to boast, “But this here’s one child what can still outride, outshoot, outbeller, and outthump the lot of you weak sisters! Mark my words, fellers—there’s comin’ a time when all the fun will be gone in these here mountains. And on the day you sorry niggers come dragging your sorry asses into Californy—don’t ’spect Thomas L. Smith, the king of Californy, to be waiting there with open arms for any of you!”
“You gonna own all of Californy?” John Rowland asked.
He turned on Rowland, one finger jabbing at the sky. “I damn well will own it, child! When the Mexicans have everything south of the Arkansas, when Sublette’s company rules the Rockies and American Fur owns the Missouri, ’cause Hudson’s Bay lays its claim to everything else west of here … then all that’s left for likely fellers like me to do is plant my stake out to Californy, where the pickin’s is good.”
“But the price of beaver ain’t fallin’, Tom,” Hatcher argued.
“I see more niggers coming out here every year,” Smith replied in a quiet, grave tone. “Every summer they bring more trappers into these here mountains. One day they’ll bring a train of wagons. Then they’ll bring out white womens! And you boys know what comes next, don’cha?”
Isaac asked, “What, Tom? What comes next?”
“Everywhere white womens go, they build churches an’ towns, stores an’ schools! They bring in the constables an’ the lawyers—all of ’em telling men like us, ‘You cain’t do this! You cain’t do that!’”
“Too damn much room out here for to worry ’bout any of that,” Titus finally spoke his piece.
Smith turned to regard the stranger he did not know. “Maybeso, mister. Maybeso. But I do know there’s a passel of folks back east—likely enough to fill up all of this out here if’n the first ones come out and spread the word.”
“I figger a man can just keep moving ahead of ’em,” Scratch observed.
He hobbled toward Bass unsteadily, his eyes squinting in the bright summer light. “S-stay ahead of ’em, you said?”
Bass nodded. “Yep. Stay out front of all them what come west to raise their houses and towns.”
With a wag of his head Smith said, “What kind of life is that gonna be for niggers like us, boys? What good is life for a man just to be pushed on ahead of the crowds … knowing them settlement folks is ruining everything we left behind when we moved on?”
“Maybeso a man don’t have to turn around and see what they’re doing to what he’s left behind,” Bass protested.
“No,” Smith said quietly. “No, he don’t. Just like he don’t have to cry when he loses a good friend neither. A man just don’t have to give a damn when them farmers and white womens and towns come out here and ruin all this for the likes of us.”
“So that’s the reason ye’re haulin’ yer plunder to California, is it?” Hatcher asked.
“For the life of me, I don’t think I can bear to watch this country get ruin’t, Jack. I’ll go on to Californy, where there ain’t too many greasers, where I can steal some horses and trap me some beaver too.”
“Can’t make me believe it,” Titus said solemnly. “Look around you. There’s too damn much room out here for all this ever to get ruin’t on us.”
Smith wagged his head, a great sadness come into his eyes. “The folks are comin’, boys. They always have … an’ I guess they damn well always will.”
How long did they have? Scratch wondered.
He raised his eyes to gaze at the late summer blue and wondered, How long would it be before numberless columns of smoke would smudge the skyline the way it had in St. Louis? How long before the dust of wagon wheels and plowshares and thousands of feet and hooves would clog up a man’s nose and make it hard for him to breathe normal?
How long before what he had found out here was no more, and he had to climb higher and higher, up from these rolling prairies and plains, to escape those who always came in the wake of the first to open a land. Smith was right about that. They always came.
They always would.
The longhunters had pushed over the Cumberland, down into the canebrakes when the stalks stood twice as tall as a man, when the game was plentiful and the buffalo still haunted the eastern timber. But in the wake of those lonely individuals came men with their families following the same narrow footpaths and game trails into the virgin forests until they came to a meadow, a grove of trees by a stream—a place where those men and their women decided to set down their roots then and there. They built cabins and turned the soil, planted their seeds and fought off the Indians there beyond the edge of the frontier.
And eventually they watched others come, leapfrogging over them to inch back the dangerous edge of that frontier a few miles, a few more days farther to the west. Season by season, year by year, farm by farm. They had always come.
And there was no reason for Titus to believe that they wouldn’t always continue to come.
On his way west Scratch had seen them with their toes dug in, clinging fast to the country along the Missouri River. Settlers and widows, families and farms. Merchants and towns. How far would they push before they ran up against the buffalo country? And what then?
That land wasn’t fit for farming, he convinced himself, hopeful. That soil wasn’t rich and black like the ground he had turned over with a plow back in Kentucky. The domain of the buffalo was nothing more than poor grassland, not at all fit for raising corn or tobacco, hemp or squash or potatoes. The settlers who came to raise crops would eventually discover that they couldn’t grow anything in that ground and would therein refuse to venture farther.
So men like Tom Smith were wrong, Bass told himself.
Farmers would not dare probe very far beyond the hardwood forests. Surely the buffalo ground would serve as a buffer, as a no-man’s-land where the great plains blanketed by those shaggy beasts would forever protect these high prairies and tall mountains from the masses of humanity he had seen streaming across the Mississippi on their ferries, rumbling right on through the byways of St. Louis, hurrying their wagons west.
It just wouldn’t happen here.
This simply wasn’t a quiet, closed-in country like that back east of the river. This land was too damned wild, too open and unruly ever to be tamed the way that country had been. Like a horse broke to saddle or a mule to plow, like a man broke to marriage … that was the kind of country folks could tame.
Not this. Not here and surely not now.
This was a land no man could tame, and these were men every bit as tough to break to harness.
“We got visitors,” Fish announced just loud enough that the others could hear.
He didn’t point, but the others just naturally looked left to Solomon’s side of their march. Up the far side of a gentle slope Bass caught sight of them. He had been so wrapped up in lazily musing in the hot afternoon sun that he might well have been asleep on horseback.
“How many ye make it?” Hatcher asked.
“Maybe a dozen,” Fish replied. “But you can bet there’s more we don’t see.”
“That’s for sartin,” Caleb warned.
“Maybeso they’re just watching,” Kinkead said, faint hope in his voice.
“For now anyway,” Jack stated. “They’ll keep their eye on us and figger a place to make their play. If not today, then tomorrow.”
“What are they?” Titus asked.
For a moment they all looked at the horsemen sitting passively at the skyline atop their ponies, just far enough away that a rifle shot would not reach them, close enough to see the long, unbound hair lifting in the hot wind, some feathers and scalp locks fluttering beneath the chins of the horses.
“Bannawks,” Jack declared.
“Likely so,” Elbridge Gray agreed.
“This here’s Bannawk country,” Rufus Graham put in his vote.
“They good to Americans, like the Flathead?” Scratch asked. “Or they devilsome, like Blackfoot?”
“Man can’t allays callate that,” Hatcher explained. “But more times’n not, Bannawks don’t mind running off yer horses, taking yer plunder, and raising yer hair if ye give ’em a chance.”
Wood said, “You ask me, they ain’t to be trusted.”
“Bannawks ain’t as brave as Blackfoot,” Hatcher explained, “and they ain’t as sneaky as Crow. But this bunch
