pushed on.
“Jehoshaphat! If that don’t look to be Ol’ Solitaire hisself!” Bass roared, wagging his hat once more at the end of his arm.
Williams came up at a lope, his horse skidding on the flinty ground. Every inch of the man was coated with a thick layering of fine talc that shook loose, forming a gauzy cloud that billowed into a bright halo around him as his animal shuddered to a halt.
“Titus Bass! That really you?”
Scratch spat out some of the sand that was settling around them all, a choking, blinding cloud of it kicked up by those hundreds of horses. “ ‘Onery as ever, Bill,” he coughed.
“Damn, if you ain’t covered ground on your own shanks! Walked all this way with that arrer hole in your ass?”
“He did, Bill!” Deromme said with a cheer.
“That our horses?” Titus inquired, glancing at the herd as it peeled aside, headed west.
“What we could get wrangled back together,” Williams confided. “The rest we’ll let the desert have. Maybe them Diggers run across some of ’em one of these days.”
“Roast a haunch or two of Mexican horse, eh?” Bass said. “Where was you headed with ’em?”
“The horses? Why—we was comin’ back for you boys.”
“See?” Robinson said. “I told you all along Bill wouldn’t light out of the desert without us!”
Bass scooted closer to Williams’s bony knee, gazing up at the old trapper coated with that layer of brown dust. “Who’s leading ’em now?”
“Kersey,” he replied. “We figgered to find water for ’em afore night over yonder at them hills.” He pointed. Then looked down at Bass. “You coming with us?”
“Damn right I am,” Scratch growled. “A whole passel of them horses are mine, Bill. To get ’em this far, I near died of thirst, got my head shot off by Californy greasers, and a’most had my throat cut by a white man. I ain’t about to let any of you side-talking varmints run off with what critters are mine!”
Williams rocked his head back and laughed so hard some more fine dust shook off him in a mist. “I figger that means you’re coming with us! You sit a saddle yet?”
“Ain’t tried—but I’ll keep covering ground on foot any way you care to lay your sights.”
“That’s what I like in this man, boys!” Williams cheered. “You just can’t beat a good man what puts his head down and keeps on coming!”
“You heard, Solitaire,” Titus said to the others as he turned around to face them. “There’s a herd to wrangle. All you fellas what are fit to help them others with the horses, saddle up and catch them horses. The rest of you what’re ailin’ too bad can lay back and come along with me.”
Only Toussaint Marechal and Joseph Lapointe ended up staying behind with him, watching the others wave their farewells, then ease away toward the tail end of that massive herd.
Titus suddenly looked up and asked, “Ain’t you going on with the rest, Bill?”
Patting his dust-crusted, lathered horse on the withers, Williams said, “I’ll lay off running them animals for a while, Scratch. Maybeso, you boys could use some company on your leetle walk.”
“Much ’predated, Bill.”
The four of them had covered several miles in the blazing sun before Williams, right out of the blue, confessed, “We got less’n half what we drove outta California, fellas.”
Bass glanced over at the skinny man walking beside him, leading his own horse. “You figgered you’d make it back to the mountains with more, did you?”
Williams was slow to grin, but smile he did, his brown teeth a shade or two darker than the pale dust coating his severely tanned face. “Shit, Scratch—you got me there! Never in all my days could I have figgered to get this many horses out of California and ’cross that killer desert.”
“But we done it, Bill.”
“By damn, if we didn’t!” Williams exclaimed. “But just think of all them horses what left their bones behind us.”
“No reason for you to feel sad for gettin’ only half of ’em to the mountains. Lookit us—we’re standing here, still alive!” Titus snorted some dust out of his nose onto the desert hardpan. Then he looked squarely at Bill. “We had us some shining times out to Californy, didn’t we, ol’ friend?”
Williams smiled hugely, no longer grave, and slapped Titus on the back. “We did have us some fun, didn’t we, Scratch? By blazes, if we didn’t have us a whole damn lotta fun!”
It took them the better part of a week, but they finally put the Green River at their backs, escaping the worst of that broken canyonland where it took all they had to keep any more of the stolen horses from slipping away in that rugged country.
Throughout the days the trappers kept the animals under a rotation of wranglers while the rest of the men slept. At dusk they saddled up and
For nights on end, Bass had been forced to follow the slow-moving caravan on foot. But by the time they had begun their climb into the first low foothills, Titus was tying on his last pair of moccasins, deciding it was time to give that ham a try before he was forced to walk barefoot. That evening he settled back into the saddle, tenderly doing what he could to keep his weight off that wounded buttock. Trying his best to ignore the painful hammer of the horse’s gait as it made its way over the uneven ground.
Far off in the distance, the verdant green of the Rocky Mountains beckoned seductively to these men who had outlasted months of desert sand, scorching sun, and their own limits.
It set Scratch to wondering how could a man live in such warm places as these, especially the sort of man who settled in valleys where other men congregated—building their shacks and huts and barns, forced to breathe each other’s air, where they had no seasons of winter, spring, or fall to their lives? How did folks live like that?
But he realized there were lots of men who did live out their lives perfectly content to do without the harsh edges any wilderness scraped away on a man, settlers who were absolutely content to live a life untested. His father had been one. One of the many.
It was Titus Bass himself who was too damned different to get along with the steady sort what came to fill up these open, feral, unforgiving spaces.
Crossing a wind-scoured country of cedar, juniper, and stunted yellow pine, the raiders were forced to angle north along the base of a great plateau. Once around the end of that towering ridge, Williams curved them around to the south-southeast. From here on out they would no longer travel at night and rest out the sun.
Three more days of driving the herd and they struck what the mountain men called the Blue River,* one of the tributaries of the mighty Colorado. Finding enough water for their horses was no longer a problem. Nor wood for their night fires. No more would they have to cook their stringy horseflesh over smoky, struggling, greasewood fires.
They had returned to the Shining Mountains.
*
* Today’s Gunnison River in southwestern Colorado, what the Mexican traders of that time called the San Xavier River.
18
“We ain’t far now,” Bill Williams had declared last night after they went into camp and killed another skinny yearling to last them the next couple of days.
“Robidoux’s post?” Titus asked.
