Buffalo Palace

3

“Sergeant!”

At that cry from the south shore Bass’s head bobbed out of the muddy water, his eyes blinking, immediately landing on the open gates, where one of the soldiers stood turned half-around to hurl his voice into the stockade.

“Pull, girl!” he called out to the mare dragging him against the Missouri’s strong current. He gripped her tail as firmly as he had ever held on to a woman at that moment of blissful union. “That’s it—pull!”

As he did his best to hold the rifle high overhead and out of the water, the mare fought the strong current, pulling them slowly toward that south bank where a second soldier appeared, joining the first. Eventually the big-bellied one hurried up to complete the trio about the time the Indian pony’s hooves touched bottom beside the mare. Together both animals struggled to find their footing on the slick river bottom, stumbled and shifted, both nearly going down as they continued to fight for a foothold. As the river surged against them, the mare managed to keep her head fully above water while all he saw of the pony in that instant was its nostrils. Then the pony was back up, eyes as big as tea saucers, ears slicked back in both fear and the effort she was giving her swim across the frothy current as the bottom of the sun’s orb sank onto the far western prairie with an audible sigh.

At the moment the mare nearly jerked him free of her tail, Bass’s bare feet scraped across the muddy, brush-choked bottom some fifty yards below the wharf where the pirogues continued to clunk together. All three soldiers moved down together to stand some twenty yards up the grassy bank, just past the two upside-down canoes as Titus finally got his legs under him, slapping the rump of both animals as they clawed their way out of the Missouri, clattering onto dry land.

He stood gasping, eyeing the trio as both horses shimmied beneath their loads, then turned their big eyes to regard the naked, white-skinned human with something bordering on a warning never to repeat such a crossing, if not outright contempt. Glancing at the big soldier who held a Harpers Ferry musket pointed his way, Titus clambered a little farther up the slope and collapsed to his knees on the grass.

“Just who the hell are you?”

Rubbing some of the river’s grit from his eyes, he felt his breathing slow, then replied, “Name’s Bass. Up from St. Louis.”

The thinnest one of the three took a step forward, a large-bored pistol hanging at the end of his arm, which he quickly waved at the two horses audibly tearing off shoots of the new grass. “There any more of you coming across?”

He wagged his head, slinging water from his shoulder-length hair. The breeze prickled his naked skin, and he grew chilled as he glanced back at the north bank. “Nary a soul. Just me.”

When Bass turned to step toward the mare, the thin one snapped, “Stand your ground, stranger!”

For that silent moment his teeth chattered, his eyes flashing over the three of them and the muzzles of those two pistols that had joined the fat man’s musket in staring back at him.

“J-just getting m-my shucks.” He gestured to the top of the mare’s packs, where he had stuffed his clothing beneath the ropes.

“Your shucks?” asked the third man, clearly the oldest of the lot.

“My clothes,” Titus replied, wrapping his arms around himself, shuddering with the breeze that seemed to pick up speed and muscle as the sun continued to sink in the west. “Wasn’t about to get ’em wet in making that crossing, you see. Now, if you fellas’ll just let me get back in my warm clothes.”

“Yes,” replied the thin one. “By all means. None of us particular like watching a naked man shake and shrivel up afore our eyes.”

With a grateful nod Bass turned to the mare, patted her on the neck, and retrieved his shirt, britches, and boots from beneath the ropes lashing the bundles to the horse’s back.

As Titus began to hop one-legged into his leather britches, the thin man out front asked him, “What the devil are you doing up here from St. Louis?”

“Headed west.”

“West?” the fat man demanded in a gush. “West, from here?”

“What you aim to do going west?” the thin one demanded. “Off to Santa Fe all by yourself?”

Stuffing the wooden buttons through their holes in the britches, Bass shook his head. “Ain’t going south to Santy Fee. Pointing my nose out yonder to them mountains.”

“You don’t say?” the third one replied with a bit of wonder. For the most part, he had been all but silent.

Bass dragged his yoke-shouldered linen shirt over his sopping wet head and asked, “You got room to put a man up for the night?”

“Do we, Sergeant?” the fat one asked. He let the Harpers Ferry musket droop until it pointed at the ground.

“I don’t know about putting you up here at the post,” the thin one began.

“Then I’ll just set myself up right out here,” Titus responded.

“Aw, c’mon, Sergeant,” the big-bellied man pleaded. “We ain’t none of us had no one new to talk with inside of weeks.”

“That’s right,” the third one agreed. “Maybe he’s got some news from downriver what ain’t gone rotted with time.”

Jabbing his big horse pistol into the waistband of his military breeches, the thin man inquired, “You ain’t a scout from one of them fur outfits, are you? Rest of ’em coming ’long behind you?”

On the ground where he plopped to pull on his boots, Bass declared, “Like I said, I’m on my lonesome.”

“And you know exactly where the hell you’re going?”

Titus pointed quickly in the general direction. “West. Out yonder.”

The younger, thin man with the beaklike nose chuckled, then said, “So do you know where you are?”

“I’m on the Missouri River,” Bass replied, flinging a thumb over his shoulder at the frothy, muddy, runoff swollen water. “Still east of the big bend.”

“Ain’t that far to the bend now!” the third man cheered.

“How far?” Titus replied eagerly, standing, stomping his heels down into the old boots.

With a shrug the older man said, “Not far. I never was one to measure things out exact.”

“He’s right,” the sergeant injected. “So you reach the big bend, what’s that mean to you?”

“Means the Missouri heads north,” Bass replied. “And me with it.”

With a bob of his head the big soldier said, “Sounds like he’s got him a notion of where he’s off to, Sergeant.”

“Could be, Culpepper,” the thin one replied, jabbing his thumb over his shoulder at the stockade for emphasis. “But—still don’t sound like he knows where he’s landed.”

Titus tugged the broad-brimmed hat firmly down on his head. “You mean this here post on the Missouri?”

The sergeant swelled out his chest proudly, swinging an arm expansively, proudly, over all his regal holdings. “Osage, it’s called,” he offered. “Fort Osage.”*

* * *

It was a sometimes proposition, this Fort Osage was.

During the early 1820s it had become the jumping-off point for those traders headed down the Santa Fe Trail.

“But there’s been a post here back to O-eight,” the thin man called Lancaster explained as they sat With Titus at the stone fireplace in what served as the fort’s mess hall.

From the size of the stockade down to the tiny barracks, it was plain for any visitor to see that a large force had never manned Fort Osage.

“That’s back when General Clark chose this here place for a government trading house,” Sergeant Clayton explained. “I s’pose that’s why to some folks this place’ll always be known as Fort Clark.”

In fact, to those on the Lewis and Clark expedition marching west to the Pacific Ocean, this location was first noted as a favorable site for a post and ever after became known as Fort Point on June 23, 1804—perhaps because of the low bluff on which the post would be eventually situated. The red-haired William Clark again passed by the site early in the fall of 1808 with a troop of dragoon cavalry on his way to make a treaty with the Osage. On November 13 of that year, upon his return trip downriver, General Clark christened the post that would be abandoned less than five years later during the war scare—the government, army, and civilians alike believing the British in Canada were goading the tribes along the upper river to rise en masse and descend the Missouri, slaughtering all Americans in their path. The army did not garrison Fort Osage again, nor operate the post as a government trading house with the Indians west of the Missouri, until 1816.

Bass nodded, kneeling to take a twig from the fire, lighting his pipe. “So like you told me—there ain’t soldiers here all the time?”

Clayton said, “No there ain’t. Nowadays just when some fur trader gets some business going with the tribes upriver. Maybeso they station us here in the spring and the fall, what with the Santa Fe trade going and coming those times of year.”

“Last bunch of soldiers stationed here,” Culpepper said, jumping into the conversation enthusiastically, his eyes dancing, “three of ’em deserted.”

“Deserted?”

“Yep. Run off with all the lead and shot they could carry—”

Clayton interrupted, “’Cepting the sergeant. He damn well didn’t desert his station.”

“Yup.” Culpepper’s head bobbed as he declared, “Three soldiers tied that poor bastard up to the fur press out there in the compound afore they took off for parts unknown.”

“Must’ve been days later when some fellas finally showed up—coming downriver in a canoe what they tied up yonder,” Lancaster joined in. “They come up to find the gates open, and the sergeant sitting right out there—all trussed up like a Christmas hog.”

“He was still alive after all that time?” Bass inquired.

“Barely,” Clayton answered. “Poor son of a bitch’s wrists was flayed and bloody trying his best to break outta them ropes.”

“An’ he could barely utter a word,” Culpepper added. “Hoarse as a sour-mouthed bullfrog. Been screaming and cussing for all he was worth since the day them three run off.”

Lancaster wagged his head, saying, “No one to hear him anyway. Don’t know why he didn’t just shut his yap and wait till someone showed up.”

“Would you?” Culpepper demanded, turning on the older soldier. “Just sit there?”

“Still say it didn’t do him a bit of good,” Lancaster replied sourly.

“What ever become of him?” Titus asked.

“I heard the poor soul’s still mending down to St. Louis,” Sergeant Clayton explained.

Bass puffed on his pipe. “Army decided to send up some more men, even after them others run off?”

“These are good men,” Clayton replied, nodding at the others. “Both of ’em hard workers, and they’re loyal, too.”

“Not like them last three,” Culpepper spouted.

Nearby, Fire Prairie Creek meandered out of the timber toward the bluff where the stockade stood and eventually spilled into the Missouri. Many years before William Clark had ever chosen the site, Fire Prairie had acquired its name among the local tribes when four Osage warriors were killed by a large band of attacking Pawnee, who surrounded their enemies, then burned them alive, setting fire to the dry grass in a nearby meadow. To the peaceful bands situated in that big-bend country of the Missouri River, the army’s post and government factory had long been commonly known as Fire Prairie Fort.

“We had to drive off four sonsabitches when we got here,” Culpepper boasted.

“Interlopers,” Sergeant Clayton explained. “Civilian interlopers—likely taking squatters’ rights here to conduct some illegal whiskey trade with the peaceable bands in the country hereabouts.”

“They sure didn’t put up much of a argument,” Culpepper added. “Likely they figured we was just the advance of a hull big outfit.”

“So they skedaddled.”

Titus asked, “Where they go?”

Clayton shrugged. “Who knows? Last we saw of ’em they was heading west toward the bend. Ain’t none of my concern now.”

Bass gazed around the small, low-roofed room again, then asked, “They take anything you know of?”

“Not the way they was packing up in a hurry under our eyes,” Lancaster said. “For sure they was a snakey-looking lot—the sort what’d trade whiskey with the Injuns and be slick-handed at it too.”

As the first drops of rain hit the plank and sod roof overhead, Bass looked at the sergeant, asking, “You hear tell of anyone trading whiskey with them Pawnee up on the Platte?”

Shaking his head, Clayton said, “Not lately. Them soldiers quartered up at Atkinson see to it none of that slips by ’em.”

“Whiskey makes an Injun mean,” Culpepper instructed as if he were spouting gospel.

“You seen Injuns before, ain’t you?” the sergeant asked of Bass.

“I seen my share of Chickasaw … years ago now.”

“No,” Lancaster joined in. “Did you ever see any of these Injuns here abouts?”

“River Injuns,” Culpepper commented with self-satisfaction. “The ones what’re still wild.”

“I seen a few come through St. Lou,” Bass admitted. “But I s’pose I ain’t seen a real wild Injun in many a year.”

The wind gusted, rain battering against the small mullioned panes of glass on the two windows that looked out on the compound, where a torch sputtered in the sudden downpour. Titus got to his feet and left the warm corona near the fireplace to go to the door. He opened it and stared out at the heavy rain drowning the countryside as the torch outside flickered, then hissed—snuffed out and throwing the stockade’s compound into utter blackness. It sent a chill down his spine like a drop of January ice water.

“Close that son of a bitch,” Culpepper ordered. “Damn, but you let in all that cold so to make my bones ache.”

Slowly shoving the iron-hinged door back into its jamb, Bass returned to the half-log benches, where he rejoined the others.

After a long period of silence as the sergeant continued to stare at the flames, Clayton finally asked, “What you figure to see out yonder to the west what’s so all-fired important?”

“First off—I want to see me some buffalo.”

“Buffalo?” Culpepper exclaimed.

“That’s right. I been hankering on seeing them big beasts for about as long as I can remember.”

The sergeant prodded for more. “’Sides the buffalo, what else?”

“Them mountains,” Bass added. “I’ve heard me stories—”

“Me too,” Culpepper interrupted enthusiastically. “The way some fellas talk about them mountains being so this and so that, why—I figure what with all that unlordly talk, them fellers is full of shit right up to the bung!”

“I knowed me one what ought to know,” Titus explained. “He was a fur trapper in that upcountry—on the likes of the Bighorn and the Yallerstone.”

“Bighorn,” Clayton repeated wistfully. “Yallerstone too?”

“So what’d he have to say for hisself?” Culpepper demanded.

“Yeah,” Lancaster joined in, “what’d he tell you ’bout that country?”

“I figure them mountains gonna be something for a man to see.”

Lancaster leaned forward now, elbows on his knees. “Ain’t you seen mountains before, Bass?”

“If what Washburn tol’t me was the true: then all the mountains I’ve seen till now back east be nothing but foothills to them what lay out yonder.”

“Where you’re dead set on going,” Clayton observed solemnly.

Titus finally owned up, “I don’t figure I can rest till I do.”

A doubtful Lancaster prodded, “Once you do, what then?”

“If’n I like ’em—I plan to stay on.”

“Doin’ what?” Culpepper asked.

“Trapping beaver.”

“So you’re for sure a fur man, are you?” Clayton inquired. “We hear most of them fur men what go upriver don’t ever come back down, leastwise with their hair still on. Them I hear what does come back got ’em lots of ghosty stories to tell of that country and the Injuns running things out there.”

Rising to his feet again, Titus bristled at the challenge. He boasted, “I ain’t scared of them mountains, not the Injuns neither. And I damn well don’t believe in no man’s ghosty stories. I’ve heard my share of windbags and Sunday-blowers to know what to lay stock in and what not. Can’t think of a damned thing gonna turn me aside from what I’ve been fixing on doing for a long time now.”

“Where you headed?” Clayton inquired as the civilian turned away from the trio.

Grumpily he said, “Off to my blankets.”

“But the night’s still early, Bass!” Culpepper cheered.

Titus stopped and turned to explain, “Not when I’ve got more miles to put under me tomorrow. If it’s all the same to you fellas, I’ll make me my bed right over here where I dropped my truck.”

“Anywhere you lay your head be fine by me,” Clayton declared. “Just as long as you don’t settle down on the spot there in the corner where you see I laid me my tick and blankets.”

No matter that there were only four of them in that whole fort—Titus Bass still felt cramped.

By the time the sky grayed, he was already wide-eyed and awake, anxious to be gone from this place. To go at last where he would be troubled by no man, rubbed against, and questioned. Maybeso to leave white folks behind wouldn’t be all that bad for a while.

Then Bass worked hard to think back on the last time he had been truly on his own. More than a decade it had been since the Mississippi flatboat crew had set him afoot on the west bank of the river, where he had taken off north to St. Louis—alone until he came across Able Guthrie’s barn and that warm, inviting hay where he lay his weary self down. Even longer still since he had run off from home and spent those first nights in the woods on his own. Alone and growing all the hungrier until he presented himself at Ebenezer Zane’s night fire, joining the pilot’s Kentucky boatmen.

Two of the soldiers snored close by in the thinning darkness. Each of them grumbling, gurgling, snorting at times. This fort room smelled damp with the seepage from last night’s rain. The timbers grown sodden and dank. How well he knew places like this took on a rank smell after man had been there too long.

Titus sat up quietly and pulled aside his blankets. After dragging on his old boots he slipped from the door, leaving it partially open rather than make more noise in closing it. From side to side he dodged the patchwork of puddles in the open compound left by last night’s rain, then passed by the tall, forlorn fur-press when he saw the Indian pony turn at the sound of his approach. The mare raised her head and stomped a hoof expectantly as well.

Aswirl with moisture, the air felt heavy to breathe here in the moments just before dawn. Light drops fell to prick the surface of each puddle and rut as he untied both orses from their hitching rings and moved off toward the gate. There he dragged aside the heavy wooden hasp and heaved back on one side of the gate until it swung open wide enough to let him slip out with the animals.

The goatsuckers were still out in the graying light, winging this way and that over the tall grass that stretched endlessly toward the timber on three sides of the stockade: several different species of birds that fed on moths and gnats—whippoorwills and nighthawks mostly, all swooping, diving, and feeding here in the cold, damp dawn.

Following a well-worn footpath, Titus led the two horses away from the walls toward the timber south of the fort. After two hundred yards he found the spring Lancaster had described. He released the animals and went to his knees, rocking forward over the surface of the water, where he could lap its cold with his tongue. Renewed, and anxious to be done with his leaving, Titus stood and waited for the horses to finish.

Sergeant Clayton had Lancaster working corn mush into cakes by the time Bass returned. Culpepper sat by the fireplace, feeding the flames and heating a skillet in which he was melting bear lard to fry their breakfast.

“You wasn’t about to run off without something in your belly, was you?” Lancaster asked, dragging his fingers down into a wooden bowl and emerging with more of the soggy cornmeal he began to pat between his palms.

“What’s for breakfast?”

The sergeant looked at Bass with astonishment, saying, “Here I thought you told us you wasn’t a breakfast man.”

Drinking in the fragrances with a deep breath for a moment, he found the three of them looking expectantly at him. “S’pose I’ll take time this morning,” Titus replied. “Seeing how this be the last morning I figger to be eating with white folks for some time to come.”

“A apple tart with hot buttered rum sauce,” Culpepper spoke right out of the blue.

“What the hell you talking about?” Lancaster grumbled at the rounder man.

With a shrug, the big-bellied soldier said, “Just sitting here thinking of what I’d like to have me a taste of.”

Clayton set the piggin of water on the plank table with a clatter. The small pail was made with stave wood: that hardwood used to make thin-shaped strips set edge to edge to form a small bucket or barrel. He asked, “A apple tart, is it?”

“Back to home in Nashville—that’s what was my favored thing to sink my teeth into.”

“Your mama made it?” Lancaster asked.

Nodding, Culpepper continued, “She made the best tarts—and always used some of my da’s rum to pour on ’em just before we sunk our teeth into ’em.” He smacked his lips noisily, then peered down at the skillet to find his lard had melted. “Hey, ol’ soldier—you best get them cakes over here in a shuffle-quick. I’m ready to cook!”

Lancaster legged back the bench he had been sitting on and rose with the pewter platter he had piled high with mush cakes. “You’re gonna stay long ’nough to eat, ain’cha, Bass?”

Drawing in another deep breath of that room no longer rank with the smell of rain and men living too close to one another—but now filled with the strong, corn-tinged fragrance of memories, Titus said, “Yes. Them pone cakes do sound good this morning.”

“Pone?” Clayton repeated. “You from somewhere south, mister?”

“Kentucky. Hard by the Ohio.”

At the fire Lancaster slipped a fourth cake into the heated oil in the skillet. “Ain’t heard these’r called pone in a spell.”

“My …” And he struggled to get the rest out without his voice cracking in remembrance. “My mam most times made all us young’uns pone cakes of a cold autumn morning.”

“I growed up calling ’em hoecakes,” Culpepper declared as he jabbed at the frying mush with a long iron fork.

“Maybeso they’re nothing more’n johnnycakes,” Clayton said, turning away from Bass as if he appeared to recognize something familiar in the look on the older man’s face.

Titus was grateful the young sergeant had turned away as his eyes began to mist up and he troubled his Adam’s apple up and down repeatedly, trying to swallow the sour gob of sentiment that threatened to choke him.

His damp leather britches and wool coat began to steam there in the heat of the mess hall—arousing a long-ago memory all of its own. The smells of frying oil, the crackling of the wood beneath the heady fragrance of the crisping corn. He remembered those long years gone by: how his grandmother always used conte in baking some sweet treats—that spice made from powdered China briar she would mix into her corn fritters fried in bear’s oil, then sweetened with honey.

At the side of the fire the steaming coffeepot began to boil, and as quickly Sergeant Clayton tossed in two hand-fuis of the coarse coffee grounds, then tugged on the bail to move the pot off the dancing flames and onto the coals at the stone hearth.

Blinking his eyes with those tears of remembrance, Titus savored the earthy perfume of that frying pan bread. Corn. His father’s crop. What his grandpap before him had grown in that rich bottomland of the canebrakes they cleared of every stone and tree, season after season slowly enlarging their fields. Corn. It not only fed Thaddeus Bass’s family, but the stalks and tops of the harvested crop fed their horses and milch cows. Corn had fattened their hogs—which meant lard for their lamps during those long winter nights there near the frozen Ohio in Boone County. And what corn was left over after the family and the stock were properly cared for, after some had been sold and shipped south to New Orleans on the flatboats, then Thaddeus, like his father before him, would boil down into whiskey mash for proper occasions like birthing, marrying, or funerals: time when a man was planted back in that very ground where he had spent his life in toil.

“Don’t ever let me catch you spitting in my fireplace again!” his mam had scolded him that first time Titus so proudly attempted to show off his new skill at the ripe old age of five and a half.

“Your mama uses them ashes,” his pap had explained, sharply yanking the youngster to his knee. “Uses ’em to make her prized hominy, Titus. So don’t ever let either of us catch you spitting in the fireplace. G’won outside with that sort of thing.”

How he fondly recalled her frumenty, their wooden bowls heaped with boiled grains of wheat served with a topping of hot milk and sugar. Not at all like the rye mush a working man had to settle for in the tippling houses along the banks of the Ohio, back there in St. Louis. Nothing more than meal, salt, and water brought to a boil before it was set before him—nothing more than animal fodder to fill his belly until a midday meal.

And, oh: his mam’s crackling bread. How his mouth began to water with the remembrance as he settled on a half-log bench across from Lancaster, right beside the fireplace where Culpepper tended to the hoecakes. Crackling read: made tasty with a crisp crust, flavored with generous handfuls of leaf-hard hog cracklings turned into the batter just before baking in the Dutch oven.

On his tongue this cold, wet morning rested the remembered taste of those meals he had not recalled in far too many years since leaving home that autumn of 1810. Only sixteen back then, but certain sure he was man enough to make out on his own. And so he had for nearly fifteen years now. Yet the memories came all the more into focus on mornings like this when he missed most the johnnycakes smeared with butter and dripping with his mam’s preserves. Or all those evenings spent remembering how as a skinny child he had climbed up to sit astraddle the top rail of the snakeline fence his pap had thrown up around their fields—patiently watching the western fall of the sun and wondering on those yonder places his grandpap spoke so dearly of, munching on the crackling, earthy taste of parched corn there at the end of the day. How the coming quiet of each evening allowed him to listen to familiar sounds of the forest softly roll across the dark, plowed ground to reach his ears: the mournful toodle of the whippoorwill calling out to its sweetheart, often interrupted by the abusive cry of a strident catbird.

Homespun memories were all he was left with now—especially now that he had chosen a’purpose to be without a home of his own.

“The Missouri makes her bend to the north little more’n ten leagues upriver from here,” Sergeant Clayton reminded him later when the time had come.

He had shaken hands with Culpepper and Lancaster there that drizzly morning as the rain became more insistent, and now Titus grasped the young sergeant’s. “You’ve made me welcome … and for that I am in your debt.”

“Think nothing by it,” Clayton said. “Those tales you spun of your whoring back to St. Louis, and them wild windies that ol’ feller Washburn told you of the far wilderness—why, they made your layover with us a genuine pleasure, Mr. Bass.”

“Next time you hap to come by—maybe on your way back to St. Louie,” Lancaster added, “I’ll wager you’ll have some wild windies of your own to tell us.”

Turning away, Titus rose to the saddle and tugged on the mare’s lead rope. “Thanks all the same for the invite, soldiers—but I don’t plan to be back this way a’tall. Have to be something damned important—nothing less’n life and death … to bring me back to St. Lou.”

As the river meandered, Titus had to cross more than thirty more miles before he reached the big bend of the Missouri, its roiling surface seeming to grow muddier with every hour he put behind him that first long day after leaving Fort Osage. Before the sun had climbed all that high that following morning, Titus realized the river had changed directions for good and no longer flowed out of the west. Now he would follow the Missouri north. Mile after mile he watched how it was becoming even more the color of unsweetened chocolate, frothing and bobbing with snags and clutter, tumbling with drift and refuse carried down from far upriver.

A river become the color of the quadroon’s skin. That warm-fleshed whore who abandoned her tiny crib down on Wharf Street where she had to belong for an hour at a time to any man with a guinea or pistole in his pocket, choosing to have herself put up in a fancy house where she would belong thereafter to only one wealthy Frenchman who could afford to provide himself the sweet delights his frigid wife would no longer pleasure him with.

That color of unsweetened chocolate she was, all over. How the turbulent, brown Missouri reminded him now of their tempestuous coupling.

As the pony picked its way along, several yards out from the brushy riverbank, and they pointed their noses north to the mouth of the Platte, Bass dug into the blanket pouch he wore slung over his shoulder. Dragging out the lue scarf the coffee-skinned quadroon gave him not all that long ago, he drank deeply of its fragrance. Disappointed to find that her scent no longer filled the cloth. Her smell was as gone as she herself was. Crumpling the scarf in his hand, angry to learn that some memories were far too fragile to last out the miles and the years, he stuffed it back into the pouch—no more did he want to think upon her and the joy she brought to his body.

Still, far easier was the chocolate-skinned whore to remember than was … Marissa.

There beneath the breaking clouds Titus squeezed down hard to expel the sudden appearance of Able Guthrie’s daughter at the horizon of his memories. The soft, sweaty, sticky feel of her heated flesh against his as they lay that summer in her father’s barn. The dusty fragrance of hay and the pungent scent of the animals rising from the stalls below them. Oh, for so long, how he had done his best to hold her image at bay, to prevent it from nibbling away at the edges of his certainty that he had done the right thing by leaving.

Opening his eyes to the spring sun, Bass scratched at the back of his neck, there beneath the brown curls at the collar of the warm shirt he had put on that morning at Fort Osage: square-armholed, drop-shouldered, sewn from flax and wool … hoping he had not taken on tiny varmints during his brief layover among the soldiers. He should have known better, he scolded himself—such places had the reputation of sharing lice, mites, and fleas with all visitors. All it took was but one man to bring them in.

As it had been on Ebenezer Zane’s Kentucky flatboat. By the time Hames Kingsbury got the dead pilot’s load of hemp, ironmongery, flour, and tobacco down to New Orleans, even Titus found himself cursed with what the boatmen affectionately called the “Scotch-Irish itch.” Few, if any, of those men who made the rivers their life ever bathed in the waters of the Ohio or the Mississippi. Much less did they patronize the public baths in New Orleans’s “Swamp” at journey’s end. Simply put, most Kentucky boatmen of the era shunned anything that remotely resembled soap and water.

Pretty sure of it he was, what with the way such vermin bit and burrowed, that he might well have himself a case of them already. At least one tormentor back there, and maybe as many as a handful. With a fingertip he tried to find one there at his collar, remembering how many a boatman would remove his colorful crimson bandanna to expose his neck made raw and red itself from a row of lice all lined up on the irritated flesh like a string of pearlish beads.

He brought his hand up before his eyes, staring at the louse he had captured between thumb and forefinger—then crushed it between his nails and flung it aside as the recognizable border of trees came in sight. Reining up among the brush on the bank minutes later, Bass peered across the river flowing in from the west, dumping its clear flow into the muddy Missouri.

“What the hell you figure that be?” he asked almost in a whisper as he patted the Indian pony on the side of the neck.

Bass straightened, peering to the north and west, stretching some saddle kinks out of his back. Eventually he admitted to the two horses, “I s’pose it don’t matter. This here’s the Missouri—and to follow it, a man’s gotta cross this’un. Giddap.”

With his heels he urged the pony into motion, moving along the brush, tugging on the lead rope to the mare. In no more than a half mile Bass found what he figured was a suitable place to make his crossing. Down the grassy bank and into the sparkling water, loosening up on the reins to give the pony its head—allowing it to find its own footing as it slowly took its rider deeper, step by step toward the middle of the river. Cold wicked up his boots, flowed over the top to bite at his calves, then billowed over his knees. Spring runoff soaked his thighs, saddle, and blanket by the time the pony began swimming at midstream. With every yard the horse carried him, Titus was compelled to raise his rifle all the higher until he held it high overhead.

Just as Bass began to heave himself off the back of the saddle onto the pony’s haunches, ready to swim alongside the animal, the pony instead recovered its footing with a sudden start that almost jerked him free of his hold on a thick strip of latigo woven into the back of the saddle pad.

Titus came out of the water, sputtering, his right arm still held aloft with the rifle—cursing the river and the pony, cursing the soft-bottomed crossing.

On the north side the pony and mare lurched up the muddy, grassy bank as he slid off the wet saddle—ultimately cursing himself for not yanking off his shucks before plunging into the river. He slogged over to the brush, water sluicing from his clothes as he stood tying off the two horses. Their flesh quivered as Titus quickly collapsed to the grass, yanking at the waterlogged boots. Standing again to tug at the wet leather britches, he struggled to pull them off one leg at a time, and finally yanking free of the wool and flax shirt.

For those first moments he was cold, chilled to his marrow as he suffered the breeze left in the wake of last night’s thunderstorm. But it wasn’t long before the climbing sun began to work its eternal magic, caressing his goose-pimpled skin with its warmth. Every bead of water dippling his arms or clustered at the base of each tiny hair on his chest, across the top of his bare thighs—all of them shimmered like tiny, iridescent rainbows as the sun began to dry every one.

Raising his face toward the sky, eyes closed, “Thank you,” he said quietly.

Surprised that he had. Not knowing what had come over him of that moment, causing him to offer his gratitude right out loud. Out of the corner of one eye, Titus glanced quickly at the sky, self-consciously regarding that great tumble of white-and-gray clouds dabbed against the pale-blue dome. With the rustle of the wind through newly leafed brush, he suddenly felt the presence of something greater than himself, something so immense here across the wide Missouri that it was almost impossible to comprehend.

At that moment he looked around him, certain that he was standing shamelessly naked within the sight of someone. But try as he might, he could not see, nor did he hear, another being, save for the two horses gently tearing off the green shoots at their feet as they dripped and dried in the sun, now spearing bright shafts through the breaking clouds.

This was as good a place as any, he decided. A fine spot, indeed. So from his shooting pouch he retrieved a small tin the size of his palm, then laid it among some stones where he figured he would build his fire. Titus began to scrounge among the brush for dry kindling. After the showers of the last two days, it was not all that easy to find dry wood, but eventually he had all in readiness.

From the German silver tin he removed the firesteel curved in a large and elegant C big enough to fit over the four fingers of his right hand. In his left he gathered some charred cloth, a bit of dried cotton boll, and the large gray chunk of flint. Striking downward on the sharp-edged stone with the firesteel, he began creating sparks, a few of which soon caught hold on the cloth, smoldering there within the boll’s loose fibers. Very softly he blew on the reddish coal he had created until it burned bright enough for him to slip the char beneath the tiny cone of kindling he had stacked up right at his knees.

One by one he set bigger and bigger twigs, then broke thicker branches to lay upon the flames until he had no fear of the fire sputtering out. Quickly rubbing his hands together over the rising heat, and at long last beginning to sense the fledgling fire’s warmth radiating on his chest and belly, Bass stepped over to the mare and threw back the dirty oiled Russian sheeting lashed on the off side of her packs, removing the blackened coffeepot. With the pot half-filled from the river he had just crossed, Titus set the water to boil while he went in search of some coffee among the supplies purchased back in Franklin.

With it and one of his dented cups set near his cheery fire, Bass finally draped his britches and shirt over clumps of nearby brush so the sun’s rays would strike them as he waited for the water to come to a boil. Then he stretched out on the grass, flat on his back, lacing his fingers behind his head to stare up at the spring sky, savoring the crackle of the fire close by, relishing the way the gentle warmth washed down from the sky to caress his skin.

As he closed his eyes, he remembered how good it had been to slip off into the forests of Boone County, Kentucky—his grandpap’s old fullstock flinter at the end of his arm, with the family’s old hound, Tink, loping ahead through the dapple of sunlight and shadow as Titus sought out rabbit or squirrel, turkey, or even some venison.

Like most boys growing up there at the edge of the frontier that stretched to the west a little farther with every new year, Titus spent every moment his pap allowed him immersing himself in the woods. School and church and work behind the plow: those were the had-to’s. But for most young fellas like Titus, time was never sweeter than when it was spent hunting or setting snares and deadfall traps, learning the herbs and fruits and nuts one could gather from the forest’s bounty.

Most children learned early what it took to read game trails or the moss on the trees, the whorl of certain flowering plants or the caliber of the wind—all those things they must remember so they would never become lost or put themselves in danger of being hurt, alone and far from the family ground. When he and the other boys his age gathered at one farm or another, there would of course always be a tall tree to shinny up, there to lie along its wide branches and gaze down on the world below. Or the boys plunged deep into that band of thick timber and limestone bordering the Ohio River itself, where they explored sinkholes, caves, and rockhouses—imagining themselves to be river pirates or the flatboatmen who would repel any such bloody and vicious attack.

Of course, there was always the swimming hole. He smiled, remembering how he and the others had knotted an old rope to a high limb so they could swing out over the surface of the water shaded by that same tree, flinging themselves naked out through the summer air crackling with the buzz and drone of flies and mosquitoes, letting go of that rope at just the right moment so they could sail for those deliciously brief seconds totally free before they hurled downward into the cold green swimming hole.

Come a time in a young man’s life—it was only the boys who went to the pool they had dammed up for swimming. As a girl’s body began to change and bloom, she would no longer join her brothers and their friends.

Through his reverie Titus could hear the faint tumble of the water’s first turn to a boil. And likewise felt the tingle of his own flesh stir with the memory of Amy Whistler.

How fully had she bloomed in those weeks and months before they had consummated their young passion there on a summer night beside the moonlit swimming pond. So full and soft were the curves of her, the roundness to the feel of her gliding up to him in the water … there beneath him where he laid her back on the grass beside the great boulders. But with that aching physical memory of the exquisite pleasure Amy brought him came also a flash point of anger at the coquette in her that had attempted to possess and corral him before he was ready to have his wings clipped, ready to be put in the wire cage the way a woman had done to his grandpap … the way his very own mother had imprisoned his pap.

Amy. Or Marissa. Oh, the wiles women used to snare men from the beginning of time. Roping them down with pleasures of the flesh, then later with the coming of children, and finally snaring them to stay on the land—plowed land. Land where a man walked behind an ox or mule, lashed and laboring as surely as did his beasts.

The boiling water hissed and tumbled, calling him from his reverie.

From the small pouch of pounded coffee beans Titus took a handful and flung the grounds into the pot, then carefully hooked a finger within the wire bail and dragged the pot from the edge of his fire. As the water continued to turn, Bass stood and moved off to test his wet clothing.

Dry enough they were. Into the still-damp britches he stuffed his legs, then slipped his arms into the warmth of his shirt. Around his waist he finally drew the wide belt and tightened it before kneeling at the fire, pouring himself a cup, then rocking back on his haunches to first draw in the savory fragrance of the coffee. Only then did he sip at the steaming brew.

Because the wool shirt itched when it became damp, he thought he might change back to the linen shirt. He smiled, recalling how riyerboatmen like Hames Kingsbury and the rest were really no different from other men on the razor’s edge of the frontier: they would wear one set of clothes until it fairly rotted off, then they promptly rooted around for something new to wear out completely in its time.

Not so very different was that from his own childhood, he mused as he sipped on the coffee there in the sun’s spring light. Most young’uns had no more than one change of clothing: their everyday wear, along with those clothes saved for Sunday-morning meeting as well as those rare special celebrations of life. The marryings, birthings, and the funerals of friends and family … those cords of remembrance he felt still binding him to that past and that place had begun to grow thin and weak—very much like spider’s silk stretched to the breaking.

It struck Titus there by the rivers’ junction, now that he was here on the yonder side of the wide Missouri: he had been gone from home for almost as long as he had spent growing up in the house of his father. Considering, too, how Thaddeus Bass himself had known little else but the place where his father had set down roots before him. Yet, unlike Titus, never had Thaddeus desired to reach out, to explore, to search beyond what lay there in that small section of Boone County he plowed and planted. And that failure was something Thaddeus’s son could not fathom.

Staring down at the surface of the coffee in his cup, Titus wondered now about his family. How his pap had aged. How the intervening years might have marked his mam with gray and lines. His brothers and sister—they all were grown and would surely have families of their own now. Children carrying on the family cycle on the land.

And all he had to his name were these two hand-me-down horses, his guns, and the clothes on his back, along with what little else was packed on that mare.

A shadow flitted past him across the ground, startling him. He looked up in time to catch the crimson flutter of the cardinal as it disappeared among the timber north of his fire. So he smiled.

He might not own all that much, Titus decided as he stood and gazed into the west. For certain he sure as hell didn’t own much by most men’s standards.

But right now—he sensed he had all of that out yonder to call his very own.

* Reconstructed near present-day Sibley, in Jackson County, Missouri