plews for goods and liquor. And that meant that now he knew the three would have to push on down the Yellowstone, on down the Upper Missouri until they got close to the Knife River … but where was the word from them they had promised to leave him?
Perhaps an angry band of Indians had burned down the fort’s cabins and stockade in some long-ago season past … or maybe the white traders had done it themselves when they’d abandoned the post. Maybe the Crow trade wasn’t all that profitable for the company, he mulled. Not any longer, since men like Ashley had come to the mountains with skin trappers of their own to strip a piece of country bare. Maybeso the fur companies that had of a time ruled on the northern rivers no longer could survive the competition.
Stepping over the burned hulk of a cottonwood wall now collapsed into the soil where the stockade and cabin ruins were being overgrown year after year by grass and weed and the blooming purple crowns of wavyleaf thistle, Titus remembered how Cooper said the traders were operating their post not all that long ago.
“Twenty-one,” Bass said to himself, scratching at his bearded cheek. “Maybe twenty-two it was.”
But Silas and the rest said they had been here not long after the fort had been constructed and manned … just like the Spaniard Manuel Lisa had raised his own fort somewhere nearby more than ten years before that.
Back of the ruins rose a soft-sloped knoll he hurried to on foot, climbed, then carefully appraised the surrounding country. How he wished now that there was some high point of rimrock the likes he had discovered back upriver a ways, some great flat-topped promontory where a man could see for himself a good stretch of country.*
But from up here on this low knoll, and from his explorations back by the mouth of the Bighorn itself, Scratch could see no indication of another stockade. Too much time had passed since Lisa and Henry had abandoned the northern country.
“Mayhaps a dozen years or more,” he reminded himself quietly, despair sinking in atop that hill.
After all those winters and summers, there simply wouldn’t be much left of an abandoned stockade and some dirt-roofed cabins, a post burned down by those who sought to leave nothing behind for the brownskins. Too many seasons for the ground itself to reclaim any ruins, grass too tall for him to spot anything, anyway.
He sighed, sure there was no chance that Silas and the rest had left him some notice, some sign, some indication they had been there and were heading on downriver. For a moment there his hope had soared: if not at the Missouri Fur Company post, then likely the trio had left all important word at the earlier Bighorn post Isaac Washburn had spoken of during Lisa’s day on the upper rivers.
Damn.
But in gazing west at the path of the falling sun, he realized he didn’t have time to mourn and brood about it now. Time he should be working on filling his belly with what was left of that antelope he’d shot two days back. And some coffee to keep him warm until he rode off to find himself a likely place for a cold camp farther downriver.
But as he descended the knoll and walked past the ruins, his belly didn’t feel all that hungry. Just empty and cold—a feeling he thought for a moment was something he could remedy with a juicy steak and some strong coffee. Yet no matter how much he tried to feed his belly, what bothered him would not be satisfied until he knew what had become of the three.
Call it fear. Call it doubt. Call it what he would—Scratch figured he was smart enough to realize that until he knew for sure, then there would be plenty of room in his imagination for all sorts of possibilities.
And that scared him down to his roots.
Rising from the bank of the river with his coffee kettle among the broad-leafed cattails and slogging out of the water lapping against the shore, he told himself he did not want to believe anything but the best in people. Despite what others older and perhaps much wiser than he might believe—Titus simply wanted to give every man the sake of the doubt. Far better was it for him to fear the worst that could befall the trio than to think the worst of them. Far, far better to believe that some terrible fate had rubbed them out than to allow himself to believe that he had been taken advantage of.
Alone again … but Scratch would simply not allow himself to even begin to consider anything but that Lady Fate’s terrible and capricious ways had robbed him of the notice they were going to leave at this post if they found it abandoned. If it had been something scrawled on a scrap of canvas with a bit of fire-pit charcoal and then hung loosely at the corner of the ruins … perhaps the wind might be the playful culprit. Or Old Man Coyote.
That evening as he waited for his coffee to come to a boil and he hung the thick antelope steak from a sharpened stick over the flames to drip huge drops of fragrant grease into his cookfire, Bass grappled with it until he decided there was no other way but to backtrack along the south bank of the Yellowstone. He could remember the last of the trio’s campsites he had run across as he’d marched downriver. Back there on the north bank—and a hell of a distance back up the Yellowstone.
So somewhere between here and there he would likely have his answer. To find where they had pulled over to the bank, tied up their rafts, and built their night fire. If not a campsite, then he would likely find evidence of their ruin. His worst fears conjured up images of discovering one of the rafts crushed and broken against some boulders, perhaps one of their scalped and mutilated bodies tangled in the driftwood. And all those plews—a rich man’s ransom in beaver—gone to the bottom of the swollen river.
That evening as the light began to fade slowly from the summer sky, Scratch ate slowly, chewing each bite deliberately but without any real enjoyment, sipping at his coffee without relish. There wasn’t enough antelope or thick coffee to fill the yawning hole of his doubt, the chasm that was his fear.
After cooling the small coffee kettle so he could repack it among his camp plunder, Bass walked over to the grazing animals. Thinking he ought to try cheering himself as he threw the blanket onto the back of the saddle horse, Titus began to whistle notes of some tune that he quickly recalled as a song the boatmen sang. It helped to think back on how Ebenezer Zane’s and Hames Kingsbury’s crew had held together—one for all—men he could put his faith, trust, and loyalty in. Scratch’s whistle became a bit merrier at the remembrance.
Then, as he bent over to retrieve the saddle and rose with it suspended across both arms, he was shoved from behind.
Dropping the saddle as if it were a hot coal, Scratch wheeled, yanking at the big pistol stuffed into the wide sash at his waist—his heart in his throat as he yanked back the hammer with the heel of his left hand.
Surprised now more than scared—he wagged his head and stuffed the pistol away, swallowing down the hard lump of instant fear that had choked him.
“D-damn, girl,” he said with relief as the mule moved closer, her head bobbing up and down as if she acknowledged that term of address he often used around her. “Don’t you go scaring me like that.”
Quickly rubbing her muzzle, Titus turned away and went back to whistling the riverboatman’s song as he bent to pick up the saddle. Again she jabbed her nose right between his shoulder blades, shoving him forward clumsily. He stumbled a couple of steps, lunging against the saddle horse that sidestepped out of his way.
“Damn you!” he growled this time. “You need to stop that, Hannah. I got work to do here.”
Again he turned his back on the young mule and stepped toward the horse. Not realizing, he went back to whistling the merry tune and had just managed to throw the saddle up onto the animal’s back and was bending over to reach under the horse’s belly for the far half of the cinch when out of the corner of his eye he saw Hannah coming for him.
“You stay right there,” he warned with a wag of his finger. “I ain’t in no mood to be putting up with no pranks you done learned on your own.”
Yanking up on the cinch, he twisted to keep an eye on her as his hands completed the task, and went back to whistling … watching her bob her head up and down as she came for him again.
“Why … I’ll be go to hell right here,” he said quietly as she moved up close enough. He scratched that forelock between her ears. “And be et for the devil’s tater.”
Maybe she wasn’t being a devilish, cantankerous, playful sort when she came up and tried to get his attention in her own way. Perhaps he was just too dumb to notice at first. Scratch decided he’d just have to prove it to himself, here and now before they went off to find a cold camp where they would bed down.
Stepping over to the far side of the horse, he waited the few minutes until Hannah went back to her grazing. As soon as her head lowered and she began to tear off the tops of the tall stems of porcupine and bluegrass, Titus quietly moved away, taking a roundabout route as he made for the walls of the abandoned post.
Reaching the ruins, he sat down on the collapsed corner of the burned logs where the grass and weeds and the wavyleaf thistle had knotted themselves over the charred stumps, then waited a few minutes more to be sure she wasn’t paying him any attention.
