minutes until he slowly faded out of sight, gone downriver, riding for the far hills.
“Man’s in a hurry to be gone from here, ’pears to me,” Rufus exclaimed.
As they all turned back to their campsite, Hatcher said, “He’s damn well got him somewhere to be, fellas. That’s for certain.”
“Wish I was the sort what could figger folks out,” Bass admitted, still staring after McAfferty even though he could no longer see the distant figures. “Sometimes what I know a man is keeping from me gets in my craw and eats at me for not knowing.”
Later that morning Jack came to a halt where Bass was finishing his work lashing the last bundle atop his pack animals. “Ye’re still bound for the Judith?” he asked.
“Good trapping, that country,” Scratch had answered as he tied off the last knot, knowing the saddest of moments had arrived. “If I keep my head and don’t let no roaming Blackfoots know I’m about—I’ll hang on to my hair.”
Hatcher had stepped up, opening his arms wide, seizing Titus within his bony embrace. “You’ll damn well watch over what ye got left for hair, won’cha?”
He heard a sob thicken the sound of Jack’s words. It made his own heart rise in his throat as he squeezed Hatcher fiercely, fiercely. “I’m prideful of my purty hair, Mad Jack. It’s gonna be long and gray afore you’ll ever think of seeing it hanging from any warrior’s lodgepole.”
One by one he had hugged the others, slapped them each on the back and promised to buy them a drink come whiskey time in Willow Valley, come the summer of thirty-one. But for now the rest were headed west, and he felt the Judith pulling him north once more. As if that country might become as much his as he had come to love the Bayou Salade.
Jack stepped close and held up his hand after Bass was in the saddle. For a long moment Hatcher was silent before he finally spoke. “Yers is a damned ugly scalp anyway, Titus Bass. Not a warrior wuth anything a’tall gonna wanna take yer poor scalp.”
“You flea-bit, broke-down, crow-bait of a buzzard.” Bass shook heartily one last time, then flung Hatcher’s hand down with a wide smile and waved to them all. “You ain’t got no room to talk about just who’s got the worst case of the uglies! You boys watch your backtrail now! I’ll see you come summer!”
A painful memory, recalling how he rode off for the north, how he had turned in the saddle that one last time to look behind him, finding the six of them still standing. How they had all raised their arms and some had waved hats … it again brought that dry clutch high in his chest here beside the Yellowstone, two moons later.
But he had a cache to finish before he could push on for the Judith. To find a certain sandbar. And there to make medicine.
The sort of medicine a man could make only when he was truly alone. Truly on his own at long, long last.
23
How good were those last hot days of summer to think back upon now that winter had clamped its jaws tight upon this land. Those days that he rode out the long hours from well before sunrise until twilight squeezed down until nothing but starshine fell from the sky. Even the cool rainy days of autumn when he had turned back from the Mussellshell to dig his cache near the Yellowstone would have felt far better than this marrow-numbing cold.
Up ahead beneath the aching winter blue of the clear sky, he recognized that bulk of those hills as they tumbled down toward the valley of the Judith.
“Looks like we found it, girl!” he flung his voice back to Hannah, eager to share his mounting anxiousness with another. “Maybeso we’ll make camp up yonder for the night.”
For days now it had felt as if it were the thing to do: locate the place where he and Asa had camped late last spring as they’d worked their way north to the Missouri River—the site where for days McAfferty had ministered to his wounds, sewn up the worst of them on his hip and back with those short strips of buffalo sinew and downy tufts of beaver felt, then through day and night nursed Scratch back to health with bone broth and broiled bits of meat.
It hurt to think about his old friend, pained him to wonder just what it was that lured a man into Blackfoot country all on his own—to go where certain death waited, go where few other white men would ever tread. A tangible ache throbbed in his chest each time he tried to figure out what made McAfferty ride off into a sure and certain death carrying nothing more than his Bible and his rock-hard faith that all his steps were guided by his God.
Most times Scratch could put his mind on other things, the way a man would pick up a checker piece and move it to another square. But there were times in the black of night, or the coming gray of morning, or in the day- long swaying rock of the saddle, that he found it wasn’t so damned easy to shift his thoughts away from a mortal fear for McAfferty’s life, if not his very soul.
Not so much afraid that the Blackfoot would butcher Asa as he was afraid of something he could not describe, could not put his hand out and touch. To fear a man of flesh and blood who came at you with his gun or club or knife was one thing. But Bass was coming to fear this journey of McAfferty’s had everything to do with what Scratch himself could not understand.
Titus Bass had never really been afraid of what he could look in the eye—whether it be man or beast. It was what Scratch could not see that scared the bejesus out of him now.
After hollowing out that hole on the north side of the Yellowstone not far from that huge, flat-topped sandstone monolith that stood on the river’s south bank, he went out that third morning and cut some willow branches, a mile downstream where they might not be missed and arouse suspicion. Then he chopped up some five-foot lengths of cottonwood deadfall and dragged them down into the hole, where he laid them out side by side to form a solid floor. On them his supplies would rest up and out of the dirt and mud in the event any water seeped into his cache. After a first layer of willow was stood against the walls and across the cottonwood floor, Bass started down with the plews that he would not need to pack around until he was headed south for rendezvous next summer.
When he had all those autumn pelts and a little extra plunder secured in the cache, Scratch backed out through the neck of the hole and shoved in a last half-dozen leafy willow branches to finish off the lining of that shaft. Up on the ground once more, he jammed a cross-hatch network of willow limbs across the narrow neck of the cavern until it could support the replacement of the sod he had carefully removed in four large pieces when he had begun his excavation two days before.
The final act was then to start his supper fire right on the top of that entrance to the cache, hoping to obliterate as much evidence as he could. As the sun came up the next morning and he prepared to ride north for the Judith to trap on into the early winter, Scratch took note of two nearby landmarks one last time: the position of the two big cottonwoods and that outcropping of red sandstone rock, in addition to how many paces his treasure lay from the downed tree, how many paces up from the bank of the narrow creek.
Early next spring when his winter in Crow country was drawing to a close, he would come back here to dig up his autumn’s take and those few supplies he felt he could do without. But for now he had put the Yellowstone at his back and turned his nose north for the Judith, setting his course for that ground where the sow grizzly had forever changed everything between two men.
He brought the horse, Hannah, and the packhorses to a halt and sighed in the silence of this place.
Collars of old snow clung back in the shady places there in the copse of trees rising on the west bank of the river.
“It was good enough for us back then, girl,” he said quietly as he swung off his horse and rubbed his thighs quickly, “so it ought’n do for us now.”
As much as he wanted to walk down to the riverbank then and there, Bass resisted and instead busied himself with pulling the loads from the backs of the animals, removing saddles and blankets and pads from them all, leading them one by one toward a small clearing where the cool autumn nights were beginning to brown the last of the tall grass. He secured the forelegs of the last of the three with twisted rawhide hobbles, rubbed each animal down with tufts of sage, then turned back to see to his camp. After resetting the firestones he and Asa had used
