Death Rattle (60 page)

“Not only is he totally without any abilities as an honest businessman, but—he’s a scoundrel of the first order!” Meldrum roared his disapproval. “Cheated whoever got within reach or was in his way: the Crow, the company, his factors—”

“Last time I see’d Jim Beckwith, was two year ago,” Titus confided. “He and a few other Americans built themselves a small trading post on the Arkansas.”

“Near the Bent brothers’ fort?” Meldrum inquired.

“Upriver a good ways, closer to the mountains.”

Meldrum snarled, “I say, let that southern country have him so the thieving bastard won’t ever show his lying face up here again.”

“Far as I know he’s settling in down there, for a fact,” Titus told them. “Got him a Mex wife, even opened up a li’l trade store too.”

“Is he even aware that some of the Crow mean to kill him if he ever returns to this country?” Meldrum disclosed.

That shocked Titus. “W-what for?”

“They think he betrayed them by living with them for so long, then suddenly leaving them to return to civilization,” Kipp explained.

“That’s right,” Meldrum added. “A few—not all, mind you—but some of the harshest warriors and headmen would love to get their hands on him, Mr. Bass.
Believe me, I married into the same band Beckwith ruined with his shameless scams. There’s no affection for him among the Crow people now.”

“Damn shame,” Scratch brooded, thinking how Bill Williams appeared to hate Beckwith with this very same fury. “I knowed Jim Beckwith for almost as long as I been out here in the mountains. Shame to see what haps to a fella when he turns his back on them what was once his friends.”

Many were the times since that autumn journey to Fort Alexander when Titus reflected on how circumstances changed the folks around him—when he didn’t consider he was any different. Not from that first winter with the Yuta,
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and not from the time of his first contact with these Crow … Scratch looked back to weigh the possibility that he might have treated anyone less than the way he wanted to be treated himself. If there ever had been a code among men out here in the mountains, that was its evenhanded preamble.

But as the fates undermined the economic structure of their lives, Scratch had watched the long-held code splinter. No longer could a white man count on the help of another without question. White men stole not only from white men—just as the big fur companies did day in and day out—but desperate white men had taken to stealing from their red allies.

That whole unspoken code of honor lay in shambles by the time Scratch had followed Bill Williams and Peg-Leg Smith west to California. It was clear that the new watchword was now:
every man for himself.
No more camaraderie. No longer any sense of that fraternal brotherhood he had experienced in the heady heyday of the beaver trade.

As Yellow Belly’s band turned around on the Yellowstone and started up the Bighorn in the last autumn moon, something struck him for the first time. While a right-thinking man knew he never could recapture what
had been … Scratch held out the possibility that, at the very least, he might well revisit old memories. And while his most glorious days were behind him now, he decided a man was due a chance to relive those seasons through reminiscence with old friends.

Not once that following winter did he ever give any serious thought to heading back east to find Hames Kingsbury or any of Ebenezer Zane’s other Kentucky riverboatmen.
^*
Those who hadn’t suffered a violent death in the intervening thirty-five winters surely weren’t the sort of men who left any traces of their whereabouts, from New Orleans at the mouth of the Mississippi all the way north to the upper waters of the Ohio River.

Then too, no man could argue there was any need of hunting down the three who had stolen a fortune in furs from him back when he first came to the mountains. More than ten years ago he stumbled across Bud Tuttle, who had become a Santa Fe trader, then hunted Billy Hooks all the way to dockside in St. Louis, finding that poor demented soul was dying fast from the venereal disease eating away at his brain. But the sweetest revenge came when Scratch watched Silas Cooper die with his own eyes.
^†

And there was no sense in trying to turn back the calendar in hoping to run down his old partner Jack Hatcher. Any reunion they might have shared had been snuffed out by a Blackfoot bullet in Pierre’s Hole. Not to mention how Asa McAfferty had gripped fate itself by the throat and strangled the life out of it high in a snowy bowl at the end of a long manhunt.
^††

But there had been a man who had stood at his shoulder through one skirmish and ordeal after another, a man who had lived through some of the last glory days of Titus Bass. And he was still alive … at least according to Mathew Kinkead’s claim. How long ago was it? Back
in the fall of ’42, that’s when Kinkead declared the man was doing well for himself.

“Yes,” Waits-by-the-Water said with a smile as harsh winds gusted a new snow outside their lodge, “I remember your friend, Josiah Paddock. Do you remember that you believed I loved him?”

“I was pretty stupid back then.”

“You were all I wanted, Ti-tuzz.”

“I can still remember what a fool love can make of a man.”

“Love did not make you a fool,” she corrected. “It was jealousy. Blind jealousy.
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After all these winters, is your heart telling you that it must apologize to me again for thinking I did not love you?”

He gently touched her hand with his callused fingers that morning as they sat by the fire with their children. “Every day with you is like a new beginning. I am thankful for each morning like this when I awake and you are with me.”

She leaned against him, her cheek resting against his chest. “When you were away—and I believed you were gone forever—every day was a torment I could never describe to you. So I know your words are strong when you tell me how thankful you are to be here with me. I am grateful for every day, season, and year we have shared since you returned to me—not once, but twice.”

Then she gazed into his eyes. “You don’t need to bring up old memories and mistakes to make me grateful for this time we have in our lives.”

Touching her cheek, he admitted, “I asked if you remembered Josiah for a reason. You remember his wife—Looks Far Woman? Their little son, Joshua, too?”

“I remember them, and the mud lodge where we stayed in Ta-house,” she said.

“Rosa is gone,” Scratch confided. “And Mateo Kinkead has married another.”

“I hope she will make him as happy as Rosa made him when they were together in Ta-house—”

“Do you want to go?”

Waits’s brow furrowed as she looked him squarely in the eye. “Go … where?”

“Taos.”

Her eyes grew wide, and she immediately laid fingers over her lips in that Indian way of preventing her soul from escaping in unabashed wonder. She turned slightly, looking at Flea, at Magpie who held little Jackrabbit in her lap, as the three of them chewed on some dried chokecherries the children had collected last summer.

“It is so long a journey—we will take the children with us?”

He grinned, and said, “I’ve promised I wouldn’t go anywhere without my family!”

“T-to Ta-house?” she repeated.

“What is this Ta-house?” Magpie asked before Titus could answer his wife.

Waits turned to her daughter, saying, “Far, far, far to the south—farther away than I had ever gone before, or have been ever since—is a land where a people live in mud lodges, eat food that is hot on your tongue, and talk much different than the Americans where your father comes from.”

“This is the place our father wants to go?” Flea asked as he cupped some chokecherries in his hand for his three-year-old brother, Jackrabbit.

“It will be a grand adventure!” Waits cried, enthused. “It has been …”—and she counted on her fingers—“twelve summers since we left that place with our baby daughter!”

For Magpie, the enthusiasm was clearly contagious. “Do we start soon?”

Titus shook his head. “The snow is too deep and the cold would make such travel too dangerous—for a fourth winter in a row. To start out now might well kill us all. No, we won’t leave until late this summer when the buffalo are migrating south once more.”

“Ta-house.” Flea tried out the word, then turned to his
father. “Popo, what will you find in this faraway place that makes you want to go back after so many summers?”

Scratch thought, then said, “Old times, and old glories, my son. But mostly … I want to find an old friend.”

The family traveled as light as they dared when they set off on their march south out of Absaroka. Down the Bighorn at the Wind River, they entered the land of the Shoshone. From the Wind they continued up a tributary until it elbowed its way directly toward the saddle of the Southern Pass, lying to the west. In less than a morning’s march from there, they struck the Sweetwater, following that river east.

For the first time in all his years in the mountain West, Scratch spotted long grooves cut upon the land, a corduroy of iron-tired tracks—more of them than all the carts in a trader’s caravan would carve while plodding their way to a rendezvous encampment.

“What is this?” Waits asked him as he stood afoot, gazing first to the eastern horizon, then turned to stare as those scars followed the landscape rising toward the Southern Pass. “These are not the marks made by travois?”

“The white man’s boxes you have seen teams of horses pull into summer rendezvous many years ago.”

She gently wagged her head. “There must be many of them going across the mountains.”

Bass laid his arm around her shoulder and snugged her against his side. “I hope that’s where they all keep right on going. Hope they don’t ever stop. I don’t really care how many of them want to cross the mountains … just as long as they push on through.”

“These people, the ones who made these tracks,” Waits-by-the-Water said with a small, unsure voice, “they aren’t like you and the other fur hunters?”

“No, they are no way like us,” he answered grimly.

Titus remembered all that he had run away from back there in Boone County, on that farm outside the tiny crossroads of Rabbit Hash. “The folks who leave marks like this on the land are the sort of folks who will cut through the ground with huge knives, to plant their crops and make them grow. Folks who come in their wagon trains aren’t like me at all because when they stop somewhere … they mean to stay put.”

“Then they are not like my people either.”

He grinned at her. “They sure as hell ain’t.”

“Are you, Ti-tuzz?” she asked, surprising him. “Are you like my people?”

Scratch realized he must answer her truthfully. “No, I’m not like your people either. Not like white folks, and I’m not like Indians. Figured out I wasn’t much good at being white—but, trouble is … I’ll never be an Indian in my heart.”

“You are a man in between,” she put it succinctly.

For a long moment he stared deeply into her eyes. “Perhaps I am just that, Waits. A man in between. Not a white man, and not an Indian either. So it pains me even more deeply to think of what’s coming.”

“Tell me, Ti-tuzz. What do you see coming out there, on the far horizon?”

He gazed into her eyes with such sadness, such despair in realizing his time had come and was all but gone. The evidence of it lay in those scars beneath his feet. “The white people, there are too many of them. They keep
growing like the blades of grass in the spring—spreading everywhere. And where they go, they push out who was there before. It will not be good when they reach Absaroka.”

“Perhaps we will be old or long dead by then,” she said with hope in her voice.

Scratch looked at his three youngsters a moment as they tossed rocks at a fleeing jackrabbit. “I pray the children will be very old, perhaps long dead too, by the time this land is swallowed up by whites.”

“Perhaps wiser men could prove me wrong,” Waits said as she stepped against him, resting her cheek against his chest, “but I don’t think the future can be changed now.”

A deep pain stabbed through him. “You’re right. What’s to come, will come … and one man like me can never stop it.”

She explained, “Surely the buffalo will be wise enough to stay far, far away from these travelers. So let the white people go on to where the sun sets, and we’ll stay away from this sunset road, like the buffalo.”