Roman’s eyes flicked away, then he turned back to the two old trappers. “Seems Hargrove is coming to welcome you to the train himself.”
They all turned their heads, watching the three men approach. Train captain Hargrove, with two of his biggest men hard on his tail.
“Don’t that appear to be a big ol’ smile of welcome on that bastard’s face?” Titus grumbled with mock cheer. “Amanda, why don’t you take Waits and Shell Woman around the other side of the wagon with all the young’uns? Find ’em something to eat, maybe. Put ’em to helping you pack up your goods in that wagon.”
She could read the seriousness in his eyes. “All right, Pa.”
For a moment longer he watched Amanda gesture to the women, then start them around the back of the canvas-topped prairie schooner, where she would get them involved with more than the arrival of the wagon captain.
“Good morning, Burwell!” Hargrove sang out in that easygoing way of a man who always carried a smirk on his face and self-righteousness in his heart.
“Hargrove,” Roman responded.
The hair at Digger’s neck ruffed menacingly, and the dog growled, low at the back of his throat. Bass quieted him with a whisper. “Hush, boy!”
The captain’s eyes raked over the trappers. “I trust you’re here to bid farewell to these members of your family.”
With a shake of his head, Titus said, “That ain’t why we’re here.”
Straightening in the saddle and pressing his chin down against his puffed-up chest, Hargrove tried again. “Then it’s probably for the best that you’ve come to try talking Burwell and his wife into staying behind with you here until another train comes through for Oregon. Admirable, my good man—that you should place their welfare so highly, rather than see them risk it all on an unwise gamble on their own.”
“They won’t be on their own,” Titus declared. “My friend here, Mr. Shadrach Sweete, he was first to jump up an’ offer to ride along to Fort Hall. Likely find some fella there what can lead the train on to Oregon country after you an’ Harris gone off to Californy.”
Hargrove’s eyes appraised Sweete a moment. “You’ll be part of the Burwell family since you’ll be making the journey by yourself?”
Shadrach picked at an old scab on the back of one hand and said, “I ain’t goin’ alone. Got my family comin’ too.”
“Family?” the wagon captain repeated uneasily.
“Wife, two young’uns.”
“Wife? She’s come out from the East?”
Crossing his big forearms across the saddle where he stood on the ground beside his horse, Sweete peered over the animal at the man, saying, “She ain’t been no farther east than the Little Dried River, or the Smoky Hill. She’s Cheyenne.”
“So you’re a squaw-man?”
Bass slowly stepped aside and laid his rifle atop his saddle so that it pointed in Hargrove’s direction. “That’s a word you don’t wanna use with neither of us, Cap’n Hargrove. Some things just get under a man’s skin, an’ make him see red.”
He turned back to Sweete. “You’re married to a squaw.”
“Cheyenne, like I told you.”
“An’ my wife’s Crow,” Titus advised. “Her people come from far to the north. Likely you ain’t heard of ’em.”
Hargrove blinked a few times, then asked of Sweete, “Your … wife and children—you’ll be part of Burwell’s camp?”
“We will,” Bass replied for them all.
The wagon master’s head jerked in his direction. “We?”
“I figgered to go along, show my family some country, give a hand to Roman when he needed it—”
“I can’t allow all of you to join our train!”
“That don’t callate to me,” Bass argued. “Two day ago you was tellin’ ever’one how you an’ Black Harris was taking off for Californy on your own. So what the hell say you got in who throws in with these other folks when you’re dropping out soon as you reach Fort Hall?”
“It’s my train,” Hargrove growled. “I formed it, I—”
“You was elected captain,” Burwell interrupted as he stepped up suddenly, causing a horse ridden by one of the hired men to shy and shuffle backward awkwardly. “You don’t own none of us. Not our wagons. An’ you sure as the devil don’t own this trail.”
“We’ll see what the others have to say about that!”
Scratching the side of his cheek, Titus said, “No man’s got a right to tell me where I can ride and where I can make camp for the night, Cap’n.”
Hargrove glanced to his right, then to his left, in a way that unmistakably indicated his hired men. With a smile he said, “I think we understand one another. In this wild country, might always makes right.”
“Most times,” Sweete responded.
Hargrove wagged his head meaningfully and clucked, “It can make a man nervous, forced to watch over his shoulder for trouble creeping up on him all the time.”
“These here friends o’ your’n,” Titus began, wagging the muzzle of his rifle at one, then the other, of those horsemen arrayed on either side of the wagon master. “You figger they very good at killing a man? Maybe good for killin’ two of us?”
“I’m certain they—”
“I ain’t,” Bass interrupted. “This coon’d lay down good money none of your gun-toters ever kill’t a man.”
Sweete had his hat off and was wiping the sticky moisture off the sweatband as he said, “Hargrove, I want you to look at that rifle my friend is holding on you. See them brass tacks he pounded into the stock, up an’ down the forearm too?”
“What business is it of—”
“Ever’ one of ’em is a dead man he’s kill’t.”
Titus watched how that caused all three of them to train their attention on his rifle, where it was propped atop the saddle.
“Near as I know, he ain’t added the last two tacks he should,” Shadrach continued. “Pair of Frenchie fellas who thought they was gonna run off with the man’s half-blood daughter—figgered a half-wild white man wasn’t gonna care ’bout his family an’ all.”
Hargrove’s eyes grinned mirthlessly and he said, “Sometimes justice can indeed be swift out here on the frontier.”
Shadrach added, “But I doubt any of your hired men done more’n rough up some poor folks they had outnumbered. They don’t appear to have the stomach for killin’—just for making you look bigger’n you are to sodbusters and settlement folk.”
From his right side, out of the corner of his good eye, Titus watched three of his grandchildren poke their heads beneath the wagon. Then a fourth shadow: little Lucas, plopping onto his belly and squeezing his way between Lemuel and Annie. All of them intently listened in on the conversation between the menfolk and that talk of the brass tacks on his rifle, talk of his life of killing. It wasn’t the sort of thing he wanted his grandchildren to know about him.
Hargrove was already starting a sentence with something about the council he would call when they had reached that night’s campground to decide the matter—
But Titus interrupted, “You best keep your boys away from our camp.”
“They were hired by me to patrol the line of march every day,” Hargrove huffed. “And they stand their rotation of watch every night, just like the rest of the men. As long as I’m captain, there can never be anywhere that is off-limits to my men.”
“I warned you once, Hargrove. Won’t waste my breath again,” he declared, then turned a quick glance at those four grandchildren of his, wide eyes peering out from under the possum belly slung beneath the wagon, every one of them getting a real earful. “But, I’m sure men like you an’ me don’t want no trouble with the other. Do we
