“I ain’t letting go,” Bass said resolutely, watching how his words startled the bigger man. “You cain’t go an kill her for no good reason.”
“No good reason?” Cooper shrieked. “I got good reason, Titus Bass … and for nothing more’n the hell of it if’n I wanna.”
Desperate not to watch another animal die with a lead ball in its brain, Titus blurted, “L-lemme have ’er.”
Something came across Silas’s face in that next moment as he stared down at Titus Bass, standing there toe to toe, only inches between them. “Y’ … y’ say y’ want this cantankerous pile of mule shit for yourself?”
“Just lemme have ’er and you won’t have to waste your time no more on the mule.”
Silas wagged his head. “But I awready give y’ a mule to use for packin’ your truck and plews.”
Titus nodded, sensing his arms growing weary as he continued to grip Cooper’s wrist. “I’ll trade you. That’s what we’ll do.”
“A trade.” Finally Silas nodded, then gazed at where Bass held his wrist. “Awright. We’ll work us a fair trade. Now, y’ best let go a’me, Titus.”
He immediately released Cooper’s arm. “You gimme that mule and I’ll give you back the one you gimme that first day you run onto me.”
Cooper rubbed the wrist Bass had held imprisoned for those long, terrifying moments. “Hold on there: it ain’t so easy to trade pack stock. You’re just a dumb pilgrim when it comes to tradin’, ain’cha, Scratch? Y’ see, y’ made the mistake of letting the other man find out just how willing y’ was to be trading—showed me plain just how much y’ wanted what I got to trade.”
“We’re just swapping the mules, one for t’other,” Bass said.
“That’s only fair, Silas,” Tuttle agreed, licking his cracked lips nervously.
“One for t’other. One for t’other,” Billy Hooks repeated with that ready smile of his as he shifted back and forth from foot to foot.
“No,” Cooper snapped. “If’n y’ want this mule so bad, then we’ll trade. But it’s gonna cost y’ more’n just that fly-bait mule I give y’ when I first took you on. That’uns the wust in our hull bunch.”
Bass swallowed. “What’s it gonna cost me?”
Silas appeared to regard that for a long moment as he peered over at the mule carrying all that Bass owned in the world. “Y’ been doing good at trappin’, Scratch.”
“I been catching on what you learned me, yeah.”
“Got better’n Tuttle, y’ have—right off.”
Bud snorted. “That ain’t hard for ary a man to do!”
“And you’re damn near good as Billy Hooks right now.”
Titus said, “I’d wager I am as good as Billy right now.”
“Maybeso you’re better’n me,” Hooks injected, “but you’ll never be good as Silas Cooper!”
“Maybe I will,” Bass replied, watching those coal-black eyes come back to rest on him. “One day real soon.”
Cooper asked quietly, “Y’ want this here mule, Scratch?”
“You know I do, goddammit,” he snapped, knowing full well it was going to cost him dearly.
“Then I’ll trade y’,” Cooper offered. “For your ol’ fly-bait animal, and half what plews y’ll catch this winter.”
Tuttle gasped. “T-that mean from here on out, Silas?”
“No, that means half of everything Scratch trapped up till now, and half till we reach ronnyvoo come summer.”
Titus seethed inside. “W-what’s ronnyvoo?”
Silas explained, “Where I tol’t you we was gonna barter in our beaver come next summer. Drink some whiskey and poke a squar or two … barter us plunder for next year. Ronnyvoo.”
Bass swallowed hard, knowing he had nowhere to wiggle in the negotiations. “H-half of my hides this winter … till ronnyvoo—”
“You want the mule … or don’cha?”
“I want it,” Bass said squarely.
“Then it’s a deal,” Cooper said, sticking out his bare right hand in that bitterly cold wind.
Bass yanked off his mitten, took the hand, and shook as he gazed up into those marblelike eyes of Cooper’s. “It’s a deal.”
Then he felt Silas slowly start squeezing, bearing down harder, slowly harder as the muscles and bones of his hand cried out in sudden, hot pain. When he looked back up at Cooper’s eyes, they were lit with cold, cold fire.
Behind that big grin of his, Silas said, “And … one more thing, Titus Bass.”
That hand hurt like hell, so much it was hard to speak. “What’s … what’s that, Silas?”
“Don’t y’ ever, ever again lay a hand on me …”
He interrupted, “I don’t figger I’ll have cause to lay a hand on—”
But Cooper snarled, interrupting, “Or the next time y’ll pull back a bloody stump.”
* * *
That mule-for-beaver bargain had been nothing short of mountain thievery.
And for certain there had been times since that very first day when Titus Bass wished he’d let Silas Cooper go right on ahead and put a lead ball in that mule’s head.
But for all the trouble she’d give him in those days and weeks that would come to pass—besides the pain of having to trade off that half of his beaver plews to boot—Scratch remained steadfastly hopeful that the sorrel mule would one day come around and behave like a decent, docile, and obedient animal … the sort that would prove herself to be a true partner to a man, just like those mules that had faithfully plowed the ground for his pap back in Boone County.
Why, Titus had even named the stubborn, stiff-backed mule—something new for him: Bass had never before named a horse or mule, ever—but feeling this time that to give her a name might not only make it seem she was just that much more special to him, but she might well come to know the sound of her own name, learn to recognize it, and might thereby figure she was pretty damned special to him.
“Hannah,” he had told her aloud the third morning of that storm, after sitting and studying her for the longest time, watching the sorrel’s big eyes study him in turn as she worked on a patch of ground he had cleared of snow. “I’ve always favored that name—for a wife of my own, thought maybeso for my daughter. So I’d like you to have it … Hannah.”
As hard as he was to work in the Weeks to come, hoping that the mule might just one day come around to his way of thinking and try a little to be his friend … well—trouble was, the two of them were still a long, long way off from that glorious day.
The early-winter storm on the pass had indeed continued another three days and nights, dumping an icy snow without stop. In their sheltering ring of trees the four men chopped what firewood they needed from the limbs and branches of that copse of stunted pine. A part of each morning they used their time to scrape and chisel down through the new snow to reach some bare ground for the horses and mules grown weary of digging for themselves with bloody hooves. Most afternoons two of the men ventured out to hunt in relay, going as far off as they would dare—every one of them aware how a man could easily get himself turned around in the endless white blur of a blizzard.
What they managed to bring in for all their effort was hardly enough to keep one man well fed, much less four hearty appetites in that subzero cold: a few snowshoe hares, a handful of blue grouse, and a fat marmot—one more than Titus ever wanted to see again in his life. Nevertheless, that poor fare along with the one bony Indian pony they sacrificed kept those men alive enough so that after five more days, when the weather cleared, they were strong enough to urge their animals on up past timberline, across the loose, shifting talus and shale of that treacherous saddle, then down the far side of the eastern slopes into the trees, where they would surely have more luck hunting what game had been driven down, ever down, to lower elevations by the winter storms.