the Arkansas, Titus promised them they would find the mud-walled fort where the Bent brothers traded with the likes of the Kiowa, Arapaho, and Cheyenne. But they hadn’t escaped the foothills when they spotted those distant horsemen—dark figures crossing the crusty snow. Turning his family and their animals into a juniper-cloaked draw, Bass took his eldest son and together they worked their way to the edge of a rocky overhang.
Through the spyglass the figures appeared to move like white men, at least by the way they rode spread out rather than strung back in a long column like a war party would ride on the march. But who could tell for sure, what with those horsemen bundled under layers of winter clothing—wrapped in wool blanket coats or thick fur hides as their hang-down animals plodded for the foothills while the sun continued its fall. He and the boy would watch from here until the horsemen made camp for the coming night … then leaving his loved ones back in the safety of that ravine, Titus alone would slip up on the strangers.
First off to learn the color of their skin, and then to discover the purpose of their journey south toward that land of revolt and bloodshed.
Titus didn’t recognize a one of them.
Not that it was particularly easy for him to pick out a familiar face as the strangers hunkered around their fires, their faces obscured by furry hats or the hoods to their blanket coats, lit only with the flicker of low flames a dull red on the snow as they murmured to one another. He waited in the darkness, listening to a foreign tongue he knew was not Mexican, but a language he had heard plenty of during those years he languished in old St. Louis before striking out for the mountains. Some of these strangers were Frenchies, the laborers who had long played an important role in the fur trade across this wide, wild continent.
Silently he pushed back, sliding into the dark, and inched over closer to another fire, where he strained to listen to the quiet talk of those men rubbing frozen hands and warming icy feet near the flames. This bunch was Americans. Leastways, what he could hear of their few words.
Slowly rising to his feet, Bass called out, “Ho, the camp! I’m comin’ in! Don’t get no itchy fingers—this here’s a white nigger!”
At his first cry the men around those half-dozen fires leaped to their feet, some snatching up guns and preparing to make a fight of it, others ducking behind what cover there was in their baggage. The huge white dog leaped up, a deep, menacing growl rumbling at the back of its throat. In their midst a man of middling height stepped forth, longrifle in hand, yelling orders at the rest as he seized hold of the wide collar buckled around the big dog’s throat.
“Hold on there, you men!” he roared as he jerked the animal into a sitting position. “You heard him say he’s a white man.” Then he turned and flung his voice to that side of the camp where the shadow emerged from the brush at the base of the ridge. “How many are with you?”
Bass stopped and started to grin. With a shrug he held out his arms and replied, “Jus’ me. Ain’t no others.”
Lowering his smoothbore, the leader said, “C’mon over here.”
Less than two dozen men quickly surrounded Bass and the leader, who yanked the mitten off his right hand. “My name’s Bill Bransford.” The dog growled at the newcomer, so Bransford snapped, “Hush!” then peered at Bass. “We met before?”
“Not that I know of,” Titus said, stuffing his right hand under his left armpit and yanking off his thick blanket mitten. They shook. “My name’s Bass. Titus Bass.”
“I heard tell of you,” Bransford replied with a grin. “Sometime back, you was over to the big fort on the Arkansas with some other fellas and a big herd of horses you was sellin’.”
“You’re good at ’memberin’, Mr. Bransford.”
“Hell, I was a junior clerk back then. Brought my dog here out from St. Louis when I come to work at the fort years ago. So I well remember how you dickered on every last dollar for your horses, and ended up riding off with a couple of Charlotte’s puppies too.”
The remembrance of those fat, furry pups made him smile as another man stepped up. “Your name’s Bass?”
Titus instantly turned on the speaker, intrigued at something naggingly familiar in the clip to the stranger’s words, and replied, “Titus Bass.”
“You’re the one I heard who’s called Scratch?”
“That’s right. And what be your name?”
“Lewis Garrard.”
“Ever you spend time on the Ohio River?”
“Born in Cincinnati,” Garrard responded with a grin. “How’d you know?”
“I come from the Ohio River country my own self,” Titus explained. “Boone County, Kentucky. Thort I heard the ring of that country in your words.”
“I’ve come west looking for a little adventure,” Garrard remarked.
He asked Garrard, “How you get hooked up with these pork-eaters?”
“I was with William Bent, trading out to the Big Timbers, when word of his brother’s death reached us.”
Bass looked at Bransford again, eyeing the man up and down. “Knowed Hudson’s Bay had Fort Hall across the mountains, but I didn’t think John Bull’s boys ever come this far south. How come Hudson’s Bay got hooked up with them Bent brothers?”
Bransford spoke up defensively, “We ain’t no Hudson’s Bay!”
“So you claim you ain’t a John Bull* outfit?” Titus inquired.
“No,” Bransford answered, looking mystified. “What made you think we was?”
“Laying out there in the dark, I was listening to them Frenchies palaver over yonder at that fire. Just figgered with them parley-voos along you was Hudson’s Bay.”
“William has him some Frenchmen working for him,” Bransford explained. “A few of ’em are hard workers. Like this bunch.”
“Where away you bound, headin’ south for the pass?” Titus asked. “You know there’s trouble south of here now.”
Garrard rubbed his hands together eagerly. “Just the sort of adventure I came west to find.”
Bransford motioned Bass to join them at the closest fire and said, “You’ll soon get all of the adventure you’re wanting, come the day we reach Taos, Garrard.”
“Taos?” Bass echoed in surprise. “So your bunch is headed for Taos?”
The leader turned on his heel and glared at Bass. “Sounds to me you know something of the bloodbath down that way.”
“I carried news of those doin’s all the way north to the Pueblo,” Titus declared sourly. “Kinkead and Fisher, the rest of ’em too, they set out with me the next day.”
“What are you doing up here if you returned to Taos?” Garrard asked.
“Decided it ain’t my fight.”
Garrard snorted. “Isn’t my fight either—but it’s bound to be one helluva time!”
Bransford leaned forward. “Why you wandering around out here by your lonesome?”
“Taking my family to Bents’ big lodge. Afore we push on north for Crow country.”
“Your family with you?” Garrard asked.
“That’s why I ain’t making that scrap in Taos my fight.” He pointed to the coffeepot at the edge of the fire pit. “You got something hot to drink?”
“Pour this cold man a cup,” Bransford ordered. “We’re on our way to Taos, maybeso to help the soldiers and those fellas from Fisher’s fort put down this revolt.”
Scratch watched the hot liquid hiss into a tin cup he held out, steam rising into the cold air. “Ain’t much any of you can do,” he explained quietly. “By now them murderers gone and butchered every white person in the area. They wiped out Turley’s mill.”
“Turley’s mill too?” one of the strangers repeated.
He nodded as he took a first sip of the hot coffee. “I’ll lay as how them greasers got their work done awready. No one left to save now.”
“William Bent wanted us to try,” Bransford declared.
“Bent hisself?” Bass echoed. “So Louy Simmons did make it after all.”
