clearly Indian made. “An’ ye ain’t never see’d a travois?”
“You’re fixing to drag me back in one of them?”
Rowland said, “Less’n you’re fit to sit a horse.”
In resignation Bass shook his head, then felt his shoulders lifted as the one called Elbridge raised him, stuffing a folded saddle blanket beneath his head and shoulders as Solomon unfurled the dirty red blanket over the length of him.
Kinkead asked, “You warm enough, Titus Bass?”
“I’ll do for now—thankee.” But he shuddered as the wind gusted along the hillside.
“Don’t tell me you’re one of them fool-headed, prideful niggers, now.” Hatcher turned to a knot of the others, saying, “Isaac—I seen ye pack that blanket of yer’n ahind your saddle. Fetch it up for this man’s cold.”
“A good man, if’n he’s a little solemn,” Kinkead confided.
Hatcher stood to fling his voice down the slope. “An’ Isaac—get one of the boys to ride up the valley to fetch us the first hide them Sho’nies pull off.”
“What you figger to use the hide for if I got this fella a blanket for to lay over ’im?” Solomon asked.
“To my way of thinking,” Hatcher explained, squatting to lay a palm flat on the grassy soil beside him, “this here ground ain’t all that warm a place for a ailin’ man to Jay hisself.”
Solomon’s eyes smiled as he rose to his feet and started away. “I’ll make double sure our friend here gets ’nother blanket and his robe too.”
Bass watched the trappers move off toward their horses not far down the slope.
Scooting closer to Bass and crossing his legs, Hatcher explained, “Like I said, we only got to wait till Rufus makes it back. So it be fine for ye get yer rest if’n ye can.”
“Maybe later,” Bass replied quietly. “It’s about all I can do … just that it’s damned good to run onto folks.”
“I’d ’spect it would be, Titus Bass.”
One by one he looked around that circle, the severely tanned faces lined by wind and weather, eyes smiling every one. For a moment he was overcome with such emotion, he could not speak. Finally, “H-how say you fellers go to callin’ me by the name I was first give out here not long back?”
“Ye call me Jack … even Mad Jack,” Hatcher replied, “then I’ll damn well call ye anything ye want me to.”
“Scratch.”
The tall and angular Hatcher scooped up Bass’s right hand again, not shaking it hard at all, more so a tight squeeze. “Pleased be to mee’cha, Scratch. Now—I’ve got me my ears pinned back, and I’m hankering to hear the tale of how ye come to have a hole in ye.”
Rowland nodded. “Where’s the rest of your plunder?”
Bass swallowed hard. “What’s on the mule’s all I got left me in the world.”
“Red-bellies?” asked the blond-haired Solomon.
“Arapaho.”
With a grunt of agreement Hatcher said, “Stands to reason, don’t it? With those sons of bitches … well—they be just ’bout as bad as Bug’s Boys.”
“B-bugs?”
“Bug’s Boys,” Hatcher repeated. “Blackfoots.”
“Much as I heard about ’em, ain’t never run onto none of them.”
“And you don’t wanna!” Rowland cried.
“Now, g’won, Scratch,” Hatcher prodded. “We got us a wait to bide our time. What say ye fill it with yer tale?”
Which is just what Titus did, beginning with the death of his last horse in the mountains and the fortuitous arrival of the trio.
“Hol’ on there,” Hatcher demanded. “How ye come to be all on yer lonesome, trapping by yerself in the first place?”
“Maybeso I ought’n tell you how I come out here from St. Louie.”
“First whack—by damn you best start at the beginning.”
So he eagerly went back to his time learning from Isaac Washburn and their plans to come out together along the Platte … then continued by recounting his solitary journey after Gut got himself killed in St. Louis where for a time there it seemed Scratch’s dream had gone up in smoke.
Right on through it all he related the story to Hatcher and the rest, who all scooted close to sit a spell. The lot of them listened in attentively, not a one of the trappers interrupting as Bass told of his first winter with the Ute, and his first scrape with the Arapaho. Then on to his first rendezvous in Willow Valley.
“By jam, we was there!” Isaac Simms commented.
But Elbridge Gray was a little’ more somber in his comment, “Not much likker howsoever.”
“Trader had him likker enough this summer, didn’t he, Jack?” Wood asked.
“Let the man finish his story, boys,” Hatcher scolded.
From rendezvous Bass recounted their fall hunt and how he had begun to bring in more beaver, bigger ones too, than the other three trappers. But he kept to himself how Silas Cooper just up and took what he believed was his rightful share of Titus’s catch—not daring to tell these men how Cooper ended up beating him so badly he came close to asking to die.
“How them Crow to winter with?” Gray asked.
Simms grinned as he inquired, “Them Crow gals good in the blankets as I hear they be?”
“Hush up, now!” Jack chided them. “Mebbe Scratch here didn’t get his stinger wet in none of them Crow gals. G’won—tell us how ye come to be from Crow country down south to ’Rapaho ground.”
Tracing their decision to float the furs downriver and how he discovered there was no post at the mouth of the Bighorn, Bass explained his journey south into Park Kyack, looking to scare up some Ute company—and when he didn’t find any of that, deciding he’d just as well head on over to the place Cooper had chosen for their reunion.
“After I waited some more, long past time for the ronnyvoo at Sweet Lake,” Bass told them, “I set out, figgering I’d run across one outfit or ’nother—an’ trade off some of them horses for what I needed in the way of fixin’s.”
In marching east toward the mountains where he had decided he would turn north, Titus told the hushed circle of attentive trappers about his coming across Injun sign, running onto the painted war party, and how he had come to be left for dead, stripped of weapons and a little less of his hair.
As soon as the words were out of his mouth, every set of eyes flicked up to stare at the blue bandanna.
“What ye done for it?” Hatcher inquired, wagging a finger at the back of his own skull. “That noggin of yer’n?”
“Put me some moss on it—soon’s I was able to drag my bones down to the water.”
Elbridge Gray’s head bobbed in confirmation. “That’s good thinking.”
“Likely it was,” Hatcher added. “How come it was the red bellies didn’t steal yer rifle?”
“Thought they had at first,” Bass said, then explained how he had found it buried in the brush where the weapon had tumbled.
“Lucky nigger you was,” Isaac Simms declared.
“Best luck I ever had was that mule there,” Bass admitted. “No telling for sure—but I imagine I’d been buzzard bait afore now if’n I didn’t have that savvy mule to carry me away from there.”
“And right into this valley filled with buffler!” Wood exclaimed.
“A white buffler at that!” Jack said.
“Lookee yonder,” Gray announced, turning to point.
A band of some ten horsemen had come into sight to the north. Clearly two of the riderless horses dragged the long, crossed poles of travois strapped to their backs.
“Wh-white buffler?” Scratch repeated.
“By the by,” Jack Hatcher replied, “that’s what the second horse drag is for.”
“See that bunch down there still?” Rowland asked.
Horses and warriors, were still knotted around something on the prairie, which Bass could not make out from
