Titus quickly slapped Rowland on the back and turned to Hatcher. “C’mon, Jack—let’s go see this through.”
Dawn came and went, then midday with it. In the early afternoon they crossed a wide, shallow creek, tarrying only long enough to water their horses a little, not enough to make the animals loggy. No more than a few moments for man and beast to gulp down the cold, clear mountain runoff, enough to give the saddle horses a burst of newfound energy. They pushed on into the afternoon and watched as the sun began to tumble toward the horizon behind their left shoulders.
“How many more you figger?” Solomon Fish asked the others who were stretched on their bellies with him, all six having left their animals tied in a copse of trees far below them before they scrambled up the slope to the top of the rimrock that color of old, sun-dried blood.
Eyeing the warriors below, Elbridge Gray replied, “Baker’s dozen, at least.”
The lean-faced Rowland stared down at the two hands he held up, flipping up fingers slowly, then folding them back down as he mouthed his numbers. “That makes more’n … oh, shit! We ain’t got us—”
“Hush yer face, Johnny!” Hatcher snapped.
“Way I see it,” Bass declared, “with that other bunch what just come in to join up with them horse thieves, looks to be they evened up the odds now.”
Rowland gulped, “Even … evened up the odds?”
“Yepper,” Titus replied. “I figger things is about a draw now.”
Mad Jack cackled low, wagging his head, eyes merry in the deepening twilight. “Eegod—if’n ye don’t take the circle, Titus Bass! With us having even-up odds, just what ye got in mind for to get our horses back from that camp they’re making down there?”
“Wh-what I got in mind?” Scratch asked with a snort. “You’re the one with all the notions, Jack. I’m just here to help out. I ain’t no smart nigger now.”
“I was hoping ye was gonna show us ye was a lot more dad-blamed smarter’n me, coon,” Hatcher said. “’Cause I ain’t got no plan neither. No way. Nothing ’cept my hankering to sashay in there quiet as can be come slap-dark, cut loose what’s ours, an’ run the rest off so’s they can’t trail us.”
“Gotta be quick and brassy ’bout it,” Titus added.
“Pick yourself a strong one to ride out with,” Solomon advised gravely.
Caleb Wood finally spoke up, “Chances are good these red niggers gonna come fair boiling after us, on horse or foot.”
“No two ways about it, boys,” Jack reminded the rest, “we gotta drive off all their ponies.”
“Don’t know about you,” Bass said as he started scooting back down the slope, a bone-deep weariness penetrating to his core, “but this here’s one child gonna grab him a few hours shut-eye till it’s time to go crawling in there and kill us some Blackfoots.”
“Dead on my feet, my own self,” Hatcher agreed, flinging his arms back and stretching like a skinny, long-legged cat. “C’mon, boys. It’s been a long day awready. And from the looks of things, we’re fixin’ to lose some more sleep tonight.”
Bass lay curled up in the frosty, fireless dark with the others, listening to the men snort and clear their throats, turn about and flop over, doing their best to root around and get themselves comfortable on the cold, cheerless ground. He wondered if the others were thinking on the Blackfoot and their fire. Likely the rest were all thinking on the same thing he had on his mind. Women.
He brought his hand up and gently touched the long braid tied in what hair hung in front of his right ear. Thinking about Pretty Water—how she had braided it for him the first time, then taught him to do it for himself.
For some reason tonight, he couldn’t get her out of his thoughts. That Shoshone gal who had taken on the boldest share of his nursing after buffalo hunters had discovered Bass near the spot where they had killed the sacred white medicine calf. According to that band of wandering Snake Indians, Scratch was responsible for bringing them that calf—a powerful, mystical symbol of the Creator’s blessing, a promise of plenty after so many, many weeks of want.
A damned lucky thing it had been for Titus Bass too. A hole in his chest from an Arapaho bullet, the scalp ripped from the crown of his head, grown weak as a newborn beaver kit after days of wandering half-conscious clinging to the back of his steadfast Hannah … never before had Scratch been so close to death’s door as he was that day last summer when Hatcher’s bunch and the Shoshone hunters happed onto him.
Suddenly become hero to the tribe if not their savior—Bass was treated like a chief, picked from the ground by the hunters and laid upon downy soft buffalo robes. Dragged on a travois back to the huge camp where Titus was descended upon by the women of the tribe, every last one of them clucking and chattering at once as they hoisted him into a huge buffalo-hide lodge where he would stay for the next two weeks while he was knitting up.
As he began to put back on the weight he had lost in his ordeal, the Shoshone women started out to care for him in relays, coming and going to change the noxious, slimy poultices they compressed into his bullet wounds, supporting him gently against their fragrant softness as they poured rich, greasy soup past his lips, or bathed him with scraps of cloth dipped in cool water. There had been nothing remarkable about any of those hovering faces, or the healing hands, or the gentle chatter he did not understand in the least … until one morning he awoke to the soft, lyric humming of a new woman he found sitting by the low flames warming the fire pit.
With her back turned toward him, for the longest time Bass contented himself to watch her sway gently back and forth in time to her half-whispered song as she repeatedly poked her bone awl through a piece of smoked leather, then drove the end of some sinew through the hole, down and through over and over again, tightening each stitch with a tug of her deft fingers.
He so surprised her the moment he asked for water that she stabbed herself with the awl.
But as soon as she whirled on him with a startled jerk, placing that bleeding fingertip to her lips where she licked at the blood—Bass’s mouth went dry. Finding himself pasty-tongued as he looked into those eyes that reminded him so much of Marissa Guthrie’s, that settler’s daughter back along the river south of St. Louis.
“What’s her name?” he had asked Hatcher later.
“Like that’un, eh?” Jack had said, his merry green eyes twinkling with devilment. “Some punkins, I’ll say.”
Now he was growing testy. “Her name, dammit.”
“Pretty Water,” Hatcher answered with a grin forming. “Got stabbed, did ye?”
“Stabbed?”
“Yer heart, nigger. Got stabbed in yer heart!”
As Titus lay there now in the cold and the dark, listening to the discomfort of the others on the ground, to the night sounds of their horses and the closeness of wild critters who owned this forest, Bass had to admit she had stabbed him in the heart.
Women. They had long been his weakness. How they preyed upon his heart, pierced him to his soul. Time and again hadn’t they loved holding a mirror up to his life, showing him just how weak he truly was. Not strong at all … oh, no. Women—like Amy, and Abigail, and Marissa. Then Fawn had renewed his faith in himself and the gentler sex—the sort of woman who unconditionally gave more than she got. Strange how she hadn’t expected any more from him than what he was prepared to give during their brief time together that first winter with the Ute.
A sudden lick of shame flushed through him.
What right had she to expect that he would stay on when spring freed the mountain passes and softened the ice clogging the high country streams where the flat-tails were awaiting the beaver men and their iron traps? A man simply didn’t pack along a woman, not a beaver man like Titus Bass. Come winter, was the time for bedding down with a woman, lying back in a lodge … maybeso a quick tangle or two with some likely gals come rendezvous when the sun was summer-high. A fella just had no business, no real need, to pack along a full-time night-woman. Looking after himself and his animals, his weapons and his traps, was truly more than enough to keep a man’s attention. That, and constantly watching over his shoulder, or the skyline ahead, for brownskins.