Where Custer began singing his death song that hot afternoon.
Up here, where I sit alone, it is so quiet at this moment that I can hear the breeze nudge the grass into whispers, a breeze that taunts this hallowed ground, pushing gently through the gray-bellied sage with a mournful keening of memories too-long unspoken. Here, on this quiet, lonely hill, I stay while the sun sets, listening to the ghosts that will forever haunt this place.
Ultimately, it is the ghosts who have told their story here across the pages of my book.
This story is their whispers heard among the grass and sage that blankets this hallowed, bloody ground where they fought and fell.
Their whispers.
TERRY C. JOHNSTON
Custer Battlefield
Montana Territory, U.S.A.
25 June, 1990
*a story told in Son of the Plains, Volume 1: Long Winter Gone
Terry C. Johnston captures the spirit and
drama of a unique era in American history
in his magnificent novel,
DANCE ON THE WIND, which marks
the return of a great fictional character
by a storyteller at the height of his power.
DANCE ON THE WIND
Now, the award-winning author of Dream Catcher and Carry the Wind presents a novel that marks the return of one of the most beloved characters in frontier fiction—mountain man Titus Bass, made famous in the bestselling, critically acclaimed trilogy Carry the Windy BorderLords, and One-Eyed Dream In the first book of an exciting new saga, Johnston takes us back to the early years of this extraordinary individual as a young Titus Bass blazes a trail of danger and adventure across the American Frontier. From the banks of the upper Ohio to the vast, unexplored expanse of the lower Mississippi, Bass comes of age on a journey across a volatile, violent country of riverboatmen and river bandits, knife fights and Indian raids, strong liquor and stronger women. Like America itself, Titus looks west and sees the future … and he’s willing to risk everything to seize it.
Turn the page for an exciting preview of Terry C. Johnston’s DANCE ON THE WIND, available now in paperback wherever Bantam Books are sold.
ONE
Slick as quicksilver the boy stepped aside when the mule flung her rump in his direction.
Only problem was, he had forgotten about the root that arched out of the ground in a great bow nearly half as tall as he stood without his Sunday-meeting and schoolroom boots on. The end of it cruelly snagged his ankle, sure as one of his possum snares.
Spitting out the rich, black loam as fine as flour in this bottomland, Titus Bass pulled his face out of the fresh, warm earth he had been chewing up with a spade, blinking his gritty eyes. And glared over his shoulder at the mule.
Damn, if it didn’t look as if she was smiling at him again. That muzzle of hers pulled back over those big front teeth the way she did at times just like this. Almost as if she was laughing at him when here he had just been thinking he was the one so damned smart.
“Why, you …,” the boy began as he dragged himself up to his knees, then to his bare feet in that moist earth chewed by the mule’s hooves and his work with iron pike and spade.
On impulse he lunged for the fallen spade, swung it behind his shoulder in both hands.
“Put it down, Titus.”
Trembling, the boy froze. Always had at the sound of that man’s voice.
“Said: put it down.”
The youth turned his head slightly, finding his father emerging from the trees at the far edge of the new meadow they were clearing. Titus weighed things, then bitterly flung the spade at that patch of ground between him and his father. The man stopped, stared down at it a moment, then bent to pick it up.
“You’d go and hit that mule with this,” Thaddeus Bass said as he strode up, stopped, and jammed the spades bit down into the turned soil, “I’d have call to larrup you good, son.” He leaned back with both strong, muscular hands wrapped around the space handle like knots on oiled ropes. “Thought I’d teached you better’n that.”
“Better’n what?” the boy replied testily, but was sorry it came out with that much vinegar to it.
Thaddeus sighed. “Better’n to go be mean to your animals.”
Titus stood there, caught without a thing to say, watching his father purse his lips and walk right on past to the old mule. Thaddeus Bass patted the big, powerful rump, stroked a hand down the spine, raising a small stir of lather near the harness, then scratched along the mare’s neck as he cooed to the animal. She stood patiently in harness, hooked by leather and wood of singletree, the quiet murmur of her jangling chains—the whole of it lashed round a tree stump young Titus Bass had been wrenching out of a piece of ground that seemed too reluctant to leave go its purchase on the stubborn stump.
Titus flushed with indignation. “She was about to kick me, Pap.”
Without looking back at his son, Bass said, “How you know that?”
“She was hitchin’ her rump around to kick me,” Titus retorted. “Know she was.”
“How hard you working her?”
Dusting himself off, he replied in exasperation, “How hard I’m working her? You was the one sent me out here with her to finish the last of these goddamned stumps.”
Thaddeus whirled on his son, yellow fire in his tired eyes. “Thought I told you I didn’t wanna hear no such language come outta your mouth.”
He watched his father turn back to the mule’s harness, emboldened by the man’s back, braver now that he did not have to look into those eyes so deeply ringed with the liver-colored flesh of fatigue. “Why? I ain’t never figured that out, Pap. I hear it come from your mouth. Out’n Uncle Cy’s mouth too. I ain’t no kid no more. Lookit me. I be nearly tall as you—near filled out as you too. Why you tell me I can’t spit out a few bad words like you?”
“You ain’t a man, Titus.”
He felt the burn of embarrassment at his neck. “But I ain’t no boy neither!”
“No, you rightly ain’t. But for the life of me, I don’t know what you are, Titus.” Bass laid his arms over the back of the tall mule and glared at his son. “You ain’t a man yet, that’s for sure. A man takes good care of the animals what take care of him. But you, Titus? I don’t know what you are.”
“I ain’t a man yet?” Titus felt himself seething, fought to control his temper. “If’n I ain’t a man yet—how come you send me out to do a man’s job then!”
“Onliest way I know to make you into a man, son.”
He watched his father turn and survey the stump partly pulled free from the ground, some of its dark roots already splayed into the late-afternoon air like long, dark arthritic fingers caked with mud and clods of rich, black earth.
Thaddeus straightened. “You wanna be a farmer, Titus—the one lesson you gotta learn is take care of the animals gonna take care of you.”
The words spilled out before he wanted them to. “Like I told you before, Pap: it’s your idea I’m gonna be a farmer.”
The old man’s eyes narrowed, the lids all but hiding the pupils as he glowered at the youth. “You not gonna be a farmer like your pap, like your grandpap and all the Basses gone before you … just what in blue hell you figure on doing with your life?”