Buffalo Palace

10

That white-headed trader’s whiskey tasted good enough, by damn—nonetheless, Titus still had him a serious hankering for some good old Monongahela rum, generously sweetened with raw cane sugar, the likes of which they served in every watering hole, tippling house, and gunboat brothel on the great rivers back east.

Bass licked his lips, savoring the tang of raw tobacco and red pepper on his tongue, the faintest sweetening of strap molasses … then slowly awoke, still running his tongue over his bottom lip—hoping there was more to drink.

Rubbing the grit from his eyes, Scratch sat up, finding the others still dead to the world around the coals in their fire pit, none of them more than shapeless mounds buried beneath an inch-thick, wet snow. That cold white blanket covered most everything as he reluctantly came awake—feeling as if the cold spring fog had pierced him to his marrow. He peered through the trees, finding the horses still as statues in their rope corral, not bothering to paw at the ground this early.

Shuddering, Scratch thought how good it would feel to have Fawn next to him. Maybeso there really would be women down to the trader’s rendezvous in a few weeks’ time, just as Billy and Silas had been saying over and over again. A man might hold out that long, he considered, working up hope once more. Yes, indeed: a man could get himself through the spring and the autumn … just so he could have him a woman at the height of summer, as long as he had one with him too through the deep of winter.

He kicked back the blankets, stood, and tightened the wide belt around his blanket capote. Then he reached into his possibles pouch and pulled out the blue scarf. Holding two opposite corners, Scratch whipped it into a thin band he tied around his head to hold the long hair over his ears for warmth. Stuffing his coyote-hide hat down on his head, Titus bent over the remnants of last night’s elk. He dug among the chunks of the meat they had boiled, then set to cool in a second kettle. What they hadn’t eaten now had a dusting of snow upon it. He blew some of the icy crust off each piece as he stuffed it into a large piece of oiled nankeen cloth, then rolled up the square so it would slip down into the shooting pouch he slapped over his right shoulder.

With the fullstock rifle in his. blanket mitten and still no sign of life from the others, who went right on snoring in their buffalo-robe cocoons, Bass crept away into the cold mists of that spring morning in the high country, eager to get the jump on the day, and the jump on Silas’s boys.

He hadn’t covered much ground before the calves of his leggings were soaked by the wet, melting snow that clung heavily to everything in his path—frosted to every blade of grass and thick-leafed swamp cabbage, crusted on every willow or aspen leaf. The swirling, thick fog was cold all by itself as it danced and whirled on the ground around his knees, yet it became thicker still the closer he got to the upstream meadow where he had been taking beaver hand over fist for the last six days without seeming to put a dent in the rodents’ population.

And every last one of them was a prime fur. “Seal fat and sleek)” was how Billy Hooks had described the first of the pelts Titus had brought back to their camp.

“Damn near the finest I ever see’d,” Tuttle had commented as he began to help Titus scrape the excess flesh and fat off the back of each hide before they stretched it upon a willow hoop.

Damn pretty things they were too—near as satiny as any fur Titus had laid eyes on were those plews of his. And dark, much darker than their lowland cousins he had trapped before. By Jehoshaphat, spring trapping was the prime doin’s in a mountain nigger’s life, he recalled Silas exclaiming more than once since leaving the Ute winter camp. Sure and certain, he thought again now—there were no two ways about it. Spring trapping up this high was where a man was sure to make himself a small fortune in beaver. No better time of the year for a man to bust his ass: knowing he’d soon be swapping those furs in on one hell of a spree come the time to meet the trader at rendezvous.

It was a life Bass knew he was going to relish. Hell, there wasn’t a thing he didn’t already love about this life he had decided to wager everything on more than a year ago back in St. Louis. No man to boss him around up here, why—a man rose or fell by his own efforts and not those of others. As much affection as he had felt for Hysham Troost, Titus purely savored working on his own hook.

Standing the rifle in a crook of some willow near his first set, Scratch stepped sideways off the slippery bank and into the freezing water that steamed into the cold air. Above him the granite peaks and talus slides were brushed with a golden rose in the coming of the sun as the day’s first light touched only the highest places.

Down here life was still nothing but shadow as Bass inched toward the float-stick, snagged it with his bare hand, and dragged it over to the bank. At the end of the chain hung the trap, and in its square jaws hung a heavy beaver—slick and dripping as he eased it out of the water. Onto the bank he heaved it, then clambered up after the carcass. Squatting on the two powerful springs, Titus freed the animal’s leg, laid the trap aside, and pulled the skinning knife from its scabbard at the back of his belt.

Rolling the beaver over onto its back, Scratch started the slit at the anus and worked the knife carefully up in a straight cut toward the lower jaw. That done, he sliced around the legs near the body itself and prepared to remove the precious plew. Now with the unnecessary legs removed and a quick whirl with the knife to hack off the large, scaly tail, Titus laid his finger along the flat top of his skinning knife and began the slow, careful work of separating hide from body, a few inches of connective tissue and fat at a time. Almost like peeling back the robe off Widow Grigsby’s shoulders: pulling and slicing, pulling and slicing a little more as the plew relinquished its hold on the carcass.

From the rump end he worked forward, finally peeling the hide from the head itself, right down to the animal’s nose. Holding it up, Bass inspected it quickly, as he did with every one, looking first at the flesh side to see that he hadn’t been too quick and eager, and thereby sloppy, causing his knife to slip and cut through the plew. Then he could admire the thick, damp, oily fur on the opposite side.

After resetting the trap and smearing more of the sticky bait on the tip of the willow limb poised over that much-used slide the beaver had carved themselves down the slippery bank, Titus poked a long whang of stiffened rawhide through one of the empty eye sockets and slung the heavy green plew over his shoulder. Snagging the beaver’s scaly tail root, he flung the carcass as far as he could into the brush away from the pond. A few feet away he retrieved his rifle, threaded his way back through the willow, and slogged on to the second set.

One after another one he pulled up a beaver. It had been this way for days. Not a single empty trap. Fourteen more plews by midmorning when he finished resetting his traps and turned back for camp. Those fourteen would make for a full day of fleshing and stretching. As boring as the work was, it remained somewhat joyous work, nevertheless: knowing now just what each one of those hides should be worth come the middle of summer when they got on over to the Willow Valley by the Sweet Lake.

Through the thin vertical straps of lodgepole shadow and the patches of early sunlight, he saw the gray film of firesmoke and the slow, deliberate movements of the three as he drew close. Cooper was late turning them out this morning.

“Ho! The camp!” Bass called out.

Billy Hooks turned, his face quickly painted with that ready smile. “Ho! Scratch!” Then he peered more carefully at Bass as Titus lumbered up with half of his burden at the end of each arm. “Will you lookee at that, boys?”

Bass himself turned to find Cooper squatting over a pile of his own beaver hides. Silas rose and set his big ands down on his hips. “Pound some powder up my ass and strike fire to my pecker! Looks to me like this here green pilgrim got him a haul of prime plew awready today, boys!”

Titus was proud to boast, “Fourteen of ’em, Silas!”

“Fourteen?” Cooper repeated as he came around Scratch’s shoulder to have himself a look at the two heavy bundle of green hides. “All these since yestiddy?”

“Skinned ’em this mornin’.”

“An’ don’t they look like big’uns too,” Cooper went on, admiringly.

Bass glowed with the praise, fairly crowing. “Nearly every one—bigger’n any I ever catched.”

Slapping his hand down on Bass’s shoulder, Silas nodded once and said, “Fellas, this here greenhorn nigger gonna have him the finest pack of plew come time to talk to the trader, don’t y’ think?”

“For balls’ sake if he won’t!” Bud agreed, and Billy bobbed his head eagerly.

Then Tuttle stepped up to heft both rawhide straps from Titus, flinging the green hides toward the area of camp where they fleshed the skins and lashed them inside willow hoops—where more than two dozen of those willow hoops stood propped against trees this morning, their skins drying, hide side up.

“C’mon, y’ two. We got us a long way to go this morning,” Cooper ordered, the slash of a grin on his face. “We ought’n go see if we can catch ourselves some of them prime plew like Scratch here done.”

Joking good-naturedly among themselves as they always did, the three gathered up their trap sacks and float-sticks, bait and weapons, before easing off downstream where they had been trapping for the last six days with moderate success. But unlike Bass’s good fortune, the three had been forced to move farther and farther downstream with each succeeding day.

Once he had some more limbs steepled on the fire, and the coffeepot set on the flames to boil, Titus turned back to the fourteen green hides. One at a time he slid them off the thick rawhide whang, laid each down, and rolled it up tightly, flesh side in so they would not air-dry prematurely. All but the last one he tied up with thin cords of fringe to prevent them from unrolling. On that last one he began work there beside his morning fire as the coffeepot began to spew a thin trail of vapor from its spout.

From his leather possibles pouch, where he carried everything a man might require to survive in the wilderness, Scratch took one of those large iron awls he had fashioned for Isaac Washburn and himself back in Troost’s St. Louis livery. Stuffing one of its two sharpened ends into the hole drilled in a rounded knob of wood that fit his palm, Scratch began to carefully poke holes around the outer circumference of the first plew, grabbing an empty willow hoop from those stacked to lean against some deadfall. When he had selected a long loop of rawhide cord from among those hanging on knots and broken limbs around their campsite, Titus began the process of lashing the hide to the hoop.

Leaving himself better than a foot of the rawhide cord free, Scratch shoved the pointed end of the cord through the first hole he punched at the extreme edge of the soft green hide, then looped the cord over the thick willow limb and repeated the process of poking the cord through the next hole, round and round and round, over the willow hoop and through the succeeding holes until he had the beaver plew completely circumscribed.

Now began the most time-consuming part of the job at hand: ever so slowly stretching the hide into a large round shape to fit the round hoop. Tugging on loop by rawhide loop, Scratch painstakingly moved around the hoop again, stretching the hide out another fraction of an inch. A little more on the next trip around. Then stretched it more, and more. Finally, after uncounted trips around that willow hoop, the beaver plew had been worked as taut as the head of an Indian war drum, fashioned into that crude shape the mountain man called his “beaver dollar.”

The coffee had begun to hiss and spew, so he grabbed a short limb and used it to pull on the bail to ease the pot back off the flames. There on the bed of glowing coals it would remain warm for some time to come. Then …

Oh, how Titus hated what grueling work came next: fleshing.

Yet he figured he should make a start of it before Tuttle came back to finish up the hides—at least flesh this first one. So far this spring they had them an easy bargain worked out. Titus was far better at lashing the plews within their willow hoops, so he did that for Bud. And Tuttle didn’t much mind the fleshing, a chore most beaver men considered “squaw’s work.” Funny thing was that here, as in most camps of fur trappers, there simply weren’t any squaws to complete the back-bending, shoulder-sore labor of removing every last bit of flesh, fat, and connective tissue from the backside of the beaver plew once it had been stretched on its frame.

Near a stack of empty willow hoops, Scratch found one of the fleshing tools, its half-round wooden handle well darkened with oil from the hands of those who had labored with it. Screwed between the two long halves of the wooden handle was a rounded piece of thin iron, sharpened on its convex side, enough room left in the iron blade so that a man’s fingers could slip through the slot and firmly grip the flesher.

Flipping the hoop so it laid fur side down, Titus squatted, sighed, then knelt over the plew to begin dragging the sharp edge of the flesher against the grain of the beaver’s skin—gradually lifting that excess flesh, thick straps of fatty tissue, and thin strips of connective fascia. Time and again he peeled the sticky residue from his crude flesher and went back to work, until he eventually had the hide scraped to within a thumb’s width of the edge of the plew where the rawhide loops secured it to the willow hoop.

Slowly volving his shoulders as he rocked back on his haunches, Scratch felt the pull and tightness in his back with the hunched-up work he truly felt was fit only for a squaw. Weary as the work made him, the rest could wait until Tuttle returned, he figured. Then together they could begin to work on the other thirteen, plus what others Bud would manage to bring back from his own traps that morning.

Titus crabbed forward and poured himself half a tin cup of the steaming coffee as more of the sun shot down through the trees in narrow shafts of misting light. He scooted his rump over to lean back against a large trunk of some deadfall, his feet to the fire, and sipped his coffee.

Here in the sun, its warm rays creeping up his legs, the heated coffee tin cradled between his hands, Scratch slowly closed his eyes. No doubt was there that the best beaver men moved out of camp before first light. But just as sure was it that a man might reward himself with the luxury of a little nap once he was back in camp with the prior day’s catch. Titus sat the coffee tin beside him on the trampled ground, folded his arms, and let his chin whiskers fall to his chest.

Startled by the chirk of a squirrel in the branches high overhead, he awoke sometime later, aware he had indeed been dozing with no recollection of just how much time had passed. But picking up the cup and taking a sip of the cold coffee gave him some idea of just how long. He flung out the dregs and poured himself another half cup. That was the way he had learned not to waste valuable coffee: drinking only a half cup at a time so that it wouldn’t cool prematurely.

After a few sips on the hot brew that invigorated him, Scratch got to his feet and moved off toward his side of the small camp to roll up his bedding he had abandoned before first light. There among his pack goods he stopped of a sudden—staring down at the four packs of beaver hides he had trapped in valley and high-country streams since first reaching the mountains last autumn. Three … damn if three of the packs didn’t look smaller than he remembered.

Bass rubbed his smoke-reddened eyes, thinking perhaps it was only because he was still groggy from napping that the packs somehow appeared smaller. Then he tilted his head to one side, appraising them. And tilted his head to the other. None of it made things appear any better.

Dropping quickly to his knees on the thick turf of fallen pine needles, Scratch worked to loosen the knots at the first of those three short packs. As his fingers clawed feverishly, he realized his heart was hammering a little faster with apprehension. Confusion. Pure bewilderment. And a sickening lump was starting to rise in the back of his throat, making it hard to swallow.

As he flung back the four long strands of thick rawhide, Titus became all the more despairing—thinking back to that very morning at the meadow pond where he had labored to skin those fourteen beaver: when he had realized those fourteen plews would be enough to finish out his fourth pack and provide a good start on a fifth. But now as his hands quickly parted the hides, counting them silently as his lips moved, trembling and fearful—Bass knew with growing certainty that he no longer had four full packs.

He quickly tore at the rawhide lashes on a second stack and began counting.

Suddenly Bass was confronting the fact that what he had now was far from enough to make even three full packs, much less the four. And as quickly he was afraid of just what that meant.

His hands froze at the knots securing the rawhide lash on the third short pack. Instead of releasing the knot, he turned slowly, staring across camp to where the others cached their plunder, possibles, and plews.

Titus was choking on the sour taste of it as he rose shakily, his knees wobbly as the realization sank in … slowly stumbling around the fire pit toward the far side where the trio’s packs sat beneath drapes of dirty canvas.

There he stopped and stared down, seeking to weigh things before committing the unpardonable transgression of prowling through another man’s belongings. From the way things appeared, Bud Tuttle didn’t have near enough packs among his things for Bass to be concerned.

Maybe Billy. By damn, maybeso it was him. That handy smile and happy-go-lucky naybobbin’ way of his might well be just the proper cover-up that would allow a jealous Hooks to get away with the theft of another man’s furs.

Thievery.

There it was. A word yet unspoken, but big and bold all the same.

Kneeling beside Billy’s possessions, Bass hurled back the end of the canvas, pulled the first stack toward him, and tore at the knots. But as he was beginning to count that first stack of furs, his eyes eventually, reluctantly, crawled to Cooper’s hides bundled nearby.

Lord, how he didn’t want it to be so.

Rising from Billy’s uncounted furs, Bass trudged over to Silas’s belongings with the air of a man forced to walk those last thirteen steps up to a hangman’s noose. Sinking to his knees, he drew back the canvas drape. There sat better than five whole packs.

Titus looked once more at Turtle’s piddling catch. At Billy’s best efforts. Then back again to regard how Silas’s catch outstripped the other two. It was plain to see that Cooper had a sizable lead on Titus.

His hands were shaking as he began to pull at the knots on that first pack, trembling so bad that Scratch finally pulled his knife and slashed at the rawhide ties. Setting the skinning knife aside, Titus pulled the first hide off the top. He swallowed hard as he turned it over, eyes skipping quickly over the flesh side.

It bore Cooper’s mark.

As did the second, and the third. And even the fourth.

He swept the knife up and cut free the rawhide bands on the second pack, beginning to inspect the hides in that pack. The first half dozen or so were clearly branded with Cooper’s mark. Likewise he slashed at the rawhide thongs on the third pack. Growing more desperate as he went along, Titus tore into the fourth stack of beaver pelts, wondering what was worse: thinking Cooper was the thief, or finding out that Cooper was not … which meant Titus still had a great, unsettling mystery to solve.

Then eight plews down in that fourth pack he saw it.

His mark on the backside of a large, shiny, glossy beaver pelt. His mark, sure enough—except that Cooper had attempted to scratch his own mark right over Bass’s.

Bass yanked it out of the stack, then pulled the seventh and studied it. Damn but the job was good, the way Cooper had carefully scratched a knife tip over the T B on the rough, stiffened, fleshy side of the pelt, turning the T into a careless S, and thickening out the B, adding a crude curve to the letter, which served to scrawl the C for Cooper.

Lunging for one of the stacks he had just inspected, Titus found the same to be true farther down in each pack. He hadn’t looked deep enough, nor well enough. The top six or eight hides were Cooper’s in each pack, to be sure. But they laid upon plew after plew that Scratch had trapped, skinned, and fleshed with Turtle’s help. Bass realized he hadn’t seen the crude forgery at first—how Cooper’s scrawl obscured all Titus’s hard work.

“What the hell are y’ doing in my packs, you weasel-stoned nigger?”

Bass wheeled at the growl, his hair rising on the back of his neck, skin prickling in fear as he stared at Cooper some two rods away. Just behind Silas stood Tuttle and Hooks, looking on—but not in disbelief or shock that Bass would be among Cooper’s belongings … instead, looking at the scene with masks of knowing horror. He realized they knew.

Suddenly the massive Cooper had crossed those last few ten yards, seizing Bass’s coat in one big paw, and hurled him to the ground. “Y’ fixing to steal from me, you tit-sucking son of a bitch?”

“S-steal from you?” Titus’s voice crackled as he rolled onto his knees, then arose slowly. He couldn’t believe he had been accused of theft by the thief himself.

“Looks to me what you’re fixin’ to do!” Cooper spat. His big jaw jutted there in the middle of his wide, sloping shoulders that gave him the look of a man without a neck. Silas flung out his arm, pointing across the fire to Bass’s packs torn apart and in disarray.

Titus wagged his head in disbelief and stammered, “Y-you … you’re the one what’s been—”

“Lookee there, boys!” Cooper interrupted, his long black beard waving on the breeze as he whirled on the other two. “I caught this greenhorn sumbitch fixing to line his packs with my furs!”

Beginning to shake in utter disbelief, Bass glanced quickly at Turtle. Bud dropped his eyes just as quickly. Then Titus took a deep breath and dared the words, “Silas—you’re the thievin’ son of a bitch!”

Cooper had him again in an instant, flinging the smaller man backward before Bass even realized Silas had snagged the front of his coat again. This time Titus collided with a tree, knocking the wind out of him as he slid down its trunk, the shooting pain in his back so immense that he could taste it. The next time he inhaled it hurt so much he gasped—fighting to catch his breath. Scratch swallowed down his galloping heart and tried to speak as he struggled back to his feet.

Bass’s arm was shaking as he pointed. “F-found my furs in your goddamned packs, Cooper!”

Silas brought the rifle into his right hand, his monstrous thumb drawing back the hammer.

“Silas! No!” Tuttle screeched, lunging toward Cooper, then suddenly remembering that he must not interfere.

The other three watched the rifle shudder in Cooper’s grasp, as if he were tormented to keep from pulling the trigger.

Bass stared down at the muzzle. Never before had he looked at a weapon’s yawning black hole … so damned close.

There beneath the gray-black wolf hide he had sewn into a cap so the pelt spilled over his shoulders and the wolfs face was pulled down to his brow to shade his black eyes, suddenly came an ugly, taunting, vicious look to the giant’s face as he asked, “What … what’d you say ’bout me, Titus Bass?”

“You g-got my hides in your … your, p-packs.”

Hooks took a step closer saying, “Silas ain’t stealin’ your beaver, Titus. He only—”

“Shuddup, Billy!” Cooper snapped, hulking there in that lumbering side-to-side shuffle of his.

Bass watched how Hooks immediately clamped his mouth closed, eyes every bit as wide as Turtle’s, and both pairs of eyes filled with fear, the two men’s faces blanched as they studied Cooper, then Bass, then back to Cooper.

Quietly, Tuttle started, “Maybe Titus don’t under—”

“You shut your yap too, Bud!” Silas growled as he flung an arm menacingly in Turtle’s direction. “This here’s a’tween Scratch’n me. Ain’t it … Titus?”

For an instant Bass let his eyes flick to Tuttle, then to Hooks, and finally back to Cooper with the full realization. “That’s r-right, Silas. A’tween only you an’ me.”

Cooper grinned, that crooked, one-sided smile, big and broad. He looked down at the rifle in his hand, then slowly squeezed on the trigger, lowering the hammer. “Billy.”

Hooks came up as Cooper held the rifle back at the end of his arm. Billy took it from him.

“Bud.”

“Yeah, Silas.” Tuttle stepped forward obediently too, receiving the shooting pouch Cooper pulled over his head without taking his eyes off Titus.

“Now, Scratch,” Silas began, his voice gotten strangely quiet, his eyes narrowing as his iron-strap jaw set firmly in that black beard that reached the middle of his chest. “What y’ gotta say to me, face-to-face? Man to man?”

“Found some of m-my furs in your packs,” Titus repeated, watching Cooper take a step closer.

God, how the man seemed to tower over him. Cooper possessed shoulders wide enough to carry the span of a hickory-ax handle with room to spare.

“Them’s my furs, Titus,” he said, all but in a harsh whisper, taking another yard-long step closer to Bass.

Scratch wanted to back up that same distance. Maintain that much room between him and the big, chisel-faced man. “Had my mark on alla them.”

“Un-uh. All of ’em got my letters on ’em, Titus. Or ain’t y’ ever l’arn’t to read, son?”

“I can read good as most any man,” he said, his throat gone parched as Cooper came another long step closer. Easing in like a cat ready to pounce on a mouse. Toying. Playing.

This time Cooper’s voice had less of a mocking tone, more of an edge. “So what’d y’ read, greenhorn?”

“Saw wh-where you scratched over my letters … put your own letters on my hides.”

Suddenly Silas snapped his shoulders back, enjoying how that made Bass flinch. He grinned again. “But them ain’t your hides, nigger.”

“I catched ’em, Silas.” Titus wanted one of the others to say something, sure they knew, certain they realized the theft.

“They’re mine, Scratch.”

Bass shook his head slowly, daring that brave gesture as he watched the black cloud cross the big man’s face. His stomach growled with dread as he coughed loose the words, “Them’s my plews, Cooper.”

Although his eyes remained narrowed, his smile now became a wolf-slash of a grin on Silas’s lips while he said, “You ’member when y’ grabbed hol’t of my arm last fall, Scratch?”

His head bobbed once, not sure what meaning Cooper’s question had. “Yeah. I ’member. When you was fixing to kill yourself a mule.”

The grin widened in the black beard as Silas licked his lower lip. “Do y’ recollect what I tol’t you back then ’bout ever laying a hand on me?”

“Never forgot that, Silas,” he said, the furrow between his own eyes deepening in consternation at the confusing direction things were taking. “But I ain’t never laid a hand on you—”

“Y’ go an’ put your hands on what belongs to Silas Cooper,” he interrupted with a bellow like a buffalo bull in the rut, “y’ might as well gone an’ put your hands on Silas Cooper his own self!”

Without any more warning than that, Bass found himself shrunken in the big man’s shadow, seized, and flung backward with both powerful arms—smashing against the wide trunk of another old pine.

The breath driven out of his lungs a second time, shaking his head free of the mind-numbing stars, Titus remained helpless as Cooper yanked him up, held him out at the end of his left arm, and drew back his right arm.

“Silas!”

Cooper turned at Turtle’s screech.

“Don’t hurt ’im, Silas,” Billy pleaded too. “He don’t know no better. We can teach him. Swear we’ll teach him—Bud an’ me.”

But Silas shook his head, looking back at his two partners. “You can teach him, sure y’ can. I don’t doubt that a bit. But only after I’ve teached him my own self—”

Hanging there in the giant’s grip, Bass flung out a fist, connecting with Cooper’s left temple. God, did that ever hurt his knuckles, he thought … watching Silas turn back to look at him now, his marblelike eyes blinking a few times in surprise. Then flecking over in reddening anger.

“Why—the hairless pup got him some sand after all, boys!”

And the stars burned a fiery path through Bass’s mind as Cooper’s fist connected with the side of his head. It felt like he’d been kicked by one of them big draft Morgans.

Somewhere off in the distance Scratch heard men shouting, watched shadows and colors blur and swim before his eyes as he was yanked back up from the ground. This time Cooper drove a fist savagely into the pit of his belly. He stopped breathing, it hurt so bad. Then a second time the fist collided with his belly, and a third before Silas let Bass collapse onto his knees.

Titus huddled there, heaving slightly, waiting for his coffee to come up. But there wasn’t enough of that in his stomach. Only angry yellow bile spewed fiery torment at the back of his throat as he fought for breath. Struggling to breathe against the pain in his ribs, slowly he raised his face to look up at the fuzzy apparition stepping over him.

“Don’t kill ’im, Silas!”

“Shit, Billy,” Cooper cried back with genuine joy as he snagged hold of Titus again, started dragging him to his feet once more, “I ain’t got no druthers to kill the man.”

Then he brought a wide left jab rocketing in to crash against Bass’s jaw. Like the head on a stuffed doll, Scratch’s skull flopped to the side, then back loosely. He could feel the teeth loosen and sensed that thick syrup of blood on his tongue. How salty it tasted.

“Don’t wanna kill him,” Cooper said as he switched hold of Bass now, drawing back his right arm, cocking it like the hammer on a huge weapon. “Why, this feller be our best trapper, boys! Wouldn’t do to kill him, would it?”

Titus felt his nose crumple as the fist smashed against his face, blurring his vision, sensing the hot blood oozing from it over his mustache and onto his lips as Cooper let go and he sank to his knees.

“Tell ’im, Silas!” Tuttle pleaded, daring to take two steps closer to the savage beating where Bass knelt, gobs of blood seeping from nose and mouth. “Goddammit—tell ’im!”

“Tell ’im, Bud?” Cooper asked with an innocent sound to it, then suddenly brought the-toe of his moccasin up brutally beneath Scratch’s bloody and bearded chin, snapping his head backward with such force that it all but drove his body off the ground in an arch as he sailed into Cooper’s packs.

Tuttle continued, “C’mon, Silas. He didn’t know.”

Cooper wheeled on Bud, his knuckles red, scuffed from the beating he was giving Bass. “Sumbitch’ll know now, won’t he?”

“He’ll know, Silas,” Billy promised, trying that infectious gap-toothed smile of his. “B-but you don’t let ’im be, he cain’t catch no furs.”

Cooper stood over Scratch in that next moment, his shadow crossing Bass’s face. Titus blinked up, trying to focus, sensing that the blood was pooling at the back of his throat from both nose and jaw. Knowing too that if he didn’t get off the ground, he might well choke. Then it suddenly didn’t matter because Silas drove his foot right into Bass’s belly.

Titus doubled up, drawing his legs up reflexively, lying on his side in a fetal lump and coughing up blood on the hard, sharp pine needles that dug into the bloody side of his face.

“Maybeso they’re right, Scratch,” Silas snarled after he knelt right over the bloodied man, putting his face down within inches of Bass’s.

Vainly, courageously, Titus tried to raise an arm, if only to push the cruel face away. In such utter pain, he found he didn’t have any strength and dropped the arm with an agonized gush of air from his puffy, battered lips. As bad as his bones and belly felt, it was his spirit, the very heart of him, that hurt all the worse: lying there, beaten so badly without giving a good account of himself. Not like it had been back in St. Louis. Oh, for sure he had usually been beaten in those days of wenching and brawling, and beaten real good upon many an occasion. But such thumpings had always come after he had given back just about as good as he was forced to take—able to acquit himself honorably in those wharfside tippling houses and knocking shops.

But this … Bass spit blood out with his swollen tongue, the needles plastered to the sticky side of his face, and his stomach wrenched with more burning bile … this beating he was taking at the hands of the man who had come along to teach him how to trap, how to winter up, the man who had shown up to teach him how to keep his hair in the far mountains, was something altogether different.

This hadn’t been any test of bloody knuckles between two drunken sports full of liquefied bravado simply out to prove one another’s mettle. Nor had this been the sort of senseless bloodletting, robbery, and mugging that naturally occurred in the darkened back alleys and narrow lanes of any river town back east. No, indeed—that look on the big man’s face, the sheer gleam of it in his eyes, why—the very way Silas had driven his maul-sized fists into the flesh of Titus Bass showed him just how much Cooper had enjoyed handing out that beating.

It made Scratch all the sicker as he lay there in the dirt and that bed of decaying pine needles, unable to pick himself up, dust himself off, unable even to crawl back to his own damned blankets, all the sicker to have seen the deep vein of passion ignited in Silas.

Titus had just been on the receiving end of something very cruel, very brutal—and ultimately very, very personal.

How glad he was when the blurry face and the man’s hot breath finally pulled back and Titus no longer had to stare up through his puffy eyelids at the taunting vision with its pitiless, crooked slash of a smile.

But just as Bass was celebrating that tiny flicker of momentary victory, Cooper grabbed a handful of Titus’s hair, slowly dragging his head back so that he was again forced to look up at his tormentor. The face loomed close again, so Bass strained to stare instead across the camp as well as he could, unable to focus with the blood seeping in his eyes—yet able at least to see the two standing there, watching Cooper hunker over his fallen victim like a wide-shouldered, predatory vulture.

Even Billy Hooks, the man for whom life was one episode of fun after another, even he who found humor in most every event in his day—even he stood there, white-faced and stock-still, his jaw dropped in utter shock. Behind Bud’s dirty-blond, tobacco-stained beard, his face was ashen, the baggy eyes standing out all the more in the homely, hound dog of a face. Perhaps it wasn’t often enough that Cooper’s fury exploded for them to grow accustomed to it. Rare enough, perhaps, that such eruptions shocked them … but furious and extreme enough was his rage that both had somehow learned to stay back out of the way when Silas flailed and pummeled and punished with such bloody effectiveness.

“Lookit me, dammit!” Cooper spat into Bass’s face.

Painfully, slowly, Titus brought his eyes around, then twisted his head slightly beneath the clawlike grip on his hair—just enough so he could do as Cooper ordered him: look into the son of a bitch’s face. Bass felt more blood at the back of his throat, tried to spit it out past his swollen bottom lip with his tongue, sensed it dribble down his chin into his whiskers instead.

“That’s better,” Silas said then, the edge to his voice surprisingly gone. “When I say y’ lookit me—y’ best lookit me. Lemme tell y’, this here beatin’s been a long time comin’, Scratch. Way I see things, y’ likely was needin’ that for a long, long time. Hope this whuppin’ takes, I do. Hope y’ got outta this beatin’ what I wan’cha to l’arn.”

Still gripping Bass’s hair, Cooper turned slightly to look at the others. “Y’ figure he’s l’arn’t what he needs, boys?”

Hooks answered first. “Figure so, Silas.”

“How ’bout you, Bud?”

After a moment Tuttle responded, “Y-yeah. He’s the sort what l’arns fast, Silas.”

Cooper looked back, down at Scratch, smiling. “By damn if y’ ain’t right about that, Bud. Titus Bass do l’arn fast. Be it beaver … or be it beatin’s. He l’arns fast. But what say I see for my own self if’n he’s got him his lessons done for the day.”

“Y-you ain’t gonna hit him no more, are you, Silas?” Hooks pleaded suddenly as Cooper shifted over Bass.

“No, Billy. Not if’n he’s got the answers to his lessons this day.” Cooper leaned close again.

Titus tried to turn away, but Silas brutally yanked his head back, just like a man would grab a dog by the scruff of the neck and shake him—Cooper shook Bass’s head so much there, once, twice, that Titus saw those stars again, felt the teeth rattle in his busted jaw.

“Don’t turn ’way from me, son! I’m tellin’ y’ now,” Cooper warned, then waited while Bass finally fought to focus, to bring his eyes back to bear on his tormentor.

“That’s better. Now, then—s’pose y’ tell me just who them pelts belong to what’re over yonder in my packs. Whose pelts is they?”

Scratch blinked slowly, how it hurt the bruised eyelids swelling with blood, seeping with tears and coagulate. He swallowed a little more of the hot, thick crimson coating his tongue. “Y-yours,” Titus whispered, able to speak no louder.

God, how it hurt to say those words, to speak anything less than the truth … but it hurt a damned sight less than did the beating he knew would come if he didn’t say just that right then and there.

“That’s right, Scratch,” Cooper declared, victory clearly in his voice. Then he flung his words over his shoulder, louder still. “Y’ hear that, boys? Bass knows his lessons for the day. Say it again, Scratch. All them pelts in my packs—ever’ last one of the sumbitches—who they belong to?”

“You.”

“Say it for me again, Scratch. A little louder so the other boys sure to hear. Tell me the name of the man what owns them pelts.”

“Silas … Silas Cooper.” Heartsick, he wanted to throw up, spewing it then and there.

“And y’ know why, Scratch?”

“Y-you beat me and took ’em—”

Bass didn’t get any more out as the huge fist was driven into the side of his jaw again. How he struggled to hold the warm, wet blackness at bay. He felt the crown of his head hurt where Cooper shook his scalp, his hand tangled in Titus’s long hair.

“They’re mine because y’ owe me, Scratch. So say it!”

“I … I owe you.”

“Y’ owe me them pelts.”

“Yes. Owe you.”

“Very good, son. I damn well coulda kill’t y’ that first day an’ took ever’thing y’ owned, Titus Bass. You know that?”

“Kill’t me. Yeah.”

“But instead—my good nature tol’t me to take y’ on, like I took on these here others. Was my own good heart tol’t me to show y’ the ways of the mountains. If’n I hadn’t, likely some red nigger been wearin’ your hair on his belt by now, Titus Bass. If’ I hadn’t come along, likely your bones be bleaching white under the sun long time ago—like all stupid niggers what come to the mountains and get theyselves kill’t by grizz, or winter snows. Y’ owe me, Bass.”

“I … I owe you, Silas.” Maybe he did, his hobbled head thought. Maybe it made good sense. Perhaps it would make even more perfect sense once he quit hurting. Once he stopped wanting to lay his head down and die right there in the bloody pine needles.

“Yes,” Silas hissed with that smile. “Y’ owe me for savin’ your worthless hide. For not killin’ y’ my own self … for turnin’ y’ into the master trapper you become, Scratch. So them pelts y’ been pullin’ from your traps, why—one in ever’ three is mine.”

“One …”

“That’s right. In ever’ three,” Cooper continued. “An’ y’ be damned glad it ain’t more. Like I might well take me half. Right, Tuttle?”

“Yeah, Silas. Half.”

“But the older I get, Bud—the kinder grows my nature. Scratch here only owes me one in three,” Cooper explained. “You understand all this, Titus Bass?”

With a growing fog clouding his brain, Scratch replied, “I … owe … you.”

“Y’ owe me your goddamned life, Scratch. Ever’ day now y’ live—when a red nigger or a grizz likely kill’t y’—y’ owe me your life ever’ day from now on.”

“Yeah. I owe.”

Eventually Cooper took his fingers out of Bass’s hair, watching Titus slowly keel to the side in exhaustion, his eyes blinking up in the bright sun to try gazing at Silas, as some feral animal, trapped, treed, and cornered would watch the predator closing in.

“Y’ l’arnt good, Scratch. So I s’pect y’ to be at your traps in the morning. You’re good, son. Likely y’ awready got beaver Out there on your line. An’ if y’ got beaver, means I got beaver.” And then Cooper sighed. “Best y’ bring ’em all in, for us both. I got my share, don’t y’ see? Y’ owe me my share for helping you survive out here in all these mountains, Titus Bass!”

“Owe you. Yes.”

Then Silas stood, his great bulk throwing a shadow over Scratch’s face at last. He turned to Tuttle. “From the looks of things, Bud—seems to be that Titus here brought in a passel of furs this morning, early on. Best y’ be to getting ’em stretched and grained.”

“I’ll do that, straightaway, Silas.”

“Good man, Tuttle.” Then Cooper looked down at the fallen form at his feet. “Bud’s a damned good man to help y’ out, Scratch. He ain’t never been all that good a trapper—but I keep him alive, and he keeps care of things round camp, don’t he?”

Titus didn’t answer.

“Billy, how ’bout y’ puttin’ coffee on to boil, then havin’ yourself a start in on them pelts we brung in for ourselves?”

When the other two had turned away and moved off to busy themselves with their tasks, Cooper knelt over the bloodied man again. He laid a hand on Scratch’s arm.

“I don’t wanna kill y’, Titus Bass. But if y’ ain’t l’arn’t today, then your bound to l’arn soon enough—out here in this land each man is a law to hisself. An’ what that means to me is that y’ do and take for only yourself … and the others get what tit’s left over when you’re done. If there’s ’nother man big enough, good enough to kill y’ for what y’ have—then so be it. But for now, I’m big bull in this lick. Y’ remember that, an’ I’ll teach y’ to keep your hair. Y’ don’t l’arn—an’ y’ll be dead as a three-week-ol’ plew.”

As weak as that newborn buffalo calf, Bass whispered, “T-teach me, Silas.”

“ ‘At’s a good lad now, Titus Bass,” Cooper said, patting the arm again and rising once more. “I’ll wager y’ll go far in these here high and terrible places. Y’ just remember who it is teaching y’ to stay alive … and y’ll go far in these here mountains.”