It did not take him long before he was able to surpass Bud Turtle’s catch at each camping site. Then for weeks he worked hard to equal the tally of Billy Hooks’s beaver. And in the end, as winter set in hard and drove the group down out of the Wind River Mountains, south for the southern Rockies, Titus Bass knew he would never be content until he beat Silas Cooper.
Just the way he had come, oh, so close to beating Eli Gamble in that shooting match back to Boone County fifteen summers before.
“So how old a man are y’ now, Titus Bass?” Cooper asked one blustery evening as the clouds parted enough to let the moon and some stars shine through not long after twilight.
He shivered, knowing it would be a cold one this night. “I turn thirty-two this coming Janee-ary.”
“Won’t none of us rightly know when that is!” Tuttle advised.
“Maybe we go and have us a li’l celebration anyways,” Cooper said, shivering himself. “Time we get down to Park Kyack, we’ll likely have to fort up for the winter—as far out of the wind as a man can get hisself.”
Titus dug up behind an ear, his fingertip feeling for the tiny hard vermin about the size of a small grain of rice. “Park Kyack?”
“Where we plan on winterin’,” Bud Tuttle said.
Hooks pointed at Bass, squealing, “Just throw that grayback in the damn fire!”
“Your goddamned nits better not come jumpin’ over here on me,” Tuttle grumbled.
“Titus Bass,” Silas started, “’bout time y’ owned up that you’re fixed with the nits.”
“Rode on him alla way from the settlements, I’d imagine,” Tuttle said.
“Whores got ’em. Ever’ last whore I knowed,” Billy said. “That and the pox too. Man takes his poison from a whore in small doses, but, damn, I hate the Irish itch the way you got it!”
Bass’s scalp crawled all the more just for the speaking of it. Sheepishly he dug his fingers along the top of his scalp, searching, feeling more and more of the tiny varmints infesting him.
Cooper asked, “Whores, was it?”
Wagging his head, Bass replied, “Ain’t been with a whore since early last spring.”
“You itch right after?” Tuttle inquired.
“Not till I was out long the Platte.”
Silas roared, “Say, boys—any Pawnee what had raised that varmit’s skelp—they’d get the grayback nits for all their trouble!”
The three of them laughed heartily, generously, at Bass’s incessant torment. It had gotten worse since meeting up with the trio—if only because one or the other would always comment about his all-but-nonstop itching. When Titus was alone, at least there hadn’t been anyone around to remind him he played host to a troublesome infestation. But looking back at this moment, he decided it had to be that he took on those vermin from the damned soldiers at Fort Osage … that, or from the widow woman up north of Franklin.
“Chances were good it were soldiers,” he declared, not wanting to mention Edna Grigsby as he dug at the back of his neck, pulling a louse free and pitching it into the coals, where it popped and hissed as it was quickly consumed.
“Soldiers?” Cooper demanded.
“Where abouts you run onto ’em out on the Platte?” Hooks asked.
“Wasn’t there,” Titus replied. “Back to Fort Osage.”
“Oh,” Tuttle said with relief crossing his face. “Good thing they didn’t just make you a soldier with ’em. They do that, you know? They can press you into service if’n they take a mind to.”
Bass defended, “These were good fellas—”
“Damn ’em all!” Hooks interrupted. “Soldiers is just like them graybacks. Serve for no good.”
Cooper leaned over and slapped a big hand on Bass’s knee to ask, “Y’ been anywhere else’t but that soldier post where you’d take on a herd of nits?”
A bit embarrassed at telling of his encounter with the widow, Bass looked down, away from the prying eyes, to stare at the fire. It was as good as admitting to it.
“Where, Titus?” Tuttle demanded.
“A woman.”
“Tell us! Tell us now!” Billy roared, clapping his hands twice.
“Billy loves him stories of the womens, he surely does,” Cooper declared. “So tell us your woman story, Bass. And make it a good’un. We all been without for too long, and likely be some weeks afore we winter up with some friendly Injun gals.”
“Injun gals!” Hooks repeated with enthusiasm, rubbing his crotch and humping his hand. “Good poontang, them Injun gals for Billy Hooks.”
“Best part of living in the mountains for the man,” Silas said. “So, y’ gonna tell us ’bout your woman?”
“A widow woman,” Bass finally admitted. “Just a lonely … widow woman. Been ’thout a man for a long time.”
“Them’s the best kind!” Cooper exclaimed with a smile. “They know just how a man gets—going too long ’thout a wet woman wrapped around his stinger. Damned thankful too—no matter how a fella treats ’em.”
“Yeah—them widder-women kind get the hunger bad as us,” Tuttle added.
“So,” Cooper announced in a loud voice suddenly, “before Titus Bass here spins his tale of the widder woman and how she give him the grayback nits … I believe it be time we give our new partner here a new name.”
“N-new name?” Bass stammered.
Billy chimed right in, “Yes, yes! A new name!”
“You got something in mind?” Tuttle asked of Cooper.
Silas shrugged. “S’pose I do, Bud. Just look for yourself. Lookee what he’s got hisself doing for days on end now.”
“Itching,” Tuttle replied as he stared at Bass. “He’s scratching all over hisself. Damn but he’s got him a passel of them nits, and bad!”
“Scratchin’ is what he’s doing,” Silas said. “So—I say let’s give him a new name what’s fittin’ for all them nits he’s been digging at.”
“We gonna call him nit?” Hooks asked with a silly grin.
“Nawww,” Cooper growled as he stood and stepped over behind Bass with his warm tin cup of coffee in hand—which he slowly began to pour on Titus’s head.
When Bass started to jerk aside to get away, Cooper’s empty hand came down to clamp on one of his shoulders as he continued to pour the warm coffee on the newcomer’s long brown hair. His head and shoulders steamed in the cold, frosty air, just like their coffee tins.
Then Cooper flung his cup aside and spread a hand over the crown of Bass’s head, raising his eyes to the black of that winter night, his voice booming in declaration.
“Henceforth and for yonder time—let all men know this here pilgrim nigger no longer be called Titus Bass, greenhorn … but from now on he be the free trapper we gonna know as—Scratch!”
*The LaRamee, or Laramic, River
7
“There h’ain’t no use to pushing on,” Silas Cooper announced to the other three that late afternoon as the wind and snow battered them with such force that it nearly wore a man out. “We’ll hunker down to camp here.”
“Don’t figger we can make it?” Bud Tuttle asked before he swung out of the saddle right behind Cooper in the deep, swirling snow they had been slogging their way through.
“Sun’s falling,” Silas explained, looking off to the west, then looked up ahead of them. “Clouds dropped on that pass up yonder. H’ain’t no way we’re gonna make it over an’ back down to timber afore dark no way.”
Titus watched them both anxiously. In the last few weeks he had come to trust their judgment on just about everything. And now the four of them had just passed timberline into the open, where the wind battered and bruised them without respite. The animals were beginning to bog down in ever-deeper snow. All around them the soft white flakes kept on falling, gusting, swirling in what was close to becoming a whiteout.