These men, that blanket-wrapped body, the quiet stillness about them as the birds ceased their songs and calls—and especially the utter senselessness of Joe Little’s death … it all brought a flood of memories back for Titus. Remembering Ebenezer Zane. Recalling how he had lived, and how the man died. How the pilot’s loyal crew of boatmen buried him off the side of their Kentucky flatboat, the shroud slowly slipping beneath the muddy surface of the Mississippi River.
“Any of ye have something to say to Joe, now be the time to speak yer piece,” Hatcher said quietly.
“He was a good man and a fair ’nough trapper,” Caleb said after he took a step right up to the edge of the long hole.
Moving up beside Wood, Elbridge Gray added, “The sort you could allays trust to watch your backside.”
“He weren’t the best in the world at nothing,” Simms said, “but he knew just how to be a man’s friend.”
“Not a better man to count on when things got tough,” Fish said self-consciously. The rest nodded.
Jack said, “Won’t none of us soon forget ye, Joe Little.” Then he turned to the rest of them. “Any ye niggers know any proper church words?”
For a few moments all of them stood there embarrassed and shuffle-footed in their moccasins and greasy buckskins, hands clasped in front of them, their eyes darting this way and that, or staring at the dark hole near their feet … none of them knowing what to say.
“Stupid for this here nigger to ask that,” Hatcher admitted after a long moment. “Should’ve knowed better’n to ’spect any of us ever been inside a church to recollect any Sunday-meeting words to say over one of our own.”
Then Caleb blurted, “Weren’t no good reason for him to go the way he did.”
Kinkead nodded his big head, saying, “Man figgers to be took in a Injun fight, maybeso a grizz—but to go under this a’way …”
“Dead is dead,” Scratch muttered just as suddenly. The words surprised him as much as they surprised the others, who turned to look at him. “Don’t matter how a man dies—that ain’t what counts nohow. What matters most is how Joe Little lived.”
Hatcher and a couple others grunted their approval. Jack studied Bass carefully there as he picked at an itchy scab on his cheek where a mosquito had landed at the edge of his beard. Then Jack said, “That’s the true of it, fellas. Joe ain’t here no more. He’s gone.”
“Ain’t here no more,” Wood repeated.
Jack continued. “Like Titus said, it don’t matter how he died. It were how Joe lived … how any of us lives what makes a good goddamn.”
“He were a free man,” Rowland said. “Lived free and didn’t cotton to working for no man.”
“I don’t know no better words’n that, Johnny,” Hatcher declared. “Joe Little was a free man. He gone where he wanted to go. He done what he wanted to do. And he damn well lived the way he wanted to live. That’s what matters most.” Jack looked at Bass.
With a nod Bass added, “A man don’t always get a chance to choose the way he dies, fellas … but a man sure as hell can choose the way he lives. I figger Joe had all he ever wanted to have, and lived the way he wanted to live.”
“Let’s us remember that,” Hatcher reminded them. “Not how the man died. Let’s remember the good days we had with our friend.”
Jack knelt quickly, scooping up a double handful of loose soil and shoving it into the hole, where it landed with a muffled splatter on the thick wool blanket. “S’long, Joe.”
Caleb knelt at the side of the grave and tossed in a single handful of dirt. “Keep your eye on the skyline.”
One by one they came to the edge of the hole and threw in some dirt to begin this burial of their friend, each man speaking his own farewell as if it might be no more than a parting among those at the end of rendezvous. Neither one knowing when next they would see one another.
Eventually all had spoken save for Bass.
“We vow to remember,” he said, repeating the grieving woman’s words more than seventeen winters old, words spoken while another canvas-wrapped shroud was slipped into the waters of the Mississippi. “Those of us left behind, we vow to remember the ones what been took from us.”
“Damn,” Jack muttered. He dragged his forearm beneath his nose and blinked rapidly. “Promised myself I wasn’t gonna do this.”
Titus began, “Ain’t no shame in having strong feelings for a friend—”
But he fell silent the instant Hatcher turned on his heel and stomped away.
“Goddamn—I knowed this was gonna happen,” Caleb explained, wagging his head.
The others didn’t even look up to watch Hatcher hurrying back to camp. Their eyes stole a glance at Titus, then went back to gazing down at the body in the hole.
“Wh-where’s he going?” Bass inquired.
“To get hisself away,” Simms said.
“Get away from what?”
“From you,” Wood answered.
“From me?”
Caleb explained, “From what you said.”
“I … I said something wrong?”
“No, not rightly wrong,” Wood confided. “I s’pose it was bound to happen. You see, Jack ain’t never took … he ain’t never got used to losing folks. We’uns—all of us—we know Jack ain’t never had him a friend what died that he wasn’t all broke up about it for a long time.”
“Ain’t nothing wrong with that,” Titus said, looking after the tall, thin man hurrying across the small meadow as the sun began to creep down the hillside toward them.
Simms declared, “Maybeso Titus here hadn’t oughtta gone and said nothing ’bout having feelings for a friend. Hatcher being so techy the way he is.”
“How ’bout me going to tell Jack I didn’t know,” Bass suggested, sensing remorse that he had offended a friend and hurt feelings. “Tell him I’m sorry for—”
They all heard the pony snort. And the forest around them go silent in the space of a heartbeat. Then came the snap of a branch somewhere behind them in the timber. Turning as one without a word, the trappers bolted off in the opposite direction as if a bolt of lightning had struck beneath their feet.
In that instant they were racing back for camp on instinct—not yet aware just what danger was riding down on them with the hammer of all those hooves.
A danger wearing death’s own hideous, earth-paint masks.
*
23
With a wild, whooping screech, a single horseman burst out of the trees on the slope off to Hatcher’s left.
Bass watched the warrior kicking his heels into the pony’s ribs as he hunched forward, drawing back the raw-hide string on his short bow as he swung it in an arc over the pony’s bobbing head, the animal carrying him rapidly across the grassy flat that still remained between him and Hatcher.
With that war cry Jack exploded into a dead run—so tall and skinny, his movements were almost spiderlike. Grabbing free the pistol stuffed in his belt—still he kept sprinting for camp.
Voices cried out, screeching behind the rest of them. As Scratch’s blood went cold, it seemed the whole forest instantly came alive with more horsemen exploding from the trees. Perhaps two dozen or more. Maybe as many as half a hundred. No matter how many—the odds were clearly stacked against these men racing for their lives. They’d been caught flat-footed, away from camp without their rifles and pouches at a moment of grief … having nothing more than a single load in each of their belt pistols.
