Crack in the Sky (51 page)

Sweeping both hands down the length of her long, loose black hair before she tossed it over her shoulder, the woman knelt onto the rumple of blankets he had prepared, folding her own neatly at the side of the bed, then laid her skin dress upon it. At last she sank onto her back, and gazed over at the white man staring mule-eyed and slack-jawed at her provocative, bare-skinned beauty.

Scratch sensed the urgency suddenly seize hold of him, realizing any self-control was no longer possible. More
quickly than she had, he wrenched up the bottom of his leather shirt and ripped it from his arms, yanking it over his head, flinging it into the brush. Where the shirt landed, it mattered not.

Reaching beneath the front flap of his breechclout, Titus’s fingers flew at the knot tied in the wide rawhide whang that secured the wide strip of wool around his waist. That whang came whipping off in one hand at the same time the other hand ripped the breechclout from between his legs. He heaved both of them into the surrounding brush.

Still wearing his leggings, Scratch knelt at her knees. She spread her legs and held her arms up to him, grasping one of his wrists and pulling him toward her gently as she reached out with a hand, fingers searching for his manhood.

He nearly choked on readiness when she wrapped her hand around him, guiding him down, down, then forward, ever so gently as the woman sought to place him against her just so.

Lying here now with the woman as his heart continued to slow, Titus remembered how she had half closed her eyes while he had driven himself into her. Not sure if that had been pleasure for her, or merely pain with his fury to plant himself fully, completely within her moist warmth.

Barely opening his eyes from time to time as they lay together, Scratch became aware that time was passing only because of the journey taken by that half-moon limned behind the silver-framed cotton puffs in its climb from there to there across the cloudy sky. He wasn’t really aware he had been sleeping until he felt her rustle beside him, bringing him fully awake.

For a moment she peered over a shoulder at him, her narrow, naked back only inches from his face; then she reached out to drag her dress into her lap. As she began to pull the hide garment right side out, Bass propped himself up on an elbow and studied what he could see of her, finding himself stirred once more. Just as the woman was
about to stab her arms into the sleeves of the dress, he seized her, twisting her down onto the blankets.

In her first words to him, these spoken in a low, husky voice, she began to give him hell, shaking her head emphatically as he flung the blanket off himself and rolled over to position himself between her legs. With one arm shoving upward against his chest, the woman clamped her other hand over herself so he could not enter.

“Now what you doing that for?” he groaned, rocking back on his knees in distress, his hardened flesh wagging forlornly.

Pushing herself backward, the woman slid far enough away from him that she could sit up and reach for the blanket, which she yanked into her lap.

“You was all for me crawling on you afore,” he groaned, dejection thick in his voice. “Why not now when I can make it last a little longer for us both?”

After a pause she shook her head, then motioned that she intended to head over to her village across the creek.

He tried to inch forward, eager to grab one or the other of those small breasts. “Lemme crawl on you one more time … then you get on back to your camp.”

Curling her legs up defensively, she put out an arm to hold him at bay. Then she made the sign for no trade.

“No … no trade?”

For a moment he was confused; then it struck him. “What I give your father was for just the first time, that it?”

She continued to stare at him. At least she wasn’t moving to get away.

Good enough for the first time—all right, he thought. If he was going to convince her to spread her legs for him a second time, Bass figured he was going to have to come up with something to give her that she would not have to share with her older sisters. Something for her and her alone.

Turning to stare at the free trappers’ camp some sixty yards away in an attempt to divine what he could offer her, Bass heard her moving of a sudden. When he whirled
back, he found her dragging her dress over her head and arms.

“No, stay,” he begged in desperation, his hardened flesh still insistent, his heart in despair of finding something to offer her.

But then he lunged to the side, flinging back the flap on his shooting pouch to dig around inside until his fingers found one of the awls he had traded for that afternoon. Scratch scooted back on his knees to present it to her in his flat palm.

After a moment of consideration she took it from his hand, tapped a finger pad against its sharp tip, and considered his offer a moment longer … before she laid it back in his hand and went back to pulling the dress down over her breasts.

Jehoshaphat! What did he have that would make her eyes shine enough to lay back down for him!

Glory!

He dived back at his shooting pouch, stuffed a hand into the pocket at the back, and swept out a long length of the wool ribbon generally used to bind an edge on blankets. This he held out in his hand for her to inspect.

By that time she wasn’t watching him—rising to her knees so she could tug the dress down over her hips when she suddenly spotted the selvage ribbon and froze. Despairing that it was not enough, he moved that open hand closer to her, bringing it up beneath her chin so she could see just what it was that he offered her. The woman lifted the narrow strip of wool from his palm, inspecting it in the moonlight. Then shook her head and dropped it back across his hand.

“Please, don’t … don’t go,” he implored with that urgency of the flesh.

Then, with her two hands, she pantomimed poking the index finger of one hand into an invisible something she held in the other. For a moment he imagined she was making the sign for copulation…. Then he understood.

“The awl!” he whispered. “You want the awl too!”

He retrieved it from his pouch and laid it in one hand,
grabbing the ribbon in the other, and presented them both to her.

For a painful moment the woman stared down at the awl and ribbon. Just stared.

And finally she removed the two objects from his palms, placing them to the side atop her blanket, then rose on her knees to grasp the bottom of her dress once more, shimmying out beneath it as he suddenly went desert-tongued at the sight of her quivering breasts freed again for his touch … sensing his own renewed hardness, his own feral heat about to overwhelm him.

As savage as he attacked her that first time, now he discovered he was able to savor this delicious anticipation of delay rather than feeling himself hopelessly swept up and helplessly hurtled forth by a mysterious force he could in no way control.

Again she reached out to wrap her fingers around his swollen readiness, easing him forward to rub against that moistening cleft in her flesh for a time while she gently gyrated her hips, gradually driving him mad with desire. With one volcanic lunge he was finally inside her, feeling his groin locked against hers as the woman clamped both of her hands on his buttocks, arching her back as she began to gyrate more violently beneath him. He was certain he would explode if she continued flinging herself up at him—

Instead, Bass locked his hands on her hips and rocked back, lifting her completely off the blanket as he sank backward until the woman straddled him. For a sudden, frightening moment she did not move, gazing down at him in shock. But when he ground his hips up against her, raising her off the blankets, he got the notion across to her. The Shoshone woman apparently liked the sensation of their position so much that she herself began to buck and dance there atop his upright flesh, clamped tightly about him as she moved forward and back, side to side, and even tried slowly to grind herself round and round in small, and very insistent, circles.

Of a sudden she was recklessly bouncing on top of his hardness, rocking up so far on her knees that she stroked
the entire length of him, so far, in fact, that he feared she would pull him out … yet each time she slammed herself back down onto his hips. Up and down she pumped him, her eyes compressing into half slits, her breathing become ragged as he felt himself rising toward a furied crescendo.

Then she was whimpering, and for a moment he became afraid he had hurt the young woman with the vigor of their coupling. He stopped and seized hold of her shoulders, worried—when she opened her eyes and stared down at him. Shaking her head, she smiled as she hadn’t ever smiled at him before … and immediately went right back to bouncing atop his rigid manhood.

This time they rose together, climbing toward a fiery release. The initial whimper that had begun low in her throat was now a keening, breathless, raspy cry. And that grunt of his beast on the verge of achieving its primal satisfaction became like shrill hammer strikes on an anvil.

Slamming herself down onto his penis, the woman instantly began to shudder and quake, little high-pitched wails squeaking past her lips…. Then he was thrusting himself against her every bit as forcefully, clawing at her breasts, seizing her upper arms and pulling her close as he roared into her like a ferocious torrent dammed for far too long.

She collapsed against him, sinking weak and drained, at just the instant he felt that last explosion rocking him to his core.

Bass cradled the woman atop him until their flesh cooled and the air chilled with the coming of morning there beside the Popo Agie. He pulled her blanket over them both and let her sleep atop him. Surrendering to complete and utter exhaustion, Scratch sighed and closed his eyes, feeling the weariness washing over him, sensing sleep flooding every part of his body.

A woman like this was clearly a poison for a man: exactly the sort of creature who confounded, confused, and ailed a simple man with simple needs, just those very needs that made him crave a woman like her in the worst way … yet at the very same time, she was just the sort
of cure for that very poison she inflicted—a soothing balm for all that ailed him. A poultice drawing out all the months of pent-up hunger and despair with such satisfaction that Scratch knew he would never again find such complete and utter relief.

Bass went to sleep as the sky far to the east began to gray, realizing that if he ever again found a woman who could bring him the sort of satisfaction he had just experienced, he wouldn’t hesitate a moment to trade his pistol for her.

Almost two weeks later, William Sublette and Robert Campbell parted company on the Popo Agie. The Irishman was intent on returning to his native soil—much disturbed at a number of letters that had reached him in the mail his good friend had packed overland to rendezvous. Instead of accompanying the mule train bound for the States himself that July, Sublette installed Campbell as booshway over those he assigned to see those forty-five paltry packs of beaver all the way to St. Louis.

By any measure, a miserable take for a whole year in the mountains.

Of the three company owners, it appeared only Sublette had secured any profit for their joint efforts—and all of that through the dogged efforts of Campbell’s Powder River brigade. It was hoped that David Jackson was still somewhere north in that Flathead country where the Blackfeet were wont to go, but after two years no one expected ever again to lay eyes on Jedediah Smith and his outfit … not this side of the great by-and-by.

At the same time Campbell was to backtrack east toward the Sweetwater and the Platte, Sublette dispatched his younger brother, Milton, along with German-born Henry Fraeb and Frenchman Jean Baptiste Gervais, north—leading a forty-man brigade to hunt the Bighorn basin in three smaller outfits that fall. Now William could himself lead the rest of his hardened veterans and a crew of green recruits to search for some sign of what had become of his long-overdue partner—reported to be somewhere in the country of the upper Snake River.

The Blackfeet hadn’t rubbed out the industrious Jackson!

After more than a week of revelry beside the Popo Agie, word had come that the ever-enterprising brigade leader would be waiting on the Snake instead of coming to the prearranged valley of the Prairie Chicken—news of that change in plans arriving with Tom Fitzpatrick, who weeks before, as Jackson’s brigade had begun to work its way south from Flathead country, was dispatched as a lone express rider sent to reach Sublette east of the Wind River Mountains.

“Tell Billy I’ll meet him on the Snake below the Pilot Knobs.”

With that electrifying report Sublette had promptly hurried to wrap up the last of his trading with what free men wandered in to rendezvous so he could turn west himself. This was great news! Not only was Davy Jackson still alive and kicking—but their company would now have more to show for their efforts than those puny forty-five packs of beaver.

Why—with what furs Jackson was likely to have with him, the two partners might even have enough left over after paying off General William H. Ashley that they could show a profit for the year! Things were looking up.

Jack Hatcher and his outfit of a half-dozen free trappers had decided they would mosey along behind the booshway’s brigade, with the idea in mind that they could divide off from the company men after reaching the Snake, laying plans to trap into the autumn season there on the eastern fringe of Hudson’s Bay territory.

“That Snake sure is purty country,” Mad Jack had boasted the morning Sublette and more than fifty company men were to start into the high country for the headwaters of the Wind River. “Eegod—them three bee-you-tee-full breasties just pointing up there agin’ the sky like tits on a squaw ye’re thumping! My, but that’s country the likes I ain’t seen none of anywhere else!”

As the twenty-eight-year-old Milton struck out down the Popo Agie, which would take his outfit north for the Bighorn and Yellowstone country, Campbell whipped the
balky mules south by east for the States
*
that same morning.

An hour later Bill Sublette himself turned his nose north by west, ascending the Wind River with some free trappers in tow until he crossed over the mountains and dropped down the Buffalo Fork to strike the Snake River in the northern part of what was already widely known as Davy Jackson’s Hole. On the shores of Jackson’s Lake, the booshway allowed his outfit to recruit and recuperate for a few days before he would set off again in his search.