swipe with his left hand to remove enough of the blood to see what lay beneath it.
That lighter skin did form a pattern across the warrior’s cinnamon-colored chest.
Shoving aside both flaps of the warrior’s buffalo-fur vest, he quickly rubbed away more of the blood.
“Goddamn,” he whispered, stunned.
Scratch raised his face to the sky deepening suddenly with the sun’s last whimper, its crown just disappearing over the distant peaks.
When he opened his eyes again, Bass laid both of his palms flat against the two scars.
“This were a brave man, Grandfather,” he said in no more than a whisper. “He lived them many winters you gave him after I handed the bastard back his life. Tol’t him to go back to his people, so he could tell ’em the story of all I done to the nigger what took my ha’r.”
Removing his hands from the scars, Titus gazed down once more at T and the B he had scraped in this warrior’s chest many summers ago when he had finally taken his revenge on the scalper.
“I hope you saw fit to let him have children, Grandfather,” he whispered. “Brave man what had to drag hisself back to his village. Maybeso he crawled till someone come out looking for him. A brave man ought’n have children.”
Such a warrior had some mighty powerful medicine.
Bass sensed the chill drag its finger down his spine like a drip of ice water. He turned suddenly to look over his shoulder as if he had been warned.
Likely more of them. Where there were two, there would be more. And if they didn’t start looking for these two dead men tonight, they surely would be coming at first light. From the sign he had run across the last few days, these two might even belong to that hunting party working this side of the mountain.
With a shudder he stood, already feeling regret that he would have to endure another night wrapped in his buffalo robe and blanket rather than enjoying the comfort of a small fire. He needed to get back up to the rocks where he had camped, throw everything together, and get as far from there as he could before sunup.
The Arapaho’s pony was skittish as he approached, but with its long loop of rein played out on the ground, Scratch was able to bring the animal close and tie it off to Samantha for companionship. Slowly inching alongside the nervous horse, he stopped. Brushing his hand across the half robe the warrior had draped across the horse’s back, the trapper suddenly realized what he had yet to do.
“Easy, boy,” he whispered as he gently dragged the long section of buffalo hide from the animal’s back, turned, and gazed at the line of trees gone to shadow.
There in the dusk he knew he didn’t stand a chance finding any of those lodgepole or aspen with limbs big enough. And he sure didn’t have time to waste cutting branches and lashing together some lattice to construct a tree scaffold. Besides, he told himself, the others would be coming along tomorrow, and odds were they would undo all that Bass would attempt to do now.
Still, he realized he must do what he could do.
A brave man deserved a proper burial, especially if he was buried by the man who had killed him.
What one warrior did for another.
As an inky twilight deepened, in the distance he spotted a tangle of boulders that had torn themselves away from the mountainside above him aeons ago. The top of those rocks would have to do. As good a place to offer up the body to the elements as any man could ever want, as good as any brave warrior could ask.
As he struggled to lift the body, to hoist it over his shoulder, then onto the back of the pony, Titus found his right hand growing numb, the hot pain diminishing the more he demanded of the hand. After making his first ascent to decide upon the best route to reach the top of the boulders, Bass laid the buffalo hide on the gently arched crown of the highest rock, then returned for the body.
Looping the end of his rawhide rope under the dead man’s arms, he dragged the body to the bottom of the boulders, then began to climb. As he reached a narrow shelf, he would turn and haul back on the rope, bringing the body up behind him. Once it lay at his feet, Scratch climbed a little higher. Then hoisted the warrior too. Higher and higher still, until he finally heaved the body onto the edge of that tallest boulder.
Turning his back on the faint light of that band of sky in the west, he stared to the east and smiled with satisfaction. It was good: here the sun would not be blocked as it rose come morning.
Flipping the buffalo robe fur side up, he stretched it out to its full length, then dragged the body atop the hide so the warrior’s feet would point to the east, greeting the morning sun.
For a few minutes he remained there, catching his breath while the air grew cold, that last bit of early-spring warmth sucked out of the earth with the onrush of night. Finally Titus started to slide back down, knowing what he had to do.
He would gather up the enemies’ weapons, strip the first man of any tradable clothing, then search for the second Arapaho pony before he led the two animals and Samantha back to the rocky outcrop where he had pitched his temporary camp. There he would tie everything onto the mule and ponies, then ride downslope through the night.
Maybe the time had come for him to get moving anyway.
Wasn’t going to be healthy for him to lollygag around this part of the country for some seasons to come.
*
14
“White wim-men?” she parroted back the two English words she heard so many of the trappers around her shouting at that moment.
“Yep,” Bass told his wife. “They say some white womens gonna be here soon.”
Waits-by-the-Water noticed how his green eyes narrowed with concern as he stared toward the mesa bordering the eastern edge of the river valley.
In Crow she asked, “You Americans really do have white women?”
He looked at her quizzically. “Course we do. Mothers and sisters. Only ones what don’t grow up to be wives are the ones what become whores.”
“Whores—I never heard that word from your tongue before.”
“A woman what lays with a man for the money he pays her,” and he turned his eyes away, staring at the growing bustle of activity as the electrifying news spread.
“Women who open their legs for men?” she asked in her language, still somewhat bewildered. “Indian women who take the beads and ribbon to open their legs for you white men?”
“Maybeso,” he admitted as he turned back to gaze down at her face. “I laid with my share of white whores back east in my day. But as long as I been out here in these mountains, as many Injun gals what I laid with, never have I thought Injun women was whores the same as white women—”
“Why not?” she interrupted, scratching the top of the dog’s head. “If I opened my legs for you men so I could get a new knife or some hawksbells, wouldn’t I be a whore like your white women?”
After some thought he eventually wagged his head. “Somehow, it don’t seem the same to me. Them whores all the time stay where the men come to lay with ’em. It’s what they do to make their living—like I trap beaver to make mine.”
“In that land where you came from, are there more whores, or more wives?”
He grinned a little, saying, “I s’pose there’s many more wives.”
She sighed, grinning herself as she snuggled against him. “A long time ago when I was a young girl and the first white men were coming to visit my people, many of us came to believe that among your people there must not be very many women.”
“Not many, eh?”
With a nod Waits explained. “We decided you must not have many women where you come from because you white men had such an appetite for our women.”
Squeezing her shoulder, he replied, “There are more’n enough white women back there. I sure as hell knew enough of the worst for me to decide I like Injun gals best.”
