shadows of the bluff, beside the Gila, come nightfall.
Titus stood and looked down at the rest when he was done, wagging his head at how pitifully small was what they could carry away from this place. Without those two extra animals and their four packs—why, what they were taking along now might just outfit a small band of Digger Injuns. No more than that.
But he and Asa had their lives back in their own hands, and that was a damned good feeling for a man who had no hankering to turn over his fate ever again to another, nor to the desert. His life was back in his hands, and his hands alone.
As soon as it was nearing full dark, Bass was already strapping the rebuilt packs back on Hannah and on Asa’s packhorse. Kneeling, he nudged McAfferty awake, and together they hauled themselves into the saddle and reined away from the boulders, following the river toward those mountains looming in the distance. Swinging loosely from the ropes lashing both bundles carried by Asa’s packhorse were the nine Apache scalps. Every bit of the long black hair, and the tops of the ears too. Titus wasn’t about to let any hoo-doo haunt him from here on out.
With the arrival of dawn Bass was half dozing in the saddle. McAfferty lay asleep, slumped forward against the withers of his horse. It wasn’t until some time after the sun came up that Scratch found them a place out of the light among some small but shady paloverde trees.
Another day out of the sun, followed by another long autumn night of relentless riding—pointing their noses northeast, keeping the North Star at the corner of his left eye. Pick out some feature of the land in the dark and ride right for it until they got there. Then select another landform in the distance and make for it. Again and again while the stars continued to wheel overhead and the night turned cold enough to turn their lips blue and cause their teeth to chatter.
Night after night of riding. Waiting out each day, keeping a rotation of watch between them, their eyes constantly searching the horizon for pursuit until sundown again marked the hour for them to pack up and remount.
How much longer? he had often wondered. How much farther did they have to go? … Until he scolded himself and forced his mind to think on something else. Day and night Bass tried hard to remember the look of Taos from afar, remember the smell of the rutted streets littered with refuse and offal. Were the women really as pretty as he remembered them? Was the village as gay as his memories painted it? Or had he only grown so sick and lonely for the sight of another human face, desperately yearning for some sign of those whitewashed walls, that the Taos he conjured up was far more than it really was?
“How ol’t a man you be, Mr. Bass?” Asa asked early of a morning after they had snuffed out the moon and rolled into their robes to sleep out the frosty day.
He thought a moment, tugging at the figures the way a man might tug at the strings on his moccasins to knot them securely. “I’ll turn thirty-six this coming birthday.”
“When will that be?”
“First day of the year.”
“A noble day, that,” McAfferty replied. “Meself, I’ll be turning thirty-six next year too. Late of the year, howsoever.”
Bass turned in the growing light and pulled the edge of his robe from his face to peer over at his partner. “You’re younger’n me?”
“’Pears to be.”
“S’pose it’s that white hair of your’n,” he said finally. “Makes you … seems you’re older’n me.”
“My years out here make me a old man to some,” Asa confessed. “But I’m a young’un to others.”
“Never asked where you come from.”
McAfferty hacked at some phlegm, then answered, “I was bred and borned in North Carolina.”
“I ain’t never been there. Was down along the Natchez Road, clear to the Muscle Shoals—but never got that far east.”
“A purty country, so my pappy said. He come to America back in eighty-nine. He always told folks he got here when this here country got its first president. I be full-blooded Scot, you know. A Scot I am—and most proud of that. Though I was borned this side of the east ocean, I’m a Scotsman like my pappy’s people.”
“My grandpap was a Scot his own self,” Bass announced. “You come west to the mountains from Carolina country?”
“By the heavens no,” McAfferty snorted. “I was on the Mississap when it come time to point my nose for these shining hills. Wasn’t too old when my family up and moved west from the Carolinas, clear across the Mississap to the Cape, south there from St. Louie.”
“I know of the Cape,” Scratch replied. “So you was the firstborn to your mam and pap?”
“My folks had three boys awready to bring along with ’em when they come to America. The family come in from the coastal waters, on to the deep forests where my pappy started off trading with the wild Injuns for their skins. He brung to the villages blankets and axes and mirrors and paint, goods like coffee and sugar too. It was a hard life, but a good one for my folks. After them three boys, they had ’em three girls. Then I come along there at the last.”
“If you was a young’un when you come to the Cape, it must’ve been a wild place back then.”
“Not many a white man had come across the Mississap to settle. Oh, there was folks up around St. Louie, but only a few French farmers down at the Cape. Good, rich ground that was too.”
With no school within hundreds of miles, McAfferty had come to learn his reading and writing as most did on the frontier, if they were fortunate: studying at his mother’s knee, copying words every night, following supper, from their old Scottish Bible, by the light of the limestone fireplace.
“By summer of 1810 more and more folks was coming in, so my pappy itched to move us on to a crik near the Little White River—a place more’n a week’s ride on west of St. Louie.”
“That was the fall I left home,” Bass admitted, watching his words drift away in hoarfrost. “Run off and ain’t ever been back.”
“You was sixteen then—a time when a boy figgers he’s just about done with all his growing,” Asa confided. “Likely you figgered you was man enough to set your own foot down in the world.”
Scratch turned to his partner. “You ’member the day the ground shook so terrible the rivers rolled back on themselves?”
“I do,” McAfferty said. “I was turned seventeen that fall. By the prophets, I do remember the day the earth shook under my feet. ’O
“I was working on the Ohio—a place called Owensboro. Where was you?”
“On the Little White,” Asa replied. “That first day the shaking started early off to the morning, afore the sun even thought to come up. I woke up, me pappy yelling at me, ’Asa! Asa! Get up, boy! Fetch the dogs! They under the floor after a coon, boy! Fetch them dogs out!’”
Titus inquired, “Them dogs of your’n was chasing a coon under the house that very morning the earth was shaking?”
“No—my pappy thought the rumbling and the roaring under the floor come from the dogs chasing a coon critter under our cabin. We all come right out of our beds—hearing the dogs outside the window, in the yard—all of ’em howling and yowling. Wasn’t a one of ’em
“You all knowed right then it weren’t the dogs?”
“Pappy hit the floor with his knees, and my mama was right beside him—and they both started praying like I ain’t ever heard ’em pray afore or since. Their eyes so big—saying they was sure the day of judgment was at hand.”
“I was up the Ohio a ways that cold day,” Titus explained. “Remember my own self how the ground rolled and shook so hard, the river come back on itself.”
“We was all on our knees—praying our hardest together,” McAfferty continued his story. “Soon as my mama went to singing ’Shall We Gather at the River,’ the might of the Holy Spirit come right over me, commanding my tongue to speak words right from the Bible:
“You knowed those words by heart back then?”
“I never paid me much attention to the lessons my mama gave me from the Bible,” Asa admitted. “But there I was—watching my pappy pray like he never done afore, the trees outside our window swaying this way and that,
