16
Soon as it was light enough for a man to see, Bill Williams and the others watched as Thomas L. Smith cut out a small part of the herd for himself. Peg-Leg had elected to take Curnutt and Warren with him, if not for companionship in that lonely expanse of desert they were staring in the face, then for their help in wrangling the three hundred horses that the other raiders felt Smith was due for seeing them through to the valleys of southern California.
“I reckon you know the way if any man does, Tom,” Williams said when the horses had been divided off and the sky was graying hundreds of miles away to the east. “You go on back by way of the Ammuchabas, you’ll fare good.”
Smith’s eyes narrowed as he glared down on his old partner from horseback. “You make it sound like you ain’t coming back through the Ammuchaba villages.”
Taking a step back, the lanky old trapper said, “We ain’t.”
Startled, Smith asked, “H-how you going back, Bill?”
“This here’s your chance, Peg-Leg,” Williams repeated mysteriously. “I’m doin’ this ’stead of killing you an’ them others outright—”
“You come down on the side of murdering a friend of mine in his sleep. I got nothin’ more to say to you. Use this chance, Tom.”
For a moment Smith pressed his lips tightly together as if about to spew some venom, then he vowed, “I’ll see you back to the mountains, Solitaire.” His dark, dangerous eyes snapped over to glare at Scratch. “See you back in the mountains too, Titus Bass.”
They watched the trio pull away into the murky, predawn light as another two dozen of the horses ambled off from the herd to join Smith’s animals. Bass, Williams, and the others had seen to it that the three men were equipped with a horn of powder, enough lead to see them to one of the southern posts, and only enough fixings to keep them alive in the deadly crossing that lay ahead.
That seemed fitting to Scratch, really seemed more than fair, considering they all had a hand, one way or another, in scheming to murder a man in what was clearly less than a fair fight. Maybeso Peg-Leg didn’t have a direct role in plotting or carrying out Thompson’s scheme to cut Bass’s throat … but Smith had made no bones about siding with Thompson and his kind ever since the day all twenty-four of the raiders set off from Robidoux’s Fort Uintah.
Even now on this red, raw, desert-summer morning as the thousands of horses grew restless—it made Bass wonder what he himself had ever done to Tom Smith that would cause Peg-Leg to throw his weight on the side of Phil Thompson and his compatriots. It simply couldn’t be Scratch’s hand in taking back those horses Smith, Thompson, and the others stole from Fort Hall and the Shoshone chief named Rain early in that winter of ’39.
Something far deeper, something down under the skin had gnawed away at Thompson across the intervening seasons. Something Bass was coming to realize that he himself had kept from his conscious thoughts, a matter that had come to trouble him so deeply over the last few years it went to the core of everything he was as a man.
With the death of the beaver trade, the summer rendezvous had withered right along with it. And with that demise of everything these beaver men had placed all stock in—their world was shattered, destroyed, gone forever. With nothing at all to replace it.
Not that the beaver men didn’t have anything to do in the mountains. They could choose to live with the tribes moving slowly with the seasons, or they could stay busy hunting meat for the fur posts, perhaps even ride into California for some horses. But … any of that was nothing more than a vain attempt to fill the real, gaping void of what had torn apart their lives.
Never again would they be what they had been. Beaver men. A rare breed with an unwritten code between them. They endured shoulder to shoulder against all enemies, and stood at one another’s backs when death loomed near. Never again could they be what once had given their lives worth.
But now … now that they were no longer beaver men, cracks opened up in that code. White men stole from white men, and from the friendlies too. And finally … white men had turned on white men.
If outright, cold-blooded murder had come to the mountains, Titus knew the West would never again be the same. The West he had come to know was as good as gone, good as dead and all but buried.
As Bass watched those three men and their horses fade beyond the distant curve of the earth, disappearing into the desert dawn, he was suddenly struck with a remembrance like clabbered milk. Silas Cooper, Bud and Billy too, had stolen his beaver before fleeing the mountains with their booty, land pirates who preyed on the labors of other men. The remembrance lay inside him like meat gone bad.
While they had lied, cheated, and stolen from him—Silas, Bud, and Billy had never murdered. Rotten as they were, especially Cooper, none of the three had never committed any evil worse than thievery. Leastways, what Scratch knowed of.
There had always been men Titus would just as soon not ride or camp with in these mountains. Except for those three thieves who ran off with his furs back in the spring of 1827, there had never been a question of him trusting the partners he hooked up with. Even those company men and booshways he stayed as far away from as possible because they simply were not his sort of men, he knew the chances were good he could even count on them when the stakes were high and the last raise of the night was called.
That’s just the way things were in the mountains.
“Let’s get them pack mules loaded!” Williams cried as he turned around to face the half circle of Americans. “We’re riding out in less time it takes you niggers to piss in the sand!”
They scattered as Hezekiah’s Indians shook out their coarse straw mats and thick Navajo blankets, then rolled them together and tied them over their shoulders beside those quivers of short, deadly arrows. Quivers almost empty after that furious battle with the Mexicans.
Titus quickly looked over the shorter, brown men until he spotted the tall one. “Hezekiah!”
Christmas turned, finding Scratch coming, and smiled in that ebony face. “Titus Bass. These white men you come here with, they ain’t going back by the Ammoochabees?”
“The booshway figgers on us tracking farther north. It’s high summer now. Water’s drying up even more this far south. We’re gonna lose a bunch of these horses no matter—”
“We can tell you where you’ll find the springs,” Hezekiah interrupted, extending his arm to point off to the northeast.
“S-springs,” Scratch echoed. “You can tell us?”
Bass hurried Hezekiah over to Williams and announced what information the freedman could provide.
“Why don’t you come and show us?” Titus asked, hopeful.
Peering over the other trappers for a moment, the tall Negro could not help but see how that invitation nettled some of the white men. He wagged his head and sighed, “I belong with my men—”
“Bring them too.” Titus interrupted. “The Bent brothers got ’em a Negress for a cook over to their fort. Her husband’s the blacksmith—a Neegra too. You damn well ain’t the only black-skinned son of a bitch in the mountains—”
“No, it’s better I show you where you’ll find them springs are—let you go on with your own kind, Titus Bass.”
And before Scratch could protest any further, Hezekiah dropped to one knee there before them, motioning Williams and Bass to crouch with him. A handful of others came up to stand over the three. First, Christmas shoved some sandy dirt into a footlong mound. Here and there he placed some pebbles, other places he used the tip of one index finger to burrow some tiny, shallow indentions in his crude map.
“Watch the rocks, Titus. Count the rocks,” Hezekiah instructed gravely. “Here. Here. And here too—no matter how hot it gets, you’ll still find water. But less’n you count the rocks, I fear you’ll miss the springs. Water comes out up again’ the rocks. But mind you—not all them rocks got water by ’em. Count the rocks as you go an’ you’ll be sure which ones.”
The white men closely studied the map the Negro scratched on the ground. Then one by one Williams, then
