Sinclair explained, “It was a pretty sight. Watching you weaving back and forth, leaning over to grab Bill by his ankles, dragging him around right over where Mitchell’s standing now, you good as falling yourself while you’re fighting to get Ol’ Solitaire out the door and into storm.”
Titus wiped the back of his hand across his wet lips. Then he licked the back of his hand, tasting the faint sting of the peppers, the all-but-hidden sweet molasses. “I dragged him by his leg all the way back to our camp?”
Mitchell shrugged. “Dunno, Scratch. We throwed the door shut after you got him dragged out the gate!”
Already his head was growing a little fuzzy, that whole strip of skin above his eyes gone numb. Doing his best to concentrate, Scratch said, “Bill was beside me while ago when I come awake.”
“Did you check to see he was breathing?” Craig roared, stirring up a storm of renewed laughter.
“Maybeso Scratch drowned Ol’ Bill in a rain puddle on the way back to camp!” Mitchell hoo-hooed.
“Yeah!” Sinclair jumped in. “Can’t you just see poor Scratch dragging Solitaire back to his robes—so drunk Bill can’t close his own mouth so he drowns?” The trader threw back his head and flopped his upper body back onto the counter, his arms flung akimbo as his mouth went slack, jaw dropped open.
“Shit, Prewett!” Craig hollered. “With his mouth open like that, only natural that Ol’ Bill drownded out there in the rain!”
“Poor Scratch.” Mitchell pounded a hand on Titus’s back. “You was so drunk you didn’t know any better— drownding our friend the way you done.”
They had him worried. Especially now that his head had grown so fuzzy. “M-maybe I ought’n go see to him just so I can be—”
Bass had taken a handful of steps before Craig snagged Scratch’s arm and spun him around. “Hold on there. Way you’re walking—you ain’t fit to go off to check on no one.”
“Someone ought’n go see—”
“Maybe you’re right,” Sinclair agreed. “Mitchell, you or one of the others—go see to Ol’ Bill. See if he’s breathing yet.”
Mitchell turned and nodded to one of the other trappers, a half-breed Frenchie named Toussaint Marechal, and together they stepped through the low doorway into the bright sun, disappearing across the fort compound.
Suddenly Craig leaped to the open door and shouted after them, “If’n you wake Solitaire—be sure you tell him we’re fixing to pull Scratch’s tooth. I’ll bet that ol’ preacher’d wanna be here to see this!”
“Ain’t none of you gonna pull my tooth!” Bass protested. “Gonna do just fine by my own self.”
“Maybeso,” Craig replied. “We’ll see how steady your own hands are … ’cause it’s for sure you’re ol’ legs ain’t!”
“What you figger’m I gonna use to pull it?” Scratch asked, giving Craig a playful shove as he turned back to Sinclair.
“Dunno for sure. Mitchell’s the one said he pulled his own tooth,” the trader declared, then looked at Craig. “What’d he use?”
“Had him some pinchers in his shooting pouch,” Craig explained helping steady Bass. “What he uses to pull his ramrod out when he’s pulling a dry ball or an old load.”
“M-makes sense.” And Scratch nodded, inching away from Craig. “I got me my own ball puller I can go get.”
A suspicious Craig quickly scooted over to block his way. “You wasn’t thinking of running off, was you?”
Bass leaned back against the counter noisily, sensing for the first time just how thick his tongue had grown. “Naw. Need to get my ball puller so I can be a tooth puller, s’all.”
“Thought you was sneaking off—”
Lunging out, Bass seized Craig by the front of his greasy cloth shirt with his right hand. “You figger me for being feared of pulling my own tooth, don’cha?”
“Dunno if you are or not—”
Shaking the younger trapper, Bass growled, “How ’bout we let you start this here fandango by yanking out one of your own goddamn teeth.”
Seizing Bass’s wrist in both his hands, Craig attempted to wrench the older man’s grip from his shirt. “Y-you gone stupid on whiskey!”
“Don’t you ever again let me hear you say to my face or behind my back that you think I’m feared of something,” Scratch bellowed inches from Craig’s face. “Maybeso, you was a braver man than me a few years ago when we was cornered inside Robidoux’s post by Thompson’s bunch.”
The trapper ruminated on that a moment, then released his hold on Bass’s wrist. “Yeah, I remember. You talked down them Yutas had us surrounded.” With a sigh, Craig grudgingly admitted, “Likely you saved our hair that day.”
Dropping his hand from Craig’s shirt, Titus mumbled, “You really ain’t a bad sort, Billy. Only want you to stay away from my damn mouth.”
Mitchell and Marechal shuffled back in the door, the cool of the rain-cleansed morning wafting into the trading room with them.
“Bill’s gonna be sleeping for some time to come,” Mitchell announced.
Pulling the cup of whiskey from his lips, Bass slurred, “He ain’t drowned, is he?”
“Not by rain, he ain’t,” Mitchell replied. “But he’s been damn near drowned with whiskey that he ain’t gonna be here to watch you pull your tooth neither.” The younger man yanked up the flap to his shooting pouch and pulled out the small tool. “Here you go, Scratch. Have at your tooth.”
“When you’re ready,” Sinclair prodded, sliding a round mirror in a heavy oak frame across the top of the counter planks.
Scratch reached up and pulled off his hat, flopping it on the counter. “Gimme that ball puller.”
“What ’bout the blood, Prewett?” Mitchell asked as he handed Bass the tool.
Titus swallowed hard. “W-what blood?”
Craig said, “You’re gonna have a big hole in your jaw where that tooth come out. Maybe ’bout the size of a lead ball.”
Nodding, Mitchell assured, “I bit down on a piece of leather till the bleeding stopped. Your jaw looks more swolled up than mine was—so I reckon you’re gonna bleed some—”
“Nawww, I heal fast,” Bass boasted, then turned to gaze into the mirror Sinclair was raising to eye level.
For a moment he stopped and did nothing more than stare at his image, unmoving. Gazing first at the swollen jaw, then at all the gray in his beard and mustache, amazed at just how gray had become all that hair emerging from the bottom of the faded black bandanna. Even his eyebrows were turning a stark white against the oak-brown of his skin. Since the last time he had looked in a mirror, Bass had seen his reflection only in the placid surface of a high-country pond, maybe the dark, shimmering reflection staring back at him from a cup of coffee. Nothing as clear as this … inspecting all the little lines and tiny wrinkles, the deep furrows between his eyes and those carved from the outside of his nose down to the corners of his mouth. A face that was damn well marked with most everything in his life, for good or for bad.
“Awright,” he relented. “Let’s pull this goddamned tooth.”
Slowly opening his jaw, wider and wider still, Titus was surprised at how little that stretching of his hide and muscles hurt now. Maybe this wouldn’t be so bad after all. No matter how tender that whole jaw was. Yet it continued to throb, despite the whiskey that had effectively numbed everything else from the shoulders up.
Prying apart the handles of the small tool so that he widened the two small jaws just so, Titus turned his head to the side slightly and inserted the ball puller inside his mouth. Sliding it back across his tongue toward the tooth that had a blackened crown, he took a slow, deep breath … then let it out.
While he positioned the tool’s jaws on either side of the offending tooth. He had no more than gently closed the jaws on it than it immediately felt as if the tooth had become his whole head—completely empty and hollow, filled only with an unbelievably hot pain.
Yanking the tool from his mouth, he gasped and gasped again, struggling to catch his breath, hoping to somehow put an end to the throbbing heat in his head. His hand trembling, he dropped the tool and swept up the whiskey cup between both of them, bringing it unsteadily to his lips. Slowly he guzzled everything left in the cup,
