Buffalo Palace tb-2

by Terry C. Johnston

  All the better to avoid the Arapaho who came to raid the Ute for ponies and plunder. Titus knew firsthand just how that warrior tribe craved ambushing their ancient enemies.

  It simply made a lot more horse sense to stay as far out of the way of those thieving Arapaho as he could.

  *Pompey’s Pillar, east of present-day Billings, Montana

  *South Pass in present-day Wyoming

  *Present-day Yampa River, known among the Rocky Mountain fur trappers as the Little Bear River

  18

  “Whereaway you bound, my son?”

  In his dreamlike reverie Titus peered up at the old man leading a fine horse up to his evening fire. Nighttime had come early that autumn so long, long ago now … and with it the cold as he rode closer to the city of his dreams.

  Lulled now into daydreaming once more by the late-summer heat on his back and the rocking-chair gait of the saddle horse beneath him, Scratch’s wandering mind remembered that fine fall evening.

  “St. Louie,” he had answered the stranger.

  Bass had been a sull young’un back then, with no more than nineteen summers under his belt.

  “Ah,” the old fellow replied as he halted, his expressionless face staring down in study at the small, cheery fire a moment, then finally regarded the youth and the rifle across the youngster’s lap. “I am but a poor wayfarer. Do you mind if I share your fire and a bit of conversation this night?”

  Bass tossed another limb onto the flames and shrugged. “I was just getting used to the lonesome.”

  At the sudden beating of several pairs of wings, his eyes fluttered open—blinking—to find himself on horseback … realizing he had been dreaming, remembering. How that younger man had, perhaps for the first time in his life, been truly getting used to the lonesome.

  When at the age of sixteen Titus took off from home, he hadn’t gone that many days before he yearned for the sound of another’s voice, just the look and smell and nearness of other humans. So what with the riverboatmen and the Ohio River whore called Mincemeat, along with the others who saw him across the wide Mississippi to Able Guthrie’s farm, and then with Guthrie’s most desirable daughter herself … why, he hadn’t ever been truly alone ever since the day he’d run off—just himself and the forest.

  Back then he realized this aloneness would take some getting used to. Some men took to it natural. Others never would—so it was best their kind stayed back east of the river. The third sort were like himself, Bass figured: they could do with bouts of aloneness as long as there were times when a man set his sights on being with folk. Those occasions between the long stretches of aloneness before the loneliness began to creep in—the bawdy summer celebrations of rendezvous or settling into a friendly village for the winter—he had come to believe would be enough to hold the lonelies at bay.

  What he would give now for to share food and fire with a friend—even a stranger as strange as Garrity Tremble.

  With that steady rock of the horse as they plodded east along the Little Bear River, he let his eyes slowly droop and drifted back to remembering….

  Recalling how the old man turned toward a tow sack he had tied behind his well-worn saddle, explaining, “I have food to offer, young man. You decide to share your fire and your talk, I’ll share supper.”

  Wayfarers they both had been that night. Perhaps ever after and still, they both remained wayfarers. That is, if the old man had not died in all those cycles of the seasons, those roundabout circles of his life in the intervening years. Perhaps Garrity Tremble did still ride the circuit, his only home the old saddle strapped on the back of the blooded thoroughbred. A homeless wanderer—very much as Scratch himself had come to be out here in this great wilderness. Now he rode the circle of the seasons—alone for the most part … yet always yearning to circle back toward those shining times when he would again look upon the faces of friends, when his ears would resonate with the sound of their familiar voices and laughter.

  On that cold autumn night along the Mississippi a dozen years before, Titus had asked of the old man, “Where are you off to?”

  Raising an arm that looked more like a winter-bare branch poking out of the sleeve of that huge, ill-fitting coat he wore, the stranger pointed off here, there, then off in another direction altogether. “No place special. Off to where the spirit moves me. God tells me where I am to go—as He told the wandering Israelites of Moses and Joshua of olde. Yet, truth be it, I—like you—am ultimately alone. Alas, that is God’s condition yoked upon the shoulders of us all, isn’t it, son? As many as we might have around us, family and acquaintances, we are still alone in this life, and God makes the only sure friend we will ever truly have.”

  With a snort of doubt Titus had said, “I’ve had me lots of friends.”

  From beneath the bushy eyebrows that stood out like a pair of hairy caterpillars on the pronounced and bony brow, the stranger sneered, “Yes—I can see by all these companions you have brought along with you on this journey.”

  “They are here!” he snapped at the sudden, harsh judgment, and tapped a finger against his chest. Then added, more quietly, “Right in here.”

  For a long moment the stranger regarded that, weightily, then smiled warmly as he tossed Bass three ears of the corn the preacher was donating to that night’s repast. “Yes. I believe you might just be the sort who would hold a friend dear in your heart.”

  He always had been that sort. This matter of friends and the heart ran narrow and deep, rather than wide and shallow.

  Whether it was the riverboatmen or Hysham Troost back in St. Louie, that dream reaper named Isaac Washburn, or those three who had shown up that first autumn in the Rockies to save Titus … friends had been just about the dearest, most precious, love he had experienced in his heart. And the remembrance of those friends was ofttimes his only protection against the lonelies. Everything else Titus could do for himself: he could hunt and trap and survive on his own. But he knew he could not last without friends, not without that sacred place his friends shared within his heart.

  At those times of the most excruciating loneliness, Scratch had survived because of those warm memories.

  “God has taken care of me for more years than you have been breathing, young man,” Tremble had explained that cold night after they had supped. “And I trust in Him for when there are not folks to take me in and spread their board before me. At such times God will provide me the opportunity to feed myself. It was a fine feast, wasn’t it, young man?”

  “A good change from pig meat.”

  With a visible shudder the old man wagged his head. “How I have come to hate Ned.”

  “Ned? Why you hate him? Who’s he, anyhow?”

  “Not who—what. Ned is pork. Ned is pig meat. Ned is the sustenance of the devil himself! No, I haven’t partaken of Ned in so long, I cannot remember.” He pointed a bony finger at Titus. “And you would do well to swear off it as well. Cloven-hoofed, unclean, filthy beasts that they are.”

  “But if a man’s hungry—”

  “He’s better off going hungry than biting into any Ned! God will provide for his redeemed souls … without any of us having to descend into the fiery depths and dine on the devil’s fodder.” He raised his face and arms to the sky, closed his eyes, to say, “Praise God I no longer eat such a beast.”

  The sudden quiet startled him, causing a crack to split his twelve-year-old reverie. As he opened his eyes and blinked in the bright summer sun, Bass tightened his grip on the wrist of the riflestock. And listened.

  All quiet—except for the clatter of the many hooves coming up behind him. Glancing at the sky, he found no birds on the wing. Occasionally a breeze tussled the cottonwood leaves overhead before it fell breathlessly quiet again. Not much more than the buzz of flies that seemed to constantly hover over the sweating animals, sometimes diving beneath the brim of Scratch’s hat to torment his face.

  He yanked back on the reins before he realized what he had done—before it became
a thought he could remember going over in his mind. Slipping quickly from the sweat-soaked saddle as the other horses and mules came up, Bass hurried toward the prints he had spotted, and knelt over them.

  Unshod pony hooves. By themselves not something of concern. This was Ute country, after all. But mingled in among the hoofprints were moccasin tracks—and those sure weren’t Ute moccasins.

  Unconsciously, he rubbed his shoulder long ago healed from the Arapaho’s war club, then realized that he was—so took that hand and laid its fingers in the moccasin tracks … as if to confirm that his eyes were not playing tricks on him.

  They were real.

  Without rising Scratch looked up, around at the brush. Then got to his feet and followed the tracks to the edge of the river, watched them enter the water and disappear. Two ponies and one set of moccasin prints. Maybe because one of them had to make water right then and there. Sure enough, Titus found where the warrior had stepped over to the brush and stood there. Not that the soil at the base of the brush was still damp—but he could imagine the man pulling aside his breechclout, standing patiently to finish his business, then remounting to cross the river with his companion.

  “They’re across now,” he confided to himself. And tried to convince his thumping heart that the danger had passed with that crossing.

  He’d push on, Scratch decided—not letting himself get lulled tack into napping. Stay awake and watch for sign. If those two recrossed the river, they were sure to pick up sign of all these animals. Then the fat would sure as hell drop in the fire. But for now he felt safe enough to keep moving east, on toward the foothills where he planned to turn north and make a lodestone run for one of the brigades he knew would be tramping through that country right about now.

  “Tell me, my astute young observer of life and the manner of mankind—have you ever thought of taking up the staff of God and preaching His word?” the old man said there beside that long-ago fire.

  “Me? A preacher like you?”

  “It is not easy work, let me assure you. But it is very, very satisfying.”

  “No, sir,” Bass had replied. “I never thought on it at all. I got me my hope to make it to St. Louie. See where things sit up there. Everything on beyond is wild and open.”

  “Every man must find his own call. You’ve heard your own call, then. We’ll let it rest at that,” the stranger replied, apparently satisfied with Bass’s answer. “Yes. The beasts and the savages of the wild. Perhaps it is you are called to see them for yourself.”

  “Maybeso I’ll get to do that one day.”

  “By the grace of God, you will, my son,” the preacher replied. “I trust in God. On I ride to my next flock, gathering ray strength all the while, renewing my vigor in the Lord—for God will provide. Never should you doubt it, young man. The Almighty will provide.”

  Titus remembered gazing at the fire, the empty corn husks and naked chicken bones heaped beside the coals, thinking how a man was called upon to help himself. No one else was there to do it for him if a man did not do for himself.

  “And He will provide for you, my son,” the old preacher had repeated the next morning after they had arisen, saddled, and were preparing to separate.

  “I don’t know that I ever asked nothing of the Lord,” Bass had told Tremble. “Never been much of a one to pray.”

  With that hard-boned and angular face of his, the preacher replied, “You yourself told me last night that for a long time you’ve been praying to get to St. Louie.”

  “Maybe you misunderstood me. I ain’t never prayed to get to St. Louie—”

  “But you’ve hoped, and dreamed, and done all that you could to get there.”

  “And I am getting there on my own.”

  A smile wrinkled the lined face. “You’re getting there because God is answering your prayer.”

  Of a sudden Titus had felt most uneasy, thrown there upon strange ground. Frightened again that he might just be in the presence of something far, far bigger than himself. “I don’t know nothing about that, sir.”

  Removing his old felt hat from his head and dipping in a little bow, Tremble said, “I certainly hope that what you pray for, Titus Bass—will not become a yoke locked about your shoulders.”

  Minutes later, not all that far downstream, Bass came across the tracks of a single horseman. The prints turned in front of him; then those pony’s hoofprints left the bank and entered the water. Now there were three, he confided to himself, brushing the grip on the flintlock pistol he had stuffed into the sash at his waist. Reassurance. The sort he got when he squeezed down, locking his grip around the rifle laid across the tops of his thighs. And turned to glance behind him. Hannah. All the rest behind her.

  Three of them on the other side of the river now. He realized he’d have to keep his eyes moving back and forth along that south bank. It wouldn’t do to have himself surprised.

  In bewildered silence twelve years back Titus had watched Tremble turn the big animal away and move off into the cold, frosty, autumn stillness of the forest. Before he climbed atop Able Guthrie’s old plow horse, Titus cautiously placed a hand upon one shoulder, as if to feel for any invisible weight there. Then touched the other shoulder in the same way. Still not satisfied, he shook his shoulders as if to rock loose anything perchance resting there. Then Bass decided it was all a little ghosty and superstitious of him to believe any preacher knew what he was talking about.

  To think of it! Him, praying! Why, Titus knew he’d never prayed a prayer one in his entire life—leastways ever since he stopped going to church hand in hand with his mam.

  A man had to provide for himself.

  Just as he always had, Titus had figured.

  Anything else was nothing more than superstition.

  But—by damned—the hair went up on the back of his shaggy neck when after less than another mile he came upon the sign of a fourth horseman coming in from the east, turning down the bank to cross the river just as the others had. And the only way possible he thought to quell his growing fear was to talk out loud. Hardly a whisper, but still so he could be heard. Whatever it was that others believed in, that which was greater than himself—Bass spoke to it now.

  “Just show me the way outta this,” he whispered, his hand sweating on the reins and the lead rope strung back to Hannah.

  “You know damn well I ain’t ever been one for going down on my prayer bones and taffying up to you … but you show me the way outta this here fix right now … I swear I’ll be one to look for your sign and heed, no matter what.”

  With the back of a leather sleeve, he swiped across his sweaty face. Then added, “I vow I’ll pay heed and listen too.”

  Hannah snorted.

  Twisting around in the saddle, he watched her bob her head, jerking back on the lead rope.

  He listened too.

  She snorted again, her ears perked, pointing stiffly at the sky. And her glistening nostrils flared as wide as the eye sockets on a buffalo skull.

  Damn, if that weren’t sign enough. The mule had winded Injuns.

  What with them horses coming up behind her, Bass didn’t have time to stop and take account of much. Instead he tugged on Hannah’s lead rope and nudged the saddle horse in the ribs with his heels, reining it off into the trees that lined the narrow river. There at the edge of the cottonwood and brushy willow, Titus kept the horse at a slow walk, his eyes moving constantly, his ears eager for any suspicious sound. Yard by yard, they covered what must have been a mile, then a second mile. How much farther would they have to cover ground at this snail’s pace? he wondered.

  Better to be slow, careful, and quiet? Or to jump and get the hell on out of the country—to make a race of it then and there?

  He was squeezing down hard on his memory right then, trying to dredge up what it was Isaac Washburn had told him he had done coming east with Hugh Glass and two others along the Platte when they found themselves butting squarely up against an Arikara war party come down to do some ra
iding in the middle of Pawnee country. But all he could remember of the tale was that the two others went under—leaving Hugh and Isaac to hide for their lives in a riverbank hole.

  From there they traveled by night, hid by day.

  It caused him to glance up at the sun then and there. Way up high did it hang that hot summer day. A long time till sunset, longer still until it would be slap dark. If he could keep from making a sight of himself, keep all these animals from stirring up too much noise at all … then maybeso that old preacher’s God was one to listen to a man’s vow—

  “Jumpin’ Jehoshaphat!” he bawled as the saddle horse carried him slowly around a left-hand bend in the river.

  Four of them … bold as brass—spread out across some twenty yards of a small, open patch of grassy ground not cluttered with trees and brush. He yanked ack on the horse’s rein and jerked to a halt, Hannah coming up on their tail roots.

  Four horsemen all right—naked to the waist. Their brown skin glistening with sweat beneath the hot sun. Black hair tossing in the rare breeze, a feather or two stirring among them. And they were close enough for Bass to make out the dull smear of earth paint across cheeks and brows, noses and chins.

  It didn’t savvy to get no closer, or to try hand-talk with those red niggers—not the way they was decked out to fill their dance card at the widow-maker’s ball!

  Not taking his eyes off the four sitting still as statues just staring at him a moment, Bass yanked on Hannah’s rope, bringing the mule alongside him. There he pulled loose the knot securing the lead rope to the next horse and flung it far aside.

  Then he hurled Hannah’s rope off onto her packs, slapping her on her neck and saying, “You’re on your own, girl! Best you cover ground … now—git!”