Death Rattle (44 page)

This partner of the two Bent brothers took the reed stem of a clay pipe from his lips and exhaled a white wreath of smoke, smiling. “You know better, mister horse thief. And you ain’t no greenhorn pilgrim in this country neither. Yesterday, I sit down with Bill Williams, and I agree to take all I can off your hands … six horses a blanket.”

“Maybe you oughtta ride east with us, Scratch?” Elias Kersey prodded again as he stepped up to Titus’s elbow. “We’ll damn sure get better money for ’em back in Missouri.”

“True ’nough,” Bass replied, brushing his roughened hand across the wool as he stared at the stacks of blankets, the bolts of coarse and fine cloth, those trays of tiny mirrors, beads, tacks, bells, ribbon, iron axes, brass kettles—and on and on.

But his heart was telling him something far different than his head might try to make logic of.

Bass sighed, “Can’t think of nothing I want more’n to be home again.”

Kersey and those with him could see their enthusiasm for their ride to the Missouri settlements would not convert Titus Bass, so all turned away without another word of advice and stepped back to lean against the wall.

Scratch gazed steadily into St. Vrain’s eyes and instructed, “Tell one of your clerks here to go off an’ count what blankets you got still in your stores.”

“Blankets?”

“Said I wanna know how many blankets you got to trade me.”

When St. Vrain had dispatched one of the younger employees from the trade room to the storage rooms, he turned back to return his full attention to Bass. “We met before, I am thinking. Yes?”

“The fort was real young then,” Titus replied, struck by the memory of that spring in ’34. “Eight summers ago, Savery—when I come here looking to kill one of your robe traders. Name was Cooper.”
^*

“Ah—it was that,” and St. Vrain nodded knowingly. “But instead, his cut-nose woman finished him off in our
placita,
our courtyard.”

“You ’member me from that?”

“Most I remember you from the old Cheyenne who come to keep you from dying that day.”

“He left afore I got pulled outta here on a travois,” Scratch said. “You know his name, Savery?”

“He was just another old Injun.” St. Vrain shook his head and shrugged. “I seeing him a few times since. But haven’t seeing him around the fort any time new.”

“Damn, if that red nigger wasn’t old way back then,” Bass ruminated. “His life was on his fingernails when he somehow brung me back from the dusk of my days.”

“Maybeso wasn’t your time, eh?” St. Vrain suggested.

Titus reflected, “Maybeso it wasn’t after all.”

The young clerk rushed back into the room, stuffing a short stub of a pencil over one ear while passing St. Vrain a piece of paper with the other hand.

The trader looked up. “Appears I’ve got plenty of blankets to trade.”

“Awright.” Then his eyes danced over the rest of the trade goods. “How many horses for a kettle?”

“Four.”

“An’ them calicos back in the corner, there?”

“Coarse cloth is one horse for one yard. Them fine bolts is two horses for every yard.”

Titus drew his lips up thoughtfully a moment, then eventually said, “Savery—s’pose we see just how close you can come to taking all my California horses off my hands.”

Hell if it didn’t play out to be a high-plains robbery! But then—when hadn’t dealing with a trader in these here mountains always been larceny of the first order? A man accepted the order of things and lived out his days … or, he could get out. Head back east, or push on for Oregon country like Meek and Newell had. No sense in gnashing teeth over such a fact of life. Complaining did no good. Them what chose to stay on after the beaver trade died was the ones what figured they might never hold the best cards, much less any winning cards—but they were determined to play out what cards they had been dealt the best they knowed how.

That was the mark of these hardy few who would endure.

No, he’d decided against pushing on with Elias and the others who elected to sell their horses five hundred miles or more east of Bents Fort after more weeks of driving their herd across the great buffalo palace of the plains. “Back east” still held no allure for him.

Instead, such a journey would only delay him getting back to her before winter came shrieking down across the north country. To get back to Absaroka, to search out that first winter campsite of Yellow Belly’s band of Crow—Scratch knew he would have to skeedaddle. And to make that march as fast as he needed to, he couldn’t be hampered by a herd of wild horses neither.

He hadn’t seen her since early spring.

And those two young’uns of theirs had surely grown a foot or more since he had last held them in his arms.

Titus hadn’t planned things to work out this way: being gone so long after he had assured her he was leaving only for some spring trapping in the Wind River
Mountains. But that night camped near the Pueblo after they tied up the furious Williams and managed to pour enough whiskey down his gullet to soak him into a stupor so he’d pass out at the fire, Scratch lay in his robes, staring at the belljar clarity of the autumn sky overhead … and felt a discernible, painful tug. Something calling him back to her as quickly as a horse’s four hooves could carry him north.

His homesickness only deepened as they drove their California horses away from the mouth of Fountain Creek, on down the Arkansas for the mouth of the Picketwire,
^*
where the Bent brothers and St. Vrain had raised their huge adobe fortress squarely on the southern border of U.S. territory, like a gullet-choking gob of reddish-brown mud shoved right into the throat of northern Mexico itself. They found Charles Bent was off down in Taos doing some trading, but brother William and Ceran St. Vrain completed the wrangling with hardheaded Bill Williams to establish a per-head price on the stolen horses once the traders were assured the raiders would bring their herd no closer to the fort than some seven miles.

“We don’t want your horses eating up what’s left of the season’s grass we’ll need for our own stock this winter,” William Bent explained.

As he had ridden back from the fort with Solitaire and Silas Adair following their negotiations with the traders, Williams told the two how he and Peg-Leg, Thompson, and their bunch had reached Bents Fort with their first herd of stolen horses back in ’39 … only to discover the traders weren’t all that thrilled to take those California animals off their hands. After all those months and miles, after traipsing twice across all that desert—Bill Williams handed over hundreds upon hundreds of horses in return for nothing more than a keg of cheap Mexican whiskey!

Things hadn’t turned out near that bad this go-round with the powerful traders.

As he looked back on the last few months, Scratch could see how he had wagered his life on one more daring, risky venture … and somehow slipped through Lady Fate’s slim, grasping fingers to end up with more than he would have had to show after a spring and fall season’s worth of trapping the high country. Beaver was worth no more than a pittance compared to its high-water heyday. Plews were no longer king. Squaw-tanned buffalo robes ruled the roost now.

So any hivernant who’d had the green rubbed off him would be a durn fool to turn down St. Vrain’s calculations on just how many stolen horses it would cost a man for all them shiny trade goods the company had packed up from Mexico in carts, or clear out from St. Louis by wagon train.

Bass had held on to a hundred of the Californians he traded off to a small band of Cheyenne who were camped outside the walls of the fort, down on a bench beside the Arkansas. In exchange he ended up with a dozen of the strongest, hard-mouthed, lean-haunched prairie cayuses he could find among the Cheyenne herd. Twelve would be enough to follow him north to the Wind River country where he had cached his goods last spring. From there he planned on making a short scamper into the land of the Crow to find her and the children.

In less than another day, Bass had his Cheyenne pack animals in tow, ready to march north beneath the burden of more than eighty blankets, along with a bevy of weighty kettles and skillets, not to mention a wooden case bearing a hundred new skinning knives, and several hundredweight of other foofaraw that should damn near make him the king of all Absaroka. Tomorrow he would bid farewell to Solitaire and the other raiders who were now in their third glorious day of a drunken spree.

But for tonight he planned to have himself a doe-see-doe with St. Vrain’s Mexican whiskey, and push off at sunrise with a hard-puking, head-thumping hangover. Enough of a mind-numbing hurraw to last him for many,
many seasons to come before he dared again venture out of Crow country—

Then he stopped dead in his tracks, staring through the open doorway into the booshways’ dining hall at that wide-hipped, black-faced woman, who wore a bright, multicolored scarf around her neck and a pleated Mexican skirt swirling around her bare black calves. But it wasn’t the bosomy Negress who turned and stepped over the doorjamb into the warm, lamp-lit room late that autumn afternoon that held Titus Bass’s rapt attention.

It was that pair of small, squirming, pink-tongued puppies she had cradled across her fleshy, brown arms!

“Where the hell you fixin’ to go with them dogs, woman?”

That pinned those cracked and scuffed brown boots of hers right to the pounded clay floor. Up and down she gave him a scathing appraisal, then glared straight into his eye.

“Who be askin’?”

“You answer my question first,” he demanded with the beginnings of a grin. From the corner of his eye, Titus noticed a thick-armed Negro appear at the open doorway behind the big Negro woman. His shirt was open to the waist, sweat glistening in diamonds at the chest hair. He wore a faded yellow bandanna tied round his head, splotched with damp sweat stains. No matter the man’s imposing size, Scratch turned back to argue with the woman the moment she protested.

“Ain’t a-gonna answer you, no how,” she huffed, and her face grew even harder.

“You work for Savery?”

“I do,” and she drew herself up. “So who is you? You work here now?”

“No, I don’t,” he answered impatiently. “Tell me what you’re doing with them dogs—”

“Ain’t no business of yours these dogs.” Then she progressed another step forward with that armful of squirming puppies.

Feeling emboldened, Bass leaped directly in front of her. Now they stood less than an arm’s length apart. “You ain’t the cook, are you?”

“Leave me be!” she growled, lunging to the side to start around the trapper.

But he was far lighter, and all the quicker, dodging left to appear in front of her again, blocking her way.

“Who the hell you be, actin’ with such bad manners way you are!” she snarled.

Now a new, booming voice announced, “You better tell her just who the hell you are, mister. And what the high most you care where she’s headed with them pups.”

He glanced as the muscular man eased into the room, slowly volving the edge of a big butcher knife round and round on a flat whetstone he cupped in the other palm. He took his eyes off Bass only momentarily to spit onto the stone, then continued his sharpening.

“Titus Bass,” he said in a hurried gush. “I asked if you was the cook, woman?”

“I is,” she answered, shifting those wriggling puppies in her arms.

“Wh-what’s your name, woman?”

She turned her head nearly around to speak over her shoulder at the man standing in the doorway. “Mr. Dick—you g’won and tell Mr. Titus who I is.”

“Charlotte, she’s my wife, mister,” the man explained. “An’ Charlotte be the Bents’ cook hereabouts.”

Scratch asked, “Charlotte, you wasn’t planning on cooking these here dogs, was you?”

A snort of raw laughter broke from her big-toothed mouth while her eyes grew wide and expressive. “Why—I ain’t no Shian Injun woman now, Mr. Titus! I ain’t never et puppy and I ain’t ever
gonna
eat puppy neither. Don’t you know I’m the onliest lady in the whole damn Injun country?”

“So them pups is yours, right?”

“These here dogs?” she asked.

“Yes. They yours?”

“They mine ’cause no one else took care of the bitch they come out of,” the cook replied.

The man leaned a shoulder against the adobe door-jamb but kept on circling the edge of his knife round and round on that stone. “You want a pup, mister? That why you’re asking with such curiosity?”

Pinning his eyes again on the woman’s, Scratch continued, “You got more pups, woman?”

“The bitch had her seven of ’em,” the cook answered. “Weeks ago now. They been coming off the tit last few days.”

“Jehoshaphat!” he exclaimed, his heart leaping. “If that ain’t prime doin’s!”

“What you got in your head?” she asked, more than a little suspiciously.

“I want them two pups,” Bass exploded in a gush.

“There’s four others too. I awready give one away,” the woman declared. “But, you wanna see them other four too?”