19
The air was pregnant with the fragrance of early summer while his nostrils drank in the heady aroma of fresh-cut grass even before he opened his eyes to the sun creeping over the horizon. Without looking he knew it was morning’s call: clearly making out the gentle lowing of a half-dozen cows below him all chewing their breakfast in their stalls.
Titus stretched, yawned, rolled over, and pulled the blankets over his head, grinding out a new place for both his shoulder and hip down in the soft crunch of the fragrant stalks that cradled him in the barn’s loft. Moments of blissful reverie swallowed Bass until that voice jarred him.
“You coming down to help out today?”
Damn.
Titus shoved his blankets back from his face and replied, “I’ll be down straightaway, Mr. Guthrie.”
Instead he lay there for a few moments more—listening, hearing the settler murmur to his cows, settle atop a stool and begin milking. The first stream of milk struck the red cedar piggin loud enough for Titus to hear it. He had slept in again, later than he’d intended. Right now he didn’t know whether he should be angry with himself, or the girl.
But then he smiled. How could he possibly be angry with her for keeping him up late into the evening after a long day, talking as they did on the porch to her parents’ cabin? A few days ago he had decided there were no two ways about it. He simply would have to work hard not to fall in love.
For certain, this wasn’t anything like what it had been with Amy Whistler. That was nothing more than some mutual exploration and discovery, wherein she was seeking a dutiful husband and Titus was craving some relief from all those greatest mysteries of youth.
Nor was this at all like what he had experienced with Mincemeat back in Owensboro for close to three years. That had only been a matter of his hungers and his loneliness. Nothing more to it, he had kept himself convinced. All Abigail Thresher had done was guide him into manhood; then in return she was free to take all that she wanted from him through their season upon season together as that Kentucky frontier settlement grew like a gangly child.
When he awoke one cold morning this past spring to find that she hadn’t come home to the tiny shake-and- pole cabin he had built for them, Titus went off asking to round her up—fearful at first she had been hurt by one of the violent men who were a river-port prostitute’s only clientele. That’s when he was told Mincemeat had run off for New Orleans. As much as she had talked about it over the years, he had never once truly believed she really aimed to go there.
That morning he was unable to understand why anyone would want to go to New Orleans. Bewildered and shaking his head, Titus trudged back to their shanty—to find that Abigail had not only run off with what little weekly pay he had just earned from his work at the wharf, but over the past few days, with him gone to work, she had evidently been rooting around until she found his secret cache of what coins were left him from his trip downriver on Ebenezer Zane’s Kentucky broadhorn bound for New Orleans.
As spitting mad as he was at first, it didn’t take long at all before he found himself laughing until he cried, there and then in that shanty leaking with a cold early-spring drizzle, thinking how his New Orleans pay was on its way back down the Ohio and Mississippi right about then, traveling full circle without him.
That very day Titus determined to up and set out downriver himself.
Just shy of the mouth of the Ohio he decided he’d make camp and wait to fetch himself a ride to the far shore of the chocolate-hued Mississippi. After three days of signaling to every passing keelboat and broadhorn and even the ungainly log rafts, a flatboat finally pulled over to tie up at the bank nearby late one afternoon. In return for bringing in a couple of deer for the hungry crew’s supper, Titus was awarded a trip to the west shore of the old muddy river at dawn the next day.
Waving in farewell, he watched that boat’s crew urge their broadhorn into the main channel. On south lay the mouth of the Arkansas and the White and all the rest of those rivers he had floated past when he was younger. Now he stood there on the far side of the Mississippi at twenty, turning expectantly to face the north that spring of 1814. Upriver. New country he had never laid eyes on. Nothing else really concerned him now but moving north. His eager feet set themselves in motion.
St. Louis lay somewhere beyond the horizon. How far, he had no idea. At the time it really had mattered little when he would reach that mythical place. For the time being, he exalted in the journey itself. He was young, feeling the fiery surge of every heartbeat as the wide breadth of his life seemed to stretch out before him. For now, time as measured in days, months, or years was of little concern for him.
He was on his way to see for himself the city that had lured Levi Gamble out of the eastern forests … when one evening Titus heard nearby the lowing of cows, about the time he was ready to roll himself up in his blankets that twilight. How his mind whirled with memories of home and barns, turned earth and the heady aromas of a cabin kitchen. No, sir—those surely weren’t wild critters he heard. Why, one of them even wore a bell by the gentle clang of it.
Titus had followed the lowing to its source, and near dark he’d found the shed attached to a corral and paddock. Beyond stood a cabin where a telltale thread of smoke rose from the stone chimney. In the lengthening shadows Bass decided he didn’t feel all that much like company. Quite the contrary, the possibility of warmth in that cattle shed beckoned him even stronger. After a solid night’s rest, he figured to be up and on his way early enough, scaring up something for breakfast somewhere down the trail.
Besides, this settler might even have him a chicken or two roosting in that shed. And chickens just might mean eggs. Even pullets, those young chickens less than a year old, would mean eggs for a settler. Titus sorely missed his eggs. In these years since fleeing Rabbit Hash, he hadn’t eaten anywhere near as many as he used to eat back in Boone County. Yes, indeed. It had all sounded like a fine, fine idea to lay out his blankets in that shed for the night, then purloin himself some eggs come dawn and cook them in his cup over a breakfast fire once he had put a few miles between himself and the settler’s place later that morning.
Trouble was, Titus was about to learn that Able Guthrie was an early riser.
Which meant that he awoke not to the gentle cluck of a chicken or two as they went about laying his breakfast. No, Bass awoke instead to someone tapping the bottom of his bare foot, just barely opening his eyes enough to squint up at the muzzle of that big fowler the settler had pointed down at his privates.
“You wanna keep all your parts in working order, I’ll pray you tell me what you’re doing here in my shed.”
While there had been guns pointed at his head and his heart, never had Titus Bass had one aimed at that most tender piece of his anatomy. A downright pleasurable piece it had proved itself to be too.
“Ju-ju-ju—”
“Spit it out, son.”
“J-just sleeping.”
The settler poked the muzzle of that gun firmly against Titus’s crotch. “Where you from?”
“Nowhere … n-now.”
“Don’t fun me!”
“Ain’t gonna try funnin’ you a bit.”
“Best you tell me where you hail from.”
“Owens … Owensboro.”
“On the Ohio?”
“Yes, sir.”
“What you doing here in this country?”
“Set on seeing St. Louie.”
“So you sleep good?” the settler asked him, something easing around his eyes.
“I’m beginning to figure I slept too damned good,” Titus grumbled, looking cross-eyed down at that rifle stuffed into his crotch.
“Don’t pay to be sneaking into a man’s cow shed and sleeping the night away less’n you can get up afore that man stumbles onto you, does it?”
“No, sir,” he replied as polite as he could, watching something slowly crossing the man’s face that convinced
