Wind Walker

TWO

Like a great, golden pumpkin the adobe walls of the post glowed in a last glittering benediction of winter’s late light that third afternoon after leaving Bill Bransford to press south with his avengers to put down the Taos rebellion.

Bass pulled back on the old horse’s reins. As the rest of his family came to a halt on either side of the old trapper, he felt his wife’s leg press against his as her pony snorted a gauzy mist.

Waits-by-the-Water tugged the thick woolen scarf below her chin so she could speak, exposing the cheeks scarred with the white man’s pox. She asked, “This is where the seeing was taken from your eye so many winters ago?”^*

Leaning off his horse, Scratch rubbed the small of her back a moment, then answered with a thick voice, “Yes. I come here to find Cooper, afore I finished my journey back to you and little Magpie.”

With a flick of her eyes, Waits glanced at their oldest child. “She is not so much a child anymore. Look and you will see!”

He chuckled, then said, “Soon enough Magpie’s father will have to sleep by the door of your lodge with his gun in his lap.”

“Why would you sleep with a gun in your lap, Popo?” Magpie asked as she urged her pony closer.

Instead Waits answered, “To frighten off all the young men who will be strutting around you like noisy mosquitoes on a summer evening.”

The girl’s eyes went to her father’s face. “Do you … you really think the young men will find me … pretty?”

How he laughed at that, his face raised to the sky as he roared, “Magpie! You are as pretty as any woman I have ever seen, in either world I have lived in. Why—you are as pretty as your mother was when she was your age and her own father had to start beating the boys away from their lodge door with a long coup stick!”

“We will be safe here?” Waits asked, the sound of her words more solemn.

His eyes crinkled with reassurance when he recognized the worry on her face. “Yes, we will be safe here. The only reason there was danger here so many winters ago was that I came looking for it.”

“These horses are tired, Popo,” his oldest son reminded. “And they need water too.”

“We’ll take them down to the river and let them drink their fill,” Titus suggested. “Then I’ll take my family into the trader’s mud lodge.”

At the north bank of the Arkansas while Waits-by-the-Water sat with the other children, Scratch and Flea clambered out of their saddles and trudged to the river’s edge with their short-handled camp axes. Together they chopped a long slot in the ice while Magpie and her mother dismounted and started the animals toward the bank.

As the horses drank, Titus laid his arm across his wife’s shoulder and turned her to look at the distant golden walls. Softly he said, “It will be a good thing to get these children out of the cold for the night.”

She gazed up at him, then laid her cheek against his chest as the noisy horses nuzzled the water behind them. “For these children of ours, this little cold does not bother them, Ti-tuzz. I have never heard them complain.”

“You are right,” he whispered with his chin resting atop her blanket hood. “The winter is much, much colder in our home country far to the north.”

“But a fire will feel very good to my feet,” Flea said as he brought their three Cheyenne packhorses up the bank to where his parents stood.

“Yes. It is time you show us this big mud lodge that shines red as a prairie paintbrush flower here at sunset!” Magpie goaded him with giddy excitement.

“You too, Jackrabbit?” Titus asked of his four-year-old son still sitting his saddle, his short legs swaddled inside a buffalo robe that was tucked under his arms.

“Go with Popo,” the boy answered, a smile brightening his whole face. “My belly wants to eat!”

Squeezing his wife’s shoulder, Bass turned to his red horse and said, “Woman, we best go feed this boy before he starts gnawing on my moccasins!”

He loved how their eyes widened the closer they got to the tall mud walls. Approaching from the southwest they reined for the circular bastion that stood more than twenty-some feet above the snowy plain. Extending to the right of that bastion stood two of the three corral walls, the top of all bristling with thorny cactus. Try as he might to squeeze his mind down on it right now, Titus could not remember this corral connected to the fort on his first trip here in the spring of ’34, and he couldn’t claim he’d paid all that much attention to its presence back in the autumn of ’42 when he had traded off most of his Mexican horses for more than a thousandweight of jangly foofaraw and shiny girlews.

“Where is the door to this lodge?” Flea asked, a little perplexed as they continued to plod north along the west wall.

“Soon you will see, my son.”

As they turned their horses at the far corner, he spotted a nesting of some three dozen lodges erected back among the riverbank cottonwood several hundred yards from the fort. More than two hundred ponies pawed at the frozen ground between the camp and the mud walls—

Suddenly an iron bell began to clang inside the fort, and a head appeared over the top above them. The man’s face disappeared as quickly.

“The Mexicans are here too?” Waits asked him. “This bell rings for their holy meetings?”

He knew she was referring to how the Taosenos followed the dictates of the great iron bell rung in its tall church steeple. He said, “I don’t figger we’ll find many greasers here now.”

“No holy meeting?” she repeated.

Wagging his head, Scratch said, “That bell rings only to announce the evening.”

“Why, Popo?” Flea inquired. “I can look at the sun falling, and know for myself that it is evening!”

Halfway on down the mud wall three men suddenly belched from the wide gate and halted as soon as they spotted Bass’s party. One of them waved an arm to the others, ordering the two on toward the small wheeled cannon while he stayed in place, shading his eyes as he inspected the new arrivals, calling out, “Howdy, stranger!”

“Ho, your own self!”

“What Injuns you brung with you, mister?”

“My family—wife and young’uns.”

That man turned away and trudged over to the cannon the other two had begun tugging back toward the wall. As he helped pushing on one of the huge wheels, he inquired, “You folks fixing on staying inside for the night?”

Bass cleared his throat. “I reckon—if’n there’s room.”

“Just barely,” he replied. “Got us more’n two dozen sick soldiers getting nursed.”

Titus brought his horse to a halt as the man stopped pushing the cannon. Together they watched the other two heave the weapon on through the open portal toward the inner plaza.

“Who’s nursin’ them soldiers?” Titus inquired as his family halted their horses around him. “Charlotte Green her own self?”

The man twisted suddenly and squinted up at Bass. “How you know Charlotte?”

“I been here years ago,” he confessed, quickly glancing at his pair of dogs sniffing along the base of the mud walls for interesting scent. “Meeted her and husband Dick back then. Good folks. Bought these here two dogs off Charlotte—back when they was wee pups. That was just afore I got skinned by Savary. He here—Savary?”

“Naw,” the man explained. “St. Vrain’s been off to Santa Fe—gone last fall. I figger he’s in the thick of things in Taos by now.”

“Who’s trader here?”

“Goddamn Murray. You hear of him?”

“Hell if I ain’t!” Bass replied. “Did a piece of business with him that fall I come in here with some Mex horses from Californy. He’s a square man.”

“You was with the bunch what come in with Bill Williams back in forty-two?” the man asked, stepping right over to Scratch’s knee to peer up at the white-bearded man, the old trapper’s ruddy face all but hidden beneath the coyote fur cap.

“That was a time,” Bass sighed. “Mex soldiers chased us down to the desert, then the Diggers up and spooked our whole herd.”^*

“Story was you fellas lost more’n half them horses on the way here.”

Titus glanced at his wife, then grinned down at the stranger. “The things a man won’t do when he’s young and full of vinegar.”

“My name’s Haney Rankin,” and he held his hand up. “I’m Murray’s segundo while most of the fort hands are off with Bransford—gone to fight the greasers in Taos. You can head ’round to the east wall. You remember that corral over there?”

“I do recollect. There a gate on that side?”

Rankin nodded. “Bring your family on inside that small corral. Sun’s down so we’re bolting these here gates for the night. I’ll meet you over to the corral.”

“You don’t s’pect trouble from them Injuns camped down in them trees?” he asked as Rankin followed the cannon through the darkened entry way.

“Naw. That’s Gray Thunder’s band,” Rankin’s voice echoed through the low, shadowy entry way. “They come in a week or so back—soon as they heard Charlie Bent was kill’t by the Mexicans. Offered to go kill greasers if William wanted ’em to.”

Bass waited till the three were swallowed by shadows, then reined his horse away. “C’mon, woman,” he said in English to his Crow wife. “We’ll settle in for the night. Come morning, I’m fixin’ to pay a call on that Cheyenne camp. Maybeso scratch up some news ’bout a old friend of ours.”

“I will stay behind with the children when you go,” Waits spoke emphatically. “Cheyenne are not so much friends with my people.”

“Better I go down there by myself anyway,” he agreed. “See what sort of mood them Cheyenne are in afore I go asking up about that ol’ friend.”

“Who is this?”

“You ’member the one about as tall a man as you ever seen?”

She thought a moment as they brought their ponies to a halt outside the narrow east gate. Then a grin crossed her face ruddied by the cold. “Shad-rach,” she said slowly, deliberately, in her husband’s tongue.

“Shadrach Sweete,” he repeated as the gate was drawn back against the icy snow and Rankin was there with a candle lantern spilling its yellow patch on the snow around his feet.

“So where’s this Titus Bass?” a loud, deep voice boomed in the dark behind Rankin.

“Who’s asking?” Scratch demanded as he dropped from the saddle onto the snow and started his horse through the corral gate.

“Dick Green,” the voice said as a shadow took shape and the huge, muscular man stepped up to the old trapper. He turned to hurl his voice over his shoulder, “As I live an’ breathe—if it ain’t him, Charlotte!” Then he was grinning at the old trapper, yanking on Bass’s arm as he trudged backward into the corral. “C’mon in here, bring them folks all in here now!”

The blacksmith’s big hand quickly seized hold of Bass’s mitten and pumped heartily as Green pounded Scratch on the other shoulder.

“Oh, my! Oh, my!” a high voice squealed as a woman squirted out of the kitchen door, a low rectangle of light behind her. “It is the puppy man! An’ he brung him his fambly, Dick! Lookee if he didn’t bring his fambly—” Suddenly Charlotte Green lumbered to a halt on the ground trampled by moccasins and many a hoof, staring slack-jawed. “Why—is this them two tiny puppies you buyed from me?”

He watched her crumple to her knees in the snow, her ankle-length broomstick skirt fanning out around her as she began to pat the tops of her thighs and whistle as good as any St. Louis wharfside stevedore. “C’mere! C’mon over here, you li’l whelps!”

“This the woman who traded me for the dogs,” Titus explained to Waits as the dogs bounded over to the black cook.

“That is easy to see.” She turned and signaled through the open corral gate for the children to dismount, pointing them off to the right in this triangular-shaped corral strung along the full extent of the easternmost wall.

Watching the dogs lick the cook’s face, Scratch grinned, saying, “They sure as hell remember you!”

“What brung you back here for such a hoo-doo season?” Dick Green asked him as Rankin took the reins from Bass’s hand.

“We was down to Taos when the blood started running in the streets,” he explained in a near whisper. “Got out by the skin of our teeth.”

The big blacksmith wagged his head dolefully. “Figger to lay low here till it blows over, then head south again?”

Titus shook his head as Waits and the children came up beside him. “We’re here for a night, maybeso two at the most, then we push on.”

“Middle of winter the way it is?” Charlotte whimpered as she slowly brought her bulk off the ground and stood. “Surely you can find something to do here to keep these young’uns o’ yours safe till spring when you can leave.”

Titus smiled at her. “By first green we’ll be long on our way to Crow country, Miss Charlotte.”

He then went on to introduce everyone all around. While Dick went to fetch some short sections of rope to tie up the dogs there in the corral, Charlotte shuffled Waits-by-the-Water and the three children inside her warm, glowing kitchen.

“You manage the rest by yourself, Bass?” Rankin asked.

“Be just fine by myself, thankee.”

The trader tugged on his blanket mittens. “We got a few more chores afore Charlotte sits us all down for supper. An’ Goddamn don’t like to be kept waiting on his supper ’cause I’m late getting my chores see’d to.”

“Be off with you then,” Scratch said with a grin as Rankin started away. “And tell Goddamn Murray that the blanket man has come to pay a call.”

Rankin stopped in the snow. “Blanket man?”

“Time I was here last, I took near ever’ blanket Murray had in this here fort—traded off a hull shitteree of horses to him.”

A big smile crossed the clerk’s face. “The blanket man, eh?”

“All them blankets I packed north on Cheyenne horses been keeping the Crows warm for the past few winters.”

“Sounds to me I should ask Murray ’bout you sitting to dinner with us in the main room.”

Titus shrugged. “No need to bother ’bout such foofaraw doin’s.” He gestured at Charlotte and said, “Looks like we’ll be eatin’ just fine with the cook her own self.”

“Just the same—you still want me tell him the blanket man’s come to call?”

“If I don’t run onto him this evenin’, just tell Murray I’ll be round to call at the trade room in the morning.”

It was just growing light when Titus Bass slowly rolled out of the buffalo robes and blankets so as not to disturb his family, pulled on his moccasins and heavy coat, then carefully dragged back the heavy cottonwood door and stepped outside beneath the low awning that ran along this southern side of the courtyard. The wheelwright’s shop, where they had bedded down for the night, was located right beside Dick Green’s forge, with the wagon alley running just behind those small rooms, arranged in a row with the gunsmith’s and carpenter’s shops too. No one was yet stirring in the plaza, where a light snow had dusted the massive fur press. He stepped into the cold air, turned, and dragged the door closed behind him, when off to his right he made out the soft notes of a woman’s hum. Shuffling through the new snow he entered the kitchen, surprised to find it already warm, cozy, inviting.

“Well lookee here, Charlotte!” Dick Green’s voice greeted Titus as the blacksmith stepped around a corner. “Mr. Bass is a early get-upper hisself too.”

Charlotte poked her head around a corner, smears of flour dusting her nose, a cheek, and the side of her bandanna decorated with red Mexican roses. “You ready for some coffee?”

Scratch smiled. “Damn if I ain’t allays ready for coffee!”

“C’mon back here where we got the pot on,” Charlotte offered. “Mr. Green, I could use your help cuttin’ the bacon for me.”

“Be there straightaway,” the blacksmith promised. “You get this man a cup of coffee, then I be right with you.”

The Negro servants had spent a little time talking with the trapper and his family when their chores were done following dinner, at least until young Jackrabbit had fallen asleep in his father’s arms in a toasty spot near Charlotte’s fireplace where they all sat on stools and drank a rich, sweet mixture of Mexican chocolate seasoned with cinnamon. Their bellies filled with such delicious warmth, it wasn’t long before Flea and Magpie began to get drowsy too—their eyelids growing heavy as lead and their heads starting to sag. Titus, and Waits shuffled the sleepy children off to the wheelwright’s room, right next to the residual warmth of the forge. Scratch and Dick Green had settled the family in that shop since the wheelwright himself had marched off to the south with Bill Bransford to exact revenge for the murder of Charles Bent.

“He ain’t gonna be back no time soon,” Green had prodded the trapper, who was reluctant to bed down inside the shop. “You an’ yours stay right here long as you want. Likely he won’t be back for to work again till winter’s fair done.”

“Thankee for the offer,” Bass had replied as they shook out the robes and thick wool blankets across the narrow clay floor. “Maybeso only two nights, till we push on.”

“Stay longer, why don’cha? Charlotte, she’d love the company—your woman and the chirrun too,” Green pleaded. “There ain’t much wimmins out to these parts, so my Charlotte sure do get the lonelies for a soft face to talk to.”

Titus had straightened and stood beside the pile of blankets. “I know that feelin’ … the lonelies. But, long as Charlotte’s got you, Dick—and you got her, neither of you ever gonna be lonely, no matter where you go.”

“But my Miss Charlotte—she likes to talk to other wimmins.”

“We’ll let ’em gab an’ palaver much as they want for the next two days,” Titus promised.

“That’s right,” Dick had agreed reluctantly. “They can allays talk some more next time you come by this here mud fort.”

Laying his gnarled hand with its painful joints on Green’s shoulder, Scratch had explained, “I lay this’ll be my last trip here, Dick. Don’t see a reason to wander this far south ever again, now that I saw to what I needed to down in Taos.”

“Wh-where you gonna trade, you don’t come south?”

“I s’pose there’ll allays be a trader’s post on the Yellowstone,” he had confessed as they started back to Charlotte’s kitchen last night. “Don’t make much matter to me anyways. I think I’ve figgered out how to get by ’thout needing a hull passel of trade goods. The less I need a trader, the better off I’ll be.”

That morning over coffee as the few fort employees left behind began to stir with activity, and Jackson’s dragoons came and went with steaming cups of Charlotte’s hearty brew and plates of her fluffy, piping-hot corn muffins, Scratch told the Greens tales of that north country where his family belonged. Now, more than ever, as the army, and emigrants, and those religious pilgrims too were all crowding in on what had long been a quiet and ofttimes lonely land. When he could stuff no more in his belly, Scratch got up and moved his stool back against the wall.

“Keep a sharp eye out for them young’uns of mine,” he warned the cook. “When they get around to rolling out, a hungry bunch gonna come runnin’ in here to clean up all your bacon and corn dodgers.”

Dusting her hands on her big white apron, she beamed. “That’s why Charlotte be the cook, Mr. Bass. So’s I can fill up bellies till they’re bustin’!”

“You tell them young’uns of mine I’ll be back after I’ve looked up an ol’ friend down to the Cheyenne camp,” he explained as he pulled on his coat and started toward the door. “I figger you’ll keep ’em fed and warm right here till I come back.”

“I can allays find something for your chirrun to do for me ’round here,” Charlotte vowed. “’Specially that girl of yours. My, oh, my—she’s gonna be a sure-fire handful of ring-tail cats one of these days, you mind my word, Mr. Bass. She’s got that light of trouble sparkin’ in her eye!”

Didn’t he know that already, Titus thought as he shouldered the corral gate closed, then strode off toward the far grove of cottonwood on foot, scuffing through the old snow in those thick, hair-on winter moccasins. He damn well realized how Magpie had her father wrapped around her little finger, what with the way she had learned to flash her pretty eyes at him all the time. Come a day when she’d be batting those eyes at some young buck of a suitor. Leastways, he had begun to hope it would be a young warrior … and not some half-baked, green-hided, soaked-behind-the-ears white youngster fresh out of the settlements.

Back when he had first taken a shine to Waits-by-the-Water, Titus Bass was notching his ninth winter in the mountains. With their daughter’s mixed blood, Magpie deserved a man bred to these mountains, and not no snot-nosed young’un who didn’t know prime from stinkum.

Three older Cheyenne men stood off to the side of the first lodges as Scratch came across the open ground. He was carrying no rifle or smoothbore—surely they could see that. All three wrapped in a buffalo robe, the Cheyenne watched him warily as he approached—he was sure they had a good suspicion that he wouldn’t have come without some weapon on him somewhere. When he was less than twenty feet away, Titus stopped and held one arm up in greeting. Then he pulled off a mitten and quickly yanked at the long ties that held the flaps of his elkhide coat closed. There he patted the big pistol stuffed in the front of his belt.

The moment one of the trio nodded and started his way, the other two shuffled off in different directions. Bass stopped in front of the camp guard, realizing he didn’t know a damned word of the man’s language—wondering for a moment if any of these three had been among those Sioux raiders who had chased him and Shad Sweete down when they were on their way to Fort Davy Crockett in Brown’s Hole. Too late for him to worry about them recognizing an old, gray-headed trapper from that many summers ago.

“Sweete?” he asked, using his friend’s name.

The Cheyenne barely shrugged.

“Big man,” and Titus held up a flattened hand half a foot over their heads. “Big, big man.” As the warrior’s eyes warily studied that hand, Bass brought both his arms up, fingers tapping his own shoulders, then moved his hands out all that much wider to show the wide span of Shadrach Sweete’s muscular frame.

With no more than the slightest gesture, the warrior in the buffalo robe indicated he wanted the white man to follow him into camp. Follow him he did, scuffing through the length of the Cheyenne camp scattered among the old Cottonwood growing back from the annual floodplain of the Arkansas. At the far edge of the treeline, the Cheyenne stopped and pointed out a young woman patiently trudging around the side of a squat, small-flapped hide lodge. She had a small, bowlegged infant slowly taking some first, tentative steps beside her.

“Sweete?” Bass asked. “She know about Sweete?”

“Sweete,” the man repeated, speaking for the first time. Then he motioned for the white man to go on before the warrior pulled his hand beneath the buffalo robe’s warmth once more and turned away.

“Sweete?” Titus asked as he approached the lodge, immediately drawing the young woman’s attention.

She cocked her head to the side and repeated, “Sweete?”

“Yes—he here?”

“Shad-rach Sweete?” She repeated the three syllables with practiced certainty.

“You know Shadrach, do you?” he said with a grin, relieved. Then he started for the door of the lodge, figuring his old friend was inside.

“Sweete,” she said, stepping between Bass and the open doorway as a young boy appeared from the firelit interior. Pointing off toward the far willows, she indicated a patch of open ground where some more of the band’s ponies were grazing on grass blown clear of crusty snow.

“He’s not here? That it? Sweete’s gone off to the ponies?”

She bent her head this way, then that way, almost the way a dog would listen intently to its master’s words. “Sweete go.”

“Yeah, Sweete go to the ponies?”

“Goddamn!” the voice thundered behind him. “Can’t a man go take a piss ’thout some mule-headed idjit come callin’ after him?”

“As I live an’ breathe!” Bass gushed as he wheeled around, spotting Shadrach threading his way through the bare-limbed cottonwood. “So you stand up and take a piss just like a real man now, do you?”

“Shit—what would you know about real men, you half-growed strip of spit-out mulehide!”

“Don’t you ever say nothin’ mean agin no mules!” Scratch roared back as the man who easily went half-a-foot again over six feet tall, just as Sweete enfolded the shorter man in his big arms.

The smell of Shadrach—a free man’s mix of woodsmoke and gun oil, burnt powder and stale tobacco both—how it evoked so many bittersweet memories that Bass felt his eyes begin to sting. As his old friend loosened his grip, Scratch reached up with both hands and pulled Sweete’s face down to his, promptly planting a wet kiss on both of Shadrach’s cheeks.

“Damn, but it’s good to see you too, Titus Bass,” Sweete said in a husky whisper laden with deep emotion.

For a long moment there, Scratch could not speak. He hadn’t expected to be choked up this way with the reunion. Finally he said, “Was told up to the fort you was down here with Gray Thunder’s bunch. Knowed sometime back that you run off to the blanket with these here no-good Cheyennes.”

Sweete looped a muscular arm over Bass’s shoulder. “Pray tell, when you hear of that?”

“Can’t recollect if it were someone right here at Fort William or not,” he replied, a little aggravated that he couldn’t scratch up the proper notion. “Or, maybe it were on up the Arkansas at Fisher’s pueblo.”

Sweete waved for the young woman to move in their direction. “What’d they tell you ’bout me?”

“Said you was lookin’ to scare up some folks to take you in when Vaskiss and Sublette folded and closed down their fort on the South Platte. Said you was fixin’ to head out for to find a band of Cheyenne where you ended up takin’ a shine to a gal.”

“This here’s that gal,” Sweete announced, strong affection in his voice. “Titus—want you to meet Shell Woman.”

“Shell Woman.” Scratch bobbed his head in recognition.

“She knows her name in American talk,” Shad explained. “Ciphers more an’ more American talk all the time. Most times I call her Toote.”

“Toote?”

Shad smiled toothily. “Like them Frenchies say: ‘Toote suite,’ I call her Toote.”

Nodding his head to the pretty woman, Bass said, “Toote it is.”

Dropping to one knee, Titus asked, “This li’l pup your’n?”

Quickly scooping the child off the ground and cradling her in his big arms, Shadrach said, “This here li’l doe-eyed gal is my daughter, Pipe Woman.”

“She is a purty one, Shad,” Bass agreed. “Good thing she takes after her mama, ol’ coon. Ugly a nigger as you are, I don’t figger you’d be a man to throw good-lookin’ young’uns.”

“Shit, look who’s talkin’ ugly!” Sweete growled, then turned to Shell Woman and spoke quickly in Cheyenne before she turned away. “My darlin’ baby here was born year ago last winter. And I want you to see my boy—he’s older’n my girl. I sent the woman to fetch him.”

“Jehoshaphat! You got two young’uns?” Scratch cried. “Been keeping that poor woman heavy with child, ain’cha?”

The proud radiance on Shad’s face drained to a look of pained sympathy. “When Shell Woman give birth to the girl here—she had her a long, hard fight of it. From that day on she said she knowed something tore inside her, knowed she’d never have ’nother child after the girl. I allays wanted more young’uns when it came my time to settle down …” A look of quiet resignation came over him. “These two—why, they be all any father could pray for—”

Bursting from the lodge door toddled a small boy, somewhat lighter skinned than his baby sister, but every bit as black-headed as their mother. He sprinted across the icy snow, his small capote slurring the snowy ground as his tiny legs pumped him toward his father. Reaching Shadrach, the child flung his arms around his father’s leg and clamped on fiercely.

“He was still sleepin’ when I left to take my piss in the brush,” Sweete explained. With one of his big hands, he gently turned the boy’s head so the boy was looking up at the stranger. After saying something in Cheyenne to the child, Shad told Bass, “This here’s High-Backed Bull. He’s allays been a cantankerous sort if’n he don’t get his way.”

“Some young’uns just like that.”

“But, his mother an’ me can usual’ calm him when he gets real excitable,” Sweete said. Then Sweete gazed directly at Bass. “You just come down from the north country?”

“Afore last fall.”

“What you hear of Bridger up that way?”

Scratch smiled at the remembrance. “You an’ him … allays was best of friends.”

“You’re the best friend a man could have too, Titus Bass,” Shad admitted.

“Still, I reckon you an’ Gabe allays will be best friends since’t you come out west with Ashley together,” Scratch explained. “Back then both of you ’bout as young and green as they come.”

“Jim, he was seventeen in twenty-five,” Sweete reminisced.

“An’ you was a big lad for fifteen … seems how you told me that story a hunnert times if you told me once’t!”

Shad tousled his boy’s hair and inquired, “Didn’t you reach the mountains in twenty-five?”

“Yep—come out on my own,” Scratch reflected. “Prob’ly come close to starvin’ half a dozen times afore three fellas run onto me and showed me the way the stick floats—”

“Why the hell didn’t I think afore!” Shad exclaimed. “You come outta Crow country alone? Or, you bring your woman and young’uns?”

“They all come with me,” Bass explained. “Never gonna go much of anywhere ’thout them now. Was too long out west to steal some Mexican horses in Californy—ain’t gonna stay away from my kin nowhere near that long again.”

“Stole Mex horses, did you?”

“OF Solitaire, Peg-Leg, passel of others—some good men, others awready turned snake-bellied thieves,” Scratch declared.

“You tell me all about it tonight over some elk?”

“That mean you’re inviting me for dinner?”

Sweete shook his head. “Naw. I figgered to invite Waits-by-the-Water for dinner, have your family meet mine … so I figger you’ll be tagging along anyways.”

Balling up a fist, he started to hurl his arm at his tall friend, but Shadrach caught the fist in his huge paw. “Best you save your energy, ol’ man—’stead of throwing punches at me! Gray as you got in these last few winters, time sure has to be gnawin’ at your heels.”

“How long’s it been, Shadrach—since we last see’d each other?”

“Was it them last sad ronnyvoo days back to forty?”

“Maybeso it’s been that long,” Bass admitted after a moment. “No matter how many year it was, allays too long to go ’thout seein’ good friends.”

“Companyeros from the shinin’ times.” Sweete laid his hand on Bass’s shoulder.

“Them was glory days, Shadrach,” he whispered with an anguished remembrance. “Them really was our glory days.”

^* One-Eyed Dream

^* Death Rattle