Bass immediately laid his right fist over his heart and held out his left arm. They gripped fiercely and looked one another in the eye.
“You are my friend, Pretty On Top?”
“I am your friend,” the youth replied. “Until I die, your friends are my friends.”
Bass nodded, feeling the mist in his eyes. “And your enemies … they are my enemies.”
As the throng burst into cheers, Arapooesh stepped up and slapped them both on the back. “We will celebrate tonight! A feast! A feast! For a true friend has returned to visit!”
Turning to Bass, the chief leaned close to say in the white man’s ear, “It makes my heart happy to hear that you will spend your winter among us … the better for me to come to know this stranger who has proved to be a man of dignity and honor himself … a man who is strong enough, brave enough, that he dares to be both merciful and generous too.”
He squinted into the light of that early-summer sun.
Dragging the wide-brimmed hat off his head, Scratch tugged on a wide corner of the black silk bandanna he had tied around his neck, swiping his face with it. Suddenly recalling how so simple a touch had caused his flesh so much agony last winter.
Up ahead at the far side of the valley, he studied that thin line of dust rising against the distant hills. And wondered if they might be Indians. A war party of Bannock. Maybeso a small band of Snake on their way to rendezvous too.
Turning to glance over his shoulder in worry, Bass found he hadn’t limned himself against the pale sky, placing him and the animals right along the horizon so that he stuck out in plain view. No, he always did his best to ride somewhere on down the slope some so that he would not be spotted by any distant pair of roving eyes. He always crossed a ridge or divide through some saddle or swale low enough so that he couldn’t be spied right against the sky.
He was thirsty. His mouth gone pasty. Through the long morning the animals had dampened the leather harness, soaking it with their sweat.
Instead of slapping the hat back down on his head, he laid it atop the large saucer-shaped horn at the front of the Spanish saddle and grabbed for the bottom of the buckskin war shirt. He tugged it up, over his head, and off both arms, then turned and lashed it to the back of the saddle there with his capote. At this season it was still cold enough early in the morning on this high desert west of the southern pass that a man started out his day shivering, later went to sweating as the sun climbed high, then ended his day shivering all over again as he started his fire, ready to climb into his sleeping robes.
The cloth shirt he had bought from Bill Williams more than a year ago had faded with so many washings along the banks of streams, vigorously rubbing the material with sand scooped from the creekbed, beating it against the rocks. No more damned nits, he had vowed. Never again.
Which made him remember how he and McAfferty had stripped off all their clothing at one campsite south along the Heely in Apache country, plopping their cloth and leather garments down upon a series of huge anthills, where they sat out the day completely naked but for their hats and moccasins, content to watch the huge red creatures swarm over the tiny lice that had burrowed into every seam of their clothing.
He had vowed he’d never again travel with any man who was infested with graybacks. After all, it was only a matter of time before the lice from one host migrated on over to Titus Bass. No more damned nits.
Those distant horsemen beneath the thin cloud of dust on the horizon were traveling from north to south. As he sat there studying their ragged line of movement, Scratch could see that they were riding for the same spot off to the southwest where he himself was headed. He squinted into the high, bright light. Just across that low range of hills to the west of him, down there the Big Sandy dumped itself into the Green, and those emerald-tinged waters continued their tumble south to the Colorado.
Glancing back up at the sun as if to curse its blinding glare, he pulled his hat back over the faded blue bandanna of silk, then rocked his horse into motion, tugging on the long lead rope that played back to Hannah’s neck. In turn she tugged on the lead rope running back to the packhorse. What with those unexpected travelers, it was better for him to cross this upper dogleg of the valley and scoot west a bit more before he plunged on south. Keep as much distance as he could between him and those riders. Maybe he would try catching up come later in the afternoon, drawing close enough to them by the time the strangers went into camp that he could slip up on them and from a safe distance see if they might be foe or friend.
For a child out here on his lonesome, the chances were far greater that he would run onto a foe than he would bump into a friend.
How good the word sounded. And how it made his already heavy heart ache with more longing.
Friends to rendezvous with, tell tall stories to, companions to regale with his windies and whoppers and outright bald-face balderdash. Friends who didn’t mind when he grew thick-tongued and stumble-lipped as he drank deep to the bottom of his cups and finally threw up or passed out. One good, gut-busting revel a year—every man was due at least that. Jehoshaphat, but to lay eyes on friends he hadn’t seen for a full year?
That was cause enough to celebrate, to drink until he got sick and blacked out then and there in the dirt, among the sage and the saddles and the sand thorns.
Titus hadn’t seen Jack and Caleb and all the others since last summer after Sublette headed east and those two big company brigades set off for their fall hunt.
Why, he hadn’t seen a white face since late last autumn when he had bumped into that big outfit run by Bridger and Fitzpatrick up in Crow country. They had already punched their way into and back through Blackfoot territory, and were headed east to winter up over toward the Powder River, when Scratch spotted the smokes of all their fires and cautiously rode off the hills to investigate. It was good to see Bridger again, along with some of the others too, and they had themselves a good evening of it, sharing stories and swapping lies the way they did.
The young booshway had explained how his bunch had even run across Asa up there north of the Three Forks country.
“We was partners.”
“Didn’t know you ever rode with him,” Bridger had admitted.
“For a time we did. He say what he was doing up there all by hisself? How he was getting along?”
Fitzpatrick had wagged his head. “Had him a few pelts on them packhorses of his—but it didn’t seem to me he was up there to trap, that for certain. Man like him gotta be crazed to figger he can last out the Blackfeet much longer up that way all on his lonesome.”
“Maybe he’s eager to get his hair raised,” Bridger added.
Bass had stared at the fire, thinking back on things gone wrong between two men, and said, “I don’t figger I’ll ever see that white-head nigger again.”
Brushing one flat palm across the other quickly, Bridger said morosely, “That’s a nigger what’s good as dead awready, Scratch.”
Aw, Asa, he thought now as he dropped down into the bottom below the narrow saddle, feeling the grass brush the bottoms of his moccasins. Why, Asa? Why?
He halted at midday just on the other side of that low saddle, loosened cinches, and let the three critters graze in the lush spring growth as he chewed at some of the meat he had cooked over last night’s fire before moving on to sleep a few miles from where he had supped. Just out of caution, in new country, a man ate one place, made a cold camp, and slept out the night in another. As he ate, he watched that distant line of dust rise against the glorious summer blue painted across the canvas above the western hills.
Close enough now to calculate there couldn’t be more than twenty riders, maybe two dozen at most.
Not likely to be a small band of Snake traipsing south for the white man’s rendezvous in Willow Valley. Might so be some damned Bannock. He knew they was the sort to skedaddle if the odds wasn’t real long in their favor, the sort what laid into any white men if the red niggers could raise some horses and plunder, maybe even some scalps if their medicine was right that day. Goddamn them Bannocks.
Not good Injuns like them Crow.
They was the sort to take a man in, make him welcome, put him up in one lodge or the other till the chief’s two sisters sewed together a buffalo-hide shelter something on the order of a white man’s lean-to. A half-domed affair with a big flap that covered the wide entrance, which he could tie up during the day or lash down for protection from the cold at night, or when a new snowstorm came slashing through the valley. He’d barely gotten
