Death Rattle (42 page)

Scratch swallowed the lump of sentiment clogging his throat and said, “Damn fine to hear Josiah’s made a life for hisself. Just the way it ’pears you done right here for yourself too, Mathew.”

“Had us a place on up the Arkansas ’bout six miles for almost a year,” Kinkead explained. “Started raising buffier calves to sell.”

“Buffler calves?” he snorted in disbelief.

“Just like milk cows,” Mathew said proudly. “I’d tromp east onto the plains a ways, steal a few li’l red ones from their wet-teat mamas, and drag ’em back here.”

“How the hell—”

“Had ’em nurse a milk cow, Scratch,” Kinkead explained. “I had me a few good cows took over feeding them li’l calves. And come next spring, Teresita gonna put in her garden again—raise some corn and beans, just like we did upstream. Eat some and sell the rest.”

“Who the devil you gonna sell your corn to?”

“Bents allays buy good,” Mathew said. “But the reason I moved down here and throwed in with these others is so we could be here for overland travelers.”

Bass chuckled lightly. “Now I know you’re pulling my
leg, Mathew! Raising yourself buffler calves and selling corn to—what’d you call ’em?”

“They’re overland travelers, Scratch. Folks moving up and down the front of the mountains now. Our day’s gone, don’t you see. It’s a differ’nt time awready. Country’s changing.”

“Travelers? You mean traders—like Vaskiss and Sublette. Got ’em that post up on the South Platte—”

“Settler folks, Scratch.” And Mathew laid a thick arm across Titus’s shoulder as he swept the other arm in a half circle. “We just got the post finished last week, and lookee what’s here awready. Damn, if it ain’t got the makin’s of a real settlement right where we stand. Atween the lot of us, got chickens and cows and goats too, ’long with my buffler calves. Too late of the season to put in the fields now, but come spring we’ll be plowing up that meadow there, and turning that’un over there too.”

Bass’s eyes followed the sweep of Kinkead’s arm. Dark-skinned women and children, along with a mess of domesticated animals. Same as it would be down to San Fernando de Taos. Damn near how it was back east at Westport where the Santa Fe traders began their journey to the Mexican settlements. No, this here wasn’t like a nomadic village of the Crow or Snake, Ute or Arapaho. What Mathew Kinkead and the others were doing here was putting down roots. Deep and abiding roots.

Here in a country that of a time had known only the hoofbeats and grunts of migrating buffalo, along with the stampede of frightened antelope, not to mention the rutted tracks of countless travois, lodge circles, and fire pits, all of which come next rainy season would be washed into oblivion and the prairie would be brand new … here Titus Bass looked around him and realized his days were not without number.

Not only had the first of those goddamned sodbusters already crossed the mountains on their way to Oregon country, but here before his very eyes the face of his beloved mountains was changing. As much as he hated to
admit it, Scratch knew there were changes coming to his high and broad and beautiful heartland—changes that made him hurt to his very marrow.

Nothing would ever be the same.

Nothing would ever be good again.

Puny as it was, that little Fountain Creek—at the mouth of which Kinkead and his four partners erected their Pueblo—just happened to be the Arkansas River’s biggest tributary between its source high in the Rockies to a point more than halfway in the river’s languid travels across the prairie. Their Pueblo stood at the foot of this wall of mountains, where a man gazed out upon the abrupt and spectacular end to more than a thousand miles of Great Plains.

It was a place far better than most for any five men to raise up their wilderness post.

Back in the spring of that year, 1842, Mathew Kinkead had thrown in with Robert Fisher, George Simpson, Francisco Conn, and Joseph Mantz—unlike Mathew, not one of them a veteran of the mountain fur trade. What did distinguish the four, however, was the fact that none of Kinkead’s partners was afraid to hang their asses over the fire. They were the sort who recognized this was not only a land of gigantic risks but a land offering unbelievable riches to those who would seize opportunity by the balls and refuse to let go.

As Titus Bass looked around himself at the Pueblo, appraising the men who had erected this adobe settlement, once again he was struck in the face with the cold reality that his was a bygone era. He belonged to an age already withering like last year’s willow, a way of life now struggling to draw in its last breath … sucking into its chest that unmistakable final death rattle.

“Damn me if it ain’t Titus Bass for sure!” exclaimed the man at Mathew Kinkead’s elbow as the two stepped into the firelight late that evening.

He squinted, not sure after all the intervening years, and the darkness, and the toll time took on a man. “Beckwith?”

“In the flesh, you ol’ dog!” Jim Beckwith lunged ahead and seized Scratch in his arms.

They pounded one another breathless for a moment, then each took a step back to gaze at one other.

“You was working for Vaskiss and Sublette up on the Platte, last time I heard tell of you,” Bass declared.

“I was. Them two had me trading with the Arapahos for robes. Afore they bucked out of the buffler business,” Beckwith admitted with a wag of his head. “Bents is too big a outfit for the small-timers to take on in this here country.”

“Working up there for Vaskiss and Sublette’s outfit, you ever come across a big, tall pilgrim goes by the name of Shadrach Sweete?”

“Shad! Hell if I didn’t!” Beckwith cheered. “A square shooter, ’bout as fair as they come when he’s dealing with the Injuns.”

“So Shad ain’t working for ’em no more?”

“Vaskiss gone out of business while back,” Beckwith declared. “Ain’t no more. When they folded, I headed south to Taos—”

“What become of Shadrach?” Bass interrupted.

“The day Vaskiss pulled out with his wagons and left that fort empty, Shadrach rode off hisself.”

Titus leaned in close. “Where to?”

With a shrug of his shoulders, Beckwith answered, “Dunno. Just lit out.”

“What direction?”

Beckwith stared at his toes a moment in contemplation before answering, “South by east.”

“Heading for Bents Fort?”

“Nawww.” Jim sounded definite on that score. “After what they done to run the small outfits off the Platte, Shad didn’t wanna have nothing to do with the Bents,” Beckwith observed.

“He say what he had in mind afore he took off?”

This time Beckwith half shut his eyes and raised his chin to the sky, as if conjuring up the memory. After a few moments those eyes flew open and his face brightened. “Said he was fixin’ to look for the Shiyans. I asked him if’n he was gonna trade with ’em or what, and he just said he needed to scare up some folks to take him in while he figgered out what he was gonna do. Then he rode off and was gone.”

Damn, Bass thought as he reflected on it. “That’s been some time now, ain’t it, Jim? Hope to hell no one’s gone and raised that big sprout’s hair.”

“It’s gonna take a passel of niggers to rip off Shad Sweete’s topknot!” And the mulatto grinned. “Mathew here tells me you and Bill Williams been out to California for horses.”

Titus nodded. “Brung us out a passel of ’em.”

“Solitaire tell you ’bout the trip me and him made to California with Peg-Leg?”

“You was with ’em three years ago?”

With a nod Beckwith scratched at his chin whiskers neatly trimmed into a goatee below a bushy horseshoe mustache. “We brung some horses out then. So Peg-Leg was with you fellas this ride too?”

Scratch watched how some of the other raiders at the fire glanced up at him when Beckwith uttered his question. “Peg-Leg and Solitaire … they had ’em a argeement on the way back. Ended up splitting the blankets back in Digger country.”

With a doleful wag of his head, Beckwith said, “Bound to happen, with them two mule-headed bastards anyway. A outfit can’t have two booshways like them. So
what’d Peg-Leg do to make hisself a burr under Ol’ Bill’s saddle blanket?”

“A matter of killing a white man,” Scratch declared directly. “So Bill run Peg-Leg off.”

“Smith … killed one of your men?”

“About come to it,” Titus admitted.

“Hell, there’s always fights in a outfit like that,” Beckwith replied. “Sore feelings, ruffled feathers—”

“If’n it been differ’nt,” Titus interrupted, “Solitaire wouldn’t had no call to run Peg-Leg off the way he done.”

Jim wagged his head, not understanding. “What the hell business Williams got running Peg-Leg off?”

“Already too much bad blood not to,” Scratch explained.

“Damn that Bill Williams anyways!” Beckwith grumbled sourly. “He always was a cantankerous ol’ bunghole of a bastard. I s’pose he’s already told you how he never took to me, and that’s the God’s truth. Clear on back to the early years, or on that trip out to California neither. Fact is, the two of us just rubbed each other the wrong way right from the start, natural’, ’thout even trying hard to work up a lather ’bout me hating him or him hating me.”

“I s’pose that’s why some folks should never cross trails,” Scratch commented.

“You say your outfit come here with Bill—where’s that soft-headed son of a bitch now so I’ll make certain to steer clear of him?”

“ ‘Round camp somewheres,” Titus declared. “You just pushing on through, headed off somewheres, Jim?”

With a playful grin, Beckwith confessed, “I come up from Taos to open a trading house with my partner, fella named Stephen Lee.”

“Trading house—here?”

“Yep,” the mulatto answered. “We aim to have us a trade room in this here Pueblo. But, hell—I wanna hear what all you been up to in Absaroka. When I found Mathew was bringing out two jugs to have some talk
with you fellas ’round a fire, I just natural’ invited myself along! Let’s sit and wet our tooters.”

Kinkead plopped himself down on a smooth-barked cottonwood, setting before him two half-gallon clay jugs of Simeon Turley’s pale
aquardiente,
transported north from the Taos valley in carts filled with hay to absorb all shocks. “Say, Scratch—you won’t believe what Jim told me just a bit ago.”

Bass turned to Beckwith. “Some news from Taos?”

“Might say,” Mathew explained. “He got married down to Taos!”

Titus inquired, “That where you come from—Taos?”

“Me and my partner, Lee, yep,” Beckwith said. “Brung my new wife up here with us.”

“Sure thought you had your fill of wives up there in Absorkee country,” Bass snorted with laughter.

“Them was some shinin’ times, they was,” Beckwith replied while some of the others laughed with him. “But Jim Beckwith’s not in the blanket now, so’ I took me on just one gal in the proper Mex way—Louisa Sandoval. Come from a fine Taos family.”

“You married for serious, eh?” Kinkead asked. “Gone and hitched in the church an’ all?”

Beckwith wiped his mouth after a long gulp of liquor, then said, “She’s full Mex, Mathew—so you know you gotta marry ’em up right.”

Scratch turned to face Kinkead. “What with your new wife, Mathew—how you come to wanna skeedaddle out of Taos?”

“Year ago spring, soon as the snow was melting off the road north, I brung my family up to the Arkansas,” the big man declared. “It was time to find me a place didn’t have so many Mexicans.”

“Winters ago, back when you split the blankets with Jack Hatcher’s bunch and give up on the mountains for Rosa an’ a feather tick, I never would’ve wagered you for the sort to
ever
put Taos behind you,” Titus confessed.

“True that was—back then. Was a time I figgered I had me a home in Taos for the rest of my days,” Kinkead
sighed. “But, the last two years or so, the air ain’t smelled near as sweet in the San Fernando Valley.”

Scratch accepted the jug back from Beckwith. “That ain’t nothing new, Mathew. Them Mex was allays squeezing down on us
Americanos
with their laws and taxes anyways. Taking half our beaver when it damn well suited ’em—”

“This was something differ’nt,” Kinkead warned stiffly, swiping the back of a hand across his mouth glistening with drops of the potent, opaque liquor.

“Dust it off,” Bass demanded as he passed the clay jug on to George Simpson.

Mathew’s eyes grew cold. “First off, word drifted in to Taos and Santa Fe that the Texians were coming to invade us.”

Elias Kersey rocked forward, his eyes gleaming with intense interest. “Texicans?”

“Texians—used to be Americans. Folks what got their own country east of here,” Mathew began. “They call it a republic. Won it away from the Mexican Army a half dozen or so years back. A bunch of Tennessee boys, Kentuckians too—just like me an’ you, Titus Bass.”

Reuben Purcell waved a bony hand with impatience, asking, “So why the hell was these Texians coming to invade Taos and Santa Fe?”

“We had one report comin’ in after ’nother, said they had ’em a big army coming our way,” Kinkead explained.