A shadowy form appeared at the shelter’s low doorway, bent at the waist and knees, as the stranger stepped into a patch of shade and stood. A woman!
She straightened and shook her clothes around her—a long leather skirt that fell just below her knees and an ill-fitting cloth shirt once of a bright calico pattern, but now so crusted with grime and fire soot that it was hard for Titus to make out what color it had ever been. She wore no moccasins, her feet coated with a thick layer of ground-in dirt. She pushed back her unkempt hair and began to brush at it with a porcupine tail that had its quills clipped short, slowly and painfully yanking at the ratty knots, beginning to shake loose the bits of grass and ash that had collected there. She was not a young thing, he could see. Her hair hung well flecked with the snows of something more than forty winters, and her breasts sagged with not only the pull of age but the mouths of babes who had suckled at them what had to be a lifetime ago.
Perhaps there was a child inside that shelter; if not a child, then a youngster not quite become an adult—
A second figure stepped from the dark interior and emerged clumsily, one hand clutching onto the left side of the shelter to steady himself. Barechested, his legs naked as well, and not wearing any moccasins, the man tugged at his long breechclout, straightening it on the narrow strap of leather tied around his waist, then adjusting his manhood beneath the front fold of what had once been a bright red piece of trader’s wool. The bright colors of selvage at the edges of the breechclout were faded, frayed, and almost indistinguishable with soot and filth. He rubbed the heels of both palms into his eyes, then spread his fingers apart to push back what unruly sprigs of his graying hair had refused to stay bound within his long braids also dusted with flecks of dried grass.
“Where is the third one?” Flea asked. “Inside?”
“Wait, and we will see.”
The woman walked to the edge of the bushes, past the ground where the three horses raised their heads and followed her toward the hillside. There she yanked up the bottom of her short skirt, one side after another, raising it to her hips, then squatted and moistened the ground, unaware of the father and son across that narrow ribbon of water. When she stood, shifting the skirt back around her legs, and started back to the shelter, the three horses remained near the bottom of the hill to crop at the grass.
Quietly lifting the flap to his shooting pouch, Bass pulled out the spyglass and snapped out its three sections. He quickly looked over those three animals, inspecting their muzzles, manes, backs, and tails. These were not the proud possessions of a warrior: groomed, painted, a tail bound up for battle. All three showed their age, and two of them clearly had healing sores on their backs from an ill-fitting saddle. Slowly he dragged the spyglass across to his left, hoping to get himself a better look at these two aging and disheveled strangers.
He stopped first on the woman as she took down from a tree branch two small carcasses he had not noticed hanging there before. Rabbits; gutted, but unskinned. Plopping them beside a lifeless fire pit, she bent over the game and picked up a small knife, using it to slowly work the hide off the meat. As she squatted over those rabbits, Scratch studied her—unable to make out what tribe she was from her manner of dress or decorations. But he could only assume these two had to be Shoshone. This was, after all, near the northern border of Snake country, but close to the southern extent of Crow land as well. Still, in the absence of lodge symbols, pony paintings, or distinguishable hairstyles, Titus could only guess the couple had to be Shoshone.
When he inched the spyglass on to the left and found the man settling onto the trampled grass, Bass twisted the sections of the tube together until he brought the stranger’s face into sharper focus. The man leaned back on his elbows in the shade and closed his eyes as if relishing that particular moment. He spoke to the woman without looking at her or opening his eyes. The sound of his voice drifted across the creek to the rocks and willow where Bass and Flea lay in hiding, pricking a remembrance, perhaps even a warning, at the top of Scratch’s spine, there at the base of his skull. He held the spyglass as steady as he could, concentrating on that aging face. It had been so long, so very long, that he could not be certain … because the last time he had laid eyes on the man was more than—how many now? More than fourteen winters ago. How the years had taken a toll on the old warrior.
“I know him,” Titus whispered, not taking the spyglass from his right eye.
“The man?” Flea asked.
As Scratch watched him through the spyglass, the man’s eyes suddenly popped open and he gazed intently across the narrow creek, slowly turning his head as he studied the base of the hill where Bass and his son lay in hiding. It was clear the warrior had heard something of the unseen spies. He spoke to the woman, and she looked up, peering across the creek too as she wearily got to her feet. The man slid his legs under him and stood, backing toward the shelter as the woman hurried behind him, quickly ducking through the low opening. In a moment her arm appeared again, handing out an old trade gun to the man. Just before Bass took the spyglass from his eye, he saw how poor a weapon the firearm was—repaired with rawhide wraps at both the wrist right behind the lock, and again along the forestock, just in front of the rear sight. Both crude repairs clearly showing signs of age.
Titus put his lips to Flea’s ear and whispered, “Stay down until I tell you to show yourself.”
“Where is the third one?” asked the boy. “Should I watch for him?”
Sliding his knees under him, Bass said, “I don’t think there is a third stranger. Just that old woman and a man who was once an old friend. One who became an old enemy long ago.”
As he stood, Scratch raised his rifle in the air, held high at the end of his arm. He wasn’t certain when he shouted across the narrow creek if he had remembered the smattering of the Snake tongue he had learned that winter he was healing, after the Arapaho had ambushed him and taken part of his scalp. Maybe enough of what he said would make sense to the old man who readied that ancient trade gun to shoot and to the woman who crawled out of the shelter with a brace of horse pistols.
“I mean no harm!” he hurled his voice, waiting for the low echo to end. “We are old friends.”
“Who is this claiming we are old friends?”
Cautiously, he inched into the open, still holding the rifle in the air. “See this? I cannot shoot this weapon at you.”
“Answer my question: Who are you?”
“Look at me and tell me you don’t remember,” he urged the warrior. “I know you are called Slays in the Night.”
That seemed to stun the Indian a moment. Eventually he said, “Who knows my old name from so many winters ago?”
“Titus Bass!”
The man appeared to work that over in his mind the way a wolf bitch would work round and round making a bed for herself when it came time to birth her pups. Finally he demanded, “Let me see more of you!”
Scratch slowly lowered his rifle and moved more to his left, coming into the open, knowing he was putting faith in this old friend made into an old enemy from so long ago. It was faith and nothing more, because he had no solid reason to trust Slays in the Night. Nothing more than the sense of it in his gut that he could give the warrior this benefit of the doubt.
Even though the Shoshone did not lower his weapon, the tone of his voice was no longer strident. The way it had sounded when he cursed Titus Bass that morning in Brown’s Park.* And now he spoke in a stuttered English, “You not dead, Titus Bass?”
“You learned to talk some American, Slays in the Night?” he asked as he lowered the butt of his rifle to the ground and crossed his wrists over the muzzle, staring across the stream.
“Some little, yes.”
“Last time I see’d you—said you was gonna kill me next time you laid eyes on me,” Titus declared. “You still fixed on killin’ me?”
He mulled on those foreign words a few moments, then looked down at his old trade gun a heartbeat before he lowered it, suspending it in his hand at the end of his arm. “No. I am too tired, too old, kill you now. Maybe long winters ago. Too tired now kill Titus Bass.”
As he finished speaking English, the old woman said something to him in low tones and he turned slightly toward her to mumble.
Seeing how she lowered her pistols and turned for the doorway, Titus asked, “Is that your wife? The woman who makes the good-tastin’ pemeecan?”
Shaking his head sadly, Slays in the Night explained, “No. Not this woman. Old wife now … gone. Other wife, she …” and then he grew frustrated that he could not explain in English. Speaking Shoshone instead, he said, “That wife so many summers ago, she left Slays in the Night. That’s not really right. It is better to say that my old wife
