Beckwith affected a bit of the dandy: wearing his long black hair in a profusion of tight, well-kept braids that hung past his shoulders. As the mulatto started to turn aside with Potts, Titus decided he might just try one of those braids in his own long hair—as handsome as they were on Beckwith.
With a booming voice Fitzpatrick offered, “Say, Cooper—we have us two elk quarters along we’d offer to lay up by the fire for us all if’n that makes you fellas no mind.”
“Never make it a habit to turn down good meat,” Silas said. “Bring it on—we’ll likely chaw everything down to the bone this night!”
Most of the riders dropped their saddles, blankets, and packs onto the prairie near the quartet’s fire, then turned back to see to their horses. After rubbing down their saddle mounts with thick tufts of prairie grass, Potts strode up with his arm around Beckwith’s shoulder. Together they peered at Bass.
The stubby Potts asked, “Tell me something, mister—we look anywhar’ as dirty an’ bad off as the four of you scurvy niggers?”
Titus grinned, glancing down at his dusty, greasy, sweat-stained clothing. “I s’pose we do at that, Potts. Mayhaps even worse off.”
“Call me by my Christian name, will you? It be Daniel.”
“Sure—an’ my given name’s Titus.”
Tuttle broke in, slapping Bass on the back and saying, “But he’d sooner answer to his real handle.”
“What’s that?” Beckwith asked.
“Scratch,” Titus answered as Bud was getting his mouth open. “They give me the name Scratch some time back.”
The mulatto asked, “Was it skeeters?”
Titus shook his head. “Fleas.”
“Big’un’s too,” Tuttle said before he turned back to the fire, chuckling.
“Well, now—Scratch,” Potts said, looking wistfully over at the translucent blue of the Bear River nearby, its border of tall emerald willow in full-leafed glory. He slapped Beckwith on the back and declared, “Me an’ Jim here was cogitating that we’uns go find us a pool in that river yonder. Have us two a sit and a soak afore supper.”
The idea struck Scratch like a fine one indeed. Impulsively he asked, “You mind company?”
Potts grinned readily. “Why—no. Allays good for a man to have a new face and new ears once’t while. We both got stories Fitz, Frapp, and the other’n’s is tired of hearin’ … an’ I’ll wager you got a few tales to tell your own self.”
“Yeah!” Beckwith agreed. “Damn right we’ll all go have our own selves a sit in that cold river—either till we cain’t stand the cold no more, or we turn the water to mud!”
“Likely that Negra boy gonna turn the water to mud, Scratch!” Billy Hooks was suddenly nearby, laughing and wagging his head with cruel sarcasm. “But that brown-assed Negra still gonna be a Negra when he comes out’n that river—no matter how hard the black son of a bitch scrubs hisself!”
Beckwith was turning on his heel to start for Hooks when the strong and stocky Potts locked his friend’s arm and held the mulatto in place—at just the moment Bass stepped between the mulatto and Billy, staring Hooks in the eye.
“This man ain’t done nothing to deserve the talk you’re throwing at ’im, Billy.”
Hysterically laughing, Hooks said, “Just look at him, Scratch! Why, I cain’t hardly believe my own eyes. It’s a Negra—out in these here mountains!”
Potts growled, struggling to hold Beckwith, “He’s as good a man as any.”
“If Beckwith here ain’t the kind to walk away from the fight we had us with Blackfoot not long back,” Bridger interrupted them all as he hurried up purposefully, Cooper and Fitzpatrick both scrambling to stay with him, “then he sure as hell ain’t the kind to back off from no fight with you.”
“Fight?” Cooper repeated as he stepped between the two, grinning from ear to ear, raking his long beard with his fingers, and taking a measure of those standing with the mulatto. “There ain’t gonna be no fight here … will there, now, Billy?”
“No fight, Silas,” Hooks agreed quickly, then giggled some more like a man willing to rub salt into another’s wounds.
“Damn ride der’ h’ain’t be no fide here,” declared a swarthy, dark-eyed, much older man as he eased up on the far side of Fitzpatrick, his fists clenched and ready.
It was plain the trapper had something on the order of twenty years on Bass, maybe as much as a decade older than Cooper. More than a life outdoors had aged his face: many a year on the frontier had clearly left their mark on the man. His accent was thick, throaty, yet something that sang of its own rhythm, an accent Titus could not remember hearing since those youthful days along the Lower Mississippi: maybe Natchez, more likely all the way down to New Orleans, where the Spanish, French, and Creole tongues mingled freely with the upriver frontier dialects.
“Easy there, Henry,” Fitzpatrick coaxed the German-born Henry Fraeb. “Frapp here gets his blood up pretty quick, but there ain’t no need for cross words, is there, fellas?”
“We’re all friends here,” Cooper readily agreed. “Right, Billy?”
Hooks giggled behind his hand, his eyes gleaming with childlike innocence again. “I ain’t never see’d no Negra out here—”
“Beckwith is the name, not Negra,” the mulatto repeated firmly. It was plain his pride had been wounded. He looked at Hooks steadily and said, “Beckwith. Maybeso you’ll remember it one day.”
“Why, you gonna be something big up on a stick?” Billy mocked, then suffered himself another fit of laughter.
“G’won and help them others with their plunder,” Silas ordered sternly, slapping Hooks across the upper arm, plainly made uneasy by the readiness of the others to back the mulatto.
Cooper waited while Hooks moved off wagging his head, still giggling to himself. “Pay him no mind fellas,” he advised good-naturedly. He tapped a finger to the side of his head, explaining, “Billy’s just … just a bit slow a’times. Why, he finds him some simple joy in most ever’thin’.”
His eyes angry, Bridger argued, “Being soft-brained don’t give a man no right—”
“You’re right,” Silas interrupted, nodding at the much younger man. “C’mon now, fellas. What say we forget this trouble … let’s camp!”
“Man’s right,” Fitzpatrick said grudgingly, eyeing Bridger, Fraeb, and Beckwith with a look that told them all that he expected them to smooth their ruffled feathers and put the matter to rest. “Sun’s down and this bunch ain’t et since morning. ’Sides—we move on to shining times tomorrow.”
Cooper shouldered in between Fitzpatrick and Bridger as the group moved toward the fire, asking, “You boys figger the general spoke the truth when he tolt us he’d pack likker this summer?”
Fitzpatrick said, “Ashley’s a man allays done what he said he’d do. If he says there’ll be likker to ronnyvoo— there’ll be likker there, by God.”
Bass watched the rest gradually settle near the fire with Cooper. But instead of joining them, Potts and Beckwith hung back with Titus.
“So, fellas,” Scratch finally asked in that uneasy silence, “we still going to have us our soak?”
The mulatto shrugged dolefully. “S’pose I could use some water.”
“Damn right you could use some water!” Potts exclaimed suddenly, joyfully, flailing an arm exuberantly at Beckwith. “You’re coming to the river, or you’re dang well stayin’ downwind o’ me from here on out!”
As cold as the water was, nonetheless Scratch plopped himself down in a little pool of it near the sandy bank, just as Potts and Beckwith readily did as twilight put a twinkle to the summer sky. They sat up to their armpits in a little backwater the Bear had long ago cut out of the side of the bank.
In the last of the real light Titus noticed the dull glimmer of something hung round the mulatto’s neck on a narrow thong. “What’s that you got yourself?”
Beckwith held it up, gazed down at it again a moment. “A guinea. First pay I ever got. Stamped with the year I was born.” He held it up for Bass to see.
Leaning over, Titus stared in the fading light at the large round coin, a tiny hole drilled near its top right through the king’s head. There below the nobleman’s neck was emblazoned the date 1800. “You was born six years after me.”
Potts suggested, “Tell him where you got your coin, Jim.”
