done following dinner, at least until young Jackrabbit had fallen asleep in his father’s arms in a toasty spot near Charlotte’s fireplace where they all sat on stools and drank a rich, sweet mixture of Mexican chocolate seasoned with cinnamon. Their bellies filled with such delicious warmth, it wasn’t long before Flea and Magpie began to get drowsy too—their eyelids growing heavy as lead and their heads starting to sag. Titus, and Waits shuffled the sleepy children off to the wheelwright’s room, right next to the residual warmth of the forge. Scratch and Dick Green had settled the family in that shop since the wheelwright himself had marched off to the south with Bill Bransford to exact revenge for the murder of Charles Bent.
“He ain’t gonna be back no time soon,” Green had prodded the trapper, who was reluctant to bed down inside the shop. “You an’ yours stay right here long as you want. Likely he won’t be back for to work again till winter’s fair done.”
“Thankee for the offer,” Bass had replied as they shook out the robes and thick wool blankets across the narrow clay floor. “Maybeso only two nights, till we push on.”
“Stay longer, why don’cha? Charlotte, she’d love the company—your woman and the chirrun too,” Green pleaded. “There ain’t much wimmins out to these parts, so my Charlotte sure do get the lonelies for a soft face to talk to.”
Titus had straightened and stood beside the pile of blankets. “I know that feelin’ … the lonelies. But, long as Charlotte’s got you, Dick—and you got her, neither of you ever gonna be lonely, no matter where you go.”
“But my Miss Charlotte—she likes to talk to other wimmins.”
“We’ll let ’em gab an’ palaver much as they want for the next two days,” Titus promised.
“That’s right,” Dick had agreed reluctantly. “They can allays talk some more next time you come by this here mud fort.”
Laying his gnarled hand with its painful joints on Green’s shoulder, Scratch had explained, “I lay this’ll be my last trip here, Dick. Don’t see a reason to wander this far south ever again, now that I saw to what I needed to down in Taos.”
“Wh-where you gonna trade, you don’t come south?”
“I s’pose there’ll allays be a trader’s post on the Yellowstone,” he had confessed as they started back to Charlotte’s kitchen last night. “Don’t make much matter to me anyways. I think I’ve figgered out how to get by ’thout needing a hull passel of trade goods. The less I need a trader, the better off I’ll be.”
That morning over coffee as the few fort employees left behind began to stir with activity, and Jackson’s dragoons came and went with steaming cups of Charlotte’s hearty brew and plates of her fluffy, piping-hot corn muffins, Scratch told the Greens tales of that north country where his family belonged. Now, more than ever, as the army, and emigrants, and those religious pilgrims too were all crowding in on what had long been a quiet and ofttimes lonely land. When he could stuff no more in his belly, Scratch got up and moved his stool back against the wall.
“Keep a sharp eye out for them young’uns of mine,” he warned the cook. “When they get around to rolling out, a hungry bunch gonna come runnin’ in here to clean up all your bacon and corn dodgers.”
Dusting her hands on her big white apron, she beamed. “That’s why Charlotte be the cook, Mr. Bass. So’s I can fill up bellies till they’re bustin’!”
“You tell them young’uns of mine I’ll be back after I’ve looked up an ol’ friend down to the Cheyenne camp,” he explained as he pulled on his coat and started toward the door. “I figger you’ll keep ’em fed and warm right here till I come back.”
“I can allays find something for your chirrun to do for me ’round here,” Charlotte vowed. “’Specially that girl of yours. My, oh, my—she’s gonna be a sure-fire handful of ring-tail cats one of these days, you mind my word, Mr. Bass. She’s got that light of trouble sparkin’ in her eye!”
Didn’t he know that already, Titus thought as he shouldered the corral gate closed, then strode off toward the far grove of cottonwood on foot, scuffing through the old snow in those thick, hair-on winter moccasins. He damn well realized how Magpie had her father wrapped around her little finger, what with the way she had learned to flash her pretty eyes at him all the time. Come a day when she’d be batting those eyes at some young buck of a suitor. Leastways, he had begun to hope it would be a young warrior … and not some half-baked, green-hided, soaked-behind-the-ears white youngster fresh out of the settlements.
Back when he had first taken a shine to Waits-by-the-Water, Titus Bass was notching his ninth winter in the mountains. With their daughter’s mixed blood, Magpie deserved a man bred to these mountains, and not no snot- nosed young’un who didn’t know prime from stinkum.
Three older Cheyenne men stood off to the side of the first lodges as Scratch came across the open ground. He was carrying no rifle or smoothbore—surely they could see that. All three wrapped in a buffalo robe, the Cheyenne watched him warily as he approached—he was sure they had a good suspicion that he wouldn’t have come without some weapon on him somewhere. When he was less than twenty feet away, Titus stopped and held one arm up in greeting. Then he pulled off a mitten and quickly yanked at the long ties that held the flaps of his elkhide coat closed. There he patted the big pistol stuffed in the front of his belt.
The moment one of the trio nodded and started his way, the other two shuffled off in different directions. Bass stopped in front of the camp guard, realizing he didn’t know a damned word of the man’s language— wondering for a moment if any of these three had been among those Sioux raiders who had chased him and Shad Sweete down when they were on their way to Fort Davy Crockett in Brown’s Hole. Too late for him to worry about them recognizing an old, gray-headed trapper from that many summers ago.
“Sweete?” he asked, using his friend’s name.
The Cheyenne barely shrugged.
“Big man,” and Titus held up a flattened hand half a foot over their heads. “Big, big man.” As the warrior’s eyes warily studied that hand, Bass brought both his arms up, fingers tapping his own shoulders, then moved his hands out all that much wider to show the wide span of Shadrach Sweete’s muscular frame.
With no more than the slightest gesture, the warrior in the buffalo robe indicated he wanted the white man to follow him into camp. Follow him he did, scuffing through the length of the Cheyenne camp scattered among the old Cottonwood growing back from the annual floodplain of the Arkansas. At the far edge of the treeline, the Cheyenne stopped and pointed out a young woman patiently trudging around the side of a squat, small-flapped hide lodge. She had a small, bowlegged infant slowly taking some first, tentative steps beside her.
“Sweete?” Bass asked. “She know about Sweete?”
“Sweete,” the man repeated, speaking for the first time. Then he motioned for the white man to go on before the warrior pulled his hand beneath the buffalo robe’s warmth once more and turned away.
“Sweete?” Titus asked as he approached the lodge, immediately drawing the young woman’s attention.
She cocked her head to the side and repeated, “Sweete?”
“Yes—he here?”
“Shad-rach Sweete?” She repeated the three syllables with practiced certainty.
“You know Shadrach, do you?” he said with a grin, relieved. Then he started for the door of the lodge, figuring his old friend was inside.
“Sweete,” she said, stepping between Bass and the open doorway as a young boy appeared from the firelit interior. Pointing off toward the far willows, she indicated a patch of open ground where some more of the band’s ponies were grazing on grass blown clear of crusty snow.
“He’s not here? That it? Sweete’s gone off to the ponies?”
She bent her head this way, then that way, almost the way a dog would listen intently to its master’s words. “Sweete go.”
“Yeah, Sweete go to the ponies?”
“Goddamn!” the voice thundered behind him. “Can’t a man go take a piss ’thout some mule-headed idjit come callin’ after him?”
“As I live an’ breathe!” Bass gushed as he wheeled around, spotting Shadrach threading his way through the bare-limbed cottonwood. “So you stand up and take a piss just like a real man now, do you?”
“Shit—what would you know about real men, you half-growed strip of spit-out mulehide!”
“Don’t you ever say nothin’ mean agin no mules!” Scratch roared back as the man who easily went half-a-foot again over six feet tall, just as Sweete enfolded the shorter man in his big arms.
The smell of Shadrach—a free man’s mix of woodsmoke and gun oil, burnt powder and stale tobacco both— how it evoked so many bittersweet memories that Bass felt his eyes begin to sting. As his old friend loosened his
