a—”
“Take him away, Mathew,” Bass commanded, wagging his head. “Get Beckwith outta here—
“I could’ve killed him. You know I could’ve,” Beckwith pleaded. “But I didn’t. Son of a bitch had it comin’.”
Kinkead wrapped one of his big arms around the mulatto’s shoulders. “C’mon, Jim. Let’s g’won back to the Pueblo.”
Bass turned away from Beckwith, shaking his head in disappointment.
Kinkead started away, then stopped, still gripping onto Beckwith as he asked his question, “What you gonna do when Bill comes to, Scratch?”
“I ain’t got a notion what to do.”
“He’s gonna be madder’n a spit-on hen,” Mathew intoned. “And he’ll be hankering to come looking for Jim here. Finish things one way or another. Gonna be messy—”
“I’ll do what I can to keep Bill outta your Pueblo tonight, Mathew,” Titus vowed. “Then we’ll get our horses started away from here at first light.”
Titus Bass dug at an itch at the nape of his neck and came away with a louse. Goddamn that Pueblo, he cursed, crushing the louse between a thumb and fingernail. Then looked again at Ceran St. Vrain. “How many horses did you callate for a blanket?”
“Six,” answered the trader.
He laid a hand on the white blanket festooned with narrow red stripes running the entire length of the thick wool fabric, which St. Vrain had unfurled down the long wooden trade counter here at Bents’ Fort on the Arkansas. “Sure it weren’t
This partner of the two Bent brothers took the reed stem of a clay pipe from his lips and exhaled a white wreath of smoke, smiling. “You know better, mister horse thief. And you ain’t no greenhorn pilgrim in this country neither. Yesterday, I sit down with Bill Williams, and I agree to take all I can off your hands … six horses a blanket.”
“Maybe you oughtta ride east with us, Scratch?” Elias Kersey prodded again as he stepped up to Titus’s elbow. “We’ll damn sure get better money for ’em back in Missouri.”
“True ’nough,” Bass replied, brushing his roughened hand across the wool as he stared at the stacks of blankets, the bolts of coarse and fine cloth, those trays of tiny mirrors, beads, tacks, bells, ribbon, iron axes, brass kettles—and on and on.
But his heart was telling him something far different than his head might try to make logic of.
Bass sighed, “Can’t think of nothing I want more’n to be home again.”
Kersey and those with him could see their enthusiasm for their ride to the Missouri settlements would not convert Titus Bass, so all turned away without another word of advice and stepped back to lean against the wall.
Scratch gazed steadily into St. Vrain’s eyes and instructed, “Tell one of your clerks here to go off an’ count what blankets you got still in your stores.”
“Blankets?”
“Said I wanna know how many blankets you got to trade me.”
When St. Vrain had dispatched one of the younger employees from the trade room to the storage rooms, he turned back to return his full attention to Bass. “We met before, I am thinking. Yes?”
“The fort was real young then,” Titus replied, struck by the memory of that spring in ’34. “Eight summers ago, Savery—when I come here looking to kill one of your robe traders. Name was Cooper.”*
“Ah—it was that,” and St. Vrain nodded knowingly. “But instead, his cut-nose woman finished him off in our
“You ’member me from that?”
“Most I remember you from the old Cheyenne who come to keep you from dying that day.”
“He left afore I got pulled outta here on a travois,” Scratch said. “You know his name, Savery?”
“He was just another old Injun.” St. Vrain shook his head and shrugged. “I seeing him a few times since. But haven’t seeing him around the fort any time new.”
“Damn, if that red nigger wasn’t old way back then,” Bass ruminated. “His life was on his fingernails when he somehow brung me back from the dusk of my days.”
“Maybeso wasn’t your time, eh?” St. Vrain suggested.
Titus reflected, “Maybeso it wasn’t after all.”
The young clerk rushed back into the room, stuffing a short stub of a pencil over one ear while passing St. Vrain a piece of paper with the other hand.
The trader looked up. “Appears I’ve got plenty of blankets to trade.”
“Awright.” Then his eyes danced over the rest of the trade goods. “How many horses for a kettle?”
“Four.”
“An’ them calicos back in the corner, there?”
“Coarse cloth is one horse for one yard. Them fine bolts is two horses for every yard.”
Titus drew his lips up thoughtfully a moment, then eventually said, “Savery—s’pose we see just how close you can come to taking all my California horses off my hands.”
Hell if it didn’t play out to be a high-plains robbery! But then—when hadn’t dealing with a trader in these here mountains always been larceny of the first order? A man accepted the order of things and lived out his days … or, he could get out. Head back east, or push on for Oregon country like Meek and Newell had. No sense in gnashing teeth over such a fact of life. Complaining did no good. Them what chose to stay on after the beaver trade died was the ones what figured they might never hold the best cards, much less any winning cards—but they were determined to play out what cards they had been dealt the best they knowed how.
That was the mark of these hardy few who would endure.
No, he’d decided against pushing on with Elias and the others who elected to sell their horses five hundred miles or more east of Bents Fort after more weeks of driving their herd across the great buffalo palace of the plains. “Back east” still held no allure for him.
Instead, such a journey would only delay him getting back to her before winter came shrieking down across the north country. To get back to Absaroka, to search out that first winter campsite of Yellow Belly’s band of Crow—Scratch knew he would have to skeedaddle. And to make that march as fast as he needed to, he couldn’t be hampered by a herd of wild horses neither.
He hadn’t seen her since early spring.
And those two young’uns of theirs had surely grown a foot or more since he had last held them in his arms.
Titus hadn’t planned things to work out this way: being gone so long after he had assured her he was leaving only for some spring trapping in the Wind River Mountains. But that night camped near the Pueblo after they tied up the furious Williams and managed to pour enough whiskey down his gullet to soak him into a stupor so he’d pass out at the fire, Scratch lay in his robes, staring at the belljar clarity of the autumn sky overhead … and felt a discernible, painful tug. Something calling him back to her as quickly as a horse’s four hooves could carry him north.
His homesickness only deepened as they drove their California horses away from the mouth of Fountain Creek, on down the Arkansas for the mouth of the Picketwire,* where the Bent brothers and St. Vrain had raised their huge adobe fortress squarely on the southern border of U.S. territory, like a gullet-choking gob of reddish-brown mud shoved right into the throat of northern Mexico itself. They found Charles Bent was off down in Taos doing some trading, but brother William and Ceran St. Vrain completed the wrangling with hardheaded Bill Williams to establish a per-head price on the stolen horses once the traders were assured the raiders would bring their herd no closer to the fort than some seven miles.
“We don’t want your horses eating up what’s left of the season’s grass we’ll need for our own stock this winter,” William Bent explained.
As he had ridden back from the fort with Solitaire and Silas Adair following their negotiations with the traders, Williams told the two how he and Peg-Leg, Thompson, and their bunch had reached Bents Fort with their
