And once the lodge was stripped of all that could be given away, an old, bent woman took up a burning brand from a nearby fire, and as others keened and wailed, she set the lodge hides aflame. Slowly turning aside, the people went to their horses and travois, setting off to the south for a new winter campsite.
While a black, greasy spiral rose from what had once been his friend’s home.
Friends. And home.
Where he found friends, Titus Bass had always found a home.
White faces swam before him now as those copperskins of the Crow faded from view. Come rendezvous he would reunite with old friends, make him some new ones … and drink that annual toast to the missing few who failed to come in.
Recalling in that early-morning reverie how he had vowed to hoist a drink to Asa McAfferty’s memory—
Through a sudden narrow crack that opened in his reverie, Scratch listened as the magpie took flight over him, cawing noisily in alarm.
He did not move, peering through squinted eyes, listening to every sound, testing every smell the breeze brought to him.
Nearby Hannah lifted her muzzle into the air.
Were it a Injun—she’d be raising a ruckus.
Could it really be a white man she’d winded?
The old man squinted and barely made out the felt hat sitting motionless now behind some low brush across the clearing.
Damn—but he hadn’t seen a white face in longer’n he ever cared to go again.
Sudden hope fluttered in his chest like the rush of a thousand pairs of wings—raising his own spirit as high as that seamless blue belt stretched far above him, higher than his spirit had been in a long … long time.
A white man.
He figured there were answers come to the most private of prayers.
“I heard you, nigger!” Titus hollered. “Might’n come out now!”
Reluctantly, the felt hat rose, with the hairy face of a young man appearing beneath its wide brim, frightened eyes about as big as the quilled rosettes on Scratch’s leather shirt.
Titus looked up and down the intruder’s frame. The bearded stranger already wore his hair hung long over his collar. Maybeso this feller’d been out here some time already.
But he was still wearing store-bought woolen clothes—mussed and dirty to be sure, torn and ripped in places. And it was plain to see that his leather belt was notched up tight around a waist surely much skinnier than it had once been.
And suddenly Titus Bass remembered that he too had been this young of a time long ago, come to these far and terrible mountains when he had been so damned ignorant that he wouldn’t have lasted ’less someone took him under a wing.
His eyes misting with the heartfelt swell of inexplicable joy, Scratch’s voice croaked when now he used it.
“C’mon over here. Lemme take a look at you.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
TERRY C. JOHNSTONwas born in 1947 on the plains of Kansas and has lived a varied life as a roustabout, history teacher, printer, paramedic, dog catcher, and car salesman, all the while immersing himself in the history of the early West. His first novel, Carry the Wind, won the Medicine Pipe Bearer’s Award from the Western Writers of America, and his subsequent books, among them Cry of the Hawk, Winter Rain, BorderLords, and the Son of the Plains trilogy, have appeared on bestseller lists throughout the country. Terry C. Johnston lives and writes in Big Sky country near Billings, Montana.
A Special Preview of
RIDE THE MOON DOWN
Here is the eagerly awaited sequel to Terry C. Johnston’s bestselling frontier trilogy, Carry the Wind, BorderLords, and One-Eyed Dream, as readers watch the mountain man Titus Bass continue his heart-wrenching journey through the perils of the Wild West.
Ride the Moon Down is another triumph of the master of frontier fiction, Terry C. Johnston, who brings to life once more vivid slices of America’s history.
Turn the page for a special preview of the opening chapter of this fascinating novel.
The baby stirred between them.
She eventually fussed enough to bring Bass fully awake, suddenly, sweating beneath the blankets.
Without opening her eyes, the child’s mother groggily drew the infant against her breast and suckled the babe back to sleep.
Titus kicked the heavy wool horse blanket off his legs, hearing one of the horses nicker. Not sure which one of the four it was, the trapper sat up quiet as coal cotton, letting the blanket slip from his bare arms as he dragged the rifle from between his knees.
Somewhere close, out there in the dark, he heard the low warning rumble past the old dog’s throat. Bass hissed—immediately silencing Zeke.
Several moments slipped by before he heard another sound from their animals. But for the quiet breathing of mother and the ngg-ngg suckling of their daughter, the summer night lay all but silent around their camp at the base of a low ridge.
Straining to see the unseeable, Bass glanced overhead to search for the moon in that wide canopy stretching across the treetops. Moonset already come and gone. Nothing left but some puny starshine. As he blinked a third time, his groggy brain finally remembered that his vision wasn’t what it had been. For weeks now that milky cloud covering his left eye was forcing his right to work all the harder.
Then his nose suddenly captured something new on the nightwind. A smell musky and feral—an odor not all that familiar, just foreign enough that he strained his recollections to put a finger on it.
Then off to the side of camp his ears heard the padding of the dog’s big feet as Zeke moved stealthily through the stands of aspen that nearly surrounded this tiny pocket in the foothills he had found for them late yesterday afternoon.
And from farther in the darkness came another low, menacing growl—
Titus practically jumped out of his skin when she touched him, laying her fingers against his bare arm. He turned to peer back, swallowing hard, that lone eye finding Waits by the Water in what dim light seeped over them there beneath the big square of oiled Russian sheeting he had lashed between the trees should the summer sky decide to rain on them through the night.
He could hear Zeke moving again, not near so quietly this time, angling farther out from camp.
Bass laid a long finger against her lips, hoping it would tell her enough. Waits nodded slightly and kissed the finger just before he pulled it away and rocked forward onto his knees, slowly standing. Smelling. Listening.
Sure enough the old dog was in motion, growling off to his right—not where he had heard Zeke a moment before. Yonder, toward the horses at the edge of the gently sloping meadow.
Had someone, red or white, stumbled upon them camped here? he wondered as he took a first barefooted step, then listened some more. Snake country, this was—them Shoshone—though Crow were known to plunge this far south, Arapaho push in too. Had some hunting party found their tracks and followed them here against the bluff?
Every night of their journey north from Taos Bass had damn well exercised caution. They would stop late in the lengthening afternoons and water their horses, then let them graze a bit while he gathered wood for a small fire he always built directly beneath the wide overhang of some branches to disperse the smoke. Waits nursed the baby and when her tummy was full Bass’s Crow wife passed the child to him. If his daughter was awake after her supper, the trapper cuddled the babe across his arm or bounced her gently in his lap while Waits cooked their supper. But most evenings the tiny one fell asleep as the warm milk filled her tummy.