“So you’ll take them wet mares along to hurry the stole horses back from Californy,” Scratch said, slapping Williams on the back exuberantly. “I’ll be damned if that ain’t some!”
“I come up with that plan my own self,” Williams boasted, his chest swelling. “Ever since we come back from California, I been waiting to put all the other pieces to it. Now I wish’t we had more riders.”
“Bet Peg-Leg’s signing up a few more down at Robidoux’s post right now,” Craig advised.
“Where’s Sinclair?” Bass inquired.
Craig pointed at the mud-and-log hut at the back of the three-sided stockade. The river served as the fourth wall of the enclosure. “He’s inside, dusting and combing out some robes he traded off a band of Yutas last week.”
“So tell me, niggers—is there any whiskey in this piss-hole of a post?” Titus asked, grabbing Williams by the back of his neck. “I don’t know about you boys, but Bill and me here are near half froze for a hard drink after all our cold camps and too goddamned many saddle sores.”
“Let’s go swab our gullets, Scratch!” Williams roared. “And have us a drink to Peg-Leg signing on some more riders.”
One of those problems with getting older was that the hangovers hurt more than they used to.
That next day when he awoke pasty-mouthed, cuddled within his buffalo robe and blanket, curled up back to back with Bill Williams beneath that sheet of oiled canvas, Bass hurt all over—just the way he would if he had been pummeled in a St. Louis riverfront brawl. He wasn’t even certain how they’d ended up back at their camp outside the stockade. Under their own power? Maybe not.
He sat up slowly, pulling the robe back from his face, greeted with a bright dawn, the cottonwoods still dripping rain from last night’s storm, the air cool and vibrant with a tang of moisture to it. The bright light hurt his head more than it should until he found his wide-brimmed hat and pulled it down low over his eyes. But it was the side of his face that hurt more than anything.
Perhaps he’d fallen and didn’t remember. Maybe one of the other trappers had flailed his fists around when he got into the cups—with one of the blows slamming against his cheek.
“Bill,” he whispered. Even the sound of it hurt between his temples. So when Williams did not respond to some gentle nudging, Titus decided not to awaken the trapper.
Gingerly laying his fingers against the side of his own face, Titus found his cheek swollen. Nothing more than that gentle touch made him wince: in an instant his jaw was in utter torment, so extreme a poker-hot pain exploded in his head, taking his breath away.
Slowly the heat subsided in his jaw and he could open his eyes again. Careful to hold his head just so, Titus dragged back the blanket and robe from his legs. He had to pee in the worst way.
Standing in the brush a few yards away from their shelter, Bass wondered how much he owed Prewett Sinclair for all they drank the night before.
“You wasn’t the hard punisher, Scratch,” the fort proprietor explained later that day when Bass plodded back through the post’s gate and found Sinclair at work unfolding, then refolding, a few bolts of calicos and other coarse cloth on a narrow counter set up in the trade room.
Billy Craig sat in the corner on his pallet, scratching his belly with one hand, his wild hair with the other. “Ol’ Solitaire was the punisher.”
“He get me back to camp?” Titus asked, eyeing one of the small kegs on the counter.
“Looked to be that way.” Levin Mitchell stirred in his bedroll. “Bill was shining on till it come time he figgered he should get you back to your bedroll.”
“But that’s when Solitaire went soft at the knees and spilled right down on his face,” Craig snorted with a giggle. “He was out and there was no raising the dead!”
“I need me a cup of that barleycorn, Sinclair,” Bass mumbled huskily, doing his best to talk without moving his jaw.
“Couldn’t understand you too good. Something wrong with your mouth, Scratch?” asked the trader as he noisily slid a tin cup down the counter to the small keg where he began to pour out the cheap whiskey.
“Ain’t anywhere I don’t hurt,” he confessed, rubbing a gritty eye. “My head thunders like a herd of loose ponies with ever’ little noise. But I just crawled out with my jaw on fire this morning.”
Sinclair pushed the cup at him across the narrow counter. “Lemme look.”
In a moment the trader nodded to the others. “He’s swolled up.” Then he tapped the trapper’s cheek as gently as he could. Again Bass winced and jerked his head away. “It’s hot, Scratch.”
“Bet it’s a tooth,” Mitchell advised. “Had me a bad one last year.”
“Tooth?” Titus echoed.
“C’mere,” Sinclair said and gestured him over. When Bass wasn’t quick about leaning over the counter, the trader promised, “Listen, I won’t touch you again. Just wanna look. C’mere now and open your mouth. Have me a look inside.”
Titus looked down his nose as Prewett Sinclair leaned close, holding a candle between their faces as he peered into the trapper’s open mouth.
“Wider,” the trader demanded.
“Aggggg,” Bass growled, his mouth opening as wide as he dared, the hot pain flaring as he did.
Sinclair leaned back and rubbed his nose. “Smells to me like you got a rotten tooth in there, Bass.”
“Sm-smells?”
“Like meat going bad,” Craig added, with a nod of his head.
“M-meat goin’—”
“You look all swolled up in there, what I can see,” Sinclair continued. “There”—and he pushed the cup a little closer to the trapper—“you g’won ahead and drink your whiskey.”
“Sinclair’s rotgut hooch gonna take the edge off your hurt,” Mitchell explained.
With an unsure, reluctant nod, Titus took up the cup and sipped. Slowly at first to see how the whiskey would burn his inflamed jaw. If he kept the potent liquid off to the left side of his mouth, it wasn’t near so bad. But his head hurt so damned much that he had trouble swallowing. Nevertheless, Scratch succeeded in getting some of the whiskey down, eventually warming a stomach that had wanted to revolt at the first swallow.
“Maybeso this is gonna help some,” he told the others as two more of the trappers pushed through the door to join them in the low-roofed trader’s cabin.
“Go on and drink up,” Craig said as he stepped to the counter to have himself a look at Bass’s jaw. “You’re gonna want to drown as much of that pain as you can afore we yank that tooth outta there—”
“Y-yank?” Scratch sputtered, some whiskey dribbling off his lower lip.
“Gotta come out,” Mitchell agreed. “Just like I pulled my own tooth last year.”
“P-pulled your own tooth?” Titus echoed, his eyes growing larger.
“Drink up, Bass,” Sinclair declared. “It’s on the prairie.”
Both of the trappers who had just arrived lunged toward the counter, as one of them hooted and slapped a flat hand onto the wood planks. “On the prerra! Hurraw! Let’s drink, Sinclair!”
“Not for the likes of you,” Sinclair snarled as the trapper jerked back in surprise. “We’re gonna get Bass drunk here, then pull a tooth out of his head.”
The entire room watched as Scratch slowly poured the stinging whiskey past his lips, letting it slide down his tongue, past the back of his throat and on to his warming belly. In their eyes was a look of unabashed envy. A free drunk, compliments of the Fort Davy Crockett trader.
When he pulled the cup away from his mouth and licked some drops hanging from his shaggy mustache, Sinclair took the cup from him. When it was refilled, Bass took another long sip of the whiskey that tasted even smoother than that first cup.
“Awright,” Titus mumbled, feeling his tongue thickening, “so if Ol’ Bill fell on his face and wasn’t moving a muscle … I figger you boys joined in to help get him and me back to our trees?”
“None of us figgered you needed any damn help,” Mitchell explained. “Because you started dragging him out the door.”
Craig sniggered some now. “You wasn’t pulling him out into the rain and mud by his collar like this!” And he pantomimed by seizing the back of his own shirt and raising it until his arm flapped.
“?-how?” Bass stammered.
