Back and forth he looked, then decided on Jenks. Closer than Benjamin. Bass swallowed down the burning pain in his hip, setting the butt of the pistol on top of the rocks. Hunching up behind the weapon, he aimed it right as Jenks brought up the muzzle of his rifle and fired an instant before Bass’s ball slammed into the bully’s chest, just below the throat.
Titus was sinking to the ground and dragging the pouch toward him, sensing in the pit of him that one of the bastards would get him now. He didn’t want her to see it—lose a son, then her father too.
“Now you’re mine, old man!” promised that disembodied voice of the horseman.
Plug came out of the powder horn, and he spilled the black grains down the muzzle of the pistol.
The hoofbeats slowed, then stopped. Then there were footsteps as the voice came at him again. “Hargrove wants you real bad—had everything going his way till you came in the picture.”
Desperation overtook him as his fingers scrambled for a ball from his pouch. Pushing it into the muzzle with his thumb, he yanked out the ramrod and drove it home just as another voice yelled.
“Outta the way!”
Whirling with the pistol, he found the wounded man standing just outside the rocks, his rifle wavering as he growled at Amanda. Something in the bully’s desperate eyes told Bass he was going to shoot anyway—
But Titus fired his pistol instead, sending ball and that short ramrod both toward the target.
“That means you’re empty now, old man!”
He spun around with the empty weapon, realizing Benjamin was right. Dead right. Shifting the pistol to his left hand, Titus reached at the small of his back for a knife.
With a wicked and broadening smile, Benjamin stopped, as if enjoying this moment. When the bully brought the rifle to his shoulder and took aim at Titus down the long barrel, he laughed and said, “Looks like you just run outta chances—”
With the rest of his words swallowed by a sudden gunshot that made Titus flinch in surprise.
NINETEEN
The sun blazed down hot as a new blister now that it had ducked below the wide brim of his old felt hat.
Late afternoon and it was beginning to feel as if Shadrach had been dragging him for days already. Titus shifted his head slightly to get the sun out of his eyes and spotted Amanda bouncing on the horse she was riding off to the side of the travois. The whole bottom half of her would be sore by the time they reached the wagon camp, Bass thought with an anguished sigh. He’d never known a white woman who rode back east—the only ones were rich and fancy ladies perched atop their sidesaddle rigs as if they were the queens of all they chanced to survey. Every other gal he could lay a memory on had preferred a buggy, carriage, wagon, or cart to straddling a thousand-pound beast.
Scratch gritted his teeth again as the travois poles chattered over the rough ground and bounced across the stumps of sagebrush Shad did his best to avoid as he led Scratch’s horse northwest through the ancient lava fields, following the rutted tracks of this trail of dreamers and schemers, sojourners and sodbusters making for Oregon country. Near as he could recollect, the last time he was shot as bad as this was back in the early spring of ’34, the doing of Silas Cooper. Bents’ big adobe lodge down on the Arkansas River.
But over a multitude of seasons, round balls, knife steel, stone and iron arrowtips … they had all profaned his flesh. Yet, he had healed, his body becoming a veritable war map of his adventures, a litany of his hairbreadth escapes from the long reach of death.
Closing his eyes, he swallowed down the acid taste of gall that came from the continued hammering his hip was taking … and wondered how long he could manage to be so goddamned lucky. Just how much longer would it be before the last of his luck ran out? Scratch felt so damned old, more so now that he was unable to fork a saddle horse, deeply insulted that he need be carried on this bouncing travois. Luck? That was a laugh! Many were the times that another had stepped in to pull his ass from the fire. Likely there’d come a day when no one would be around to yank the hand of death from Titus Bass’s throat.
He clenched his eyes shut against the throbbing pain and remembered the others who had saved his hash. At its best, dying would someday be a one-man job no one else could do for him.
“What the devil you doin’ here, Shadrach?” he had sputtered when the big man clambered down from his perch atop the rocks, from where he had knocked Benjamin down with his big .62-caliber flintlock.
Sweete knelt to provide his friend a little shade. His eyes grinned. “Come back ’cause I was getting a mite lonely for you.”
“Ain’t you the honey-tongue sweet talker now,” he had said, shifting position slightly, gritting his teeth.
“Hurt bad?”
“Pains me like hell,” he admitted as Amanda settled next to him in a rustle of petticoats.
“You bleedin’?”
Titus shook his head and grinned. “Cain’t tell, not rightly—ever’thing’s behint me.”
“Ball broke any bones?”
And he shook his head again. “Nothin’ broke but my pride, Shadrach. Bastards shot me where I sit.”
That got a big smile from Sweete. “Lemme take a look at you.”
The two of them had rolled him over onto the good hip before Shad took to prodding.
“Maybeso Amanda could turn her head away” he grumbled, “while you got my bare white ass pointin’ at the sky!”
“It’s nothing I haven’t seen a thousand times before,” she had scolded.
Sweete chuckled at that, which had made Titus all the more grumpy.
“Don’t appear you can fork a saddle, Scratch.”
He squinted in the bright morning light. “What you got in mind?”
With a shrug, Sweete stood. “I’ll fetch you some water, then I’ll go see what I can find for to make you a drag.”
When he again closed his eyes to the jarring pain of each bounce the travois took, Titus remembered how he had waited a heartbeat after that faraway shot, sensing it hadn’t come from the attacker. Then cautiously inched his head up to find Benjamin stopped in his tracks, staring down at the blood starting to gush from the big exit wound in his chest while his knees turned to water. Pasty-faced with shock, he spilled forward, his nose in the sand, fingers twitching as he let out his last explosive breath.
Back among those rocks Scratch had warned the children to avoid, he had watched the shadow move, then a figure emerge: tall and shaggy, his shoulders almost wide enough to take the span of a hickory ax handle. Shadrach Sweete stepped through the sparse shadow provided by some low brush, emerging into the intense light of midmorning. Reloading as he moved toward his old friend.
Relief washing over him, Titus had sunk to the ground. “We’re gonna be fine now, Amanda.”
While he was out fetching some of that sulfurous water for Scratch to wet his tongue, Shad said he had looked over the attackers. “Your aim gettin’ poor?” he asked as he knelt over Bass.
“What’s that mean?”
“Had to finish one of ’em off,” Sweete announced. “You didn’t hit ’im clean.”
But there were four bodies, and that meant four horses. So Shad and Amanda started in cutting up three of the saddles to make short strips of leather they used to lash together a narrow travois, just wide enough for one man—a contraption that bounced even rougher because its poles weren’t wide. After stringing together a network of short crosspieces, they laid on the four saddle blankets, all they had to put under Bass when they were ready to set off. On his one good leg, he had hobbled next to Sweete, out of the cluster of low rocks, reaching the drag, where he stopped and turned, then slowly sank across the travois on that one good hip of his. His side was growing numb by the time the sun reached midsky, dead from the waist down by the time Shad boomed that they were approaching the wagon camp.
“You got a grand woman,” Sweete declared. “That Waits-by-the-Water is a grand woman.”
