Bigger than life, Shadrach Sweete himself was standing with Bridger’s longtime partner, Louis Vasquez, outside the stockade walls of Fort Bridger, both of them watching the return of the Shoshone delegation. On up the valley from the post stood more than five dozen lodges, pony herds dotting the meadows. Down in the creek bottoms the cottonwood blazed with a golden fire, touched by the late-autumn sun. For the old man known as Titus Bass, this place and this moment had the feel of homecoming.

“Jim Bridger!”

Gabe shouted in glee, “Shadrach Sweete, his own self!”

As Vasquez waved his hat and the tall man started toward the riders, Sweete suddenly stopped, his huge moccasins kicking up dust. “Could that really be Titus Bass?”

“Hell if it ain’t!” he roared back as he reined up, kicked his right leg over and plopped to the ground. “Damn, but you’re back from Oregon!”

All three of them met at once there in front of the open double gates while curious Shoshone men and women came out from camp to shout their greetings to Washakie’s returning delegates.

“You give up on farmin’?” Titus asked as he and Jim gazed up at the face of their old friend.

“Never was much for scratchin’ at the ground,” Sweete admitted.

“Been four year now,” Bridger stated as he pounded a hand on Shad’s shoulder. “What you done with yourself, young’un?”

“Pray tell how’s that daughter of mine—Roman an’ their li’l’uns?” Scratch inquired before Shad could utter a word.

“I spent some time with them, raising a cabin an’ a barn with Roman,” he explained. “At the same time I was helping Esau get a roof over his head for the comin’ winter too.”

Bridger asked, “You have Hudson’s Bay folks lookin’ over your shoulder?”

He nodded and stepped between the two of them, looping an arm over Jim’s shoulder, another thick arm around the bony Titus Bass, as they started moving slowly toward the open gates where Vasquez had disappeared, headed for the trading room. “We never went hungry, my family didn’t. Plenty of folks needed help, an’ they paid us in vittles. Me an’ Esau even lent a hand to Meek a’times.”

“He ever come back to Oregon after them Cayuse troubles?”

“Sure did,” Shad remarked. “Don’t know why he took a southern trail after he got word of the Injun murders back to Washington. But he traipsed on down through Santa Fe.”

“I was wondering where he went,” Jim said. “After him and Squire Ebbert come through late that winter of forty-eight, I ’spected to see ’em come back through again inside of a year.”

Coming to a halt just inside the double gates, Sweete turned to Bridger and said, “That had to be hard on you too, Gabe—losin’ your li’l Mary Ann—”

Grabbing the front of Jim’s cloth shirt, Titus interrupted, “I didn’t know you’d lost your daughter too, Jim.”

“Like Joe lost his li’l Helen, my Mary Ann was carried off by them Cayuse,” he confessed as he stared at the toes of his moccasins. “She was less’n thirteen summers by then. No tellin’ if them bastards killed the girl … or a buck took a shine to her an’ made her his squaw.”

“Vaskiss’s missus told me you took a new wife,” Shad announced as women and children dismounted and kept their horses at a distance from the walls.

“Hell—sounds to be you’ve been here long enough to catch up on all my news!”

“Little more’n a week now, I callate,” Sweete said. “Snakes was already camped yonder when I got in. I s’pose they been markin’ time for Washakie and his chiefs to get back from the big talks over to Laramie.”

“Truth be,” Titus whispered, “Gabe’s been married twice’t since you left, Shadrach.”

He stared at Bridger incredulously. “Two wives?”

“Married a Ute gal that next spring after you rode off for Oregon,” he explained. “But she died the followin’ summer givin’ birth to our girl. Forty-nine. Named the baby Virginia Rosalie.”

“That’s a good name,” Shad remarked. “You give ’er that ’cause you was born in Virginia?”

“Takes a friend to remember somethin’ like that!” Bridger replied.

Sweete said, “Mrs. Vaskiss says you married a Shoshone this time.”

“Washakie’s daughter,” he announced with a grin. “Last year. So we ain’t had no young’uns of our own yet.”

While Sweete and Bridger continued catching up on years of news, Bass called Waits over and suggested she pick out a nearby spot to raise their lodge. When his family had started toward the gold-hued cottonwoods, he turned back to his old friends.

Shad was saying, “With Mary Ann disappeared, you only got Cora’s two younger ones around the fort now.”

“Felix, he’s turned ten years now, and li’l Josie, she’s almost six.”

Titus said, “I ’member how you lost your first wife, Cora—not long after she give birth to Josephine.”

“An’ then three years later you lost your Ute wife givin’ birth too,” Sweete said, wagging his head in sympathy.

“That was a patch of rough country there for a while,” he confessed, his eyes gone sad with the remembrance. “After Virginia Rosalie’s mama died, I had my hands full of a new-borned baby an’ no way to feed the poor thing … till this child come up with a idee.”

Bass inquired, “You had a emigrant’s cow, a milker?”

“Had two, an’ both of ’em was dry,” Bridger admitted. “So ever’ mornin’ I rode out to find me a small herd of buffier. Looked ’em over and picked out a likely cow. Dropped her quick with a ball in the lights. After a time, I got real good at cuttin out her udder ’thout spillin’ too much of the milk.”

Scratch beamed with admiration. “That’s how you fed your daughter ever’ day—on buffler milk?”

“You see’d her yourself over to the treaty doin’s at Horse Creek, Titus Bass. An’ on our ride back here—ain’t she a pistol? An’ I owe it all to buffler milk!”

Shadrach looked about. “Which one is she?”

“That’un,” and Bridger pointed to the scampering toddler set down upon the ground by her stepmother. “Blazes, but she’s fat an’ sassy! Just like her mama was. So I still got three young’uns around, but me an’ Mary plan on havin’ a fortful more of ’em on our own!”

Turning to Bass, Sweete asked, “How’s Waits-by-the-Water took to Jim’s Shoshone wife?”

“Hell, they get along slick. Seems that’s the way it is with Injun women. They can make their way with gals from ’nother tribe easy enough,” Scratch mused. “It’s the bucks can’t get along with bucks from ’nother tribe at all.”

Bridger asked, “Why you s’pose that is?”

Titus thought on that puzzlement a moment, then answered, “Maybe the reason they can is their bucks is allays off stealin’ squaws from some other tribe, bringing them squaws back to have more children for the band. I figure because of that the women get used to takin’ to squaws from other tribes like it’s no great shakes.”

“Likely you’re right,” Bridger agreed. “Leastways, the three of us bound to see for ourselves on that ’count. What with us three coons havin’ a Snake, a Cheyenne, an’ a Crow gal too—three unfriendly tribes all mixed up together here at this post.”

Shad snorted a laugh and said, “Why, if the three of ’em didn’t get along, these here ol’ stockade timbers couldn’t hold all the hell those gals’d make!”

Titus jabbed an elbow into Sweete’s ribs and said, “From the looks of Gabe’s new wife, I figger her for the kind what can raise hell way up an’ stuff a chuck under it so hell’ll never come back down!”

Bridger slapped them both on the back, and they started toward the post store. “I see’d that Louie come up from the Promised Land. You talked with him much since you been here, Shad?”

“He come in couple days after I did,” Sweete said, then held his two hands out in front of his belly. “That’s a man ain’t ever missed a meal!”

“Louie has put on some meat since he’s livin’ so high on the hog,” Jim declared. “He have any news ’bout Brigham Young’s Saints?”

“Vaskiss only said he rode up here to sleep with his wife, since it’d been a long time he’d poked a woman. Down there with all them Mormons, he says he ain’t got a chance of finding a part-time night woman to keep his

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