Wind Walker

TWELVE

“Do you want us to go with you?” she asked him.

Titus looked at his wife. Last night, after they had returned to the post from having supper with Amanda’s family in the wagon camp, he thought he had had that question all figured out. But as the two of them stirred now in the predawn darkness, in their lodge pitched just outside the post walls, he knew he already had changed his mind.

“It will be a long journey,” he reminded.

“Not as far as it is from here to the land of my people,” she declared. “You still did not answer my question.”

For a moment he watched her as she laid more kindling on the feeble embers in the fire pit. “I thought you would stay here, for the children.”

“They go everywhere we go, Ti-tuzz.”

He heard the rustling of blankets. Looking over his shoulder, he found Magpie sitting up at the edge of the darkness. “You do your best not to make noise.”

She whispered, “I wanted to tell you something before you decided you were going alone.”

“I am not going alone,” he explained again in Crow. “Shadrach and his family are going with me.”

Magpie pushed some of her long hair out of one of her almond-shaped eyes. “We belong with you more than we belong here waiting for you at Bridger’s post.”

Scratch looked back at his wife again. “Much of that country will be new to me. Parts of it I’ve never been through.”

“Many summers ago, that was the country where you met Big Throat for the first time.” Waits-by-the-Water used the Crow’s name for Bridger as she leaned back and put some larger wood on the fire that began to cast a warm glow on the inside of the small lodge. “But I would not worry even if it was a completely strange land to you.”

“My popo will see us through it,” Magpie chimed in.

He grinned, his heart feeling much lighter. “Then you want to go with me when the wagons leave this morning?”

Waits leaned over and laid her hand on his. “Magpie and I will take care of everything in the lodge—taking only what we need for the journey. Flea can see to the horses. So that means you will see to Jackrabbit.”

“Do you want to take down the lodge and drag a travois with us?”

“We have enough of the heavy cloth we can tie up if we need shelter from the rain,” she stated. “I will leave the lodge here. Big Throat can care for it while we are gone to this Snake River I have heard so little about.”

So it was decided, not so much by him as by the two women in his family. They would be setting out together on this long journey this morning, all of them, as a family. Somewhere over the past day and a half he had first come to believe it would be far better for him to go alone, to leave her and the children behind at Bridger’s post when he set off with Shadrach’s family in following Hargrove’s wagon train to Fort Hall. Sweete had eagerly volunteered to ride along during their big supper inside the fort walls two nights ago after Hargrove’s meeting at the wagon camp.

After that brief and clearly unfinished confrontation with the wagon captain and his bully-boys, Amanda’s family had come back to the post with the old trappers for what was to have been a supper to celebrate this reunion of father and daughter and families. But for a while there it had all the makings of a wake, what with Amanda and Roman quietly despairing on what they would do once the train reached the Snake River and Phineas Hargrove pointed his nose southwest on the California Trail.

But by the time Shadrach returned from fetching his family for supper, the tall trapper sashayed up to the fire as cocky as any prairie grouse, plainly ready to bust his buttons with what he just had to tell Titus before he would burst.

“We’re gonna light out with the wagon train day after tomorrow.” He unloaded his news the moment everyone fell quiet around that fire crackling in the pit at the center of the stockade.

Bridger’s face grew worried. “You’re leaving me, Shad?”

Sweete looked at his old friend. “Wanna see some new country, Gabe. I’ll get to Fort Hall, then turn around. I’ll be back afore you can miss me.”

“What’m I gonna do ’thout you here?”

With a snort, he flung his thick arm around Bridger’s shoulder and shook his friend. “Same as you done afore I showed up!”

Bridger looked a little jealous of that freedom Shad was taking to wander. “Tired of that ferry work you was doin’?”

“Them seven others gonna work out slick for you,” Shad replied. “’Sides, the season is winding down awready. If them emigrants ain’t anywhere close to the crossing of the Green by now, they ain’t gonna make it through the mountains afore winter sets in. I figger we’ve see’d all but the stragglers by now.”

Jim chewed his upper lip a moment. “I’ll lay you’re right on that. Likely we’ve awready seen just about all of them what’s gonna be passing through.”

“Maybe some more of them Marmons,” Titus growled.

Turning to Bass, Jim said, “Young told me there’d be a heap more Saints come through here next season—but wasn’t no more coming through this summer.”

“A good thing too,” Bass declared with a slight shudder. “Didn’t like the read I got off that man’s sign. I seen my share of fellas glad-slap you on the back with one hand while’st the other hand’s dippin’ into your purse for all you’re worth.”

“That prophet didn’t seem like such a bad sort to me,” Bridger responded, “far as a preacher goes.”

Bass declared, “Doc Whitman—now that was a good preacher!”

With a wave of his hand, Bridger said, “Young and his flock gone on to their promised land. Even if Brigham Young don’t take ’em where I told him they should settle, I wish all good things for ’em. Sorry I couldn’t do a li’l more trading with that preacher’s folks. Likely them Saints won’t have much to do with Jim Bridger from here on out.”

“The farther they stay away from you, the better it is by me,” Titus said, then turned to Shad and asked, “Shell Woman wanna go?”

“See some new country with me,” he admitted. “Ever since I brung that gal out of Cheyenne country, her eyes has growed hungry to see more an’ more!”

Titus looked down at Waits-by-the-Water, recognizing the interest that was apparent on her face as she managed to snag a few words here and there of the men’s conversation. Roman Burwell stepped back to the fire, bringing young Lucas by the hand. Just before he had settled with the boy by his knee, Amanda rocked onto her toes to whisper something in her husband’s ear.

The emigrant turned to Shad in a huff, asking, “You say you’re riding along with Hargrove’s train, Mr. Sweete?”

“Figgered I’d come along to Fort Hall with you, lend a hand in what I could,” Shad said.

“I don’t need no … we don’t need no help,” Roman grumped. “Got this far just fine. We’ll make the rest of the way just fine too.”

Ignoring the settler’s peevishness, Sweete continued to explain, “Won’t get in your way. Comin’ only to see what I can do to help your bunch find a pilot what’d get you on to Oregon.”

Gripping her husband’s arm tightly, Amanda asked, “You really think we might find someone to guide us at Fort Hall?”

“Chances better up there at Hallee, than you waiting here,” Titus explained. “That post sits at the edge of the country you need to be showed a way through, where the crossings of the Snake are, how to ford that river, some such. You’ll do far better scratching up a pilot yonder at Fort Hall than you will anywhere along the road atween here an’ there.”

“What if we don’t find us a pilot?” Burwell asked, his long brow deeply furrowed.

Scratch thought a moment before he said, “Worst you could do’d be light out from there ’thout a pilot.”

Roman wagged his head unapologetically. “We can follow the wagon road where them who’ve gone before us come through that country. Ain’t nothing to staying on the road all the way to Oregon.”

But Scratch snorted, “What your family come through awready ain’t but a piss in a barrel put up against what you got left to go.”

“But we can’t go back if we don’t find a pilot,” Amanda groaned. “There’s nothing left for us back there but … lean times.”

Titus stepped over and gently laid a hand on her shoulder. “I ain’t sayin’ you go back. Hell, I’d be the last man to ever tell ’nother he should give in, turn around, and go back.”

That fuzzy patch between Roman’s eyebrows wrinkled testily. “Then what the blazes we gonna do when Hargrove an’ his pilot take off from Fort Hall for California … and we got no one to guide us to Oregon?”

Scratch gazed the settler in the eye. “You sit tight for the winter if’n you have to.”

“The winter!” Burwell roared. “That means I’d lose a whole growin’ season, time I finally got to Oregon next year.”

Titus saw how Amanda hung her head with defeat. He rubbed his hand on the back of her shoulders and said. “Come the first train through next season, you an’ the rest can throw in with them. But the worst thing you’d do is all you farmers set off down the Snake on your own, get stopped somewhere along the way with wagon trouble or early snows—have to fend for yourselves all winter long out in that God-forsook country.”

“Rest of us, we can take care of ourselves,” Roman snapped testily.

“This ain’t sweet an’ safe Missouri—” Titus bellowed, but immediately felt bad for it.

For a long moment he gazed down at his grandchildren, sensing a deep and nagging responsibility to see them safely through. He took a deep breath then said more calmly, “Roman, that ain’t the sort of country where you wanna get caught out with your young’uns for the winter.”

“There’ll be someone there,” Shad reassured as he inched over a little closer to Burwell around the fire. “Likely someone I know from the beaver days—someone I can vouch for. Ain’t that right, Scratch?” Sweete’s eyes pleaded a little.

Titus quickly glanced over his daughter’s family, deciding there was no choice but to agree with his friend—if only for the sake of Amanda and the others. “Shad’s right. There’s a real good chance your train will hire a pilot soon as you reach Fort Hall.”

“But if we don’t?” Roman pressed.

“Then pick you a spot to spend out the winter there within sight of the fort,” Titus reminded.

Just as Roman was about to open his mouth again, Amanda stepped up and slipped her arm through his, saying, “I know we’ll find us a pilot to hire, Roman. I feel it in my bones. So there’s no need to fret any longer over what isn’t going to happen. We’re going to Oregon, just like you said we’d do all along. No matter what Phineas Hargrove or that weasel-eyed Harris do to roll boulders in our path … we are going to Oregon, Roman!”

He turned sideways and gripped the tops of her arms a moment before he pulled his wife against him. “God bless you, Amanda. Bless you for your faith in this journey to our own promised land.”

“It ain’t the promised land I got faith in, Roman—it’s you,” she vowed. “No matter what the journey, I got faith in you.”

“We was meant to go to Oregon,” he said as he crushed her in his big arms. “It’s there we’ll have all the bad days behind us.”

As the stars had blinked into view and the tree frogs began to chirp their friendly calls down in the slough, Titus watched how Waits fluttered close to Shell Woman, as if she were reluctant to let her new-made friend go. He had felt a stab of pain for her. She was a social creature, not a loner like him. From the dawning of their first days together, he had realized that it was much, much harder for her to be apart from her family and her friends than it was for him to be alone. Back as far as those Boone County growing-up days in Kentucky he had come to know he was not meant for needing much in the way of human company. Oh, for certain he knew he could not do without Waits and those children of theirs. It would be so hard when Magpie, or Flea, or even little Jackrabbit were older and went off to make a life of their own with another. But … he would always have her, and that gave him the greatest sense of belonging he had ever known. Hers was the only belonging he felt he had to have for the rest of his life.

From those days when his self-knowing was awakened in Rabbit Hash, time and again he had put his faith in the wrong people, more often in the wrong women. First there was Amy Whistler, who wanted him for reasons other than loving him. And then there was Abigail Thresher, the bone-skinny whore who had given him all the love his body could stand, but never came to love who he was. And then there was Amanda’s mother, Marissa Guthrie—who had put so many restrictions and knots on him that he could do nothing else but flee while he still had the chance. By the time he reached St. Louis, Titus was not about to risk any deep affair of the heart. But try as he might, the high-born, coffee-skinned quadroon managed to get under his skin before she too went the way of all those saddest stories of unrequited love. Confused and despairing, he had learned too late what it would take to protect his heart. Titus vowed he would simply not let another woman in.

And so it was for more than ten years. While there were those who crawled in naked to join him beneath the buffalo robes, spreading legs and arms to ensnare him in their moist embrace, Bass kept hidden that most precious piece of himself. In its place, he had substituted the immutable bond of men … yet found that affection shattered by the betrayal of those who professed their protection of him. It took a long, long time for him to genuinely trust again in those who rode the same trails as he, trapped the same high-country streams, slept and snored, ate and laughed, hunted and fought, beneath the same starry skies. But he eventually found friends. Not many—for he had never, never, never been a garrulous sort who sought the reassuring company of the many. No, Titus Bass had been rewarded with a few true companions who asked no more of him than they were willing to give—that complete and utter trust as they stood at one another’s backs and dared the fates, damned the gods, and stood mighty against the wind in those days of brief and unmitigated glory.

Good men, the best friends a man deserved—even those the likes of Asa McAfferty, who went bad for reasons he had never sorted out, a compañero who, in the end, asked one final act of faithfulness from an old friend. Better it would be, Titus had come to believe after years of mind-numbing consternation, for a man to be killed at the hand of a friend than by the hate of an enemy.

Good men, the best friends a man could ever have. So many of the best gone now. Gone to where those mortals still walking the earth could only suppose. Gone where no man alive knew for certain. These good men, gone to where Titus could only pray he would see them again at last on some far-off, faraway day. Like the bullet holes in his flesh, the arrow puckers and knife wounds too, the losing of each of those good friends carved its scar upon his heart. Perhaps even deeper, unto the marrow of his very soul. Such loss was all but unbearable, one by one wounding its own piece of his being.

So he did take friends unto his bosom, the few and the most trusted he had embraced, and made a home for these in his wounded, broken-in heart. Likely he could survive, live out the rest of his days with two or three of the old ones at his side, men like Sweete and Bridger. Save for his family, Titus Bass needed little more. But, his need of Waits-by-the-Water was a different animal altogether. She left behind everything she had ever known to come and be with him. In those first seasons they were together, Waits found a new friend in Josiah’s wife. Later, Mathew Kinkead’s too. But both were a far cry from the friends who had surrounded her before he took her away from Crow country. She needed friends much more than he.

Titus could do with the few who easily moved in and out of his life, as easily as he could do with being a loner. But it near destroyed him when he was apart from her. If he had to live with but one friend for the rest of his days, it could be no other but her. Yet, he had come to realize she was different. Waits thrived and bloomed with her woman friends. She needed that companionship far more than he ever would. Watching how she fluttered near Shell Woman, her bravest and most cheerful reaction to knowing Shadrach was taking his family far away for a time, if not forever, gave Scratch a sense of remorse for his wife.

Yesterday, before the others awoke, he sought out Bridger.

Jim listened, then asked in exasperation, “You too?”

“Time’s come for me to stretch my legs a little,” Titus had explained as Jim poured them coffee from that first brew of the morning.

“Your family goin’?”

“If I go, they’ll likely wanna come too.”

Bridger had wagged his head. “Won’t be the same ’thout you, Scratch. Won’t be the same not hearing that anvil ring from first light till suppertime.”

“We’ll be back long afore winter comes hard, Shad an’ me.”

“You ain’t ever spent a winter in country cold as this here gets,” Jim warned. “Best you get turned around from Hallee as soon as you niggers can.”

“How far you make the journey?”

“I’d make it ten, twelve days on horse,” Bridger estimated. “But these sodbusters with their wagons. Gonna be double, no … triple that. A month at the outside, you don’t keep ’em moving hard.”

“Hell, we’ll be back well afore the first snowflake lands on that ugly nose o’ your’n. Three weeks at the most getting there, an’ we’ll be less time coming back. All of us on horses then—won’t nothing hold us up.”

“That’s if you two bring a pilot to bait for this bunch of corncrackers.”

Dread of that had worried Titus into sleeplessness that first still night after his daughter’s family trudged back to the wagon meadow and the others had carried sleepy children off to their beds. How, Scratch despaired, could he just drop this weighty matter into Shadrach’s lap once they reached Fort Hall, and pay no mind to the looming potential for failure once the train was beyond the horizon and out of sight?

And if he finally decided he could do nothing less than go along to Fort Hall himself—what would he do, Titus brooded, if he and Shad failed to scratch up a pilot who could be trusted? In the final dusting he admitted to no one but himself that this whole dilemma might well come down to what Roman Burwell and the other hickory-headed settlers would decide to do when they were confronted with that impossible choice of staying out the winter near Fort Hall, or pushing on without a pilot because their feet had grown far too itchy with every mile they put behind them. Exactly what happened when these emigrants reached the Snake would likely turn not only on events Titus Bass could not foresee but also turn on folks Titus Bass had no control over.

And that powerlessness was just the sort of thing that had nettled him no end since eighteen and twenty-five when he fled to the Rocky Mountains, seeking to finally seize hold of his own life, wrenching it away from the control of others. This was another of those crucial, pivotal decisions in a man’s life that offered no good choice versus the bad options. In the two paths he saw left for him, there was no solidly good choice. Only a matter of what choice appeared to come with less risk … what path came with an acceptable, manageable level of danger or the possibility of failure. Time and again in his life among these mountains, he had been confronted with less than ideal options. Only trouble now was that the safety of so many of those he cared for rested on what choices he made from here on out—beginning with the choice he had to make that very morning.

The sun was only hinting at just how hot the day would be when the three families gathered in the open square of Fort Bridger. Jim had thrown some wood on the embers and poked life back into those flames that cast their reflections as those who were departing embraced each and every one of those who were staying behind. Tears shared between the two women and Gabe’s three children, hugs between all the youngsters who had been able to play and frolic despite the language barriers. Off to the side two men said farewell to an old friend in much the same way this breed once bid farewell to their comrades when the luster of summer rendezvous had faded and the brigades were stringing out in a half dozen different directions for the high-country hunt.

“Watch your topknot, Gabe!” Titus cried as he rose to the saddle, a sour ball caught in his throat, eyes stinging in the early light.

Blinking his own misty eyes, Bridger pounded Sweete on the back one last time, then let the big man go to his horse. Finally they were all mounted and turning from the timbered stockade, with Jim trudging along beside them, like a man who had one last thing to say before parting … but could not remember what he wanted to say for the life of him. In the end, he looked up at Titus with those imploring eyes.

And said, “Countin’ on you. Bring ’em back, Titus Bass. Bring ’em all back soon as you can.”

With Magpie and Flea riding the left flank among the packhorses, it was Jackrabbit, along with little Bull Hump and Pipe Woman, who giggled and shrieked with excitement as the party set off to the southwest for the meadow where the Hargrove train had put in more than two whole days of rest, recruitment, and repairs. The women chattered, their hands busy as they always were when people of different tongues wanted desperately to communicate. But there was really no need to understand Crow or Cheyenne to recognize the joy on their copper-skinned faces, the excitement in sharing this new adventure with friends. Out in the lead rode the two old comrades, as they had done countless mornings before.

One last time they both turned and gazed back at Jim’s double stockade, then waved a final farewell to Bridger’s shrinking figure before Bass held out his left hand to Sweete. Shad nudged his horse closer and took Scratch’s wrist in his right hand. Gazing into one another’s eyes with that long-buried smile of great anticipation, they squeezed hard before freeing their grip. Exactly as they had done many, many times before when setting out on a trail they knew not where it would carry them.

Even at this early hour the emigrant meadow was beginning to throb with noise and color. Oxen bellowed and mules bawled as men and boys brought back strings of the beasts from a long watering in Black’s Fork. The wind out of the west brought Scratch a cornucopia of fragrances, from fresh dung to coffee on the boil, from the strong perfume of bacon crackling in cast iron to the heavenly scent of flour biscuits or ground-corn johnnies. Here and there rode men on horseback, their eyes taking in everything as they moved slowly from wagon camp to wagon camp, rarely uttering a word that wasn’t some terse or scolding command.

“You figger ’em for Hargrove’s bully-boys?” Shad inquired.

“That’un, see how he just spotted us,” Titus replied. “Lookit him turn ’round an’ lick it back to give Hargrove the word that trouble just showed up.”

They watched that first rider off to their left give his horse a kick and lope away into the midst of the busiest place in camp, just before a second bullnecked horseman dared to ride a bit closer, standing in his stirrups for long moments while he satisfied his curiosity and got himself a good long look at the newcomers, then suddenly reined aside and tore off at a gallop.

“We ought’n find Roman’s camp straightaway,” Scratch declared sourly. “I figger company’s gonna come callin’ soon enough.”

“Never thought about it,” Shad admitted. “What if Hargrove an’ his boys say we can’t go along?”

Bass snorted. “You ever ask a by-your-please of ary a man to ride where you wanted to ride, Shadrach?”

“No. Onliest I ever give a thought of it was my first time in Blackfoot country up north.”

“What if they tol’t you, ‘No, you can’t ride across our country’?”

Sweete said, “We damn well rode across it anyways.”

“Now ain’t the time to change our ways, Shadrach.”

“Titus!” Roman Burwell shouted as he stepped from the corner of the wagon. “Come to see Shadrach off with us?”

He waited a few moments longer until he had stopped near the wagon and dropped to the ground there as Burwell, Amanda, and their children came flocking toward the horses and those two happy, yipping dogs.

“My stick floats with Shadrach,” he confessed. “Thort the young’uns an’ Waits might like to see some new country!”

“Y-you’re really coming along?” Amanda asked breathlessly, reaching out to take her father’s hand in both of hers.

“Till we get you to Fort Hall,” he confessed. “The two of us, we’ll run down a pilot to lead your bunch the rest of the way.”

Roman’s eyes flicked away, then he turned back to the two old trappers. “Seems Hargrove is coming to welcome you to the train himself.”

They all turned their heads, watching the three men approach. Train captain Hargrove, with two of his biggest men hard on his tail.

“Don’t that appear to be a big ol’ smile of welcome on that bastard’s face?” Titus grumbled with mock cheer. “Amanda, why don’t you take Waits and Shell Woman around the other side of the wagon with all the young’uns? Find ’em something to eat, maybe. Put ’em to helping you pack up your goods in that wagon.”

She could read the seriousness in his eyes. “All right, Pa.”

For a moment longer he watched Amanda gesture to the women, then start them around the back of the canvas-topped prairie schooner, where she would get them involved with more than the arrival of the wagon captain.

“Good morning, Burwell!” Hargrove sang out in that easygoing way of a man who always carried a smirk on his face and self-righteousness in his heart.

“Hargrove,” Roman responded.

The hair at Digger’s neck ruffed menacingly, and the dog growled, low at the back of his throat. Bass quieted him with a whisper. “Hush, boy!”

The captain’s eyes raked over the trappers. “I trust you’re here to bid farewell to these members of your family.”

With a shake of his head, Titus said, “That ain’t why we’re here.”

Straightening in the saddle and pressing his chin down against his puffed-up chest, Hargrove tried again. “Then it’s probably for the best that you’ve come to try talking Burwell and his wife into staying behind with you here until another train comes through for Oregon. Admirable, my good man—that you should place their welfare so highly, rather than see them risk it all on an unwise gamble on their own.”

“They won’t be on their own,” Titus declared. “My friend here, Mr. Shadrach Sweete, he was first to jump up an’ offer to ride along to Fort Hall. Likely find some fella there what can lead the train on to Oregon country after you an’ Harris gone off to Californy.”

Hargrove’s eyes appraised Sweete a moment. “You’ll be part of the Burwell family since you’ll be making the journey by yourself?”

Shadrach picked at an old scab on the back of one hand and said, “I ain’t goin’ alone. Got my family comin’ too.”

“Family?” the wagon captain repeated uneasily.

“Wife, two young’uns.”

“Wife? She’s come out from the East?”

Crossing his big forearms across the saddle where he stood on the ground beside his horse, Sweete peered over the animal at the man, saying, “She ain’t been no farther east than the Little Dried River, or the Smoky Hill. She’s Cheyenne.”

“So you’re a squaw-man?”

Bass slowly stepped aside and laid his rifle atop his saddle so that it pointed in Hargrove’s direction. “That’s a word you don’t wanna use with neither of us, Cap’n Hargrove. Some things just get under a man’s skin, an’ make him see red.”

He turned back to Sweete. “You’re married to a squaw.”

“Cheyenne, like I told you.”

“An’ my wife’s Crow,” Titus advised. “Her people come from far to the north. Likely you ain’t heard of ’em.”

Hargrove blinked a few times, then asked of Sweete, “Your … wife and children—you’ll be part of Burwell’s camp?”

“We will,” Bass replied for them all.

The wagon master’s head jerked in his direction. “We?”

“I figgered to go along, show my family some country, give a hand to Roman when he needed it—”

“I can’t allow all of you to join our train!”

“That don’t callate to me,” Bass argued. “Two day ago you was tellin’ ever’one how you an’ Black Harris was taking off for Californy on your own. So what the hell say you got in who throws in with these other folks when you’re dropping out soon as you reach Fort Hall?”

“It’s my train,” Hargrove growled. “I formed it, I—”

“You was elected captain,” Burwell interrupted as he stepped up suddenly, causing a horse ridden by one of the hired men to shy and shuffle backward awkwardly. “You don’t own none of us. Not our wagons. An’ you sure as the devil don’t own this trail.”

“We’ll see what the others have to say about that!”

Scratching the side of his cheek, Titus said, “No man’s got a right to tell me where I can ride and where I can make camp for the night, Cap’n.”

Hargrove glanced to his right, then to his left, in a way that unmistakably indicated his hired men. With a smile he said, “I think we understand one another. In this wild country, might always makes right.”

“Most times,” Sweete responded.

Hargrove wagged his head meaningfully and clucked, “It can make a man nervous, forced to watch over his shoulder for trouble creeping up on him all the time.”

“These here friends o’ your’n,” Titus began, wagging the muzzle of his rifle at one, then the other, of those horsemen arrayed on either side of the wagon master. “You figger they very good at killing a man? Maybe good for killin’ two of us?”

“I’m certain they—”

“I ain’t,” Bass interrupted. “This coon’d lay down good money none of your gun-toters ever kill’t a man.”

Sweete had his hat off and was wiping the sticky moisture off the sweatband as he said, “Hargrove, I want you to look at that rifle my friend is holding on you. See them brass tacks he pounded into the stock, up an’ down the forearm too?”

“What business is it of—”

“Ever’ one of ’em is a dead man he’s kill’t.”

Titus watched how that caused all three of them to train their attention on his rifle, where it was propped atop the saddle.

“Near as I know, he ain’t added the last two tacks he should,” Shadrach continued. “Pair of Frenchie fellas who thought they was gonna run off with the man’s half-blood daughter—figgered a half-wild white man wasn’t gonna care ’bout his family an’ all.”

Hargrove’s eyes grinned mirthlessly and he said, “Sometimes justice can indeed be swift out here on the frontier.”

Shadrach added, “But I doubt any of your hired men done more’n rough up some poor folks they had outnumbered. They don’t appear to have the stomach for killin’—just for making you look bigger’n you are to sodbusters and settlement folk.”

From his right side, out of the corner of his good eye, Titus watched three of his grandchildren poke their heads beneath the wagon. Then a fourth shadow: little Lucas, plopping onto his belly and squeezing his way between Lemuel and Annie. All of them intently listened in on the conversation between the menfolk and that talk of the brass tacks on his rifle, talk of his life of killing. It wasn’t the sort of thing he wanted his grandchildren to know about him.

Hargrove was already starting a sentence with something about the council he would call when they had reached that night’s campground to decide the matter—

But Titus interrupted, “You best keep your boys away from our camp.”

“They were hired by me to patrol the line of march every day,” Hargrove huffed. “And they stand their rotation of watch every night, just like the rest of the men. As long as I’m captain, there can never be anywhere that is off-limits to my men.”

“I warned you once, Hargrove. Won’t waste my breath again,” he declared, then turned a quick glance at those four grandchildren of his, wide eyes peering out from under the possum belly slung beneath the wagon, every one of them getting a real earful. “But, I’m sure men like you an’ me don’t want no trouble with the other. Do we now?”

“This is my train, Burwell,” Hargrove fumed as he turned to gaze at the farmer. “You signed on with your family—but these … these others didn’t.”

“We ain’t part of your train,” Titus said. “We’ll ride with this family. Keep to ourselves. Ain’t gonna cause no trouble … but we ain’t backin’ off from trouble if it comes neither. Be sure to tell all your boys that. Don’t want none of ’em crossing tracks with me or mine here on out.”

The wagon master sputtered, “I can’t have my train providing for you—”

“We take care of ourselves,” Shad declared. “Don’t we, Scratch?”

“We ain’t taking nothing from another’s mouth, Hargrove. We’ll hunt for what we eat,” Titus explained. “An’ we’ll camp off from the rest of your farmers.”

Pulling himself up to full height again in the saddle, Phineas Hargrove took a moment to sneer down his long, patrician nose at the poorly dressed farmer and his two friends arrayed in greasy buckskins and faded calico. “Enjoy your day on the trail with these new companions of yours while you can, Burwell. After our council meeting tonight, the men and their families will have no choice but to turn back come morning.”

Scratch watched the three ride off. First one, then the other hired man twisted round in the saddle or looked back over his shoulder. Only Hargrove refused to give the newcomers another glance.

“Better we gave ’em that warning right off,” Shad explained as he stepped over.

Roman declared, “I don’t believe we’ll be troubled by them after that council meeting tonight.”

Wagging his head, Titus felt weary, deep-down bone weary. As he turned to gaze down at those four young faces peering out at him from the early-morning shadows beneath the wagon box, he grumbled, “Way I read the sign—our trouble with that Hargrove an’ his bunch o’ bullies only gonna turn uglier from here on out.”