discovered his first living, breathing buffalo? How well had he come to understand that the forts and outlying settlements, the white man himself, all were the greatest enemies to the wild creature he sought.
But it had been so long now, he ruminated as he eventually drifted off to sleep that night—so many weeks and countless miles since he had left the Missouri and the last bastions of white civilization all behind.
When would he ever possess the answers to those questions he had carried inside him for more than half his lifetime?
When would his mortal prayers finally be answered?
Late of the morning two days later he sensed the breeze come up, relishing its cooling touch across his cheek as it swept beneath the wide brim of the low-crowned hat that for the most part protected his face from the unforgiving sun in this open country. Hell, it was about all the shade to be found out here: for the past two days there hadn’t been trees big enough for a man to squat under and get out of the sun. What shade there was, the three of them were making for themselves: right below the horses’ bellies, and right below his hat’s floppy brim.
The pony snorted, jostling him awake with a start. Jehoshaphat—hadn’t it been a good dream too! His nose nestled down between the quadroon’s breasts where the sweat pooled and he could taste the salty earthiness of her coffee-skinned body as he crawled atop the woman in that ramshackle Wharf Street house of pleasure built crib upon tiny crib.
Immediately his hand tightened reflexively around the rifle laid upon his thighs, his eyes blinking as they came open in the late-morning light. Turning his head to the south, he quickly scanned the distant horizon, then turned to the right, studying the abrupt, low bluffs that bordered the river near at hand.
“What the hell you wake me for?” he demanded of the Indian pony as he loosened his white-knuckle grip on the rifle’s stock, slipped the reins into his right hand along with the weapon, then patted the horse along the neck. “I s’pose you caught yourself falling asleep too—that it, girl?”
She seemed to roll her eyes back at him.
“Yeah, I know. Hot as hell, ain’t it? And the way I figger it—this country gonna get hotter afore we get higher and cooler.”
As he said it, Titus cocked his head, peering up from beneath the wide brim of his dark-brown hat to find the offending yellow orb warming him to sleep at the same time it made him more thirsty than he had ever been in his life. Licking his dry, cracked lips, he mentally cursed the sun and its incessant heat, then blinked again and turned away from it, praying for more of that cooling wisp of breeze.
It was then that he saw them. Far off in the distance. Black specks swirling across the blue sky, off to the north and west of him. As the ponies plodded on, he watched, becoming almost hypnotized by the way the flock swooped and dived, then wheeled about and rose in the sky once more. Black specks diverging for but a moment, scattering like water striders on the surface of a Kentucky pond—then suddenly congealing in an ever-darker mass as they came down in a loud fluttering of wings, all of them disappearing from view.
His throat went even drier. That was the first great flock of birds he had seen like that. They must be tiny, for they had no real form at this distance. One of them would have been all but invisible, he decided as he reined the pony gently to the north, toward the river. Maybe even a few of them would still have trouble making themselves visible. But the innumerable masses of them flocking together in that one black cloud across the spring blue was enough to capture any man’s attention.
As he reached the water’s edge and halted the animals, Bass saw the faint puffing of dust rise beyond the bluff, a dirty smudging of the blue horizon far beyond his line of sight.
“Shit,” he grumbled.
Angry at himself, Titus sat there a moment in the saddle, watching those birds rise again, swoop to the north, climb ever higher to the cloudless sky, then sweep back to the south before settling once more behind the bluff.
What stirred that dust? What caused those birds to take to flight like they did—spooked perhaps, then descending to roost once again?
Heart thumping, afraid he had made the last mistake of his life … yes, Bass was angry with himself for all but bumping into the rear of the Indian village after so many days, weeks now, of taking such pains to avoid the Pawnee. So damned many miles during which he had been so very careful that if he had a fire, he built it beneath one of the rare leafy trees where the branches would disperse the smoke, or beneath an overhanging shelf of a ravine where he could again hide himself, the glow of his fire, and his camp for another night. Just enough fire dug down in a hole to boil some coffee.
Still, there had been those nights when something in his gut told him he’d best make it a cold camp: lying up with the horses close enough that he could swing atop the pony and make a run for it if fate dictated that he would be discovered there in the dark beneath the prairie stars. Suspicious enough, even afraid enough too there at times, that he only traveled at night for more than eight days—back there along the Platte after first running across the village site.
Those tepee rings and meat racks and the size of that trail had been enough to scare him. Hell, just such a sight was enough to pucker any thinking man’s bunghole.
He’d seen for himself how the Chickasaw stole in to work over their enemies—night creatures that they were, sneaking on board that flatboat as Ebenezer Zane’s men lay tied up on the far side of the Mississippi. Yes, Titus had seen with his own eyes just how bloody ruthless Indians could be … and from Isaac Washburn’s accounts of his own cross-country trek with Hugh Glass last year, these river Pawnee might well be all the worse than those Mississippi Chickasaw.
There was simply no taking chances. A younger man might, and lose his hair in the bargain. Hell, who was he kidding anyway? If he was dumb enough to pull a stunt like heading out to the far mountains on his own, then he just might be stupid enough to get himself in some big trouble.
“Damn,” he muttered in exasperation, slamming a palm down on the saddle horn as he stared at that rising, swirling dust cloud.
That’s what had happened, he decided. No doubt about it, he had run right up on the rear of that village moseying upriver on the north bank as the season warmed, likely searching for new hunting grounds. And here he was, traipsing right along behind that village until he’d run right smack into them.
Was it run, or turn back?
Turning to look left, then right, he decided this south bank of the shallow river was not the place to hide out the rest of the day. Over there, across the Platte, the bluffs rose, cut by sharp-sided ravines where he might find a place for himself and the animals until nightfall. Only then would he chance recrossing to the south bank and hurrying wide around them. Get in front of those Pawnee where he would not have to worry about bumping into them again.
It sounded as good as any idea he’d ever had as he got down from the saddle, threw up the stirrup fender, and slipped his fingers beneath the cinch. Tugging, he figured it was tight enough still. Likewise he checked the cinch and straps on the mare’s packsaddle. When he had stripped off his clothes and stuffed them under the packsaddle’s ropes, Titus figured he had them all ready for another crossing and remounted.
Nudging the pony upstream, Bass soon found a wide, sandy slope pocked with hundreds of huge prints. It was there he stopped, the horses’ hooves just barely in the water, as he studied the route across the river to the far bluffs more than two hundred yards beyond. Again he looked down at the damp hoofprints embedded in the moist sand. Then again out to the river, studying that brush emerging from sandbars and islands in the middle of the Platte, brush that barely poked its head above the turbulent flow at this season of mountain runoff far to the west.
“Awright,” he said quietly to them. “Let’s go.”
Just get across before anyone spotted them there among the brush and stunted trees on the bank.
They hadn’t gone but a third of the way across when the pony suddenly volved its head around and tried to peer back at its rider, eyes wide as clay mug-bottoms. On all sides around the three of them, the water seemed to boil, alive with silt and stinging sand. Then the pony stumbled on the shifting bottom, going down. It re-emerged from the water with its rider, both of them snorting water, muddy silt gushing from its muzzle. Bass coughed, spitting sand, his eyes gritty.
Then the horse got its footing with a jerk and fought hard at the reins to whirl about in that moment, straining to head back to the south bank rather than to push on any farther, any deeper.
