Crack in the Sky

24

Bass dived into the brush the instant he spotted the blackened tops of those buffalo-hide lodges, dropping his travois.

Here—just past midday—a thick pall of firesmoke clung to the bone-bare branches of the leafless cottonwood, clotted in a dirty halo about the graceful whorl of poles that rose above every lodge. The air barely moved, not so much as a sigh of wind in the valley of the Yellowstone now.

Cursing himself for not spotting the low-hanging smoke earlier, Scratch knelt there in the brush, his heart hammering against his ribs. What with the way the low, heavy clouds had moved in right after sunrise, and the way the air barely stirred all morning, a man didn’t have a chance of spying that camp smoke rising from every fire pit, no chance of smelling the village before he bumped right into it.

Titus glanced across that ten yards separating him from the travois … and his rifle. Then back at the village, if they saw him, they saw him. He’d damn well need that gun if they did anyhow. Bass quickly crabbed out to the bundle, crouching behind it to reach up so he could grip the buttstock, pulling the rifle free of the two ropes.

Then in a crouch he scurried back to his hiding place in the brush.

Sure enough, the raiders’ trail had brought him right to the village. He swallowed at the scratchy knot in his throat, his mind galloping, digging away at his options the way he’d scratch at a troublesome mosquito bite that refused relief for anything longer than a moment. Then Titus decided that he had left himself no other choice.

After all, what had he stumbled all these miles through the snow for? Why had he crossed the Yellowstone and damn well froze himself to death? If not to confront the horse thieves, then why had he trudged on through the night so he could catch up to the raiders while they rested?

Through those trees lying between him and the village drifted the tatters of laughter and trilling tongues, cheers and war whoops. Dogs joined in and children shouted too—then he heard Hannah’s bawl.

And remembered the way it had torn him apart that morning just before dawn as he’d watched the Crow warrior smack his mule across the head with that piece of firewood.

With that remembering Bass knew why he had endured the miles and hours, the icy snow and the river crossing. He had come to reclaim what was his.

Licking at the ooze of blood seeping from the wide crack in his lower lip, Scratch slowly swiped the mitten down his face, feeling the agonized torment the harsh wool sanded through his windburned, frostbitten flesh. He stood and pulled that mitten from his right hand under his left armpit, stuffing his fingers into his shooting pouch so he could scoop out a half-dozen .54-caliber lead balls. Plopping them into his mouth, he tongued them over so they would lie between his cheek and gum, then squared the pouch where it hung beneath his right elbow.

After looking to the priming powder on both the rifle and the pistol he stuffed back into his sash, Titus laid the long weapon across the crook of his left arm and stepped out of the brush, striding purposefully along the ground trampled not only by the pony raiders returning to this village, but by a growing number of converging trails.

At that moment it began to snow lightly—huge, ash-curl flakes swirling down on the still, frozen air. The heavy fragrance of firesmoke slapped him in the face, reminding him that he was one, walking into a village to confront the many who had done him wrong.

Licking at the oozy lower lip, the wound yelped in pain as he entered the thick belt of cottonwood and brush behind which the tops of the lodges disappeared. A few more steps and he realized the village actually sat across a narrow river that dumped itself into the Yellowstone.

For no more than the measure of a few heartbeats he stopped among the leafless willow and studied the lodges on the western bank. Then looked at the river itself, and the ford leading down to it. After drawing back the rifle hammer to full-cock, Bass dragged the pistol from his sash … and moved out of the brush, down the trampled, muddy snow to the ford.

Straight into the icy water that swirled around his ankles, then up his calves to splay the bottom of his capote out upon the river surface as he reached midstream. A woman coming down to the bank upriver to his left stopped, watched for a moment, then turned about and lunged up the trampled snow, shouting. Her shrill cry sent a trio of magpies bursting from the low branches hanging over the far side of the crossing.

Knots of children suddenly emerged from the open places between the lodges, hurrying for a glimpse of him as he reached the west bank. A half-dozen horsemen whooped up out of the thickening snow, halting with a cascade of icy clods, brandishing their weapons and shouting at him.

Camp guards.

Stopping, he glared at them, each one in turn, letting them see that he was not afraid of their boasts, letting them see that though his rifle was not pointed up the low rise right at them, it was nonetheless ready to fire in their direction. He brought the pistol arm up and rested the long barrel of the heavy rifle across the left wrist. And pushed on up the rise toward the outlying lodges as more of the curious gathered to watch his approach.

Around to his left poured three horsemen, piercing the thick grove of cottonwood, perhaps seeking to sweep behind him.

Bass turned, his knees slightly bent, whirling and bringing up the rifle’s muzzle. One of the riders signaled the other two, and they all three halted; then the one sent the pair across the river.

“No, you stupid red nigger!” Scratch growled at the horseman. Then he quickly stuffed the pistol back into his belt and raised that left hand, holding up one finger. Quickly he brought that finger down to jab at his own chest. “There’s only one of me!”

Yanking the pistol back out of his sash, Scratch continued to the top of the low rise as children, women, and dogs began to part before him, opening a wide gauntlet for the stranger. Faces emerged out of the crowd, heads poking around others, children staring out between the legs of adults, dogs slinking behind him to sniff warily at his heels until he wheeled and swung the heavy iron muzzle of the rifle at one of the curs—catching the animal in the ribs, bowling it over, driving the dog off yelping and whimpering with its tail between its legs.

“Ti-tess!”

Sounded something like his name.

Bass whirled again on the crowd and started moving once more—the hair prickling on the back of his neck. As he pushed ahead through the widening gauntlet, his eyes searched the faces, spotting a man forcing his way through the pack to stand in the open some twenty feet away between the two columns.

“Ti-tess!”

“Bird in Ground?” He quickly looked over the man wrapped in a heavy wool blanket. “That really you?”

“Me, Ti-tess!” the man-woman shouted, and came hurrying across the snow as fast as his blanket would allow.

The blanket opened as Bird in Ground reached the trapper, revealing the beautiful dress the man-woman wore, heavily decorated with elk milk teeth. The Crow threw his arms around Scratch, embracing and pounding the startled white man on the back.

“I’ll be damned,” Bass muttered.

“Yes, damned,” the Indian repeated in his best imitation of his mentor’s speech.

“I recall some of these here faces …” and his voice trailed off. Then he set the rifle butt on the ground and signed while he spoke in what little Crow he remembered from winters gone before. “This is your camp?”

The man-woman nodded. “Some of these people remember your visit so many winters ago.”

Quickly gazing at the cluster of faces watching the two of them expectantly, Bass drew his shoulders back. “My friend: in your camp … there are five thieves.”

“Thieves?” Bird in Ground repeated.

He signed for “horse,” remembering the Crow didn’t have a word for “mule.” “Pony thieves. Five of your men took my three horses. Two nights ago. I followed them here.”

“Yes,” and the man-woman turned, pulling the blanket around his shoulders. He pointed off through the camp. “They came in a short time ago. Shouting, happy—proud of their new horses.”

“I want my horses back,” Bass signed and said in his stuttering Crow. “Then … I want those five—here.”

“You came to take their scalps?” Bird in Ground asked, his eyes narrowing.

“I get my horses back,” he explained, “I won’t want their lives. Just want some of their blood.”

“You will fight all five—as one finger would fight the whole other hand?”

“If I have to,” Bass answered. “But one especially: the man I watched beat one of my animals.”

“Where was this?” a voice demanded above the murmurs of the crowd.

Scratch turned, peering over Bird in Ground’s shoulder at the tall, regal warrior approaching them from afar. Already the crowd had parted for this impressive figure the moment he had emerged from his lodge, which sat at the center of the great camp circle. Quickly Bass glanced at the tall tripod standing near the doorway as the villagers stepped back in deference to this handsome and powerful man.

Turning back to Bird in Ground, Titus asked, “You lived with Big Hair’s band—”

“These are the same people,” the man explained as the tall warrior approached. “We were Big Hair’s band.”

“What became of your chief?”

“Big Hair was killed in a fight with the Blackfoot,” the man-woman explained just as the tall warrior came to a halt and his expressive eyes measured the white man. Bird in Ground continued, “The new chief of our people … is Arapooesh.”

“Ara … Arapooesh,” Bass repeated, then took off his mitten and held out his hand.

For a moment the chief looked down at it, then seized Bass’s wrist in his hand, and they shook, gripping one another’s forearms. The tall man had a warm and genuinely disarming smile.

“Ti-tuzz Bazz,” Bird in Ground explained the white man’s name.

After repeating the foreign sounds for himself, Arapooesh pointed at the fur cap pulled so far down over Bass’s head it reached clear to the eyebrows, hung below his ears on both sides. He said something so rapidly to Bird in Ground that Scratch was able to follow none of it.

“Arapooesh asked if you had a long trip. If you stayed warm.”

“Yes, I stayed warm,” Bass replied, wondering how much of that answer was the truth. “Tell your chief why I am here.”

Bird in Ground asked, “The horse thieves?”

“Thieves?” Arapooesh echoed.

“Yes,” the Crow man-woman told the chief. “The white man followed the men who stole his horses. Their trail led him to our camp.”

“The horse thieves came here?”

Bird in Ground nodded, his eyes narrowing. “I know the ones, Arapooesh. I saw them return this morning after they were gone many days. They brought two ponies and the white man’s strange horse with them.”

“Strange horse?” Arapooesh asked.

“Half-a-horse,” the Crow man-woman attempted to explain.

“Ahh, I have seen some of those,” and then the chief studied Bass a moment more. “Are you a friend of Bird in Ground?”

And the Crow man quickly responded, “Yes, he is a friend of mine.”

“No,” Arapooesh snapped, his eyes coming back to Scratch. “I asked the white man.”

“I am Bird in Ground’s friend.”

“Are you a friend of the Crow?” asked the chief.

For a moment he thought, then said, “I am the friend of all Crow who do not steal from me. I am friend of all Crow who have honor.”

The chief seemed to measure the heft of those words, then replied, “My people like horses very much. Sometimes we find horses, we take them for our own—”

“I have never done a thing to hurt the Crow,” Bass interrupted angrily.

“This is a good man, Arapooesh,” Bird in Ground explained. “He listens to our people talk and tries to understand. He even tries to understand about a woman who was born in this man’s body.”

As Arapooesh regarded Bass, he scratched his smooth, plucked chin and finally said, “Tell me, Bird in Ground … tell me the names of the men who stole the white man’s horses.”

Clearing his throat, plainly nervous, the man-woman toed the snow before him and eventually spoke the names of the five he believed were the raiders.

Arapooesh’s eyes narrowed with concern. “You are certain?”

“These are the five I saw come to camp this morning with the two ponies and the half horse.”

“But,” Arapooesh said, wagging his head, “these are not …”

“They stole from the white man. They stole from the man who is my friend. Stole from one who has done no wrong to our people.”

As he drank in a deep breath, his chest swelling in contemplation, the chief finally turned away to raise his voice over the crowd. “I call for these five to come here so that I may talk to them: Red Leggings, Comes Inside the Door, Crow Shouting, Sees the Star, and … and Pretty On Top.”

As several voices in the crowd took up the cry, echoing those five names and shouting the chiefs command through the village, the rest in the great throng started to murmur and whisper. Just when Bass was coming to believe that the five would not dare show their faces, the crowd parted in a rush of noisy excitement. Through that widening gap stepped the five.

Titus blinked his eyes, recognizing the tall, thick curl heavily greased and pinned atop one of the thieves’ heads. He was Hannah’s tormentor.

Suddenly seething all the way to the soles of his feet, Scratch started to lunge forward—then stopped abruptly. Shocked: for the first time looking closely at the five, into the faces of those horse thieves, into the eyes of these … boys.

He whipped around on Bird in Ground, flushing with sudden rage. “W-what is this!” he sputtered in English, then asked in that foreign tongue. “These are boys!”

“Boys,” the chief repeated in Crow as the five came to a stop near Arapooesh, eyeing the white man suspiciously. “Yes, they are boys.”

“We are men now,” disputed the one with the tall greased curl on his head.

Bird in Ground sneered. “You are men because you stole three horses from one white man?”

“Three was all he had,” said another of the youngsters, then laughed with the rest.

“So you did take this man’s horses?” Arapooesh asked, silencing them.

Perhaps believing that he had good reason to boast, the one with the curl said, “We went out to steal horses, Arapooesh. We stole some and brought them back to our camp.”

“But you stole a lone man’s horses!” Bird in Ground protested.

The curled one snorted, “I will not be talked to like this by a creature who has a manhood between his legs but does not want to be a man!”

As swiftly as a camp robber swoops down to raid the meat-drying racks, Bird in Ground lunged forward and smacked his flat hand across the youth’s face. “Pretty On Top!” he shrieked. “I am a person of honor … one who is strong enough to kill you with my bare hands!”

Arapooesh stepped between Bird in Ground and the youngster as Pretty On Top started for the man-woman. “There will be no fighting between my people today.”

“No woman talks to a warrior like this—”

“You are not a warrior!”

Again the youngster leaped for Bird in Ground, his hands thrashing like claws ripping the air.

But Arapooesh restrained him. “What he says is true, Pretty On Top. You are not a warrior.”

Wounding crossed his face: Pretty On Top slowly brought the fingers of one hand up to touch the bright-red mark on his cheek where he had been slapped. But it was plain that his feelings suffered more pain than had his flesh. “How will you ever call me a warrior, or how will any man ever ask me to come along on a scalp raid … if you won’t even consider me a man when I steal a white man’s horses.”

“The white man,” Arapooesh started to explain, “he is not our enemy.”

“Ever since the first white men came to our country,” Pretty On Top argued, “our people have stolen their horses.”

Sees the Star agreed, his head bobbing. “The Crow have never killed a white man.”

“You will never steal from this man!” Bird in Ground demanded.

Pretty On Top snorted with laughter. “Is this white man your … husband?”

Some of the young people in the crowd sniggered behind their hands.

Bird in Ground’s cheeks flushed with anger. “Little boys like you will never understand the ways of a real man,” he declared, putting his face up close to the youth’s, “because you will never grow up to become a man.”

This time the tall adolescent swung his arm back, ready to slap the older man, when his wrist was suddenly caught in the trapper’s mitten.

“That’s right. You’re no man yet,” Bass grunted in Crow as he pushed the strong youth’s arm down, “because a man would never strike a friend.”

Pretty On Top seized the wrist of the hand the white man had clamped on him, and for a moment they glared into one another’s eyes. “You are no friend of mine!” And he tried to fling Bass’s arm aside.

Instead, Scratch slowly released his grip. “I am a friend of the Crow. I am a friend to all men of honor and bravery.” He turned to look into the face of Arapooesh, saying, “Until the Crow blacken their faces against me, I will be a friend to your people. Your friends are my friends. Your enemies … they are my enemies too.”

“My people, we are not many,” the chief exclaimed as he laid his hand on the big youth’s shoulder. “We cannot afford to turn away any man who says he is our friend, any man who says he will stand against our enemies with us.”

Some of the women in the crowd trilled their tongues in approval, and several of the old men raised their voices in triumph.

“It was good you came to us this winter,” Bird in Ground said.

With a smile Scratch replied, “I did not intend to visit your camp this soon.”

With his strong hand Arapooesh turned to Pretty On Top so that he stared the tall youth directly in the eye. “We have this problem of the white man’s horses.”

“They are our horses now!” the youth barked in protest.

Bird in Ground lunged up to shout, “You stole from a friend of ours!”

“You’ve never stolen a horse in your life!” Red Leggings snapped as he came to stand beside Pretty On Top.

Arapooesh laid his other hand on Red Leggings’ shoulder. Now he clamped his hands down hard and said to them, “We do not steal from those who are our friends.”

The five youths started to sputter in protest, but the chief dug his fingers into the shoulders of the two until their knees began to buckle and they howled in pain.

“But we went out to risk our lives!” Pretty On Top wailed. “We wanted to show our people we were brave enough to go on a pony raid of our own!”

And Comes Inside the Door agreed, “If the older warriors weren’t going to ask us along on the raids they were leading, then Pretty On Top said we would have our own raid to show our bravery!”

“And you all were very, very brave,” Arapooesh declared. “No man or woman in this camp will question your courage. From this day all will know that you five are brave enough to start on the path that will make you warriors. And … all of our people will know that you five are wise, that you are men of honor who will do what is right.”

For a moment the youths looked at one another; then Pretty On Top asked, “You are ordering us to return the white man’s horses?”

“You tell me,” the chief said. “What would a true warrior do? One who did not care about his own wealth, but only about the wealth of his people?”

“But a warrior grows rich by going to war!” Crow Shouting protested.

“And one day you will go to war,” Arapooesh replied. “So tell me: what would an honorable man do?”

Pretty On Top hung his head a moment. And when he spoke, the words came out as if they had a bitter taste on his tongue. “He would return the horses to the white man.”

In a loud voice the chief asked, “Is that the answer for all of you?”

The other four muttered their agreement.

Clapping his hands on the two shoulders of the youngsters standing before him, Arapooesh roared with approval. “You three, go bring me the white man’s animals.”

Crow Shouting, Sees the Star, and Comes Inside the Door immediately turned away and pushed their way through the crowd.

As they left, the chief announced in his booming voice, “Today the heart of our people has been strengthened! Whenever a man does an honorable act, all our people are made stronger for it! And when a man does something that reflects well upon our people, we will reward his good works!”

Wildly cheering, the throng responded, singing and whooping.

Arapooesh continued. “As chief of our people, I will honor these five young men who have shown their bravery in going out to prove their courage. And I will celebrate these five because they have today shown us they are indeed men who do what is right for our people—they are men of honor!”

Again the crowd raised its collective voice of approval.

“Bird in Ground, I want you to take these five young men who exemplify Crow courage and honor to the place where my own ponies graze among our herds. Let them choose from among those animals that belong to me—all but my war pony and the horse that my wife loves so dearly.”

The throng laughed while Bird in Ground said, “If you gave away your wife’s horse, Arapooesh … you would have to find you a new place to sleep tonight!”

“These young men can choose from my ponies,” Arapooesh repeated with a smile.

“Th-this is a great thing!” Pretty On Top gushed, his eyes wide with wonder. “You took back from us the white man’s three horses … and now you replace them with three of your own!”

“No!” the chief said, shaking his head. “Not three. I said each of you will select a pony for himself. For five young men of courage and honor, I will award you each a pony!”

“F-five ponies?” Red Leggings stammered.

“This is a marvelous thing,” Bird in Ground declared to Pretty On Top and Red Leggings. “This shows you how a man of honor can become a great man, how a man of honor can become a leader of our people!”

Several of the old men came up suddenly, whooping their songs of celebration just as the three youths led the trapper’s horses and mule into the middle of the camp circle.

“It is good that you are here this winter!” Bird in Ground exclaimed as he turned to Bass, having to shout his words above the noisy celebration.

Scratch watched the three frightened animals approach, their nostrils flaring, eyes wide as they were led through the crowd. He said, “This will be a good winter, here among friends.”

“Your guns will help make us strong come spring when the Blackfoot raid from the north again.”

But the trapper wagged his head and explained, “By spring I must be far from here.”

“The beaver are not good in Absaroka?” the chief said as he moved close.

“I have far to travel to the place where all the white men gather next summer,” he tried to explain.

“This is the place my people choose to live,” Arapooesh said. “I have never understood why you white men have to come and go, come and go great distances.”

With a smile Bass explained, “Whenever I leave Absaroka, it reminds me how good your country is. So it is really not a bad thing to go and come back when I find out how poor everywhere else is.”

The chief clamped his hand on the taller man’s shoulder as the three youths brought up the animals and stopped before Arapooesh. He asked of Titus, “These are your horses?”

“Yes.”

“Then we have settled this matter to your satisfaction?”

Stepping aside, Bass nuzzled Hannah between her eyes, rubbed his mitten along her neck, then turned back to the chief.

“Arapooesh,” he said, “there is something that still troubles me.”

His brow furrowing, the chief said, “Tell me so we can put this matter behind us.”

Scratch thought a moment on how to express it, then said, “Your war pony, you care very much for it?”

“I care for it the way I would care for a true friend,” the chief answered.

Scratch nodded. “Then you would not want to see someone strike your horse between the eyes with a tree branch?”

Arapooesh flinched but did not answer immediately. Instead, his eyes moved from Bass, to the mule the white man was petting, then shifted to stare at Pretty On Top. Without taking his harsh gaze from the youth, the chief asked, “Did you see your horse friend hit by a Crow?”

“Yes.”

Continuing to glare at Pretty On Top, the chief asked, “Is that person here?”

“Yes, he is here.”

Licking his lips thoughtfully, Arapooesh said, “A man of honor, a true warrior of his people—he would ask you how he could make restitution for hurting such a friend of yours. Do you find any fault with my words … Pretty On Top?”

“No,” the youth answered in a voice almost too quiet to hear as the crowd fell hushed. When he took his eyes off the ground, he looked at the trapper. “How can I make this up to you for hurting this half horse?”

Titus wasn’t sure just how a man could ever truly make amends for injuring something so important as another man’s friend, be it a trapping partner, or … his mule. Wasn’t Hannah a true partner? Hadn’t she proved herself to be every bit as faithful, loyal, and steadfast to him as any person had ever been? Wasn’t she even more of a friend to him than many people had been throughout the years?

“I do not know,” he eventually admitted, wagging his head as he looked into the face of Pretty On Top. Then—something struck him of a sudden. “Perhaps for this young warrior to tell me he knows that my animals are my truest friends … and that I would do anything to see that my friends are not hurt.”

Contrite, the youth dropped his eyes. “I am truly sorry.”

“I—I am sorry too,” chimed in Red Leggings.

Arapooesh turned to the trapper. “No, this cannot be enough to pay you for the cruelty to your animal—for the hurt to your friend.”

But Bass surprised them, saying, “Yes—their apology is enough, Arapooesh.” He watched the shock strike all the faces around him. Some of the bystanders even clamped hands over their mouths in amazement.

Arapooesh asked, “Is this true what you are saying?”

“Pretty On Top … I think he has grown many years this morning. He is older beyond his winters now for it. I believe he is already a true Crow warrior: a man of honor and courage. So I will consider this matter settled, Arapooesh … if Pretty On Top will tell me … that he will be a true friend to me.”

Many of the old, wrinkled, scarred, and weathered warriors in the crowd yelped and cried out with shrill songs of celebration, raising their thin, reedy voices to the snowy sky overhead.

“Pretty On Top?” the chief turned to ask. “You have heard the white man—”

“I will be honored to be this white man’s friend,” the youth interrupted in a flurry, his lips quivering, betraying the emotions he fought to hide.

Pretty On Top stepped away from Arapooesh, stopping in front of the trapper and his mule where the youngster placed his right fist over his heart while he held his left arm out to the white man.

Bass immediately laid his right fist over his heart and held out his left arm. They gripped fiercely and looked one another in the eye.

“You are my friend, Pretty On Top?”

“I am your friend,” the youth replied. “Until I die, your friends are my friends.”

Bass nodded, feeling the mist in his eyes. “And your enemies … they are my enemies.”

As the throng burst into cheers, Arapooesh stepped up and slapped them both on the back. “We will celebrate tonight! A feast! A feast! For a true friend has returned to visit!”

Turning to Bass, the chief leaned close to say in the white man’s ear, “It makes my heart happy to hear that you will spend your winter among us … the better for me to come to know this stranger who has proved to be a man of dignity and honor himself … a man who is strong enough, brave enough, that he dares to be both merciful and generous too.”

He squinted into the light of that early-summer sun.

Dragging the wide-brimmed hat off his head, Scratch tugged on a wide corner of the black silk bandanna he had tied around his neck, swiping his face with it. Suddenly recalling how so simple a touch had caused his flesh so much agony last winter.

Up ahead at the far side of the valley, he studied that thin line of dust rising against the distant hills. And wondered if they might be Indians. A war party of Bannock. Maybeso a small band of Snake on their way to rendezvous too.

Turning to glance over his shoulder in worry, Bass found he hadn’t limned himself against the pale sky, placing him and the animals right along the horizon so that he stuck out in plain view. No, he always did his best to ride somewhere on down the slope some so that he would not be spotted by any distant pair of roving eyes. He always crossed a ridge or divide through some saddle or swale low enough so that he couldn’t be spied right against the sky.

He was thirsty. His mouth gone pasty. Through the long morning the animals had dampened the leather harness, soaking it with their sweat.

Instead of slapping the hat back down on his head, he laid it atop the large saucer-shaped horn at the front of the Spanish saddle and grabbed for the bottom of the buckskin war shirt. He tugged it up, over his head, and off both arms, then turned and lashed it to the back of the saddle there with his capote. At this season it was still cold enough early in the morning on this high desert west of the southern pass that a man started out his day shivering, later went to sweating as the sun climbed high, then ended his day shivering all over again as he started his fire, ready to climb into his sleeping robes.

The cloth shirt he had bought from Bill Williams more than a year ago had faded with so many washings along the banks of streams, vigorously rubbing the material with sand scooped from the creekbed, beating it against the rocks. No more damned nits, he had vowed. Never again.

Which made him remember how he and McAfferty had stripped off all their clothing at one campsite south along the Heely in Apache country, plopping their cloth and leather garments down upon a series of huge anthills, where they sat out the day completely naked but for their hats and moccasins, content to watch the huge red creatures swarm over the tiny lice that had burrowed into every seam of their clothing.

He had vowed he’d never again travel with any man who was infested with graybacks. After all, it was only a matter of time before the lice from one host migrated on over to Titus Bass. No more damned nits.

Those distant horsemen beneath the thin cloud of dust on the horizon were traveling from north to south. As he sat there studying their ragged line of movement, Scratch could see that they were riding for the same spot off to the southwest where he himself was headed. He squinted into the high, bright light. Just across that low range of hills to the west of him, down there the Big Sandy dumped itself into the Green, and those emerald-tinged waters continued their tumble south to the Colorado.

Glancing back up at the sun as if to curse its blinding glare, he pulled his hat back over the faded blue bandanna of silk, then rocked his horse into motion, tugging on the long lead rope that played back to Hannah’s neck. In turn she tugged on the lead rope running back to the packhorse. What with those unexpected travelers, it was better for him to cross this upper dogleg of the valley and scoot west a bit more before he plunged on south. Keep as much distance as he could between him and those riders. Maybe he would try catching up come later in the afternoon, drawing close enough to them by the time the strangers went into camp that he could slip up on them and from a safe distance see if they might be foe or friend.

For a child out here on his lonesome, the chances were far greater that he would run onto a foe than he would bump into a friend.

Friend.

How good the word sounded. And how it made his already heavy heart ache with more longing.

Friends to rendezvous with, tell tall stories to, companions to regale with his windies and whoppers and outright bald-face balderdash. Friends who didn’t mind when he grew thick-tongued and stumble-lipped as he drank deep to the bottom of his cups and finally threw up or passed out. One good, gut-busting revel a year—every man was due at least that. Jehoshaphat, but to lay eyes on friends he hadn’t seen for a full year?

That was cause enough to celebrate, to drink until he got sick and blacked out then and there in the dirt, among the sage and the saddles and the sand thorns.

Titus hadn’t seen Jack and Caleb and all the others since last summer after Sublette headed east and those two big company brigades set off for their fall hunt.

Why, he hadn’t seen a white face since late last autumn when he had bumped into that big outfit run by Bridger and Fitzpatrick up in Crow country. They had already punched their way into and back through Blackfoot territory, and were headed east to winter up over toward the Powder River, when Scratch spotted the smokes of all their fires and cautiously rode off the hills to investigate. It was good to see Bridger again, along with some of the others too, and they had themselves a good evening of it, sharing stories and swapping lies the way they did.

The young booshway had explained how his bunch had even run across Asa up there north of the Three Forks country.

“We was partners.”

“Didn’t know you ever rode with him,” Bridger had admitted.

“For a time we did. He say what he was doing up there all by hisself? How he was getting along?”

Fitzpatrick had wagged his head. “Had him a few pelts on them packhorses of his—but it didn’t seem to me he was up there to trap, that for certain. Man like him gotta be crazed to figger he can last out the Blackfeet much longer up that way all on his lonesome.”

“Maybe he’s eager to get his hair raised,” Bridger added.

Bass had stared at the fire, thinking back on things gone wrong between two men, and said, “I don’t figger I’ll ever see that white-head nigger again.”

Brushing one flat palm across the other quickly, Bridger said morosely, “That’s a nigger what’s good as dead awready, Scratch.”

Aw, Asa, he thought now as he dropped down into the bottom below the narrow saddle, feeling the grass brush the bottoms of his moccasins. Why, Asa? Why?

He halted at midday just on the other side of that low saddle, loosened cinches, and let the three critters graze in the lush spring growth as he chewed at some of the meat he had cooked over last night’s fire before moving on to sleep a few miles from where he had supped. Just out of caution, in new country, a man ate one place, made a cold camp, and slept out the night in another. As he ate, he watched that distant line of dust rise against the glorious summer blue painted across the canvas above the western hills.

Close enough now to calculate there couldn’t be more than twenty riders, maybe two dozen at most.

Not likely to be a small band of Snake traipsing south for the white man’s rendezvous in Willow Valley. Might so be some damned Bannock. He knew they was the sort to skedaddle if the odds wasn’t real long in their favor, the sort what laid into any white men if the red niggers could raise some horses and plunder, maybe even some scalps if their medicine was right that day. Goddamn them Bannocks.

Not good Injuns like them Crow.

They was the sort to take a man in, make him welcome, put him up in one lodge or the other till the chief’s two sisters sewed together a buffalo-hide shelter something on the order of a white man’s lean-to. A half-domed affair with a big flap that covered the wide entrance, which he could tie up during the day or lash down for protection from the cold at night, or when a new snowstorm came slashing through the valley. He’d barely gotten used to the dwelling last winter when it came time for the village to move a few miles upstream away from the Yellowstone. The camp had begun to stink something awful from all the gut-piles, rotting meat, and human offal piling up back in the trees. Maybe as much as a half-dozen times Arapooesh’s band would move each winter, finding themselves another place that offered open water, plenty of firewood and grass for their pony herds, along with some protection against the possibility of attack.

As winter deepened, it seemed the Crow grew more relaxed—less concerned about their most fearsome enemy. Too damned cold now, the snow drifted too deep for the Blackfoot to try anything as foolish as a major assault on a village in the heart of Absaroka—home of the Crow.

It hadn’t been long before Scratch had felt a part of them too. Much more a part of them than he had years back when he had come to the Bighorn country with Silas, Billy, and Bud. Perhaps he had felt set apart from the tribe because the three of them had not tried in the least to fit in with their winter hosts. Just as they had refused to do with the Ute. Instead, the trio of white men had stayed apart, taking all that they needed from the Crow and doing little to repay in kind all that had been given them with such generous hospitality. Whether it was food, or a woman offered to warm their robes, or some shelter from the raging winter blizzards—Silas and the others had considered themselves above their hosts, remaining as aloof as those company brigades traveling through one tribe’s territory or another.

But for a lone man eager to learn all the more about these attractive pale-brown people, the past winter in Absaroka with Bird in Ground and Pretty On Top was all that he had hoped it would be. And from that first night’s feasting and celebration, it seemed that old Arapooesh took to the white man, right off.

“Rotten … Belly?” he had repeated the words spoken to him by Bird in Ground.

The man-woman rubbed his stomach with a flat hand, bending over slightly and groaning as if he were sick. “Rotten Belly, yes.”

“That’s Arapooesh’s name?”

Indeed, it was how the venerable chief was known among the two divisions who roamed Absaroka. Recently he had brought his wife and family back to live with her band of the Apsaalooke after spending many years among his River Band. And with the regrettable death of Big Hair, his wife’s people turned to the respected warrior and tribal counselor to lead them into the coming winters.

After recouping his strength in the Crow village for several days, Bass had journeyed east to retrieve the trade goods and supplies he had abandoned when he’d set out on the trail of the horse thieves—just one day shy of reaching his cache. After taking two days to bury the last of his pelts in that black hole, he loaded up the rest of what he needed for the winter on Hannah’s back and turned about for Rotten Belly’s camp. He made it back just as a howling blizzard raked the land. That first night back he slept in Bird in Ground’s lodge, inviting the chief and some of the old warriors, along with Pretty On Top and other youngsters, to a giveaway dinner.

Oh, the way those Crow eyes sparkled as he passed around small gifts of coffee and sugar, some powder and brass tacks, fingerings and bracelets, hanks of ribbon and beads! The men clucked and laughed—for it had been a long, long time since any of them had seen such riches as these!

“Do you see, Pretty On Top?” Bird in Ground playfully chided the young man. “See what a man receives in return when he gives away his friendship to a stranger?”

Later on as that winter grew old, as the wind keened and twisted through the Yellowstone Valley, the chief gathered his friends and advisers in his lodge for a red-stick feast. From the pot for this traditional Crow celebration, the invited guests all plucked tender pieces of elk. Afterward they scraped the greasy marrow from bones they pulled from the coals and cracked upon the rocks ringing the fire pit. Then they smoked and related their coups.

When it came time for Bass to count his own exploits sitting there at Rotten Belly’s left hand, he enthralled them into the deep hours with his tales, stripping off his shirt and showing them those scars earned at the hands of the Blackfoot, being hunted down by the Apache far to the southwest of Absaroka, fighting the Mexican soldiers and fierce Comanche raiders in that land of warm waters, as well as his two struggles with the grizzly—letting them see the scars of his few seasons among the mountains, how the wilderness had marked his whipcord-lean white body.

After the sixteen men nodded and murmured in approbation that he still lived, Arapooesh had refilled his pipe and sent it around the circle another time. And when it reached the chief at the end of its circuit, Rotten Belly solemnly proposed to give a name to the man who had come to his people earlier that winter—on foot and wearing the fur of a coyote wrapped around his head so that only the white man’s eyes and cheeks showed above his beard and mustache, those frosted whiskers similar in color to the gray pelt of that coyote Scratch had worn for winters beyond count already.

“So I give my white friend a name I will call him from this night onward,” Arapooesh declared. “Pote Ani. Because when he came to us, this man seemed to have the head of a coyote on his shoulders. But more than that, my new friend has the cunning of the coyote that allows him to survive both the wolf and the winter. Because the coyote is an animal faithful to its own, steadfast to its friends … because this white man is loyal to my people—I pledge I will always remain loyal to him.”

The rest of those gathered in the lodge had cheered with approval, slapping their thighs, banging their tin cups on the rocks ringing the fire.

Then Arapooesh had continued. “So, my friends—it is with a full and happy heart that I take this white man as my brother. From this night he will be known among our people as Pote Ani. And he will be my brother.”

It never failed to bring a smile to his heart, warming him, every time he thought about his dear friend, Rotten Belly. Remembering how the chief and Bird in Ground and even young Pretty On Top had come to mean so much to him through those winter moons. The sort of men who formed a bulwark against the storms in a man’s life.

Like Jack Hatcher, Caleb Wood, and the others.

Men red and white, men for all the seasons of his life.

As the ice on the Yellowstone had begun to crack and shatter, opening the river early that spring, he had taken his leave as Rotten Belly’s band started upriver to the south, while he pointed his nose down the valley to the east. Just past the big rock, he had crossed to the north bank of the Yellowstone and located the patch of ground where he had dug his cache last autumn, the frozen earth lying beneath a snowdrift he had to shovel aside.

As he pried back the thick sod lid to the cache’s neck, Scratch had suddenly remembered what he hadn’t during that winter in Absaroka—he had turned thirty-seven!

Although there had been times during his winter with the Crow that he had wondered on Christmas and remembered Taos during the Nativity festival, thinking too how his own birthday came only a week after that celebration … Bass hadn’t given all that much thought to adding another ring to his years.

It had simply been too wonderful a winter in the land of the Crow: new friends, plenty of protection from the wind and the cold among a people who from time to time provided their guest with one woman or another to relieve the trapper’s pent-up hungers.

“Who’s been sending me these women who come to my lodge?” he had asked Bird in Ground one cold day as they were out gathering deadfall for their fires.

The strange man of the Apsaalooke stood and looked squarely at Bass. “Since you do not want me for your wife, I decided that you must satisfy your appetites with the women of our tribe.”

“Believe me when I say, if I ever wanted to settle down with a man-woman among your people for the rest of my winters, I would choose you, Bird in Ground.”

“I am afraid I will never have a husband,” the Crow sighed. “Look around. There aren’t any others now who are like me—touched by this same spirit medicine. Perhaps I can find some way to show the power of my medicine, to prove to other young men of our tribe that I would make them a good wife.”

“It is not hard for any man to see that you would make a good wife.”

The man-woman smiled in that gentle way of his. “I realize you will never be my husband. But you will always stay one of those strong in my heart.”

“And you will always stay one of those strong in my heart too.”

Had to be Bannock under that distant dust cloud. Damn. They sure weren’t good folks like the Crow.

Bannock.

Certain that’s what they were, Bass tarried a while longer after finishing his cold meat before retightening cinches and pushing on into the afternoon. He’d do all he could to give the Bannock war party a wide berth.

Not long after the saffron orb had slinked from the summer sky, Scratch noticed how that smudge of dust to the south had faded. The riders must have put in for camp up there a ways in the valley of Black’s Fork. And from there he calculated it wasn’t more than nine, ten days at the most before he’d finally reach the inner-mountain valley where Sublette promised to meet the company brigades for July.

Before long he grew wary, figuring he had dogged the war party’s backtrail close enough and found himself a place where he tied off the animals, letting them graze while he set off on foot along the east side of the valley. Watching to the southwest as the shadows lengthened, sticking his nose in the wind for firesmoke, keeping his eyes moving from horizon to horizon. That bunch might have hunters out, after all. Making meat for supper. It wouldn’t pay to have a run-in with one or two of the bastards, then find himself tracked by the rest as they tried to run him down.

Goddamned Bannocks. Who the hell did they think they was, anyway? He’d been run down by the best of ’em—riding day and night with the Apache breathing down on his ass. No way these here Bannocks ever come close to measuring up to Apache.

He stopped there in the shadows of the man-sized willow that bordered the coulee and sniffed again. Woodsmoke.

His mouth went dry.

That weren’t no summer thunderstorm grass fire. No, that was a smell altogether different. This was wood-smoke. Even had the smell of broiling meat braided around the edges of that stronger scent.

And that made his dry mouth water.

Then Bass remembered that he was slipping up on some thieving red bastards, scolding himself that he’d better forget his feed bag for now.

After checking the priming in both the rifle and pistol for the fifth or sixth time, Titus angled down the side of the coulee toward the river valley, hanging with the cover offered him by the thick, leafy brush.

Less than a half hour later, he stopped suddenly—his nose greeted by horse sweat wafted on that cooling breeze nuzzling its way down the riverbank. Another twenty yards and … he heard them.

Parting the willow with the rifle’s muzzle, Titus spotted the horses. Son of a bitch if that wasn’t a white man’s tack on that piebald! Not no braided buffalo-hair hackamore.

And that roan! Hell if he hadn’t seen it before!

One of the horses on the far side of the bunch whinnied low as a figure stepped out of the tree shadows and headed for the piebald. Scratch’s heart stopped then and there in his chest—

“Rufus Graham!”

The figure wheeled at the call of his name, yanking on the pistol he had stuffed into the wide, colorful sash at his waist.

“Don’t shoot me, Rufus!”

As Bass rose to his feet there in the thick willow, he watched the horses part, listened to the ground reverberate with running feet. At the far side of the clearing where a wary Rufus Graham stood frozen, there suddenly appeared the other five.

Titus didn’t know when their ugly, hairy faces had ever looked prettier!

“Eegod, boys!” Jack Hatcher yelped as he stepped closer, a wide slash of a grin splitting the lower half of his bearded face. “If it ain’t Titus Bass his own self … riz right up from the dead!”