prayed Tuttle would realize that now he was free—
“Don’t do it, Scratch.”
That sharp whisper made him freeze, rocking there atop his rifle like a peg-legged crutch. Titus wasn’t sure in those seconds when he didn’t breathe, his eyes peering over the three forms, just which one had called out to him.
Then Tuttle slowly sat up. “I figger I know what you’re about to do, Scratch. But—killin’ him ain’t right.”
“You saw. He … he almost kill’t me.”
For a long time Tuttle just stared at Bass in that crimson-tinged darkness, his face grave in the low flames and shimmering coals of their fire, his eyes deadly serious. Then he finally spoke. “Them was his furs—his fair share, Scratch. The man could’ve kill’t you long time back. ’Stead, he took you on. You learned to trap, to live up here, and you kept your hair. You owe him.”
“The way you see it: I owe him.”
“That’s right,” Tuttle emphasized.
“Bet you owe him too.”
“I do—an’ that’s the devil’s gospel. For balls’ sake, Cooper’s saved my hash more’n I care to count. You owe him, same as me.”
“You got a gun on me, eh?”
After a long silence Tuttle quietly said, “I have.”
“I could kill him afore you took me, Bud.”
“But you won’t, Titus. I know you can’t. I know you see what he’s saying. You owe him your goddamned life. You won’t kill him ’cause you can’t take the life what give you back your own.”
Titus sighed long and deep, and, oh, how it hurt to fill his lungs like that. He tore his eyes off Tuttle and stared at the other sleeping form beneath its blankets.
“He right ’bout me goin’ under, Tuttle?”
“He saw to it you made yourself a trapper, Titus. Don’t figger you was a nigger what was gonna keep hisself alive out here when we found you.”
It was like lancing a festering, fevered boil … sensing that poison ooze out of him. Suddenly he felt as weak as a wobbly-legged, newborn calf.
Starting to turn away, pivoting on his rifle, Bass stopped and whispered, “You can put your gun down, Tuttle. The killin’ fever’s gone.”
“I’ll be here to mornin’ for you, Titus,” Bud replied. “Goin’ with you out to your sets like Cooper told me.”
He choked hard on the pain. “Don’ know if I can.”
“I’ll be with you ever’ step of the way.”
Titus sighed wearily, completing his turn, and began to hobble off to his blankets, sleepier than he could remember being in a long, long time.
“Get your rest, Titus Bass.”
That voice froze Scratch where he stood.
“Y’ll need your strength come sunup,” it said.
Slowly he turned his head, peering over his shoulder—finding Silas Cooper pulling the sawed-off, shortened smoothbore trade gun from beneath his blankets now, laying it in plain view atop his belly. It was one of the trophies he had claimed off the dead Arapaho warriors.
“You just learn’t me something more, didn’t you, Silas?”
“Mayhaps I did, Scratch. G’won now—get in your blankets.”
He did just that, painfully settling back atop that single buffalo robe Fawn had given him, a robe he had laid over some pine boughs in making his bed at this campsite. After pulling the blankets up to his chin, he stared across the fire at the chertlike eyes gleaming back at him in the glow of the red coals. Then Cooper closed them.
And all that glimmered was the dull-brown sheen of the barrel on that stubby trade gun filled with lead shot that likely would have cut him in half had things come down to it.
That’s twice now he could’ve damn well killed me, Titus thought as he rolled painfully to attempt finding a position comfortable enough to sleep.
He seen me coming for him, thinking him asleep—could’ve had me dead to rights.
… Mayhaps I do owe him.
Yet that hurt most of all. Owing your life not once, but twice … twice to the bastard you’ve wanted to kill more than any other man alive.
* * *
From the Sierra Madre range rising west of the Medicine Bows, they continued north over the western rim of the Great Divide Basin, north still until they dropped into the southern tableland of the Red Desert Basin, where they struck out due west with the setting sun as their guiding lodestone.
Picking their way day by day between the jutting escarpments and low, solitary peaks of that parched, striated desert, the four always kept in view those mountains far to the north where the Wind River was given its birth. After striking the Verde River,* Cooper led them angling northwest along its meandering course until they reached the mouth of the Sandy: It was there they crossed to the west bank and finally left the Verde behind, making for the low range of mountains that lay almost due west.
“We get beyond them hills,” Silas explained one evening in camp, “I was told we’d likely see Sweet Lake from a ways off.”
“Yup—that’s what we was told,” Hooks agreed, dragging the back of his dust-crusted hand across his parched mouth.
Titus figured Billy had him the whiskey hunger bad. That, or he needed a woman soon in the worst way. Then Bass looked over at Tuttle, and Cooper too. Ana finally peered down at himself. If they all didn’t look the sight!
Hats, faces, hands, and damned near every exposed inch of clothing, even their horses and pack animals, from nostrils to tail root—all of it layered with a thin coating of superfine dust. Beneath the high summer sun the pale talc seemed to cling tenaciously to the horses and the men because of the sweat that poured out of them from sunup to well past sundown every one of those lengthening days.
At what those early trappers called Sweet Lake,** to distinguish it from the bitter-tasting and immense inland lake they called the Salt Sea, lying not all that far to the southwest, Silas Cooper had been told by Ashley’s trappers that a man would have to decide upon one or the other of two courses from there on in to the rendezvous site. The southern route would lead them around the lakeshore until they were able to strike out. due west toward the last range of mountains they would have to cross before dropping into the Willow Valley.
Cooper chose to take them on the longer route, but one that was bound to be much easier on man and horse alike. At the north end of Sweet Lake they picked up the Bear River, named years before by a brigade of British Hudson’s Bay men, which they followed even farther north before it angled west, then quickly swept back again to the south, looping itself through some austere country dominated by lava beds, eventually flowing on around the far end of that tall range of mountains they might otherwise have had to cross.
“Damn easier going on these here animals,” Titus declared as they made camp that first evening after they had pointed their noses south along the course of the Bear River. Nearby was a soda spring from which bubbled bitter water.
“Don’t mind taking our time at it my own self,” Tuttle said as they unloaded the weighty packs, dropped them to the ground.
Next came the task of picketing the animals out to graze in the tall blue grama, where most of the horses chose to plop down and give themselves a good roll and dusting before beginning to fill their bellies on the plentiful salt-rich grasses. From night to night Tuttle and Bass rotated these tasks with Cooper and Hooks, who this evening were gathering wood, starting the cookfire, and bringing in water for their coffee.
“Lookee there, Bud,” Titus said, the hair standing on his arms as he slapped Tuttle on the back to get his attention. He pointed, his alarm growing. “You s’pose them to be Injuns?”
Tuttle squinted into the distance stretching far away to the north of them. “Don’t figger so. Lookee there— you can see them niggers is riding with saddles. Legs bent up the way they is. Only red-bellies I ever knowed of rode barebacked: legs and feet hanging low on their ponies.”
“Yeah, maybeso you’re right,” Titus agreed, peering into the shimmering distance as the sun secreted itself beyond the western hills. “Looks to be they got pack animals with ’em.”
