“No. Last summer Jarrell told me that his boss, a man I met out to the western sea, sent him to rendezvous all alone only to look things over. That boss, a white-headed eagle named McLoughlin, had plans to send a brigade of men here this summer.”
“More of the English white men?”
“Yes, woman—all sent by a man who wants to carve off a piece of this rendezvous trade for himself.”
Worry tinged her voice. “Will the English push the Americans out of these mountains?”
Bass snorted, shaking his long, damp hair. “Not a chance of that. If the English know what’s good for them, they’ll stay to their own country and leave this to the rest of us.”
“You will go this morning to throw the tall white man out of this country?”
After some hesitation Bass said, “I don’t figure I got the right to throw any man out of what country isn’t mine.”
“But many times you’ve told me this land is your home.”
“True, woman. But it still isn’t mine, the way folks put down claims on the ground back east. No, I’m content to live out here where none of this is really mine, to pass on through a lot of country where I’m only visiting.”
“There is Crow country farther north,” she tried to explain as she wrapped his arms over the tops of her heavy breasts. “And this country is the land of the Shoshone and Bannock. All fight to keep the powerful Blackfoot from taking away their lands. So why aren’t you going to fight the English now that they have come to take this country from you?”
“I don’t think they have come here to take any land from me,” he declared.
“But they came for the beaver,” she maintained. “And some of that beaver is yours.”
He leaned to the side so he could gaze closely at her face. “You trying to stir up some trouble between me and that big Englishman?”
With a smile she replied in Crow, “No. I am only trying to make sense of why you do what you do sometimes. Make sense of what you don’t do at times. You Americans and the Englishmen are confusing to me: you say you don’t want this country out here, but you both want to be free to take what you want from the land.”
Beginning to fuss, the child began a muted squawl from the bank.
“You’re right, woman,” Bass admitted. “This land ain’t mine, but the beaver I take with my own sweat, with my hands—they’re mine. I don’t allow I have any right to fight for this country because it’s not mine. But I will fight for what is mine: my beaver, my animals and traps, my family. No man will ever take them from me.”
She turned slightly and kissed him, then pulled away, wading to the bank. He stood too, allowing the water to sluice off his cold white flesh, marveling at just how pale he was now that the sun had climbed fully above the ridge to the east.
As she pulled her dress over her head and tugged it down over her hips, Waits-by-the-Water laughed again. “I am happy a strange fish like you is the father of my child.”
“Even if you don’t understand me at times?”
The woman nodded, dragging the cradleboard into her lap and stroking the infant’s cheek with a fingertip. “I may not always understand the way things rumble around inside your head, husband. But I always know just how your heart works.”
“Is that the back of Jarrell Thornbrugh’s head I’ve got my pistol pointed at?”
At first the tall Englishman froze, daring not to turn his head, his eyes instead glancing at the other company employees nearby, hoping to find them ready to defend him.
“And you’re the booshway of this here bloody Hudson’s Bay bunch, ain’cha?”
With his pounding heart rising to his throat and his hands held out from his body, Thornbrugh turned just enough to level his eyes at his antagonizer.
Plain to see that the man had no pistol trained on the back of his head.
Jarrell’s eyes climbed to the stranger’s face.
“By the stars! It can’t be!” Thornbrugh roared as he whirled around, his booming voice like the clangor on a huge cast-iron bell.
Bass slapped both his open hands on his chest, then spread his arms wide. “In the flesh, you god-blame-ed Englishman!”
They crashed together, hugging fiercely, slapping backs and shoulders, dancing side to side and around and around.
“I’ve asked after you,” Thornbrugh admitted breathlessly as they ground to a halt, their forearms locked fraternally. “No one heard evidence of you since last summer on the Green. No one’s come across you in their travels.”
“I stayed south ever since ronnyvoo,” Bass explained. “And I went east for a time too.”
“The States?” and Jarrell rocked back a bit, closely studying his friend’s face. “You didn’t think of giving up the mountains?”
“Hell, I couldn’t give up the mountains,” he declared with a reassuring smile. “Wouldn’t be happy anyplace else.”
Then he spotted the left eye and leaned close to have himself a look at it. “So tell me about this eye of yours.”
“Don’t rightly know what to think of it, Jarrell. Just come on me few months back. Been seeing stars shootin’ out of it for some time, howsoever. But this last spring it got so ever’thing’s real fuzzy.”
He peered closely at the milky film over the iris and pupil. “Looks cloudy. You see anything with it?”
“A little,” Bass answered. “I can tell light from dark. Not much else. For most part, I ain’t in a bad way, what with this other eye doing more’n its share.”
“Tie your horse off and come on in here, you old one-eyed reprobate,” he said with relief, gesturing for Titus to follow him beneath the canvas sheeting Thornbrugh’s men had strung up for shade in the middle of their encampment.
He watched the American ground-hobble his animal where it could graze nearby, then patted the blanket beside him. “Sit.”
“You John Bulls got any tobaccy wuth smoking?” Bass inquired.
“Get me some tobacco for this guest with such terrible manners,” Thornbrugh roared, laughing.
As the American filled his pipe, Jarrell said, “As soon as I arrived here, I asked after you. But as the days slipped past, I feared more and more you’d lost your hair.”
“Wagh! If’n that half-breed giant named Sharpe couldn’t raise this nigger’s hair last summer, ain’t a Injun gonna take what’s left of this poor scalp!”
He slapped Bass on the leg, sensing such an exquisite joy in seeing this friend after a long, long year of separation. “You’ve brought many pelts to trade?”
“Nope, I ain’t got but a few left to barter off.”
“Not a good year for you and young Paddock?”
The American smiled. “It was a damn fine year for the two of us, Jarrell. But I left most all of them plews behind in Taos with Josiah.”
“Taos,” he repeated, confused. “Josiah’s not here with you?”
Having puffed on his pipe to get it started with a twig from the nearby fire, Titus Bass began to tell the story of all that had taken place since last summer’s raucous trading fair. From that chase after an old Shoshone friend turned horse thief, through their deadly hunt for an Arapaho war party in the Bayou Salade, on to those Christmas and New Year’s celebrations in the little village of San Fernando de Taos, where Scratch had run onto an old friend believed dead. A chance meeting that spurred Scratch all the way back to St. Louis through the maw of winter, then off to the west again for the massive mud fort the Bent brothers had erected beside the Arkansas River— completing that deadly journey in hopes of putting some old ghosts to rest.
“This Silas Cooper shot you?”
The American tugged up the hem of his cloth shirt to show the vividly pink bullet wounds.
A dark-skinned stranger stepped beneath the shady bower, leaning in to inspect one of the puckers as he commented, “You got nothing better to do, Jarrell—but go and look at this man’s bullet holes?”
Thornbrugh snorted, “By the stars, the bullet made that wound came a hairsbreadth from killing my friend here. Introduce yourself proper, Thomas.”
“Thomas McKay,” the man declared, holding his hand out as he backed a step.
