a li’l trade store too.”
“Is he even aware that some of the Crow mean to kill him if he ever returns to this country?” Meldrum disclosed.
That shocked Titus. “W-what for?”
“They think he betrayed them by living with them for so long, then suddenly leaving them to return to civilization,” Kipp explained.
“That’s right,” Meldrum added. “A few—not all, mind you—but some of the harshest warriors and headmen would love to get their hands on him, Mr. Bass. Believe me, I married into the same band Beckwith ruined with his shameless scams. There’s no affection for him among the Crow people now.”
“Damn shame,” Scratch brooded, thinking how Bill Williams appeared to hate Beckwith with this very same fury. “I knowed Jim Beckwith for almost as long as I been out here in the mountains. Shame to see what haps to a fella when he turns his back on them what was once his friends.”
Many were the times since that autumn journey to Fort Alexander when Titus reflected on how circumstances changed the folks around him—when he didn’t consider he was any different. Not from that first winter with the Yuta,* and not from the time of his first contact with these Crow … Scratch looked back to weigh the possibility that he might have treated anyone less than the way he wanted to be treated himself. If there ever had been a code among men out here in the mountains, that was its evenhanded preamble.
But as the fates undermined the economic structure of their lives, Scratch had watched the long-held code splinter. No longer could a white man count on the help of another without question. White men stole not only from white men—just as the big fur companies did day in and day out—but desperate white men had taken to stealing from their red allies.
That whole unspoken code of honor lay in shambles by the time Scratch had followed Bill Williams and Peg- Leg Smith west to California. It was clear that the new watchword was now:
As Yellow Belly’s band turned around on the Yellowstone and started up the Bighorn in the last autumn moon, something struck him for the first time. While a right-thinking man knew he never could recapture what had been … Scratch held out the possibility that, at the very least, he might well revisit old memories. And while his most glorious days were behind him now, he decided a man was due a chance to relive those seasons through reminiscence with old friends.
Not once that following winter did he ever give any serious thought to heading back east to find Hames Kingsbury or any of Ebenezer Zane’s other Kentucky riverboatmen.* Those who hadn’t suffered a violent death in the intervening thirty-five winters surely weren’t the sort of men who left any traces of their whereabouts, from New Orleans at the mouth of the Mississippi all the way north to the upper waters of the Ohio River.
Then too, no man could argue there was any need of hunting down the three who had stolen a fortune in furs from him back when he first came to the mountains. More than ten years ago he stumbled across Bud Tuttle, who had become a Santa Fe trader, then hunted Billy Hooks all the way to dockside in St. Louis, finding that poor demented soul was dying fast from the venereal disease eating away at his brain. But the sweetest revenge came when Scratch watched Silas Cooper die with his own eyes.†
And there was no sense in trying to turn back the calendar in hoping to run down his old partner Jack Hatcher. Any reunion they might have shared had been snuffed out by a Blackfoot bullet in Pierre’s Hole. Not to mention how Asa McAfferty had gripped fate itself by the throat and strangled the life out of it high in a snowy bowl at the end of a long manhunt.††
But there had been a man who had stood at his shoulder through one skirmish and ordeal after another, a man who had lived through some of the last glory days of Titus Bass. And he was still alive … at least according to Mathew Kinkead’s claim. How long ago was it? Back in the fall of ’42, that’s when Kinkead declared the man was doing well for himself.
“Yes,” Waits-by-the-Water said with a smile as harsh winds gusted a new snow outside their lodge, “I remember your friend, Josiah Paddock. Do you remember that you believed I loved him?”
“I was pretty stupid back then.”
“You were all I wanted, Ti-tuzz.”
“I can still remember what a fool love can make of a man.”
“Love did not make you a fool,” she corrected. “It was jealousy. Blind jealousy.* After all these winters, is your heart telling you that it must apologize to me again for thinking I did not love you?”
He gently touched her hand with his callused fingers that morning as they sat by the fire with their children. “Every day with you is like a new beginning. I am thankful for each morning like this when I awake and you are with me.”
She leaned against him, her cheek resting against his chest. “When you were away—and I believed you were gone forever—every day was a torment I could never describe to you. So I know your words are strong when you tell me how thankful you are to be here with me. I am grateful for every day, season, and year we have shared since you returned to me—not once, but twice.”
Then she gazed into his eyes. “You don’t need to bring up old memories and mistakes to make me grateful for this time we have in our lives.”
Touching her cheek, he admitted, “I asked if you remembered Josiah for a reason. You remember his wife— Looks Far Woman? Their little son, Joshua, too?”
“I remember them, and the mud lodge where we stayed in Ta-house,” she said.
“Rosa is gone,” Scratch confided. “And Mateo Kinkead has married another.”
“I hope she will make him as happy as Rosa made him when they were together in Ta-house—”
“Do you want to go?”
Waits’s brow furrowed as she looked him squarely in the eye. “Go … where?”
“Taos.”
Her eyes grew wide, and she immediately laid fingers over her lips in that Indian way of preventing her soul from escaping in unabashed wonder. She turned slightly, looking at Flea, at Magpie who held little Jackrabbit in her lap, as the three of them chewed on some dried chokecherries the children had collected last summer.
“It is so long a journey—we will take the children with us?”
He grinned, and said, “I’ve promised I wouldn’t go anywhere without my family!”
“T-to Ta-house?” she repeated.
“What is this Ta-house?” Magpie asked before Titus could answer his wife.
Waits turned to her daughter, saying, “Far, far, far to the south—farther away than I had ever gone before, or have been ever since—is a land where a people live in mud lodges, eat food that is hot on your tongue, and talk much different than the Americans where your father comes from.”
“This is the place our father wants to go?” Flea asked as he cupped some chokecherries in his hand for his three-year-old brother, Jackrabbit.
“It will be a grand adventure!” Waits cried, enthused. “It has been …”—and she counted on her fingers —“twelve summers since we left that place with our baby daughter!”
For Magpie, the enthusiasm was clearly contagious. “Do we start soon?”
Titus shook his head. “The snow is too deep and the cold would make such travel too dangerous—for a fourth winter in a row. To start out now might well kill us all. No, we won’t leave until late this summer when the buffalo are migrating south once more.”
“Ta-house.” Flea tried out the word, then turned to his father. “Popo, what will you find in this faraway place that makes you want to go back after so many summers?”
Scratch thought, then said, “Old times, and old glories, my son. But mostly … I want to find an old friend.”
* Jim Beckwith—adopted by the Crow, he lived among them for many years, took several wives, and fathered many children before he grew weary of the diversion and abandoned his families and adopted people.
* Present-day Bear Lake, in northeastern Utah;
