“Wha’chu gonna do yourself now?” Harris asked as Bass handed him the hired man’s rifle.
“Me? We was headin’ back to Bridger’s post,” he declared, spotting the forms stepping out of the rocks. A woman and a young boy. “Eventual’, we need to be back in Crow country by the first deep snow.”
“Who’s we?”
“Them,” and he pointed to Waits-by-the-Water bringing Jackrabbit toward him, the child’s hand in hers, the long flintlock at the end of the other arm.
Harris turned back to him and said, “You wasn’t takin’ no chances, was you?”
“Onliest way ol’ coons like us got to be so old, Moses. We don’t take scary chances.”
“Them too?” Harris asked.
Titus turned and found Magpie and her brother emerging from the boulders.
“They don’t have to be the best shots in the mountains,” Titus explained. “Just good enough to keep ever’body else busy.”
Harris grinned and wagged his head. “I’ll be damned if you don’t take the circle, Titus Bass!”
Gesturing to Flea, Scratch said, “Get the horses. We’re leaving this place.”
Having turned and started away with his wife and youngest son while the two older children headed off to fetch the animals, Titus was surprised when Harris called out to him. “Don’t you want anything off this son of a bitch?”
He stopped, thought a moment, then shook his head.
“Not his scalp?”
“Only hair I ever raised I took off a proper warrior, Harris.”
“Then you don’t want none of his money?” Harris asked in a loud voice.
“Money?” and he snorted a laugh. “Why, coon—that’s the sort of addle-headed stuff you need out to Californy. What in blazes would I do with money in these here mountains?”
“Suit yourself!” Harris cackled with glee.
“For all I care,” Scratch flung his voice back over his shoulder as he moved toward the horses, “you can keep ever’ damn dollar of it. Man like me won’t ever need money again.”
“You don’t s’pose Shadrach gonna stay out there in Oregon for good, do you?” Jim Bridger asked not long after Titus Bass had hit the ground outside the tall stockade timbers and informed Gabe why Sweete wasn’t along for this return to Black’s Fork of the Green.
“You just never know about that boy,” Titus said as he wiped a droplet of sweat from the end of his nose. “But I don’t figger he’s the sort to put down roots in that country. Lad big as a stalk of corn the way he is needs his sun to grow!”
“Gonna fix us up something special for supper,” Jim proposed. “An’ after we fill your paunch with venison, I’ll lather up your tongue with some barleycorn so you can tell me all ’bout your li’l sashay up to Fort Hall.”
It was a merry return. If not a crowded homecoming, then the best they all could make it. This post wasn’t home, but Gabe and his two children were nonetheless the very best of folks. And the way that Waits-by-the-Water and Magpie dove right in, making themselves comfortable around the place, chattering and giggling too, it did a lot to put the trials of the last few weeks behind him. It had been just like holding a gaunt and hungry wolf at bay … until the strong liquor loosened his tongue and the floodgate of memories came washing back over him in a way he hadn’t allowed since that fateful day at Soda Springs.
“D-dead?” Bridger whispered. “That towhead young’un … your grandson?”
His eyes teared up uncontrollably as he peered at Gabe. “You know what it does to a man when he can’t do a thing to help someone he loves?”
Laying his hard-boned hand on Bass’s shoulder there beside the fire as his wife and Magpie talked, Flea chasing Jackrabbit and Felix about in the cool of the late-summer evening, Jim said, “You ’member how I lost my Cora last year, just after Josie was borned … but, still, I don’t have no way of knowin’ how that’s gotta cut you clear to the backbone, what with losin’ a little’un like that.”
From the beginning Titus had promised himself that he would not get down in the cups with the grief he felt crushing in on him like an inescapable weight. He had resisted the urge to prevail upon Esau for a little of Fort Hall’s hooch, either for some wallowing in misery or for a parting celebration. He had resisted this long—but now the fire of that whiskey pouring down his gullet matched the burn he suffered in that hollow spot that had been growing a bit bigger inside him with each new day. Maybeso he needed to roar and wail, to weep and moan, to release the grief after it had been bottled up for so long. At the very least to get it flushed out of his belly before it ate away at him from the inside like a terrible hydrophobia … like the snake’s own poison had eaten away at Lucas Burwell’s will to fight until there was no more strength left holding on to life.
The flames of that merry fire wavered in a blurry dance the longer he talked. And the longer he talked the more he drank. Magpie sat with her arm around Waits-by-the-Water, the two of them listening intently while Titus spilled his grief like a drunk would puke his belly on the ground—stinking and noxious and loathsome … but this was something that made both the drunk and the griever feel all the better for it.
“Shit, I warned ’em, Gabe,” he had long ago started slurring his words, what words he managed to choke out around the huge lump wedged down in his throat. Something that just wouldn’t budge no matter how he kept washing it down with Bridger’s whiskey. “Told them young’uns stay back from them rocks.”
“But, Ti-tuzz,” Waits reminded in her language, “the snake did not get the boy who died near the rocks.”
He squinted at the fire, trying hard to make the swimming images hold still for just a heartbeat. Struggling too as he attempted to get his grasp around what her words meant.
“Sounds to me there ain’t no reason for you to think you could have done a thing different,” Bridger consoled. “The boy didn’t go to the rocks. He just crossed paths with one of them rattlers out huntin’.”
For a long time he watched the flames with his half-lidded, pooling eyes, sensing so much of the poison leaching out of him, the way on a hot summer day back in Boone County moisture would sweat beads on the outside of his mam’s clay pitcher. Like it was being pulled out of him a drop at a time, one heartbeat at a time. Gradually healing himself from the inside out as he wallowed in this despair so long rising to the surface.
“I tried my best to understand it, Gabe,” he admitted. “All the time me an’ Waits sat by that fire, makin’ a poultice for them bites, or boilin’ down some roots for Lucas to drink so’s his dyin’ wouldn’t hurt so goddamn much.”
“Tried to understand what?” Bridger asked.
He raised his eyes, struggling to focus on his friend’s face as the tears spilled down his cheeks. “Understand why it is that these here Injuns we white fellers got for wives know so much more’n we men do.”
“How you figger?”
“I see it’s because we’re white, Gabe,” he confessed, staring at the dogs working over old bones nearby. “Ever’ time I work so hard to get my mind around something I can’t figger out, my wife tells me I can’t unnerstand because I ain’t meant to unnerstand. She says I ain’t s’posed to work so hard to find a answer. She says I’ll find out soon enough why ever’thing works out the way it does, an’ why any of the rest of it don’t matter none at all.”
Bridger glanced at Waits-by-the-Water, then concentrated again on his friend. “Don’t matter none at all?”
“You been around Injuns near as much as I have, Jim,” he whimpered. “You sure as hell gotta awready know!”
“Know what?”
Licking a drop of whiskey that clung to his mustache, Titus spoke low, “Injuns say this here life of ours—what I’m doin’ sittin’ an’ jawin’ with you by this fire—this here life ain’t real at all.”