Bass listened as the man shuffled about in the hay nearby like a dog making its bed, then settled back with a grunt and a sigh. The stranger was eating something, his lips smacking as he continued talking.
“Come in hyar lookin’ fer a blacksmith. Ye be the blacksmith? Shit-fire. I be needin’ a blacksmith in the wust way. Traps is what I got need of. Strong-assed traps, mind you. Them criks and rivers in that thar’ kentry take ’em a toll of meanness on a man’s beaver traps. This’r nigger cain’t be takin’ off fer the far lonesome ’thout a smithy like you fixin’ on ’em.”
This was a … a Negra!
But … the man didn’t talk like no Negra Titus had ever met, sure as hell sounded nothing like the one he had known the best—Hezekiah Christmas. But, Lord and behold! The man had just called himself a nigger.
Painfully he cracked one eye open, his heart thumping with a generous mix of both fear and anticipation. In the dull glow of that squat-bellied toad of an iron stove Titus made out the dim, shadowy figure hunched in the corner of his tiny cell, chewing at what meat remained on a huge bone. Slowly he raked his sore eyes over the man, his nose suddenly pricked with the fragrance of what the man ate.
No, what Titus smelled could not be that bone the stranger tossed aside carelessly before wiping his mouth with the back of his sleeve. It had to be the clothing he wore.
In shadows that rose and fell down the man’s arms and legs long fringes danced in the muted rose of the fire’s dim light. Strips of dull color laced their patterns down each sleeve, over each shoulder, a round patch emblazoned at the center of the man’s chest, partially covered by a long, unkempt beard he wiped his greasy hands upon, then stroked aside. From somewhere beneath the tangle of his chin whiskers he produced a small clay pipe.
Straining his eyes through the murky, smoky firelight kicked out by that small, cast-iron stove, Bass tried to make out the man’s features. Sure as hell didn’t look like no Negra. Not like no Negra Titus Bass had ever laid eyes on—drunk or sober. No broad nose there … but it was damned hard to tell for sure in this light, what with all that matted beard.
As the stranger loaded the pipe from a pouch at his side, Titus worked to tear his eyes open wider, the better to make out the man’s hoary head—a mass of hair sprouting every which way in wild and greasy sprigs once he yanked off his low-crowned, wide-brimmed beaver-felt hat and carefully laid that wind-battered, rain-soaked old veteran aside. Evidently a prized possession, Bass made note.
Agonizingly Titus rolled onto an elbow about the time he cracked the second eye fully open and rocked himself up.
“Ah—thar’s a leetle life left to ye, is thar now?” The stranger leaned forward, his face coming into the stove’s glow as he stuffed a long piece of straw through the grate on the stove’s door.
Bass nearly gasped, low and rumbling, collapsing from his elbow again. “You … you’re a white man.”
“What?” the man asked, then threw his head back and roared in great peals of laughter, rocking back into the smoky confines of the shadows skulking in that corner of Bass’s little cell. “Me, a white man? Sure as sun, coon—I be a white man in sartin comp’ny, mister. But in t’other comp’ny, like these decent, God-fearin’ folks hereabouts, I s’pose I be took for as Injun as Injuns come.”
“I … thought … no. But you … said you was—”
“Spit out your piece—I said me what?”
“Call’t yourself a Negra.”
The stranger’s brow knitted up a moment, quizzically working that over in his head; then he suddenly rocked forward, roaring in laughter again. “I’ll be go to hell right hyar an’ let the devil hisself chaw on my bones. If’n that don’t take the circle! I call’t myself a nigger, mister.”
“That’s what I said—just what you called yourself.”
Leaning forward even more, the man came closer to Titus. Now Bass could see that one big upper tooth protruded outward like a hound’s unruly fang. Likely from force of habit come of many years living with his affliction, the stranger constantly worked his upper lip beneath that shaggy and unkempt mustache, sliding the lip this way, then that, doing his very best to hide that large yellowed fang that poked its way out into broad daylight despite some of the stranger’s best efforts.
Around it the man rasped his explanation. “An’ a feller what calls hisself a nigger ain’t in no way calling hisself a Negra. A Negra got him black skin, black as charcoal in that forge o’ your’n. An’ a nigger … well, now.” He scratched at the side of his beard, then pushed some of his long hair back over his shoulder, shrugging as if his tilt on things made all the world of sense to him. “Niggers come in all colors. No more’n that. Yest a word fellers I know come to use, s’ali.”
Bass licked his dry lips, then croaked, “W-where in God’s earth you come from?”
“God’s earth, eh? That’s purty good, mister. Fer that’s yest whar’ I come from.” He sighed. “Yessir. I yest come hyar from God’s earth. Say, ye look thirsty thar’. Bet ye could do with some water?”
Titus watched him drag the red cedar piggin close and pull the dipper from it.
“Hyar. Drink up,” the man commanded.
He did so, greedily too: savoring the cool, sweet taste and smooth texture of the water sliding like silk across his parched membranes.
“That ought’n limber up that talkin’ hole of yer’n,” the stranger declared. “My Lordee—what ye gone and done to yerself? All cut up the way ye are?”
“A fight over to a tavern last night,” Bass replied, his stomach suddenly feeling very empty with the slosh of water he had just poured into it. Maybe his stomach rolled only from the smell of the stranger’s food—the mere thought of eating made his belly curl up in protest.
“I see’d wust myself, mister. Blackfeet mostly. Though them Rees do a fairsome job on a nigger. When their kind get done workin’ over a man—he ain’t left near as purty as you. An’ it ain’t be all that long ago I see’d fellers wus’n yerself.” He clucked, sucked his lips sideways to hide that snaggletooth, and wagged his head. “Leastwise, as hangdown as ye might feel, looks to be yer movin’ and talkin’.”
“Don’t mean I ain’t half near death,” Titus grumbled with self-pity, his mind of a sudden feverish on something to eat after his fast of nearly twenty-four hours, despite how his stomach might protest. Then he remembered the food Troost said he’d brought in. Rocking unsteadily onto that one elbow, he craned his neck, searching for the plate in the shadows of his smoky quarters.
“Don’t ye take the circle now!” the stranger exclaimed suddenly, as if it had taken more than a moment for Bass’s words to sink in. “Why, if this coon ain’t got him a sense of humor.”
“You damn well got me wrong—I ain’t much at funnin’,” Titus admitted, growing impatient with his search. Troost had said he’d set that plate nearby, towel and all. “Never have been much at funnin’. Say, you see’d a plate around here? Had it a towel laid over keep the bugs out?”
“Towel, an’ a plate? Like this’un hyar?” the man replied, bald-faced and innocent as could be—producing the large pewter platter, complete with a striped towel covering it all.
“Likely that’s the one.” Bass took it from the man, immediately sensing just how light the whole affair was. Collapsing to his side, he flung off the towel, finding the plate empty. “What … the hell?” he screeched two octaves too high.
“Was them yer victuals?” the stranger asked. “Pardon the bejesus out of me. When I come on in here while’st back, I nudged ye. Spoke at ye too. But nary a move. Figgered ye wasn’t dead, way ye was breathin’—but had to be laid out black as night till the peep o’ day. Feller in that condition surely didn’t want him no victuals, so hungry as I was—I weren’t about to leave ’em go to waste.”
“You ate my god … goddamned supper?” Titus shrieked. The effort hurt, his sudden flare of hot anger shooting through every bruised scrap of tissue in his body as he rocked off his elbow, the plate
clattering beside him.
“I’ll go fetch ye some victuals on my own, straightaway,” the stranger declared, starting to rise. “Ain’t used to St. Louie City, but I’ll likely find something in this’r town, even this time of night.”
“What time you figure it to be?” Bass asked weakly, his brain hammering with great slashes of pain once more as he closed his eyes, laid an arm over them as he sought a soft place for the back of his head.
“Hell if I know what time to make it out to be ’cept nighttime, mister.” He pointed off generally toward the rafters overhead. “From looks of the moon out there ’mongst all them clouds when I come in, had to be some past midnight.”
“Jumpin’ Jehoshaphat!” Titus growled nearly under his breath. “You come in hereto rob a sick man of his food this time of night? Cain’t you just leave a sick man to get his sleep?”
“Look who’s gone an’ got hisself techy,” he snarled back. “Mayhaps I best find me ’nother blacksmith do my work for me tomorry an’ ye can yest ferget me rootin’ ye out some victuals this time of night!”
Titus wasn’t doing a damn bit of good against the steam-piston throbbing that rocked his head. As quietly as he could, he said, “Don’t … please don’t go nowhere. Troost’d have my balls if I run off any business, mister.”
“Troost?”
“My boss,” Titus replied. “Man what owns this place.”
“That mean … yer saying ye ain’t the blacksmith?”
“I am. But I just work here.”
“Ye any good?”
“You damn bet I am,” he growled back, angry at the man. The thought of it: to be awakened by a stranger who had just eaten his food in the middle of the night, then turned around and insulted him too.
“So tell me,” the man said. “Ye gonna be worth a lick to work on my traps tomorry?”
“I doubt it.”
“Then I’ll wait,” the stranger said, smacking his lip around that fang the color of pin acorns. “’Sides. It’ll gimme time to have my spree. Come down hyar to St. Louie to have me my spree. So I got me time till ye heal yerself up.”
Titus grumbled, “That’s mighty kind of you.”
“Ye still hungry? Said ye was hungry. I’ll go fetch ye some victuals.”
“Least you could do so I can consider us even,” Bass replied, wagging his hammering head slightly.
The stranger slowly got to his feet and began pulling on a long blanket coat, well-greased and dirtied, blackened by the smoke of many fires. “Yer sure as sun a techy sort, ain’t ye?”
“Ain’t you touchy if’n some feller come in to eat your food and wake you up from a dead sleep?”
He clucked a tongue against that big front tooth, then said with a nod, “S’pose yer right, mister. I owe ye for yer hospitality. I does at that.”
Titus rolled his thundering head away, easing it over onto the elbow he crooked beneath his puffy cheek. “Supper would be a damn good start at showing your thanks.”
“If’n ye don’t take the circle, my friend! Fer a man what’s been beat as bad as ye surely be, I got to hand it to ye,” the stranger said with a nod of certainty. “No matter how yer painin’—ye sure don’t mind making use of that there mean mouth of yer’n, full of stupids the way it is.”
“Mean?” Titus snapped, trying to rise off his blankets, straining to hold his head up and bring the stranger’s face into focus. “You dance on in here the way you done, and you go off telling me I’m mean?”
“The way yer acting,” the stranger replied, “yer gonna be yest fine, I can see. Got lots of fight left in ye, yessirree! No matter that I find ye layin’ hyar lickin’ yer wounds arter someone nigh onto kill’t ye … but I don’t make ye out to be the sort to whimper an’ moan like a bitch ’bout to pup, is ye? Hell, no—ye still got ye sand enough in yer goddamned craw to bark at me like a bad dog.”
“Bad dog? Barking at you?”
“Yep!” And the stranger chuckled heartily. “Maybeso ye do got some ha’r in ye after all, mister—if’n ye can bark at me while’st yer all tore up the way ye are.”
“Ain’t no use in a fella feeling sorry for hisself,” Titus replied, working hard to focus on the stranger with his blood-rimmed eyes.
“Yer some, mister blacksmith. Think I yest might like gettin’ to know ye.”
“Don’t matter none to me if you do or if you don’t,” Bass snapped, immediately sorry he had. “I … I don’t have me many friends.”
The stranger crawled over and slowly knelt near Bass, the gamy aroma of him washing over Titus.
“Me neither, mister,” the man explained quietly. “Not … not many friends no more.” Then he suddenly reared back and slapped both palms down atop his thighs, rising to his feet. “Ye still hungry—I’ll run off an’ fetch ye some victuals.”
“I better eat,” Bass admitted. “If only to give me something for my belly to toss right back up.”
“Yer meatbag paining ye, is it?” He held down his hand to Titus. “Name’s Isaac Washburn. Isaac—with two a’s. What’s yer’n?”
“Titus Bass.” He struggled some to roll off his right side, but he eventually got the arm freed and gripped the stranger’s hand. “Where was it you said you was from, Isaac Washburn?”
“God’s kentry, Titus Bass. Up the Missouri—land of the Blackfeet, Ree, an’ Assiniboin. Seen me Mandan and Pawnee kentry too. Land whar’ them red niggers take yer ha’r if’n you don’t keep it locked on tight. Kentry where the moun-tanes reach right up to scrape at the belly o’ the sky, an’ the water’s so cold it’ll set yer back teeth on edge.”
Electrified at that announcement, Bass anxiously fought to prop himself on both elbows when Washburn released his hand. The older man clearly had a secure grip on Titus’s attention.
“You … you been out … out there?” Bass asked.
Isaac grinned, knowingly. “Out thar’?” And he pointed off into the distance. “Damn right I been out thar’. Seen yest ’bout ever’thin’ thar’ is fer a nigger to see north on the upriver.”
“Then … you had to seen ’em?”
“Seen what? Injuns? Yest tol’t ye: I see’d more Injuns’n I ever wanna see again in my hull durn life—”
“No,” Bass interrupted. “Have you see’d the buffalo?”
“Buffler?” Washburn reared back, snorting a great gust of laughter that showed Bass the underside of that great tooth all but sticking straight out of his upper gum. “Titus, I see’d buffler so thick at runoff time their rottin’, stinkin’ carcassees dang near clog the Missouri River her own self. From that river I see’d them critters moseying off to the north, goin’ round to the south, likely to gather up in herds so big they’d cover the hull kentry far as a feller could see.”
“Then you … you really see’d ’em!” he exclaimed under his breath, wide-eyed and aghast. Bass’s heart hammered mercilessly in his chest, every bit as hard as his temples throbbed. How he hoped this was his answer. “Damn, here I am talking to a man what’s see’d buffalo for real.”
Washburn looped a four-inch-wide belt around his blanket coat, securing it in a huge round buckle. “My friends call me Gut.”
Quickly his red eyes shot down to the stranger’s belly. Nothing there that in any way remotely appeared to be a gut on the man. He was about as lean as a fella could be. Made of strap leather and látigo, most likely, Bass decided.
“Why they call you Gut?” Titus asked. “Ain’t a man can say you got a big belly.”
Isaac laughed. “No—not ’cause of my belly. Others laid that handle on me some time back—up in them Three Forks, y’ars ago it were—I s’pose fer it be my favorite food.”
“You eat … eat gut?”
“Not gut rightly. Bou-dans. A parley-voo French word for sausage, s’all it is.”
“Bou-dans,” Titus repeated, trying out the sound of it on his tongue bitten and swollen from the beating.
“Yessirree, my friend. I’ll fix ’em for us sometime while’st
I’m hyar in St. Louie. Plant myself down fer a short time afore I feel the needs be pushing upriver once more.” He stared off for a moment before saying, “Lord, but for once I’d love to see how a man could do getting hisself west foilering the Platte.”
“The Platte,” Titus repeated. He had heard something of it.
Washburn pointed off with a wide jab of his arm. “Runs right out to the moun-tanes. One of them rivers what comes in off the prerra.”
“All the way in from far away on the prairie?” He had seen rivers long and wide and wild. But to think of a river bringing water down from mountain snows, all the way here to St. Louis!
Washburn smacked his lips loudly, his eyes gleaming now that he had the younger man’s rapt attention. “Like I said it, Titus: that water comes all the way from them moun-tanes. What moun-tanes I see’d up north in the Missouri River kentry, them moun-tanes even down south of the Powder—they was still some ways off west from the criks and rivers I was trappin’ or trompin’. Word is, them moun-tanes on the headwaters of the Platte scratch the belly of the sky … an’ go all the way south to greaser kentry.”
He wagged his head in disbelief, trying to conceive of any range so high, any range that extended that great a distance. “S-same mountains?”
Washburn nodded in the dim fire’s light. “Same. North, to south—far as a man can travel in a month of Sundays.”
“Naw,” Bass scoffed, suddenly suspicious the older man was making sport of him. Titus had seen mountains, back east. That Kentucky and Cumberland country. He damn well knew there could be nothing near as big as Isaac Washburn was claiming. “I cain’t believe there’s mountains what run from the Missouri where you was all the way south that far.”
Squinting, the disheveled, greasy man gazed down at Bass incredulously. “Ain’t ye heard, lad? Right north of St. Louie not far from hyar, a man can foller the great Missouri north to trap or trade. Goin’ upriver, that man’ll run onto more’n a handful of big rivers, ever’ damn one of ’em coming in from the far, far moun-tanes.”
“I know ’bout the beaver trade on the upper river. Been making traps for years now,” Titus snapped a little impatiently. “What’re they called … them mountains you set eyes on?”
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