everything else and this tobaccy.”
“You done a lot for us this winter, Willy,” Scratch said.
“Whiskey and women and now some smoke,” Caleb cheered.
“It ain’t only the things ye traded for us,” Hatcher explained. “You and Matthew saw to it them greaser soldiers didn’t come try rubbing us out.”
“Where is Matthew anyways?” Rufus asked.
“Here it is our going-off hoot and Matthew ain’t here,” Isaac said.
Workman replied, “Kinkead said to tell you he’d be here afore first light. Said he knows how Jack hates to burn daylight—so he’ll be here afore you pull out.”
Matthew Kinkead was good at his word. Always had been. And that cold mid-March morning was another painful tearing away for Titus Bass. They had fought Blackfeet together, covered more miles than any man back east might imagine, slept and ate and talked around countless fires in what had been more than a year of scuttling across trackless wastes and climbing over never-ending mountain ranges. But now Matthew was staying behind with his Rosa.
Titus knew he would miss the big bear of a man as much as he had ever missed anyone in his life of wandering.
“You listen up to what Mad Jack Hatcher tells you,” Kinkead instructed as he released Bass from a terrible squeeze.
“That’s right, ye best listen to me,” Hatcher echoed as he took up the reins to his saddle horse.
But Matthew continued as if he hadn’t heard Jack say a thing. “You listen to Hatcher … and then you damn well go do just the opposite!”
They all laughed together, but this time it wasn’t the easy laughter that comes from camaraderie on the trail. This was the strained laughter of men parting from good companions, longtime friends, compatriots in battle, men who had survived long, harsh winters together. Slowly Matthew made the rounds of those riders gathered in what was a long oval of horses and pack animals. Then he finally stepped back to join the whiskey maker at the stone threshold to Workman’s hut.
“We got miles to go, pilgrims!” Hatcher cried as he turned back to his horse, his voice cracking with sentiment. “And you sumbitches are burning my daylight!”
“Let’s ride!” another cried.
A voice called, “Hep-hepa, you trail niggers!”
“To the Shining Mountains!” Matthew Kinkead cried, dragging a hand beneath his big bulb of a nose and raising his arm overhead as the others filed out of the creekbottom, up the wide trail to the prairieland above.
“To the … the Shining Mountains!” Bass roared, his throat clogging as he leaned far out of his saddle to quickly shake Kinkead’s and Workman’s hands while he moved past.
“There’s beaver waiting!” Hatcher sang out from the head of their column.
Caleb hollered, “Here’s to likker-lovin’ coons like us!”
“Billy Sublette better hide his whiskey!” Isaac bellowed.
“Injun bucks better hide their daughters!” Rufus cheered.
As they went on and on like that, their loud voices careening off the stone walls of the creekside, Bass turned in his new Spanish saddle with a groan of stiff leather … gazing back at Workman and Kinkead. He pulled off his blanket mitten and raised a bare hand in the shocking cold of that dawn. Saw them both wave to him one last time as the trail took him around a bend and they fell out of sight.
Farewells never got any easier. No matter how old he got, farewells damn well never got any easier.
12
“H’ar ye now!”
Bass and Elbridge Gray turned at the sudden call of that strange voice, their hands gone to their pistols.
Out of the quakies emerged a horseman in gaily ornamented buckskins pulling behind him two more ponies, their packs gently swaying from side to side as they were brought to a halt near the two trappers on the grassy creekbank. Mexican conchos dotted the outer seam of his leggings dyed with red earth paint, the same color as the sleeves on his war shirt. Over the fringed shirt he wore a faded, soot-stained waistcoat complete with pewter buttons.
With the way this stranger had his stirrups buckled real short and high along the ribs of his horse, he appeared to be perched atop a saddle far too small for his long, bony legs. From both ears dangled large sky-blue rocks of turquoise suspended on narrow wires that bobbed and jiggled as the man turned this way and that, looking first at Gray, then at Bass.
“H’ar yourself,” Scratch replied as he relaxed the grip on his pistol. “You ain’t no Injun now, are you?”
“Ye took me for Injun, did ye?”
Elbridge pointed to his cheek with a finger, saying, “Why’s a white nigger wear Injun war paint?”
The stranger’s narrow, slitted eyes suddenly came to life, twinkling within a tanned face of well-soaped saddle leather as he studied the pair for what seemed like the longest time. Then he spoke.
“Been living with Injuns for lotta moons.”
“You paint up like ’em?” Gray asked.
“I paint up like ’em, yeah,” the stranger replied matter-of-factly as he pulled his massive wolf-skin cap off and pointed to the bright purple of the vermilion pigment he had rubbed along the part in his hair.
“You’re sure a purty Injun, for a white man,” Scratch declared.
He turned to Bass. “I h’aint see’d a real honest-to-God white man in just shy of a year, boys. Where ye hail from?”
“The Illinois,” Gray answered, taking a step closer to the horseman. “By way of Taos this past winter.”
He nodded, his eyes quickly coming back to rest on Bass while he spit a thin stream of brown into the grass beside his saddle horse. “An’ you?”
“Kentucky, by way of St. Louie … and a winter in Taos.”
“Taos a good place for winter doin’s,” the stranger agreed. “Wha’chore names?”
“Titus Bass,” Scratch answered as he stepped up beside the horse and held a hand up to the rider. “And this here is Elbridge Gray.”
“Ye on yer own hook, ye two?” asked the stranger.
“No,” Bass replied, sensing his guard hairs bristle as he glanced past the horseman to the timbered hillside, wary. “S’pose you tell us your name.”
“Williams. William Shirley Williams,” he answered, innocently smiling.
“Sweet Marie!” Elbridge exclaimed. “That there’s a hull passel of Williams in that goddamned name!”
The smile faded as the horseman turned his straight-faced, expressionless stare back to Gray. Then, with a droll purse to his lips, he replied, “That be my name. But my friends call me Bill. I figger any white man up here got a good chance to be my friend—so whyn’t you two call me Bill?”
“Be pleased to call you Bill,” Bass replied, already liking the cut of the tall, skinny trapper. “My friends hale me as Scratch.”
Craning his neck to look up the aspen-choked hillside, Gray asked, “More niggers with you?”
“Nope. I ride alone now’days.”
“Leg on down here,” Bass proposed, stepping back. “We’re bound to finish setting our last two traps straightaway, then you can ride on up to camp with us. Make a night of it.”
Elbridge declared, “One of the t’others dropped a elk cow this morning. Some mighty fine eating—”
They both watched Williams visibly shudder, his whole body trembling, his face pinched.
With a wag of his head the rider said, “Good it weren’t no bull elk.”
“Bull ain’t near as good eating,” Bass stated.
“Don’t ye fellers never go kill a bull with one antler broke off and a’hanging like so,” he said, a sudden sharp and warning edge come to his voice as he balanced his long fullstock rifle across the tops of his bony thighs and raised both his arms to their full length on either side of his head, spreading his fingers as if they were antler points.
