Titus leaned over and gripped her forearm sympathetically. “Don’t think nothing of it. Just wanted you and Magpie to see the show.”
For a moment Waits gazed at her daughter’s cheerful face, then said, “Yes. Let’s go see the show these Pierced Noses put on for the white women.”
As it turned out, all four tribes eagerly joined in the grand procession as it worked its way toward the site where the missionary women were camped. By the time Scratch and Waits dismounted and tied off their ponies, the front ranks of the march were approaching. Having started their ride at the west end of the valley, the Snake and Bannock passed through the Flathead camp, then the Nez Perce village, sweeping up more and more participants until some four hundred yelling, chanting, shrieking warriors boiled up and down the sides of the parade column.
Stripped as if for the hunt, they wore no more than their breechclout and moccasins, many painted with vivid colors, tying birds and feathers in their hair, wearing the skullcaps of wolves, badgers, even buffalo upon their heads. Shaking lances strewn with the scalp locks taken from vanquished enemies, the horsemen strutted as proudly as any war hero might. Old men rode stately at the center of the march, singing their battle songs as they beat on hand drums or shook buffalo-bladder rattles filled with stream-bottom pebbles. Younger men who had taken no scalps brandished their bows or war clubs or fusils, to which they had tied long strips of red and blue cloth to flutter in the summer breeze.
Within a nearby copse of trees, Captain William Drummond Stewart and Bridger assured Marcus Whitman and Henry Spalding that this noisy, bellicose charge was every bit as harmless as the charge made on them by the trappers racing out to meet the caravan. Both wives appeared at the flaps of their tall conical tent sewn of bed ticking and large enough to comfortably sleep all seven of the missionaries. But the moment pale and sickly Eliza Spalding spied the approach of the screaming warriors, she emitted a pained yelp, slapped a hand over her mouth, and turned on her heel—disappearing back into the sanctuary of her tent.
“Curse these godless savages for their nakedness!” the prim and proper one shrieked in horror as she ducked from sight.
But Narcissa Whitman of the twinkling blue eyes and ready smile clapped her hands together with glee before hurrying on her husband’s arm to the edge of the meadow to watch the approach of that cavalcade assembled in honor of the missionaries.
Closer and closer the warriors came, growing noisier, shrieking louder as they drew near until the front ranks spotted the holy man’s fair-haired wife. Like the reflex of a muscle, they put their ponies to the gallop, shouting anew as they raced toward that bed-ticking tent, shaking weapons and feathers, scalps and coup-sticks, tearing out and around, leaping again and again over clumps of gray and green sage, spurts of yellowish dust flaring from every flying hoof. When no more than ten yards away, the first chiefs in the parade suddenly swept to the side without slowing in the slightest, careening their snorting, wide-eyed ponies in a maddening loop that took them entirely around the tall conical tent held fast to the prairie with wooden stakes.
Now more than four hundred warriors raced in a crude oval round and round the campsite as Narcissa laughed and clapped and spun with the excitement and color of it all, made immensely happy at this exhibition in her honor. At first a few warriors, then more, reined up in a spray of dust and dismounted, walking their ponies over to examine the Dearborn carriage the missionaries had succeeded in bringing all the way from the States. Outside and in they inspected it, some even crawling in the grass beneath the carriage to get themselves a complete study of it. Others rubbed the top, dragged their fingers across the soft leather-covered horsehair-stuffed seats, or repeatedly picked up and dropped, picked up and dropped the double-tree that harnessed the carriage to a single horse.
“Waits-by-the-Water!”
They both turned to find Narcissa and her husband approaching with quite a crowd in tow. The doctor’s wife called out the Crow woman’s name again just as they came to a halt before the trapper.
“Please tell your wife it is so good to see her again,” Narcissa exclaimed. “I was hoping to before we depart for Oregon country.”
Bass translated and Waits nodded self-consciously.
“Mr. Bass,” Marcus Whitman began, “my wife and I would like to invite you and your family to have dinner with us tomorrow evening. If that isn’t convenient, we’ll make it the night after.”
“No, ’morrow evening will set just fine by us, Doctor.”
“Good,” and Whitman smiled genuinely. “Tomorrow it is.”
Narcissa took a step forward, reaching up to touch Magpie’s bare foot as she sat on her father’s shoulders. Then she took up Waits-by-the-Water’s hand and squeezed it, smiling with her whole face. Together she and her husband turned and moved once more into the crowd that inched its way back to that conical tent of blue-striped bed ticking.
“Tomorrow,” Waits repeated after they had started back for their ponies.
“Won’t it be fun for you and Magpie too?”
“Yes,” she answered in English, then turned to face him fully after he lifted Magpie from his shoulders and set her atop his saddle.
Waits-by-the-Water took his empty hand and caressed the fingers gently, looking into his eyes as she said, “It will be a good night to celebrate our happy news.”
“What happy news?”
She laid his hand on her belly, pressing it there as she had done once before. “Ti-tuzz … you are going to be a father again.”
15
A father again?
Why … he had a grown daughter back in St. Lou, a woman herself, old enough to give him grandchildren.
This momentous news, all tangled up in his blissful ignorance of how a woman came to be with child, purely confounded Titus. While most of his fiber rejoiced at his wife’s happiness, there was nonetheless a narrow but hardy spider’s thread of baffled wonderment and befuddled concern for the health of a child born of so old a father.
Not that such a thing was so rare in his family; why, at the time his grandpap was born, his great-grandpap was fifty-two! Though Titus never knew the man, he had indeed known his grandpap, hale and hearty, every bit as lean as whipcord and tough as sun-dried rawhide till that fated evening he had told his wife he figured it was time for him to accept God’s rest and took to his bed. There he had closed his eyes as if to sleep, slipping away to his mortal rest before morn.
His grandpap’s was truly the first dying Titus had ever witnessed, but far from the last his eyes were to behold. Times were Scratch had fervently prayed God would grant him a passing every bit as much at peace as his grandpap’s had been. Each time, however, he would realize that simply wasn’t the way of a man’s seasons out here in this big yonder.
Would folks be awestruck that this man the color and toughness of a lean strop of saddle leather could still father a babe? Would a great number of them stare all mule-eyed and wag their heads in judgment while some would snigger behind their hands when they learned he was going to be a father again?
In the end he supposed these things did not matter—none of those fears or doubts, and surely none of what others thought of him. He was reminded that the way of such things wasn’t his to decide, but the doing of something far greater. Not his, but God’s. When a man and woman coupled, then Bass figured God eventually saw fit to give them a young’un. As surely as Jim Bridger’s wife was now heavy with child.
He glanced over at Cora again as the shadows deepened, finding her still reluctant to join her husband and the others at the missionaries’ fire. Instead, the young Flathead princess stood in the shadows behind Bridger, not saying a word, nor joining in the lighthearted talk and bantering laughter. Titus figured she, like Waits-by-the-Water, had grown dismayed by the way the white men acted so differently around the white women.
Maybe later he should pull Gabe off to the side and remind him to assure Cora that he still loved her.
