Doctor’s an honorable man, so he wouldn’t hear of any whiskey trade.”

“Which puts us at a decided disadvantage,” Thornbrugh stated. “Sublette opened his packs and his whiskey kegs three days before Wyeth ever came in. Which meant that Rocky Mountain Fur was dead and buried by the time that Yank showed up to sell them his goods—”

“Rocky Mountain Fur’s … d-dead?” Bass sputtered.

“Sublette bought them out, one at a time I hear,” Jarrell said. “There were five partners, but by the time Sublette got through offering them this or offering them that for their shares, only two of them decided to stay on with Sublette.”

“Which ones?” Bass inquired.

“Thomas Fitzpatrick is one,” McKay answered. “Don’t know who the other one is.”

“Rocky Mountain Fur, dead,” Bass repeated, staring at the trampled grass. “Hard for that to make sense to me.”

“So where’s your future lie, Titus Bass?” Jarrell asked. “You want to bring your pelts over here and trade with Hudson’s Bay?”

The American regarded Thornbrugh a long and thoughtful moment, then admitted, “I figure I owe first crack to the Americans.”

McKay roared, “You’re gonna give in to Sublette’s temptations too?”

“No.” Bass wagged his head. “Feel I ought’n see what Wyeth’s got to offer a man like me what’s come in late too, after Sublette’s bamboozled all the rest into backing out on their word. What the Yankee can’t trade for, I’ll be over to see if you can help me out, fellas.”

Thornbrugh slapped his hand down on Bass’s thigh. “Good man, Titus Bass. Perhaps there is a bit of honor left in a few of you Americans after all.”

“We still got lots of honor, Jarrell,” Titus snapped. “A man ain’t nothing without his honor. Pulling something so underhanded like that goddamned Sublette done makes all us Americans look bad.”

By the time Scratch had pushed more than three miles downstream that afternoon, what had been a faint, far-off hodgepodge of sounds became the familiar revelry of rendezvous as he drew closer.

Down from the bluffs lining both sides of the valley wound small groups of hunters leading pack animals, carcasses of deer, antelope, and elk lashed securely athwart their sturdy backs. In the bottoms men competed with warriors from the visiting Nez Perce and Flathead camps in horse races, handsome fleet geldings as the champion’s prize. Even greater numbers of the trappers stripped down to no more than breechclout and moccasins as they pitted themselves against one another in drunken footraces. Cheered on by foggy-headed companions, the finish line judged by the unsteadiest among them, most of the contests erupted into a drunken brawl as knots of men rolled about in the tall grass.

Behind it all arose the periodic boom of rifle fire echoing from the meandering hemline of bluffs where others shot at the mark for a treasured prize or another cup of Sublette’s whiskey. Thin, ghostly wisps of gun smoke intertwined to trail lazily on the breezeless air that hot afternoon, its whitish gray captured among the branches of leafy Cottonwood and willow. From creekside and meadow alike came the constant din of whoops and hurrahs, loud voices raised in cheer, mingling with a few strident calls made in heat and anger as men fell to gouging eyes and kneeing groins, urged on by their backers.

More than six hundred white men—company and free—languished and played, celebrating their survival, toasting their having met the challenge for another year even though the greater number of them hadn’t trapped near enough to pay off the entirety of last year’s debt, much less be free to purchase everything needed for the coming season without hanging oneself on the company’s hook. Six hundred, not as many as last year for sure, but still more than had gathered for that high-water mark in Pierre’s Hole two summers ago.

Horses grazed, while some took a dusty roll, freed now for long days when they would not suffer the heavy burdens of the fur trade. A time for saddle sores, cinch ulcers, and herd bites to heal before making that climb to the autumn high country.

Off in the distance through the afternoon’s haze he could make out the tops of the lodgepole swirls, faint fingers of wood smoke still rising from fires tended by the squaws in that camp. Of a sudden he wondered if that were the Flathead village, and if chance dictated it might be the people Looks Far Woman left when she chose to find Josiah, the father of her child. Perhaps he would see before rendezvous played itself out, if only to tell her kin she was safer in that Mexican town on the border of Comanche country than she was living at the edge of the Blackfoot domain.

Then again, that band might well be Nez Perce. A man couldn’t really tell from this distance. Not with all the dust raised by the teeming crowds in the Rocky Mountain Fur camp he was about to enter, a veritable town with its streets laid out among the shady trees, the grass trampled by hundreds of feet as groups came and went of some serious purpose.

“Got furs to trade with Sublette, do ye?”

Bass reined up, staring down at the face of an old companion.

“Elbridge?”

“Get down here and shake my paw, Titus Bass.”

Behind Gray the others streamed, a handful in all as Scratch leaped to the ground, dropping Samantha’s lead rope. Breathless when he finished hugging these dear old friends, done pounding backs and withstanding the blows of doubled fists hurled his way, he stood back and stared at the semicircle of their faces.

Dragging a hand beneath the dribble at the end of his nose, he sighed, “You ugly boys sure make a sight for these ol’ eyes.”

“So where’s that pretty wife of your’n?” Rufus Graham asked, his auburn hair just hinting at turning gray. He was missing those four front teeth, both top and bottom. “The gal you had roped to you last ronnyvoo finally get smart and run off with a good-looking man?”

“Naw,” Titus said with a big grin. “She’s back yonder to our camp, upstream. We had us a girl-child.”

“Merciful heavens! A girl?” Caleb Wood echoed.

“Purty as her mother,” Bass declared.

“God bless!” exclaimed Solomon Fish, rubbing the long ringlets of his blond beard. “Pray God saw to it the little child didn’t take after her homely pap!”

Bass suddenly looped an arm around Solomon’s neck and playfully rubbed the top of his mangy blond hair with a handful of knuckles before allowing the struggling man to go free.

“Where’s Wyeth?” Bass asked. “I heard tell when we come in yestiddy that the Yank was already in from the East.”

None of them answered at first, until the stocky Isaac Simms said, “He’s yonder. More’n a couple miles on down the creek. On past them Nepercy what’s camped close to Sublette’s tents.”

“That’s Sublette off yonder, eh?”

Caleb nodded. “He’s doing a handsome business.”

Of a sudden it struck Titus. “Why you boys camped in here with Rocky Mountain Fur? You ain’t thro wed in with the company men, have you?”

Wood toed the grass a moment before answering. “It ain’t been so good for us since losing … J-jack,” he said quietly.

Bass looked around at the others, most of whom did not meet his gaze. “Been two summers now, ain’t it, boys?”

Graham swallowed and answered, “Y-yeah. Two year, Scratch—since them god-blamed Blackfoot got him in the Pierre’s Hole fight.”

“But when I saw you fellers last summer on the Green, seemed you’d done fair for that first year ’thout Jack Hatcher in the lead,” Titus declared.

“The more we talked about it last ronnyvoo,” Elbridge explained, “the more we figured we ought’n try some new country up north when we pulled away from ronnyvoo.”

Solemnly, Isaac said, “But a man’d be stupid to ride north ’thout a brigade round him.”

“So you boys throwed in with one of the outfits, eh?” Bass inquired.

“Bridger’s, it were,” Caleb volunteered. “Fitzpatrick was going to the Powder, so we signed on with Bridger.”

Titus could see it written on their faces—how the toll of losing their leader had marked every man jack of them. No matter how they had spouted and spumed in protest at Mad Jack Hatcher, not a one of them was leader enough to take the reins and make an outfit of them once again. They were good men, hard-cased and veterans all. But they were followers still. No man could fault them for realizing that before every last one of them lost his hair.

“It’s a good thing,” Scratch told them, “for the easy beavers been took already. To go where the beaver still plays, a man needs to go in goodly numbers. Wise you boys chose to throw in with Bridger’s brigade.”

And he watched how his words visibly struck each one, bringing relief and smiles to eyes and faces.

“Where’s that Josiah, the young’un you brung with you to the Pierre’s Hole fight?” Simms asked.

“He was with you last year on the Green,” Rufus said.

Bass sucked down some wind. “Left him in Taos with his wife and boy, ’long with some trade goods to set up shop.”

Caleb eyed him. “You figger to be a trader now?”

With a wag of his head Titus answered, “Just Josiah. He’d tempted Lady Fate’s fickle hand enough while we rode together. Time was for me to give him his leave.”

Scratching the beginnings of his potbelly, Elbridge asked, “Who you riding with come autumn?”

“On my own hook, boys.”

“By jam—just you and the woman?” Isaac inquired.

“And our girl.”

“You ought’n throw in with us, Scratch,” Caleb observed.

“That’s right,” Gray said. “Bridger knows you. He ain’t got nothing ’gainst a man packing a squaw along.”

With a shake of his head, Titus quieted their suggestions. “Time’s come for me to go it alone. Moseying with a brigade’s gonna be the best for most fellas. But there’s hard-assed pricknoses like me what’re better off on their lonesome. Thanks for the asking. If I was to lay down my traps with any bunch, it’d be you boys … and only you boys.”

Solomon asked, “Got time for some whiskey?”

Titus looked at the five slowly, his eyes narrowing. “You figger this here nigger got stupid in the last year? Course I got time for some whiskey and some stories. Then I ought’n be on my way to find Wyeth.”

“But Billy Sublette’s got his trade tents just past the bend in the creek,” Caleb said. “Hell, he’s so close I could throw a rock and likely hit one of his whiskey kegs!”

“No thanks,” Bass said as he turned around and took up both the reins to the horse and Samantha’s lead rope. “From what I heard ’bout the underhanded jigger-pokey Sublette pulled on Wyeth—I don’t care to have nothing more to do with Billy Sublette.”

“So I s’pose you’ve heard there ain’t no more Rocky Mountain Fur?” Isaac asked.

“But we’re still working for Bridger’s company,” Rufus explained.

“From the sounds of things,” Bass said, “Fitzpatrick and Bridger can call their company what they want … but Billy Sublette still owns ’em and calls their tune.”

Elbridge suddenly placed the flat of his hand against Bass’s chest to bring Scratch to a halt. “Then I take it you’re a nigger what won’t drink none of Billy Sublette’s whiskey.”

Titus thought on it a moment, careful that his face remained gravely pensive. “Is Sublette’s whiskey as good an’ powerful as it ever was?”

“Damn right it is!” Caleb roared.

“Then I ain’t above accepting a free drink of that low-down thieving Sublette’s whiskey,” Bass declared boldly, “not when I get me the chance to drink that whiskey with the likes of you boys!”

* BorderLords