dollars’ worth. So that should just about use up the last of what you got left there.”
Instead of agreeing immediately, Titus regarded the immense pile of dark twists of fragrant burly. Taking one from the stack, he brought it to his nose and sniffed in appraisal. “Kentucky, you said?”
“So I’m told. Fine smoking. Even finer a chew—if I do say so my own self.”
“And this here sixty twists will finish me off?”
“Less’n you got more money hid on you,” Henline replied, a fat paw beginning to sweep the last of Bass’s coins toward his side of the counter, “there ain’t no more you can spend.”
Firmly, yet without a hint of malice, Titus quickly clamped his hand down on the storekeeper’s wrist, looking Bailey Henline in the eyes. “That what you got under this hand pays for the tobaccy—”
“I done said that,” Henline interrupted with irritation that mottled his cheeks in anger.
“And,” Bass continued, “… pays off all the candy for them young’uns there.” Titus nodded once toward the far end of the counter where the woman and the children stood watching like a gaggle of wide-eyed geese, frozen for the moment beside the colored jars of sugared treats.
Immediately shaking his head, Henline uttered the first sounds of protest—but they were squeezed off as Titus clenched the wrist all the harder.
“Listen, mister: you’re making a fine profit on me this day,” Bass said with quiet assurance. “Enough a profit you can give these here young’uns their treat ’thout it weighing down this woman’s account.”
For a long moment the shopkeeper looked down at the hand holding his wrist prisoner, then glanced over at the woman. Reluctantly, he nodded. “Awright. The treats is on you, mister.”
Taking his hand off the storekeeper, Titus glanced quickly to the side, not sure if he read gratitude in the woman’s eyes, or scorn because she wanted none of his pity.
“This here’s American all right,” Henline declared as he finished sweeping up all the coins together and shoving them deep within the side pocket on his drop-front button britches. “Cain’t ever be too sure out here in this country—what’s good money and what’s not. Guineas, pistoles—”
“My money was always good, Mr. Henline. Worked hard for it, and I was always one to give a man my sweat for a day’s pay.”
“Franklin’s damn well the last place on the road you chose to take,” the shopkeeper emphasized with a roll of his eyes in that direction. “On west of here is Fort Osage. Only other place yonder’n that is Fort Atkinson. At Osage the river changes course, runs north from there up to Atkinson, you see.”
The name pricked him. Titus leaned in a little to ask, “Ain’t that the place, the fort you just said—the one they built at the mouth of the Platte?”
“That’s right, mister. You figure to ride through Pawnee land, by the time you reach Atkinson—a man turns himself left and heads due west as the sun goes.”
With a shake of his head Bass replied, “I ain’t got me any plans to be riding nowhere close to Atkinson.”
“Maybe for the best,” Henline declared as he stuffed the last of the tobacco twists into a fourth and fifth linen sack and began to tie off the tops with length of twine cordage. “Up and down this part of the river, word is that the army don’t want no one in that yonder country out there … no man but soldiers and them fur companies.”
“I heard such, yes.”
With a smile creasing the fleshy jowls, Henline ventured, “Hell, maybe it’s better you spend some time behind the bars in that army pokey up at Fort Atkinson than you lose your hair to them bugger Pawnee.”
Sweeping the first of the satchels from the storekeeper’s counter, Bass replied, “I don’t plan on spending no time with the army or leaving my hair with the Pawnee. Thank you just the same for the meal, coffee, and tobaccy.” He hefted the last of his goods across both laden arms and turned toward that doorway patch of bright sun splaying a fan of its bright saffron into the shop’s cool shadows.
Just as Titus reached the door, he stopped to step aside for a pair of mud-caked men who eyed the newcomer before striding dutifully over to the row of wooden dowels driven into one wall where stood several tall, two-man saws.
“Thank you, mister,” the woman said suddenly, blurting it out as if honor bound to express her gratitude, but then her eyes softened as she tugged a child to her hip beneath each arm. “Tell the man thankee, children.”
They all shyly muttered their appreciation—every bit as prideful as their mother—eyes watching the stranger shuffle his feet self-consciously, his arms sagging beneath the weight of the last worldly goods he would buy for hard cash money.
“I was … I’m glad to do it,” Titus replied, glancing over the faces of the children as they licked and sucked on their treats. How they reminded him of Amy’s brothers and sisters back in Rabbit Hash.
Then Henline intruded. “Stranger—since you’re of a mind to go out yonder to that saint-forsaken land on your lonesome—you mind my asking one more thing?”
“What’s that?” Titus responded, turning his head from the young eyes to look at the storekeeper. At that very moment Bass became aware the two men had ceased their talk and their noisy handling of the saws behind him.
Scratching at the side of his pockmarked nose, Henline inquired, “Mind telling me if … well, if you’re a praying man?”
For but a moment Titus glanced at the mud-plastered pair who interrupted their appraisal of the saws so they could study him critically. Plain enough to see they were settlers. Farmers. Had the same look to them that Thaddeus Bass had himself.
When Titus brought his eyes back to the storekeeper, finding himself suddenly irritated at the way Henline’s jaw hung open smugly, Bass almost wished one of the big bottle-green flies buzzing about the low-roofed shanty would flit its way right into that gaping hole in Bailey Henline’s face.
Titus repeated the question. “A praying man? Well, now. I s’pose any fella what takes off where I’m heading all on my lonesome better be a praying man, mister. That—or he’s plain crazy.”
2
“That trader man was wrong, mister.”
With the sudden sound of the child’s voice, Titus turned where he stood at the edge of the muddy, rutted path that passed for a main street here in Franklin. It was the oldest girl among that woman’s brood wanting hard candy back in the mercantile. Bass continued stuffing the first of the cornmeal sacks into the bundles lashed on either side of the mare’s back.
“Oh?” he asked absently. “What was he so wrong about?”
“This’r ain’t the last place you run onto.”
“It ain’t.”
“No, mister. It ain’t.”
Jabbing the second sack down into the bundle on the far side of the mare’s packs, Titus figured he was being goaded into asking. He sighed with a little exasperation, then glanced again at the gangly girl who appeared about to enter her adolescence—and the impatience drained from him. She so reminded him of his oldest sister. Every day slowly rounded out those hard angles on her body now that she was ready to flower into womanhood.
“All right,” he said. “S’pose you tell me what you come to tell me.”
“See: this’r ain’t the last place there’s white folks.”
“Just what the devil that mean to me?” He growled it more than he had wanted it to come out, turning away because he was angry at himself—in that moment remembering how he had marveled at the way another young girl’s bony form rounded itself into a woman’s body back in Rabbit Hash.
“Means there’s white folks on yonder,” the girl declared, then pointed, turning away with a gesture to the north. “Mama said for me to come tell you that.”
His fingers stopped their tying of the canvas lashes. “Your mama in there … she told you come tell me that?”
With a nod the girl replied, “Our place is up to Boone’s Lick. I figger she’s due for a vis’tor. Ever since’t my da took sick and died sudden-like late last summer—we ain’t had all that much in the way of company. Mama ain’t much of a talker, but I knows she tires of us’ns—”
