longer.
Titus asked, “Figger they’ll tag along with a train on their way down from Green River?”
“Could be,” Jim replied. “Been two weeks since I sent up them four coons to take over at the ferry.”
Fifteen days ago it had been. Barely a week before that four more former skin trappers from the old American Fur Company days showed up at Fort Bridger, men who had served in Jim’s brigades during those last half dozen years of the beaver trade. Each of them had a woman along, two with children in tow, and a third squaw so swollen with child she waddled about like a melon ready to burst. Shoshone gals, they were. The old friends weren’t looking for a handout, just a way they could manage to live something resembling the old life and still buy a few geegaws for their women. Jim offered them work at the ferry.
All four leaped at the opportunity handed them by their old booshway. One claimed he’d even worked a rope-and-pulley ferry across the Wabash back in the Illinois country. When Gabe dug in, he found out the former beaver man did know his stuff. Hiring the quartet to help out the three there already would allow Shadrach to bring his family back to the fort, turning over the operation at Green River to that party of old comrades. The four were to pass along Bridger’s request for Sweete to return as soon as he could get packed up. The big man’s help was sure to come in handy around the post while the emigrant season wound down, now that they were nearing the end of that summer of ’47.
“Better get on that ol’ horse of your’n, Gabe!” Bass cried as Jim shuffled away toward the gate, heading for the second, smaller stockade that served as a corral. “You figger to tag along with that lad o’ mine, you best be quick about it!”
In that moment of watching his oldest son rein his pony around and around Bridger playfully, Bass felt an immense pride in the lad. What a figure he cut upon this three-year-old claybank Jim had given him as a gift to train several weeks back, right after the trader returned from Fort John with the first train of the season, piloted by Joseph Reddeford Walker himself. Seemed the former Bonneville man had gone east to the mouth of the La Ramee earlier that summer to see if he could stir up any work guiding emigrants through to Oregon. By the peak of the summer season there had been seven parties already come by Fort Bridger, not including those Mormons with Brigham Young on their way to the valley of the Salt Lake.
Such pride he felt for the youngster as he watched him take off at a lope beside Bridger for the northeast. Flea wore his long, brown-tinted hair loose and unfettered in the hot breeze, floating gently as the pony bounded along to match its young rider’s exuberance. Flea twisted around slightly and waved his arm one time before the two of them were gone beyond the edge of the gate, into the trees, following the much-scarred pattern of ruts where little of the dry, browning grasses grew any longer. In turn he waved to the boy, then clucked to himself and turned back toward the shady awning, where clung the heavy stench of cinders and fire smoke, white-hot iron and half-burnt coffee.
“He’s a good lad,” Titus said with a stirring in his breast for the child quickly becoming a young man. “No man could want for any better.”
Come this winter, Waits-by-the-Water might well give him another son. Or, perhaps another daughter. Gawd, but it did not matter—long as Waits was delivered of the child with ease and the babe was whole in body and mind. He had seen a few of those infants born not quite whole: missing fingers, perhaps a clubbed foot, maybe their eyes sightless or they were unable to hear the sound of rattle or whistle when a grandparent gave them a naming ceremony. It was his only prayer—that this child and its mother would come through the birthing whole. He picked up the leather-wrapped handle of the hammer and looked at the shady doorway of the store. Thinking of her. Waits was not a young woman any longer. Her scarred, pockmarked face was much fuller than it had ever been. Three youngsters given birth, along with so much loss and sadness since she became his back in ’33. Older than most Crow women when they customarily took a husband, she had preferred to wait for the husband she wanted—wait to have children and raise a family with him.
Twice he’d almost lost her.
Bass dropped the hammer on the anvil again and stepped to the fire hopper, stirring the glowing coals with the tongs, digging out the hottest of the short strips of repair metal he was fabricating. He plopped it down on the anvil and took up the hole punch in his left hand, the hammer in his right.
The first time, he had believed she was taken from him by Josiah Paddock, that winter after he and Josiah returned from lifting the scalp From an old white-headed friend. Finding the pair of them together beneath the robes, Waits as naked as she got when she lay with him, Titus tore off to the west, plunging into the dead of winter and danger, spitting in the eye of death as he undertook a mission so risky that only it could come close to easing the pain of losing her to his best friend. Losing them both at once was almost more than a mortal could bear. …
With the punch crafted from a solid spike of oil-tempered iron positioned a few inches from the end of the strip of band iron, Titus slammed the hammer down on top of it, jarring both of his forearms. If nothing else, he had mused nearly every day of this hot summer, his hands and arms, shoulders and back, were all the stronger for this smithy’s toil.
Years later the Blackfoot had ripped her from him and the Crow. Warriors already grown sickly with the smallpox that ate up their flesh as it sucked away their life with an unquenchable fever. That deadly illness had consumed her brother, but Titus dared his damnedest to keep her alive. The scars it left on her face could never diminish the beauty she remained on the inside, although it took long seasons for her spirit to heal after that lonely walk she had taken with the ghosts along the edge of the sky.
It took more than two dozen strikes with that hammer against the flared top of the punch before he finally pierced a half-inch hole through the strap iron. He laid the punch aside and picked up the tongs, returning the strap to the fire for reheating before pulling another strap of iron from the glowing coals. With a series of holes punched in these short strips of iron, most every repair could be made to a cracked yoke, tree, or running gear, even hold together a wagon box itself. He could bind up what was broken with iron strap and coarse bolts, work everything down tight with the muscles in his back so the emigrant could move on to Fort Hall beside the Snake River. Follow the twists of the Snake all the way to the Columbia … and the sojourners found themselves in Oregon country.
With a repair to this or an exchange for that, Titus Bass would get those farmers a little farther on their epic journey. Fix up a busted axle, trade for a proper-sized wheel. Maybe even refit a tire to the wood shrinking in this high, desert climate … if the farmer relented and gave Titus enough time to do a proper repair during a brief layover at Fort Bridger, heart of the Rocky Mountains.
The sweat beaded down the bridge of his nose, hung there pendant for only an instant, then landed on the glowing iron with a faint hiss.
Twice before he thought he’d lost her. Old as he was now, Titus didn’t figure he could live through losing her again.
“Titus Bass?”
He quickly turned at the unexpected sound of a woman’s voice. She stood framed in a splash of bright sunshine, her fingers knitted together before her. A poke bonnet shaded her sunburned, weathered face as she peered at him standing in the shade of that brushy arbor, where he was plunging a new iron tire into a narrow trough of water with a resounding sizzle.
“That’s me,” he replied after a cursory glance—these settlement women all ended up looking pretty much the same—then turned back to his hoop of iron. With his empty left hand he scooped up a dribble of water and smeared it down his face grimy with cinders and smoke, streaked with rivulets of sweat. “You’re from the train camped over west what come in yestiddy?”
“Yes. Just before noon yesterday.”
“The store’s off that way,” and he pointed.
“I was just there,” she confessed. “That’s where I happed to overhear your name.”
Squint-eyed, he turned his head to peer at her again. “Oh?”
“Major Bridger was speaking of you to some of our leaders,” she explained, inching a step closer, but stopped again, her hands still clenched in front of her apron. “One of the men, he’s needing some blacksmithing work done. That’s when I heard your name.”
“You said that awready, ma’am.” Sensing some impatience with the woman, he dragged the heavy iron tire he had fitted for a front wheel out of the trough and carried it to the outside wall of the Bridger cabin, where he hung it from a wooden peg.
