Another convulsion shot through Williams’s body as he attempted to hold his arms and hands still over the fire like a man in dire need of its warmth. “Ye sure it weren’t just a Ree warrior?”
“Medicine man,” Hatcher agreed.
And Solomon added, “A real rattle shaker.”
Rubbing his hands together over the flames, Williams asked, “An’ his ha’r turn’t white?”
“McAfferty’s did.”
Williams looked straight at Bass. “Just as I tol’t ye, Scratch. Mark these words. I’ll lay that McAfferty these boys talking about is the sort what don’t just hear the hoo-doos through that crack in the sky yonder. He’s gone an’ see’d them spirits too!”
Graham asked, “Say, Bill—you figger that’s what turned McAfferty’s hair white?”
Slowly Williams turned so his rump faced the flames. As he rubbed the breechclout covering his bony posterior, Williams said, “Only thing I ever heerd of turning a soul’s ha’r white is coming eye to eye with a hoo- doo.”
Caleb whispered solemnly, “Don’t say?”
Williams pursed his lips in reflection for a moment, then said, “That McAfferty must be a nigger with some strong magic.”
Leaning toward Hatcher’s ear, Gray whispered, “Here he goes with his magic talk now!”
“If’n the rest of you don’t wanna hear what Bill’s got to say,” Titus snapped at Elbridge, “s’pose you g’won and have your own talk on your side of the fire.”
Elbridge started to rise suddenly. “You ain’t gonna tell me where I ought’n go—”
Hatcher suddenly put his hand out and grabbed hold of Gray’s arm. “Maybe ye ought’n go fetch yer squeezebox. And bring me my fiddle too.”
“You figger on some music tonight?” Rufus asked as Gray reluctantly nodded and moved off, glaring back at Williams.
“Music’s better’n my men squabbling over hoo-doos like some puffed-up prairie cocks.”
“Didn’t mean to cause no trouble here,” Williams said.
Still edgy, Bass watched Elbridge as he grumbled, “Ain’t your doing, Bill.”
With a wag of his head Bill declared, “This here’s why I travel alone now, boys. Can’t allays count on folks caring to listen to what ’Nother man’s gotta say—even after they gone and asked me to tell ’em what I think.”
“Elbridge just be the sort don’t want ye to know he’s unnatural scairt of ghosts and such—even the talk of it,” Hatcher whispered, glancing over his shoulder to be sure he wasn’t heard. “Scratch—I want ye to know he didn’t mean nothing by what he said.”
“No harm done,” Williams volunteered.
“Yeah,” Bass agreed, nodding. “No harm done. Didn’t know he was scared of such.”
“Elbridge allays makes fun of ever’thing he’s afraid of,” Hatcher explained.
“Ye’re friend’s awright being ’fraid,” Williams declared. “Something wrong with a man what ain’t afraid of nothing.”
Jack nodded, staring at the flames for a moment more before he admitted, “Truth be, I ain’t so sure I wanna have any more talk of ghosts around me too.”
Williams said, “Ain’t nothing ye be scared of with a little talk, Hatcher.”
“That’s right, Jack,” Bass replied confidently as he laid the beaver fur back over his skull and tugged on the blue bandanna. “Only things a man should be scared of are them what a man can see. Like Injuns. Or grizz. Even a whiteout blizzard.”
“To hell with fearing what I can see,” Hatcher declared sourly, staring into the fire. “Only things this child’s ever been afraid of are what I
Spring was all but done warming the earth in advance of summer, carpeting the hillsides with a new color every day as wildflowers of bewildering hues raised their heads to sway in the breezes drifting along the slopes where snow-melt raced toward the valley floor. More than a moon had passed since Bill Williams had departed as he said he would—leaving at sunup the next morning, the old man had crossed to the far side of the Bayou where he disappeared into the shadowy timber. And was gone.
Better than a month of hard work trapping first one creek, then another, trying every stream that showed some promise by its beaver dams, slides, and lodges. As diligently as the beaver labored to fell the young saplings that forested their watery meadows, the trappers worked all the harder still. Time enough for a man to fit in a little sleep here and there after setting the traps at sundown, rising early to check the line at sunrise the next day. After dragging the pelts and traps back to camp, scraping and fleshing and lashing them onto willow hoops, a man might catch a little shut-eye before the sun began to fall and it was time to haul the traps back out as twilight brought a delicate rose-colored alpenglow to this high valley.
“Billy Sublette damned well better get his ass to the Popo Agie this summer,” Rufus Graham often grumbled, reminding them how the trader had distributed supplies to company men well before last July’s rendezvous.
Hatcher agreed, “All this prime beaver gonna stake us to one big hurraw!”
“If Sublette brings out the likker,” Isaac argued in that overly solemn way of his, scratching aimlessly at his whitish beard stained with dark, yellowish-brown streaks that characterized the man’s careless tobacco chewing.
Was that all a man worked for? Bass wondered. Did a man force himself through endless hours standing up to his crotch in the icy streams only to earn himself some two weeks of revelry with whiskey and women and wildness? Was there nothing more to what days were granted a man?
Such brooding thoughts troubled his head as Titus chopped down aspen saplings for float-sticks, peeling each before sharpening one end, then lashing them together in a bundle for the next day’s sets. These were matters rarely considered by most men adrift here early in the far west. By and large they were of a breed who existed in the here and now, and that was all that concerned any of their kind. That day, perhaps the next, maybe even those thoughts of how fast the summer rendezvous was approaching … those were the only concerns of most trappers: survival, and that which lay on the immediate horizon for a man—what to eat the next time their bellies rumbled, where to lay their blankets and robes the next time they grew weary, where to find water and grazing for their stock …
But never, never, never did any of the rest want to talk again about what Bill Williams had stirred up within Titus Bass. And as the days rolled past in slow, easy succession, Scratch was beginning to believe the others refused to talk about those uncertain, frightening matters because such talk stirred up feelings better left untouched within each of Hatcher’s men. Simple men. Iron-hard, hand-forged men. The sort not easily given to ruminations on life and death and what might exist beyond one’s grasp.
A man lived. Then a man died. So be it.
Yet as many times as Bass tried to convince himself he should put such notions out of his mind, those notions grew more troublesome. After all, he spent so damned much time alone every day. Hours alone with only his thoughts, with matters that deeply pricked a man who had begun to fear he hadn’t spent near enough time listening to the stories his mother read her children from her Bible.
Did a man’s life tally up for no more than dumb luck? How else could he account for one man going under to nothing more than ticks … when he himself had been shot, scalped, and left for dead? Was it a roll of the dice or a lay of the cards that determined who lived and who died? Or … was it something more?
Was it as Williams explained it: that Titus Bass had been told plain as sun that there was a heap more living in store for the sort of man who survived a scalping by those intent on killing him?
For some reason unfathomable to a simple man, had Titus Bass been chosen not to die? Had he been somehow plucked from the grasping claws of death itself? Why had he been spared a fate that befell other men? Who were these capricious and fickle spirits deciding such things?
Who had yanked him from the gaping maw of death?
Were they at his shoulder then and there? And if he listened hard enough, would he hear them?
Climbing down off the bank, he waded upstream with the trap, float, and bait sticks.
So many questions.
Quickly scraping out a shelf for the trap a few inches below the surface of the stream, Scratch positioned the trap and strung out the chain, driving the long, pointed sapling into the graveled creekbottom. Returning the small
