“Ever you broke a bone?” Craig asked.
“Nary a one, this child ain’t,” Bass confided.
“You gonna try again?” Mitchell inquired, staring at Scratch’s mouth.
He brooded on it, then said, “Maybeso that last drink of whiskey has done it, boys.”
Clanking the tin cup onto the narrow counter, Scratch swept up the ball puller as Sinclair repositioned the mirror. Again he slowly opened the tender jaw and once more he inched the tool toward the rotten tooth. Sucking in a breath, Bass opened the metal jaws and did his best to position them on either side of the inflamed tooth. The instant the tool brushed its surface, with no more than a whisper of contact—it was as if a small charge of powder went off in that jaw.
He flung the tool down. As it skidded across the counter and tumbled onto the clay floor, Scratch spun round and round trying his best to cup that excruciating side of his face, an elbow knocking the mirror out of Sinclair’s hands. It clattered onto the counter where the trader managed to keep it from tumbling to the floor.
“C-can’t do it,” Scratch rasped in the midst of the fading pain.
“Lemme have a look,” Mitchell requested.
He shrunk back from the trapper, hollering, “No!”
“I ain’t gonna touch your goddamned tooth,” Mitchell protested. “Lookee here, I’ll keep my hands down, see? Just open your mouth so I can look at it.”
His eyes widening with suspicion, Scratch slowly opened his jaws as Mitchell rocked up on his toes and peered closely into the older man’s mouth.
“Damn,” Levin Mitchell muttered as he rocked back again. “That tooth looks wuss’n mine did.”
“Wager it hurts wuss’n yours did too!” Bass grumbled.
Mitchell turned to Sinclair and Craig. “That jaw of his—the whole thing is swolled up. He’s got it bad.”
“What could happen if’n that tooth don’t come out?” Craig asked the others.
With a shrug, Sinclair declared, “Maybe the poison in his jaw crawl up to his brain and kill ’im.”
All of them turned as one and gazed at the older trapper. By now there were more than a half dozen of them crowding into the trading cabin.
“You think we oughtta?” Mitchell asked the others with a devilish look in his eye.
“Oughtta wha?” Bass echoed, his eyes squinting in alarm.
“No other way,” Craig said with a shrug of his shoulders.
The trader nodded, “Best thing we can do for the man.”
At that moment, Scratch had a foggy notion of what they were fixing to do to him. Whirling on his heel clumsily, he almost went down as he attempted to throw a shoulder into one of the younger men, spilling him backward.
“Grab ’im, boys!” Sinclair bellowed behind the counter.
Suddenly the others converged on him, grabbing arms and legs as Bass let out a high-pitched, unearthly howl.
“Grab his head! Grab his head!” Mitchell ordered.
One of the strongest of the young men clamped his beefy arm squarely around Bass’s forehead and pinned the older trapper into the crook of his shoulder.
The pressure on his face, indeed his whole head, was suddenly unbearable. Lashing out with both feet, Titus slammed into two of the others, catching one of them dead center in the groin, sending the young man hobbling backward for the doorway, doubled over and yipping in breathless pain like a scalded coyote pup.
His hands stiffened into claws, his arms flailing like the wings of some doomed bird of prey, Titus struggled against his young attackers, now unmindful of the pain in his jaw as he twisted this way and that to free his head.
Within moments they collapsed to the floor together. Sinclair was shouting orders, Craig and Mitchell too. In seconds they had seven men on him, with the trader commanding the others to raise Bass to the counter. With a heave they hoisted him into the air, his arms and legs flailing again, then plopped the older trapper onto the planks with a hollow thud. They had him pinned and helpless again.
Sinclair’s face appeared right above Bass’s, inches away. “We’re doing this for your own good, Scratch. You don’t get that tooth out, you’ll likely die of poison gone to your brain. Leastways, you won’t be worth a tinker’s dam for the horse raid.”
“G-god-d-damn you,” he muttered between his teeth clenched shut with all the strength he could muster so they couldn’t get to his tooth.
“Go to work, Mitchell,” Sinclair growled, rocking up on his toes to get better leverage, bracing the heels of both hands against Bass’s hairy, whiskey-soaked chin to slowly force the mouth open.
Already the waves of pain were making his eyes water, so hot, stinging. He started gasping for air as he watched Mitchell approach from the corner of his eye.
“Turn his head this way some,” Mitchell ordered the big youth who imprisoned Scratch’s head.
Fight as he did, Bass realized he was powerless to stop what was about to happen. So he went limp, his head pounding, his hot, empty belly rumbling with the sloshing whiskey, wondering if he was about to be sick. Most of all he tried to tell himself it wasn’t going to hurt near as bad as leaving the tooth in … that he’d get through the pain and to the other side of this agony … that the pain was something small compared to all he’d been through—
Then those metal jaws clamped onto his tooth and it felt as if Mitchell was trying to tear his jaw right out of his mouth. When the tool started rocking back and forth, Scratch began screaming in the back of his throat—a sickly, feral sound—no more than a despairing gurgle now that his jaws were pried open and only his tongue was free to move.
An explosion of black powder ignited inside his head, blowing off the top of his skull. Icy-hot shards of pain splintered out from his mouth, slashing into his brain, down his throat, making it difficult to swallow, impossible to breathe.
“I got it!” a voice roared in victory.
Of a sudden the cool blessedness of a black syrup poured over him, releasing him from the heat. Causing him to tumble down, down, down—
5
He snaked the tip of his tongue through that gap between his back teeth. There at the bottom of the left side of his jaw a second tooth was gone now.
In the week since Mitchell pried out the first, its gaping hole had knitted up quite nicely, what with the way Scratch swished whiskey or salt water around in his mouth several times a day. But this second hole hadn’t closed yet, being fairly new the way it was.
For a few days there, his swollen, inflamed jaw began to feel better. Then the whole packed up and lit out from Sinclair’s Fort Davy Crockett. By that second morning on the tramp, Scratch woke up in almost as much pain as he had suffered before. This time he understood what had to be done, especially when Levin Mitchell came over to inspect his jaw in the gray light of that miserable, rainy dawn. The trapper tapped his finger against the side of another tooth in Bass’s head, and Titus groaned in agony. Not only with the heat of that immediate pain, but grumpy with the anticipation of what was to come. The only thing that had ever come close to that sort of torture had been when the Arapaho ripped off his topknot.
Bill Williams headed off to his packs to dig out a small canteen of whiskey while Bass dug for his ball puller in a gray-tinged resignation.
“Hol’ me down, fellas,” he begged the rest. “I know what’s coming and I’m gonna be kicking like a three-legged mule here when Mitchell grabs hol’t of that tooth.”
He did, for sure too.
But for some reason, that extraction didn’t hurt quite as much as the first had. And although he continued to bleed throughout the rest of that day on the trail, his jaw nonetheless felt better than it had for a long time. Maybe two of them, side by side, had gone bad together, he thought. Better to be shet of them both and start healing the poison that had swollen the whole side of his head.
Titus swatted at the tiny buffalo gnats swirling around his sweaty face now and pulled the hat brim down lower to shade his eyes from the midday
sun as they plodded southwest down the Green River for Robidoux’s post. Five days gone from Brown’s Hole and Sinclair’s fort already, which by his reckoning should put them close to rendezvousing with Peg-Leg Smith, what with the way this bunch had been licking over the ground.
He and Bill Williams ended up riding off for Fort Uintah with thirteen men in tow. To march right into California with Bill’s brazen plan of sweeping up two thousand or more Mexican horses, Scratch knew they would need more than twenty riders. For the time being, the success of their California expedition rested in the lap of Thomas L. Smith, that fiery redheaded, hot-tempered veteran of both the Rocky Mountain beaver trade and more than one lucrative journey to the land of long-horned ranchos. If Peg-Leg ended up drafting another ten or more recruits, then their foray against the land of the missions would make each of the riders a wealthy man no more than weeks from now.
But if they attempted to punch their way into and out of California with too weak a force—hurled up against not only the vaqueros tending the ranchos but small squads of Mexican soldados as well—then this daring ride west into that foreign land lapped by the western ocean could well be their last hurraw. And he would never see his family again.
The days had not only been growing longer but hotter too, each night not nearly so cool as they had been. Summer was ready to bloom. The knitting of the stars overhead had taken a definite northward shift, along with that tilt to the path the sun scoured across the sky each day. It glowed hotter every morning, and hung up there longer every afternoon.
Then today they had run across these mists of troublesome buffalo gnats—disgusting little creatures so tiny a man might miss them if it weren’t for the fact that they traveled in clouds that swarmed and swirled around the heads of their horses and pack animals, hovered around every square inch of bare flesh the men had exposed to the galling heat. It was as if the creatures’ very feet were on fire when they alighted on his flesh, even before the gnats began to bite and burrow.
No wonder the shaggy buffalo had long, coarse, matted hair shrouding its eyes. An admirable protection from these annoying insects that zealously followed the herds, or any other warm-blooded, breathing creature who happened to pass close enough that the cloudy swarms sensed the body heat of those other unsuspecting mammals.
By midafternoon when they stopped to let the horses drink, the swarms surprisingly drifted off, theirs a dark mist weaving up the cooler bottom of a coulee as the sun finally appeared committed to falling toward the western horizon that day. Bass knelt on the creekbank, leaned over, and drank alongside the men and animals. Then he freed a second black-silk kerchief where he had knotted it around the strap to his shooting pouch and soaked the cloth in the cold water. After wringing it out, he rubbed it over his face, pulling his long hair aside so he could swab the back of his clammy neck. That done, he crudely knotted it around his long, coarse hair, allowing the damp handkerchief to drip, drip, drip down his backbone as he stood and stepped over to Williams.
“Was just cogitating on somethin’, Bill,” he began.
Williams looked up at Bass. “The heat can damn well swell up a man’s head like that. It’s a fact.”
“I figger you got yourself a damned good reason why you’re heading southwest across the wastes to California this time of year.”
“I do.” And Williams bent over for one last noisy slurp at the creek. Then he stood and explained. “Any other time of the year, this right here would be a problem.”
The leader gestured at the gurgling creek.
“Water,” Titus observed.
“Water,” Williams repeated. “Come late summer, them creeks and springs and seeps down in that country we’re gonna have to ride through will all be drying up—disappearing into dust.”
A few of the other riders were stepping closer as Scratch remarked, “Weather’d be cooler come autumn.”
“But with nary a drop of rain or a flake of snow to refill them waterholes,” Williams declared. “Naw, my friend—you’ll see for your own self that there’s but one time of the year to make this crossing. ’Specially when we’re pushing thousands of horses ahead of us, and every last one of ’em needs a lot of water to make it back to these here mountains.”
“Only gonna get hotter from here on out,” Scratch stated. “South where we’re headed.”
“We ain’t see hot yet,” Williams warned. “Ain’t seen nothing of dry either. I wouldn’t dare try what we’re about to do any other time of the year but here at the end of spring. Turning back by midsummer. Any later’n that—why, our bones might just rot out there in them wastes with the bones of all them Mexican horses we couldn’t get back to the mountains without water.”
With a grin, Bass snorted, “So you claim we ain’t on a fool’s errand?”
“Could be, ol’ friend,” Bill replied, smiling.
“That’s good,” Titus said as he slapped a hand on the older trapper’s shoulder. “I was beginning to wonder if you wasn’t making it sound like this was serious business. Sure as hell glad to hear we’re out on some great lark you dreamed up, Bill! Beaver’s gone to hell and the mountain trade is disappeared like winter breath smoke—why, no better reason we ought’n just have ourselves some fun!”
“Especially if it’s the last thing any of us do in this here life,” Williams said, his grin slowly fading. “Awright, you ciboleros!” he shouted at the others, calling them buffalo hunters. “Let’s get back in the saddle—by my reckoning, we’ll be pounding on Robidoux’s back door by sundown!”
The sun had turned every butte and mesa a startling red, so bloodily surreal it seemed as if the entire earth around them were the same burnished copper as were those trinkets and religious objects hammered out by a Mexican craftsman. Then down in that wide bottom he recognized from three years past, Scratch spotted the stockade and the small herds of horses grazing here and there on the low hillsides farther downriver.
They could hear distant voices hallooing and begin to make out telltale shadows of men emerging at the top of the near wall, a few coming out of the stockade on foot to have themselves a look. Across the river from the post stood a scattering of lodges, low and squat. Ute, he suspected.
“That you, Bill?” a voice cried as they approached.
“Peg-Leg?”
One of the figures hobbled away from the rest of those on foot and waved his hat. “You brung a good bunch with you?”
Williams reined to a halt beside Smith, held down his hand, and they clasped wrists. “Not near enough to bring out all them horses I planned on, Peg-Leg.” He straightened in the saddle and sighed. “I’m hoping you done us some good here.”
“Got a few hands, Bill,” Smith admitted. “But I didn’t come up with near as many as we’d hoped would come west with us to the Mexican diggings.”
“Let’s go have us some victuals,” Bass said as he brought his roan to a halt on the other side of Smith.
“Lordee tells. That really Scratch?” Peg-Leg asked as he pivoted on the wooden limb.
“How-do, Thomas,” Titus cheered as more of their bunch came to a halt around them.
For a moment Smith glared hard-eyed at Bass, then suddenly grinned as he held up his hand to the horseman. “Been a long time, Scratch. I see no gol-durned Black-foot’s knocked you in the head and stole what you got left for a mangy skelp.”
“You was hoping my hair would get raised after we stole them horses back from you?”
Smith laughed easy and genuine. “I ain’t never carried me no hard feelings for nothing, Scratch. Less of all, for you and them others coming here to take back them Snake horses.”
“It’s all water gone downhill long ago,” Titus mused.
“Damn sure is,” Smith agreed. “Why—when me an’ Bill left here after that ruckus we had with you an’ Walker, we ended up stealin’ a lot more horses from the Mexicans that year!”
“More horses’n we could’ve stole round here!” Bill roared.
Williams a
nd Smith had their chuckle before Peg-Leg turned and hobbled off with a wave, starting the procession toward the stockade as shadows quickly deepened. More hallooing greeted the new arrivals as they neared the walls, men streaming out that lone open gate as lanterns began to glow behind the tiny, rawhide-covered windows pocking the walls of those few miserable cabins inside the fort.
“Robidoux here?” Bill asked.
“He’s here,” Smith declared as they halted before the gate. “But he’ll be leaving for Taos soon to fetch up more trade goods. Leave off your horses to graze over yonder with ours and bring your gear inside the walls. We been sleeping inside under the stars nights waiting for you.”
“We? Who else you got gonna be a good gun to have along?” Williams inquired.
“Two of them went with us that first year, Bill.”
“Who?”
“Dick … Dick Owens,” Smith declared guardedly, his voice lowering. “And, Thompson too.”
“Philip Thompson?” Bass echoed in alarm.
Smith pursed his lips, narrowing his eyes knowingly, and nodded. “You two fellers just stay outta each other’s way, and we won’t have us no trouble on this ride.”
Just how in blue blazes could two men keep from stepping on one another’s tails when both of them were going to be following Bill Williams and Thomas L. Smith out to California and back again with several thousand horses?
Maybe he just ought to pack up come morning and light out for the Bent brothers’ Arkansas fort, or one of those posts farther north on the South Platte. Perhaps he could dig up his cache near the mouth of the Popo Agie and trade off a few peltries, managing to end up with what geegaws he wanted for his woman, those things he wanted to give his children. Not everything to be sure. Only a soft-brained idiot wouldn’t admit that the bottom had gone out of beaver and it was going to be some time before the business rehabilitated itself. But in the meantime, Scratch figured he could get a little of this and a little of that, enough to show his family just how much he cared. If a man didn’t bust his ass to make it so his family could have a few good things—what in hell did a man bust his ass for anyway?
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