“Just lemme kill Newell! Then you can do what you want with me! Nothing counts for nothing no—”
“If you’d killed him, I would have shot you dead myself,” Drips interrupted, shaking the man quiet. “Maybe better still, I would have hanged you with that rope holding you to this tree.”
“Hang me?” he spat. “I’m wuth more’n a hanging!”
“Look at you.” Drips slowly got to his feet. “You sure as hell ain’t worth a lead ball now.”
“I’ll kill you when I get these here ropes off—”
“Let’s hope you feel different come morning, Harris.”
Once more the drunk trapper whimpered, “M-morning?”
“You’ll be good and sober by then,” Drips declared, seeing Newell emerge from the trees armed with his pistol and a rifle. “Maybe by then the missionaries will be on their way, and there won’t be any cause for more trouble from you.”
With their eyes trained on the Columbia country, Newell, Meek, and William Craig started the three missionary couples west at first light, just as Andrew Drips had suggested they do. The rumble of their wagons and the clatter of their leave-taking awoke a hungover, blood-crusted Moses Harris still firmly lashed to his tree.
Red-eyed, the old veteran watched them depart, struggling to keep from showing his utter grief at being left behind. He bit his tongue and didn’t utter one word, not one curse, as the wagons rolled from the valley. Joining the missionaries when they set forth on this last momentous leg of the overland journey to Oregon were Joel P. Walker and his wife, along with their four children and his wife’s younger sister. They were to be the first family to ply what would soon become a great emigrant road.
With Dick Owens having thrown in with Philip Thompson’s bunch who had headed west to steal California horses, Kit Carson found himself alone when the end came. No more would he trap beaver, Kit had decided. Instead, he chose to ride south across the mountains for the Arkansas where he would apply to become a hunter for St. Vrain and the Bent brothers.
But hardest for Bass to take would be Shad Sweete’s decision.
“What’s come of their gumption?” Titus asked his partner as Carson left their camp after announcing his plans to abandon the fur business. “Won’t no one ride into these mountains to trap beaver no more? Looks to be we’re the last, Shadrach!”
The moment he turned to peer at Sweete’s eyes, Scratch’s stomach shriveled as if he’d swallowed a mouthful of pickling salt. He knew, even as he asked, “W-what is it? Why you got that look on your face?”
For a while longer the tall man stood there before his friend, shuffle-footed and dumb, unable or afraid to speak.
Bass said, “Them words are like cockleburrs choking you, so you best spit ’em out now. Ain’t nothing you’d say ever hurt me, for you’re my friend.”
“Beaver’s done, Scratch.”
“It ain’t done,” he snapped.
“Then maybeso … I’m done with beaver,” Sweete explained gently, seeing how he had wounded Bass. “Done splashing round in freezing streams and allays looking over my shoulder for red niggers. I’m done chasing after something I know I ain’t ever gonna find.”
Titus blinked back the sting at his eyes and asked, “What you been chasing, Shadrach?”
“Maybe I allays figgered I’d make me a little money at this, leastways enough to fix up a post for myself where I could do some trading.” Then Sweete shrugged. “But the last few seasons I come to figger the best I’m gonna do is have myself some steady work as a hand for someone else.”
“Who … who you figger you’ll work for?”
He gazed squarely at Bass, seeming a bit more confident. “Been thinking ’bout heading down to the South Platte. Maybeso that post you said Sublette and Vaskiss got.”
“There’s work down there, Shad,” Scratch admitted, choking back the pain already ripping his gut in two at this parting. It never got easy. Damn, but it never got any easier.
“I’ll find me something—”
“Bill Williams told us there’s other posts down in that country too,” Bass said. “Won’t be hard for a likely lad such as yourself to find work.”
Wearing a look of unashamed gratitude for Titus making it easier on him, Sweete nodded. “I’ll hunt for ’em. Maybeso do some trading for Vaskiss. You said yourself that’s dead center in the ’Rapaho and Cheyenne country.”
“I’d wager my last beaver dollar on you, Shadrach. You’ll make a life for yourself on them plains.”
“How—how ’bout you, Scratch?” Sweete asked, worry suddenly carving deep furrows on his brow.
“Don’t you fret over us none,” he said, glancing momentarily at the woman and their children. “Likely stick close by these mountains come fall, maybe winter up down to Sinclair’s post in Brown’s Hole. I’ll lay off that north country till it’s for certain them Blackfoot been took by the pox and ain’t gonna play the devil no more.”
“Things for sure gonna be a mite safer for you in this’r country.”
Splitting his shaggy beard with a grin, Titus said, “Won’t no Injuns be troubling me anywhere I go, Shad—not as far back in them hills as I plan to hide.”
“To get that high, and go back so far, that be a load of work and time on a man.”
“Hardscrabble for sure,” he admitted. Then, shrugging, Titus pointed at the woman. “But we don’t got nothing else to do, nowhere else to be now, but up there where the Injuns ain’t likely to roam … so it don’t matter a lick if I gotta work hard and high to find them flat-tails.”
“Bridger told me him and Frapp gonna hook up again, fixing to work the rivers hereabouts. He asked me to join in, but I told him I’d give the traps a rest. Maybeso you’d wanna ride with them?”
Wagging his head slowly, Titus confessed, “I spent me some seasons throwed in with Jack Hatcher’s outfit. Since then I got old and set in my ways. Better off on my lonesome.”
Slowly Shad Sweete grinned, then flung his long arms around the thin man and squeezed him fiercely. His voice so quiet that it was barely heard over the rustle of the breeze, he whispered into his friend’s ear, “Likely you always will be better off, going where it feels right, and being on your own, Titus Bass.”
His flesh a war map etched with every wound of arrow, knife, and ball, his sagging face lined and pocked by the deep cold and the high sun, the very marrow of his soul cut, healed, and now scarred … Titus Bass clung on. He always would, alone if need be.
Though the seasons he had weathered in this life had mellowed, aged, then died, each one gone the way of the quakies’ golden leaves—still his love for this land and this life endured.
Though those summers of rendezvous were now gone forever, though no more than a few beaver had survived the deadly onslaught, though most of the hardy hunters were already scattering east or west … still a few would linger, a few would prevail as their world changed around them.
For those few, this then had truly been a love story if ever there was one. Across winters harsh and unforgiving, throughout brief seasons of fading glory, the few had come to love a land, come to love a way of life with such fierce and steadfast devotion that they could not begin to consider ever abandoning their mountain domain.
No more could these few forsake this wild land and this raw life they had come to love with such unspoken fidelity than they could abandon a woman they loved with that same undying passion.
No more could Titus Bass leave these uncharted western rivers than he could leave little Flea. No more could he abandon the valleys teaming with elk and buffalo than he could abandon his sweet Magpie.
And no more could this man forsake the high mountain passes and the hoary peaks than he would ever think of parting from the woman who held his heart in her hands.
There were sunrises and seasons yet unborn.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
TERRY C. JOHNSTON was born the first day of 1947 on the plains of Kansas, and has lived all his life in the American West. His first novel,
