“I don’t need no … we don’t need no help,” Roman grumped. “Got this far just fine. We’ll make the rest of the way just fine too.”
Ignoring the settler’s peevishness, Sweete continued to explain, “Won’t get in your way. Comin’ only to see what I can do to help your bunch find a pilot what’d get you on to Oregon.”
Gripping her husband’s arm tightly, Amanda asked, “You really think we might find someone to guide us at Fort Hall?”
“Chances better up there at Hallee, than you waiting here,” Titus explained. “That post sits at the edge of the country you need to be showed a way through, where the crossings of the Snake are, how to ford that river, some such. You’ll do far better scratching up a pilot yonder at Fort Hall than you will anywhere along the road atween here an’ there.”
“What if we don’t find us a pilot?” Burwell asked, his long brow deeply furrowed.
Scratch thought a moment before he said, “Worst you could do’d be light out from there ’thout a pilot.”
Roman wagged his head unapologetically. “We can follow the wagon road where them who’ve gone before us come through that country. Ain’t nothing to staying on the road all the way to Oregon.”
But Scratch snorted, “What your family come through awready ain’t but a piss in a barrel put up against what you got left to go.”
“But we can’t go back if we don’t find a pilot,” Amanda groaned. “There’s nothing left for us back there but … lean times.”
Titus stepped over and gently laid a hand on her shoulder. “I ain’t sayin’ you go back. Hell, I’d be the last man to ever tell ’nother he should give in, turn around, and go back.”
That fuzzy patch between Roman’s eyebrows wrinkled testily. “Then what the blazes we gonna do when Hargrove an’ his pilot take off from Fort Hall for California … and we got no one to guide us to Oregon?”
Scratch gazed the settler in the eye. “You sit tight for the winter if’n you have to.”
“The winter!” Burwell roared. “That means I’d lose a whole growin’ season, time I finally got to Oregon next year.”
Titus saw how Amanda hung her head with defeat. He rubbed his hand on the back of her shoulders and said. “Come the first train through next season, you an’ the rest can throw in with them. But the worst thing you’d do is all you farmers set off down the Snake on your own, get stopped somewhere along the way with wagon trouble or early snows—have to fend for yourselves all winter long out in that God-forsook country.”
“Rest of us, we can take care of ourselves,” Roman snapped testily.
“This ain’t sweet an’ safe Missouri—” Titus bellowed, but immediately felt bad for it.
For a long moment he gazed down at his grandchildren, sensing a deep and nagging responsibility to see them safely through. He took a deep breath then said more calmly, “Roman, that ain’t the sort of country where you wanna get caught out with your young’uns for the winter.”
“There’ll be someone there,” Shad reassured as he inched over a little closer to Burwell around the fire. “Likely someone I know from the beaver days—someone I can vouch for. Ain’t that right, Scratch?” Sweete’s eyes pleaded a little.
Titus quickly glanced over his daughter’s family, deciding there was no choice but to agree with his friend—if only for the sake of Amanda and the others. “Shad’s right. There’s a real good chance your train will hire a pilot soon as you reach Fort Hall.”
“But if we don’t?” Roman pressed.
“Then pick you a spot to spend out the winter there within sight of the fort,” Titus reminded.
Just as Roman was about to open his mouth again, Amanda stepped up and slipped her arm through his, saying, “I know we’ll find us a pilot to hire, Roman. I feel it in my bones. So there’s no need to fret any longer over what isn’t going to happen. We’re going to Oregon, just like you said we’d do all along. No matter what Phineas Hargrove or that weasel-eyed Harris do to roll boulders in our path … we are going to Oregon, Roman!”
He turned sideways and gripped the tops of her arms a moment before he pulled his wife against him. “God bless you, Amanda. Bless you for your faith in this journey to our own promised land.”
“It ain’t the promised land I got faith in, Roman—it’s you,” she vowed. “No matter what the journey, I got faith in you.”
“We was meant to go to Oregon,” he said as he crushed her in his big arms. “It’s there we’ll have all the bad days behind us.”
As the stars had blinked into view and the tree frogs began to chirp their friendly calls down in the slough, Titus watched how Waits fluttered close to Shell Woman, as if she were reluctant to let her new-made friend go. He had felt a stab of pain for her. She was a social creature, not a loner like him. From the dawning of their first days together, he had realized that it was much, much harder for her to be apart from her family and her friends than it was for him to be alone. Back as far as those Boone County growing-up days in Kentucky he had come to know he was not meant for needing much in the way of human company. Oh, for certain he knew he could not do without Waits and those children of theirs. It would be so hard when Magpie, or Flea, or even little Jackrabbit were older and went off to make a life of their own with another. But … he would always have her, and that gave him the greatest sense of belonging he had ever known. Hers was the only belonging he felt he had to have for the rest of his life.
From those days when his self-knowing was awakened in Rabbit Hash, time and again he had put his faith in the wrong people, more often in the wrong women. First there was Amy Whistler, who wanted him for reasons other than loving him. And then there was Abigail Thresher, the bone-skinny whore who had given him all the love his body could stand, but never came to love who he was. And then there was Amanda’s mother, Marissa Guthrie —who had put so many restrictions and knots on him that he could do nothing else but flee while he still had the chance. By the time he reached St. Louis, Titus was not about to risk any deep affair of the heart. But try as he might, the high-born, coffee-skinned quadroon managed to get under his skin before she too went the way of all those saddest stories of unrequited love. Confused and despairing, he had learned too late what it would take to protect his heart. Titus vowed he would simply not let another woman in.
And so it was for more than ten years. While there were those who crawled in naked to join him beneath the buffalo robes, spreading legs and arms to ensnare him in their moist embrace, Bass kept hidden that most precious piece of himself. In its place, he had substituted the immutable bond of men … yet found that affection shattered by the betrayal of those who professed their protection of him. It took a long, long time for him to genuinely trust again in those who rode the same trails as he, trapped the same high-country streams, slept and snored, ate and laughed, hunted and fought, beneath the same starry skies. But he eventually found friends. Not many—for he had never, never, never been a garrulous sort who sought the reassuring company of the many. No, Titus Bass had been rewarded with a few true companions who asked no more of him than they were willing to give—that complete and utter trust as they stood at one another’s backs and dared the fates, damned the gods, and stood mighty against the wind in those days of brief and unmitigated glory.
Good men, the best friends a man deserved—even those the likes of Asa McAfferty, who went bad for reasons he had never sorted out, a companero who, in the end, asked one final act of faithfulness from an old friend. Better it would be, Titus had come to believe after years of mind-numbing consternation, for a man to be killed at the hand of a friend than by the hate of an enemy.
Good men, the best friends a man could ever have. So many of the best gone now. Gone to where those mortals still walking the earth could only suppose. Gone where no man alive knew for certain. These good men, gone to where Titus could only pray he would see them again at last on some far-off, faraway day. Like the bullet holes in his flesh, the arrow puckers and knife wounds too, the losing of each of those good friends carved its scar upon his heart. Perhaps even deeper, unto the marrow of his very soul. Such loss was all but unbearable, one by one wounding its own piece of his being.
So he did take friends unto his bosom, the few and the most trusted he had embraced, and made a home for these in his wounded, broken-in heart. Likely he could survive, live out the rest of his days with two or three of the old ones at his side, men like Sweete and Bridger. Save for his family, Titus Bass needed little more. But, his need of Waits-by-the-Water was a different animal altogether. She left behind everything she had ever known to come and be with him. In those first seasons they were together, Waits found a new friend in Josiah’s wife. Later, Mathew Kinkead’s too. But both were a far cry from the friends who had surrounded her before he took her away from Crow country. She needed friends much more than he.
Titus could do with the few who easily moved in and out of his life, as easily as he could do with being a
