“No fight, Silas,” Hooks agreed quickly, then giggled some more like a man willing to rub salt into another’s wounds.
“Damn ride der’ h’ain’t be no fide here,” declared a swarthy, dark-eyed, much older man as he eased up on the far side of Fitzpatrick, his fists clenched and ready.
It was plain the trapper had something on the order of twenty years on Bass, maybe as much as a decade older than Cooper. More than a life outdoors had aged his face: many a year on the frontier had clearly left their mark on the man. His accent was thick, throaty, yet something that sang of its own rhythm, an accent Titus could not remember hearing since those youthful days along the Lower Mississippi: maybe Natchez, more likely all the way down to New Orleans, where the Spanish, French, and Creole tongues mingled freely with the upriver frontier dialects.
“Easy there, Henry,” Fitzpatrick coaxed the German-born Henry Fraeb. “Frapp here gets his blood up pretty quick, but there ain’t no need for cross words, is there, fellas?”
“We’re all friends here,” Cooper readily agreed. “Right, Billy?”
Hooks giggled behind his hand, his eyes gleaming with childlike innocence again. “I ain’t never see’d no Negra out here—”
“Beckwith is the name, not Negra,” the mulatto repeated firmly. It was plain his pride had been wounded. He looked at Hooks steadily and said, “Beckwith. Maybeso you’ll remember it one day.”
“Why, you gonna be something big up on a stick?” Billy mocked, then suffered himself another fit of laughter.
“G’won and help them others with their plunder,” Silas ordered sternly, slapping Hooks across the upper arm, plainly made uneasy by the readiness of the others to back the mulatto.
Cooper waited while Hooks moved off wagging his head, still giggling to himself. “Pay him no mind fellas,” he advised good-naturedly. He tapped a finger to the side of his head, explaining, “Billy’s just … just a bit slow a’times. Why, he finds him some simple joy in most ever’thin’.”
His eyes angry, Bridger argued, “Being soft-brained don’t give a man no right—”
“You’re right,” Silas interrupted, nodding at the much younger man. “C’mon now, fellas. What say we forget this trouble … let’s camp!”
“Man’s right,” Fitzpatrick said grudgingly, eyeing Bridger, Fraeb, and Beckwith with a look that told them all that he expected them to smooth their ruffled feathers and put the matter to rest. “Sun’s down and this bunch ain’t et since morning. ’Sides—we move on to shining times tomorrow.”
Cooper shouldered in between Fitzpatrick and Bridger as the group moved toward the fire, asking, “You boys figger the general spoke the truth when he tolt us he’d pack likker this summer?”
Fitzpatrick said, “Ashley’s a man allays done what he said he’d do. If he says there’ll be likker to ronnyvoo—there’ll be likker there, by God.”
Bass watched the rest gradually settle near the fire with Cooper. But instead of joining them, Potts and Beckwith hung back with Titus.
“So, fellas,” Scratch finally asked in that uneasy silence, “we still going to have us our soak?”
The mulatto shrugged dolefully. “S’pose I could use some water.”
“Damn right you could use some water!” Potts exclaimed suddenly, joyfully, flailing an arm exuberantly at Beckwith. “You’re coming to the river, or you’re dang well stayin’ downwind o’ me from here on out!”
As cold as the water was, nonetheless Scratch plopped himself down in a little pool of it near the sandy bank, just as Potts and Beckwith readily did as twilight put a twinkle to the summer sky. They sat up to their armpits in a little backwater the Bear had long ago cut out of the side of the bank.
In the last of the real light Titus noticed the dull glimmer of something hung round the mulatto’s neck on a narrow thong. “What’s that you got yourself?”
Beckwith held it up, gazed down at it again a moment. “A guinea. First pay I ever got. Stamped with the year I was born.” He held it up for Bass to see.
Leaning over, Titus stared in the fading light at the large round coin, a tiny hole drilled near its top right through the king’s head. There below the nobleman’s neck was emblazoned the date 1800. “You was born six years after me.”
Potts suggested, “Tell him where you got your coin, Jim.”
“We never was the best-off folks in Portage des Sioux outside of St. Charles,” he explained. “So my pa set me to work with a blacksmith, learn me a trade.”
“You don’t say,” Titus replied with happy recognition. “I worked for many a year in Hysham Troost’s place.”
“There in St. Lou? I heard of it, often,” the mulatto replied. “Casner’s was the blacksmith shop where I apprenticed for some five years.”
“Then you come out here to the mountains?” Bass inquired.
“Nawww. Not when I left Casner’s,” Beckwith said. “First I fought Injuns with Colonel Johnson’s expedition up to Fever River when I was released from Casner’s indenture … only nineteen, I was by then. Short time later I figured to take me a ride on down to N’Awlins … where I got yellow fever for my trouble. Barely made it back home alive to my folks at Portage des Sioux, and there I stayed put, healing up, till I learned General Ashley was outfitting him a new brigade for the mountains.”
“I first knowed of Ashley some time back—had him outfits going upriver for the last few years,” Bass observed. “When was it you first come out with him?”
“Back to twenty-four,” Jim answered, his eyes growing wide with excitement, “and that was the first year the general wasn’t headed upriver with them keelboats to get on by the Ree villages. This time he was bound to ride overland for the mountains.”
“Say, boys—my belly’s beginning to holler for fodder,” Potts declared, leaning over to scoop up a handful of sand from the bottom of the pool. “Telling me it’s time to eat my fill of that elk we shot this morning.”
For a few moments Titus watched with interest as Potts, then Beckwith, scooped up one handful after another and used it to scrub their skin.
“What’re you two doing?”
Potts replied, “Givin’ ourselves a good washing.”
“Just sittin’ there in the river isn’t going to help a man much,” the mulatto advised.
“When was the last time you sat your ass down in some water?” Potts asked.
With a shrug Titus said, “Been a long time. ’Cept for times I swum rivers with my critters and stood freezing in mountain streams—I ain’t been near no washing water for more’n a year.”
“Once a year,” Potts instructed, “a man ought’n wash up proper … as good a cleaning as he can.”
Bass said, “I never figgered I’d be one to carry me lye soap.”
“We ain’t the sort to carry no soap neither,” Beckwith explained. “But a good hard scrubbin’ with sand does a toler’ble job, Scratch.”
“Awright,” Titus answered them, scooping up a double handful of sand, which he smeared over his chest.
“Rub it hard, now,” Potts said. “Gotta get shet of all that stink afore ronnyvoos.”
“If you watch, you’ll see your horses and mules does about the same thing when they have themselves a roll in the dirt,” Beckwith said as he pulled one leg out of the water and began sanding it.
Next to his, Bass’s leg was starkly white. In fact, Scratch was so pale, his legs reminded him of the skinny white legs on the pullets the family raised back on the place in Boone County. Only his hands from wrist down were deeply tanned, along with that wide vee extending from his neck onto his chest, as well as his darkened face. Except for those river crossings when he briefly stripped off his clothing, every other part of his pale hide had been protected from much exposure to the sun’s light as far back as he could remember.