“Them’s the best kind!” Cooper exclaimed with a smile. “They know just how a man gets—going too long ’thout a wet woman wrapped around his stinger. Damned thankful too—no matter how a fella treats ’em.”
“Yeah—them widder-women kind get the hunger bad as us,” Tuttle added.
“So,” Cooper announced in a loud voice suddenly, “before Titus Bass here spins his tale of the widder woman and how she give him the grayback nits … I believe it be time we give our new partner here a new name.”
“N-new name?” Bass stammered.
Billy chimed right in, “Yes, yes! A new name!”
“You got something in mind?” Tuttle asked of Cooper.
Silas shrugged. “S’pose I do, Bud. Just look for yourself. Lookee what he’s got hisself doing for days on end now.”
“Itching,” Tuttle replied as he stared at Bass. “He’s scratching all over hisself. Damn but he’s got him a passel of them nits, and bad!”
“Scratchin’ is what he’s doing,” Silas said. “So—I say let’s give him a new name what’s fittin’ for all them nits he’s been digging at.”
“We gonna call him nit?” Hooks asked with a silly grin.
“Nawww,” Cooper growled as he stood and stepped over behind Bass with his warm tin cup of coffee in hand—which he slowly began to pour on Titus’s head.
When Bass started to jerk aside to get away, Cooper’s empty hand came down to clamp on one of his shoulders as he continued to pour the warm coffee on the newcomer’s long brown hair. His head and shoulders steamed in the cold, frosty air, just like their coffee tins.
Then Cooper flung his cup aside and spread a hand over the crown of Bass’s head, raising his eyes to the black of that winter night, his voice booming in declaration.
“Henceforth and for yonder time—let all men know this here pilgrim nigger no longer be called Titus Bass, greenhorn … but from now on he be the free trapper we gonna know as—
*
7
“There h’ain’t no use to pushing on,” Silas Cooper announced to the other three that late afternoon as the wind and snow battered them with such force that it nearly wore a man out. “We’ll hunker down to camp here.”
“Don’t figger we can make it?” Bud Tuttle asked before he swung out of the saddle right behind Cooper in the deep, swirling snow they had been slogging their way through.
“Sun’s falling,” Silas explained, looking off to the west, then looked up ahead of them. “Clouds dropped on that pass up yonder. H’ain’t no way we’re gonna make it over an’ back down to timber afore dark no way.”
Titus watched them both anxiously. In the last few weeks he had come to trust their judgment on just about everything. And now the four of them had just passed timberline into the open, where the wind battered and bruised them without respite. The animals were beginning to bog down in ever-deeper snow. All around them the soft white flakes kept on falling, gusting, swirling in what was close to becoming a whiteout.
“We gonna get ourselves snowed in here, Silas!” Billy Hooks whined.
“What about game?” Titus asked, anxious, his belly growling.
“Game?”
Bass continued, “How we gonna eat?”
“There’ll be game, Scratch. Don’t y’ fret yourself ’bout that.”
“And if there ain’t, for balls’ sake?” Tuttle demanded, slogging up through the snow that reached to their knees.
“Then we’ll eat our damned horses,” Cooper replied, glaring at Bud. “Beginning with yours!”
For a moment the two men stared at one another, shoulders loose, hands encased in those crude blanket mittens ready to snatch up a belt pistol or knife if the other jumped.
“C’mon, boys,” Hooks finally cooed. “Let’s g’won back down there some to that last big patch of trees where we can fort up.”
Without taking his eyes off Tuttle, Cooper said, “Plumb center idee you got, Billy. Let’s camp, boys.”
Until Silas and Billy yanked their horses and mules around and started back down the slope on foot, followed a moment later by Bud Tuttle, Bass didn’t realize he had been gripping the butt of the big pistol he carried stuffed in the wide belt at his waist.
There was something deadly about Silas Cooper—something always there right under the surface, something that he figured could strike with the quickness of a cotton-mouth while the man was still smiling at you, talking to you … giving you no warning of the danger. In his thirty-one years Titus had learned that some men were easy to steer clear of because you had a clear sense of who they were and the danger they posed. And then there were a few like Cooper. They were the scariest of all.
The sort who could turn on you in the blink of an eye. When you had no idea it was coming.
Down the gentle slope the four men slid and skidded, plunging between the sparse, wind-tortured scrub cedar until they reached the copse of stunted pine Hooks had suggested. Here at least, Titus thought as they crowded into the cluster of trees, they would be out of most of that wind driving the snow into thick, wavering banners of ground blizzard, a wind that this high could cut through a man like a hot pewter knife would slide right through Marissa Guthrie’s freshly churned butter.
“I-I …,” and Bass worked hard to keep his teeth from chattering in the cold. “I ain’t n-never been this g- goddamned high afore.”
Tuttle turned his head to regard the leaden sky, the clouds no more than fifty, maybe as much as a hundred, feet at the most over their heads. “You best watch your swearing, Scratch. We’re up high enough on these mountains a man might just run hisself into a angel or two!”
Hooks laughed easily with that. “Long as them angels is womens—I don’t mind running onto ’em at all! Yessirreebob! Been dreaming more an’ more about soft breasties and a woman humping up and down on my stinger. I’d take me a angel right about now—right here in the snow!”
Tuttle wagged his head, looking at Bass to say, “Billy and his womens. Always got a passel of ’em on the brain.”
“Been thinking on women my own self,” Titus admitted.
Tuttle smiled. “Ain’t hard to figger, Scratch. Not when a man’s been doing so long without.”
“Sounds like you think on the womens too, Bud.”
Tuttle stopped his horse, turned toward it to throw up the stirrup and grab the cinch. “I’m a man—like any else, I s’pose.”
“You think back on a special girl?” Titus inquired.
“Just remember women. First one of ’em to come into my head. I ain’t never been particular when it comes to poking a woman center … so why should I be particular when it comes to thinking about ’em?”
“I remember this one gal back along the Ohio,” Titus began to explain. “She weren’t my first, but she was a whore—so she was the first what showed me how much fun poking could be with a woman.”
“You ’member her name?” Bud asked as he dragged the saddle and blanket from his horse.
“Abigail—uh, Mincemeat was her given name.”
“There been others, ain’t there?”
“A few. Sweet farmer’s daughter and a mess of dark-skinned backwater whores.”
“And don’t forget that widow woman what give you them passel of gray back nits.”
“Even thought on her a time or two, I have,” Bass admitted. “All them lonely nights I camped along the Platte, even after I got out here to these mountains.”
“Sometimes all the quiet out here can make a man’s mind turn to such things as womenfolk, the women a man left him back there,” Tuttle suggested as he turned away to gaze at the rest of their pack stock Cooper and Hooks were driving into the trees.
