But no sooner did they make it back to the Mexican villages than Asa had to rescue him in that knocking shop. Later to save his life a second time with that she-grizz.
Scratch wondered if his wanting to stay together with McAfferty might only come from his longing to right the scales. To square himself with the man who had not just evened things by rescuing him at the whorehouse … but had gone on to pull him back from death’s door on that sandbar beside the Mussellshell River. Maybe, just maybe, Scratch thought, he might be resisting McAfferty’s notion of splitting up only because that would make it near impossible for him ever to clear his accounts with the white-head.
If he was anything, Titus Bass realized he wasn’t the sort of man who could stand going through the rest of his days knowing that he owed someone for saving his life a second time.
It was something that nettled him as they began their journey south from the Judith, up near the Missouri itself, then continued to eat at him as they made their way on down the valley of the Mussellshell, picking their way between mountain ranges. After crossing the Yellowstone, Bass and McAfferty reined to the southeast, skirting the foot of some tall snow-covered peaks then steered a course that took them through a wide cleft in two lower ranges.
Near there they struck the Bighorn, following it south until the Bighorn became the Wind River.
At the hot springs they tarried for two nights among the remnants of countless Shoshone and Crow campsites. Here where warrior bands had visited far back into the time of any old man’s memory, the two had the chance to sit and soak in the scalding waters so comforting that they made Scratch limp as a newborn babe before he would crawl out, crabbing over to a cold trickle of glacial snow-melt that had tumbled all the way down to the valley from the Owl Creek Mountains. There he splashed cold handfuls of the frigid water against his superheated flesh, then scampered back, shivering every step, to settle once again into the steaming pools. Back and forth he dragged his slowly healing carcass, sensing the stinking, sulphur-laden water draw at those poisons that could near eat up a man’s soul. Like one of his mam’s drawing poultices she would plaster upon an ugly, gaping wound, Bass felt those hours he lay in the springs renew not only his flesh, but his spirit as well.
By late in the afternoon of that second day, Titus called for McAfferty to bring his knife along to the pools. Once more the heated water had softened the tough sinew Asa had used to sew up his ragged wounds—and now he was ready.
“Come cut your stitches out,” he asked of the white-head.
“Lemme have a good look at ’em first.” “They’re heal’t.”
McAfferty finally pulled his knife from its scabbard and plunged it beneath the scalding water after he had inspected the thick ropes of swollen welt. “You heal fast, Mr. Bass. ’This poor man cried, and the Lord heard him, and saved him out of all his troubles.’”
Titus bent over and turned his bare back and hip toward his partner. “I’m ready. Cut ’em out of me.”
“My sewing wasn’t purty,” Asa muttered as he pricked the end of the first short length of animal tendon and began to tug it from the tight new skin become a rosy pink with the heat.
“But your sewing likely saved my life.”
Between the long edges of every jagged laceration, McAfferty had stitched tiny fluffs of downy-soft beaver felt as he’d crudely closed the wounds by the fire’s light. But now nothing was left of that beaver felt—all of it absorbed by Scratch’s body until all that remained were those thick purplish-red welts roping their way across his shoulder, down his back, over his hip.
Titus Bass would carry that mark of the bear for the rest of his natural life.
As tight as it was, in time that new skin would stretch and loosen, and he would move that shoulder, move that hip without so much as a protest from it. But Scratch knew he would never … could never … forget coming face-to-face with a force so powerful it could rip the sky asunder, reach through, and devour his very soul.
No more than two days later they reached the valley where the Popo Agie drained into the Wind River. Those wide and verdant meadows were dotted with several camps of Indian lodges, small herds of grazing horses, and a scattering of blanket-and-canvas shelters lying stark against the green banks of both rivers.
“Har, boys!” Scratch cried, feeling an immediate and very tangible joy rise in him like sap in autumn maples.
A handful of white men came out of the shady trees to squint up at the two newcomers. One of them asked, “Where you in from?”
Bass replied, “The Mussellshell and the Judith.”
Another stranger inquired, “You must be free men?”
“We are that,” McAfferty answered this time.
So Titus asked, “You know of Jack Hatcher?”
A third man nodded and moved forward a step as he pointed on up the valley. “Seen him and his outfit, come in already. Don’t know if they’re still here. But they was camped on past Bridger’s bunch.”
“D-don’t know if they’re still here?” Bass repeated, disappointment welling in him like a boil. “They pull out early?”
“Naw,” replied the first man. “Just that ronnyvoo’s ’bout done for this year. Ain’t no more beaver for Sublette to wrassle from us. You boys are the last to wander in from the hills.”
Bass gulped and straightened in the saddle, licking his lips. “Trader still got him any whiskey?”
“Might’n have him a little left,” the second trapper explained as two of his group turned away and headed back to the shade where swarms of flies droned. “He brought the hull durn shiterree out from St. Lou in wagons this year. Can you cotton to that?”
The first man cackled. “Ain’t never been a wagon roll all the way out here! And if that don’t beat all—Sublette brung him two Dearborns along too!”
“Carriages?” Bass squeaked in a high voice, disbelieving. “Dearborns and wagons—here in this wilderness? Shit,” Scratch grumbled as he turned to flick a raised eyebrow at McAfferty. “What’s all this big open coming to? Next thing there’ll be white women and town halls out here!”
“So you say Sublette still got his tents open?” Asa inquired, clearly anxious. “Need me some trade goods.”
“Seemed he had some of near ever’thing left yestiddy,” the trapper answered. “You looking for supplies—lead, powder, coffee?”
With a shrug Asa explained, “Want me some goods for the Injun trade: Chinee vermilion, ribbon and calico, maybeso a passel of beads and tacks and hawk’s bells—the likes of that.”
Bass gazed at the white-head in consternation. “Now, where you figger to use all that?”
“Injun country, Mr. Bass,” he answered cryptically, then turned his head to look again at the stranger below them. “You said Sublette’s got his tents on up the valley?”
The man pointed. “Just other side of the bend in the river. That Hatcher feller’s camped not far past the trader hisself.”
“Much ’bliged,” Asa said, tapping heels against his horse.
They hadn’t gone more than a hundred yards when Scratch caught up with McAfferty at a lope. “Damn if you don’t seem in the hurry. Who lit the fire under you?”
“I can’t go ’thout them trade goods, Mr. Bass,” Asa explained, anxiety already graying his face.
He could see how something was chewing away at McAfferty. “Why are them trade goods so all-fired important?”
“I know now the Lord’s given me a sign. Showed me the road to go. ’For all the land which thou seest, to thee will I give it, and to thy seed for ever. ’”
“What land?” he asked. “And what sign was give you?”
“Up north there, that’s the country give me by the hand of God,” McAfferty explained. “The sign come to me on the Judith—after you was near kill’t by the bear.”