“Gamble?” Bass asked suspiciously. “Just what you got in mind?”
“Nothin’ but a li’l game o’ chance,” he replied, turning to kneel at his blankets, dragging his possibles pouch over to begin rummaging through it. “There!” he exclaimed with genuine excitement, standing before Bass to slowly open his hand.
In Washburn’s dirty palm lay two small pieces of what looked like quartz stone, perhaps ivory, both of them carved and painted with strange hieroglyphic symbols totally foreign to Titus.
“What’s them?”
“Bones.”
“You gonna gamble with them?”
He nodded matter-of-factly, his Adam’s apple bobbing appropriately. “Ol’ Injun game of hand. I find us a place on the floor to play, singin’ out that the loser buys the drinks.”
“Then what?”
“We wait till we got us someone to play.”
“How you play?”
“I go an’ hide one of ’em in my hand, and the unlucky son of a coon can guess till tomorry which hand’s got it the bone—he ain’t got a chance of winnin’. Or ’nother way the Injuns play is to bet how many of these here scratches gonna come up when I throw the both of ’em on the floor.”
“But you ain’t got no money to buy a fella his drink when you lose.”
Washburn’s face went blank with righteous indignation. “I don’t ever lose at the bones, Titus. Never, ever lose.”
He looked down at those two small objects, like some foreign, sacred totems they were. And his gut rumbled in warning. “I … I ain’t goin’ with you, Isaac.”
“I don’t never, ever lose!” he repeated. “C’mon—don’t ye hear the whiskey callin’ out yer name?” He slung an arm over Bass’s shoulder, clacking the two bones together in his hand with the clatter of ivory dominoes on a hardwood table. “Cain’t ye jest
He swallowed hard. Damn, but it sounded like it could work. Washburn knew what he spoke of—on everything from Indians to the courses of the far rivers, from the valleys and passes and mountain ranges, to the ways of whiskey and the whys of women. Tempting, seductive, so damned luring was his scheme for the night—
“No, I can’t go out gaming with you tonight ’thout no money,” Bass answered resolutely.
“Don’t be no yella-livered fool, now, Titus.”
“I ain’t yella!” he growled with a mighty shrug, flinging Washburn’s arm off his shoulder and stepping away.
“Then c’mon with me an’ have some fun.”
With a shake of his head Titus said, “Better us go down to the grove where we can shoot some more. Maybeso you can show me better how to throw that belt ’hawk of your’n.”
“Nope,” he replied succinctly, turning to sweep up his possibles pouch, draping it over his shoulder, then pulled up the flap to drop the bones within. “Ye can find me, Titus. If’n yer of a mind to have yerself a spree with Isaac Washburn.”
“You’re gonna go and get yourself in ’nother fight.”
He whirled on Bass. “Don’t tell me ye gone and got squeamish ’bout a li’l fightin’ when yer drinkin’! Why, you an’ me been mixin’ the fightin’ an’ drinkin’ for better’n a hull damned moon now.”
“And we gone through everything I had, ’cept what I’ll make tomorry.”
“What’s it all track anyway, Titus? If yer money buyed us a bunch of whiskey an’ a hull bunch of daubin’ our stingers—then it were worth it! Yest money, an’ a man allays can get him some more for the next spree he plans to have fer hisself.”
Now it was Bass who turned aside, brushing past the trapper as he stepped out of his cell. “I got ’nother trap to finish.”
“It’ll be thar’ tomorry, Titus.”
“There’s more lock parts I gots to file down an’ polish for our guns—”
“They’ll be there too,” Washburn interrupted, following Bass into the livery as Titus headed for the forge. “It can all wait. It allays has.”
Bass stopped, wheeled on Washburn. “Yeah, it allays has, ain’t it? Long as there was enough money to give us both a hammer in our heads the next day … while’st you watched me pounding away at this here goddamned anvil!”
“Hell with ye, then!” Washburn roared in reply, flinging his arms in the air as he thundered past Titus. “Ye yest stay hyar, goddammit! Maybeso ye can yest stay right hyar in St. Louie when Isaac Washburn takes off fer the far places, Mr. High-an’-Mighty!”
“Isaac!”
The trapper kept on walking down the long, dusty corridor between the stalls, waving an arm in dispute of Bass’s cry. “Yer a sneak an’ a coward—an’ not fit to eat with a dog or even drink with a nigger. Ye can yest stay behin’t when I set off—”
“Isaac!”
“To hell with ye, Mr. Too-Good-to-Come-Drinkin’-with-Me!” he roared his words over his shoulder when he reached the door.
“Come back here, Isaac!”
Washburn shoved against the door with a loud scrape of wood and creak of heavy iron hinges. “I’m better on my own, ye god-blamed penny sniffer!”
And he was gone into that evening’s glow as the sun sank somewhere out there to the west—far, far beyond what world Titus had ever known. For the briefest moment a golden shaft of light exploded in through that doorway flung open by Washburn, igniting the lingering particles of dust the trapper had stirred up, like flecks of crimson-fired starlight slowly settling in the shaft of light. Too quickly the sunset’s fire went out, the gold swallowed by the interior darkness, the livery cold once more.
The sun gone to rest out there once more.
He turned, resolute. Looked back over his shoulder one last time, for but an instant considering that he might run to catch up the trapper—at the least to put things a’right before he returned to work, before night fell, before Washburn was off to chance a dangerous gamble to pay for his spree.
It was cold when Titus awoke to the startling, pristine silence. The fire must have all but gone out, he decided as he turned beneath the blankets, fighting the urge to lie there.
Eventually the silence alarmed fear in him.
Rolling quickly, Titus bolted upright. Washburn’s blankets were empty.
Blinking, he tried to clear the webby gauze from his mind. He rubbed the grit from his eyes, then gazed through that doorway. Nothing but gloom. It must surely still be night, he assured himself. Not a thing to worry himself about.
Then he recognized the gray seep of false dawn bleeding into the livery. Enough light to realize day would not be long in arriving now.
As he sat there staring at the trapper’s old, greasy blankets, what little Washburn had to truly call his own, Bass wanted to believe Isaac was at that very moment snoring beside one of his lovelies. But try as he might, Titus could not convince himself that the night remained innocent.
That he himself might not be an unwitting accomplice. Guilty for no other reason than allowing Washburn the freedom to go off with a damned fool notion playing in his head.
A drizzle began its insistent, growing patter on the shake roof overhead as he wobbled to his feet. From a tenpenny nail he took down his blanket coat, looped the wide leather belt about his waist as he reached the back door beyond the forge. Into the rain he plunged, through the soggy paddock where Troost kept his animals, over the split-rail fence and on to Market Street.
Little life stirred in lower St. Louis this time of day. Night all but done. Day yet to announce itself. Smudges of fire smoke clung low about the roofs like gray death’s wreaths; at his feet tumbled the scattered clutter of fog.
