“Long as I see it’s safe out here, old friend,” he sighed, “I’ll bring her back one day. But I want my father-in-law to understand I’ve lost two wives already. I could not go on if I lost Little Fawn too.”
Nodding, Washakie said, “A woman goes the way of her husband. If he rides into trouble, she rides too. But if he takes his family far, far away from harm, then she must go with her husband. My heart will grieve for our separation, but I know you will take her where she will be safe.”
That was all any man ever wanted for his family, Titus thought that night through and on into the graying of the morning. Somewhere safe where a man could live out the last of his days in peace. Maybe in Absaroka.
Washakie’s camp was slow to awaken that cold morning as a few errant snowflakes bobbed and danced on a cold wind, scudding along an icy rime that coated the ground. But somehow Shadrach and Bridger sensed what was afoot. They awoke the other old friends early and kicked life into their fire, then set coffee on to boil before they pitched in to help bundle up what few possessions Waits-by-the-Water owned after the Mormons had burned or stolen everything from Jim’s post. Old friends joked and kidded one another, like they had in the old days, squatting around the fire, drinking the steamy coffee, and chewing on strips of lean, dried buffalo. But by the time the sun was rising low upon the southern horizon, Scratch knew he could no longer put off this one last crossing of the Green.
“We’ll be here all summer long,” Bridger reminded, “somewhere along this stretch of the river.”
Sweete stepped up with them, his eyes sad. “C’mon down for a visit.”
“You’re welcome at my lodge anytime, Titus Bass,” Jim said. “I figger we’ll make our home here till the army goes in down on Black’s Fork an’ throws Brigham Young off my land.”
Shad shrugged. “But it don’t sound like the dragoons gonna do that anytime soon, so I figger you’ll find us here when you mosey down for a visit.”
For a moment he looked over at the three women, always saying their good-byes while their menfolk stood off and stumbled through their own. It damn well had to be easier tearing yourself away when everyone believed you’d be seeing one another on down the trail, somewhere else, another time. Then again, maybe it was easier like this after all—just making the break clean and quick, not laying out any hope of the impossible.
Because Titus Bass was never coming back.
Scratch knew that now. It wasn’t so much a matter of his not wanting to see old friends ever again—hell, there was a passel of ’em he’d never lay an eye on now, dead they were. No, Titus realized he’d soon have a hankering to see old faces, hear familiar voices on his ear, feel their arms around him and their mighty hands lustily pounding him on the back. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to return to Green River, or go wherever the old free men might hunt in the seasons to come.
It was simply that he knew down in the marrow of him that it was never to be. Titus Bass was never coming back again. This was the last time he would look at these wrinkled, wind-scoured, sunburned faces. The last time he would gaze across this piece of country. He was going home for the last time. Every bit as well as he knew the aches in his bones and the scars on his body, Titus Bass accepted that he would never be back.
So he swallowed deep, working up the courage to explain it, and finally said, “Very ol’t man, name of Real Bird, some years ago, he said if’n I go back to Crow country this time, I can’t never leave again.”
“C-can’t leave?” Sweete echoed, worry graying his expression.
He patted his tall friend on the shoulder and said, “My heart’s telling me that’s awright, Shadrach. Because my spirit wants to get back north to the Yallerstone.”
As the others moved in close, forming a tight semicircle about the old man, Sweete cleared his throat and asked, “Th-that mean none of us ever see you again?”
Sensing the sting of tears, Scratch explained quietly, “Maybeso you niggers won’t ever see Titus Bass like this again, not like you see me standin’ here now. Gray, an’ ol’t, an’ awful tired. But … ever’ night when you boys close your eyes to sleep, close your eyes to dream—you’ll see them days that used to be.” He looked directly at Bridger then, smiling. “Gabe, you ’member back to that night at your post, round a fire, when I come back after takin’ them emigrants to Fort Hall?”
“I ’member the night.”
“You recollect I was in the cups, an’ how we talked of what was dream … an’ what was real?”
Bridger swallowed. “I ’member that too.”
“Them dreams you fellas will have of the used-to-be days are gonna be real … an’ all the rest of these seasons without beaver, these seasons when the unhonorable men come crushin’ in on us—why, that won’t be real a’t’all,” he told his friends. “Way I see it, the dreams is just about all we got to hang our hands on to now. So them dreams of what was our glory time are gonna be all the sweeter for it.”
Few of them could hold their eyes on him now, most of the old friends dragging hands beneath their cold, dribbling noses or smearing an eye here or there.
“I ain’t got no doubt you’re gonna see me again an’ again, over an’ over, in your dreams,” he explained with difficulty at putting the feelings into words. “But I don’t figger you’ll ever see me like this again. In your dreams I won’t be feelin’ all my war wounds an’ all these here battle scars.”
Quietly, Sweete said, “We lived through a high time when other’ns went under, Scratch.”
“That’s right,” he responded. “An’ in them dreams each of us gonna have in the seasons to come, we’ll all be fresh an’ brand-new again, boys. Can’t you see them dreams now? Why, we’ll be settin’ foot out here again for the first time—just like this land was brand-new. The day after God made this country for our kind, when we was the onliest white niggers to put down a mokerson track out here.”
Scratch could tell by the way tears were trickling from their eyes that most of these old friends were remembering those glory days already. Veterans of more than two decades of survival, countless seasons and battles, victories and losses. Friends moved on and friends gone under. These last holdouts were remembering those bright and shining times when this country was brand-spanking-new … and they had been the first.
The goddamned very first to walk this high and mighty land.
“I’m going back north to live out what I got left of days, fellas,” he confessed in a voice cracking with emotion. “Spend it with my family, up there with my wife’s relations. Now that it’s come my time to cross the river an’ go, I don’t want none of you to stare at this here ol’ nigger too good. Don’t want you to ’member his gray head or the tired way he moves in his ol’ bones.”
“Don’t look at you?” Sweete asked.
“I want you ol’ friends to do me honor,” he started to explain, “to remember me when we was all like young bulls come spring green-up: strong, an’ wild, an’ with the sap runnin’ through us so heady that no man dared stand agin’ any of us, red or white.”
Dragging his coat sleeve beneath his nose, Scratch quietly said, “That’s the Titus Bass I want you to ’member. When you boys close your eyes, I want you to dream on them glory days we had. An’ I’ll be there. No matter what happens to me from here on out, I swear to you under this great sky that them dreams are gonna be more real than us standin’ here right now.”
Shadrach impulsively threw his arms around the shorter man, hugging him fiercely. As Sweete took a step back, the others came up and embraced their old friend in turn. Until it was time for Bridger.
With a deepening melancholy, Scratch looked into Jim’s face and said, “Nothing lives long but the earth an’ sky, Gabe. Only the earth an’ sky.”