Dammit! He may well be one against that handful of red thieves, but it didn’t make no never-mind to him that he was on foot against horsemen.
Bass decided they wouldn’t figure a lone white man to be coming after them … so that arrogance just might work in his favor.
From the looks of the moon hanging above those southwestern ridges, he calculated that he might have as much as two more hours before it was light enough to take off after them.
Not that he couldn’t go now, racing off into the snow-covered night. But he was damned suspicious one of the thieves, maybe even two of them, might turn back in the dark, hiding somewhere along the trail left by the others, watching for any possible pursuit from the lone trapper.
Better was it for him to wait until there was sufficient light to see far enough ahead along the thieves’ backtrail.
Besides, he had him plenty to do until the gray of predawn came sliding over the bluffs to hail its first greeting to the Yellowstone valley.
After warming his hands over the flames a moment more, Titus snatched up his small camp ax and turned toward the tall willow clustered along the riverbank. Wouldn’t be long before he’d have a sweat worked up, cutting enough branches to hide his plunder and plews.
More than two weeks ago he had turned south from the Judith basin as the weather grew unbearably miserable. No longer was winter merely dallying with the northern plains. Deep cold left in the wake of a hellish storm descended so quickly upon this country that it left a man no doubt that autumn was long done with. Bass had pushed his luck about as far as any savvy man might, lingering that far north along the Missouri River country, trapping past the time when lesser men might have turned tail and run.
But, damn—weren’t the plews fine!
Big, fat beaver, the sort what wore pelts so large the mountain man called them blankets. And thick? Jumpin’ Jehoshaphat—but they were seal fat and sleek! It was damn near the finest trapping Titus Bass had ever done in the weeks he tarried past the falling of the leaves, the freezing of the smaller creeks and streams, lingering past the first icy glazing to the surface of the Judith and even the mighty Upper Missouri itself.
Battling his way south, back up the Judith until it reached the foothills, he struggled on through the narrow breach between two mountain ranges, eventually crossing the low divide to drop into the valley of the Mussellshell. Scratch plodded south by east only as long as the animals’ strength held up each day, slowly making for his cache on the north bank of the Yellowstone. When he could tell they were close to being all but done in, Titus would be forced to find them someplace to camp where a small patch of grass had been blown clear. If he wasn’t that lucky, Bass would spend the last hour of light each afternoon chopping cottonwood he would peel before throwing the limbs onto his fire. Though it wasn’t the best of fodder for the animals—it had to be better than some of the withered, wind-dried grasses the stock had been forced to eat as the seasons quickly turned against man and beast in this icy land.
This was to have been his last camp before reaching the cache. One last sleep before he would spend a day or so reopening the hole, laying in his high Missouri pelts with what he had already stashed away of the catch from earlier in the autumn. In addition, he had planned to stow away what he knew he wouldn’t need until late in the winter—like the extra weight of his traps, both American and Mexican made—when the streams and creeks and rivers began to open. And before he resealed the cache, he figured he should pull out a little of this and a little of that from his Taos and rendezvous goods: gifts of foofaraw and geegaws for the Crow.
This one last camp before …
After he had slogged back to his plunder with that first armload of brush, Scratch took a few minutes to pull his hands from his blanket mittens and warm them over the fire before turning to the business of dragging the bundles back into the willow near a small stand of cottonwood saplings. Retying each pack, Titus made sure every square inch was covered by the oiled Russian sheeting. Then he dragged up the first of the brush he had cut, working carefully to stuff the limbs down into the ropes on the top and all four sides.
A second trip added more brush to his cover. A third, fourth, and finally a fifth time he trudged down to the riverbank to chop more limbs. By the time the sky to the east turned as red as that afterbirth expelled by a buffalo cow dropping a calf, he stood back and was satisfied he had concealed what he owned.
Now he had to go after the rest of what little he had in this world.
Stuffing his hands back into the mittens after rubbing his flesh over the fire, Bass laid his two buffalo robes one on top of the other. After folding his two blankets, he placed them inside the robes before turning in the edges of the furry hides. With a bundle more than two feet thick, Scratch took the last long braid of rawhide rope and lashed it all together into a pack some four feet long and nearly as wide.
Rising from the cold, blue snow just beginning to turn a pale pink presaging the sun’s arrival, he hurriedly chopped down three of the strongest cottonwood saplings and trimmed them of branches and knots. Crossing one of the long, thin saplings over another, he tied the two together with some short sections of hemp rope. After cutting the third sapling into two pieces, he tied both sections across the wide vee formed by the others. Then, with his last piece of rope, Titus lashed his bedding and a small packet of dried meat to his improvised travois.
By then it was light enough to plainly see the trail left by the raiders. Time to move out.
Stepping into the vee just ahead of his bundle, Bass shoved the barrel of his rifle through two of the bedding ropes. He jabbed his pistol under another rope, then turned and adjusted the knife and tomahawk at his back, shifted the shooting pouch over his shoulder.
Then he stepped forward, bent down, and pulled the two saplings off the ground.
Surprised to find it wasn’t so heavy after all. And if he had left enough room at the base of the travois below that bottom crosspiece, the drag should ride well enough over the sagebrush and rocky ground, keeping his robes out of the ankle-deep powder.
Squinting into the west as the light began to balloon around him, he thought of Hannah.
Remembered how she had run off that day the Arapaho had jumped them. How she had come back later. How the mule had saved him, saved them both.
“I’m coming for you, girl,” he vowed in a cold, dry whisper.
Ain’t no red niggers gonna get you from me ’less I die trying to get you back.
The intense cold of that early dawn nearly froze the hot mist in his eyes as he set out on the trail, realizing just how warm a man could be when he nursed on revenge.
Stopping only long enough to blow and catch his wind or get a drink of water that first day, Bass didn’t eat until evening. After chewing on some dried strips of venison, he bent over the bank and cracked the thick scum of ice forming along the Yellowstone. He drank long and deep, knowing how vital it was to quench his thirst several times a day in this high, dry, cold land.
Every bit as important, if not more so, as it was to take in water during the heat of late summer—just as crucial as such a thing could be in Apache country. Water might mean the difference between his keeping up with the raiders or never even standing a chance of catching them … the difference between life and death, alone as he was in this winter wilderness.
He stood again, his weary bones protesting, pushing his face on into the brutal slash of that drying west wind.
A while after the sun went down ahead of him, the wind died, no longer tormenting the valley, nor rawhiding his leathery face. Throughout the day’s march he had stopped here and there long enough to swipe one mitten or the other over his face, scouring the frost from his eyebrows and lashes, scrubbing the icicles from his mustache and beard where they collected as his heaving gusts of breath froze in a coating over his face. All day hauling his little travois onward in the path of the falling sun.