Death Rattle

19

Puny as it was, that little Fountain Creek—at the mouth of which Kinkead and his four partners erected their Pueblo—just happened to be the Arkansas River’s biggest tributary between its source high in the Rockies to a point more than halfway in the river’s languid travels across the prairie. Their Pueblo stood at the foot of this wall of mountains, where a man gazed out upon the abrupt and spectacular end to more than a thousand miles of Great Plains.

It was a place far better than most for any five men to raise up their wilderness post.

Back in the spring of that year, 1842, Mathew Kinkead had thrown in with Robert Fisher, George Simpson, Francisco Conn, and Joseph Mantz—unlike Mathew, not one of them a veteran of the mountain fur trade. What did distinguish the four, however, was the fact that none of Kinkead’s partners was afraid to hang their asses over the fire. They were the sort who recognized this was not only a land of gigantic risks but a land offering unbelievable riches to those who would seize opportunity by the balls and refuse to let go.

As Titus Bass looked around himself at the Pueblo, appraising the men who had erected this adobe settlement, once again he was struck in the face with the cold reality that his was a bygone era. He belonged to an age already withering like last year’s willow, a way of life now struggling to draw in its last breath … sucking into its chest that unmistakable final death rattle.

“Damn me if it ain’t Titus Bass for sure!” exclaimed the man at Mathew Kinkead’s elbow as the two stepped into the firelight late that evening.

He squinted, not sure after all the intervening years, and the darkness, and the toll time took on a man. “Beckwith?”

“In the flesh, you ol’ dog!” Jim Beckwith lunged ahead and seized Scratch in his arms.

They pounded one another breathless for a moment, then each took a step back to gaze at one other.

“You was working for Vaskiss and Sublette up on the Platte, last time I heard tell of you,” Bass declared.

“I was. Them two had me trading with the Arapahos for robes. Afore they bucked out of the buffler business,” Beckwith admitted with a wag of his head. “Bents is too big a outfit for the small-timers to take on in this here country.”

“Working up there for Vaskiss and Sublette’s outfit, you ever come across a big, tall pilgrim goes by the name of Shadrach Sweete?”

“Shad! Hell if I didn’t!” Beckwith cheered. “A square shooter, ’bout as fair as they come when he’s dealing with the Injuns.”

“So Shad ain’t working for ’em no more?”

“Vaskiss gone out of business while back,” Beckwith declared. “Ain’t no more. When they folded, I headed south to Taos—”

“What become of Shadrach?” Bass interrupted.

“The day Vaskiss pulled out with his wagons and left that fort empty, Shadrach rode off hisself.”

Titus leaned in close. “Where to?”

With a shrug of his shoulders, Beckwith answered, “Dunno. Just lit out.”

“What direction?”

Beckwith stared at his toes a moment in contemplation before answering, “South by east.”

“Heading for Bents Fort?”

“Nawww.” Jim sounded definite on that score. “After what they done to run the small outfits off the Platte, Shad didn’t wanna have nothing to do with the Bents,” Beckwith observed.

“He say what he had in mind afore he took off?”

This time Beckwith half shut his eyes and raised his chin to the sky, as if conjuring up the memory. After a few moments those eyes flew open and his face brightened. “Said he was fixin’ to look for the Shiyans. I asked him if’n he was gonna trade with ’em or what, and he just said he needed to scare up some folks to take him in while he figgered out what he was gonna do. Then he rode off and was gone.”

Damn, Bass thought as he reflected on it. “That’s been some time now, ain’t it, Jim? Hope to hell no one’s gone and raised that big sprout’s hair.”

“It’s gonna take a passel of niggers to rip off Shad Sweete’s topknot!” And the mulatto grinned. “Mathew here tells me you and Bill Williams been out to California for horses.”

Titus nodded. “Brung us out a passel of ’em.”

“Solitaire tell you ’bout the trip me and him made to California with Peg-Leg?”

“You was with ’em three years ago?”

With a nod Beckwith scratched at his chin whiskers neatly trimmed into a goatee below a bushy horseshoe mustache. “We brung some horses out then. So Peg-Leg was with you fellas this ride too?”

Scratch watched how some of the other raiders at the fire glanced up at him when Beckwith uttered his question. “Peg-Leg and Solitaire … they had ’em a argeement on the way back. Ended up splitting the blankets back in Digger country.”

With a doleful wag of his head, Beckwith said, “Bound to happen, with them two mule-headed bastards anyway. A outfit can’t have two booshways like them. So what’d Peg-Leg do to make hisself a burr under Ol’ Bill’s saddle blanket?”

“A matter of killing a white man,” Scratch declared directly. “So Bill run Peg-Leg off.”

“Smith … killed one of your men?”

“About come to it,” Titus admitted.

“Hell, there’s always fights in a outfit like that,” Beckwith replied. “Sore feelings, ruffled feathers—”

“If’n it been differ’nt,” Titus interrupted, “Solitaire wouldn’t had no call to run Peg-Leg off the way he done.”

Jim wagged his head, not understanding. “What the hell business Williams got running Peg-Leg off?”

“Already too much bad blood not to,” Scratch explained.

“Damn that Bill Williams anyways!” Beckwith grumbled sourly. “He always was a cantankerous ol’ bunghole of a bastard. I s’pose he’s already told you how he never took to me, and that’s the God’s truth. Clear on back to the early years, or on that trip out to California neither. Fact is, the two of us just rubbed each other the wrong way right from the start, natural’, ’thout even trying hard to work up a lather ’bout me hating him or him hating me.”

“I s’pose that’s why some folks should never cross trails,” Scratch commented.

“You say your outfit come here with Bill—where’s that soft-headed son of a bitch now so I’ll make certain to steer clear of him?”

“ ‘Round camp somewheres,” Titus declared. “You just pushing on through, headed off somewheres, Jim?”

With a playful grin, Beckwith confessed, “I come up from Taos to open a trading house with my partner, fella named Stephen Lee.”

“Trading house—here?”

“Yep,” the mulatto answered. “We aim to have us a trade room in this here Pueblo. But, hell—I wanna hear what all you been up to in Absaroka. When I found Mathew was bringing out two jugs to have some talk with you fellas ’round a fire, I just natural’ invited myself along! Let’s sit and wet our tooters.”

Kinkead plopped himself down on a smooth-barked cottonwood, setting before him two half-gallon clay jugs of Simeon Turley’s pale aquardiente, transported north from the Taos valley in carts filled with hay to absorb all shocks. “Say, Scratch—you won’t believe what Jim told me just a bit ago.”

Bass turned to Beckwith. “Some news from Taos?”

“Might say,” Mathew explained. “He got married down to Taos!”

Titus inquired, “That where you come from—Taos?”

“Me and my partner, Lee, yep,” Beckwith said. “Brung my new wife up here with us.”

“Sure thought you had your fill of wives up there in Absorkee country,” Bass snorted with laughter.

“Them was some shinin’ times, they was,” Beckwith replied while some of the others laughed with him. “But Jim Beckwith’s not in the blanket now, so’ I took me on just one gal in the proper Mex way—Louisa Sandoval. Come from a fine Taos family.”

“You married for serious, eh?” Kinkead asked. “Gone and hitched in the church an’ all?”

Beckwith wiped his mouth after a long gulp of liquor, then said, “She’s full Mex, Mathew—so you know you gotta marry ’em up right.”

Scratch turned to face Kinkead. “What with your new wife, Mathew—how you come to wanna skeedaddle out of Taos?”

“Year ago spring, soon as the snow was melting off the road north, I brung my family up to the Arkansas,” the big man declared. “It was time to find me a place didn’t have so many Mexicans.”

“Winters ago, back when you split the blankets with Jack Hatcher’s bunch and give up on the mountains for Rosa an’ a feather tick, I never would’ve wagered you for the sort to ever put Taos behind you,” Titus confessed.

“True that was—back then. Was a time I figgered I had me a home in Taos for the rest of my days,” Kinkead sighed. “But, the last two years or so, the air ain’t smelled near as sweet in the San Fernando Valley.”

Scratch accepted the jug back from Beckwith. “That ain’t nothing new, Mathew. Them Mex was allays squeezing down on us Americanos with their laws and taxes anyways. Taking half our beaver when it damn well suited ’em—”

“This was something differ’nt,” Kinkead warned stiffly, swiping the back of a hand across his mouth glistening with drops of the potent, opaque liquor.

“Dust it off,” Bass demanded as he passed the clay jug on to George Simpson.

Mathew’s eyes grew cold. “First off, word drifted in to Taos and Santa Fe that the Texians were coming to invade us.”

Elias Kersey rocked forward, his eyes gleaming with intense interest. “Texicans?”

“Texians—used to be Americans. Folks what got their own country east of here,” Mathew began. “They call it a republic. Won it away from the Mexican Army a half dozen or so years back. A bunch of Tennessee boys, Kentuckians too—just like me an’ you, Titus Bass.”

Reuben Purcell waved a bony hand with impatience, asking, “So why the hell was these Texians coming to invade Taos and Santa Fe?”

“We had one report comin’ in after ’nother, said they had ’em a big army coming our way,” Kinkead explained.

“Why they want Taos when they had ’em their own brand-new republic?” Scratch asked.

Mathew turned sideways and took the jug offered him before saying, “Talk was, them Texians got the high head ever since they throwed the Mexican Army out of their new country, so they got to figgering all the land this side of the Rio Grande belonged to them.”

Scratch stared at the leaping flames a moment as he grappled in his mind for the location of the Rio Grande del Norte, then realized it flowed west of Taos on its way south.

Jim Beckwith jumped in now, saying, “All the news we heard had it them Texians was setting a army loose to throw all the Mexicans out of Mexico.”

Mathew added, “They was coming to take over the northern part of Mexico for themselves, make it part of their republic.”

“But Taos—that’s way up in the north of Mexico,” Titus offered, his eyes flicking back and forth between Beckwith and Kinkead with growing concern. “What them Texians want with Taos?”

Jim replied, “Take more land from the Mexicans they throwed out, I s’pose.”

Nodding, Mathew confirmed, “Ever since that autumn of eighteen and forty, ever’ last greaser in northern Mexico had a differ’nt eye when they looked at gringos like me.”

“You mean how they treated Americans?” Scratch inquired.

Kinkead said, “Don’t you ’member how years ago I become a Mexican my own self so I could marry my Rosa in her church?”

Bass’s eyes narrowed. “But Josiah didn’t need to—he had him a Flathead woman.”

“Josiah Paddock?” Beckwith perked up with sudden interest.

Scratch turned to gaze at the mulatto. “You know Josiah?”

“Me and Stephen Lee—my partner—we bought some of our goods off Paddock,” Jim admitted. “He’s a fair-handed man.”

Scratch took pride in that, saying, “Josiah an’ me—we rode together for a time.”

Then Mathew continued, “Even though Paddock had a Injun wife, he still become a Mexican citizen so to make things run smoother on his trading business.”

“Much as I’d never do such a thing my own self,” Titus began, “if a fella lives in Mexico and works with Mexicans, I savvy it makes good sense for Josiah to raise his hand and swear he’s gonna be a Mexican too.”

“Hold on there, fellas,” Jake Corn sputtered through a gulp of whiskey, shaking his head in argument as he glared at Mathew. “Wasn’t Kinkead here just saying it didn’t make no difference if any American swore to be a Mexican citizen, because every American was still gonna be treated bad the same way by them bean-bellies?”

Mathew nodded emphatically, his eyes gazing into the fire. “Didn’t make no differ’nce to the greasers even if we swore to be a Mexican like they wanted us to do. The way the Mexicans was starting to look at us Americans—we knowed they figgered us all as spies for them Texians.”

“S-spies?” Silas Adair snorted.

“That news of an army coming to the Rio Grande sure did stir up them Mexicans,” Kinkead explained. “You know it ain’t been that long since them Texians whipped the great Mexican Army—so now when them Taosenos hear this story ’bout these Texians marchin’ west to take us over too … why, ever’ last Mexican who ever was my friend turned his face from me.”

“You tellin’ me greasers black their faces against you?” Scratch bristled.

“Meaning to hurt me?” Kinkead asked. “Lookit me, coon! I’m twice’t as big as most any bean-belly in all of Mexico!” Then that merry grin drained from his face, “But …”

“But what?” Titus demanded, sensing his own uneasiness stirring.

Mathew sighed, “I do know myself of a fella here or there what had the piss beat out of ’em purty bad.”

“Beat on by greasers?” Corn demanded gruffly.

“Yep,” Kinkead admitted reluctantly. “An’ most of them what’s had some trouble like that has already cleared out of the valley.”

Titus leaned sideways to lay a hand on Kinkead’s shoulder. “You was right to mosey north to the Arkansas. Figgered to find your family a more sleepy stretch of country?”

“Look around, fellas. Beaver’s dead,” Kinkead complained. “The big companies got their hands around the buffler trade; gonna strangle it to death too. And now the Mexicans don’t want Americans comin’ anywhere near their country no more. All you gotta do is look around and you’ll see this here’s the land where a man can make a brand-new start.”

Scratch took a long drink. But the whiskey didn’t help: he kept growing more fretful. “Afore you pulled up your picket pins and left San Fernando, Mathew—you know of any greasers ever make things hard on Josiah?”

“Nawww, he’s a big-boned lad, Scratch. Just like me,” Kinkead reminded. “Don’t you worry none ’bout Josiah Paddock. You best remember I know the nigger what taught that big lad how to hang on to his hair in these here Shining Mountains. Any man what learns from Titus Bass sure as hell gonna keep a keen eye on his back trail. Ain’t no pepper-belly I know of gonna have the huevos to go scratching round, makin’ trouble for Josiah Paddock!”

Bass handed the jug on to Joseph Manz, then turned back to Kinkead. “You ask the lad if’n he wanted to move north to the Arkansas with you?”

“I did,” Kinkead confessed. “But he told me he was staying ’cause he’d come to know them Mexicans and didn’t figger ’em to raise no truck with him. ‘Sides, Josiah said he had a big stake already made down to Taos, didn’t wanna lose if he closed up and walked away from his shop. Said he didn’t fear they’d do him no harm—no matter how mean they made it for some others we knowed of.”

Bass rocked back and asked, “Them Texians ever show?”

“Not that none of us ever heard. Maybeso it was just cheap talk,” Mathew declared, wagging his head with regret. “Damn shame of it, here at our Pueblo we’re sitting right where Armijo’s soldados or them Texians either one could jump us real easy.”

“If’n you hear either one’s comin’—where’s a man like you to go?” Scratch inquired.

Kinkead gazed at him squarely. “Nowhere, Titus. Nowhere. Some men you can push out of one place after ’nother. As for me, I decided folks pushed me off from one place already. I ain’t gonna let any nigger push me outta my home again. I figger the Arkansas’s my home now, where I plan on livin’ out the last of my years.”

“Just like Josiah’s figgering on lastin’ out his years in Taos.” Bass worked at calming his fear. “After all this time, I’ll wager the lad talks purty good Mexican.”

Kinkead roared, “Good as any natural-born pepper-belly!”

When out of the darkness a loud voice suddenly bawled, “To hell with ever’ last pepper-belly, I say!”

The men at the fire whirled to find Bill Williams striding up, accompanied by two more of the raiders.

“That whiskey in them jugs?” Williams asked as he stepped right into the corona of warm firelight. “Three of us just been over to see how the herd’s grazing—”

His words dropped off in midsentence as Jim Beckwith stood and turned to face his old nemesis.

“How you been, Bill?” the mulatto stated with a flat, dispassionate voice.

The old trapper’s face went hard as slate, glaring at Beckwith. “I’ll be jiggered, boys. Seein’ how this Neegra shows his face to me here sure sours my milk, it does. Never thort he’d have the nerve to stay in the same territory I’m in—”

“Goddamn your eyes!” Jim snarled, muscles tensing along his jaw. “You’re the child just dropping right outta the hills. This here’s my home!”

“Y-your home, Beckwith?” Williams scoffed. “I say a low-down sack of Digger droppings like you don’t deserve no home! Maybeso you best crawl back under some shit-covered rock you come from!”

Of a sudden, Bass reached up and grabbed Beckwith’s wrist, stopping the mulatto in his tracks. But he asked his question of Williams, “Bad blood still atween you two, Solitaire?”

Bill’s eyes flicked to Titus, then back to the mulatto’s face. “Been some, it has. This here mongrel dog of a Neegra allays sided with Peg-Leg on ever’thing that first ride to California.” He grinned cruelly, saying, “Wish’t Beckwith been along so’s I could leave him dry up in the goddamned desert with Peg-Leg.”

“That what you done to Smith?” the mulatto demanded, his fists clenching and unclenching. “Leave him in the goddamned desert?”

“We give him plenty of horses to eat,” Bass said, releasing Beckwith and standing at the black man’s elbow. He took a step backward to place himself almost halfway between the mulatto and the old trapper.

Beckwith’s black eyes bore into Scratch. “You was part of this, Titus Bass?”

Before Scratch could answer, Williams grumbled to the others, “What with you boys ’llowing this here p’isen-brained Neegra to make his home here with you, our outfit gonna be pulling out come first light.” He sniffed the air. “Can’t stand this smell of half-dead yellow-bellied dog—”

“You sure mighty big on calling a man bad things when you got all your friends at your side!” Beckwith snarled, his fists flexing as he glanced a hateful glare at Bass.

“Better’n talkin’ bad behind a man’s back—just what a snake-belly black-ass like you does!” Williams snapped, his right forearm sliding up across his belly, the hard-knuckled, slender fingers coming to rest around that elk-antler knife handle. “Never you had any backbone to say a mean thing to a man’s face!”

“You ain’t bound to change, are you, Bill?” Beckwith shot back. “Still the same ol’ soft-brained idjit you allays was. Still runnin’ off at the tongue like a ol’ woman—”

“An’ you’re never gonna be a white man, are you, Neegra?” Williams interrupted, his bony shoulders drawing up threateningly. “No matter how hard Jimmy Beckwith tries to be white—”

The instant Beckwith lunged for him, Williams started to yank his belt knife free of the sheath, but Kinkead snagged that arm just above the elbow.

“No stickers, you sonsabitches!” Bass hollered as he jerked backward on Beckwith’s arm, stumbling at the edge of the flames.

The mulatto twisted, wrenching his arm free as the rest of the men at the fire bolted to their feet. Williams whirled around on one foot, surprising Kinkead when he jammed a hickory-hard knee into Mathew’s groin and pushed himself free of the big man’s hold on him.

“Watchit!” someone cried as Williams lurched between two of the raiders who were attempting to block his way.

Scratch suddenly hopped in front of Beckwith, screaming at Williams, “I’ll kill you my own self, you go an’ pull your sticker, Solitaire!”

“Best get out of my way, Bass!” Williams shrieked as he lumbered around the side of the fire, traders and raiders dodging out of the fray. “Gonna gut ’im with my bare hands!”

Just as Titus raised his arms out before him and started toward Williams, Beckwith shoved Bass from behind, hurling Scratch aside as the mulatto leaped around him. Landing on his knees, Bass jerked around to find Beckwith yanking his pistol from his belt.

“Goddamn you, Beckwith!” he shouted. “Don’t shoot!”

Williams was already under a full head of steam, his neck tucked into his shoulders as he closed on the mulatto.

But instead of pointing his pistol at Williams, Beckwith suddenly whirled the weapon around in his hand, gripping it by the barrel, swinging it backward at the end of his arm before he slashed downward the instant before the old trapper collided with the mulatto. The resounding crack reminded Titus of the dull thud a maul made as it drove an iron wedge into an old hickory stump.

Williams went down like every bone had been ripped from his body.

His heart pounding in his ears, anger at both men rising near the boiling point, Titus got to his hands and knees, crawling back to kneel over Williams.

“He breathing?” Rube Purcell asked as he came up, bent at the waist.

“Yeah, he’s alive,” Bass grumbled as he stood, not taking his hard glare off the mulatto.

Before any one of them, much less Beckwith himself, saw it coming—Titus lashed out with the back of his hand, the oak-hard knuckles slashing across the mulatto’s, mouth.

“You stupid bastard!” Scratch growled menacingly. “You pulled your goddamn pistol, ready to kill a man!”

“By dogs, he was gonna kill me if I didn’t lay him out first!” Beckwith protested, then licked at a trickle of blood seeping from the corner of his mouth.

“Maybe he should have kill’t you outright,” Titus said, a rumble of warning in the back of his throat.

Jim’s eyes grew wide with confusion. “You takin’ his side, Scratch?”

“I was willing to give yours a listen—till you knocked him in the head,” Bass said, tearing his eyes away from Beckwith so he could glance down at Williams. “Maybeso, you’d better go back to your Pueblo now while you got the chance.”

“Trouble is,” Beckwith admitted, “this ain’t finished ’tween him and me—”

“You gone mad with whiskey?” Titus demanded.

That appeared to bring Beckwith up short. “No. No, I ain’t so drunk I don’t know ’sactly what I’m doing when a—”

“Take him away, Mathew,” Bass commanded, wagging his head. “Get Beckwith outta here—now.”

“I could’ve killed him. You know I could’ve,” Beckwith pleaded. “But I didn’t. Son of a bitch had it comin’.”

Kinkead wrapped one of his big arms around the mulatto’s shoulders. “C’mon, Jim. Let’s g’won back to the Pueblo.”

Bass turned away from Beckwith, shaking his head in disappointment.

Kinkead started away, then stopped, still gripping onto Beckwith as he asked his question, “What you gonna do when Bill comes to, Scratch?”

“I ain’t got a notion what to do.”

“He’s gonna be madder’n a spit-on hen,” Mathew intoned. “And he’ll be hankering to come looking for Jim here. Finish things one way or another. Gonna be messy—”

“I’ll do what I can to keep Bill outta your Pueblo tonight, Mathew,” Titus vowed. “Then we’ll get our horses started away from here at first light.”

Titus Bass dug at an itch at the nape of his neck and came away with a louse. Goddamn that Pueblo, he cursed, crushing the louse between a thumb and fingernail. Then looked again at Ceran St. Vrain. “How many horses did you callate for a blanket?”

“Six,” answered the trader.

He laid a hand on the white blanket festooned with narrow red stripes running the entire length of the thick wool fabric, which St. Vrain had unfurled down the long wooden trade counter here at Bents’ Fort on the Arkansas. “Sure it weren’t five, Savery?”

This partner of the two Bent brothers took the reed stem of a clay pipe from his lips and exhaled a white wreath of smoke, smiling. “You know better, mister horse thief. And you ain’t no greenhorn pilgrim in this country neither. Yesterday, I sit down with Bill Williams, and I agree to take all I can off your hands … six horses a blanket.”

“Maybe you oughtta ride east with us, Scratch?” Elias Kersey prodded again as he stepped up to Titus’s elbow. “We’ll damn sure get better money for ’em back in Missouri.”

“True ’nough,” Bass replied, brushing his roughened hand across the wool as he stared at the stacks of blankets, the bolts of coarse and fine cloth, those trays of tiny mirrors, beads, tacks, bells, ribbon, iron axes, brass kettles—and on and on.

But his heart was telling him something far different than his head might try to make logic of.

Bass sighed, “Can’t think of nothing I want more’n to be home again.”

Kersey and those with him could see their enthusiasm for their ride to the Missouri settlements would not convert Titus Bass, so all turned away without another word of advice and stepped back to lean against the wall.

Scratch gazed steadily into St. Vrain’s eyes and instructed, “Tell one of your clerks here to go off an’ count what blankets you got still in your stores.”

“Blankets?”

“Said I wanna know how many blankets you got to trade me.”

When St. Vrain had dispatched one of the younger employees from the trade room to the storage rooms, he turned back to return his full attention to Bass. “We met before, I am thinking. Yes?”

“The fort was real young then,” Titus replied, struck by the memory of that spring in ’34. “Eight summers ago, Savery—when I come here looking to kill one of your robe traders. Name was Cooper.”^*

“Ah—it was that,” and St. Vrain nodded knowingly. “But instead, his cut-nose woman finished him off in our placita, our courtyard.”

“You ’member me from that?”

“Most I remember you from the old Cheyenne who come to keep you from dying that day.”

“He left afore I got pulled outta here on a travois,” Scratch said. “You know his name, Savery?”

“He was just another old Injun.” St. Vrain shook his head and shrugged. “I seeing him a few times since. But haven’t seeing him around the fort any time new.”

“Damn, if that red nigger wasn’t old way back then,” Bass ruminated. “His life was on his fingernails when he somehow brung me back from the dusk of my days.”

“Maybeso wasn’t your time, eh?” St. Vrain suggested.

Titus reflected, “Maybeso it wasn’t after all.”

The young clerk rushed back into the room, stuffing a short stub of a pencil over one ear while passing St. Vrain a piece of paper with the other hand.

The trader looked up. “Appears I’ve got plenty of blankets to trade.”

“Awright.” Then his eyes danced over the rest of the trade goods. “How many horses for a kettle?”

“Four.”

“An’ them calicos back in the corner, there?”

“Coarse cloth is one horse for one yard. Them fine bolts is two horses for every yard.”

Titus drew his lips up thoughtfully a moment, then eventually said, “Savery—s’pose we see just how close you can come to taking all my California horses off my hands.”

Hell if it didn’t play out to be a high-plains robbery! But then—when hadn’t dealing with a trader in these here mountains always been larceny of the first order? A man accepted the order of things and lived out his days … or, he could get out. Head back east, or push on for Oregon country like Meek and Newell had. No sense in gnashing teeth over such a fact of life. Complaining did no good. Them what chose to stay on after the beaver trade died was the ones what figured they might never hold the best cards, much less any winning cards—but they were determined to play out what cards they had been dealt the best they knowed how.

That was the mark of these hardy few who would endure.

No, he’d decided against pushing on with Elias and the others who elected to sell their horses five hundred miles or more east of Bents Fort after more weeks of driving their herd across the great buffalo palace of the plains. “Back east” still held no allure for him.

Instead, such a journey would only delay him getting back to her before winter came shrieking down across the north country. To get back to Absaroka, to search out that first winter campsite of Yellow Belly’s band of Crow—Scratch knew he would have to skeedaddle. And to make that march as fast as he needed to, he couldn’t be hampered by a herd of wild horses neither.

He hadn’t seen her since early spring.

And those two young’uns of theirs had surely grown a foot or more since he had last held them in his arms.

Titus hadn’t planned things to work out this way: being gone so long after he had assured her he was leaving only for some spring trapping in the Wind River Mountains. But that night camped near the Pueblo after they tied up the furious Williams and managed to pour enough whiskey down his gullet to soak him into a stupor so he’d pass out at the fire, Scratch lay in his robes, staring at the belljar clarity of the autumn sky overhead … and felt a discernible, painful tug. Something calling him back to her as quickly as a horse’s four hooves could carry him north.

His homesickness only deepened as they drove their California horses away from the mouth of Fountain Creek, on down the Arkansas for the mouth of the Picketwire,^* where the Bent brothers and St. Vrain had raised their huge adobe fortress squarely on the southern border of U.S. territory, like a gullet-choking gob of reddish-brown mud shoved right into the throat of northern Mexico itself. They found Charles Bent was off down in Taos doing some trading, but brother William and Ceran St. Vrain completed the wrangling with hardheaded Bill Williams to establish a per-head price on the stolen horses once the traders were assured the raiders would bring their herd no closer to the fort than some seven miles.

“We don’t want your horses eating up what’s left of the season’s grass we’ll need for our own stock this winter,” William Bent explained.

As he had ridden back from the fort with Solitaire and Silas Adair following their negotiations with the traders, Williams told the two how he and Peg-Leg, Thompson, and their bunch had reached Bents Fort with their first herd of stolen horses back in ’39 … only to discover the traders weren’t all that thrilled to take those California animals off their hands. After all those months and miles, after traipsing twice across all that desert—Bill Williams handed over hundreds upon hundreds of horses in return for nothing more than a keg of cheap Mexican whiskey!

Things hadn’t turned out near that bad this go-round with the powerful traders.

As he looked back on the last few months, Scratch could see how he had wagered his life on one more daring, risky venture … and somehow slipped through Lady Fate’s slim, grasping fingers to end up with more than he would have had to show after a spring and fall season’s worth of trapping the high country. Beaver was worth no more than a pittance compared to its high-water heyday. Plews were no longer king. Squaw-tanned buffalo robes ruled the roost now.

So any hivernant who’d had the green rubbed off him would be a durn fool to turn down St. Vrain’s calculations on just how many stolen horses it would cost a man for all them shiny trade goods the company had packed up from Mexico in carts, or clear out from St. Louis by wagon train.

Bass had held on to a hundred of the Californians he traded off to a small band of Cheyenne who were camped outside the walls of the fort, down on a bench beside the Arkansas. In exchange he ended up with a dozen of the strongest, hard-mouthed, lean-haunched prairie cayuses he could find among the Cheyenne herd. Twelve would be enough to follow him north to the Wind River country where he had cached his goods last spring. From there he planned on making a short scamper into the land of the Crow to find her and the children.

In less than another day, Bass had his Cheyenne pack animals in tow, ready to march north beneath the burden of more than eighty blankets, along with a bevy of weighty kettles and skillets, not to mention a wooden case bearing a hundred new skinning knives, and several hundredweight of other foofaraw that should damn near make him the king of all Absaroka. Tomorrow he would bid farewell to Solitaire and the other raiders who were now in their third glorious day of a drunken spree.

But for tonight he planned to have himself a doe-see-doe with St. Vrain’s Mexican whiskey, and push off at sunrise with a hard-puking, head-thumping hangover. Enough of a mind-numbing hurraw to last him for many, many seasons to come before he dared again venture out of Crow country—

Then he stopped dead in his tracks, staring through the open doorway into the booshways’ dining hall at that wide-hipped, black-faced woman, who wore a bright, multicolored scarf around her neck and a pleated Mexican skirt swirling around her bare black calves. But it wasn’t the bosomy Negress who turned and stepped over the doorjamb into the warm, lamp-lit room late that autumn afternoon that held Titus Bass’s rapt attention.

It was that pair of small, squirming, pink-tongued puppies she had cradled across her fleshy, brown arms!

^* One-Eyed Dream

^* What the mountain men called the Purgatory River.