Death Rattle (35 page)

He finally sucked in a deep breath of air, shocked at how good it felt. How could he have been so foolish to sleep so hard that Thompson got the jump on him? Was it that he believed he was among friends—safe enough here, far from Blackfoot country? With Thompson ready to make good on his threats, how could he have allowed himself to drop his guard?

For what seemed like a long, long time, the only sound besides his own ragged breathing was the crackle of the two fires, dry cedar popping sparks into the black of that desert night beneath a milky quarter-moon. Bass peered up at Hezekiah, the deepest of unspoken gratitude for the bowman in his eyes.

Then his attention was drawn away to the far side of their encampment—finding Felix Warren and Frank Curnutt standing stock still there at the edge of the flickering light. Warren had a pistol in his right hand, a tomahawk in his left. Curnutt held only his round-barreled smoothbore.

Titus swallowed hard, then growled, “You niggers keeping watch to make sure Thompson kill’t me?”

The two didn’t say a thing. Didn’t move a muscle
either. Instead, they kept staring at Bass, looking to the Indians, and glaring at the big, baldheaded Negro.

“Speak up, fellas,” Bill Williams ordered as he emerged into the firelight. “Answer the man’s question.”

Curnutt started to wag his head, not as if he were denying a thing. Only a gesture of futility.

“You was in deep with Thompson, wasn’t you?” Titus demanded, clambering to his feet. “Fixing to murder me together.”

“N-no,” said Warren. “Only Thompson. We knowed he was gonna kill Bass but we was only—”

“But that Neegra kill’t Thompson!” Curnutt squealed with anguish. “Kill’t a white man!”

“Sounds to me like what Thompson was fixin’ to do was murder,” Williams growled, watching Smith hobble into the light. “How ’bout you, Peg-Leg?”

Smith wagged his head with reluctance. “Ain’t really murder when it’s atween two fellas, Bill.”

“Wasn’t no fair fight—that Neegra shootin’ Thompson!” Warren protested.

“You fellas almost had you a hand in this bastard killing me,” Bass grumbled as he started around the fire for Felix Warren.

Both Curnutt and Warren started to move, but immediately realized Williams had his two pistols pointed at them. They stared at the muzzles while Bill said, “When a nigger jumps a man in his sleep—’thout it being a fair fight … that’s a murder, any way you lay your sights, Peg-Leg.”

“Tell you what, you sonsabitches.” Bass stopped some twelve feet from Warren and Curnutt. “I’ll give you a better chance’n you and Thompson was gonna give me.”

“I’ll kill you, you come any closer,” Curnutt warned with a high, feral pitch in his voice.

Titus snorted with a raw gust of laughter, saying, “I ain’t gonna kill you like you niggers was gonna do me.”

“You want me take their guns?” asked Jake Corn as he stepped up.

Curnutt’s and Warren’s eyes flicked here and there
around them as they watched the other Americans gather close, imploring Thompson’s other comrades.

“Maybeso we better, Jake,” Williams decided. “Don’t let us have no trouble outta you two.”

At first both men refused to let go of their weapons when Corn and. Coltrane hurried in to grab hold of the firearms and that tomahawk.

“I’d as soon kill you both right now my own self,” Williams warned.

Smith lunged into the compact group, shoving Jake and Roscoe away as he protested, “These two ain’t done nothing to Bass, nothing to any one of you!”

“Get outta the way, Peg-Leg,” Williams demanded. “They don’t drop them guns—you’re likely to get hurt too when I start shootin’.”

Peg-Leg whirled on Williams. “M-me? Y-you ’pear to be forgetting just who the hell’s the brains in this here outfit—”

“Shuddup, Peg-Leg. I ain’t got no more stomach for you,” Williams snapped. “Clear outta the way.”

Smith took a long moment to stare into the muzzles of those two pistols Williams held before him, then back into the old trapper’s face. “Got no more stomach for me? W-what’s that mean? Why, you’d been nothin’ weren’t it for me asking you to ride along to California with me!”

“That tears the blanket, Peg-Leg. You go your way and the rest of us go ours.”

“Go my own way? You’re talking crazy, Solitaire! You can’t mean … dammit, most of them horses belong to me!”

“Fair is fair, Bill,” Titus said as he came up to stand beside Williams. “Let him have his rightful share afore you send him off.”

“Send me off?” Smith’s eyes narrowed into slits. “Send me off, is it? You low-down back-stabbin’ Diggers! None of you have any of them horses weren’t for my hand in leadin’ you all to California!”

“Just be satisfied I don’t do to you what Thompson was gonna do to me or Hezekiah … all because you
been covering his back ever’ step of the way,” Bass stated.

Silas Adair asked, “What you figger’s fair for the three of ’em, Bill?”

“These here two can go with Peg-Leg in the morning, I s’pose.”

Bass watched their shoulders sag with something akin to relief. “You figger to cut ’em loose short of fixin’s?”

“W-what’s that mean?” Felix Warren demanded.

“Take their guns from ’em,” Williams instructed. “We’ll give ’em back come morning. Leave you a dozen balls and enough powder for those shots. Give each of you something to ride, along with a ol’ horse or two for vittles to get across the desert.”

“What you fixin’ to do with me, Solitaire?” Peg-Leg demanded haughtily.

“You get the same,” Williams stated flatly. “No more. No less.”

“We’re partners, Bill!” Smith roared. “I led this hull bunch out to California—”

“You been doing your damnedest to get sideways with me near ever’ step of the way back, Peg-Leg. None of these fellas know much of what you been cookin’ up in your head,” Williams menacingly said to his longtime friend.

“These here are my friends, Bill!” Smith roared. “I can’t let you—”

“You can’t let me?” Williams interrupted quietly. “Tell you what you can do. You can take what horses I’ll give you, and it’s yours to decide if’n you take these two bastards along with you or not.” Williams glanced over at Warren and Curnutt, then returned his steady gaze to Smith. “If’n it were me, I’d leave these snake bellies to make things out on their own. Them an’ Thompson put you in a real fix, now didn’t they?”

Smith’s hands clenched into balls of fury in front of him. “Sounds like you’re stealing all my horses from me, Solitaire.”

Before Williams had a chance to utter a word, Bass
stepped up and stuck his face right up close to Smith’s, saying, “Way I see it, Bill’s making it more’n fair to give you and these two back-killers a fighting chance at that desert out there. If’n I was you—come mornin’, I’d take him up on it … and get.”

Soon as it was light enough for a man to see, Bill Williams and the others watched as Thomas L. Smith cut out a small part of the herd for himself. Peg-Leg had elected to take Curnutt and Warren with him, if not for companionship in that lonely expanse of desert they were staring in the face, then for their help in wrangling the three hundred horses that the other raiders felt Smith was due for seeing them through to the valleys of southern California.

“I reckon you know the way if any man does, Tom,” Williams said when the horses had been divided off and the sky was graying hundreds of miles away to the east. “You go on back by way of the Ammuchabas, you’ll fare good.”

Smith’s eyes narrowed as he glared down on his old partner from horseback. “You make it sound like you ain’t coming back through the Ammuchaba villages.”

Taking a step back, the lanky old trapper said, “We ain’t.”

Startled, Smith asked, “H-how you going back, Bill?”

“This here’s your chance, Peg-Leg,” Williams repeated
mysteriously. “I’m doin’ this ’stead of killing you an’ them others outright—”

“Why
you treating me this way?” Peg-Leg demanded, clearly unrepentant.

“You come down on the side of murdering a friend of mine in his sleep. I got nothin’ more to say to you. Use this chance, Tom.”

For a moment Smith pressed his lips tightly together as if about to spew some venom, then he vowed, “I’ll see you back to the mountains, Solitaire.” His dark, dangerous eyes snapped over to glare at Scratch. “See you back in the mountains too, Titus Bass.”

They watched the trio pull away into the murky, predawn light as another two dozen of the horses ambled off from the herd to join Smith’s animals. Bass, Williams, and the others had seen to it that the three men were equipped with a horn of powder, enough lead to see them to one of the southern posts, and only enough fixings to keep them alive in the deadly crossing that lay ahead.

That seemed fitting to Scratch, really seemed more than fair, considering they all had a hand, one way or another, in scheming to murder a man in what was clearly less than a fair fight. Maybeso Peg-Leg didn’t have a direct role in plotting or carrying out Thompson’s scheme to cut Bass’s throat … but Smith had made no bones about siding with Thompson and his kind ever since the day all twenty-four of the raiders set off from Robidoux’s Fort Uintah.

Even now on this red, raw, desert-summer morning as the thousands of horses grew restless—it made Bass wonder what he himself had ever done to Tom Smith that would cause Peg-Leg to throw his weight on the side of Phil Thompson and his compatriots. It simply couldn’t be Scratch’s hand in taking back those horses Smith, Thompson, and the others stole from Fort Hall and the Shoshone chief named Rain early in that winter of ’39.

Something far deeper, something down under the skin had gnawed away at Thompson across the intervening seasons. Something Bass was coming to realize that he himself had kept from his conscious thoughts, a matter
that had come to trouble him so deeply over the last few years it went to the core of everything he was as a man.

With the death of the beaver trade, the summer rendezvous had withered right along with it. And with that demise of everything these beaver men had placed all stock in—their world was shattered, destroyed, gone forever. With nothing at all to replace it.

Not that the beaver men didn’t have anything to do in the mountains. They could choose to live with the tribes moving slowly with the seasons, or they could stay busy hunting meat for the fur posts, perhaps even ride into California for some horses. But … any of that was nothing more than a vain attempt to fill the real, gaping void of what had torn apart their lives.

Never again would they be what they had been. Beaver men. A rare breed with an unwritten code between them. They endured shoulder to shoulder against all enemies, and stood at one another’s backs when death loomed near. Never again could they be what once had given their lives worth.

But now … now that they were no longer beaver men, cracks opened up in that code. White men stole from white men, and from the friendlies too. And finally … white men had turned on white men.

If outright, cold-blooded murder had come to the mountains, Titus knew the West would never again be the same. The West he had come to know was as good as gone, good as dead and all but buried.

As Bass watched those three men and their horses fade beyond the distant curve of the earth, disappearing into the desert dawn, he was suddenly struck with a remembrance like clabbered milk. Silas Cooper, Bud and Billy too, had stolen his beaver before fleeing the mountains with their booty, land pirates who preyed on the labors of other men. The remembrance lay inside him like meat gone bad.

While they had lied, cheated, and stolen from him—Silas, Bud, and Billy had never murdered. Rotten as they were, especially Cooper, none of the three had never
committed any evil worse than thievery. Leastways, what Scratch knowed of.

There had always been men Titus would just as soon not ride or camp with in these mountains. Except for those three thieves who ran off with his furs back in the spring of 1827, there had never been a question of him trusting the partners he hooked up with. Even those company men and booshways he stayed as far away from as possible because they simply were not his sort of men, he knew the chances were good he could even count on them when the stakes were high and the last raise of the night was called.

That’s just the way things were in the mountains.
Were.
The way things
bad been
in the wild, raw yonder he had come to call home. The unspoken code of these first, hardy few was no more. Right now he found himself more sure than he had ever been that his was not just a dying breed, but a breed that had already been rubbed out.

“Let’s get them pack mules loaded!” Williams cried as he turned around to face the half circle of Americans. “We’re riding out in less time it takes you niggers to piss in the sand!”

They scattered as Hezekiah’s Indians shook out their coarse straw mats and thick Navajo blankets, then rolled them together and tied them over their shoulders beside those quivers of short, deadly arrows. Quivers almost empty after that furious battle with the Mexicans.

Titus quickly looked over the shorter, brown men until he spotted the tall one. “Hezekiah!”