right in front of her and flung his arms around the children, embracing them fiercely. After kissing their cheeks, their foreheads, and their eyes, he stood again and pressed his lips against her mouth one last time.
“Be-before winter.” His voice was raspy with regret as he quickly turned away, took up the horse’s rein, and climbed into the saddle.
Ever since that morning, it had tortured him to think of just how many lonely nights he would have to endure until the coming winter turned the earth hard as iron. Until he lay against her damp skin all night through—
The wind was not right, so those riders could not smell the smoke of the small fire Bass had left behind in his camp. Titus squinted in the late-afternoon light and did his best to study the distant horsemen picking their way in and out of the tall willow down there along the Popo Agie. From the way the heat waves danced up from the valley floor, it looked as if there could be three riders, maybe four. He couldn’t be sure.
Black, swirling figures lost then spotted once more against the meandering braid of vegetation … until he realized there were only three animals. And only one of the horses carried a rider. The two others were strung out behind the man—
The horseman had his knees folded high along the front flanks, his bony knees almost rubbing the horse’s withers. Only one man Scratch had ever known rode in such a way, his stirrups lashed so short he had the appearance of a too-large man riding an undersized pony and saddle. Bass almost wished he had taken the long spyglass with him when he stepped away from camp to hunt the wet places for greens and shoots. With it he could make sure …
But, in his marrow, Scratch was already sure. It had to be.
He stood there in those trees bristling upon the gentle slope above his camp, letting his eyes draw a line away from the horseman, scribing what had to be the rider’s path he would take down to the mouth of the next creek. Bass could easily reach the post on foot before the rider appeared out of the cottonwood there on the other side of the stream.
Scratch heard one of the rider’s horses snort as he clambered to a halt and emerged into the open, crossing his arms and standing just so, casual though a little winded.
“Howdy, Bill!” he called out as the rider came into sight of the creek crossing. “Har’ you now?”
William S. Williams yanked back on his reins in surprise, his rifle raised up with lightning speed. “Goddamned you, nigger! Been a Injun, I could’ve gut-shot you for pulling such a prank!”
“I’d been a Injun, Bill,” Bass roared, slapping both thighs with mirth,
“Blazes, but you give a man a start: poppin’ up there right outta the ground.” And the skinny man slid his rifle back across the front of his saddle.
“Didn’t do no such thing, Bill,” he replied with mock solemnity. “I see’d you from way back up the slope. You was making your way for my camp. Seems you just didn’t know it. C’mon across the crick an’ leg down off your horse.”
Ol’ Bill Williams urged his horse into the fast-running stream, pulling the two packhorses behind him. Onto the south bank the animals clattered to a halt on the rocky cutbank. “Where you bedding down, Bass?”
“Yonder in the trees,” he answered. “Your belly ready for some fodder?”
“No coon in his right mind ever passes up a meal,” Williams admitted. “Never know when he’ll next have a chance to strap on the bag.”
The late spring sun had settled behind the Wind River Mountains, and the cool air was sinking off the high places by the time they both sighed and pushed themselves back from the slabs of meat Titus had suspended over the coals on sharp sticks he had stabbed into the ground around his small fire pit.
“I got coffee,” Bill declared.
“Tobaccy too?”
Williams nodded, slowly inching to his feet on crackling knees.
Scratch inquired, “You been to a trader lately, have you?”
“Not since last autumn it was. Laramie. I ain’t got much, but running onto ol’ friends is sure as hell good cause to break out the last of what I do have.”
That had always been the mark of those hivernants, seasoned veterans of the mountains. They were willing to share the last of what powder and lead, coffee and tobacco they had with a compatriot. A man never knew when he might be the one who would be short of fixin’s one day.
“Where you been since Laramie?” Titus asked as he came back from the creek, having filled the coffeepot with clear, freezing water racing down from those snow-fields high above them in the mountains.
“Here and there,” Williams offered. “Spent time on the Rosebud, tarried some on the Tongue. Wintered the longest on the Tongue.”
Titus set the pot on the fire and pulled off the lid. “You get up to Tullock’s post?”
“Never did.” Then Williams stood and walked around the fire to one of his rawhide parfleches where he pulled free a large skin bag. He tossed it to Bass across the low flames.
Pulling the drawstring loose, Titus smelled the aroma of coffee. He knelt at the fire near the pot and poured three heaping handsful into the pot before replacing the lid and yanking on the drawstring. “Where you away to now, Bill?”
“West a ways.”
They were quiet a long time, listening to the last calls of the tiny birds at the crossing, hearing the lick of the water coming to a boil, the tumbling of the coffee as the lid began its delicate dance. Bass grabbed a short twig and pulled the pot to the edge of the coals, then relaxed back against his saddle.
“Last I see’d of you, Bill—was down to Taos,” Scratch remarked. “Become a trader your own self—growed wearisome of standing in freezin’ water up to your cock-bag.”
Williams snorted with that. “Blazes, if nothin’ come of that endeavor! Packed up my plunder and hightailed it for the hills.” He sighed, stared at Bass a long time, then asked, “You ever run across that nigger what took your hair?”
“I did, few years back,” he answered. “Fact be, I run onto him later on that spring after I first run onto you.”*
Williams dug a louse out of his beard. “What ever come of it.”
He turned and looked at Bill, a rueful smile coming across his face. “You soft-brained idjit! Here I sit right afore you. What you think happed?”
“Just callated there’d well be a dandy of a tale behin’t you cutting that red nigger’s trail,” Williams explained.
Titus had settled the grounds, poured them each a cup, and settled back against his saddle with his feet to the fire when he next spoke, “I … set things right.”
Williams studied him a moment, then seemed to realized he would get little else for the time being. “A good thing, when a man sets things right.”
He sipped his coffee, then asked Williams, “You’re laying your sights west to find better trapping?”
“Ain’t going west for beaver, Scratch.”
For a moment Bass gazed at the small packs of beaver pelts William had pulled off the pack animals and flung to the ground earlier.
“Gonna take your plews to John Bull at Fort Hall?”
Bill shook his head emphatically. “I don’t figger to go nowhere near Hall.”
“Maybeso you do your best to keep your goddamned meat-hole closed ’bout where you’re going and what you aim to do when you get there, because I didn’t up an’ tell you how I killed the nigger what scalped me, left him gutted for the magpies and crows to pick over?”
With a shrug, Bill said, “Naw, I was just sitting here reckoning on if you’d be one to come with me.”
“Come with? Where, goddammit?”
“Down to Fort Winty,”* Williams explained. “Got plans to meet some fellas there.”
“Who?”
“Peg-Leg, Dick Owens, Silas Adair, and others.”
“What you fixin’ to do, if I throw in with you?”
“Beaver’s all but dead, Scratch. I don’t plan to curl up an’ die with it,” Williams growled sour as green rhubarb.
