3
“Sergeant!”
At that cry from the south shore Bass’s head bobbed out of the muddy water, his eyes blinking, immediately landing on the open gates, where one of the soldiers stood turned half-around to hurl his voice into the stockade.
“Pull, girl!” he called out to the mare dragging him against the Missouri’s strong current. He gripped her tail as firmly as he had ever held on to a woman at that moment of blissful union. “That’s it—pull!”
As he did his best to hold the rifle high overhead and out of the water, the mare fought the strong current, pulling them slowly toward that south bank where a second soldier appeared, joining the first. Eventually the big- bellied one hurried up to complete the trio about the time the Indian pony’s hooves touched bottom beside the mare. Together both animals struggled to find their footing on the slick river bottom, stumbled and shifted, both nearly going down as they continued to fight for a foothold. As the river surged against them, the mare managed to keep her head fully above water while all he saw of the pony in that instant was its nostrils. Then the pony was back up, eyes as big as tea saucers, ears slicked back in both fear and the effort she was giving her swim across the frothy current as the bottom of the sun’s orb sank onto the far western prairie with an audible sigh.
At the moment the mare nearly jerked him free of her tail, Bass’s bare feet scraped across the muddy, brush-choked bottom some fifty yards below the wharf where the pirogues continued to clunk together. All three soldiers moved down together to stand some twenty yards up the grassy bank, just past the two upside-down canoes as Titus finally got his legs under him, slapping the rump of both animals as they clawed their way out of the Missouri, clattering onto dry land.
He stood gasping, eyeing the trio as both horses shimmied beneath their loads, then turned their big eyes to regard the naked, white-skinned human with something bordering on a warning never to repeat such a crossing, if not outright contempt. Glancing at the big soldier who held a Harpers Ferry musket pointed his way, Titus clambered a little farther up the slope and collapsed to his knees on the grass.
“Just who the hell are you?”
Rubbing some of the river’s grit from his eyes, he felt his breathing slow, then replied, “Name’s Bass. Up from St. Louis.”
The thinnest one of the three took a step forward, a large-bored pistol hanging at the end of his arm, which he quickly waved at the two horses audibly tearing off shoots of the new grass. “There any more of you coming across?”
He wagged his head, slinging water from his shoulder-length hair. The breeze prickled his naked skin, and he grew chilled as he glanced back at the north bank. “Nary a soul. Just me.”
When Bass turned to step toward the mare, the thin one snapped, “Stand your ground, stranger!”
For that silent moment his teeth chattered, his eyes flashing over the three of them and the muzzles of those two pistols that had joined the fat man’s musket in staring back at him.
“J-just getting m-my shucks.” He gestured to the top of the mare’s packs, where he had stuffed his clothing beneath the ropes.
“Your shucks?” asked the third man, clearly the oldest of the lot.
“My clothes,” Titus replied, wrapping his arms around himself, shuddering with the breeze that seemed to pick up speed and muscle as the sun continued to sink in the west. “Wasn’t about to get ’em wet in making that crossing, you see. Now, if you fellas’ll just let me get back in my warm clothes.”
“Yes,” replied the thin one. “By all means. None of us particular like watching a naked man shake and shrivel up afore our eyes.”
With a grateful nod Bass turned to the mare, patted her on the neck, and retrieved his shirt, britches, and boots from beneath the ropes lashing the bundles to the horse’s back.
As Titus began to hop one-legged into his leather britches, the thin man out front asked him, “What the devil are you doing up here from St. Louis?”
“Headed west.”
“West?” the fat man demanded in a gush. “West, from here?”
“What you aim to do going west?” the thin one demanded. “Off to Santa Fe all by yourself?”
Stuffing the wooden buttons through their holes in the britches, Bass shook his head. “Ain’t going south to Santy Fee. Pointing my nose out yonder to them mountains.”
“You don’t say?” the third one replied with a bit of wonder. For the most part, he had been all but silent.
Bass dragged his yoke-shouldered linen shirt over his sopping wet head and asked, “You got room to put a man up for the night?”
“Do we, Sergeant?” the fat one asked. He let the Harpers Ferry musket droop until it pointed at the ground.
“I don’t know about putting you up here at the post,” the thin one began.
“Then I’ll just set myself up right out here,” Titus responded.
“Aw, c’mon, Sergeant,” the big-bellied man pleaded. “We ain’t none of us had no one new to talk with inside of weeks.”
“That’s right,” the third one agreed. “Maybe he’s got some news from downriver what ain’t gone rotted with time.”
Jabbing his big horse pistol into the waistband of his military breeches, the thin man inquired, “You ain’t a scout from one of them fur outfits, are you? Rest of ’em coming ’long behind you?”
On the ground where he plopped to pull on his boots, Bass declared, “Like I said, I’m on my lonesome.”
“And you know exactly where the hell you’re going?”
Titus pointed quickly in the general direction. “West. Out yonder.”
The younger, thin man with the beaklike nose chuckled, then said, “So do you know where you are?”
“I’m on the Missouri River,” Bass replied, flinging a thumb over his shoulder at the frothy, muddy, runoff swollen water. “Still east of the big bend.”
“Ain’t that far to the bend now!” the third man cheered.
“How far?” Titus replied eagerly, standing, stomping his heels down into the old boots.
With a shrug the older man said, “Not far. I never was one to measure things out exact.”
“He’s right,” the sergeant injected. “So you reach the big bend, what’s that mean to you?”
“Means the Missouri heads north,” Bass replied. “And me with it.”
With a bob of his head the big soldier said, “Sounds like he’s got him a notion of where he’s off to, Sergeant.”
“Could be, Culpepper,” the thin one replied, jabbing his thumb over his shoulder at the stockade for emphasis. “But—still don’t sound like he knows where he’s landed.”
Titus tugged the broad-brimmed hat firmly down on his head. “You mean this here post on the Missouri?”
The sergeant swelled out his chest proudly, swinging an arm expansively, proudly, over all his regal holdings. “Osage, it’s called,” he offered. “Fort Osage.”*
* * *
It was a sometimes proposition, this Fort Osage was.
During the early 1820s it had become the jumping-off point for those traders headed down the Santa Fe Trail.
“But there’s been a post here back to O-eight,” the thin man called Lancaster explained as they sat With Titus at the stone fireplace in what served as the fort’s mess hall.
From the size of the stockade down to the tiny barracks, it was plain for any visitor to see that a large force had never manned Fort Osage.
“That’s back when General Clark chose this here place for a government trading house,” Sergeant Clayton explained. “I s’pose that’s why to some folks this place’ll always be known as Fort Clark.”
In fact, to those on the Lewis and Clark expedition marching west to the Pacific Ocean, this location was first
