then let out a moist sigh as the pain slowly became bearable once more.
“Ever you broke a bone?” Craig asked.
“Nary a one, this child ain’t,” Bass confided.
“You gonna try again?” Mitchell inquired, staring at Scratch’s mouth.
He brooded on it, then said, “Maybeso that last drink of whiskey has done it, boys.”
Clanking the tin cup onto the narrow counter, Scratch swept up the ball puller as Sinclair repositioned the mirror. Again he slowly opened the tender jaw and once more he inched the tool toward the rotten tooth. Sucking in a breath, Bass opened the metal jaws and did his best to position them on either side of the inflamed tooth. The instant the tool brushed its surface, with no more than a whisper of contact—it was as if a small charge of powder went off in that jaw.
He flung the tool down. As it skidded across the counter and tumbled onto the clay floor, Scratch spun round and round trying his best to cup that excruciating side of his face, an elbow knocking the mirror out of Sinclair’s hands. It clattered onto the counter where the trader managed to keep it from tumbling to the floor.
“C-can’t do it,” Scratch rasped in the midst of the fading pain.
“Lemme have a look,” Mitchell requested.
He shrunk back from the trapper, hollering, “No!”
“I ain’t gonna touch your goddamned tooth,” Mitchell protested. “Lookee here, I’ll keep my hands down, see? Just open your mouth so I can look at it.”
His eyes widening with suspicion, Scratch slowly opened his jaws as Mitchell rocked up on his toes and peered closely into the older man’s mouth.
“Damn,” Levin Mitchell muttered as he rocked back again. “That tooth looks wuss’n mine did.”
“Wager it hurts wuss’n yours did too!” Bass grumbled.
Mitchell turned to Sinclair and Craig. “That jaw of his—the whole thing is swolled up. He’s got it bad.”
“What could happen if’n that tooth don’t come out?” Craig asked the others.
With a shrug, Sinclair declared, “Maybe the poison in his jaw crawl up to his brain and kill ’im.”
All of them turned as one and gazed at the older trapper. By now there were more than a half dozen of them crowding into the trading cabin.
“You think we oughtta?” Mitchell asked the others with a devilish look in his eye.
“Oughtta wha?” Bass echoed, his eyes squinting in alarm.
“No other way,” Craig said with a shrug of his shoulders.
The trader nodded, “Best thing we can do for the man.”
At that moment, Scratch had a foggy notion of what they were fixing to do to him. Whirling on his heel clumsily, he almost went down as he attempted to throw a shoulder into one of the younger men, spilling him backward.
“Grab ’im, boys!” Sinclair bellowed behind the counter.
Suddenly the others converged on him, grabbing arms and legs as Bass let out a high-pitched, unearthly howl.
“Grab his head! Grab his head!” Mitchell ordered.
One of the strongest of the young men clamped his beefy arm squarely around Bass’s forehead and pinned the older trapper into the crook of his shoulder.
The pressure on his face, indeed his whole head, was suddenly unbearable. Lashing out with both feet, Titus slammed into two of the others, catching one of them dead center in the groin, sending the young man hobbling backward for the doorway, doubled over and yipping in breathless pain like a scalded coyote pup.
His hands stiffened into claws, his arms flailing like the wings of some doomed bird of prey, Titus struggled against his young attackers, now unmindful of the pain in his jaw as he twisted this way and that to free his head.
Within moments they collapsed to the floor together. Sinclair was shouting orders, Craig and Mitchell too. In seconds they had seven men on him, with the trader commanding the others to raise Bass to the counter. With a heave they hoisted him into the air, his arms and legs flailing again, then plopped the older trapper onto the planks with a hollow thud. They had him pinned and helpless again.
Sinclair’s face appeared right above Bass’s, inches away. “We’re doing this for your own good, Scratch. You don’t get that tooth out, you’ll likely die of poison gone to your brain. Leastways, you won’t be worth a tinker’s dam for the horse raid.”
“G-god-d-damn you,” he muttered between his teeth clenched shut with all the strength he could muster so they couldn’t get to his tooth.
“Go to work, Mitchell,” Sinclair growled, rocking up on his toes to get better leverage, bracing the heels of both hands against Bass’s hairy, whiskey-soaked chin to slowly force the mouth open.
Already the waves of pain were making his eyes water, so hot, stinging. He started gasping for air as he watched Mitchell approach from the corner of his eye.
“Turn his head this way some,” Mitchell ordered the big youth who imprisoned Scratch’s head.
Fight as he did, Bass realized he was powerless to stop what was about to happen. So he went limp, his head pounding, his hot, empty belly rumbling with the sloshing whiskey, wondering if he was about to be sick. Most of all he tried to tell himself it wasn’t going to hurt near as bad as leaving the tooth in … that he’d get through the pain and to the other side of this agony … that the pain was something small compared to all he’d been through—
Then those metal jaws clamped onto his tooth and it felt as if Mitchell was trying to tear his jaw right out of his mouth. When the tool started rocking back and forth, Scratch began screaming in the back of his throat—a sickly, feral sound—no more than a despairing gurgle now that his jaws were pried open and only his tongue was free to move.
An explosion of black powder ignited inside his head, blowing off the top of his skull. Icy-hot shards of pain splintered out from his mouth, slashing into his brain, down his throat, making it difficult to swallow, impossible to breathe.
“I got it!” a voice roared in victory.
Of a sudden the cool blessedness of a black syrup poured over him, releasing him from the heat. Causing him to tumble down, down, down—
5
He snaked the tip of his tongue through that gap between his back teeth. There at the bottom of the left side of his jaw a second tooth was gone now.
In the week since Mitchell pried out the first, its gaping hole had knitted up quite nicely, what with the way Scratch swished whiskey or salt water around in his mouth several times a day. But this second hole hadn’t closed yet, being fairly new the way it was.
For a few days there, his swollen, inflamed jaw began to feel better. Then the whole packed up and lit out from Sinclair’s Fort Davy Crockett. By that second morning on the tramp, Scratch woke up in almost as much pain as he had suffered before. This time he understood what had to be done, especially when Levin Mitchell came over to inspect his jaw in the gray light of that miserable, rainy dawn. The trapper tapped his finger against the side of another tooth in Bass’s head, and Titus groaned in agony. Not only with the heat of that immediate pain, but grumpy with the anticipation of what was to come. The only thing that had ever come close to that sort of torture had been when the Arapaho ripped off his topknot.
Bill Williams headed off to his packs to dig out a small canteen of whiskey while Bass dug for his ball puller in a gray-tinged resignation.
“Hol’ me down, fellas,” he begged the rest. “I know what’s coming and I’m gonna be kicking like a three- legged mule here when Mitchell grabs hol’t of that tooth.”
He did, for sure too.
