first herd of stolen horses back in ’39 … only to discover the traders weren’t all that thrilled to take those California animals off their hands. After all those months and miles, after traipsing twice across all that desert—Bill Williams handed over hundreds upon hundreds of horses in return for nothing more than a keg of cheap Mexican whiskey!
Things hadn’t turned out near that bad this go-round with the powerful traders.
As he looked back on the last few months, Scratch could see how he had wagered his life on one more daring, risky venture … and somehow slipped through Lady Fate’s slim, grasping fingers to end up with more than he would have had to show after a spring and fall season’s worth of trapping the high country. Beaver was worth no more than a pittance compared to its high-water heyday. Plews were no longer king. Squaw-tanned buffalo robes ruled the roost now.
So any hivernant who’d had the green rubbed off him would be a durn fool to turn down St. Vrain’s calculations on just how many stolen horses it would cost a man for all them shiny trade goods the company had packed up from Mexico in carts, or clear out from St. Louis by wagon train.
Bass had held on to a hundred of the Californians he traded off to a small band of Cheyenne who were camped outside the walls of the fort, down on a bench beside the Arkansas. In exchange he ended up with a dozen of the strongest, hard-mouthed, lean-haunched prairie cayuses he could find among the Cheyenne herd. Twelve would be enough to follow him north to the Wind River country where he had cached his goods last spring. From there he planned on making a short scamper into the land of the Crow to find her and the children.
In less than another day, Bass had his Cheyenne pack animals in tow, ready to march north beneath the burden of more than eighty blankets, along with a bevy of weighty kettles and skillets, not to mention a wooden case bearing a hundred new skinning knives, and several hundredweight of other foofaraw that should damn near make him the king of all Absaroka. Tomorrow he would bid farewell to Solitaire and the other raiders who were now in their third glorious day of a drunken spree.
But for tonight he planned to have himself a doe-see-doe with St. Vrain’s Mexican whiskey, and push off at sunrise with a hard-puking, head-thumping hangover. Enough of a mind-numbing hurraw to last him for many, many seasons to come before he dared again venture out of Crow country—
Then he stopped dead in his tracks, staring through the open doorway into the booshways’ dining hall at that wide-hipped, black-faced woman, who wore a bright, multicolored scarf around her neck and a pleated Mexican skirt swirling around her bare black calves. But it wasn’t the bosomy Negress who turned and stepped over the doorjamb into the warm, lamp-lit room late that autumn afternoon that held Titus Bass’s rapt attention.
It was that pair of small, squirming, pink-tongued puppies she had cradled across her fleshy, brown arms!
*
* What the mountain men called the Purgatory River.
20
“Where the hell you fixin’ to go with them dogs, woman?”
That pinned those cracked and scuffed brown boots of hers right to the pounded clay floor. Up and down she gave him a scathing appraisal, then glared straight into his eye.
“Who be askin’?”
“You answer my question first,” he demanded with the beginnings of a grin. From the corner of his eye, Titus noticed a thick-armed Negro appear at the open doorway behind the big Negro woman. His shirt was open to the waist, sweat glistening in diamonds at the chest hair. He wore a faded yellow bandanna tied round his head, splotched with damp sweat stains. No matter the man’s imposing size, Scratch turned back to argue with the woman the moment she protested.
“Ain’t a-gonna answer you, no how,” she huffed, and her face grew even harder.
“You work for Savery?”
“I do,” and she drew herself up. “So who is you? You work here now?”
“No, I don’t,” he answered impatiently. “Tell me what you’re doing with them dogs—”
“Ain’t no business of yours these dogs.” Then she progressed another step forward with that armful of squirming puppies.
Feeling emboldened, Bass leaped directly in front of her. Now they stood less than an arm’s length apart. “You ain’t the cook, are you?”
“Leave me be!” she growled, lunging to the side to start around the trapper.
But he was far lighter, and all the quicker, dodging left to appear in front of her again, blocking her way.
“Who the hell you be, actin’ with such bad manners way you are!” she snarled.
Now a new, booming voice announced, “You better tell her just who the hell you are, mister. And what the high most you care where she’s headed with them pups.”
He glanced as the muscular man eased into the room, slowly volving the edge of a big butcher knife round and round on a flat whetstone he cupped in the other palm. He took his eyes off Bass only momentarily to spit onto the stone, then continued his sharpening.
“Titus Bass,” he said in a hurried gush. “I asked if you was the cook, woman?”
“I is,” she answered, shifting those wriggling puppies in her arms.
“Wh-what’s your name, woman?”
She turned her head nearly around to speak over her shoulder at the man standing in the doorway. “Mr. Dick—you g’won and tell Mr. Titus who I is.”
“Charlotte, she’s my wife, mister,” the man explained. “An’ Charlotte be the Bents’ cook hereabouts.”
Scratch asked, “Charlotte, you wasn’t planning on cooking these here dogs, was you?”
A snort of raw laughter broke from her big-toothed mouth while her eyes grew wide and expressive. “Why—I ain’t no Shian Injun woman now, Mr. Titus! I ain’t never et puppy and I ain’t ever
“So them pups is yours, right?”
“These here dogs?” she asked.
“Yes. They yours?”
“They mine ’cause no one else took care of the bitch they come out of,” the cook replied.
The man leaned a shoulder against the adobe door-jamb but kept on circling the edge of his knife round and round on that stone. “You want a pup, mister? That why you’re asking with such curiosity?”
Pinning his eyes again on the woman’s, Scratch continued, “You got more pups, woman?”
“The bitch had her seven of ’em,” the cook answered. “Weeks ago now. They been coming off the tit last few days.”
“Jehoshaphat!” he exclaimed, his heart leaping. “If that ain’t prime doin’s!”
“What you got in your head?” she asked, more than a little suspiciously.
“I want them two pups,” Bass exploded in a gush.
“There’s four others too. I awready give one away,” the woman declared. “But, you wanna see them other four too?”
Charlotte didn’t have to ask him a second time. Eager, Bass held out his arms and she immediately obliged, passing him one of the thick-furred pups. With the other dog still wrapped in her arm, she turned and led him back through the doorway as her muscular husband stepped aside. Back through the kitchen they wound their way, past small kegs and crates, on through the cool shadows in the pantry, eventually emerging through a low, narrow portal to find himself out in the autumn sun. Nonetheless, he discovered they were still standing inside the fort walls. She paused at one end of an oblong corral, where the black cook immediately stooped over a low, crudely erected pile of brush and firewood meant to serve as a small pen. She set her pup on the ground right in front of the low entrance to a small canvas shelter, where the four other pups burst into view, scrambling into the light around their weary but suspicious mother.
“There they be, Mr. Titus,” she said with the most cheerful tone. “Take your pick which one.”
