He dreamed of Absaroka through those days on the precipice of hell—his mind’s eye yearning on the high, lofty snowfields mantling the mountains, the green of grasses tall enough to brush a horse’s belly, the blues and teals of streams or ponds lying beneath a never-ending sky. He dreamed of her still as the bottom went out from under him and his horse sank beneath him, tumbling into the sand.
Bass lay there exhausted, totally unmoving too, aware only on some nonmobile plane of urgency—listening to the horse grunting helpless as it attempted to get up, whimpering low in its throat because the animal realized in its own primitive way that it would never get back on its legs.
He closed his eyes, feeling how the sun stabbed right on through his thin cloth shirt, pierced the buckskin leggings—wondering if he would ever get back up. Titus tried to dream of the cool of Absaroka again one last time before it would be too late and he could remember no more.
“Bass.”
He blinked, looking up, finding the outline of a face hovering right over his—totally in shadow because the man’s head completely blocked out the sun. Squinting, he blinked again as the man’s salty, stinging sweat trickled into his eyes. The sweat in his own made everything swim, but Titus finally made sense out of the features, that pale, blond hair turning gray.
“Ros … Roscoe.”
“Brung a horse for you,” Coltrane said sparingly as he pulled on Scratch’s arms, slowly dragging Bass to his feet.
His mouth pasty, tongue thick and slow, Titus asked, “How come you—”
“Ain’t leaving a one of us to die,” Coltrane explained, likely stringing more words together than he had in a month of Sundays. “You’re steady enough here, I’ll get your outfit.”
Roscoe dragged Bass’s saddle from beneath the dying horse, then cinched it onto another of the spare animals he brought over, its legs plodding, big hooves scuffing furrows in the hard sand.
Without a word, Coltrane made a stirrup by weaving his fingers together and hoisted Titus into the saddle.
Just staring down at the short, squat man made him feel more clearheaded, less woozy, despite the compelling heat. As he watched the hundreds of horses continue to plod by, recognizing one lone trapper after another strung out there at the edge of the dwindling herd, Titus was suddenly struck with the realization that Roscoe had just spoken more words than the man had ever uttered to him before.
“W-why?” he asked when Coltrane remounted and their horses lumbered into a shuffling gait once more.
“I know you’d do the same for me.”
Then Roscoe Coltrane reined away, saying no more.
For the rest of that long, sizzling afternoon, Scratch’s thoughts dwelled on those few words spoken by a man not given much to speech at all. “Ain’t leaving a one of us to die.” Then he would think again of, “I know you’d do the same for me.”
It gave him enough hope that there might be a few still left who remembered the glory days, remembered the old ways. Men who still fervently clung to the code.
Spring by spring, with long stretches of relentless heat in between the warm seeps when they did their level best to rest the horses, short nights when they traveled in the starlit darkness, feeling their way along past the landmarks Hezekiah Christmas noted for them. Spring by spring, the summer aged on them—days grown so old and parched they began to find less and less water. The land was drying up about the time they reached a country more rumpled. If nothing else, a stunted and scrawny vegetation prickled the surface of a changing panorama. And then —there in the distance one sunrise as they slowly brought the herd to a halt for the day near a dry lake bed—Bass believed he sighted a ragged skyline where the orange of a new day was brushing itself clear across the uneven horizon. From one end of the earth to the other.
“Elias—lookee there and tell me what you see,” he prodded as they came out of their saddles that late- summer morning.
“Them hills?”
“More’n hills,” Silas Adair ventured as he came down on his good leg, still favoring the other with its wound so long in healing.
Titus nodded. “Maybeso the mountains.”
“Which’uns?” Jake Corn asked.
“Dunno what they’re called,” Bass said. “If’n they be the ones I’m figgering on.”
“Where they rise?” Silas inquired.
“Far south of the Salty Lake. We crossed below ’em coming down the Green.”
Excitement brightened Corn’s parched face. “W-we come that far? You mean we’re back in the Rocky Mountains?”
“A’most,” Adair declared wistfully.
It was a remarkable moment as the Americans stripped the damp saddles and soggy blankets off their horses, picketing the riding animals in the scrub vegetation before they rolled out their dusty bedrolls and lay down to wrap themselves around a few hours’ sleep while the sun came up behind that distant, saw-toothed skyline. Hope crept back into their parched souls, hope itself beckoning from the very edge of the earth.
Bass slowly rolled over there atop his sweaty blanket in the late-afternoon heat and peered from underneath the wide brim of his felt hat. He hadn’t been sure what he saw flitting in and out of the nearby rocks—not sure at all even why he had awakened to sight the merest hint of motion. Whatever it was …
That jumble of rocks lay at one side of what they had left of the herd after those weeks of dry, desert crossing—something on the order of half the horses they had driven east over Cajon Pass. The rest had perished mile after grueling mile back there in the wastes before the trappers reached this rocky, canyon country where rattlesnakes and jackrabbits abounded.
For a good part of this day those huge boulders had provided little shelter for the weary men, but now that the sun was in its final quadrant of the sky, the glare was threading its way through a scattering of wispy clouds, no longer scorching the skin-clad figures curled atop their dust-caked, threadbare blankets.
In the shadow of those iron-red rocks, more of the forms showed themselves, then were gone with a wolf spider’s quickness. Titus wasn’t sure if they were human or just some overcurious critter. There—a flicker of hair. Next, a flitting glimpse of skin tanned so brown their hides blended right into the sere-colored boulders. So quick the movement could have been that of an antelope fleeing a predator … or maybe the movement of the predator itself circling in on its prey.
Slowly he extended his left arm as if stretching, his fingers tapping Kersey’s elbow. “Elias!” he whispered under his breath. “Lookit the rocks. Tell me them ain’t red niggers.”
Cracking one eye and slowly shifting his head, Kersey peered at the rocks warily. “Diggers.”
“I was ’fraid of that,” Bass grumbled. “Trouble be—they don’t seem scare’t of us.”
“Only one reason for that, I’d wager,” Jake Corn whispered under the floppy hat he had laying on his face. “They likely got us outnumbered four or five to one.”
Kersey shifted his rifle slowly. “Maybe they just got their curiosities up an’ don’t really mean no harm—”
“Don’t be chuckleheaded, Jake. Them brownskins wouldn’t be skulking around if’n they didn’t mean us no harm,” Bass snorted as he sat up suddenly, wrenching up the rifle where he had it pinned between his legs. “Bill!”
Scratch had no sooner spit out that alarm than the Indians took form, bolting up from the boulders. Shrieking, they boiled out of their hiding places in the nearby rocks. Almost as one, the groggy trappers snapped awake, snatching up weapons and bellowing commands or curses in their surprise.
Quickly his eyes raked left, then right across the rocks, looking for which one might prove to be the squat enemy’s leader. But Titus could not tell which of the poor, naked brown men might be commanding the rest. Even more of them washed over the rocks in waves.
“Make your first shot count, boys!” Scratch bellowed at those around him as the trappers threw themselves down behind what skimpy baggage they were dragging back to the mountains. “We might not get us a second
