“We hadn’t come on him when we did, Roman be dead.”
“He feels the same way about this as I do,” Amanda had explained after a long and heavy silence. “He doesn’t want to spill any blood. Just stay out of their way till we get to Fort Hall and see ’em gone.”
“Then you don’t wanna know what I’m gonna do,” Titus said.
“I don’t,” she admitted quickly. “All I know is that blood begets blood.”
“Roman don’t want a piece of these niggers?”
“No,” and she had shaken her head. “Says he just wants to get us to the Willamette River, where we can put everything that happened behind us.”
Titus had sighed. “And start a new life.”
“Yes, Pa. Row and me don’t think we could start a new life by shedding blood.”
It hadn’t been that way for Scratch. Not years ago, not out here in this same country. This harsh wilderness had required a squaring of accounts from those who believed they had what it took to stand tall and bold against the wind. And that payment was often made in blood—either their own, or in the blood they were forced to take in order to survive. How he wished his life had been different, somehow. But this wilderness had to be accepted on its own terms. Maybeso things were far softer back east, the way these settlement and farmer folks hoped things would be once they made it all the way to Oregon. Perhaps the reason these sodbusters were on their way west was because they figured that far country would be as easy a land as the East had been to them. Otherwise, why would a man risk everything on staking a claim in a place that would demand a payment in blood?
But to get from that soft country back east to that gentle country called Oregon, these settlement folk had to pass through an unforgiving gauntlet—a long, wide strip of harsh territory, a land that demanded a man must become about as brutal and unforgiving as that wilderness itself.
“This here’s my country, Amanda,” he had quietly explained to her at the rear of the wagon just as the music started and the joyful voices were raised to the starry sky. “Out here folks like you an’ Roman don’t set the rules. That’s what sticks in my craw ’bout your sort on your way to a new life. You’re gonna come through here an’ do what you can to make this place fit for all of you what are running somewhere else. Don’t you see the reason I lasted so long out here is I took this land on its terms?”
She had stared down at her scuffed boots for a long time before she finally looked into his face again and said, “I always thought that folks had a say in how they lived, no matter where they were, east or west, Pa.”
“Maybeso that goes for back there where we both come from, daughter,” he sighed. “But, out here in this country, the wilderness got the last say. What you an’ the rest of these folks think should be don’t matter a red piss. An’ that even goes for oily men like Phineas Hargrove too.”
“Because he struggles to make it all turn out for his good?”
“No, just because life in this country has a way of balancing things out in the long run,” he explained. “What he takes from others will one day be took from him. And that day has come, Amanda.”
She gripped his arm as he leaned forward to kiss her on the forehead, stopping him from immediately pulling away. “Pa, I’d like to tell you there’s no need to put yourself in danger—but I know I’d be wasting my breath.”
He had squeezed her hand. “You take the risk and the danger out of my life, that’d be like taking the breath outta my body.”
Titus had heard her scrambling back up the rungs of the short ladder, over the tailgate, and into the back of the wagon as he moved around the fire to that spot where Shadrach stood waiting. Both of them bristled with weapons—not firearms but the sort of sharp-edged weapons that called for close and dirty work, knives and tomahawks. Along with the short sections of rope each man carried inside his shirt where they would not swing loose, making noise or getting in the way of what was to come.
His nose picked up the smell of fresh dung before Scratch even made out the clot of shapes before him, as he neared the patch of dried, sun-cured grass where he knew Hargrove’s men kept the moneyed man’s stock grazing through the night. They worked in watches, he had been told, those hired men. Two of them spelling the last pair for a few hours, until the last three men would fire the four-o’clock gun to rouse the whole camp. This early in the night, he and Shad would be catching the first watch—meaning there would still be some time before the relief arrived to discover what had been done to their friends.
Into his nostrils the westerly breeze brought that strong perfume of sweaty animals and the clumps of green manure dropped when the horses had finished digesting the brittle plateau grasses. He stopped and smelled deeply, wondering if either of the guards were smokers. Looking into the dark, Titus figured he might see the glowing ember of a pipebowl even if he weren’t downwind of their burning tobacco. But the only thing his nose could make out was pony droppings and the sharp tang of the breeze cutting through the sagebrush and bitter alkali flat. He’d hear the man soon enough, maybe see the guard move against the horizon, if the man wasn’t squatting under some bush—
Bass heard that stream of water hitting the hard, dry, flaky ground with a hiss. But it wasn’t the loud and powerful gush of a horse taking a piss. No, that was a man sprinkling the ground. At his most vulnerable, with his pecker in his hand and his mind on the relief he was experiencing. He moved forward, his nose alive and drawing him onward, his ears pricking as his senses led him toward the guard. There!
Titus saw him. The dark, the shadows, the hat—Scratch wasn’t sure which one it was. But the guard stood there with his left hand propping up his short prairie rifle while his right hand was busy at his groin, shaking free those last few drops—
Surprised, the guard was barely able to start his turn when Scratch kicked the rifle out from under his left arm, then drove in another step, swinging his arm with all the power his old shoulder and hip could put behind the blow. His hard-boned fist connected under the taller man’s jaw, staggering the guard back a step, then delivered a second crack as the guard’s arms wheeled in an attempt to regain his balance.
The instant he started to cry out, his brief warning muffled with the suddenness of the attack, Bass was already on him like a calico sack full of mountain cats. Scratch struck with the left fist this time, causing the guard to go rigid for a heartbeat.
But somehow the man managed to growl, “Napps!”
The guard was shaking his head violently as he scrunched his neck down into his shoulders and hunched over, starting toward the old trapper—pulling out his belt pistol. Scratch desperately lunged to the side as he dragged free one of the knives at the back of his hip with his left hand, immediately passing the blade of the skinner into his right palm and flicking it forward as the guard cleared the pistol from his belt. The knife’s impact froze everything for a moment in the black of that night. The guard stood in place, shock registering on his face as he slowly peered down at the bone handle sticking out of his lower chest.
“N-napps!” he gurgled, much weaker this time as he struggled to screw up the strength to raise the pistol.
As the weapon floated up, Titus was already lunging forward, quickly knocking the pistol hand aside before he seized the handle of the embedded knife with his right hand, clenching his left around the back of the young man’s neck like talons. Grunting with pain and fear, the guard flailed away with his arms, pounding Bass with one while the other struggled to jam the pistol’s muzzle against the old trapper’s belly. Just as Titus was twisting away, his right hand dragging down on the knife’s handle through flesh and sinew, he heard the click of the hammer spring, felt the hammer fall against his arm at the same moment his sleeve was trapped beneath the frizzen, preventing flint from striking steel and igniting power in the pan.
As Bass landed on his hip, the man went limp, crumpling atop dead legs. The guard hit his knees, staring down at the long, jagged gash high in his abdomen where a dark and shiny gush spilled over the front of his britches. Rocking for a heartbeat, the man tumbled backward.
As Scratch wrenched the tomahawk from the back of his belt and rolled onto his knees, he watched the guard arch his back in a brief leg-twitching spasm, yanking the knife free of his chest before he collapsed and moved no more. Bass got to his feet, took a single step, and laid one of his moccasins on the man’s wrist, pinning the hand against the ground. Bending over, he pried open the guard’s sticky fingers and reclaimed his knife. After wiping it on the man’s gingham shirt, he stuffed it back into the empty scabbard.
For a few moments he crouched there among the stunted jack pine, listening, his good eye searching the darkness. Maybe no one had heard the man’s call for help. Perhaps Sweete had already seen to the only aid the guard could have summoned. He waited a few heartbeats more while the animals stopped snorting at the scent of fresh blood on the breeze, then knelt over the guard.
“You stupid idjit,” Bass whispered as he leaned over and seized the back of the man’s collar, dragging the
