“What you got to wager against a cup of hooch?” Shad inquired.
He thoughtfully scratched at his chin whiskers. “That Cheyenne skinner hangin’ off your belt sure to grab someone’s attention at the trade counter.”
“My skinner and this sheath Shell Woman worked for me?” he whined in disbelief. “An’ my right arm to boot? You’re just ’bout as slick as year-old snake oil, Titus Bass.”
“Smooth talker, ain’t I?” And he grinned as the rain splattered his face.
“Shit. You can’t get away with nothin’, ol’ friend—you’re so bad at lyin’.”
“Then you’ll buy me a cup of whiskey?” Scratch begged. “Ain’t had none since Dick Green topped off my gourd back down to Bents’ big lodge on the Arkansas.”
“If’n you’ll put up something of your own against two cups of whiskey, then I reckon I can throw in my arm for a match.”
“Shell Woman don’t mind you drinking?”
Turning to peer over at his wife, Sweete ruminated a moment, then said, “I can’t callate as I’ve ever had a drop o’ whiskey since I’ve knowed her.”
“Nary a cup down to that mud fort on the Arkansas?”
He wagged his head. “Nope. Not a drop since I been around Shell Woman an’ her people.”
Titus chuckled softly and said, “Then she ain’t see’d you drunk the way I see’d Shadrach Sweete get in the cups!”
“Nope. Them days belong to another man now, Scratch.”
“You was a wild critter, Shadrach,” Bass commented with fond remembrance. “Good damn thing you never got so drunk we’d had to rope you to a tree till your head dried out. Would’ve took a bunch of us to get you wrassled down and tied up.”
“Can’t say as I’ve ever see’d you get bad in the cups neither,” Sweete admitted. “So you figger to tear off the top of your head and howl at the moon tonight?”
“Nope.” And he shook his head dolefully. “Them times is over for me too, lad. I hurt too damn much for days after. Can’t swaller likker like I used to and stay on my feet.”
“We’re just getting old.”
“The hell you say! Speak for your own self!” And he shuddered with a chill that was penetrating him to the bone. “I’m getting damned cold sitting out in this rain, water dripping down my ass what’s gone sore on this here soggy saddle—listening to you spoutin’ off ’bout whiskey,” Titus grumbled. “A few swallers’d sure ’nough warm my belly right about now.”
The fifteen-foot-tall double gate was still much the same as it had been on his last visit to Fort William, but now the arch that extended overhead bore the figure of a horse galloping at full speed, painted red in a primitive design that reminded Scratch of how a horse might be rendered on the side of a Crow or Shoshone lodge. A little distance out, he whistled the dogs close and they all angled away from the mud walls, aiming instead for that flat just below the fort, where the La Ramee Fork dumped itself into the North Platte. Here they would camp close enough to the post to conduct some business, but far enough away that there was little chance of their families being disturbed. After Titus sent Magpie and Flea off through the brush to scratch up what they could of kindling dry enough to hold a flame, he turned to help Shell Woman and Waits-by-the-Water with that small Cheyenne lodge the two women erected only when the weather turned as inhospitable as it had this day.
“Here, I’ll lend a hand,” Shadrach offered as he grabbed an edge of the buffalo-hide lodge cover.
“Not with that arm of yours still mending,” Bass scolded.
“A’most good as new awready.”
Titus shook his head. “G’won and tend to the stock. Three of us raise the lodge while you get our goods off them horses.”
The early spring rain finally let up late in the afternoon, not long after the women and Magpie got Shell Woman’s lodge staked down and the smoke flaps directed against the breezy drizzle. Inside the women unfurled buffalo robes and blankets around the small fire pit, then got the little ones out of their wet clothing. To the left of the door Flea piled the driest wood he could find down in the brushy creek bottom, while the women stacked bundles of their belongings dragged inside, out of the weather. Again tonight the two families would gather beneath one roof, crowded hip to elbow, sharing their warmth and their laughter rather than erecting Waits-by-the-Water’s lodge nearby.
“Go with you?” Flea’s English caught his father as he and Shadrach ducked from the lodge right after a supper of some boiled venison.
“He asked that real good, didn’t he?” Sweete remarked.
Bass nodded proudly, then told the boy, “Go tie up the dogs to a tree, close by, like we allays do, son.”
Magpie’s head poked from the lodge door as she asked, “Me too, Popo? Go with you to fort?”
“What’s your mother say?”
The young girl stood just outside the doorway, speaking to her mother, then turned back to Titus and said, “We go, yes. Stay with Popo all the time.”
“You both unnerstand what stay with me all the time means?”
Magpie moved up two steps and took Flea’s hand in hers. They nodded their heads in unison as she said, “Where you go, we go.”
“If’n your manners stay as good as your American talk, then there won’t be no reason for me to scold you two,” Titus replied. “Your mother’s been here afore, you too, Magpie.”
“Me?” she asked. “I don’t remember.”
With a grin he explained, “You was little. No more’n a year an’ a half old back then.”
She stepped over and squeezed his hand lovingly. “That was so long ago, this will be a brand-new visit for me.”
“Like our visit to Bents’ lodge on the Arkansas,” Titus said, hugging her quickly, “this might just be your last an’ only chance to see this here Fort William on the Platte.”
“Platte?” Flea repeated.
“The river,” Shad explained. “That’s parley-voo for flat.”
This time Magpie echoed, “Parley-voo?”
“Frenchie talk,” Scratch said. “Lots of Frenchies out here. Not so many up to Crow country, but they’re all over the Arkansas country.”
“Frenchies—is this a tribe?” she inquired in her native tongue as the four of them climbed onto the flat and started crossing the soggy pasture toward the fort itself.
Both of the men laughed and Bass explained, “They’re part of the white tribe. Like there are River Crow, and there are Mountain Crow. The Frenchies are part of the white tribe, but they come from a land far, far from here— and they talk with a whole different tongue of their own.”
“But, the two bands of Crow speak the same tongue,” Flea protested. “Why do these Frenchies talk a different tongue than the rest of the white tribe?”
Baffled, Titus shrugged as he came to a halt near the gates, the light growing dim.
Shadrach chuckled as he held up two fingertips barely spaced apart and exclaimed, “Because them Frenchies got a wee small brain—so they don’t know no better than to squawk an’ whine in that idjit talk of theirs!”
“They got the inner gate closed, Shad,” Titus announced with a little worry. “C’mon.”
Passing under the arch over the double gates, the four entered a passageway at the end of which stood the set of closed gates. Midway down the adobe wall to their left was a narrow window covered by wooden shutters that had been bolted shut on the inside of the wall.
Scratch pushed on them gently. “Throwed an’ locked.” Then he pounded on them with his fist. “Ho! The fort! Open up! Open up out here!”
Muted voices and the scrambling of feet on soggy ground drifted to them from inside the gates; then the scrape of iron was heard, and one side of the shutters was pulled back a few inches. A nose poked itself out. After the nose’s owner made a cursory inspection of the newcomers, the shutter opened all the way and there stood a round-faced white man, his chin and cheeks clothed in a neatly trimmed beard, his upper lip naked of a mustache.
“What’s your business?”
“We’re thirsty,” Bass declared.
