Quietly she explained, “I suppose there are far fewer chances of bumping into a Titus Bass out here in the Rocky Mountains than there are chances finding a Titus Bass along the Mississippi, or running onto him back in St. Louis.”
He slowly turned toward her and snatched up that small scrap of burlap. He wiped it down his sweaty neck and across his bare chest, smearing more of the blackened cinders across his reddened skin. “St. Louie?”
“Where you and I first met,” she said after another step that brought her right to the edge of the shade.
“W-where was that?”
“Emily Truesdale’s sporting house.”
A memory long submerged beneath the layers of seasons, miles, and a thousand other faces. But not near forgotten.
His heart misstepped as he searched for words his dry tongue could speak. “Did you … work for the woman?”
“Of a time, I did.” She stepped beneath the awning, her hands kneading one another now, anxiously. “If you’re the Titus Bass I later saw at Amos Tharp’s livery back in the late winter of thirty-four, then I am … your daughter, Amanda.”
Instantly he felt a twinge of shame—for his sweated body, smeared with dust and blacksmith grime, stinking no less than a horse would at the end of a long day’s ride. “You’re Amanda?” He quickly turned for the wall of the cabin, where his cotton shirt hung on a wooden peg. As he got it over his head and began to smooth it over his sticky frame, Titus asked, “Marissa’s daughter?”
“Your daughter,” she said, finally moving toward him without stopping. As he flung open his arms she pushed back her bonnet, letting it fall to hang suspended from her neck with her long, ash-hued curls. “Father—”
Scratch folded her into his arms, unable to utter a sound, feeling his legs going as weak as they had when she had declared her existence to him back in Tharp’s St. Louis barn. Every bit as quickly he brought her away from him to gaze down into her face. No longer did she possess the pudgy, childlike face of her mother the way she had when she confronted him so many winters ago.
“H-how long’s that make it?”
Shaking her head slightly, she made a tally. “More than thirteen years, Father.”
“F-Father,” he repeated. “Sounds so … starchy an’ high-backed to me.” He rubbed the top of her shoulders. “How ’bout you callin’ me Pa.”
She grinned, and it lit her whole face. “Pa. Yes, yes, I can call you that, Pa.” Then the light in her face was gone, replaced with one of concern as she stared at him intently. “Your eye. What’s become of it?”
“Don’t know,” he admitted with a shrug. “Happened that same spring I rode back to St. Louie. After I come back west. At Bents’ big lodge on the Arkansas River. Ain’t see’d wuth a damn from the eye ever since.”
“It’s gone cloudy,” she said, inspecting it closely. “I’ve known some folks that’s happened to.”
Hopeful, he asked her, “They ever get better of it?”
“No, Pa,” and she shook her head. “Wish I could tell you different. But I never knew of a person, their eyes got better after they got cloudy such a way. Yours no better since?”
“Can’t say it’s got worse neither,” he admitted. “Allays made do with the one.”
Leaning close, she studied his one good eye. “I didn’t remember till just now—but your eyes are green. Like mine. They’re green like mine.”
With a self-conscious swallow he realized his tongue was so dry it nearly clung to the roof of his mouth. “Talkin’ is dusty work—lemme get a drink.”
Releasing her, Scratch leaped over to his drinking bucket and pulled an iron dipper from it. A lot of it sloshed on his dusty moccasins as he brought it to his lips and slurped what he hadn’t managed to spill. Then he suddenly thought of genteel manners. “You want some?”
“Yes, I would like that,” she answered, coming over and taking the ladle from him after he had dipped her a drink. “I never knew there could be heat like this.”
“You think it’s hotter here’n it gets hot back to St. Louie?”
Wiping the back of her hand across her lips, Amanda said, “A different heat. Back there is so heavy, sticky with misery. But the farther west we’ve come, the drier it got. Like the sun’s been sucking every drop right outta me … Pa.”
He smiled at that, hearing her use that special word. “You come west with that wagon train?”
“Yes, all the way from Westport.”
“That’s a long way for a gal … for a woman on her own.”
She laughed easily at that. “I ain’t alone, Pa. I’ve had a family for some time.”
“A-a family?”
Leaning toward him, she asked, “Lookit me, real close. I ain’t the young gal you met back to St. Louie all them summers ago. Lookit these lines I see when I look in my mirror every night. Can’t stand to look in it the mornings when I rise, what for all the aging I see. It’s better to see my tired ol’ wrinkles by candlelight when the children are put to bed and I have a few minutes—”
“Children? Y-you got young’uns?”
“Land sakes, Pa! I said I come west with my family—children and a husband too.”
“You married and started your family,” he said, on the verge of wanting to believe it. “Wh-where are they?”
“Back at the wagon camp,” she confided. “After I heard your name early this morning in the store, and looked outside the door to find you pounding on that anvil—I bided my time.”
“Didn’t come right over an’ make yourself knowed to me?”
With a wag of her head, Amanda confessed, “I wanted to be alone when I came to talk. So I walked back to the camp with Roman and the children. Told him I was coming back to wrangle a deal for some calicos at the store from Major Bridger’s wife. He’d have to watch the children while I came back to the post.”
“Gabe … Jim Bridger don’t have a wife no more,” he explained. “She got took givin’ birth to their last child.”
Her eyes filled with consternation. “But … it was an Indian woman.”
“Which’un you talk with?” he asked. “Which Injun woman?”
“She was a taller one. Had a long face, not the round-faced woman—”
“You met my wife!”
“The … same one you were … with when you came back to St. Louis in thirty-four?”
“I got back to her down in Taos just afore she birthed our first child, a daughter.”
Amanda’s eyes widened. “She’s here too? Your daughter … your other daughter?”
“Magpie,” he said. “My boy—he come with Bridger to lead your train down to the south meadow to camp. You see him yesterday, spy him with Bridger?”
“Our wagon was so far back in the train,” she explained. “The dust and all—we never saw anything happened up front.”
Bubbling with enthusiasm, he said, “He’s a great boy, more’n ten years old now.”
Amanda dabbed a fingertip at a bead of sweat that was collecting in the hollow under her lower lip. “So you have two children?”
“Actual’, there’s three. ’Nother boy. Four summers old now. An’ there’s one on its way this comin’ winter.”
“Your fourth?” Then she caught herself. “I mean, that would be your fifth, counting me—of course. I was your first!”
“That’s some, for a ol’ fella like me.”
“Pa, I’ve got four of my own,” she declared, glowing with pride. “My oldest, a boy, he isn’t as old as your … Magpie.”
He took a step back and regarded her with a big grin. “Your whole family’s here? Goin’ west?”
“Yes, Pa.”
“Where away—California or Oregon?”
“Oregon.” She said it with a special reverence. “Roman’s been wanting to come west for almost three years now. They been hard years.” The softness in her eyes melted away with what he took to be a sour-tinged remembrance. “Roman, he was gonna get to Oregon, or kill himself back there in Missouri.”
