pan, spearing them into his tin cup, then settling onto his haunches across the fire as two other trappers moseyed up to the fire, plainly sniffing the air.
The shorter one’s eyes twinkled as he peered at the skillet where Kersey set the last of the dumplings to fry in the popping grease. But he nonetheless remained silent as his wide-shouldered, bandy-legged partner spoke up.
“Merciful a’mighty—that smells good! Wha’chu made, fellas?”
“Dumplin’s,” Jake Corn said, grease dripping off his lips, spilling into his chin whiskers.
“I’m Silas. Silas Adair,” the talkative one explained, then licked his lips as his eyes never left Kersey’s frying dumplings. “If that smell don’t get a man’s hungers up.”
“Tell you what, boys—have you something to add to the pot,” Bass offered, “you’re more’n welcome to sit and share what we got cooked for ourselves.”
With his tree-stump-thick arm,. Adair nudged the stocky trapper on the shoulder. “Roscoe, go fetch us some gut and a few ribs too.”
The quiet one nodded and quickly turned away.
Purcell said, “He don’t talk?”
“Coltrane ain’t a mute,” Adair replied. “But, he ain’t ever been one to talk much at all.”
“Sometimes, that’s a good thing,” Bass observed as he watched Coltrane scooping up a length he cut from the coil of buffalo intestine, dropping the gut into a small kettle at a nearby fire where Philip Thompson and his bunch were entertaining a number of the warriors.
“Any one of them fellas’d cut your throat if that Thompson so much as asked ’em to,” Corn declared right out of the blue.
Bass turned suddenly to look at the man seated to his right. “That’s a strange thing to say to me.”
“Jake is right,” Kersey agreed. “That bunch of hard cases sticks with Thompson like ticks gone fat on an ol’ bull. They’re gonna jump you when that sumbitch says to jump you.”
Scratch put a bite of dumpling in his mouth and sucked the grease from his fingers before he said, “Don’t matter what those bastards try, or when they do it. I’ll be ready.”
“Yeee-awww!” snorted Kersey. “That’s what I liked about you right from the start over there in the fight we had when Fraeb was rubbed out. There ain’t no shuffle-footing about you, Titus Bass. You’re a man what sees things for what they are. This is this, and that is that. I tell you, I much admire that in a man.”
Bass glowed at the compliment, feeling his cheeks grow hot with the blush that spread beneath his gray beard. “Most all my friends, they call me Scratch.”
“Scratch, is it?” Silas Adair asked. “Why, I didn’t know you was the one I heerd of called Scratch.”
“What’d you hear ’bout him?” Purcell asked, his mouth stuffed with dumpling as the quiet Roscoe Coltrane returned, setting down his kettle filled with intestine and humpribs.
Pushing an unruly sprig of copper-red hair out of his eyes, Adair grinned at Bass and winked. “Heerd how you died, two or three times. That’s what I heerd tell.”
“Only three times, they say?” Scratch echoed. “Hell, I’ve riz up from the dead more’n that!”
“Help yourselves, fellas,” Kersey suggested, gesturing at the sizzling skillet.
They watched Adair and Coltrane greedily dig in, scooping dumplings from the grease. Around the fire the six of them ate and ate till they belched, making room for more of the greasy dumplings, their lips, indeed the entire lower half of their faces, shiny in the firelight. About the time the last of Kersey’s dumplings had been speared from the skillet, Jake Corn was kneeling at the far side of the pit, using a long twig to scoop his boudins out of the coals. As he speared each one with the tip of his knife, picking it up to plop the footlong section of broiled intestine onto a man’s plate, steam hissed from the tiny puncture wound Corn had poked in the stiffened, crackling tube of gut.
It was well after dark when Smith and Williams finished their parley with the leaders of the Ute hunting party. Illuminated by the low flames of a half dozen small fires, the white men got to their feet with the warriors who rose and moved off for their ponies. Bill Williams called three of his men close, then momentarily watched them step away into the dark before he shambled over to the fire where Titus and the five others sat smoking their pipes in the afterglow of their hearty repast.
“Need three of you to take the next watch,” Bill ordered. “After a couple hours go by, those three I sent off gonna come back here and get the next watch. That bunch’ll come wake me when their time’s done.”
Bass nodded to Kersey.
Elias looked up at Williams. “Me and Scratch here will go.”
As Kersey was glancing over the rest of the men, Williams said, “You need one more.”
“How ’bout you, Roscoe?” Bass inquired, staring at the solemn one.
Without any change in his expression, even looking up from the fire where he knelt with a twig to relight his pipe, Coltrane nodded.
“That makes three of us, Bill.”
Just before he turned away, Williams said, “See you in the morning.”
“You ’spectin’ trouble?” Purcell asked as the leader turned his back on them.
Bill contemplated the flames a moment before he answered. “We’re bringing our stock in close, ’specially them broodmares we need. Those Injuns figger on riding off with our horses, I don’t aim to make it easy for ’em.”
“We’ll sleep light, Bill,” Titus said.
The bunch at the fire remained quiet in their own thoughts for some time until Silas Adair stood and stretched. He tugged down on the brim of his battered, black-felt hat. In the fire’s light it appeared the hat had been singed at the back where it caught on fire when he used it to fan some flames of a time. “C’mon, Roscoe—we best go get our blankets.”
Bass watched the two men trudge away to the nearby fire. Then he turned to the trio left with him. “You fellas promise me something.”
“What’s that, Scratch?” asked Jake Corn.
“Trouble ever comes—no matter when, no matter where … you fellas promise me you’ll watch my back.”
“A fight starts,” Kersey began, “there ain’t no Injun gonna get close enough—”
“I ain’t talking ’bout Injuns, Elias,” Titus interrupted. “I need you to watch out for Thompson and his weasels.”
“That’s just what we aim to do,” Corn vowed. “ ’Cause I figger you for a man what’d do the same for any of us.”
Likely, those warriors were sitting out there in the dark, watching every precaution the trappers took to bring their stock in close to camp and post guards around those animals. More than once Bass chuckled to himself how that must irritate the piss right out of those Ute who had plainly come into camp with no better purpose than to eat the trappers’ food, drink the trappers’ coffee, and count the trappers’ guns. Something about the redskins had convinced him they were a thieving lot, right off … and if they coveted anything the white men had along for their journey to California, it was the guns. In the constant warfare waged against their Apache neighbors, those rifles and pistols and smoothbores would more than tip the scales in the Utes’ favor.
How it must gall the hunting party to watch the white men prepare for trickery even though the double- tongued Ute leaders had professed only the strongest of affections for those trappers who passed through their land!
Twice during his watch that night, Titus was certain at least one of the warriors was making a crawl for the horses. A sound out of place, maybe an odor brought him on the shifting breeze. Both times he would bring the rifle’s hammer back to full cock and noisily stride toward that side of the remuda. That second time he was sure enough of what he’d heard that he dropped to his knees, lowered his head, and peered at that strip of horizon where the pale, starlit sky met the darker earth. There he spotted three of them lying among the sage, really nothing more than shadows humped upon the ground.
The temptation to shoot and wound one of them, even kill one of the slippery bastards, was almost more than he could endure. But Bass was sure they saw him too, had to hear him approach before his moccasins ground to a halt on the flinty hardpan, sure that’s what brought the trio to a stop in their crawl toward the animals. Maybe just fire a warning shot somewhere between them …
“You two-tongued sonsabitches!” he bellowed instead. “You don’t get and stay gone, I’ll wear your hair my
