Crack in the Sky

13

Ol’ Make-’Em-Come had done its work slick as scum on blood soup.

That much was plain to see when Bass hurried over to the warrior he had blown off the back of the pony.

Not all that much left of the man’s face, what with the way the soft lead ball had flattened as it smashed right on through the bottom of the jaw. Nearly all of the lower half of the Arapaho’s face was gone in a shredded, bloody pulp. Only a small part of the jawbone and some slivers of flesh still hung from the front of the skull below the hole where most of his nose had been.

Little wonder, Scratch thought. The bastard was sitting no more than five times the length of his fullstock from him when he pulled the trigger.

The wonder of it was slowly beginning to soak in.

His eyes crawled on down the muscular frame of the younger man. Perhaps somewhere in his midtwenties, no older than thirty, for certain. Bits of dried grass and dust furred his dark and sweaty body, fuzzing what bloody smears were left of his war paint. A strong man.

Suddenly Titus thought how outsized he would have been if he had been conscious enough to make a fight of it that day after being wounded and knocked from his horse.

Instead, the warrior had figured him for dead, taken the prized topknot, and left the white man where he lay beside the river.

Funny how things worked out …

Cautiously, Titus looked around him, turning this way … then that, his eyes roaming, carefully scanning the horizon for any movement, any life … any crack in the veil between this world and that.

Maybeso there was some spirit, some power, some being watching over and protecting him back then. Watching over him even now.

He tore his eyes away from the tree line behind him, listening to the hush of the wind creeping through the quakies. And stared back at the Arapaho he had killed. The man who had left him as good as dead.

Something decorated with fringe and beads lay partially hidden by the warrior’s body. Bass planted the toe of his moccasin under a hip and gave a shove. There at the waist hung a long bag looped through the side of the man’s belt—something on the order of eight or so inches wide, it lay there twisted in the fall of the body. Bass knelt, turning it over, feeling the large brass beads and the strands of thick hair as he pulled it free.

Brown hair. Loose, wavy curls. A white man’s. There was no mistaking that.

With the bag draped over one hand, he brought his fingers up and touched the curls hanging at the side of his head. Then rubbed the scalp and his own hair at the same time.

This was his hair.

Those brown, wavy locks more than a foot long clinging to that shriveled circle of a topknot were crudely stitched to the front of that belt bag. Like some of the fringe, many strands of the hair had been gathered and decorated with tarnished brass beads.

He shoved aside two strands of animal sinew loosely stitching the scalp to the bag and slipped a single finger beneath the dried flesh. It was hardened to a rawhide stiffness with age. Nothing much left of his topknot now but this coup of a dead warrior.

He gently caressed those long waves of brown hair lying across his palm. This scalp had nearly cost him his life. And it might well have saved his life too.

So Bass stared at the dead man for a long time before he flipped the body over with his foot. With the warrior resting on his stomach, Scratch carefully laid the long fringed bag across the dusty small of the bare back. He squatted beside the Indian’s shoulder, picking up that big knife he had wrestled off the second warrior. Looping his fingers through the long black hair, Scratch tugged back on the head, laying the big blade against the bare flesh of the forehead an inch below the hairline.

There his hand froze a matter of heartbeats, his breath coming quicker.

Suddenly he decided to lay the Indian’s knife aside, placing it atop the buckskin bag. Instead, Titus pulled the head back again and slipped his old skinning knife from its scabbard at the back of his belt.

Only fitting, he figured.

What he clutched in his hand was the only knife left him, back when this warrior took nearly everything from him. Its curved skinning blade had been sharpened so much by ol’ Gut Washburn that the metal had gradually been worn down over years of use until it was no more than an inch in width.

Laying his right index finger along the top flat of the blade, Bass again pressed the sharpened edge on the warrior’s brow. Slicing through that thin layer of flesh, he quickly dragged the old skinning knife back toward the temple, right on through the middle of the right ear, and after tugging aside the warrior’s long hair, Bass finished that first cut just below the hairline at the nape of the neck. Yanking the long hair aside, he pulled the head over so it rested on the right cheek. Again he dragged the knife from the brow, down across the middle of the left ear, and on back to the incision he had left at the base of the skull.

This would be a full scalp, complete with the tops of his dead enemy’s ears. No mere topknot as this warrior had taken from him. This day was clearly the doing of strong medicine.

Bracing his knee at the back of the Arapaho’s neck, Bass gathered the hair in both hands and started pulling from the brow back. Slowly, the scalp began to give way, peeling from the skull with a crickling sound as it tore loose, tops of the ears and all, until there wasn’t much flesh left on the bloody cranium—nothing much left on the dead man’s head at all.

Standing again, Scratch stared down at the scalp hanging limp from his hand, then gazed at his own scalp sewn to that belt bag while the warrior’s dripped the last of its blood and sticky gore across the toes of his moccasins. With the flush of a sudden impulse he began to whirl the fresh scalp vigorously round and round at the end of his arm, slinging off the last of the thick fluid and blood from the drying flesh.

Remembering how he had awakened in that thick, hot fog. How he had watched the Indian scraping his scalp with the edge of his knife through the blood oozing into his eyes.

There and then Bass knelt beside the Arapaho’s body, just as the warrior had knelt beside him on that river bank so long ago. Laying the whole scalp, flesh side up, atop one of his thighs, Titus began to carefully drag the side of the skinning knife’s sharp blade back and forth across the flesh, scraping it clean the way he fleshed an animal’s hide.

Twilight continued to deepen as he worked at his task, the air cooling until he finally stood again, turned, and looked in the direction where he had left the second Arapaho.

Unable to see the warrior, Bass narrowed his eyes, fingers tightening on the scalp. And he listened.

The son of a bitch was trying to crawl away through the grass, slipping into the buckbrush bordering the creek. Quiet as the Injun was, Bass still heard him. Swapping the scalp to his left hand, taking the knife into his right, Titus moved along the creekbank, finding the warrior’s horse grazing on the far side of some bramble. Then he saw him.

“You fixing to make it to your pony?”

In the middle of pushing himself across the grass, the warrior jerked his head around, discovering the trapper coming up behind him. His eyes instantly filled with a dangerous mix of fear and hatred, the Arapaho tried to lunge forward in escape, grunting in pain as he dragged his broken ribs across the ground.

“Come back here, nigger,” Bass growled, slamming his moccasin down on the warrior’s ankle.

Clearly in agony, the Arapaho attempted to twist back far enough to grab hold of the trapper’s foot, to swat it off his leg. Amused at that effort, Titus cocked his foot back and slammed it under the Indian’s jaw. The warrior crumpled back on the grass, groaning low as blood oozed from his lips.

“Easy, now—I ain’t gonna kill you,” Titus said quietly as he knelt, realizing how much it hurt where the ax had smacked his shoulder minutes ago. “That’d be too damned easy, don’t you see?”

He leaned down and rolled the warrior onto his back. The eyes fluttered a little, as if the man as struggling to stay conscious.

“I wan’cha alive, you red bastard. Just enough alive so you can earn your miserable life back.”

With that he raised his right foot into the air, momentarily suspending it directly over the warrior’s lower leg, then slammed the foot down with savage force halfway between knee and ankle, shattering both bones.

The sudden, excruciating pain wrenched the warrior off the ground in an arch of agony—screeching. Half-coagulated blood spewed from his mouth as he sputtered some garbled oaths, whimpering in pain and spitting out pieces of his teeth and blood to clear his mouth.

“Good,” Scratch muttered as he knelt beside the warrior’s head. “I want you wide-awake for what comes next.”

As the Arapaho writhed, Bass held the scalp inches above his face and shoved the bloody skinning knife right under the man’s nose—pressing up, up, up as crimson drops beaded along the blade. The warrior quickly stopped writhing.

“That’s better,” he said as he got to his feet. “Now you’re coming with me.”

Laying the skinning knife in his left hand with the scalp, Bass filled his right with the warrior’s hair, dragging up the man’s head and slowly bringing the body around in a wide circle to begin slowly, foot by foot, tugging the Arapaho’s deadweight through the grass. Towing him back toward the dead scalper.

Each time he tugged the warrior forward with a lunge, the Indian grunted low in his throat, a guttural sound of deep pain that always ended with a quiet, shrill whimper. Then Bass would drag him another three or four feet through the tangle of grass, the man’s head suspended by his long hair, and he would groan in pain again. On and on, until they crossed better than sixty feet of creekbank to stop at the outflung arm of the dead warrior.

“This here’s the son of a bitch what scalped me,” Scratch told him, releasing the man’s hair.

Then he knelt where the wounded warrior could watch his pantomime of removing the Indian’s scalp. That done, Bass reached up and took the blue bandanna from his head, turning slightly to point to his own bare skull—tapping the bare bone to be certain the wounded man understood. Next he pointed his gnarled finger to that brown hair stitched to the dead warrior’s belt bag. Back to his skull his finger went a second time, then once more to the bag. Over and over that blood-crusted finger moved slowly as he continued to gaze straight into the Arapaho’s hate-filled eyes.

At last he saw something register there, some understanding, perhaps a recognition that only increased the pain and fury in the eyes.

After tugging on his bandanna, Bass held up two fingers. Then he positioned both hands in front of him at waist level, palms and fingers pointed up, fingers waving gently as he raised them slowly.

Again he signaled two.

And once more he made the grass sign for “summer.”

The Indian’s eyes came away from Scratch’s hands to meet the trapper’s eyes. Sure enough sign the warrior understood.

“That’s right. Two summers ago.”

Then he tapped the end of his finger on the dead Indian’s chest. And when the wounded man’s eyes came back to his, Bass said, “This nigger. That’s right. Two summers ago, this here red nigger.”

As before, he used both hands to sign. Extending only the forefinger on the right hand, Titus held out his left arm, the first two fingers on that hand pointing down, symbolizing the legs of a man. Now he struck that man repeatedly with the right forefinger.

Coup.

“Good. This friend of your’n counted coup on me two summers ago. You savvy that, you bastard?”

He signed all of it over again.

Two.

Summers.

Counted coup.

Then he ripped off the bandanna a second time, pointing to the bare skull bone. And finally to that patch of long, wavy brown hair loosely sewn to the buckskin bag.

When those black, luminous eyes locked back on his, Bass resumed signing. He tapped his own breast with his right hand, then placed the back of that hand against his forehead, the first two fingers extended and held apart, slightly curved. He raised the hand slowly, moving it round and round in a simulated rise of smoke from a fire.

“My medicine” he spoke softly as the breeze nuzzled the leaves overhead.

Making a fist of that right hand, Titus slapped it against his chest, right over his heart, then brought the fist down to almost waist level with a bold, confident gesture.

“It is strong. My medicine’s strong.”

Now Scratch opened his hand and placed it near the right side of his forehead, fingers open, separated, and slightly curved into a cup as he twirled the hand back and forth, back and forth in a tight spin to resemble mental instability.

“That’s right: I’m crazy,” he explained, the volume of his voice rising. “A damn fool, crazy. You go tell your people they best not mess with me. I’m a crazy nigger!”

The eyes glared back at him, unflinching.

“Now I’m gonna prove to you just how crazy I am, you son of a bitch,” Titus growled. “When you get back to your people—you be sure to tell ’em all what you see’d here today.”

Leaning to the side, Bass quickly laid the belt bag and the dead man’s knife where they would be safe, more than an arm’s length away, then took out his own skinning knife. It made a faint crackling noise as he drove the narrow blade deep into the base of the dead man’s throat, blood seeping out as he dragged the blade along the flesh and muscle stretched over the breastbone. At the bottom of the sternum he plunged the knife into the abdomen, all the way to the handle. Sawing through the thick rawhide belt that held up the leggings, Titus flung aside the front of the leather breechclout and continued down, down in a ragged line, drawing the full length of the blade through the gush of blood and spill of purple intestines until the knife struck hard bone just above the warrior’s penis.

After wiping the blood from the blade on the dead Indian’s legging, Scratch drove the weapon into the ground beside the body. He rocked forward, rising onto his knees over the warrior. Giving the wounded Arapaho one last, long look of devilish insanity—the trapper stuffed both hands into that wide, grisly incision.

Again and again he ripped apart the gaping slash, pulling out long lengths of that purplish-white intestinal coil, heaving it to the far side of the body until no more remained. Then he retrieved the knife from the ground and went to work on the rest. Bladder and both kidneys he hacked loose, flinging them onto the growing gut-pile. The stomach, and liver, then the gallbladder—chopping it all free with savage slashes of the knife, splattering himself with the Indian’s blood, painting himself in crimson, reveling in the warmth of his victim’s body like some wild, feral beast gorging itself up to the snout in its prey.

He growled, grunted, whooped, and shrieked in shrill exultation every time he pulled some new organ free and hurled it onto the expanding gut-pile there in the grass near the body. Chopping and jabbing, hacking and sawing with the knife, Scratch repeatedly stuffed his arms past the elbows into the chest cavity, tearing free the lobes of lung from the connective tissue on the interior of the chest wall, ripping them from their last grip on the windpipe’s branching forks.

With all those warm, quivering organs lying beside the sundered carcass, empty from downstream anus to upstream voice box, there remained but one last organ for him to cut free from that bloody hollow.

Seizing the soft, sticky, warm globe in his left hand, Scratch slipped his knife under the rib cage and hacked it free. Bringing it out from beneath those last, lower ribs, he gazed at the heart, turned it over and over, thick blood continuing to ooze from those butchered vessels. So small and weak and defenseless, he thought as he studied it.

Then for the first time during his mad, crazed orgy over the body, Bass turned to look at the wounded man. And when he saw how transfixed the warrior’s eyes had been on him throughout it all, Bass knew what he must now do.

Cradling the quivering heart in his left hand, he scrambled over to where he could squat right beside the wounded Arapaho. Rolling the organ over in his hands, Bass suddenly shoved it forward, until he held it suspended no more than two inches from the warrior’s face, blood still dripping onto the brown skin stretched taut across the Indian’s frozen, grim countenance.

“You tell your people what you see’d here today,” Bass grunted, realizing his anger fired his every vein with hot surges of adrenaline, his voice little more than the sound an animal would make after making its kill.

His eyes never leaving the wounded man’s, Scratch slowly turned the heart over and over in his hands, slowly bringing the slimy organ closer and closer to his opening mouth. Then he shoved the heart between his teeth, clamped down, and savagely tore off a symbolic hunk of his enemy’s power.

How warm the soft, elastic tissue felt between his teeth, against his tongue—yet no different from the elk liver or buffalo heart he had been eating for years. So strong was the muscle, he knew as soon as he began to grind it between his back teeth that he wasn’t about to chew it up fine enough. Instead, he swallowed hard, gagging at first, then tried again—this time sensing the hunk of raw flesh glide past the back of his tongue. He swallowed once more to make sure it would stay down.

And stood, grinning madly, staring wild-eyed at the wounded man—then suddenly cocked back his arm and flung the heart across the creek. It landed with a bounce on the open and grassy bank the horsemen had come down to make their crossing.

Quickly pointing at the dead Indian, Bass made the sign for “medicine” in front of his forehead: bloody, slimy fingers rising slowly in that symbolic spiral of smoke. He concluded by slapping his own chest with that crimson hand—painting himself with that red handprint.

“His medicine,” he uttered the words now as he repeated the signs. “It’s now my medicine!”

Swiping the back of his red hand over his mouth, Bass made the signs one last time, not taking his eyes off the enemy who lay there in pain, breathing in short gusts, watching the crazed trapper.

“You’re gonna live to tell ’em,” Titus growled as he turned back toward the mutilated carcass.

Dropping to one knee near the dead man’s hip, Bass swiftly made two slashing arcs with the skinning blade, freeing both penis and scrotum together in one ragged trophy.

“Here’s all this bastard’s got left for power now,” he said, shaking the warrior’s manhood.

Then he violently stuffed it into what was left of the dead man’s face. He adjusted it there, ceremonially, not having the lower jaw to clamp it in place. Bass stood to admire his handiwork: how he had carefully laid his enemy’s manhood across what was left of the bloody face, how he had gutted the warrior. All of it would speak a powerful message to any man who happened across this scene … that is, before the predators came and finished what he had begun.

After wiping off the knife and stuffing it back into its sheath, Scratch retrieved the buckskin bag from the ground and stuffed it under his own belt. Then he stopped and studied the dead warrior one more time. Those leggings weren’t all that bloodied. And the moccasins might be serviceable.

He knelt and dragged the cut ends of the rawhide belt thong from the knotted loops at the top of the leggings, then scooted himself down to the dead man’s feet, where he grabbed the heel of the moccasins and yanked them off the dirty brown feet. One at a time he urged the soft buckskin sheaths down the legs until they were both free and slung over his shoulder. He got back to his feet, stuffing the decorated moccasins inside his shirt.

“Go. Go on back to your people now.”

Holding his arm out toward the distance, pointing across the creek in the direction the riders had come, Bass sensed the hot fire in his veins beginning to subside. Moving over to stand above the wounded man, he watched those black eyes a moment longer, then looked down at the blood smearing the warrior’s legging where he had crushed the lower leg.

“Gonna have to drag yourself from here on out,” he said quietly, a strange calm come over him now. “G’back and tell your people what happened here. Show ’em that busted leg of your’n. Tell ’em I got the bastard what took my hair. You tell ’em his medicine’s mine now.”

“Damn—but would you look at Scratch!” Elbridge Gray said as he slowly rose from their circle of downed timber where they had spread their sleeping robes.

Titus slowly came into the fire’s light and reined his saddle horse to a halt.

Hatcher scrambled to his feet too, his eyes narrowing in concern. “Ye awright, nigger?”

“He looks hurt, Jack,” Caleb declared, stepping closer. “Lookit the blood all over ’im.”

“Ain’t mine,” Scratch explained. “Ain’t none of it mine.”

Isaac craned his neck to look back at the pack mule. “Hannah ain’t carrying no game. How you come to have so much blood on you?”

“I had me a scrap,” Bass answered as he leaned back and peeled the moist scalp off the saddle horn where he had placed it for his ride back to their camp. Placing his fist inside it, he raised the long, glossy hair into the firelight.

“What the hell is that?” Solomon asked, the farthest away at the other side of the fire.

“Whose the hell is it?” Hatcher corrected.

Kicking his left leg to the right to clear the saddle horn, Bass dropped to the ground. “The bastard what scalped me.”

He watched the sets of eyes flick to the blue bandanna, then come back to rest on his face.

“Ye made some mess of yerself,” Jack advised as he stepped closer, reaching out to brush the hair with his fingers.

Wood was next, moving up just before the rest crowded in. “How you so dad-blamed sure this was the one what got your scalp?”

“Yeah?” Rufus agreed. “That’s coming on two year ago.”

“I know,” Titus reassured them as he pushed through the group and settled onto a downed log at the fire’s edge. “A man just knows.”

“I be damned: Scratch got him back the warrior what got him,” Caleb declared as he came up to sit beside Bass.

“I knowed one day I’d kill the bastard what took my hair.”

“Awright, Scratch,” Hatcher said sympathetically. “We’re yer friends: we’ll believe you when ye say you know it was the one—”

“It was the one,” he snapped. Yanking the leggings from his shoulder, Bass flung them to the ground at his feet. “There, see for your own damn selves.”

Graham asked, “You … you took the red nigger’s leggings?”

“There,” and Titus pointed at the quillwork illuminated by the flickering firelight as the last of twilight seeped to black of night. “That’s just the way I been remembering them colors every night since the son of a bitch cut my hair off my head. Every last blessed night I see that strip of quills in my sleep. See them colors sewed up just like that.”

“Warrior wears his colors,” Hatcher agreed thoughtfully, nodding. “Every red nigger has his own design too.”

Solomon looked askance at the legging. “That really come off the one what took your topknot?”

“Many a time I told you boys since you found me in that buffler valley—I was knocked out to the world, but I come to while the son of a bitch was scraping off my scalp. I saw with my own damned eyes the colors on them leggings. He was hunkered right by my head.” Titus reached inside his shirt, tore out the moccasins, and hurled them onto the leggings by his feet. “I saw the nigger’s mockersons too!”

“I ’member ye telling us,” Hatcher assented.

“Every damn night since … I seen that nigger’s leggings, seen his mockersons in my head, and nary of it would go away and leave me be.”

“Now we know why,” Fish replied. “You was bound to get your chance at the nigger.”

“Solomon is right,” Jack agreed. “Ever’ man should have him his chance at those that done him wrong. Just one chance to even the score.”

Caleb snorted, “Looks to me like Titus done better’n just even up the score! I’d say Titus gone and got the better of it all!”

“Where’d you leave ’im?” Rufus asked.

“Right where he and ’Nother jumped me.”

“’Nother’n?” Hatcher asked. “How many red niggers did ye lay into?”

And as Elbridge brought him a scalding cup of coffee, Bass told them of the horsemen’s approach, how they attempted to outflank him and run him down about the time he noticed the warrior’s leggings and moccasins. He told it all—everything from breaking the second man’s leg, to gutting and butchering the scalp taker.

“Then ye just up and left that other’n to crawl off?”

Bass nodded. “He ain’t going anywhere very fast. I don’t figger that brownskin’s gonna drag hisself outta the Bayou afore we set off ourselves for the Popo Agie.”

“Rendezvous ain’t long now!” Rufus cried.

“Wha’cha gonna do with that scalp?” Caleb asked. “Make you some hangy-downs, some scalp locks to sew to your shirt, maybe ’long your shoulder and down the arms?”

“Dunno,” he said. “Ain’t thought that far.”

Hatcher handed the scalp back to Bass as Scratch tugged nervously at the blue bandanna. Wagging his head, Titus said, “Lost my patch o’ beaver fur, boys. Can’t for the life of me … I took off the bandanny to show the one nigger where his companyero skelped me. Must’ve lost it then.”

“You want me to see to cutting you ’Nother from a poor plew, Scratch?” asked Solomon.

“No,” Hatcher responded instead as the others turned to regard him with curiosity. “Bass won’t be needing no more beaver fur to wear over that little skull spot on his noodle no more.”

He studied Jack cautiously. “I won’t?”

“That’s right,” Jack replied, kneeling at Bass’s knee, using one finger to describe a circle around the Arapaho’s scalp. “Ye won’t need that plew no more because ye got ’sactly what ye need to make a new skelp lock for yerself.”

Scratch gazed down at the glossy hair and the drying flesh he held in his lap. “For myself?”

Hatcher reached out and seized the trophy. “Take off that goddamned bandanny for me.”

“Why you want me to—”

“Take it off so I can have me a good look at that head bone of yer’n. G’won, do it.”

Quickly glancing at a few of the others, Bass’s eyes eventually landed on John Rowland, who sat alone at the side of the fire, staring morosely into the flames—totally without interest in what the others were doing. John looked up at Scratch for a long moment, then went back to gazing at the fire.

“Awright,” Titus agreed quietly, standing as he started to drag off the dirty bandanna.

“Sit back down right where ye are,” Hatcher commanded, stepping right to Bass’s side, where he could peer down at the bare bone. With one hand he gently turned the back of Scratch’s head toward the fire’s light.

Bass started to look up a moment. But Jack locked Scratch’s head in his hands and turned it back to the side so he could examine the patch of bone while holding the Arapaho’s scalp beside it.

“Eegod! There it is, boys,” Hatcher declared eventually. “Bass can wear this nigger’s hair for his own!”

“How he gonna do that when we know the bastard’s skelp gonna dry up?” Rufus asked.

“This here scalp ain’t gonna dry up,” Hatcher said. “Not if Bass takes care of it.”

“Just how’m I gonna take care of it?” Bass inquired.

“First whack, ye’re gonna salt it,” Jack explained.

Titus wagged his head. “Awright, then what?”

“Ye’re gonna tan it just like the squaws do all their hides.”

Scratch had to grin, what with the way the others were beginning to smile as if Jack had lost a few of his pebbles. “I … I’m gonna tan this nigger’s scalp.”

“Injuns do it alla time,” Hatcher declared. “Take ye some brains and water … get that worked down into the skelp. In no time at all it’s gonna be ever’ bit as soft as them skins a squaw used for yer leggings last winter.”

He stared at his leggings for a long moment, rubbing the brain-tanned, fire-smoked hide between a thumb and forefinger. “You really s’pose it’d work?”

“Mad Jack Hatcher says it’ll work?” Caleb Wood cheered, “It’s gonna work!”

Jack himself boasted, “Less’n a week from now, ye’ll be wearing this nigger’s hair for yer’n.”

“The hull thing?” Solomon asked.

“Hell, no,” Hatcher growled. “We gonna cut that skelp down so after it’s cured, it’ll be just a li’l bigger’n that bone on the back of Bass’s head.”

“Fit right over it?” Scratch inquired.

“Like it was made to be there,” Jack said enthusiastically.

“Jumpin’ Jehoshaphat!” Bass roared, slapping his knee as he stood. “I’ll wear the nigger’s hair what got mine, boys!”

“Gonna look a li’l strange to me,” Isaac said.

Bass whirled on him. “What the hell’s gonna look so strange ’bout it?”

“Ain’t same color as your’n.”

He peered down at the scalp, a disappointment sucking the wind right out of him. “Damn, if you ain’t right. It don’t look like—”

“It don’t have to,” Jack interrupted, shouldering Simms aside. “The nigger’s hair is yer’n, no matter that it don’t look like yers. It’s the medicine what counts!”

With Hatcher’s contagious enthusiasm, he felt cheered anew. “Damn right, Jack! It’s the medicine what counts.”

“But Scratch’s hair is brown,” Solomon grumped, “and that there’s black as night.”

“Scratch’s ain’t gonna be brown much longer anyways,” Caleb declared.

Bass cocked his head, asking, “What you mean by that?”

“You ever look at your hair since we moseyed down to Taos last winter?” Wood tried to explain. “Ever give that beard of your’n a good look too?”

“This child sure is getting gray awready, ain’t he?” Rufus said.

Grabbing a hank of hair at the side of his head, Titus held it out before his eyes in the firelight. “This here ain’t gray!”

“That ain’t where ye’re going gray right now, Scratch!” Hatcher bellowed. “Up there on top of yer head. Down there on yer beard. Here,” and he grabbed some of the silver-flecked hair hanging right there at the temple. “Lookee there.”

Sure enough, if those strands didn’t radiate some gray in the firelight.

“Get me a mirror, you sonsabitches,” he grumbled at them. “I wanna see this for my own self.”

Hatcher turned to the rest. “Get the man a mirror, boys. He deserves to see just how he’s getting on in years.”

“But I ain’t a ol’ man,” Bass whimpered as he sank down upon the log with the scalp in hand.

Hatcher took the scalp from him and handed it back to Caleb. “Here, get that salted down real good for me. Roll it up like ye’d do a skin, and tie a whang around it till we can start on it in a couple of days.”

Caleb turned away as Isaac returned with a small mirror the size of a large man’s palms put side by side. Bass shifted on the log so he could look into the mirror with enough light to inspect his graying hair. Still, his eyes always came back to his mustache and beard. In a stripe of gray that ran down the middle of the brown mustache, on below his lower lip and down the extent of his brown beard, the hair stood out like that white band running down a skunk’s back.

“Damn, if I didn’t notice,” he confessed as he studied the gray hairs spreading back from his temples, the graying of that hair hanging from his brow.

“Ain’t getting old,” Hatcher declared. “Just getting gray earlier’n most, Titus.”

“Sometimes … it feels like old,” Bass explained as he peered at himself in the mirror, examining his first wrinkles, the spread of those deeply furrowed crow’s-feet.

“Chirk up, friend!” Jack cheered. “Why, ye got plenty to bark about this night!”

Isaac leaped in front of Bass, there between Scratch and Hatcher, grinning wildly. “Don’t you figger it’s ’bout time to punch some holes in Titus’s ears?”

“A damned fine idee!” Hatcher roared.

“P-punch some holes in my ears?”

“Hang some purties from ’em,” Rufus said, leaning in to tap his earrings with a fingertip.

“Y-you said … a hole?”

“Get me my awl!” Hatcher bellowed, ignoring Titus completely.

Scratch nearly came off the log as Rufus whirled away. “Your awl?”

“I could do it with a needle, Scratch,” Hatcher said, stepping right up beside Bass to grab hold of Bass’s earlobes, tugging on them to turn Titus toward the light. “But a needle makes it a round hole, ye see?”

“Which means it takes longer to heal,” Caleb explained.

Hatcher nodded. “We’ll get some glover’s needles from the trader this summer: they got three sides filed on ’em like a awl.”

“Awright,” Titus replied with no small measure of relief. “L-let’s just wait till we got the proper needle—”

“But don’cha wanna have it done on the night ye killed that red nigger what took yer hair two years back?” Jack asked.

Everyone came to an immediate stop around him, turning to look his way, expectantly awaiting his answer.

Clearing his throat nervously, Scratch explained, “It’s a mighty fine thing you wanting to celebrate with me—”

Solomon hollered, “Birthdays too!”

“But I ain’t so sure ’bout putting holes in my ears—”

“Nothing to it,” Jack assured. “Why, ye had bigger holes shot in you with G’lena lead, bigger holes poked in yer hide by Injuns. Hell—don’cha ’member?”

“By jam,” Isaac said. “We can hang some wires in ’em!”

“Maybeso Scratch don’t wanna,” Caleb came up to say, patting a hand on Bass’s shoulder protectively. “S’awright—we can just wait till ronnyvoo an’ do it.”

“No,” Titus answered of a sudden. “By Jehoshaphat’s drawers: let’s punch them two holes!”

As if a horn of powder had gone off, there was a flurry of frantic motion as Rufus returned with the awl held aloft triumphantly. Hatcher began giving instructions while he stuffed the awl’s point down in the hot coals for a few minutes. Elbridge brought over a scrap of oiling rag to lay over the shoulder while they punched through Bass’s flesh. And Solomon went off to fetch a small coil of brass wire out of his plunder.

“Cut me two pieces,” Jack explained to Solomon as he returned. “Not too long neither.”

In minutes the others were ready, all of them crowding in on either side of Hatcher to get themselves a firsthand look at the operation on one of the ears.

“Turn this way,” Hatcher instructed, tugging on the right ear to turn Bass’s head.

Elbridge draped that old piece of oiling cloth over the right shoulder beneath the ear where Hatcher was pinching the lobe tightly between thumb and forefinger.

“Damn—how much you gonna hurt me like that?” Scratch growled, rolling his eyes back to try peering at Jack’s hand.

“I don’t pinch it like this,” Hatcher explained, “it’s gonna hurt worse when I punch the hole.” He looked up at Isaac. “Got that chunk of pine from the woodpile for me?”

Simms handed him a small sliver of kindling wood about six inches long and some two inches wide.

Jack held it near the tip of Bass’s nose momentarily. “This here pine’s good and soft, Scratch.”

His brow knitted suspiciously. “What you use it for?”

“Gonna put it ahind yer ear like this,” he answered, slipping the flat piece of kindling behind the lobe. “I do this so yer hide don’t tear on the backside. Keeps that skin flat when I’m punching through.”

“Y-you ain’t gonna tear my skin, are you?”

“Eegod! I done this more times’n I can ’member.” Hatcher turned to Simms. “Time to make some blood, boys. Gimme the awl, Isaac.”

Simms bent and retrieved the awl from the glowing coals. He swiped it free of ash across his longhandle sleeve, then blew on it for good measure.

“Them ashes don’t hurt nothing,” Caleb declared. “They’re cleaner’n most anything.”

Hatcher took the awl from Isaac. “Gonna punch the hole now, Scratch.”

“Awright. Go right on ahead.”

Looking at Fish to see that he held the two short sections of wire, Jack delicately placed the awl’s sharp point at the center of Bass’s earlobe. Only then did he move the fingers he had been using to pinch the lobe and numb all feeling from the tissue.

Although he did feel the awl’s point penetrate the lobe, Scratch heard the sound of the piercing more than he felt it.

“You hit it center, Jack,” Caleb said with approval.

“Damn if I don’t always hit center,” Hatcher replied. “Here. Gimme a wire.”

Jack passed the awl off to Isaac and took from Solomon a short length of thick brass wire the trappers employed for making a variety of repairs around camp: all the way from wrapping about cracked wrists and forestocks on their rifles to making strong, long-lasting repairs to saddles and other tack where sinew would likely break down and unravel.

“Isaac, set that awl back to the coals for me,” Hatcher instructed as he seized the short piece of wire near its end.

After wiping off a little blood that oozed from the new hole, Hatcher carefully poked the wire through to the back side. Quickly he bent the wire into a crude hoop without tugging on the lobe too much, then looped and twisted the ends back on themselves so that the hoop wouldn’t be falling out by any accidental rubbing.

“How’s that feel?” Jack asked as he began to pinch the left ear, nudging Bass’s head in the opposite direction toward the firelight.

“Don’t feel much of a thing,” Bass confessed, surprised.

“Awl,” Hatcher said as Elbridge dragged the cloth off the right shoulder and draped it over the left.

“He’s sure gonna be one pretty nigger!” Gray declared.

Hatcher placed the awl tip against the earlobe right where he wanted to make the hole. “Shit! Ain’t no pair of goddamned brass ear wires gonna make this mud-ugly son of a bitch into a pretty nigger!”

He rolled his eyes up at Jack. “Who you calling mud-ugly?”

Hatcher punched the awl through the lobe into the soft pinewood stop, yanked the awl out, and when he had handed it off, took the second piece of wire and slipped it through to loop it off. Then he stepped back, cocking his head from this side to that, back and forth, first inspecting one ear, then the other.

“A right fine job, even if I do say so my own self. Get Scratch that mirror again.”

He gently touched the brass wires that dangled from both ears while Rufus brought up the mirror. Turning it toward the light while he twisted about the log, Bass gazed at one ear in astonishment, then turned aside to inspect the other ear, his grin beginning to grow within that gray-striped beard.

“Well, Mad Jack Hatcher,” he declared, showing nearly all his teeth in glee, “you said you couldn’t—but you sure did make this mud-ugly nigger one purty feller.”

Through the heads and shoulders of the other trappers Bass again spotted Rowland squatting at the far side of the fire, scuffing up small clouds of dirt with a peeled stick he used to dig at the ground near his feet.

“Say, Johnny,” Scratch said, “don’t you think I look real purty now?”

“I s’pose,” Rowland mumbled so quietly, his words almost went unheard against the sough of the wind in the trees and the crackle of their fire.

The others moved aside as Titus clambered to his feet and stepped through them. He stopped at Rowland’s elbow. “Something eating a hole in your belly, ain’t it, John?”

Without looking up, the man answered, “Nothing wrong.”

“He’s been like this last few days,” Caleb explained, coming up at Scratch’s shoulder.

“Man can act any way he wants to,” Rowland snapped.

“We been friends long enough for me to know that something’s kicking around inside you and it won’t give ye no rest,” Hatcher said when he came to a stop on the other side of Titus.

Suddenly Rowland looked at the three of them. Then he blurted out his confession: “I wanna go back to Taos.”

“Go back?” Rufus repeated as he knelt nearby.

“I done decided it,” John declared. “Don’t wanna be up here right now.”

Jack inquired, “What’s pulling ye to give up on these here mountains?”

“You got me wrong,” Rowland protested. “I ain’t saying I’ve give up on the mountains from here on out, Jack.”

Jack settled on a log next to Rowland. “You and me, we fought more’n our share of red-bellies, Johnny. I figger ye can tell me what’s on yer mind.”

“I-I really dunno what this is all about,” Rowland admitted. “I ain’t never … never had me a feeling like this, Jack.”

“You had a hole cut outta your heart,” Bass explained quietly, sympathy flooding up inside him. “When you lost your Maria—it cut out a big hole from your heart.”

When Titus said it, Rowland looked up. Wagging his head, he said, “Ain’t none of this the same no more, Scratch. Not like it was before: when I didn’t have me no woman. Not like it was when I had Maria waiting for me back in Taos.”

“You turn back for the south, what you aim to do?” Solomon asked.

With a shrug Rowland admitted, “Don’t rightly know for now. Something’ll come by that I can do.”

“Sure of that,” Hatcher agreed. “A likely man such as you can do most anything he puts his mind to.”

“Maybe I can watch some sheep, do some hunting for other folks too,” John replied. “Pay for my keep till I get all this sorted through.”

“Maybe you figger you ain’t done with the mountains?” Bass inquired.

“No,” and John shook his head. “I don’t figger I’ll stay outta the mountains for the rest of my days. Just that … for now—I ain’t a damn bit of good to none of you.”

Hatcher clamped a hand on Rowland’s knee. “Johnny, ye damn well know we’ll ride with ye come what may. Not a man here gonna say ye gotta go out and trap when ye’re nursing that hole in yer heart. Don’t make me no never-mind if ye stay back to camp and watch over our plunder and the stock while the rest of us go set traps. You just do what ye can till things get better, and we’ll stay together till they—”

“I don’t know when things’ll get better, Jack,” he interrupted. “Don’t know … if they’ll ever get better.”

Hatcher glanced up at the others when Rowland went back to staring at the fire. “Awright, Johnny. All I’m gonna ask of ye is ye leave us yer license.”

“Sure,” Rowland said. “I’m the only one of us with a license to trap in these parts since Matthew ain’t along this time out. Might be you could use it when you bring some fur back to Taos.”

“Won’t be till winter after next, I ’spect,” Jack declared.

“One of you gonna have to be me,” Rowland explained, rubbing his palms down the tops of his thighs in that manner of a man who has come to a difficult decision. “Now that I be a Mexican citizen, they call me Juan Roles. Who’s gonna be me?”

“I will,” Rufus volunteered as he squatted near Rowland.

“You’ll do,” John replied, trying out a weak smile, then gazed at the flames.

After a long, uneasy silence Hatcher asked, “Tomorrow, Johnny?”

“Don’t see me no reason to hang on when I’ve made up my mind to go.”

Caleb said, “Want some whiskey, for saying our fare-thee-wells tonight?”

“You fellers go right on,” Rowland answered. “I don’t much feel like drinking. I found out whiskey just don’t kill this hurt no more.”

“Come a time,” Bass said, “you’ll be back in these hills with us. Back to skinning beaver and fighting Injuns. Come a time when you’re ready to get on with the living.”

“Right now it don’t feel like I’ll ever wanna do much of anything ever again,” Rowland declared. “Thing of it is: a man what don’t care much if he goes on living … that man sure as hell gonna end up dead lot sooner’n he should.”