Dance on the Wind

21

Right from that November day in 1763 when French fur traders Auguste Chouteau and Pierre Laclede Liguest pulled their dugouts out of the great Mississippi, St. Louis had flourished. Even though the Frenchmen were soon to learn that the surrounding region had recently been ceded to Spain, it made little consequence. Their trading post would prove to be the start of a very French community on Spanish soil.

It wasn’t but a matter of months before the settlement had gained its broad-shouldered reputation as word spread up and down the river systems of frontier North America. Soon the muddy streets bustled with not only the French fur men and a few Spanish governing officials, but British traders, Indians in from the prairies, Creoles and Acadians, as well as black slaves, and of course American frontiersmen.

Almost from the start the waterfront was a colorful cluster of keels and flats, canoes and dugouts from the Ohio, the Missouri, the Illinois, and both ends of the great Mother of Waters. By the time Thomas Jefferson purchased Louisiana, the town could boast more than two hundred homes, most constructed of native stone. Soon thereafter Ohio flatboat merchant Moses Austin visited the city, stating that many of the homes were “large but not elegant.” So while the socially elite and old-family French maintained a strict class structure in the midst of their busy provincial calendar, St. Louis was nonetheless a rowdy, rough-and-tumble, bruising city appropriately planted at the gateway to the greatest wilderness on the continent of North America.

By the autumn of 1815, when Titus began to sweat over Hysham Troost’s forge, hammering iron into wagon parts, beaver traps, and locks for guns, the war with the British up at the Great Lakes and down at New Orleans had all but strangled off the western movement. American trade retreated from the upper Missouri: unrest fomented by British traders among the distant tribes in that northern country drove American trappers from those beaver-rich regions.

For the next few years the Americans pulled back, biding their time as the British took advantage of the situation—reaching out from their posts, going among the tribes with a missionary zeal, reaping rich fur harvests in that land of bounty. But over time the westward-yearning tide from America’s east became undeniable. By 1820 fifty wagons a day were being ferried across the Mississippi to St. Louis. Already the most daring of settlers had pushed far beyond the city, 230 astounding miles from the mouth of the Missouri into the Boone’s Lick region! Advancing settlement was taming that great river valley at the unbelievable rate of some forty miles per year. Those vanguards straining against the eastern boundary of that greatest of all American frontiers were assuredly a much hardier breed than those who at the same time were content to seep across what empty space was left throughout the Ohio and the Tennessee country. Indeed, those who left St. Louis behind to settle among the fertile bottomlands foresting the capricious valley of the Missouri more closely resembled their forefathers who had pushed down the Monongahela, hacked their way into the Cumberland, blazed trails across the canebrakes of Kentucky a hundred or more years before.

Here at the edge of all that, Titus repaired their wagons. He shod their horses. He sold them spare locks for their rifles. Then watched them go.

Farmers!

With every month and season and year he despaired that there ever would be ground left out there, in all that rumored expanse, that would not be turned by a plow, crossed by an ox, or flagged with surveyor’s stakes. Some place left wild enough that farmers and settlers and merchants had no desire to go and change it in their image.

Why, he even heard talk of Indian farmers! No longer the stuff of war paint and scalp dances, but Indians who raised acres of beans and maize, working the rich, black earth in neat green rows, some even harvesting peaches and apples from pruned orchards traced with footpaths and a web of watering ditches. There were no cities of gold, the passing settlers declared as they left St. Louis behind. At least no cities like those the Spanish searched for. Instead, the land’s true wealth lay in all that fertile soil among the river bottoms, ground long ago swept clear of timber by floods. Land where a man’s plow could cut as easily as a hot knife through churned butter just brought up from the chill of the springhouse.

After all those years watching their kind trickle across the river to St. Louis before putting the city at their backs as they spread out in a great, wide front like a fine dusting of human spoor, Titus decided that he would never lay eyes on country yet unseen by white men. Land where he was certain his grandfather’s spirit had gone to its final rest. That mythical Eden where rumor had it no man had ever, nor could he ever, reign supreme for it was ruled by the great beasts of the wilderness. If these hundreds, then thousands, of stoic settlers could push against that hardwood frontier where they intended to raise their cabins, clear the land, slash their plows into the great roll of the earth—then Bass despaired of ever finding where the buffalo had gone.

Perhaps they were mythical beasts, after all. Nothing but yarns, the stuff of nightmarish stories long ago spun for youngsters gathered at the knees of old ones first come to the Ohio and Cumberland borderlands. For certain, there must have been a few buffalo at one time—at least until the Indians and the earliest settlers had finished them off.

With the sour taste of bile in his throat Bass many times recalled his grandpap’s story of how the founders of Rabbit Hash raised the alarm to put an end to the rattlesnakes in the surrounding area by once and for all raiding the dens of those serpents. All able-bodied men gathered on a succession of Sundays—the Lord’s Day normally given over to the study of the Word but now spent ferreting out evil embodied in the shape of Satan’s hissing serpent—the entire community marching out to climb among the stone ledges, prodding the cracks and crevices with their broadaxes and hatchets, pitchforks and hoes in hand, until the yellow and black rattlers were no more. In gleeful celebration the men tormented some of the last snakes before those too were dispatched. One of them, a yellow monster more than six feet in length, the men had teased and taunted with their hoe handles for more than an hour before the snake viciously clamped down on one of the hickory poles, therein releasing its deadly venom. Before their eyes those astonished men watched the poison rise through the grain of the wood a full twenty-two inches before the rattler’s head was severed with a blow from a belt ax.

Despite what frontier folk had long claimed and Titus himself had come to believe, wanted to believe, needed to believe—that unlike those yellow Kentucky rattlers hunted to extinction, the buffalo had merely moved west to escape the encroachments of man—Titus finally decided he had been fooling himself.

Now he knew there simply were no buffalo left.

As his sense of loss deepened, so he came to drink more with each passing year, despairing of ever finding a new dream to replace that great and shaggy one he had carried inside him so long, the dream that had lured him away from his father’s place, seduced him down the great rivers and eventually enticed him here to the gateway of the frontier.

At the first of those blurred, grog-sotted days, more than anything Titus sought a new dream to hang his fading hopes on, something to fix his future squarely on besides those long-gone buffalo.

But as the seasons rolled past, even that no longer mattered. Not dreams, not hopes, nothing that faintly rattled of the future. With a little more numbing alcohol to deaden his pain come payday each week, he found himself caring just that much less that he no longer had a reason to hope. Eventually it no longer mattered that he had ceased to dream.

How Titus came to enjoy that contented reverie he sensed with the first sip of each mug of metheglin brewed from the fermented honey found in the pods of the honey-locust tree and mixed with water; or mead, a potent brew of metheglin fermented with yeast and spices—later on fighting down the panic that swept over him when he reached the bottom of each cup and grew desperate for more. What liquid amnesia burned its way down his gullet made it easier to forget all that he had left behind to get here and seize his dream at last … for now he realized his dream was nothing more than that—a wisp of fantasy, hope without substance.

Drink he did these days, haunting the stinking watering holes nearly every night when he had money in his pockets. After all, Titus had little else to spend his wages on. There in his corner of Troost’s livery he had enough blankets to hold winter’s bite at bay, them and a chamber pot Bass would empty when he got around to it. Beyond those simple requirements all Titus needed to provide himself were his infrequent meals, taking them out and about the town whenever and wherever he chose, then returning to darken the tavern doorways that dotted the gloomy streets and narrow alleyways near the wharf, there to drink himself into another numbing stupor. More and more of those mornings-after he discovered that instead of having stumbled his way back to the livery, he more often than not woke up beside some less-than-comely wench who occasionally smelled even worse than he.

Then there were the all too frequent fights—most of them nothing more than good-natured eye-gouging romps with his fists. Nothing more than raucous brawls wherein rowdy men wore off their pent-up energies or burned off their cheap but stupefying liquor. Yet through the years Titus could recall standing in one of the wharfside grog-shops or beer-sties when a fight turned poisonous, downright deadly: the combatants no longer wrestled and pummeled, no longer bit and gouged in some degree of good backwoods sportsmanship with it all. Most times it stunned him just how quickly those tests of stamina and bloodied good humor would turn murderous, knives drawn or pistols pulled—one man to stand victorious over the other who lay dying, his life oozing onto some mud-soaked, slushy floor.

Bass lost all but a handful of his fights, usually ending up as the one dragged out into the snow or the rain, there to be left unconscious for what roaming curs might happen by, drawn by the scent of blood to lick at his wounds, some to raise a leg and mark him territorially with the true measure of their disdain. No, Titus Bass wasn’t really all that good with his fists, nor was he really nimble enough on his feet to dodge the hard and hammering blows, much less quick enough to make good a speedy retreat. But until that March of 1824 he could be thankful of one thing: at least he hadn’t run into a man who had pulled out a gun, or a knife, or some other weapon every bit as deadly.

“Lucky you were,” Hysham Troost growled at him early that cold morning. His words frosted about his head like a wreath of steam as he cradled his young apprentice’s head across one arm.

Titus came to slowly, eventually blinking up at the blacksmith through one swollen eye, the other crusted shut. His puffy, bruised lips tore apart their seam of bloody crust. “L-lucky?” His tongue felt swollen to twice its size, likely bitten. And old coagulate clogged the back of his throat. “This … don’t feel like lucky.”

“From the looks of it I’d say the bastards used devil’s claws on you.” Troost dipped the rag back into his cherrywood piggin and wrung it out before squeezing drops into the dark and crusting tracks matted in the thick brown hair behind Titus’s ear, lacerations extending on down the back of his neck, ending only at the shoulder. “You musta been turning when the feller what wore them claws smacked you. Damned lucky them cruel things didn’t connect square on your face. It’d tore your eye plumb outta the skull if’n they had.”

“Devil’s claws,” Titus groaned as the term sank into his groggy, hungover, brawl-hammered brain. He closed his eyes again to the shards of icy pain with this cleaning of those wounds. That inky blackness helped but a little. “W-what’re devil’s …”

“Just like iron knuckles, wore by them mean bastards what you’ll find in them hellholes where Titus Bass goes to drink himself onto his face. In my time I’ve see’d just such a thing used once or twice myself.” Troost pantomimed as if pulling something on his right hand, then made a fist with it, the fingers of his left hand serving as the curved claws protruding from the knuckles. “Like iron nails they are. Slip their fingers into a set of ’em. Use ’em to rake a man’s face, tear up his chest, down his arms, or across his belly—opening him up like a slaughtered hog. With a swipe or two them claws can butcher you good.” He wagged his head, and then with a voice grown thick with sentiment, he said quietly, “Damn, but you’re lucky, Titus.”

“My head … don’t feel that way.”

“The day you walked in here years ago, I had you figured for better sense. But over time you’ve got yourself stupid. Real stupid. Damn, but I just know you’re gonna make me sad one of these days—me going to look for you and find you dead. Why you gotta go looking for trouble the way you do?”

“I don’t … don’t look.” He squeezed his matted eye shut as Troost dribbled water across them both to loosen the crust before rubbing more of the coagulate free.

“Well, then—maybe you are just what you say you are: one unlucky son of a bitch. Trouble must come looking for you … because for about as long as I’ve knowed you—trouble’s had it no problem finding Titus Bass.”

“I ain’t never gone to prison.”

“Maybe that’s a matter of time,” Troost said. “Prison, or a grave.”

“Prison? I never stole no man’s purse, nary a horse neither. And there ain’t a grave been dug what can hold me!” He lamely tried to chuckle at that, laugh at his predicament and hopelessness. But the self-deprecation did not last long for the physical hurt he caused himself.

“You know what they do to horse thieves hereabouts, don’t you?” Troost asked.

Of course he knew. Over the years Bass had seen many a thief caught and brought to swift and primitive justice in old St. Louis. Down on First Street was where they dealt with such criminals at a small, dusty patch of ground where stood three pillories and a pair of flogging posts.

“I know. They start by giving a horse thief stripes.”

Behind the black and bruised lids where Troost ministered to his torn flesh swam the scenes of those he had seen lashed to the posts: their wrists bound together, pulled up high with a rope looped through a large iron ring at the top of those ten-foot posts buried firmly in the ground. Barely able to stand on their toes, the guilty were given an old-fashioned flaying with all those horrid strands of a knotted cat-o’-nine-tails.

That done, a special penalty was exacted by the town constables. First the criminal was held down while he was branded: an H on one cheek, T on the other. With his skin still sizzling, still screeching in pain, the thief was hauled out of the dirt and dragged over to one of the pillories, where a constable locked the top bar of the pillory over his neck, then nailed the thief’s two ears to the wooden yoke. There the criminal remained, nailed in place and unable to move much at all for the next twenty-four hours. Only then was he freed, after the nails were cut free, ears and all, with a huge knife, just before the yoke was removed. The bleeding, branded criminal was then allowed to run, to flee, certain to carry the severity of his punishment with him the rest of his life, a marked man with a most uncertain future.

No matter what crimes of passion he had committed in his young life, Bass had never knowingly stolen anything of consequence. A few eggs, maybe a pullet here and there, but nothing that really mattered nor gave his conscience the fits at night. He’d never started out to hurt anyone, no matter how badly he ended up hurting himself.

“Damn you,” Hysham Troost muttered softly as he leaned back, studying Titus side to side. “That’s ’bout all I can do for you now with that horse liniment. Smells to hell, don’t it? Well, you just lay there an’ suffer, goddammit. I got work to do: mine and yours too now. Ain’t the first time, is it? Here you lay back all bunged up again, and I gotta take up your slack—”

Titus tried to hoist himself up onto an elbow, but he hurt too much to get very far before that elbow gave out beneath him and he collapsed into the hay atop his pallet of blankets.

“Lay there, goddammit,” Troost ordered gruffly. “About the worst beating I seen you get, so you’ll just have to sleep this’un off. Worst I ever see’d. Damn. It just don’t pay to care about you, does it?”

“Glad … glad you care.”

“I ain’t one to,” Troost snapped angrily. “I don’t wanna care for no man who don’t care for his own self. And it sure is plain as sunshine that Titus Bass don’t care for his own self. Just look at you.”

“When I … I get better, you bring me a mirror,” he croaked dry as sand, trying out half a puffy-lipped grin. “I’ll look at my own self then.”

Wagging his head with a weak smile, the blacksmith replied, “Damn you, Titus Bass. Here you are all cut up, your muscles knotted tighter’n new harness—and you still can make me laugh. You are a caution, son. A real, honest-to-goodness caution.”

He felt the older man pat his shoulder lightly, listened as Troost rose from his side and moved out of the stall where Titus made his home in the older man’s livery. Nearby sat a small iron stove radiating welcome heat as he shivered from time to time in his clothes soaked by winter’s last sleety snow. Maybe it was even spring’s first freezing rain that had battered St. Louis last night. No matter. Spring or winter now—they were just as cold, either one. He needed to get out of the clothes but knew he didn’t have the strength and sighed.

Looking back now, Bass couldn’t remember much after he had plopped himself down near the great stone fireplace at one of the grogshops and begun drinking the thick, heady stuff that burned all the way down his gullet. More and more he drank, slowly numbing his despair at ever finding what he had been seeking for so long. Just another night of punishing the whiskey and that sweet lemon-flavored rum brought upriver from New Orleans. Painkiller carried there to the mouth of the Mississippi by ship from some islands down in the great seas of the south. Another night no different from all the others gone before, he had counted on drinking his fill before stumbling out back of the saloon to one of the tiny, stinking knocking shops where women of all hues and shapes serviced the frontiersmen and riverboat crews coming and going like bees to this veritable hive at the edge of the wilderness.

For the moment there were snatches of memory, scenes that flitted behind his eyelids whether he wanted them to or not—it simply hurt to work his brain so. There in the mud and the cold rain outside the low door … the smoky light within … finding his whore and another man. Titus had shoved away. The mocking laughter. Then that stranger’s friends, two—maybe three—more had come up when the argument had started.

Why he ever argued over a whore? Hadn’t he learned his lesson? Whores had nearly killed him twice now. Annie Christmas’s gunboat girls all the way downriver to Natchez when he was barely gone from home. And now this crooked-nosed woman he hungered for bad—a woman busy with a bull-headed, nasty sort of customer with even meaner friends.

Maybe he was lucky he had been turning, like Troost said. Whoever used those claws on him might well have killed him there by the whore’s doorway. Or he might never have come to … if the blacksmith hadn’t come hunting for him at first light. Vaguely he remembered someone rolling him over, feeling the cold bite of rain lancing against his wounds, sputtering at who took hold of him as Titus tried to get his eyes open to see, working his mushy mouth to say something to the bastard hurting him so in dragging him up and out of the icy mud and puddles of bloody water.

Just leave me be! his mind had screamed every bit as loud as his body had screamed in pain.

Then he’d been draped over someone’s shoulder and hauled down the street when he’d passed out again. Had to be the blacksmith, Titus had figured just before he’d sunk again into the deep and welcome blackness of that hole he was digging for himself more and more every week, every month, every one of these last few years as he grew more and more bitter, more hopeless of ever knowing what it was his grandpap had sought, what men like Levi Gamble came west to find.

For Titus Bass there was simply nothing left to seek. Long ago when he’d begun his drinking, trying to kill himself slowly night by night an inch at a time, he had decided that his life was better short, better that than lived without hope. Better short than a life lived without that same sort of dream that had brought his grandpap to a new land.

Undeniably it was a hole he was digging for himself, a little deeper every day. For damned sure no man had yet dug the grave that could hold Titus Bass—but already he had a good start on the one he was digging for himself.

Goddamned whore.

Even the women had lost their allure for him. So why did he still seek them out? And make such an ass of himself in the process?

Titus tried to roll to the side carefully. It hurt too much, so he stayed there on his back, sensing the warmth from the tiny stove on one side, his other side still chilled and damp.

That first week he had begun work for the blacksmith years before, he and Troost had boarded up one of the stalls in a far corner of the livery. He had never made himself a door, not ever really needing one to his way of thinking. No reason to bolt things down or lock them up. He had long ago wrapped up his grandpap’s rifle in an old sheet of oiled canvas and stuffed it up high in the rafters of the livery above his stall—having decided he would never have call to use the rifle again. That curly-maple stock carried so very, very many miles in that hope of reaching the place his grandpap’s spirit had sought. Where the great and shaggy creatures ruled. Wherever they had disappeared, his grandpap’s spirit was likely at peace there, for all time.

This was something Titus realized he would never share. That sense of peace, contentment, fulfilled of his quest.

What few possessions he owned hung above him from pegs and nails driven into the walls of his tiny cell: his grandpap’s shooting pouch, odds and ends of extra clothing, a colorful bandanna, even a French-silk scarf given him by one of the dusky-skinned whores he favored in one of those knocking shops where a man degraded himself much, much more than the women he sought out in such places. Not a hell of a lot to show for his thirty years.

On the other hand, by the time his grandpap was his age, the man had brought his family into the canebrakes, fought off the French and their Indian allies, and through it all carved himself out a little place in the wilderness.

By the time Thaddeus had seen his thirtieth winter, he had cleared twice as much land as most men, raised more crops out of that rich soil than any other in Boone County, and sunk his roots down deep, deep.

Now, Titus? He had nothing to show for his years but his scars, and his miles, and the crow-foot beginnings of some wrinkles. He figured the graying would not be long in coming.

In no way was he living up to the Bass family name. He had failed in all respects, sinking lower and lower in despair and self-pity with the turn of the seasons. Failed in his attempts to accomplish anything near what the other men of his family had accomplished in their years walking the face of the earth. He had failed to make something of himself—no ground, no stock, no crops, no wife, no children. And no dream.

Nothing but his scars.

Long ago he had even considered going back home. Eventually deciding he could never return to Rabbit Hash, Boone County, Kentucky. Never to go back as Thaddeus’s prodigal son. Nay, the old wounds were still too deep for him to lick, and return with his tail tucked between his legs. No home left for him back there where his brothers and sister had likely started families of their own long ago, every one of them working to clear all the more forest with Thaddeus, to push back the wilderness just that much more for the next generation to come.

“Titus,” the blacksmith’s voice whispered close to his ear. “If you’re awake, want you to know I laid some victuals close by. Here at your left hand. It’s within reach, son. I’ll cover it with one of the missus’s towels so the bugs don’t come crawl in it right away. But you’ll have to keep the mice out of it.”

“Thank … thanks be to you, Hysham.”

He patted Bass’s arm gently, then rose again. “You sleep. Eat when you want. I’ll get more if’n you want. Come see to you later in a while.”

How lonely he felt hearing the footsteps shuffle off across the dried hay spread over the pounded clay floor of his little stall, footsteps fading down the row of stalls. In a moment he made out the distant hiss of the bellows exciting the fire, imagining the sparks sent spewing into the air like darting fireflies. Then Troost began pounding on the anvil, sure, solid, clocklike strikes with his leather-wrapped hammer.

Titus had no home.

Not Rabbit Hash. And St. Louis wasn’t any more of a home to him either—even as much as Hysham Troost had taken him under his wing and shown him what a man could do with his hands when coupling fire and iron.

“Almost like a man and woman, ain’t it?” Hysham had declared one day when they were fashioning rifle barrels: huge, heavy octagonal shafts of steel they would eventually cut with rifling and brown to a dull sheen. “A man and woman come together with such fire, softening their hardness in that coupling. Brought together in such a way they eventually become something new, different from ’em both by themselves. Same as what we’ve been doing here, Titus. It’s a good life you’ve chose for yourself. A good life for a man, this work.”

True enough. At Hysham Troost’s elbow Bass had taken what rude skills he had learned from Able Guthrie and perfected them—learning to make nails, sharpen plowshares, mend wagon tires, fashion beaver traps and lock parts for rifles, as well as repair all the many mishaps befalling ironware of the day, for much of that iron was poorly made, impure in grade, and more often than not very brittle. While all farmers in the St. Louis region, like Guthrie, possessed the rudimentary skills it took to crudely fashion a horseshoe or repair a grub hoe, practically none of them had the skills and tools to accomplish anything more sophisticated in the way of repair, much less manufacture.

There in that warm corner of Troost’s livery beside Hysham’s forge, Titus became a part of the process—no more than a tool like the other tools he used—the huge bellows, a bench vise, a half-dozen hammers, a sledge, a shoeing hammer, a horseshoe punch, a handful of tongs, two hand vises, at least seven files and a pair of rasps, a wedge and cold chisel, along with an ax-eye punch. The whole of it could be carried by one pack animal if need be, with weight to spare … yet with such an outfit and an anvil—a blacksmith could forge miracles, if not repair dreams.

The frontier blacksmith was truly an important member of any community. Especially for the frontier rifle makers.

Many times over the years Hysham had given Titus a perfectly round steel rod of a certain size and a long rectangular piece of iron he was to shape, welding it inch by inch around the long rod, withdrawing the rod after each weld to cool it, reheating the iron while he did so, making weld by weld until he had his octagonal rifle barrel shaped around that rod.

A craftsman like Troost even showed Titus how to fashion his own rifling tool completely out of wood, save for the small cutting edge of fire-hardened steel. With this Titus would be given the next task of inserting the tool with its small cutting button, twisting and drawing, twisting and drawing, removing tiny curls of the barrel, making lands and grooves of a particular caliber’s twist as specified by the growing rifle trade in the city.

“You need a hot fire, Titus,” Troost had explained early on. “Don’t know what all you’ve learned so far—so you pay heed what I got to teach you. Man can use seasoned hickory, or even oak bark—but I prefer to use my own charcoal. Made right out there in my own kiln.”

Charcoal meant cutting and splitting wood. Across the years of sweating summer and winter, Titus came to appreciate a good, sharp, narrow—or felling—ax. With its handle or helve at two feet six inches in length, carved of shell-bark hickory and set into a head weighing no more than four and a half pounds, it was a tool no man on the frontier could do without. Many times had Titus spent a portion of a day selecting a proper piece of seasoned hickory, whittling it into rough shape for an ax handle, then smoothing it with a piece of broken glass, eventually to wedge it into the ax eye so that it would stay despite hard use.

Pity that men did not treat their axes more tenderly, Titus discovered, making sure to warm them on frosty mornings to lessen the danger of breakage to that honed edge. And woe to the boy who allowed his father’s ax to bounce from wood to rocky ground, or the wife who used her husband’s ax to cut the bone from a gammon of bacon.

But without just such flaws in human nature, Hysham Troost preached, “There simply wouldn’t be enough work for a good blacksmith hereabouts.”

Long, long after Titus heard the last ring of the old man’s hammer on anvil fade from the sodden, cold air of the livery, he felt himself nudged, awakened rudely.

“Shit—you damn well don’t look like you’re in no shape to do no work for a man.”

At the strange voice he tried to turn his face, tried easing open his puffy, crusted eyelids. Clearly this wasn’t Troost kneeling nearby. A different voice. A different smell.

“Don’t try to talk right now,” the stranger continued. “I punched your fire up there in that leetle stove ye got yourself thar’. The warm sure does take the bite off this’r night.”

Bass listened as the man shuffled about in the hay nearby like a dog making its bed, then settled back with a grunt and a sigh. The stranger was eating something, his lips smacking as he continued talking.

“Come in hyar lookin’ fer a blacksmith. Ye be the blacksmith? Shit-fire. I be needin’ a blacksmith in the wust way. Traps is what I got need of. Strong-assed traps, mind you. Them criks and rivers in that thar’ kentry take ’em a toll of meanness on a man’s beaver traps. This’r nigger cain’t be takin’ off fer the far lonesome ’thout a smithy like you fixin’ on ’em.”

This was a … a Negra!

But … the man didn’t talk like no Negra Titus had ever met, sure as hell sounded nothing like the one he had known the best—Hezekiah Christmas. But, Lord and behold! The man had just called himself a nigger.

Painfully he cracked one eye open, his heart thumping with a generous mix of both fear and anticipation. In the dull glow of that squat-bellied toad of an iron stove Titus made out the dim, shadowy figure hunched in the corner of his tiny cell, chewing at what meat remained on a huge bone. Slowly he raked his sore eyes over the man, his nose suddenly pricked with the fragrance of what the man ate.

No, what Titus smelled could not be that bone the stranger tossed aside carelessly before wiping his mouth with the back of his sleeve. It had to be the clothing he wore.

In shadows that rose and fell down the man’s arms and legs long fringes danced in the muted rose of the fire’s dim light. Strips of dull color laced their patterns down each sleeve, over each shoulder, a round patch emblazoned at the center of the man’s chest, partially covered by a long, unkempt beard he wiped his greasy hands upon, then stroked aside. From somewhere beneath the tangle of his chin whiskers he produced a small clay pipe.

Straining his eyes through the murky, smoky firelight kicked out by that small, cast-iron stove, Bass tried to make out the man’s features. Sure as hell didn’t look like no Negra. Not like no Negra Titus Bass had ever laid eyes on—drunk or sober. No broad nose there … but it was damned hard to tell for sure in this light, what with all that matted beard.

As the stranger loaded the pipe from a pouch at his side, Titus worked to tear his eyes open wider, the better to make out the man’s hoary head—a mass of hair sprouting every which way in wild and greasy sprigs once he yanked off his low-crowned, wide-brimmed beaver-felt hat and carefully laid that wind-battered, rain-soaked old veteran aside. Evidently a prized possession, Bass made note.

Agonizingly Titus rolled onto an elbow about the time he cracked the second eye fully open and rocked himself up.

“Ah—thar’s a leetle life left to ye, is thar now?” The stranger leaned forward, his face coming into the stove’s glow as he stuffed a long piece of straw through the grate on the stove’s door.

Bass nearly gasped, low and rumbling, collapsing from his elbow again. “You … you’re a white man.”

“What?” the man asked, then threw his head back and roared in great peals of laughter, rocking back into the smoky confines of the shadows skulking in that corner of Bass’s little cell. “Me, a white man? Sure as sun, coon—I be a white man in sartin comp’ny, mister. But in t’other comp’ny, like these decent, God-fearin’ folks hereabouts, I s’pose I be took for as Injun as Injuns come.”

“I … thought … no. But you … said you was—”

“Spit out your piece—I said me what?”

“Call’t yourself a Negra.”

The stranger’s brow knitted up a moment, quizzically working that over in his head; then he suddenly rocked forward, roaring in laughter again. “I’ll be go to hell right hyar an’ let the devil hisself chaw on my bones. If’n that don’t take the circle! I call’t myself a nigger, mister.”

“That’s what I said—just what you called yourself.”

Leaning forward even more, the man came closer to Titus. Now Bass could see that one big upper tooth protruded outward like a hound’s unruly fang. Likely from force of habit come of many years living with his affliction, the stranger constantly worked his upper lip beneath that shaggy and unkempt mustache, sliding the lip this way, then that, doing his very best to hide that large yellowed fang that poked its way out into broad daylight despite some of the stranger’s best efforts.

Around it the man rasped his explanation. “An’ a feller what calls hisself a nigger ain’t in no way calling hisself a Negra. A Negra got him black skin, black as charcoal in that forge o’ your’n. An’ a nigger … well, now.” He scratched at the side of his beard, then pushed some of his long hair back over his shoulder, shrugging as if his tilt on things made all the world of sense to him. “Niggers come in all colors. No more’n that. Yest a word fellers I know come to use, s’ali.”

Bass licked his dry lips, then croaked, “W-where in God’s earth you come from?”

“God’s earth, eh? That’s purty good, mister. Fer that’s yest whar’ I come from.” He sighed. “Yessir. I yest come hyar from God’s earth. Say, ye look thirsty thar’. Bet ye could do with some water?”

Titus watched him drag the red cedar piggin close and pull the dipper from it.

“Hyar. Drink up,” the man commanded.

He did so, greedily too: savoring the cool, sweet taste and smooth texture of the water sliding like silk across his parched membranes.

“That ought’n limber up that talkin’ hole of yer’n,” the stranger declared. “My Lordee—what ye gone and done to yerself? All cut up the way ye are?”

“A fight over to a tavern last night,” Bass replied, his stomach suddenly feeling very empty with the slosh of water he had just poured into it. Maybe his stomach rolled only from the smell of the stranger’s food—the mere thought of eating made his belly curl up in protest.

“I see’d wust myself, mister. Blackfeet mostly. Though them Rees do a fairsome job on a nigger. When their kind get done workin’ over a man—he ain’t left near as purty as you. An’ it ain’t be all that long ago I see’d fellers wus’n yerself.” He clucked, sucked his lips sideways to hide that snaggletooth, and wagged his head. “Leastwise, as hangdown as ye might feel, looks to be yer movin’ and talkin’.”

“Don’t mean I ain’t half near death,” Titus grumbled with self-pity, his mind of a sudden feverish on something to eat after his fast of nearly twenty-four hours, despite how his stomach might protest. Then he remembered the food Troost said he’d brought in. Rocking unsteadily onto that one elbow, he craned his neck, searching for the plate in the shadows of his smoky quarters.

“Don’t ye take the circle now!” the stranger exclaimed suddenly, as if it had taken more than a moment for Bass’s words to sink in. “Why, if this coon ain’t got him a sense of humor.”

“You damn well got me wrong—I ain’t much at funnin’,” Titus admitted, growing impatient with his search. Troost had said he’d set that plate nearby, towel and all. “Never have been much at funnin’. Say, you see’d a plate around here? Had it a towel laid over keep the bugs out?”

“Towel, an’ a plate? Like this’un hyar?” the man replied, bald-faced and innocent as could be—producing the large pewter platter, complete with a striped towel covering it all.

“Likely that’s the one.” Bass took it from the man, immediately sensing just how light the whole affair was. Collapsing to his side, he flung off the towel, finding the plate empty. “What … the hell?” he screeched two octaves too high.

“Was them yer victuals?” the stranger asked. “Pardon the bejesus out of me. When I come on in here while’st back, I nudged ye. Spoke at ye too. But nary a move. Figgered ye wasn’t dead, way ye was breathin’—but had to be laid out black as night till the peep o’ day. Feller in that condition surely didn’t want him no victuals, so hungry as I was—I weren’t about to leave ’em go to waste.”

“You ate my god … goddamned supper?” Titus shrieked. The effort hurt, his sudden flare of hot anger shooting through every bruised scrap of tissue in his body as he rocked off his elbow, the plate clattering beside him.

“I’ll go fetch ye some victuals on my own, straightaway,” the stranger declared, starting to rise. “Ain’t used to St. Louie City, but I’ll likely find something in this’r town, even this time of night.”

“What time you figure it to be?” Bass asked weakly, his brain hammering with great slashes of pain once more as he closed his eyes, laid an arm over them as he sought a soft place for the back of his head.

“Hell if I know what time to make it out to be ’cept nighttime, mister.” He pointed off generally toward the rafters overhead. “From looks of the moon out there ’mongst all them clouds when I come in, had to be some past midnight.”

“Jumpin’ Jehoshaphat!” Titus growled nearly under his breath. “You come in hereto rob a sick man of his food this time of night? Cain’t you just leave a sick man to get his sleep?”

“Look who’s gone an’ got hisself techy,” he snarled back. “Mayhaps I best find me ’nother blacksmith do my work for me tomorry an’ ye can yest ferget me rootin’ ye out some victuals this time of night!”

Titus wasn’t doing a damn bit of good against the steam-piston throbbing that rocked his head. As quietly as he could, he said, “Don’t … please don’t go nowhere. Troost’d have my balls if I run off any business, mister.”

“Troost?”

“My boss,” Titus replied. “Man what owns this place.”

“That mean … yer saying ye ain’t the blacksmith?”

“I am. But I just work here.”

“Ye any good?”

“You damn bet I am,” he growled back, angry at the man. The thought of it: to be awakened by a stranger who had just eaten his food in the middle of the night, then turned around and insulted him too.

“So tell me,” the man said. “Ye gonna be worth a lick to work on my traps tomorry?”

“I doubt it.”

“Then I’ll wait,” the stranger said, smacking his lip around that fang the color of pin acorns. “’Sides. It’ll gimme time to have my spree. Come down hyar to St. Louie to have me my spree. So I got me time till ye heal yerself up.”

Titus grumbled, “That’s mighty kind of you.”

“Ye still hungry? Said ye was hungry. I’ll go fetch ye some victuals.”

“Least you could do so I can consider us even,” Bass replied, wagging his hammering head slightly.

The stranger slowly got to his feet and began pulling on a long blanket coat, well-greased and dirtied, blackened by the smoke of many fires. “Yer sure as sun a techy sort, ain’t ye?”

“Ain’t you touchy if’n some feller come in to eat your food and wake you up from a dead sleep?”

He clucked a tongue against that big front tooth, then said with a nod, “S’pose yer right, mister. I owe ye for yer hospitality. I does at that.”

Titus rolled his thundering head away, easing it over onto the elbow he crooked beneath his puffy cheek. “Supper would be a damn good start at showing your thanks.”

“If’n ye don’t take the circle, my friend! Fer a man what’s been beat as bad as ye surely be, I got to hand it to ye,” the stranger said with a nod of certainty. “No matter how yer painin’—ye sure don’t mind making use of that there mean mouth of yer’n, full of stupids the way it is.”

“Mean?” Titus snapped, trying to rise off his blankets, straining to hold his head up and bring the stranger’s face into focus. “You dance on in here the way you done, and you go off telling me I’m mean?”

“The way yer acting,” the stranger replied, “yer gonna be yest fine, I can see. Got lots of fight left in ye, yessirree! No matter that I find ye layin’ hyar lickin’ yer wounds arter someone nigh onto kill’t ye … but I don’t make ye out to be the sort to whimper an’ moan like a bitch ’bout to pup, is ye? Hell, no—ye still got ye sand enough in yer goddamned craw to bark at me like a bad dog.”

“Bad dog? Barking at you?”

“Yep!” And the stranger chuckled heartily. “Maybeso ye do got some ha’r in ye after all, mister—if’n ye can bark at me while’st yer all tore up the way ye are.”

“Ain’t no use in a fella feeling sorry for hisself,” Titus replied, working hard to focus on the stranger with his blood-rimmed eyes.

“Yer some, mister blacksmith. Think I yest might like gettin’ to know ye.”

“Don’t matter none to me if you do or if you don’t,” Bass snapped, immediately sorry he had. “I … I don’t have me many friends.”

The stranger crawled over and slowly knelt near Bass, the gamy aroma of him washing over Titus.

“Me neither, mister,” the man explained quietly. “Not … not many friends no more.” Then he suddenly reared back and slapped both palms down atop his thighs, rising to his feet. “Ye still hungry—I’ll run off an’ fetch ye some victuals.”

“I better eat,” Bass admitted. “If only to give me something for my belly to toss right back up.”

“Yer meatbag paining ye, is it?” He held down his hand to Titus. “Name’s Isaac Washburn. Isaac—with two a’s. What’s yer’n?”

“Titus Bass.” He struggled some to roll off his right side, but he eventually got the arm freed and gripped the stranger’s hand. “Where was it you said you was from, Isaac Washburn?”

“God’s kentry, Titus Bass. Up the Missouri—land of the Blackfeet, Ree, an’ Assiniboin. Seen me Mandan and Pawnee kentry too. Land whar’ them red niggers take yer ha’r if’n you don’t keep it locked on tight. Kentry where the moun-tanes reach right up to scrape at the belly o’ the sky, an’ the water’s so cold it’ll set yer back teeth on edge.”

Electrified at that announcement, Bass anxiously fought to prop himself on both elbows when Washburn released his hand. The older man clearly had a secure grip on Titus’s attention.

“You … you been out … out there?” Bass asked.

Isaac grinned, knowingly. “Out thar’?” And he pointed off into the distance. “Damn right I been out thar’. Seen yest ’bout ever’thin’ thar’ is fer a nigger to see north on the upriver.”

“Then … you had to seen ’em?”

“Seen what? Injuns? Yest tol’t ye: I see’d more Injuns’n I ever wanna see again in my hull durn life—”

“No,” Bass interrupted. “Have you see’d the buffalo?”

“Buffler?” Washburn reared back, snorting a great gust of laughter that showed Bass the underside of that great tooth all but sticking straight out of his upper gum. “Titus, I see’d buffler so thick at runoff time their rottin’, stinkin’ carcassees dang near clog the Missouri River her own self. From that river I see’d them critters moseying off to the north, goin’ round to the south, likely to gather up in herds so big they’d cover the hull kentry far as a feller could see.”

“Then you … you really see’d ’em!” he exclaimed under his breath, wide-eyed and aghast. Bass’s heart hammered mercilessly in his chest, every bit as hard as his temples throbbed. How he hoped this was his answer. “Damn, here I am talking to a man what’s see’d buffalo for real.”

Washburn looped a four-inch-wide belt around his blanket coat, securing it in a huge round buckle. “My friends call me Gut.”

Quickly his red eyes shot down to the stranger’s belly. Nothing there that in any way remotely appeared to be a gut on the man. He was about as lean as a fella could be. Made of strap leather and látigo, most likely, Bass decided.

“Why they call you Gut?” Titus asked. “Ain’t a man can say you got a big belly.”

Isaac laughed. “No—not ’cause of my belly. Others laid that handle on me some time back—up in them Three Forks, y’ars ago it were—I s’pose fer it be my favorite food.”

“You eat … eat gut?”

“Not gut rightly. Bou-dans. A parley-voo French word for sausage, s’all it is.”

“Bou-dans,” Titus repeated, trying out the sound of it on his tongue bitten and swollen from the beating.

“Yessirree, my friend. I’ll fix ’em for us sometime while’st I’m hyar in St. Louie. Plant myself down fer a short time afore I feel the needs be pushing upriver once more.” He stared off for a moment before saying, “Lord, but for once I’d love to see how a man could do getting hisself west foilering the Platte.”

“The Platte,” Titus repeated. He had heard something of it.

Washburn pointed off with a wide jab of his arm. “Runs right out to the moun-tanes. One of them rivers what comes in off the prerra.”

“All the way in from far away on the prairie?” He had seen rivers long and wide and wild. But to think of a river bringing water down from mountain snows, all the way here to St. Louis!

Washburn smacked his lips loudly, his eyes gleaming now that he had the younger man’s rapt attention. “Like I said it, Titus: that water comes all the way from them moun-tanes. What moun-tanes I see’d up north in the Missouri River kentry, them moun-tanes even down south of the Powder—they was still some ways off west from the criks and rivers I was trappin’ or trompin’. Word is, them moun-tanes on the headwaters of the Platte scratch the belly of the sky … an’ go all the way south to greaser kentry.”

He wagged his head in disbelief, trying to conceive of any range so high, any range that extended that great a distance. “S-same mountains?”

Washburn nodded in the dim fire’s light. “Same. North, to south—far as a man can travel in a month of Sundays.”

“Naw,” Bass scoffed, suddenly suspicious the older man was making sport of him. Titus had seen mountains, back east. That Kentucky and Cumberland country. He damn well knew there could be nothing near as big as Isaac Washburn was claiming. “I cain’t believe there’s mountains what run from the Missouri where you was all the way south that far.”

Squinting, the disheveled, greasy man gazed down at Bass incredulously. “Ain’t ye heard, lad? Right north of St. Louie not far from hyar, a man can foller the great Missouri north to trap or trade. Goin’ upriver, that man’ll run onto more’n a handful of big rivers, ever’ damn one of ’em coming in from the far, far moun-tanes.”

“I know ’bout the beaver trade on the upper river. Been making traps for years now,” Titus snapped a little impatiently. “What’re they called … them mountains you set eyes on?”

Isaac visibly rocked back on his heels. “Called … the Rockies. The High Stonies. The Shining Moun-tanes.”

“S-shining mountains?”

He nodded matter-of-factly. “’Cause they allays got snow on ’em, Titus. Even in the summer.”

“You seen them mountains shine for yourself?”

“Sure as hell have! I stared right up at ’em fer my first time near fifteen year ago when I was with Andy Henry on the Three Forks. Then I got me a close look again coming down the Powder this last winter with Glass’s outfit; saw ’em off thar’ to the west. Bigger’n yer gran’ma’s titties. Why, Titus—they’re even bigger’n what I ever figgered ’em to be in all my dreams growin’ up back to Albermarle County.”

“Where’s that?”

“Virginny.”

This was all coming too fast, too damned fast. He sucked in a big breath and let his answer gush forth like a limestone spring. “And the buffalo—then you’re telling me them herds is real?”

For a moment Washburn stared impassively at the injured man atop his blankets in the hay. “Damn tootin’ they’re real, Titus. Whatever give ye the idee buffalo wasn’t real?”

He wagged his head a moment, trying to find words that would describe the gut-wrenching despair suffered these long years. “I just … well, maybe ’cause I ain’t never seen one myself—”

“I see’d enough in that north kentry along the Missouri River, up to the mouth of the Yallerstone, even round the Musselshell, and down to that Powder River kentry—I see’d ’em with my own eyes.”

“Lots of ’em?”

Isaac clucked a moment on that snaggled fang, then said, “I see’d so many I thought my eyes gonna bug out … but then Ol’ Glass—he’s a friend of mine I tromped through some kentry with this’r past winter—he a way ol’t hivernant from way back … he told me I ain’t see’d all that many.”

“A hivernant?”

“Feller what’d spent him his first winter in the far kentry. Back ago Glass was one to live with the Pawnee some. But I knowed me some hivernants afore runnin’ onto Glass. Man-well Leeza had him a few hired men like that. Men so tough they growed bark right on ’em—like a tough ol’ cottonwood tree. But I gotta admit, Ol’ Glass had him more bark’n any man I ever knowed. Talked ’bout winterin’ up quite a few with the Pawnee—”

“This Glass, he said you ain’t seen very many, eh?”

Washburn jutted out his chin and slapped his chest once with a fist. “‘Many!’ I bellered like a stuck calf back at Glass as we was coming ’cross from the headwaters of the Powder, making for the Platte. ‘That’s right,’ the son of a bitch yest told me quietlike.’ If’n a man wants to see the hull consarned world covered up by buffler, he needs to take hisself on down to the prerra country come spring greenup. It’s there the buff graze and breed, moseying slow as you please afore the winds of the seasons. An’ they cover the hull durn earth from horizon, to horizon, to horizon.’” As he said it, Isaac pointed here, then there, then over there in emphasis. “That’s what he said, the truth of it too. I believe that nigger, Glass.”

“As f-far as a man can see?” Titus asked, incredulous. He had wanted to believe. Then gave up all hope. And now Isaac Washburn was telling him the whole earth was damn near black with them.

“Like a blanket coverin’ ever’thing,” Washburn added, kneeling slowly at Titus’s side. He held his open hands up to the glow in that little stove, rubbed them. “That’s the country I wanna go to see with my own eyes one day soon, Titus Bass. Clear to the moun-tanes.”

“How come you been all the way out there—but you ain’t never got to the mountains?”

“Hol’t on there, Titus,” Isaac corrected. “I been up the mighty Missouri for many a season now, trappin’ beaver for that greaser he-coon named Man-well Leeza. Then of recent I been at work for my friend Andrew Henry. But that don’t mean very many of us got all that close to them moun-tanes. While’st they was raised up all round us, we didn’t ever go to ’em.”

“Never?”

“Not once, no,” Washburn answered, kneeling beside Bass once again. “An’ when I was on my tromp with Ol’ Glass, we sure as the devil didn’t have us the time to go off lollygagging to look for no big buffler herds—man wants to keep his hair locked on, why—he keeps his head tucked into his collar out thar’ in that kentry. If’n he wanders off too much, the Blackfeet or them Rees yest might take a real shine to his skelp.”

“What’re these here Blackfeet, and them Rees?”

Washburn shuddered. “Rees? Damn ’em. Consarn them Blackfeet too! Baddest damn two-legged beasts God ever put Him on the face of the earth. Walkin’, talkin’, killing things is what Blackfeet is. Some time back they struck ’em a bargain with the Englishers to keep our kind out. Over the y’ars they been doing their best to make it hard on fellers like Leeza an’ Henry dealing in the Crow trade.”

“Crow? The bird?”

Washburn guffawed as he rose, his knees cracking. “Crow are Injuns up in that Powder River an’ Bighorn kentry. My, my—them are purty warriors—but a small tribe of ’em. They hate the Blackfeet ever’ bit as bad as we do.” He turned as if to shuffle away, tugging at that greasy blanket coat of his. “Til be off to get your supper.”

“Maybeso you can find us something strong to drink too.”

Washburn’s eyes narrowed. “Ye sure yer up to gettin’ yerself bit by the same dog nearly chawed ye in half last night, Mr. Bass?”

Titus nodded, his head throbbing so—he was desperate, certain that only a little of the hair of that mongrel that had mauled him so badly would truly salve his pain.

“All right,” Washburn replied. “Only ye’ll swaller ye some victuals first. But I’ll vow ye I’ll bring us back some barleycorn. Yessir. Isaac Washburn is due him a spree! Been a few seasons since’t I was last anywhere near me this hull consarn city. The up-kentry whar’ I been winterin’ ain’t much the place fer good barleycorn whiskey and white-skinned women, no sir.” He leaned forward, his face stuck down near Titus’s, aglow with a red shimmer from the stove. “I’m sure a likely young feller like yerself can show Isaac Washburn whar’ I can go to dip my stinger in some white gal’s honey-pot … now, cain’t ye?”

He grinned lamely. “I get myself healed up here, Isaac,” Bass replied, “we’re gonna both go dip our stingers in the finest honey-pots a man can find for hisself right here in St. Louie.”

“Whoooeee!” Washburn exclaimed, slapping the barn wall with a flat hand as he stopped and whirled about there at the door, the bottom of his blanket coat spinning out like a wheel. “Sounds to it like ye damn well better get on the gallop and mend yer own self right quick, Mr. Titus Bass. I don’t ’tend on waiting too long, now that I finally come back to St. Louie arter all these hyar winters of drinking bad-gut likker and wenching with red squaws. I owe meself a spree, young’un: white wimmens and good whiskey. An’ I’m invitin’ ye along fer the ride o’ yer life!”

At the mere thought of swilling down a whole lot more whiskey, his head pounded unmercifully, sharp pins stabbing right behind his eyes. Titus licked his swollen, cracked lips, wanting to feel hopeful about something, desperate to feel hopeful about almost anything—especially … what might lie out there.

Bass asked, “You really fixing to go on out yonder this year?”

“Yonder to them moun-tanes?” He moved into the shadows at the door.

“Wait!” Titus barked with a dry-throated croak, anxious that Washburn was leaving before he got his answer. “It true you’re fixing to light out there, going yonder the way you said you was—just go to the Platte and point your nose west?”

“Cutting my way right through the heart of that buffler kentry,” Isaac answered, then paused.

“Damn, but I allays hoped I could … maybeso one day do that too.”

“Maybeso, Titus Bass,” Washburn eventually replied, his eyes glimmering like twelve-hour coals there in the shadows of that, doorway—staring down at the younger man intently. “Maybe ye nigh well get yer chance, at that.”