of his life, a marked man with a most uncertain future.
No matter what crimes of passion he had committed in his young life, Bass had never knowingly stolen anything of consequence. A few eggs, maybe a pullet here and there, but nothing that really mattered nor gave his conscience the fits at night. He’d never started out to hurt anyone, no matter how badly he ended up hurting himself.
“Damn you,” Hysham Troost muttered softly as he leaned back, studying Titus side to side. “That’s ’bout all I can do for you now with that horse liniment. Smells to hell, don’t it? Well, you just lay there an’ suffer, goddammit. I got work to do: mine and yours too now. Ain’t the first time, is it? Here you lay back all bunged up again, and I gotta take up your slack—”
Titus tried to hoist himself up onto an elbow, but he hurt too much to get very far before that elbow gave out beneath him and he collapsed into the hay atop his pallet of blankets.
“Lay there, goddammit,” Troost ordered gruffly. “About the worst beating I seen you get, so you’ll just have to sleep this’un off. Worst I ever see’d. Damn. It just don’t pay to care about you, does it?”
“Glad … glad you care.”
“I ain’t one to,” Troost snapped angrily. “I don’t wanna care for no man who don’t care for his own self. And it sure is plain as sunshine that Titus Bass don’t care for his own self. Just look at you.”
“When I … I get better, you bring me a mirror,” he croaked dry as sand, trying out half a puffy-lipped grin. “I’ll look at my own self then.”
Wagging his head with a weak smile, the blacksmith replied, “Damn you, Titus Bass. Here you are all cut up, your muscles knotted tighter’n new harness—and you still can make me laugh. You are a caution, son. A real, honest-to-goodness caution.”
He felt the older man pat his shoulder lightly, listened as Troost rose from his side and moved out of the stall where Titus made his home in the older man’s livery. Nearby sat a small iron stove radiating welcome heat as he shivered from time to time in his clothes soaked by winter’s last sleety snow. Maybe it was even spring’s first freezing rain that had battered St. Louis last night. No matter. Spring or winter now—they were just as cold, either one. He needed to get out of the clothes but knew he didn’t have the strength and sighed.
Looking back now, Bass couldn’t remember much after he had plopped himself down near the great stone fireplace at one of the grogshops and begun drinking the thick, heady stuff that burned all the way down his gullet. More and more he drank, slowly numbing his despair at ever finding what he had been seeking for so long. Just another night of punishing the whiskey and that sweet lemon-flavored rum brought upriver from New Orleans. Painkiller carried there to the mouth of the Mississippi by ship from some islands down in the great seas of the south. Another night no different from all the others gone before, he had counted on drinking his fill before stumbling out back of the saloon to one of the tiny, stinking knocking shops where women of all hues and shapes serviced the frontiersmen and riverboat crews coming and going like bees to this veritable hive at the edge of the wilderness.
For the moment there were snatches of memory, scenes that flitted behind his eyelids whether he wanted them to or not—it simply hurt to work his brain so. There in the mud and the cold rain outside the low door … the smoky light within … finding his whore and another man. Titus had shoved away. The mocking laughter. Then that stranger’s friends, two—maybe three—more had come up when the argument had started.
Why he ever argued over a whore? Hadn’t he learned his lesson? Whores had nearly killed him twice now. Annie Christmas’s gunboat girls all the way downriver to Natchez when he was barely gone from home. And now this crooked-nosed woman he hungered for bad—a woman busy with a bull-headed, nasty sort of customer with even meaner friends.
Maybe he was lucky he had been turning, like Troost said. Whoever used those claws on him might well have killed him there by the whore’s doorway. Or he might never have come to … if the blacksmith hadn’t come hunting for him at first light. Vaguely he remembered someone rolling him over, feeling the cold bite of rain lancing against his wounds, sputtering at who took hold of him as Titus tried to get his eyes open to see, working his mushy mouth to say something to the bastard hurting him so in dragging him up and out of the icy mud and puddles of bloody water.
Just leave me be! his mind had screamed every bit as loud as his body had screamed in pain.
Then he’d been draped over someone’s shoulder and hauled down the street when he’d passed out again. Had to be the blacksmith, Titus had figured just before he’d sunk again into the deep and welcome blackness of that hole he was digging for himself more and more every week, every month, every one of these last few years as he grew more and more bitter, more hopeless of ever knowing what it was his grandpap had sought, what men like Levi Gamble came west to find.
For Titus Bass there was simply nothing left to seek. Long ago when he’d begun his drinking, trying to kill himself slowly night by night an inch at a time, he had decided that his life was better short, better that than lived without hope. Better short than a life lived without that same sort of dream that had brought his grandpap to a new land.
Undeniably it was a hole he was digging for himself, a little deeper every day. For damned sure no man had yet dug the grave that could hold Titus Bass—but already he had a good start on the one he was digging for himself.
Goddamned whore.
Even the women had lost their allure for him. So why did he still seek them out? And make such an ass of himself in the process?
Titus tried to roll to the side carefully. It hurt too much, so he stayed there on his back, sensing the warmth from the tiny stove on one side, his other side still chilled and damp.
That first week he had begun work for the blacksmith years before, he and Troost had boarded up one of the stalls in a far corner of the livery. He had never made himself a door, not ever really needing one to his way of thinking. No reason to bolt things down or lock them up. He had long ago wrapped up his grandpap’s rifle in an old sheet of oiled canvas and stuffed it up high in the rafters of the livery above his stall—having decided he would never have call to use the rifle again. That curly-maple stock carried so very, very many miles in that hope of reaching the place his grandpap’s spirit had sought. Where the great and shaggy creatures ruled. Wherever they had disappeared, his grandpap’s spirit was likely at peace there, for all time.
This was something Titus realized he would never share. That sense of peace, contentment, fulfilled of his quest.
What few possessions he owned hung above him from pegs and nails driven into the walls of his tiny cell: his grandpap’s shooting pouch, odds and ends of extra clothing, a colorful bandanna, even a French-silk scarf given him by one of the dusky-skinned whores he favored in one of those knocking shops where a man degraded himself much, much more than the women he sought out in such places. Not a hell of a lot to show for his thirty years.
On the other hand, by the time his grandpap was his age, the man had brought his family into the canebrakes, fought off the French and their Indian allies, and through it all carved himself out a little place in the wilderness.
By the time Thaddeus had seen his thirtieth winter, he had cleared twice as much land as most men, raised more crops out of that rich soil than any other in Boone County, and sunk his roots down deep, deep.
Now, Titus? He had nothing to show for his years but his scars, and his miles, and the crow-foot beginnings of some wrinkles. He figured the graying would not be long in coming.
In no way was he living up to the Bass family name. He had failed in all respects, sinking lower and lower in despair and self-pity with the turn of the seasons. Failed in his attempts to accomplish anything near what the other men of his family had accomplished in their years walking the face of the earth. He had failed to make something of himself—no ground, no stock, no crops, no wife, no children. And no dream.
Nothing but his scars.
Long ago he had even considered going back home. Eventually deciding he could never return to Rabbit Hash, Boone County, Kentucky. Never to go back as Thaddeus’s prodigal son. Nay, the old wounds were still too deep for him to lick, and return with his tail tucked between his legs. No home left for him back there where his brothers and sister had likely started families of their own long ago, every one of them working to clear all the more forest with Thaddeus, to push back the wilderness just that much more for the next generation to come.
“Titus,” the blacksmith’s voice whispered close to his ear. “If you’re awake, want you to know I laid some victuals close by. Here at your left hand. It’s within reach, son. I’ll cover it with one of the missus’s towels so the
