Hargrove cleared his throat dramatically and continued, “Do you get the import of what I’m telling you, Mr. Harris?”
“You figger me to sit here and shoot that man with the three of you?”
“If you want to get paid when we get to California.”
“Th-that ain’t part of being a pilot,” Harris protested. “I kill’t my share of Injuns, an’ I’ve done a helluva lot I ain’t real proud of in my life … but I ain’t ever out-an’-out shot no man for money.”
Hargrove’s jaw set with a jut as he ruminated on that. “Very well. You’ve cast your lot with spineless cowards, Harris—”
“I ain’t no coward!”
But the captain was already waving his pilot off with a disdainful gesture. “Be gone with you. Get out of the line of fire, you coward.”
“Tol’t you—I ain’t no coward!” Harris was starting to fume.
“Move aside and let the real men finish this once and for all—”
Titus interrupted, “You better listen to him, Hargrove. Moses Harris may be a lot of things, but he ain’t ever been no coward. Dead of winter, he’s walked back to St. Louie from the mountains. Not once’t … but twice’t.”
With a sneer, Hargrove shifted his rifle so that it lay along his right thigh, pointed in the target’s general direction. “More myths of your brave breed? So Harris has performed mighty deeds. That still doesn’t alter the fact that he’s grown spineless in his old age.”
“I ain’t spineless—”
Yet Hargrove paid Harris no mind as he continued, “Which is something it appears you still have, old man.”
“A spine?”
“Some backbone, yes.”
Harris leaned forward, reaching down to tear his reins from Hargrove’s grip. “Take your damn hand off my horse!”
The captain did just that, but brought that very fist up so fast and hard beneath Harris’s chin that the pilot’s head snapped backward, his wide-brimmed hat flying off before he slid from the saddle, dazed, spilling onto the sand.
Hargrove tapped heels into his horse, urging it forward at a walk as he brought up the rifle in his right hand. “Which ball will get you, Mr. Bass?”
“Won’t be yours, Hargrove.”
The man gentled back on the reins and halted, still clutching that short-barreled carriage gun on Scratch. “What makes you so sure it won’t be mine?”
“Have to be one’a these other hired niggers,” Titus said as he pulled the hammers back on the big pistol he gripped in the right hand, on the sawed-off trade gun he kept loaded with drop-shot that was in his left.
“My aim is excellent,” he replied to the trapper.
“Not when you can’t even get off a shot,” Scratch declared. “You’re the first’un I’m gonna shoot.”
“You’ll take your chances on these other two?”
Titus quickly appraised them. “Neither one of ’em look like killers to me, Hargrove. I figger you sent the ones what could kill on ahead to get me. If’n either these two had the stomach to cut a man down, you would’ve sent ’em along with Benjamin. But this’un an’ that’un too … I think they like breathin’ a li’l more than you give ’em credit for.”
That appraisal clearly unsettled Hargrove. As the hired men turned their heads to look at their employer, he ordered, “Don’t listen to his rantings. If he makes a move to use either of those guns, drop him where he stands.”
“Come down to just you an’ me, Hargrove,” Titus said as he flicked a look at Harris starting to stir among the sagebrush.
The pilot wagged his head, groggily rolling onto his hip behind Hargrove, rocking onto his hands and knees shakily.
When he fixed his eyes again on the train captain, Titus found Hargrove had cleared a pistol from his belt, yanking it into sight with his left hand.
Without considering those orders Hargrove had given his two henchmen, Titus brought up his two weapons on instinct, instantly deciding he would take the horseman with the pistol, then use the trade gun loaded with shot to deliver a scattered pattern at the man to his left because he stood a better chance of hitting him with a wide pattern than with a single ball.
He pitched forward onto his knees after firing his first shot with the pistol, with barely enough time to watch the ball slam into Hargrove’s shoulder before he pulled the trigger on the scattergun in his left hand. He felt the hired man’s ball snarl past his ear at the very moment that double load of coarse drop-shot chewed through the gunman’s belly like a nest of angry wasps, flinging him backward, his feet pin-wheeling in the loose sand.
But a gunshot rumbled from the rocks behind the bloodied man, knocking his body forward. He landed with the side of his face down in the dirt.
Immediately afterward a second weapon roared from the boulders, off to Bass’s right this time, the ball furrowing into the ground beside the second gunman’s boot.
“No! No! Don’t shoot me!” the henchman screeched in utter panic as he hurled his rifle loose and raised his arms.
Fury clouded Hargrove’s face as he gazed down at his bleeding wound, angrily nudging his horse forward. “Isn’t this a predicament, old man?” he crowed. “You’ve emptied both of your weapons … but I still have both of mine.”
Scratch hoped Waits could place her shot close enough to Hargrove that it would give her husband at least a heartbeat to dive out of the way, perhaps even make it to that loaded rifle the hired man had just pitched aside before the bully shuffled back in terror, his arms still high.
“I’ll still make it to California, old man,” Hargrove growled, “but your bones’ll rot here in the middle of nowhere.”
The instant Hargrove whipped both of his weapons into play, Bass dove for that loaded rifle in the sand. One of the captain’s bullets kicked up dirt at his heel the moment he smacked onto the ground and his hands scooped up the weapon. He was just beginning to wheel with it, not anywhere near ready to fire, when he winced the instant Hargrove’s second gun boomed—
But the horseman’s shot went completely wild.
Titus watched the man’s back arch suddenly, a reflex that forced his pistol to fire at the sky. A long moment, then Hargrove peered down at his chest, beginning to gurgle, finding that patch of blood beginning to seep around the bubbling black hole at the middle of his brocade vest. Then, as Hargrove slowly turned around in the saddle and Bass rolled onto an elbow so he too could look behind the man’s horse—they both found smoke curling from the yawning muzzle of that big-bore flintlock held by Moses Harris.
“D-don’t shoot me!” the hired man blubbered repeatedly as he crumpled to his knees, sobbing.
After swallowing his heart back down from his throat, Bass hollered in Crow at the rocks, “No more shooting—hold your fire!”
Mules and oxen were braying and bawling from the echoes of that noisy gunfire behind Hargrove as the train captain brought his red hand away from his chest, stared down at the blood on it, then inch by inch keeled out of the saddle and fell onto the sand. Shrieks erupted from the first women to reach the scene with their men. Children surged forward between grown-ups’ legs, held back by their parents as the crowd swelled up behind Harris, pressing in on one another for a view of the carnage.
As Titus got to his hip, then pushed himself to his feet with that rifle in hand, still uncertain if this had been played completely out or not, Harris lowered the weapon he held in his hands and trudged those few steps that brought him to Hargrove’s body with a sad weariness.
When he stopped to peer down at the wagon master, Harris grumbled, “Idjit son of a bitch.”
Scratch came to a halt on the other side of Hargrove as the captain spewed blood, trying to speak as his half-glazed eyes stared up at Harris; then his head rolled slightly so he could peer at Bass. Dropping to his knee, Titus held his ear close to the blood-covered lips.
Harris asked, “What’s he say?”
Titus looked up. “Said he’d see both of us again … in hell.”
> The instant Harris raised his rifle in the air as if he intended to smash it down into Hargrove’s face, Bass knocked it aside with his loaded weapon. Harris took a step back, his dark face hard as slate, glaring at Titus with fury-tinged eyes.
“Leave ’im be to die,” Scratch said quietly. Then watched some of the anger disappear from the old trapper’s face. “Likely he’s right.”
“Right about what?” Harris demanded.
“Chances are, we’ll both see ’im again in hell.”
“Damn this son of a bitch,” Harris growled, his tone one more of disappointment than fury now. “Owes me money, an’ a spree in California too. Señoritas an’ some pass brandy. Damn this dead son of a bitch anyway.”
“I’ll lay you can scratch up some money back there in his wagons,” Titus suggested.
A bright light dispelled the last remnants of darkness in the old trapper’s eyes. “By doggies, you’re right!”
The crowd was inching forward as Scratch said, “Why’n’t you go an’ take these here folks right on to Californy like you was set on doin’ anyway. I figger you’ll be set for quite a spree out with all them Mexican señoreetas.”
With a growing grin, Harris looked down at Hargrove’s wide, unmoving eyes. “S’pose I still could take ’em on to California at that—”
“What’re we going to do without Hargrove?”
Looking up at the new voice, Titus found the face, one of those who had been Hargrove’s biggest backers when it came time for the mutiny by the Oregon company.
“You wanna go to Californy, this pilot gonna take you folks there,” he snapped at the man. “Elsewise, you all can rot right here waiting for Hargrove to raise hisself from the dead.”
“What’m I gonna do now?” the last hired man asked, still frozen in place, his arms raised.
Harris eyed him menacingly.
But it was Titus who spoke, “You ever fire a shot at me or my kin?”
“N-no, I didn’t,” he admitted with a frightened wag of his head.
“Ever you do harm to any of these other folks?”
Again he shook his head. “No.”
Scratch turned on those men and women, and the children clutching their mothers’ skirts, wide-eyed. “This man ever raise a hand to any of you?”
Some hung their heads, others continued to stare at the dead bodies, and a few mumbled their answer.
Turning back to the hired man, he said, “Then I s’pose they might let you stay on with ’em all the way to the end of the trail.”
He could hear the weight of that breath escaping the man’s lungs. Jabbing his head toward Harris, Bass told the young man, “Seems like you can throw in with your pilot now, an’ the two of you have yourselves a grand time. Makes no nevermind to me.”
“Wha’chu gonna do yourself now?” Harris asked as Bass handed him the hired man’s rifle.
“Me? We was headin’ back to Bridger’s post,” he declared, spotting the forms stepping out of the rocks. A woman and a young boy. “Eventual’, we need to be back in Crow country by the first deep snow.”
“Who’s we?”
“Them,” and he pointed to Waits-by-the-Water bringing Jackrabbit toward him, the child’s hand in hers, the long flintlock at the end of the other arm.
Harris turned back to him and said, “You wasn’t takin’ no chances, was you?”
“Onliest way ol’ coons like us got to be so old, Moses. We don’t take scary chances.”
“Them too?” Harris asked.
Titus turned and found Magpie and her brother emerging from the boulders.
“They don’t have to be the best shots in the mountains,” Titus explained. “Just good enough to keep ever’body else busy.”
Harris grinned and wagged his head. “I’ll be damned if you don’t take the circle, Titus Bass!”
Gesturing to Flea, Scratch said, “Get the horses. We’re leaving this place.”
Having turned and started away with his wife and youngest son while the two older children headed off to fetch the animals, Titus was surprised when Harris called out to him. “Don’t you want anything off this son of a bitch?”
He stopped, thought a moment, then shook his head.
“Not his scalp?”
“Only hair I ever raised I took off a proper warrior, Harris.”
“Then you don’t want none of his money?” Harris asked in a loud voice.
“Money?” and he snorted a laugh. “Why, coon—that’s the sort of addle-headed stuff you need out to Californy. What in blazes would I do with money in these here mountains?”
“Suit yourself!” Harris cackled with glee.
“For all I care,” Scratch flung his voice back over his shoulder as he moved toward the horses, “you can keep ever’ damn dollar of it. Man like me won’t ever need money again.”
“You don’t s’pose Shadrach gonna stay out there in Oregon for good, do you?” Jim Bridger asked not long after Titus Bass had hit the ground outside the tall stockade timbers and informed Gabe why Sweete wasn’t along for this return to Black’s Fork of the Green.
“You just never know about that boy,” Titus said as he wiped a droplet of sweat from the end of his nose. “But I don’t figger he’s the sort to put down roots in that country. Lad big as a stalk of corn the way he is needs his sun to grow!”
“Gonna fix us up something special for supper,” Jim proposed. “An’ after we fill your paunch with venison, I’ll lather up your tongue with some barleycorn so you can tell me all ’bout your li’l sashay up to Fort Hall.”
It was a merry return. If not a crowded homecoming, then the best they all could make it. This post wasn’t home, but Gabe and his two children were nonetheless the very best of folks. And the way that Waits-by-the-Water and Magpie dove right in, making themselves comfortable around the place, chattering and giggling too, it did a lot to put the trials of the last few weeks behind him. It had been just like holding a gaunt and hungry wolf at bay … until the strong liquor loosened his tongue and the floodgate of memories came washing back over him in a way he hadn’t allowed since that fateful day at Soda Springs.
“D-dead?” Bridger whispered. “That towhead young’un … your grandson?”
His eyes teared up uncontrollably as he peered at Gabe. “You know what it does to a man when he can’t do a thing to help someone he loves?”
Laying his hard-boned hand on Bass’s shoulder there beside the fire as his wife and Magpie talked, Flea chasing Jackrabbit and Felix about in the cool of the late-summer evening, Jim said, “You ’member how I lost my Cora last year, just after Josie was borned … but, still, I don’t have no way of knowin’ how that’s gotta cut you clear to the backbone, what with losin’ a little’un like that.”
From the beginning Titus had promised himself that he would not get down in the cups with the grief he felt crushing in on him like an inescapable weight. He had resisted the urge to prevail upon Esau for a little of Fort Hall’s hooch, either for some wallowing in misery or for a parting celebration. He had resisted this long—but now the fire of that whiskey pouring down his gullet matched the burn he suffered in that hollow spot that had been growing a bit bigger inside him with each new day. Maybeso he needed to roar and wail, to weep and moan, to release the grief after it had been bottled up for so long. At the very least to get it flushed out of his belly before it ate away at him from the inside like a terrible hydrophobia … like the snake’s own poison had eaten away at Lucas Burwell’s will to fight until there was no more strength left holding on to life.
The flames of that merry fire wavered in a blurry dance the longer he talked. And the longer he talked the more he drank. Magpie sat with her arm around Waits-by-the-Water, the two of them listening intently while Titus spilled his grief like a drunk would puke his belly on the ground—stinking and noxious and loathsome … but this was something that made both the drunk and the griever feel all the better for it.
“Shit, I warned ’em, Gabe,” he
had long ago started slurring his words, what words he managed to choke out around the huge lump wedged down in his throat. Something that just wouldn’t budge no matter how he kept washing it down with Bridger’s whiskey. “Told them young’uns stay back from them rocks.”
“But, Ti-tuzz,” Waits reminded in her language, “the snake did not get the boy who died near the rocks.”
He squinted at the fire, trying hard to make the swimming images hold still for just a heartbeat. Struggling too as he attempted to get his grasp around what her words meant.
“Sounds to me there ain’t no reason for you to think you could have done a thing different,” Bridger consoled. “The boy didn’t go to the rocks. He just crossed paths with one of them rattlers out huntin’.”
For a long time he watched the flames with his half-lidded, pooling eyes, sensing so much of the poison leaching out of him, the way on a hot summer day back in Boone County moisture would sweat beads on the outside of his mam’s clay pitcher. Like it was being pulled out of him a drop at a time, one heartbeat at a time. Gradually healing himself from the inside out as he wallowed in this despair so long rising to the surface.
“I tried my best to understand it, Gabe,” he admitted. “All the time me an’ Waits sat by that fire, makin’ a poultice for them bites, or boilin’ down some roots for Lucas to drink so’s his dyin’ wouldn’t hurt so goddamn much.”
“Tried to understand what?” Bridger asked.
He raised his eyes, struggling to focus on his friend’s face as the tears spilled down his cheeks. “Understand why it is that these here Injuns we white fellers got for wives know so much more’n we men do.”
“How you figger?”
“I see it’s because we’re white, Gabe,” he confessed, staring at the dogs working over old bones nearby. “Ever’ time I work so hard to get my mind around something I can’t figger out, my wife tells me I can’t unnerstand because I ain’t meant to unnerstand. She says I ain’t s’posed to work so hard to find a answer. She says I’ll find out soon enough why ever’thing works out the way it does, an’ why any of the rest of it don’t matter none at all.”
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