Not only did Bass feel the wide blade pierce the cartilage and soft tissue on its path upward through the back of the throat, on past the hard palate, and into the bottom of the man’s brain—but he heard its noisy journey of death as it cracked through hard tissue. Blood and gore gushed down over that handle decorated with those tiny brass nails.
Above that border of black pain the warrior’s eyes suddenly rolled back to whites as his throat gurgled and his body went limp, pitching to the side, the double-edged blade penetrating the base of the Indian’s brain, severing motor control.
Scratch’s throat whimpered with that first breath of air he dragged in, so painfully did it rush down his windpipe—like shards of shattered mirror glass the moment he rolled onto his side, away from the Blackfoot, coughing so violently he was sure he would expel pieces of his lung. He gasped in agony as he lumbered onto his hands and knees, watching the warrior’s legs thrash spastically for a moment, then go still as the man’s bowels voided in death.
How it hurt to drag in anything larger than a tiny breath as his heart thundered in his ears like the beating of a war drum, the vapor hanging gauzy in front of his face as he looked about that small clearing. Four of them. So much blood beginning to slicken the frosty ground. Dead men come to kill him.
Scratch felt the first heave of his empty stomach, sensed the initial burn of gall at the back of his throat— then his belly revolted as he rocked forward on hands and knees, spilling the putrid yellow bile on the trampled, frozen grass. Again, and again, and again he heaved up what little his stomach held, until there was nothing left but the spastic, wrenching seizures of each dry wretch.
Did the killing ever get easier for a man?
And if it ever did, at what cost?
Wiping his mouth with the back of his right hand, he tasted the Blackfoot’s blood that had splattered over him as that knife plunged up through the throat and into the man’s brain. It made him gag anew.
On the frosty broken shafts of grass he frantically wiped his hands, smearing the frozen moisture across his face—wiping, wiping, wiping at the blood smearing his flesh while hot, stinging tears pooled in his eyes.
Then he finally crouched to the side, and with that half-frozen, bloodstained hand Bass yanked the crimson- coated knife from the enemy’s head … raised it toward the sky … and slashed a jagged line down from heaven above toward this earth below where men walked out their numbered days.
“Bass!” he croaked with searing pain in his throat.
And when the strident echo flung its answer upon him from the hills, that lone man hurled it back at the spirits of this great wilderness which must never forget his name.
“BASS!”
His left eye had sparkled for the first time later that spring while Scratch sat in a hot pool he chanced across near the Land of Smoking Waters on his slow tramp toward the southern pass, easing toward rendezvous.
And now it lit up a second time as he sat in that hot, tarry pool of thick black goo here in the Bighorn basin.
So many fiery, shooting stars burst in a brilliant fan of shimmering color from that lone left eye that when he shut the right, he found himself all but blinded.
At first Titus believed it was somehow nothing more than those wavering veils of steam rising off the hot pools of thick, stinking, sulphurous ooze that collected in these low places widely known among the beaver hunters who crisscrossed the mountain west. But even when he stood with his naked, sticky body and trudged a few yards away from that steamy vent to the cooling relief of a nearby stream, where he plopped down onto his rump, submerged right up to his chest—the eye still sparkled with the fire only a Rocky Mountain night could rain upon the earth.
So he sat there until his hide grew cold as winter meat.
Rising, Titus lunged back to the tar pool, where he eased his bare flesh down into the hot, thick ooze with a long sigh. Taking one last check on the horizons, Bass closed his eyes and let the heat soak to his marrow. He hadn’t been this warm since … since sometime last fall. Indian summer. Some seven, maybe eight suns since he had run onto those white faces and white voices he ached so to see now.
Here in this aching silence where only the spring breeze or the flap of a bird’s wing or the distant passing of a fluff of cloud brought any sound to his ears, Bass grinned—remembering how last fall up on the Bighorn he had crossed trails with that large brigade of some two dozen Rocky Mountain Fur trappers on their way south for winter encampment and he was making for Absaroka. They made camp together that cold night so old friends could share stories of the land, the price of beaver, word on this tribe or that, and any shred of news that might make the prospect of a lonely winter a bit more bearable.
Seems that Tom Fitzpatrick and his supplies had finally made it north from Taos all the way to the Platte, where Henry Fraeb finally ran onto him in all his desperate searching. Throughout those early days of autumn, Broken Hand and his hired men had their work cut out for them: with winter coming they could accomplish nothing save for traipsing around Blackfoot and Yellowstone country, running down the various brigades so the overdue Fitzpatrick could reoutfit them from those much-needed goods brought up from the Jackson and Sublette train when it reached Taos from the States.
“We was all just starting to settle in over to the mouth of the Powder—just like we done last winter, Scratch,” Jim Bridger had explained beside that one night’s fire they had shared in their trail crossing. “Cutting cottonwood for horse fodder, laying in grass, and building our huts for the time the wind blows mean.”
“That there’s pretty mild country for winter doin’s,” Bass had commented. “Man can make meat, and the snow don’t get all that deep.”
“But we got drove out!” Henry Fraeb bellowed from the far side of the fire.
“Frapp means to say the goddamned American Fur men showed up in our own blessed backyard like ticks sucking blood from a bull!” Milt Sublette exclaimed angrily.
“Am-american Fur?” Bass repeated with worry. “Wasn’t it just a couple year back Hugh Glass was preaching to every nigger at ronnyvoo about a fort American Fur was building at the mouth of the Yellowstone? Saying we all ought’n take our furs there ’stead of trading at ronnyvoo?”
“Mackenzie,” Bridger snarled, nodding. “That’s the bastard building the post.”
Then Sublette added, “He’s took to calling himself ’King of the Missouri’!”
“Now the son of a bitch sent out two fellers named Vanderburgh and Dripps to run down our brigades,” Tom Fitzpatrick spoke up for the first time as he whittled on a green bough. “Them two had ’em a bunch of green hands along—don’t bet any of ’em ever laid a trap under water!”
“Shit! Ain’t a one of ’em knows fat cow from poor bull!” Bridger roared with laughter. “So them two booshways said right to our faces they was gonna camp where we was camped, and go where we was to go—all so they could learn the best of the beaver trade in the mountains afore they snatched it right out from under us!”
“Was they serious?” Scratch had asked.
“We could tell they wasn’t just flapping their jaws!” Sublette grumbled. “They was American Fur—so that means John Jacob Astor … which means all the money in the world throwed up against us poor boys.”
“Sons of a bitch,” Fraeb grumbled in his thick German accent.
Fitzpatrick declared, “Then and there we figgered to hold us a council and see which way our stick would float.”
Bridger nodded. “All five of us decided we wasn’t the sort to hang around and watch Vanderburgh and Dripps camped across the river all winter, then have ’em dog our shadows come spring green-up.”
“So the next night—right at slap-dark—we slipped out and got skedaddling away from them bastards,” Sublette explained.
Bass shook his head sadly. “May come a time when American Fur’s money is the only money in the mountains,” he growled.
“Astor’s always been the sort what runs off all competition wherever he sets hisself down,” Sublette agreed.
“So if you’re running from this here Vanderburg and Dripps now,” Scratch began, “where is it you’re fixing to winter up?”
Bridger answered, “The five of us decided to get over to the west side of the mountains. Cross the southern pass, jump the Green, and on to the Snake afore the last of the passes close.”
