“Maybeso one day I’ll come back this way,” Asa told Workman as they swung into their saddles.
“Give it some time, like Kinkead said,” the whiskey trader reminded them. Then he turned of a sudden and held up his hand to Titus Bass.
“Near forgot to tell you, Scratch. Wanted to wish you a happy birthday.”
“H-happy birthday?”
Workman nodded. “Figger it’s well past midnight already. That makes it New Year’s Day, eighteen and thirty. How many rings that give you now?”
“Thirty-six,” he replied, astonished. “Already a new year.”
“You boys watch your hair,” Workman said as he took a step back and slapped Bass’s horse on the rump.
“You watch your’n, Billy Workman!” Scratch cried as they reined away.
At the top of the prairie McAfferty came alongside him as they loped beneath the North Star.
“That’s twice now since we threw in together what I didn’t think we’d make the new year, Mr. Bass.”
“Maybeso you’re a hard-user on your partners, Asa.”
“Me?”
“You was the one what rode us off down to Apache country.”
McAfferty snorted. “And you was the one took us off down to whore country! ’For true and righteous are His judgments: for He hath judged the great whore, which did corrupt the earth with her fornication!’”
When Titus turned to gaze at Asa, he found the white-head’s eyes glimmering with mirth. “Awright, you slick-tongued son of a bitch. I s’pose we are even. You got us in that fix down on the Heely, and I got us out.”
“Then I pulled us out of the next mess you plopped us down in,” McAfferty concluded.
“Way I see it,” Scratch declared, “we’re square, Asa McAfferty. No matter what happens atween us partners now, we’re square.”
Scratch figured they couldn’t have anywhere near as much trouble from there on out as the two of them had their first few months after throwing in together. Leastways, that’s what he told himself as they loped out of the valley of the Rio Grande, slogged their way over the pass, and finally plunged down to the foot of the Front Range, where they struggled on north.
At times they happened across a likely-looking stream flowing down from those emerald foothills and set up camp for a few days to work the banks hard, doing their best to strip the place clean of what beaver they could bring to bait. More times than he would care to count that winter and on into the early spring, they were forced to hole up and hunker down as a storm blustered over them, delaying their journey north. Nonetheless, those days imprisoned in camp gave them a chance to make needed repairs to traps, tune the locks in their rifles and pistols, sharpen knives, and reinforce saddles and tack.
Those hours also gave Asa an opportunity to discourse on a variety of celestial and theological subjects, his long, meandering monologues taking him from the rightful place of the devil and evil among mankind, all the way to his assertions that the end of the world had already been foretold and its date was therefore cast in stone. No matter how good mankind might believe it would ever become, man was by nature still an evil creature and one day would be brought to task for his errant ways.
“Even you, Asa McAfferty?” Bass asked skeptically.
The white-head had looked up from the oiled strop where he was dragging a knife blade back and forth. The sharp edge lay still as he studied Scratch. After a long moment of reflection, he answered gravely, “Especially me.”
As his partner went back to sliding the honed blade up and down the strop, Bass echoed, “You?”
“The harshest penalty come that day of judgment for this wicked world will be meted out to those of us who have sought how best to serve the Lord our God … and failed Him in the end,” McAfferty explained. “’And I saw the dead, small and great, stand before God; and the books were opened: and another book was opened, which is the book of life: and the dead were judged out of those things which were written in the books, according to their works.’”
Scratch stared into the fire for a long time and eventually asked, “Ever thort to just turn away from all your Bible-spouting ways?”
“There ain’t but a handful of men I’ve met in me life what’d understand what I’m about to say, Mr. Bass—but I figger you’re one of the few,” Asa began with measured confidence. “See, comes a time in his life a man does what he knows to be right … even when he knows no one else thinks he’s right. That might be my saving grace. My only prayer of spending eternity in the sky.”
Oh, how Scratch had wanted McAfferty to explain all that, cursing himself for not being near smart enough to figure out the riddles and parables the man used to explain things. But in the end Titus was reluctant to admit his ignorance of spiritual matters. In the end he let it lay, and did not ask.
As winter grew old, they crossed the South Platte, then struck its northern branch. Along it the pair traveled west toward the interior basin, then struck out for the Wind River. North to the Bighorn, eventually reaching the south bank of the Yellowstone itself.
By and large the ice was growing spongy that day late in March, so they were forced to push downstream until they found a patch of more open water. There they stripped out of all their clothing but moccasins, tied all of it right onto the top of their packs, and led the reluctant animals into the icy river. Yelling their encouragement to one another and to the animals, their teeth chattering like bone dice in horn cups, the trappers swam across the mighty Roche Jaune, gripping bridles or saddle horns with trembling hands.
On the far side Bass and McAfferty emerged from the water shivering so hard they could hardly stand, their half-frozen fingers fighting to loosen wet knots, finally freeing the oiled hides where they had safely wrapped their clothing. Back inside their warm buckskins, an outer pair of buffalo-hide moccasins, and their thick blanket capotes pulled over buffalo-fur vests, they made camp for the night on the spot—then pressed on the next morning.
North by northwest they pointed their noses now, their faces battered by a wild mix of brutal spring rains, freezing sleet, and some soggy, late-season snows until more than a dozen days after putting the Yellowstone at their backs they struck a narrow, winding river where the redbud and willow were just beginning to bloom beneath a clearing sky.
“By my reckoning, this here gotta be the Mussellshell,” McAfferty asserted as they dropped to the ground in that lush bottomland.
Bass studied the stream up, then down, making note of the surrounding landforms. “You heard tell this was good beaver country, eh?”
“Said to be prime beaver,” Asa replied; then he raised his rifle and gestured at the jagged line of peaks lying along the western horizon. “That yonder’s the edge of Blackfoot country.”
They slept off and on throughout the lengthening days, grabbing a short nap here and there in the morning and afternoons, catching a few hours at night. This was a dangerous land where one of them had to arise in the dark hours after the moon had set and take half their animals out to graze in plain sight of camp. The other horses they kept tied close at hand just to be ready, in the event they had to run to save their scalps.
While a trapper’s normal routine would have him going out early in the morning and again late in the afternoon, neither of these wary veterans ventured from their secluded camps during the daylight hours. Instead, Bass and McAfferty went to their traps only in the darkness before dawn, and in the blackness after twilight had faded from the sky.
As they slowly worked their way up the Mussellshell toward the mountains, then crossed over the low divide and began to trap down the Judith River, the pair cautiously chose their camps: finding a spot with enough tall willow to hide their horses and their plunder, enough of the blooming cottonwood branches overhead to disperse the smoke rising from their tiny fires. A cold and horrid winter had given way to a wet and miserable spring, fraught with daily thunderstorms that soaked man and animal alike and made a man hanker for the coming warmth of summer days and the prospect of rendezvous.