there at the border of shadow and sunlight. “I … I never had no brothers and sisters before, Pa.”
“You do now, Amanda.”
She asked, “And you know what you got in turn?”
“What?”
“You got four grandchildren.”
That took his breath a moment, struck with the sudden sureness of the revelation.
“Damn, if I don’t,” he exclaimed quietly. “Here I am, ’bout to have my fifth child come this winter … an’ I got four grandpups awready! If that don’t shine!”
ELEVEN
“Ain’t you glad to see me, Scratch?” Shadrach Sweete roared.
Bass felt troubled as he peered southwest across the valley of Black’s Fork. “It ain’t that I’m not happy to have you back,” he explained with a little irritation, watching the big man rein up beside him and slide out of the saddle. “I spotted the dust from your travois and them animals—figgered it was my daughter comin’.”
“Magpie?” Sweete snorted as he approached, leading his horse. “That li’l gal can’t raise much dust by her own self.”
They clasped forearms and shook, pounding one another on the shoulder there on the flat some forty yards outside the main gate at Fort Bridger. “Ain’t Magpie I was meaning. I got another daughter.”
Sweete inched back. “I never knowed.”
He grinned with pride. “Name’s Amanda. She come in yestiddy with the last train down from the ferry.”
“How’d she know her pa was here?”
Titus shook his head. “Didn’t. Bound away for Oregon with her husband. Got four li’l ones of her own too.”
“Then she ain’t a young’un herself,” Shad commented as they started moseying toward the post walls. “When’s last time you see’d her?”
“Late winter of thirty-four.”
Sweete looked over at Bass with a moment of study, then asked, “You still recognize her after all that time?”
“She come found me,” he declared. “Was in the store yonder when she heard Bridger give my name to some fella from the train what needed a li’l smithy work. Come over to see for herself if I was the one.”
Sweete laid his big hand on the shorter man’s shoulder. “You really her pa?”
“I am, Shad.” It was then they stopped short of the gate and Titus turned to stare at the distance, his one good eye moving across the distant trees. “Thought she’d be back with ’em by now.”
“Who?”
“Amanda an’ her family. They was coming to dinner.”
Sweete cleared his throat thoughtfully, then said with a sympathetic tone, “Maybe her husband ain’t the sort to wanna sit down for no dinner with Amanda’s pa.”
He studied Shad a moment, a new worry intruding on his plans for a happy evening. “Why you say that: He won’t wanna eat with me?”
“I dunno. Here this fella’s been married to your daughter all these years—who knows if she ever told him her pa was still livin’, or where you was in the first place, even when they started out for Oregon. Maybe your Amanda just let it out of the bag on him today real sudden, an’ it took him by surprise. Some folks are a mite touchy like that, you see?”
Titus shrugged a shoulder, not wanting to believe it. He wagged his head, saying, “Not likely. What she told me, the fella seems like a good enough sort.”
Shad peered at his friend’s face. “Sounds like you don’t got a thing to worry about.”
“Nothing to worry ’bout,” Bass repeated, unconvinced. “Just wanna know why they ain’t showed up.”
“What say we head on over to the camp, have ourselves a look? You an’ me.”
“I’ll get a horse while you tell Shell Woman why you won’t be helping her set up the lodge,” Titus said in a gush as he started to turn aside. “Tell her she can fetch Waits-by-the-Water to give her a hand! Them two need a time to talk after all the weeks Shell Woman’s been away at the ferry.”
“I’ll wait right here for you!” Sweete hollered back.
Bass suddenly dug in his heels and skidded to a halt. “By the by, tell Shell Woman you an’ the young’uns are invited to a special feed tonight in the fort!”
Shad swiped at the sweat trapped at the back of his neck beneath the long, matted mane of hair. “What’s so special ’bout tonight?”
“My family’s sittin’ down to dinner with my daughter an’ my four grandkids,” he roared back at Sweete as he bolted away again, beaming anew. “That’s what makes this evenin’ shine for this here child!”
The two of them and that pair of rascal dogs were no more than a half mile from the emigrants’ camp when they realized something out of the ordinary was afoot among these Oregon-bound travelers. Usually these camps were a bustling beehive of activity at this time of the day: young men and boys watering the hundreds and hundreds of animals, women and girls bent over fires as they prepared the evening meal, others of all ages moving about, going here and there on one mission or another now that the train was not rolling and they had these precious hours before darkness fell. Repairs to wagons, wheels, guns, or equipment. Medication administered and healing words spoken to those become sick or injured along the last few days of their journey. Older children assigned to watch over the youngest, noisiest, and quickest of foot in camp.
But even those few youngsters Titus spotted on the fringes of the gathered crowd seemed oddly quiet at this time of day; at long last they were allowed to run and play and burn off all that energy they had bottled up through the interminable hours of sitting still in those jostling wagons.
“Somethin’ ain’t … right ’bout this,” he said to Shadrach.
“Looks to be a meeting to me,” Sweete said, pointing out the large gathering near the bank of Black’s Fork.
Most of the emigrants stood, some seated in the grass beneath the shade of a thick copse of overhanging cottonwoods. Men, women, and their children too.
As their horses carried them closer, Titus picked out one voice after another, some raised louder than others to drive home a point. Although he could not make out most of what was being bandied about, he could nonetheless tell from the tone that he had not come upon a lighthearted occasion. Drawing up to the outskirts of the crowd, the two old trappers momentarily caught the attention of the first emigrants to turn, then nudge their neighbors to have themselves a look. In heartbeats most of the hundred-plus people had given the horsemen a quick look of disapproving appraisal before they turned their attention back to what was clearly some grave business at hand.
As Bass peered quickly over the crowd he spotted Amanda peeling herself away from a nest of women and children standing behind an inner cordon of their menfolk. But it wasn’t until she had reached the outer fringe of the crowd that he saw she wasn’t alone. Her hand gripped that of a young boy, a barefoot child, who shuffled along through the dusty grass to keep pace with his mother’s long strides. She turned and leaned down slightly to say something to the child as they circled around the gathering. In response the boy brought his tiny hand to his brow and peered into the distance at the two buckskin-clad horsemen. He still had his hand shading his eyes as Titus kicked out of the saddle and landed on the ground, only a moment before Amanda stopped before him.
“This is my daughter Amanda,” Scratch announced as she held out her empty arm for her father. “Amanda, this here’s my good friend, Shadrach Sweete. Him an’ me, we’ve been through a lot together over the years—”
“Oh, Pa!” she interrupted him, pain in her voice. “Our train’s breaking up!”
He took her shoulder in one strong hand and quickly glanced at the heated argument taking place nearby at the center of the crowd. “That why you was late comin’ for supper?”
Amanda’s eyes pleaded. “I’m sorry, for we got all caught up in this trouble—trying to sort out what we’re gonna do.”
