With two trembling hands he pulled the hammer back to full-cock, brought the muzzle down to aim at a spot behind her ear.
“Y’ might miss there,” Cooper advised. “Go up on her head,” and he jabbed with one long finger at a spot midway between the eyes—up between the eyes and the ears. “Horse got it a little brain … y’ don’t put that ball into it just right, y’ gonna cause the mare all the more pain, Titus Bass.”
Still trembling, he moved the muzzle to that new target, trying to hold it on the spot Cooper described.
“Nawww—hold it again’ her head,” Silas instructed. “Now, y’ want one of us to go and do—”
“No! I’ll … I’ll do it,” he interrupted, forcing down the stinging bile that gathered at the back of his throat as he brought the muzzle squarely against the mare’s forehead. Titus glanced one more time into that one wild, bloodshot, pain-crazed eye, then closed both of his and pulled back on the trigger.
The pistol leaped in his hand, and he sensed the immediate splatter of warm blood across his bare flesh as he keeled backward with instant regret—not wanting to look, not daring to open his eyes until he had turned away. Bass held the pistol out at the end of his arm, loosely in his grip—hoping one of them would take it.
Cooper swept the weapon out of the hand before it dropped, looping his other arm over Bass’s shoulder. He almost cooed, saying, “Y’ done good by her, Titus Bass. I allays said a man’s only as good as he is to his animals. And y’ done right by your mare.”
“Tough thing you did—but the right thing,” Tuttle added.
“Weren’t nothing to laugh at, Titus,” Billy said. “Sorry I am I laughed at you.”
“The world’s a merry place to Billy Hooks,” Silas replied. “Y’ just gotta understand him is all, Titus Bass.”
He peeled himself from under Cooper’s arm and trudged over to his rekindled fire. There he squatted on his hands and knees, feeding the coals until he had more warmth from the flames.
“Whyn’t you two go fetch up the animals?” Cooper instructed somewhere behind him.
“Sure, Silas,” Tuttle replied. “C’mon, Billy. Let’s go fetch up the horses.”
Hooks came bounding up on foot to stop near Bass’s shoulder as he asked, “Silas—ain’cha gonna give one of our Injun ponies to this here Titus Bass feller?”
“I s’pose it’s the thing to do, don’t y’ figger?”
“Yessirreebob!” Billy replied. “I do figger so. He needs him a horse, and we got alla them what we took off them red niggers few days back.”
“R-red niggers?” Titus repeated, looking up to the faces of the three standing over him.
“Injuns, Titus Bass,” Tuttle replied. “C’mon, Billy.”
“Dirty, thieving red sonsabitches what tried to steal our ponies, our plews, and our scalps too!” Cooper growled as the other two started off into the shadows. The snow gathered on the shoulders of his blanket coat, lying there so stark against the gleaming black of his long hair that spilled over his shoulders, tangled in with his long, dark beard.
“Where?” Titus asked, feeling his palms sweat.
“North o’ here,” Cooper replied, then squatted to help break off some more branches for the fire. “Likely they was Blackfeet, though they call themselves Blood Injuns. Part of the same sonsabitches anyways. Don’t make me no never mind to kill any of ’em.”
“F-far from here?”
“We been riding six days since,” Silas answered. “Why, now—do I see me that y’ got yourself skairt of Injuns?”
“Nawww,” Bass said with feigned bravado. “Fought me Injuns afore.”
“Where?”
“Mississippi,” Bass replied. “Chickasaw, they was.”
“Chickasaw.”
“Yep.”
Silas shook his head. “Them ain’t real Injuns no more.”
“They was real Injuns when I fought ’em,” Titus explained. “My first Injun scrap. Fifteen winters ago. Took my flatboat pilot. A friend of mine.”
“So y’ was a riverman afore y’ come to the mountains?”
“For a short time,” he admitted, then knew he ought to admit it. “One trip, then I come up the Natchez Trace for that one and only walk back to the Ohio River country.”
“That make y’ a Kentucky man?”
Bass nodded. “Boone County.”
“I hail out of what they’re calling the Illinois now,” Cooper explained. “Them other two: Billy’s from down around the Cape on the Missouri—”
“Cape Girardeau?”
“Y’ know of it?” Silas asked.
“Sure as hell do,” Bass said with some of the cold departing his stomach as he rubbed his cold hands over the flames. “Spent me many years in St. Louis.”
Cooper continued. “And, Bud there—he’s a Pennsylvania man. Don’t rightly know if he’ll ever make a trapper howsomever. Them Pennsylvania folk are slow on the take-up—leastways every one of ’em I’ve run onto. Trapping don’t seem to be Turtle’s calling.”
“Why’s he stay out here?”
“Hell,” Cooper snorted, “he’s like the rest of us what stayed on out here after those early days with Lisa— ain’t got much left for us back—”
“Lisa?” Titus interrupted, his voice rising, turning suddenly to look at Cooper beside the fire. “Manuel Lisa?”
“Y’ heard of that thieving Spanee-yard, have y’?”
“You mean you fellas worked for him?”
“Damn if he didn’t make all of us bust our humps for him—and some of us died for it too!”
“Then you’ll know … maybe you’ll know a man—fella by the name of Eli, Eli Gamble?”
For a moment there was nothing more than a blank look on Cooper’s face; then the eyes started to crinkle. “Ol’ Eli. Yes, I remember Gamble, I do. A good man—”
“What become of him?”
“Y’ be a friend of his?”
Titus shrugged, gazing back down at the fire again, rubbing his hands that refused to get warm as the snowflakes spat into the fire with a hiss. “Knowed him once. Of a time I shot against him in a rifle match. Just ’bout beat him too.”
Squinting one eye in appraisal of Bass, Cooper commented, “Always heard Eli was some with a rifle. A man what could shoot straight and hit center, Gamble was. Y’ say you just ’bout beat him?”
“I’d a’beat him,” Titus grumped. “But I was young back then.”
Silas looked Titus up and down with a widening grin. “I should say you was young then! That had to be many a summer ago!”
“I was sixteen,” he said proudly. “And I beat every other man ’cept Eli Gamble.” Then Titus had to snort with a grin, “Sly son of a bitch wasn’t even from Boone County neither—not like the rest of us shooting that day!”
“Pushing west, weren’t he?”
“Tol’t me he was fixing to join up with Lisa’s brigade,” Titus explained. “Lisa been crossing all that country north of the Ohio for to get fellas to sign on—”
Nodding, Cooper interrupted, “We all of us signed on in just such a way.”
“Then all of you know Gamble?”
“Might say we knowed of him, Titus,” he answered, his eyes narrowing. “He was in that bunch went over to the Three Forks with Major Henry. We was sent off to work other country.”
Bass itched for an answer. “W-what become of Gamble?”
Cooper shrugged a shoulder, then turned at the sound of the others’ approach. “Don’t rightly claim to know, Titus Bass.” He stood slowly, turning his rump to the fire and rubbing warmth back into it. “There was too many a good man we never knowed what become of up there in that Blackfoot country.”
“Blackfoot? Like that bunch you say you run onto a few days back?”
