stampede of frightened antelope, not to mention the rutted tracks of countless travois, lodge circles, and fire pits, all of which come next rainy season would be washed into oblivion and the prairie would be brand new … here Titus Bass looked around him and realized his days were not without number.
Not only had the first of those goddamned sodbusters already crossed the mountains on their way to Oregon country, but here before his very eyes the face of his beloved mountains was changing. As much as he hated to admit it, Scratch knew there were changes coming to his high and broad and beautiful heartland—changes that made him hurt to his very marrow.
Nothing would ever be the same.
Nothing would ever be good again.
* Today’s Monarch Pass.
*
*
19
Puny as it was, that little Fountain Creek—at the mouth of which Kinkead and his four partners erected their Pueblo—just happened to be the Arkansas River’s biggest tributary between its source high in the Rockies to a point more than halfway in the river’s languid travels across the prairie. Their Pueblo stood at the foot of this wall of mountains, where a man gazed out upon the abrupt and spectacular end to more than a thousand miles of Great Plains.
It was a place far better than most for any five men to raise up their wilderness post.
Back in the spring of that year, 1842, Mathew Kinkead had thrown in with Robert Fisher, George Simpson, Francisco Conn, and Joseph Mantz—unlike Mathew, not one of them a veteran of the mountain fur trade. What did distinguish the four, however, was the fact that none of Kinkead’s partners was afraid to hang their asses over the fire. They were the sort who recognized this was not only a land of gigantic risks but a land offering unbelievable riches to those who would seize opportunity by the balls and refuse to let go.
As Titus Bass looked around himself at the Pueblo, appraising the men who had erected this adobe settlement, once again he was struck in the face with the cold reality that his was a bygone era. He belonged to an age already withering like last year’s willow, a way of life now struggling to draw in its last breath … sucking into its chest that unmistakable final death rattle.
“Damn me if it ain’t Titus Bass for sure!” exclaimed the man at Mathew Kinkead’s elbow as the two stepped into the firelight late that evening.
He squinted, not sure after all the intervening years, and the darkness, and the toll time took on a man. “Beckwith?”
“In the flesh, you ol’ dog!” Jim Beckwith lunged ahead and seized Scratch in his arms.
They pounded one another breathless for a moment, then each took a step back to gaze at one other.
“You was working for Vaskiss and Sublette up on the Platte, last time I heard tell of you,” Bass declared.
“I was. Them two had me trading with the Arapahos for robes. Afore they bucked out of the buffler business,” Beckwith admitted with a wag of his head. “Bents is too big a outfit for the small-timers to take on in this here country.”
“Working up there for Vaskiss and Sublette’s outfit, you ever come across a big, tall pilgrim goes by the name of Shadrach Sweete?”
“Shad! Hell if I didn’t!” Beckwith cheered. “A square shooter, ’bout as fair as they come when he’s dealing with the Injuns.”
“So Shad ain’t working for ’em no more?”
“Vaskiss gone out of business while back,” Beckwith declared. “Ain’t no more. When they folded, I headed south to Taos—”
“What become of Shadrach?” Bass interrupted.
“The day Vaskiss pulled out with his wagons and left that fort empty, Shadrach rode off hisself.”
Titus leaned in close. “Where to?”
With a shrug of his shoulders, Beckwith answered, “Dunno. Just lit out.”
“What direction?”
Beckwith stared at his toes a moment in contemplation before answering, “South by east.”
“Heading for Bents Fort?”
“Nawww.” Jim sounded definite on that score. “After what they done to run the small outfits off the Platte, Shad didn’t wanna have nothing to do with the Bents,” Beckwith observed.
“He say what he had in mind afore he took off?”
This time Beckwith half shut his eyes and raised his chin to the sky, as if conjuring up the memory. After a few moments those eyes flew open and his face brightened. “Said he was fixin’ to look for the Shiyans. I asked him if’n he was gonna trade with ’em or what, and he just said he needed to scare up some folks to take him in while he figgered out what he was gonna do. Then he rode off and was gone.”
Damn, Bass thought as he reflected on it. “That’s been some time now, ain’t it, Jim? Hope to hell no one’s gone and raised that big sprout’s hair.”
“It’s gonna take a passel of niggers to rip off Shad Sweete’s topknot!” And the mulatto grinned. “Mathew here tells me you and Bill Williams been out to California for horses.”
Titus nodded. “Brung us out a passel of ’em.”
“Solitaire tell you ’bout the trip me and him made to California with Peg-Leg?”
“You was with ’em three years ago?”
With a nod Beckwith scratched at his chin whiskers neatly trimmed into a goatee below a bushy horseshoe mustache. “We brung some horses out then. So Peg-Leg was with you fellas this ride too?”
Scratch watched how some of the other raiders at the fire glanced up at him when Beckwith uttered his question. “Peg-Leg and Solitaire … they had ’em a argeement on the way back. Ended up splitting the blankets back in Digger country.”
With a doleful wag of his head, Beckwith said, “Bound to happen, with them two mule-headed bastards anyway. A outfit can’t have two booshways like them. So what’d Peg-Leg do to make hisself a burr under Ol’ Bill’s saddle blanket?”
“A matter of killing a white man,” Scratch declared directly. “So Bill run Peg-Leg off.”
“Smith … killed one of your men?”
“About come to it,” Titus admitted.
“Hell, there’s always fights in a outfit like that,” Beckwith replied. “Sore feelings, ruffled feathers—”
“If’n it been differ’nt,” Titus interrupted, “Solitaire wouldn’t had no call to run Peg-Leg off the way he done.”
Jim wagged his head, not understanding. “What the hell business Williams got running Peg-Leg off?”
“Already too much bad blood not to,” Scratch explained.
“Damn that Bill Williams anyways!” Beckwith grumbled sourly. “He always was a cantankerous ol’ bunghole of a bastard. I s’pose he’s already told you how he never took to me, and that’s the God’s truth. Clear on back to the early years, or on that trip out to California neither. Fact is, the two of us just rubbed each other the wrong way right from the start, natural’, ’thout even trying hard to work up a lather ’bout me hating him or him hating me.”
“I s’pose that’s why some folks should never cross trails,” Scratch commented.
“You say your outfit come here with Bill—where’s that soft-headed son of a bitch now so I’ll make certain to steer clear of him?”
“ ‘Round camp somewheres,” Titus declared. “You just pushing on through, headed off somewheres, Jim?”
With a playful grin, Beckwith confessed, “I come up from Taos to open a trading house with my partner, fella
