Wind Walker

FOURTEEN

As he scanned the thick cedar breaks before him, Scratch wondered which of them he would find first: the cow, or his son-in-law.

There was no chance of uncertainty here. In his black-and-white world, there was enough evidence already in hand to assure himself that Hargrove and his cronies had something to do with Roman Burwell’s not getting back to camp in time to depart with the rest of the train … with or without that missing cow. If one of the Burwells’ cows had ever managed to wander off on its own through the night.

At the corner of his eye, he caught sight of Sweete again, coming out of a knot of horse-high cedar. They waved and gestured to tell one another the direction they were moving in their search; then each disappeared from the view of the other once more. It had been that way ever since the two old friends had mounted up and left their wives behind with several rifles and a pistol apiece for them and Amanda too. Titus Bass didn’t trust Phineas Hargrove and them young bucks of his any farther than he could puke.

“I’m goin’ with you,” Sweete had announced as the backs of those five riders headed down the long slope toward the bottoms, where the grayed canvas of the wagontops looked like the back of a bull snake winding its way north by west for the Little Muddy and the north end of the Bear River Divide.

For a long moment Amanda had shoved herself against her father, clinging to him, sobbing into his chest. That’s when Titus noticed his four grandchildren coming their way, their eyes filled with questions, even the beginnings of a little terror.

“Amanda, your young’uns,” he whispered and pulled her away from him slightly so he could peer into her face. “They need you right now.”

“B-but … Roman?”

His eyes narrowed meaningfully. “We’ll find ’im. Shadrach an’ me. You … you see to the young’uns while we’re gone. Don’t let ’em see you worry.”

She nodded and swallowed deeply, quickly dragging a palm down both of her cheeks as she blinked her eyes clear. “Yes, you’re right,” she said bravely, then attempted a smile. “I’ll wait here with the children while you and Shad go f-find Roman.”

The children stopped right behind her, Annie and little Lucas both tucking themselves under their mother’s arms as they pressed themselves against her legs. She clutched them desperately. “We’ll wait here for Gran’pa to find your father … then we’ll be on our way for the day.”

“But them others has left without us,” Lemuel said.

“It doesn’t matter!” she snapped at her eldest.

Titus put a hand on the boy’s shoulder. “That train ain’t goin’ nowhere we can’t find it. All them tracks. We’ll catch up afore end of the day, son. Tie up them dogs so they stay right here with the rest of you.”

“Aw-awright, sir.”

He patted the lad on the shoulder, then turned to his tall friend. “Let’s see the women got ’em plenty of guns ready afore we light out.”

Each of them had stuffed an extra pistol in their belts before leaving their two Indian wives with the spare rifles and smoothbores. Both of them could shoot center well enough. There was never any telling what sort of critter might wander out of these cedar breaks to pose a danger to the women and children they were leaving behind. Four-legged and clawed … or two-legged and snake-eyed to boot.

“Why can’t I go with you?” Lemuel demanded as he sprinted up to them a few minutes later when the men swung into their saddles.

Titus had peered down at the boy’s face. “Your ma, she needs you right now. An’ I need to know I left a man behind to watch over the rest, Lemuel.”

The boy took a step back from the horse, peering up at his grandfather from beneath the shapeless brim of his low-crowned hat, his eyes glinting with a newfound courage. “Yessir.”

“That’s a good man,” Titus said quietly as he reined aside.

He made it a point to ride right past Amanda as she stepped toward them in their leave-taking. When she held out her hand he reached out with his. And seeing the tears streaking her dust-covered face, he gripped her thin fingers a brief instant as his horse carried him past. Then kicked the horse for all it was worth.

He was feeling his own eyes sting as the animal beneath him bolted into a gallop.

And he didn’t slow the horse until he and Shad reached the bottom of the next swale where he could no longer look back over his shoulder and see the wagon camp. Nothing more than that long smudge of dust rising yellow against the hot, pale blue of the summer sky as the sun finally broke the horizon—instantly creating shadows in the cedar thickets where before they had been only shades of gray outlines.

He found the body at the head of a draw.

Instantly sizing things up from the saddle, Titus did not find a single bootmark until it was plain how the rider had dropped from his horse and approached the animal. Those weren’t Roman Burwell’s square-toed boot tracks either. Not deep enough, nowhere big enough for the tall sodbuster. Titus sighed, searched in three directions for Shad, took one last look around for sign of Roman or maybe a strange rider on the horizon, then came out of the saddle. Dropping the reins he stepped toward the carcass of the milk cow. A few flies were clustered on the udder, and by the hundreds they were already clotting the long, deep gash across the throat.

He followed the half dozen boot tracks to the carcass, saw how the man had walked right up to the docile animal, then slashed its neck then and there. There was a dribble of blood where the boot tracks ended, then cowprints as the animal stumbled sideways, flinging its head and blood in both directions until it fell several yards from where the boot tracks ended. Titus stepped beyond the last of those prints, right over to the cow, and knelt beside its head. He held out his left hand, fingertip tapping the wide puddle of dark brown molasses beneath the carcass.

Cold. A little gummy beneath the crusty surface. But soaked into the ground and hard for the most part.

Wiping his fingers across the gritty soil, he stood and turned back for the horse. Shoving his right foot into the wide cottonwood stirrup, Scratch heaved himself into the saddle and shifted the big .54 across his thighs. Things did not look good for Roman.

Whoever it was came out here did this sometime after dark last night. This killing wasn’t done in the last few hours. The lone horseman had wrangled the cow away from the rest of the stock, then herded it over two hills and into the bottom of this draw. When he finally had the animal boxed at the head of the draw, he had dismounted and slit its neck.

Things did not look good for Roman Burwell at all.

Slamming his heels into his horse’s ribs, Titus Bass tasted the sour burn of dread rising in his throat with the burn of gall.

“If You really do listen to folks,” he whispered bitterly as he reined directly up the side of the coulee, “then I want You to listen to me. You can’t do this to Amanda. Can’t take Roman from her like this.”

He suddenly saw Shad appear at the top of the next hill, farther south than he would have thought to look, but back in the direction that unknown rider would have herded the cow. Sweete yanked his reins to the side, hard, forcing his horse to make a circle, then a second tight circle as he held his rifle high in the air. When Shad stopped after that third circle, he pointed with his rifle and kicked his horse into motion down the side of the draw. Titus hammered his horse into a gallop a heartbeat later. They both reached the body about the same time.

That’s when he raised his eyes to the sky and whispered again, but only one word this time, “P-please.”

Finding it hard to breathe, Titus was the first to leap out of his saddle, sprinting those last few yards toward the gnarled, wind-sculpted cedar where Roman Burwell was tied—his arms outstretched, legs spread-eagled. His shirt had been ripped from his shoulders and hung in tatters from the high waist of his drop-front, button-fly britches. From the bruises up and down the washboard of muscles rippling over his chest and belly, it was plain to see they had done their best to break the man’s ribs. And that gave him hope as he lunged to a stop a foot away from the body.

He grabbed a handful of thick hair on Roman’s brow, pulled the head back so he could peer into the face. The eyes barely fluttered. By damn—he was still alive!

Sweete was trudging up behind him, swinging that big .62-caliber flintlock side to side as he covered Titus’s back. For a heartfelt moment, Bass looked at the sky once more. “Thankee. Thankee more’n You’ll ever know.”

“He breathin’ any?” Shad asked quietly.

“Some,” he answered. “Barely. Roman?” Then he thought and told his friend, “Cut ’im down, Shadrach. I’ll hold him up best I can while you cut—”

“He’s a big lad, Titus,” Sweete volunteered as he stepped right against Bass and propped his .62 against the foot of the cedar. “Lemme hold him and you cut the ropes.”

Soon as he dropped his rifle against a clump of sage, Scratch slashed through the narrow rope that held the legs spread; then as he cut through the bonds around the wrists, the body sank from sheer exhaustion and the relentless tug of gravity.

Sweete supported Burwell in his arms as Titus dragged the farmer’s legs out to the side. “Like they was crucifying him, Scratch. Tied him up this’a way—like they was crucifying this poor man.”

“Cruci—” he repeated with a grunt as he helped Shad ease the big farmer’s body down onto the rocky ground. “What’s that?”

“Way they done to Jesus when they kill’t Him.”

Titus slipped the blade of his knife under the greasy strip of cloth the attackers had tied around Burwell’s mouth. “Jesus, that fella in the Bible?”

Shad scooted back on his knees and laid a hand on Roman’s chest. “That’s Him. My mama always wanted me to know that story. How the man’s enemies hung Him on a cross. Died. Later He come back to living for all time.”

As he slowly patted Burwell’s cheeks, Titus said, “I ’member how my ma told us young’uns that story over an’ over too. Damn—wish I’d brung some water with us.”

“I’ll go fetch some,” Sweete volunteered but hesitated to move.

Scratch laid his ear against Roman’s bare, blood-crusted chest. Then lifted his eyes to Shad’s. “We need to get him back.”

“How?”

For a moment he cogitated on it, staring at the two horses. “He’s a big chunk. You think you can hold ’im up?”

“Alone? On my horse?”

“Ain’t gonna work,” Titus agreed. “G’won back to the wagon. They got them ridgepoles lashed under the belly. Bring a pair of my woman’s buffler robes too, an’ two or three coils of rope.”

“Rawhide all right?”

“Any rope—buffler, rawhide—just be quick about it.”

Sweete clambered to his feet, swept up his .62, then paused a moment before he laid it back against the clump of sage beside Bass’s. “You keep that. I got my belt guns along. I best leave that’un with you … ’case someone shows up.”

Scratch shook his head. “Ain’t no one gonna come back, Shadrach. They left him for dead after they beat him. Cowards like them, they’re long gone now.”

The big man’s face hardened like stone. “You an’ me both know who it was.”

“Maybe not the three or four of ’em it took to drag the man down,” Bass said, holding up one of Burwell’s hands, studying the raw, bloodied knuckles. “From the looks of the scuffle, they didn’t have a easy time of it. One of ’em’s gotta have some bruises too. I figger that’s why they beat him so bad—even after he couldn’t fight back no more.”

Sweete stood over them, casting a wide shadow on Titus. “How they get him down?”

“Back of his head’s crusted with blood. They laid him out with a gun butt, maybe whacked ’im with a rifle barrel. Only way them bastards make a big corncracker like this to drop to his knees.”

“I’ll be back quick’s I can,” Shad promised.

Titus only nodded, watching his friend jump astride the big horse and saw the reins around in a tight circle, the animal lunging away with a grunt.

When he looked back down, he saw that the new sunlight was starting to reach Burwell’s eyes. He shifted a little so he could keep the face in some shade. Swollen, cracked lips. Puffy eyes. Tiny cuts on the brow and cheeks, blood crusted in the six-day-old stubble on his chin. The wounds had hardened, their dribble almost completely dry. Hadn’t been that long ago the attackers had approached the farmer, likely claiming they had come to help him find the cow that was already drawing flies and dung beetles farther up the draw.

As he held Roman Burwell across his thigh, out there a few yards away Titus saw the scuffed ground where the struggle had taken place. Likely one had come up behind Roman as he struggled with one or more of them at his front, at least from the way the ground was trampled. And it was easy to see from the knees of his britches that the farmer had his legs knocked out from under him. But he was still alive.

That’s when Titus looked back at the aching blue of that midsummer sky, cloudless, flawless, pristine, and pure. He had never asked anything of the First Maker, of his mother’s Creator, from the God of Brigham Young’s Saints, nothing for himself. Never had he asked, much less pleaded and begged the way he had this morning. When it came down to asking on behalf of someone else, Titus Bass would not hesitate to plead and beg. He was not ashamed as he cradled his son-in-law in his arms and shooed the annoying flies from the oozy wounds. He was not ashamed that he had asked for the help of a power far greater than he. Too many of those he had known did believe—be they the women of his Johnston clan back in Boone County. Or be they the shamans and rattle-shakers of the Ute, Shoshone, or Crow clans he had wintered among. They had a different One, but he figured it had to be the same One in the end.

More and more of late, he had felt the presence of something greater than himself.

In his coming to this country, Titus Bass had first sensed how his heart sang with the endlessness and exquisite beauty of the land, both plains and mountains. For a long time, he hadn’t realized that the feeling making his heart swell had really been the One talking to him, those first simple words he could not recognize, much less understand. It was only the utter freedom, the timelessness of each new bend in a creek or the view from the crest of a hill just topped. For a long time, Scratch had only thought the music he felt in his heart was merely the fact that he was here and now in a place few would ever see.

But there was the God-talkers, old friends like Asa McAfferty and Bill Williams—circuit-riding preachers who, although they had strayed from the path, nonetheless laid claim to the impossible, so much of the impossible that Titus Bass could only have doubted all the more the presence of any spiritual force in all of this wildness … be it the nature of the wilderness itself before the coming of man, or the nature of man alone and unfettered in that wilderness. Those who claimed to believe, be they white or red, they were merely superstitious, and maybe to be pitied for their scary beliefs. He himself was not helpless in the face of what might confront him. He had stood tall and bold against the wind—and survived without clinging to a superstitious belief in something he could not see.

Then he had held his baby daughter in his hands. And over the next few weeks he listened to Waits-by-the-Water tell him more and more about the One Above, the First Maker, the Grandfather, each day as they plodded north from Taos, making for that next rendezvous on Ham’s Fork of the Green in ’34. By the time he had truly heard his daughter’s name whispered in the softness of the breeze that caressed his face, Titus Bass had taken that first step in admitting to himself that there was something far more powerful than man himself, something far greater than this wilderness that challenged his courageous breed. Perhaps … just perhaps there was some force that had created him and this land, a power that had pulled him west into this uncompromising garden of beauty and sudden death where he could no longer deny its existence.

How, he thought, could he have ever gazed up at the tall and hoary peaks of these Rocky Mountains, still mantled with snow in the heat of summer here far below, and not admit that there was some great life force that had created all of this? How could he have ever lain on his back, elbow curled beneath his head, and stared up at the night sky with its countless, numberless, infinite tally of stars and not accept that some great hand was at work in this world, if not at work in the tiniest recesses of his own insignificant heart?

While a younger man, a man more prone to squinting out at the world around him through a cynical eye, might have determined that any belief in the spiritual was nothing more than a weak-minded person’s attempt to explain away a magician’s tricks or the vagaries of unexplainable happenstance … Scratch had simply had too damn much happen right before his eyes for him not to admit the presence of some all-powerful might at play here in this wilderness, where the trappings of civilized man and his society had not sullied this high and pristine world the way they had contaminated most everything back east. Leave it to others to refute the existence of a power outside themselves.

Titus Bass had seen how a white buffalo calf robe told the old sightless Porcupine Brush that Scratch and the rest of Mad Jack Hatcher’s men were sorely in need of rescue from the Blackfoot days before the white men were attacked, telling Goat Horn’s Shoshone warriors they must ride hard and fast to save their trapper friends.^*

And Titus Bass had seen how some all-powerful spirit had worked its healing through Shell Woman to save Shadrach Sweete’s life. Even to turning that bloodied black hump fur carved off a buffalo cow into a strip of creamy-white hide—the color of which was more sacred than anything else to Shell Woman’s people.

How could Porcupine Brush, blind and nearly deaf as well, have known the white men needed help, if he hadn’t been told by the First Maker through that sacred buffalo calf hide? And how was it that Shad’s unstoppable bleeding was healed and that makeshift wrap turned white if not through a power that answered Shell Woman’s fervent prayer, if not as an answer to Scratch’s own prayer to spare the life of his old friend? The two of them hadn’t talked about it much at all since that stormy night down on the South Platte. Some things a man found hard to describe, much less explain, even to himself, especially to others … no matter that they had gone through the very same experience together.

So if not a man to pray for himself, eventually Titus Bass had begun to pray for others. To ask that the power of that great hand be brought to bear on the fortunes of those he loved and cared for. How he had asked to get Waits back from the Blackfoot. Prayed that the pox would not take her from him. Asked to be freed from the grip of the desert, and the Diggers, and the distance too. And how he had begged that Roman Burwell be spared to his family.

In the end this simple man realized that what blessings were showered upon his loved ones would be showered upon him too.

By the time they got Roman back to the wagon, even the train’s dust had disappeared from the horizon. By then, the two old friends had put hours of work behind them.

Upon his return to the coulee, Shad explained he hadn’t wasted a lot of time when he rode up, yelling for their wives to fetch him the spare rope from the pack animals while he himself untied six of the hardwood ridgepoles from beneath the wagon box where Burwell kept them secured. They, and eight shorter poles, had been brought west with a large section of oiled Russian sheeting—kept in the event they needed additional shelter and had to erect a wall tent, or might use the extra canvas for repairs to the main wagon cover. With the two long poles tied into a V and four shorter ones quickly strapped across them, he laid the two buffalo robes over the back of the pack animal, then climbed into the saddle once more. That’s when he said Amanda had come running up, pleading with him to take her back to Roman.

“I’ve got to see him!” she begged, gazing up at the tall man in the saddle.

“Can you ride?”

“I can ride.”

As he began to turn, prepared to have his wife fetch up one of their saddle horses, Amanda pulled herself up atop that packsaddle frame to which he had lashed the improvised travois. “You ever ride ’thout a saddle?”

“No,” she answered with determination. “But, I’ve never had my husband near get himself killed neither. Let’s go.”

As soon as Shad and Amanda had neared the scene, Titus watched her pull back on the reins of that packhorse and leap off, her skirts a’swirl as she bounded to the ground and started leaping over the sage, dodging around the wind-stunted cedar.

“Pa! Pa!” she cried, her cheeks streaked with moisture as she came sliding to her knees beside him. “Oh … Roman.”

Gently, Titus pulled himself out from under Burwell and held Roman’s head up while she fit herself beneath his bare, bloodied shoulders. Bass got to his feet, feeling the cramped muscles protest in one leg where they had gone to sleep while he did what he could to shade his son-in-law from the cruel midsummer sun.

“Here,” Shad called, then tossed Scratch an old oak canteen. “I brung that for Roman.”

In turn Titus handed it over to Amanda and stepped back as he watched her drag up the end of her dress, then the bottom of her dirty petticoat. Onto a corner of this she carefully poured some water from the canteen, then dabbed it on the first of his cuts and puffy bruises.

“How far they ahead of us, by the time you got back?” Scratch asked.

“Can’t see nothin’ of ’em no more,” Sweete admitted.

Titus wagged his head, all the more angry for it. “Hargrove gonna make sure he covers ground today.”

“Make it so we can’t catch ’em today, fast as he’s driving ’em,” Shad agreed.

With a nod of recognition, Bass took a step toward Amanda, but Sweete caught his elbow and dragged him back.

“Stay here with me awhile, Scratch. Ain’t nothing you can do for ’im right now.”

“You’re right. But these hands what wanna choke those bastards need somethin’ to do,” Titus explained. “We need to be tying up a travois for Roman.”

As they bent over their work repositioning the cross members, then started tying on the cradle of a double thickness of buffalo robes in which they would place the injured man, Sweete confessed, “I wanted to keep you over here, where your daughter couldn’t hear.”

“Hear what?”

“Hear us talk on what we’re gonna do about Roman an’ Hargrove, an’ them badger-eyed bastards done this to your daughter’s husband.”

His hands stopped working at the series of knots and he stared at Sweete. “You’re in for making ’em pay for what they done to Roman?”

“Even if I wasn’t your friend, I’d throw in with you just to have a chance to see their faces when they realize they ain’t getting away with treatin’ folks like this.”

Bass grinned hugely. “While you was gone, I was thinkin’ my own self.”

“Your notion gonna happen tonight?”

“Soon as we get these three families caught up to the train.”

Shad wagged his head. “That’ll take some doing.”

“Then we’ll do it tomorrow night.”

It was all but dark when they had to admit that the oxen just weren’t going to be goaded into any more speed, any more miles that day. Reluctantly, they made camp as the stars winked into view and the women scrambled around to build a fire there beside the Little Muddy. At least they had some water. And some scrub oak, cedar, and sage for their fire—enough to last out the night.

Amanda steadfastly remained inside the wagon with Roman, day and night. She and Lucas budged from the wounded man’s side only to trudge into the brush and relieve themselves, once they crawled into the crowded box and settled in beside him. Mercifully, the farmer hadn’t come to as the travois bounded and jostled over the sage on the way back to the wagon, or as the two trappers hoisted the big man onto the tailgate. Burwell had grunted a time or two, and groaned in some misery, but he never did awaken that first day, even though his eyelids fluttered from time to time as he was jostled about. Waits-by-the-Water brought Amanda a half-full bucket of water and a dipper. Toote brought them a kettle of her hot soup.

Not long after the moon came up and Titus had Lemuel put his little brother and two sisters to bed beneath a low awning strung from the side of the wagon, Waits came to find her husband talking with Shad as the two sat just outside that ring of light given off by the flames.

“Ti-tuzz,” she said softly as she approached the two men.

He turned, seeing her, and smiled. “Your soup was good,” he said in English.

“Toote make,” she responded in his tongue. “Come now.”

“Come?”

She pointed back at the wagon. “Call for you. Amanda.”

“She needs me to come?”

Waits nodded. “Tell you come—Roman, he awake.”

Bass scrambled to his feet quickly. “Stay here and keep a sharp ear to the night, Shadrach.”

“I’ll be right here.”

Then Titus stopped and stood there a’swell with feelings and all fumble-footed. “Shad—I … I …”

Sweete bolted to his feet and held open his arms. They briefly pounded one another on the back. Shad said, “It’s good news. Him awake an’ all.”

With a nod, Scratch pulled away from their embrace and said, “Tomorrow night, we’ll cull a few outta Hargrove’s herd for what they done to Roman.”

Hurrying with Waits back to the wagon, he handed her his rifle and stepped to the rear pucker hole, pulling aside the curtain and peering over the tailgate. In a whisper Titus asked, “He awake?”

Amanda turned, smiling at her father. “Yes, Pa,” she whispered, yet with some undisguised excitement in her voice. Then she leaned over her husband. “Roman, my pa’s here.”

Bass could hear the soft murmur of words but could not make any of them out as Amanda raised his head slightly from the pillow and propped his shoulders against her side.

“He says thank you, Pa.”

That tugged at his heart something fierce. “You tell ’im that’s what we do for family, Amanda.”

“Before you got here, he said something about the sun,” she continued, then put her ear down to Roman’s mouth again. “Said you kept his face outta the sun for a long time this morning. That what you did till I got there?”

“Yeah.”

Burwell murmured more, then she explained. “He said to thank you for that, but the sun really did feel good when it touched his face after he’d been so cold.”

Titus took a deep breath, then asked her, “He tell you … anything how they come to leave him out there?”

“No,” she answered. “He hasn’t said anything about what happened. I decided I would have to ask you what state you found him in.”

All the better to take some time afore that, was what he thought, but “Good” was what he said to her. “I’ll tell you ’bout it soon. Tell Roman get his rest now. We don’t want him lollygagging around much more’n he’s done awready.”

“Goodnight, Pa,” she said quietly.

“’Night, Amanda.”

“Goodnight, Gran’papa,” came a small voice.

“That sounded like you got a Lucas critter in there with you, Amanda.”

“It is me, Gran’papa!” and the little youngster giggled.

“Shshsh!” he hissed with a finger at his lips. “You can’t stay quiet in there so your pa can sleep, I’ll come drag you out here with me.”

This time the little boy’s voice came out a delicate whisper, “I’ll be quiet. Promise. Don’t take me away—I wanna stay with my hurt pa.”

“’Night, son.”

He had dropped the cover sheet and was turning away when Amanda’s voice drifted softly one more time through the back pucker hole. “Thank you, Pa. Thank you for saving Roman for us.”

“Thank you, Gran’papa,” said that dear little voice.

He stood there, feeling the tears course down his wrinkled, scarred cheeks. It was almost enough to fill a man’s heart to overflowing, listening to those quiet voices caress him in the still of that starlit night. That’s what a man counted on his family for.

Late on the evening of that second day of goading the very most from Roman’s docile oxen, they had managed to straggle into the wagon camp on the headwaters of a narrow stream draining the northwest end of the rocky Bear River Divide.^* Three times that second day they had stopped just long enough to swap out the tired team for a fresh pair of the beasts. Midmorning. Noon. And again in midafternoon they made another rotation … desperately attempting to cover in faster time the same ground the train had crossed. Bass didn’t know a damn thing about these dull-witted brutes, but he was sure they could make up more than the time they lost during the many changes with stronger, fresher animals setting the pace. His gamble paid off as they pushed each team to their lumbering limit through that second hot and waterless day.

When the first emigrants on the outskirts of camp spotted the Burwell wagon swaying down the long slope toward the grassy, lush camping ground, Bass watched them turn and hold up hands to their mouths—shouting for the others to look on their back trail. The sun had already set, but it was still light enough to recognize the faces of friends and allies as the families came streaming out of that orderly camp, racing for the lone wagon and that dusty menagerie walking or riding on both sides of the rumbling wagon. Behind them came the extra, weary oxen, a few head of Roman’s mules, and those packhorses—the whole herd of stock tended by young Lemuel and Flea.

Men whipped hats off their heads as they came rushing forward, waving them back and forth aloft, while women and girls came lurching up the long slope, their graceful movement hampered by the long, layered impediments of skirts and petticoats that easily tangled between their legs or snagged on the calf-high sage.

“Lookit that, will you?” Shad said, his cracked lips crusted with a coating of fine dust. “This here family’s got some good friends.”

“Lord’s sake! Wh-where you been for two days?” hollered the one named Pruett, the first to reach the yoke.

Licking his bleeding lips, Titus jabbed his thumb back to the wagon. “Didn’t that bastard Hargrove tell you folks nothing o’ what happened to Roman?”

Fenton lunged up at Pruett’s elbow and said, “We didn’t know a thing till after we was in camp more than an hour or so last night.”

“Any one of you ask after the Burwells?” Shadrach inquired.

Iverson peered at the wagon while he answered the horsemen, “Goodell was the first. I s’pose we all figured the wagon was way back in line till none of us could remember seeing any of you making camp.”

Ryder spoke up, “That’s when Carter an’ me rode a circuit round the camping ground to have ourselves a look.”

“Didn’t find you,” Dahlmer confessed. “We knowed something bad had come of it.”

Titus squinted into the mid-distance, looking for some sign of the train captain or his hired horsemen. “Something bad did come of it—”

“Everyone alive?” Truell asked as he trudged past the trappers and was about to reach the front of the wagon box.

“Barely,” Sweete replied.

“We’ll have some company soon,” Titus announced from his perch.

The emigrants hushed and turned to find Hargrove and four of his men emerging from the center of the encampment on horseback.

Hoyt Bingham turned back to look up at Bass. “Hargrove said it was likely you’d not find Roman alive.”

“Did he now?”

Bingham nodded. “Figured a rattler got him when he was out looking for a milk cow what wandered off.”

“That so.” Nodding slightly, Scratch kept his eyes on the approach of those five horsemen as he said, “It were a snake that bit Roman. Fact be, least three of ’em.”

“Three snakes?” shrieked Murray.

“Two-legged ones,” Titus explained. “Near beat the man to death, then strung ’im up to a tree—fixin’ to let the desert finish him off the rest of the way.”

The crowd of women, children, and those men murmured a moment, then fell silent. It was quiet enough to hear the gentle breeze waft through the sage and dwarf yellow pine, to hear the clop of those horses’ hooves as the riders plodded up the slope behind their leader. The emigrants parted for Hargrove and the quartet.

The wagon captain took off his hat, his face grave with worry as his eyes settled on Bass. “Burwell? Is he—”

“He’s alive,” Titus interrupted. “More today than he was yestiddy mornin’ when you rode off with your train.”

Hargrove slammed the hat back down on his head. “I had every faith in the world that you’d find him out looking for his cow and that you’d be right behind us.”

“You an’ these here spineless back-shooters knowed good an’ well we wouldn’t find Roman Burwell out looking for his cow, Hargrove.”

For an instant the man’s eyes glared into the old trapper’s. “Perhaps you can explain your allegations to me later, in private … so that we don’t ruin this group’s celebration at your return to the fold!” He tore the big hat from his head again and whipped it around in the air, shouting, “This is glorious news! The Burwells have rejoined us!”

At that moment Amanda appeared at the front of the wagon, her hands gripping the backboard of the seat so tightly her knuckles were white.

“Hargrove!” she screamed accusingly. “You nearly killed my Roman!”

His mouth hung open a moment as the crowd watched in stunned silence. “I only did what any good wagon captain would have done, Mrs. Burwell,” he explained in the most syrupy of tones. “How was I to know that your husband would not be collected within minutes of our departure and you would catch up to us by midday, by last night’s camp at the latest?”

Scratch could see his daughter was near to tears as he urged his horse to the wagon.

She said, “Y-you didn’t give a good goddamn for us, Hargrove! Didn’t send no one back to see about us!”

Standing in the stirrups and reaching out, Scratch grabbed one of her rough, callused hands. “Hush now, daughter. We’ll see to his bunch later.”

“Thank you, sir,” Hargrove exclaimed in his booming voice. “Yes, Amanda—we’ll all see to this matter later. For now, just knowing your husband and family are safe is cause to celebrate! I say we ask the musicians in this outfit to bring out their instruments straightaway!”

The crowd turned back to look at the gray-headed horseman who took off his big hat and wiped the back of a hand across his brow just below the faded, sweat-soaked bandanna. Bass quickly flicked his eyes to Shad, then turned back to the ousted wagon boss.

“Awright, Hargrove,” he said as Amanda disappeared into the wagon, “I say let’s do make us a lot of noise tonight!”

^*Buffalo Palace

^* Today’s Bridger Creek.