“Damnation. Likely we got another of them windy storms boiling up out yonder,” he muttered, turning to direct his comment to the mare as he lurched to a weary halt. “Mayhap we should find us a place to make camp afore that rain rolls over us like some of ’em have.”
Quickly he scanned the southwest, then took himself a measure of the land off to the northwest, seeking something that might hold promise in the way of forting up against the bluster of a bullying storm replete with horrific wind, rain, and ofttimes hail. Already he had come to expect a brief thunderstorm most every afternoon out here along the upper reaches of the Platte—but, damn, did he hate the hail. Those icy shards hurt each time they came hurtling out of a particularly angry patch of blue-black clouds overhead. Hurt the mare so bad, she cried out in something close to humanlike pain as he scampered to take shelter under her belly and those packs she carried atop her ribby sides, the only cover there often was for miles around.
“We ain’t gonna be caught this day, no, we’re not, girl,” he promised the mare. “There, yonder—I see some big trees not too far off. We’ll skedaddle down there now till that storm blows on over.”
Off to the side of the bluffs he hurried the horse, down from the ridgetop where he first spotted the dim outline of the storm’s approach. Among an extensive grove of cottonwood Titus prepared for the bad weather by dropping the packs from the mare’s back, tying her rope to one of the trees, where she should have adequate shelter against the pelting hail. Then he went over to settle down between the two small packs himself, dragging the canvas over the packs and his head too. Breathing a sigh of satisfaction that he was at last prepared for the impending onslaught, Titus listened expectantly for telltale sounds of the storm’s approach.
Squatting there, he waited and listened. At times Bass caught himself dozing off. And waited some more. But through it all he did not hear the wind whipping itself into a fury, driving the rain and hail before it.
The longer he listened, the more he grew suspicious—thinking the storm had taken a different track to the north or south around them.
“Let’s go have ourselves a look-see,” he told the mare as he threw back his canvas shelter, stood, and untied her long rope.
He vaulted onto her bare back, saying, “Maybe that storm moved on by us—what say we go find out for my own self?”
Side to side he switchbacked the horse up the side of the bluff they had descended to take shelter, then brought the mare to a halt at the top to survey the heavens overhead. A blue expanse dotted with white, fluffy clouds—as beautiful as a man would want his sky to be. To the south, and north, and even to the west as far as he could see, the sky remained unthreatening—except that jagged line of purple-blue thunderhead still clinging to the tar western horizon.
“Ain’t like nothing I ever seen: just sitting out there ’thout coming this way a’tall,” he muttered in confusion to the horse, more in disgust that he had been ready this time when no storm came crashing over them.
Yet as he continued to stare at the distant smoked-glass horizon—it slowly dawned on him. Perhaps … yes, there might be a reason this truly wasn’t like any storm he had ever seen—especially now that he had himself a good, long gander at it … because maybe, just maybe, that wasn’t a jagged, roiling, rumbling thunderstorm gathering on the far horizon after all.
“Do you think?” he asked himself aloud, leaning forward to speak into the mare’s ear. “Could it be … them far, far mountains?”
To see them at long, long last for the first time, sitting atop that steady old horse there on that rocky bluff of pale ocher, the gentle summer breeze strong in his face, perhaps a wind bringing him the scent of those far-off and terrible places. No, not clouds at all hulking way off yonder at the end of his mortal sight … but the … the god-blamed Rocky Mountains!
“Jumpin’ Jehoshaphat!” he shrieked in a sudden gust of realization at the same moment he began to hammer the mare’s ribs with his heels.
She gamely shot away, obediently rolling into a trot.
“Whaaaa-hooooo!”
Into a lope she finally took herself, then eased up into a gallop as he hugged close to her neck, one hand double-wrapped with that lead rope, the other hand tangled in her mane as they raced west toward that thin purple-blue border of jagged landscape. Down the far end of the bluff they tore together, right onto the rolling, rugged valley—ever westward!
“By damn—we gonna make it to them Rocky Mountains, ol’ girl!” he whooped in ecstasy, then bellowed again at the top of his lungs as the mare surged ahead with all the speed she could muster for her rider. “Whaaaa-hooooo!”
It had taken so many weeks, and months too, just to leave that hardwood country behind, then suddenly to find himself pitched into a monotonously bare and rolling tableland when through all his waiting Titus had figured the country would become increasingly more hilly the closer he got to those distant, shining mountains. But instead the world around him had only become flatter, ideal for the numberless buffalo that grazed on the land’s rich bounty of grass.
“Glory! Glory! Glory!” he repeated in a wild screech as the hot breeze whipped tears from his eyes.
So long had he waited to see them with his own eyes, each night along the way remembering just how he had let his imagination paint such vivid pictures in his mind while Isaac Washburn had told him this and told him that about the far places of the west the old man had himself seen. Night after night of imagining and dreaming on them, it seemed those mountains had grown all the larger, loomed all the bigger until here he was at last—suddenly struck with disappointment that what lay before him was not as tall, nowhere near as grand, nor jagged, nor threatening, nor ultimately challenging as Washburn had made them out to be.
Nowhere near the majestic mountain ranges his very own rich and fertile and ready imagination had been making them out to be all these months.
So in no small measure of disappointment he began to pull back on the rope, slowing the mare out of her surging run to the west.
For well over a year Titus had been preparing for this moment—yet here he was, of a sudden trying to make sense of it, to reconcile Gut’s description of the Rocky Mountains with what undramatic and uneven outline lay there against the far horizon.
At last he brought the horse to a halt. Bass slid to the ground but continued to stare until he kicked a toe at a clump of bunchgrass.
“Damn—if I ain’t got a head filled with stupids!” he roared, feeling the fool of a sudden. “It ain’t that them mountains is puny, girl … just that they be too damned far away for us to see ’em proper!”
He sat there some more soaking in that distant vista before slowly turning the mare about to retrace their path. And from time to time he glanced back over his shoulder at the far jagged line.
“Gonna take us a few days afore we get there,” he consoled himself. “Leastways, now we see where it is we been heading all this time. Out there—why, that be the end of our journey, girl!”
Like everything else in his life, he decided, this was to be only a matter of keeping one foot landing in front of the other—hard times or slick. He’d come this far by putting his head down and not giving up no matter if the water was bad or the game was scarce, no matter that there’d been cold camps for lack of firewood or the possibility of scalp hunters out and afoot. But no matter any of that, Titus Bass was here at the brink of the Rocky Mountains—where he could look out there and see them for the first time in all his born days.