He struggled to bring the pistol out of his sash in a sweating palm.
Closer still.
They were lashed so tightly together that he grew scared the weapon might go off wedged there between them. Kill one of them, if not the horse under them both.
Close enough now that he could see the ribbons of sweat coursing down the enemy’s face.
Freed at last—he felt the muzzle move between them, tight against his belly as he pushed his hand forward.
Swinging the club back, the Indian grinned, his teeth glittering as he closed on what had to be a sure kill. Two white men at once. What a prize—
Shoved across his body, the pistol suddenly popped out between the two men as Titus raked back the hammer with a thumb.
The club had already begun its arc downward as the Blackfoot’s eyes suddenly locked on the pistol just then popping into view between his enemies.
In his sweat-slickened hand the pistol nearly bucked itself loose as Bass pulled the trigger. The ball slammed into its target midchest, right under the warrior’s arm that held the war club aloft. As if disbelieving, the Blackfoot kept the arm and club frozen there, reluctantly tearing his eyes off the white men as he looked down at his side … weaved—then pitched off the back of his straining pony.
“Sumbitch!” Hatcher cried exuberantly.
Drops of salty sweat stung Bass’s eyes as he blinked, trying hard to clear them, straining to see if there were any other pursuers who might pose a threat now that he had emptied his only weapon of the only bullet it had held. Behind them two other warriors slowed and brought their ponies to a halt in the sagebrush, circling back for the body of their fallen comrade.
“Maybeso the niggers are giving up,” Titus said, more hopeful than certain.
“Not Blackfoot,” Hatcher snorted. “Bug’s Boys don’t give up.”
“How long they gonna keep after us?”
It was a moment before Hatcher answered. “Till they take all the horses they can from us, and they got our scalps hanging from their belts, Scratch.”
“Ain’t healthy for a man up here—this hard by Blackfoot country—is it?”
“No, I don’t reckon it is.”
Weakness was like a thick cloud overtaking him now that the hot adrenaline was no longer surging through his veins. “Tell me, Jack: is the beaver so good up here that you’re willing to put your hide on the line ever’ day you got left in your number?”
“What say when we get back to Isaac and Rufus—we all talk about working our way south to more friendly country?”
“South … south is good.”
“Rest of them niggers been after our hair won’t be follering all that quick—seeing how we put ’em afoot the way we done,” Hatcher said. “So we can see to Kinkead and you proper and get this outfit ready to tramp south back to the Windy Mountains after we g’won to ronnyvoo at Sweet Lake. How’s ronnyvoo sound to Titus Bass?”
Jack waited a minute for an answer from Bass, and when he didn’t get one, he turned slightly to peer at the man roped behind him. “Scratch? Hyar ye—Scratch?”
Up ahead of them the others were driving the horses across the wide creek, threading the animals through the young cottonwood saplings and between stands of willow. How beautiful were the drops of water spraying up from each hoof, countless glittering gems iridescent in the bright spring sun as the four other horsemen shouted and urged the horses across.
“Ronnyvoo … just the sound of it shines,” Bass finally said as he closed his eyes again, so heavy had
“There’ll be whiskey, Scratch!” Hatcher cheered as he slowed the horse in nearing the ford. “And womens!”
His side burned with a terrible, prickling pain. And for a moment Titus wondered on just how much blood he had lost. Would he make it to rendezvous? Or would he be one of those who went under? Then Scratch couldn’t fight it any longer.
“Just lem’ … lemme sleep now, Jack.”
Not all that far overhead the calliope hummingbird’s wings blurred in frenetic flight—hovering, darting, then hovering once more as it sought out its nectar.
Bass froze, motionless there in the icy water, the five-pound steel trap and float-stick in hand. Enthralled with the bird’s dance on the gentle spring breeze, he watched the hummingbird bob and bounce from flower to flower until it was long gone down the streambank. He sighed in contentment. And arched his back, feeling the tug of tight new flesh slowly knitting along the bullet’s path through his left side. Especially taut across those two small puckers of wrinkled skin. It was good to be back working the banks of these streams. Good for a man to know where he belonged.
For days following that scrap with the Blackfoot horse thieves, the others had joshed about keeping him around for no other reason than that Titus Bass was a good omen, perhaps even the old Shoshone soothsayer’s most powerful charm.
“I had me a uncle once said to me that a few folks is like cats,” Solomon Fish had said beside a campfire one twilight as Hatcher’s brigade made their way south toward the Owl Mountains, working to put more and more country between them and the Blackfeet who seemed determined in their chase.
“Merciful heavens,” Caleb Wood grumbled as he swayed up with another armload of wood. “How people like cats?”
“Never had me a cat was wuth a red piss,” John Rowland observed. “Only good for mousin’.”
“Go ahead on with yer story, Solomon,” Jack prodded.
With an indifferent shrug Fish nudged some of his blond ringlets out of his eyes and said, “Ain’t much of a story, really. Just my uncle said some folks got ’em nine lives, just like cats s’pose to have.”
Hatcher turned to Kinkead. “What ye think of that, Matthew?”
“Sounds like Solomon’s uncle kept hisself filled with bilge water to me.”
“Maybe not a fella like you,” Fish snorted testily. “But just think about Titus Bass here.”
Hatcher grinned across the fire, asking, “Say, Scratch—figger ye used up any of yer nine lives?”
“Damn right I have,” he answered, feeling the certainty of it down to his marrow. “Figger I had a few whittled off me back in St. ’Louie, back to the time when I was doing my best to spit in death’s eye.”
“How ’bout with them Arapaho down near the Little Bear?” Elbridge Gray asked.
“Them,” Scratch replied, painfully shifting his position, “and a few times since.”
Jack turned back to Kinkead, asking, “So don’t it sound like Bass got him a cat’s nine lives?”
“Solemn,” Matthew used his favorite expression, then spit a brown stream of tobacco into the fire, where it hissed. “But if Scratch truly be a man with nine lives, I reckon he’s just ’bout used ’em all up, Jack.”
“Long as he don’t use that last one afore ronnyvoo at Sweet Lake!” Hatcher roared.
Time was drawing nigh when the company brigades and bands of free trappers would begin to gather, marching farther to the west every few days, stopping now and again when the sign along the streams convinced Hatcher’s men the trapping might be worth their efforts. Wandering slowly as the days lengthened and warmed, they neared the southern end of the Wind River Mountains—where a man jumped west by southwest over that easy, sloping divide to find himself in a country where all the waters now flowed toward the Big Salt far, far beyond the horizon.
When the hummingbird finally flickered out of sight, Titus waded another half-dozen steps and stopped there at the base of the long strip of creekside grass growing along the bank, reaching for the knife at his back. With it he plunged his arm under the water, clear up to the elbow, and began hacking away at the side of the bank until he had carved away a shelf big enough on which to set his trap. From beneath his arm he grabbed the bait stick: a section of peeled willow, one end sharpened for driving into the bank just above the surface of the stream where he had hidden his trap at the end of the beaver slide.
Here the animals repeatedly entered the water, usually dragging their limbs and saplings they were using to
