Death Rattle (9 page)

“Bill Williams!” A voice rose from the far side of the
small compound. “An’ I’ll be go to the devil if it ain’t Titus Bass with him!”

Scratch shouted, “Billy Craig, get your skinny pins on over here!”

The group of strangers parted slightly as Craig stepped through, extending his hand to the newcomers. Quickly glancing over the group, Williams laid his bony paw on Craig’s shoulder and said, “You’ve gathered a good bunch, from what I see, Billy. All old hands, that’s for sure.”

“Wish’t I had more for to go with you, Bill,” Craig declared.

“Any more fellers still to come in?”

Craig wagged his head. “No one else who wants in on our ride.”

“That be a shame,” Williams answered. “They’ll miss out on the best summer since the ronnyvoo of thirty-seven when we shot up that bunch of murderin’ Bannocks!”

“Some of the rest who turned me down say they don’t wanna come because it’s a crazy idea of yours and Smith’s,” Robinson explained.

Williams glared at him in disbelief. Then turned to another trapper as he said, “Didn’t you and Mitchell here tell ’em what we found in California that first time we went?”

With an eager nod, Levin Mitchell said, “Horses and mules for the taking!”

“After we get done having us a doe-see-doe with them see-nor-reetas!” snorted Jack Robinson.

“I was hoping for to have at least twenty men, Billy,” Williams admitted.

“Maybe Peg-Leg’s gonna find some down at Fort Winty for us,” Craig observed.

“That where the one-legged nigger’s gone?”

His head bobbing, Craig said, “Smith’s gone on ahead to see to getting the broodmares.”

“There some Snake camps about?”

Robinson explained, “Not a sign nearby. That’s why
Peg-Leg put out for Robidoux’s post. Word was, there’s Yutas camped down there.”

“What you want from the Yutas?” Titus asked. “Figger to get a few of them bucks to come along on your trip to Californy?”

“What we need to buy or trade off them Yutas is a half dozen or so wet mares.”

“W-wet mares?” Scratch responded. “I thought you’d get all the horses you wanted from the Mexicans.”

“Told you we was going back for some big doin’s this time, didn’t I?” Williams said. “We callated the best way we can strip that many head of horses off them Mexican ranchos and back across the desert to these here mountains was to take us some wet mares along.”

“Mare what are nursing foals?” Bass still could not comprehend. “Them li’l’ foals only gonna slow you down.”

“We ain’t taking the foals,” Williams announced. “Gonna leave ’em behind.”

He started to glimpse the masterful plan of it slowly materializing, just the way he would gently adjust the sections of his telescope to bring a distant object into focus.

“So you’ll take them wet mares along to hurry the stole horses back from Californy,” Scratch said, slapping Williams on the back exuberantly. “I’ll be damned if that ain’t some!”

“I come up with that plan my own self,” Williams boasted, his chest swelling. “Ever since we come back from California, I been waiting to put all the other pieces to it. Now I wish’t we had more riders.”

“Bet Peg-Leg’s signing up a few more down at Robidoux’s post right now,” Craig advised.

“Where’s Sinclair?” Bass inquired.

Craig pointed at the mud-and-log hut at the back of the three-sided stockade. The river served as the fourth wall of the enclosure. “He’s inside, dusting and combing out some robes he traded off a band of Yutas last week.”

“So tell me, niggers—is there any whiskey in this piss-hole of a post?” Titus asked, grabbing Williams by the
back of his neck. “I don’t know about you boys, but Bill and me here are near half froze for a hard drink after all our cold camps and too goddamned many saddle sores.”

“Let’s go swab our gullets, Scratch!” Williams roared. “And have us a drink to Peg-Leg signing on some more riders.”

One of those problems with getting older was that the hangovers hurt more than they used to.

That next day when he awoke pasty-mouthed, cuddled within his buffalo robe and blanket, curled up back to back with Bill Williams beneath that sheet of oiled canvas, Bass hurt all over—just the way he would if he had been pummeled in a St. Louis riverfront brawl. He wasn’t even certain how they’d ended up back at their camp outside the stockade. Under their own power? Maybe not.

He sat up slowly, pulling the robe back from his face, greeted with a bright dawn, the cottonwoods still dripping rain from last night’s storm, the air cool and vibrant with a tang of moisture to it. The bright light hurt his head more than it should until he found his wide-brimmed hat and pulled it down low over his eyes. But it was the side of his face that hurt more than anything.

Perhaps he’d fallen and didn’t remember. Maybe one of the other trappers had flailed his fists around when he got into the cups—with one of the blows slamming against his cheek.

“Bill,” he whispered. Even the sound of it hurt between his temples. So when Williams did not respond to some gentle nudging, Titus decided not to awaken the trapper.

Gingerly laying his fingers against the side of his own face, Titus found his cheek swollen. Nothing more than that gentle touch made him wince: in an instant his jaw was in utter torment, so extreme a poker-hot pain exploded in his head, taking his breath away.

Slowly the heat subsided in his jaw and he could open his eyes again. Careful to hold his head just so, Titus
dragged back the blanket and robe from his legs. He had to pee in the worst way.

Standing in the brush a few yards away from their shelter, Bass wondered how much he owed Prewett Sinclair for all they drank the night before.

“You wasn’t the hard punisher, Scratch,” the fort proprietor explained later that day when Bass plodded back through the post’s gate and found Sinclair at work unfolding, then refolding, a few bolts of calicos and other coarse cloth on a narrow counter set up in the trade room.

Billy Craig sat in the corner on his pallet, scratching his belly with one hand, his wild hair with the other. “Ol’ Solitaire was the punisher.”

“He get me back to camp?” Titus asked, eyeing one of the small kegs on the counter.

“Looked to be that way.” Levin Mitchell stirred in his bedroll. “Bill was shining on till it come time he figgered he should get you back to your bedroll.”

“But that’s when Solitaire went soft at the knees and spilled right down on his face,” Craig snorted with a giggle. “He was out and there was no raising the dead!”

“I need me a cup of that barleycorn, Sinclair,” Bass mumbled huskily, doing his best to talk without moving his jaw.

“Couldn’t understand you too good. Something wrong with your mouth, Scratch?” asked the trader as he noisily slid a tin cup down the counter to the small keg where he began to pour out the cheap whiskey.

“Ain’t anywhere I don’t hurt,” he confessed, rubbing a gritty eye. “My head thunders like a herd of loose ponies with ever’ little noise. But I just crawled out with my jaw on fire this morning.”

Sinclair pushed the cup at him across the narrow counter. “Lemme look.”

In a moment the trader nodded to the others. “He’s swolled up.” Then he tapped the trapper’s cheek as gently as he could. Again Bass winced and jerked his head away. “It’s hot, Scratch.”

“Bet it’s a tooth,” Mitchell advised. “Had me a bad one last year.”

“Tooth?” Titus echoed.

“C’mere,” Sinclair said and gestured him over. When Bass wasn’t quick about leaning over the counter, the trader promised, “Listen, I won’t touch you again. Just wanna look. C’mere now and open your mouth. Have me a look inside.”

Titus looked down his nose as Prewett Sinclair leaned close, holding a candle between their faces as he peered into the trapper’s open mouth.

“Wider,” the trader demanded.

“Aggggg,” Bass growled, his mouth opening as wide as he dared, the hot pain flaring as he did.

Sinclair leaned back and rubbed his nose. “Smells to me like you got a rotten tooth in there, Bass.”

“Sm-smells?”

“Like meat going bad,” Craig added, with a nod of his head.

“M-meat goin’—”

“You look all swolled up in there, what I can see,” Sinclair continued. “There”—and he pushed the cup a little closer to the trapper—“you g’won ahead and drink your whiskey.”

“Sinclair’s rotgut hooch gonna take the edge off your hurt,” Mitchell explained.

With an unsure, reluctant nod, Titus took up the cup and sipped. Slowly at first to see how the whiskey would burn his inflamed jaw. If he kept the potent liquid off to the left side of his mouth, it wasn’t near so bad. But his head hurt so damned much that he had trouble swallowing. Nevertheless, Scratch succeeded in getting some of the whiskey down, eventually warming a stomach that had wanted to revolt at the first swallow.

“Maybeso this is gonna help some,” he told the others as two more of the trappers pushed through the door to join them in the low-roofed trader’s cabin.

“Go on and drink up,” Craig said as he stepped to the counter to have himself a look at Bass’s jaw. “You’re
gonna want to drown as much of that pain as you can afore we yank that tooth outta there—”

“Y-yank?” Scratch sputtered, some whiskey dribbling off his lower lip.

“Gotta come out,” Mitchell agreed. “Just like I pulled my own tooth last year.”

“P-pulled your own tooth?” Titus echoed, his eyes growing larger.

“Drink up, Bass,” Sinclair declared. “It’s on the prairie.”

Both of the trappers who had just arrived lunged toward the counter, as one of them hooted and slapped a flat hand onto the wood planks. “On the prerra! Hurraw! Let’s drink, Sinclair!”

“Not for the likes of you,” Sinclair snarled as the trapper jerked back in surprise. “We’re gonna get Bass drunk here, then pull a tooth out of his head.”

The entire room watched as Scratch slowly poured the stinging whiskey past his lips, letting it slide down his tongue, past the back of his throat and on to his warming belly. In their eyes was a look of unabashed envy. A free drunk, compliments of the Fort Davy Crockett trader.

When he pulled the cup away from his mouth and licked some drops hanging from his shaggy mustache, Sinclair took the cup from him. When it was refilled, Bass took another long sip of the whiskey that tasted even smoother than that first cup.

“Awright,” Titus mumbled, feeling his tongue thickening, “so if Ol’ Bill fell on his face and wasn’t moving a muscle … I figger you boys joined in to help get him and me back to our trees?”

“None of us figgered you needed any damn help,” Mitchell explained. “Because you started dragging him out the door.”

Craig sniggered some now. “You wasn’t pulling him out into the rain and mud by his collar like this!” And he pantomimed by seizing the back of his own shirt and raising it until his arm flapped.

“?-how?” Bass stammered.

Sinclair explained, “It was a pretty sight. Watching
you weaving back and forth, leaning over to grab Bill by his ankles, dragging him around right over where Mitchell’s standing now, you good as falling yourself while you’re fighting to get Ol’ Solitaire out the door and into storm.”

Titus wiped the back of his hand across his wet lips. Then he licked the back of his hand, tasting the faint sting of the peppers, the all-but-hidden sweet molasses. “I dragged him by his leg all the way back to our camp?”

Mitchell shrugged. “Dunno, Scratch. We throwed the door shut after you got him dragged out the gate!”

Already his head was growing a little fuzzy, that whole strip of skin above his eyes gone numb. Doing his best to concentrate, Scratch said, “Bill was beside me while ago when I come awake.”

“Did you check to see he was breathing?” Craig roared, stirring up a storm of renewed laughter.

“Maybeso Scratch drowned Ol’ Bill in a rain puddle on the way back to camp!” Mitchell hoo-hooed.

“Yeah!” Sinclair jumped in. “Can’t you just see poor Scratch dragging Solitaire back to his robes—so drunk Bill can’t close his own mouth so he drowns?” The trader threw back his head and flopped his upper body back onto the counter, his arms flung akimbo as his mouth went slack, jaw dropped open.

“Shit, Prewett!” Craig hollered. “With his mouth open like that, only natural that Ol’ Bill drownded out there in the rain!”

“Poor Scratch.” Mitchell pounded a hand on Titus’s back. “You was so drunk you didn’t know any better—drownding our friend the way you done.”

They had him worried. Especially now that his head had grown so fuzzy. “M-maybe I ought’n go see to him just so I can be—”

Bass had taken a handful of steps before Craig snagged Scratch’s arm and spun him around. “Hold on there. Way you’re walking—you ain’t fit to go off to check on no one.”

“Someone ought’n go see—”

“Maybe you’re right,” Sinclair agreed. “Mitchell, you
or one of the others—go see to Ol’ Bill. See if he’s breathing yet.”

Mitchell turned and nodded to one of the other trappers, a half-breed Frenchie named Toussaint Marechal, and together they stepped through the low doorway into the bright sun, disappearing across the fort compound.

Suddenly Craig leaped to the open door and shouted after them, “If’n you wake Solitaire—be sure you tell him we’re fixing to pull Scratch’s tooth. I’ll bet that ol’ preacher’d wanna be here to see this!”

“Ain’t none of you gonna pull my tooth!” Bass protested. “Gonna do just fine by my own self.”

“Maybeso,” Craig replied. “We’ll see how steady your own hands are … ’cause it’s for sure you’re ol’ legs ain’t!”

“What you figger’m I gonna use to pull it?” Scratch asked, giving Craig a playful shove as he turned back to Sinclair.

“Dunno for sure. Mitchell’s the one said he pulled his own tooth,” the trader declared, then looked at Craig. “What’d he use?”

“Had him some pinchers in his shooting pouch,” Craig explained helping steady Bass. “What he uses to pull his ramrod out when he’s pulling a dry ball or an old load.”

“M-makes sense.” And Scratch nodded, inching away from Craig. “I got me my own ball puller I can go get.”

A suspicious Craig quickly scooted over to block his way. “You wasn’t thinking of running off, was you?”