“Dunno,” John stated. “I heard tell he up and pulled out of Taos late two winters ago. There in Mexico one day. Gone the next.”
Wood asked, “By hisself?”
“Yup. I heard he was all on his lonesome.”
“Damn,” Hatcher grumbled. “Here I was first thinking he become a strange goat … an’ now I’m feeling a mite sorry for this McAfferty. Feel sorry for a man what no one wants around.”
“How ’bout you, Johnny?” Elbridge asked. “Would you want to trap with McAfferty now?”
Shaking his head emphatically, Rowland answered, “Not a whore’s chance in Sunday meeting I’d ever travel the same trail with that one. Something ’bout him killing that rattle shaker, something ’bout that ol’ rattle shaker’s hoo-doo medicine made McAfferty go … go real soft in the head.” Then with a sudden, uncontrollable shudder of his body, John added, “This coon’ll stay as far away from that crazy bastard as I can.”
“He’s trouble,” Rufus added.
“Nawww, not like he’s a bad sort,” Rowland explained. “Just that … well, let’s say trouble follers on his bachtrail ever since the rattle shaker’s hoo-doos come after him. Way I see it: McAfferty’s gonna have trouble dogging him the rest of his days, for here on out.”
“Man’s got enough to worry about in Injun country,” Solomon declared. “He don’t have to take on a partner what’s been turned soft in the head.”
“So how ’bout you, Hatcher?” Bass inquired with a grin. “You ain’t gonna get soft in the head an’ keep us here till all the passes outta this valley are closed in, are you?”
“Nawww,” Jack replied. “I figger we each have us one more turn at camp keeper—five days more—and we’ll get on outta here.”
“To Taos!” Kinkead roared with renewed enthusiasm.
“Damn right,” Hatcher answered. “We push on over the high side and make for the mud-house Mexican settlements.”
“Ah! Women got skin the color of smoked leather,” Isaac Simms growled, a hunger glistening in his eyes.
Rufus Graham agreed, “And Workman’s likker, clear as a summer sky and as strong as the kick of a mule.”
“I’m half-froze for corn an’ beans,” Caleb Wood said wistfully, then licked his lips. “Don’t make me no never-mind that their bread is flat as it can be—it’s still bread to this here starvin’ nigger!”
“I ain’t had me no greaser bread since we put Taos at our rumps!” Rowland grumbled.
“This here nigger can’t wait to get me some of that greaser tobaccy,” explained Elbridge Gray. “How ’bout you, Jack? What you wanna get when we shine in Taos?”
“Music … music I don’t have to make for everyone else,” Hatcher explained, looking up at the cold sky dreamily. “I wanna listen and dance to such music them greasers play … while’st holding my arm round the waist of a thin gal or a plump one—hell, it don’t make no matter to me! My, my, my: how I look forward just to spin a woman to some music and look down at her purty face, seein’ right there and then in those eyes that she wants this here child to plant his wiping stick atween her legs.”
“Stand back, you damned greasers!” Rowland shouted to the heavens. “Bow your brown heads to American free men come riding in from the mountains! Get back you damned pelados an’ make way for free mountaineers come to shine in Taos!”
7
With each shrinking day Hatcher’s brigade pushed man and beast alike from the first gray stain of predawn until past the coming of slap-dark, putting behind them every mile they could—every man jack anxious for Taos.
Halting at midday only to water the animals, the trappers doggedly pressed on as the winds grew stronger and the snows fell deeper, like mules with the scent of a home stall strong in their nostrils. Grown restless around their night fires, where they began to talk more and more of the Taos valley, more and more of the spicy food and heady liquor and that strong native tobacco. And as the men pulled their blankets and robes about them with the dropping temperatures, they spoke each night of the dusky women and that particular fragrance of Mexican skin.
“Not like no Injun woman I ever knowed,” Caleb Wood advised Titus Bass.
Hatcher snorted. “An’ sure as hell like no white farmer’s gal back to the settlements.”
Wasn’t Amy Whistler a white farmer’s wife by now? Likely she had her a brood of her own, tugging at her skirt, the newest tucked in her arm, suckling at its mama’s breast. He remembered those breasts at times, how they broke the surface of that swimming hole back to Boone County, Kentucky. Firm and high, slicked with summer cool water, just begging him to fondle, to excite, to kiss each one.
How about Marissa Guthrie? Had she given Able Guthrie a grandchild yet? Why, the way that girl threw herself into the coupling, Titus was dead certain she was the sort could end up with a man of her own not long after he had pulled himself free and run off for St. Louis that autumn of 1815. Slipping away by the skin of his teeth—for he had fallen in love for the first time in his life … and if he hadn’t escaped, he’d be there still. Working the land, planting seed, tilling the ground, and raising walls around them … just like Able Guthrie, like his own pap, Thaddeus.
How much better could those greaser gals be than was Fawn, the Ute widow he bedded that first winter in the Rockies? His first Indian, so warm and fragrant with the smells of grease and smoke, bear oil and old soot, had she been. Very much like Pretty Water, the Shoshone woman who had cared for his wounds and sated his hungers that third winter before it came time to leave as the high country began its spring thaw.
In their own way, each one of them hard to leave behind.
“Just be keerful you don’t end up like Rowland or Kinkead,” Elbridge Gray warned.
Scratch would grin every time one of the others chivvied him about the Mex gals. “Don’t you worry none about me, fellas. I ain’t the marrying kind.”
“I wasn’t neither,” Matthew protested.
Hatcher would always roar, “Kinkead wasn’t till he met up with Rosa!”
At which Kinkead would nod in affirmation and agree, “That’s the solemn truth.”
Moving south over the low ridge of the Bayou Salade, the outfit dropped west to strike the Arkansas once more, following it downstream for two days until they left the river behind to climb south slowly toward the lowest pass compressed among those mountains surrounding the narrow northern reaches of a valley that eventually widened its funnel into a fertile, verdant floor carpeted with autumn-crisp grass crunching beneath the icy remnants of winter’s recent snow.
“You’re in Mexico now,” Rufus Graham explained as he brought his horse alongside Bass’s saddle mount.
“Don’t look no different to me.”
Solomon Fish explained, “Been in Mexico since we come ’cross the Arkansas.”
“How far north the greasers ever come?” Scratch asked.
With a spill of raw laughter Hatcher declared, “Never would they come this far north, Titus Bass. This still be the land of the mountaineer and the Injun. Ain’t many a greaser gonna venture far outta their villages.”
Down, down through the heart of that high valley they hurried against the lowering storms that gray-shouldered the peaks on their left and right. Finally they struck the river flowing into the valley in a tangle of streams given birth in that high ground to the west.
“A blind man could foller this all the way from here clear down to Taos,” Caleb instructed Bass that afternoon as they began winding their way along a dim trail some distance back from the brushy banks.
Hatcher said, “The wust of the ride’s over now, Scratch.” Then he sniffed the cold air deep into his lungs. “Eegod, boys! Why, I swear I can smell tortillas and beans awready!”