Death Rattle tb-8

by Terry C. Johnston

  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.”

  16

  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!”

  Christmas turned, finding Scratch coming, and smiled in that ebony face. “Titus Bass. These white men you come here with, they ain’t going back by the Ammoochabees?”

  “The booshway figgers on us tracking farther north. It’s high summer now. Water’s drying up even more this far south. We’re gonna lose a bunch of these horses no matter—”

  “We can tell you where you’ll find the springs,” Hezekiah interrupted, extending his arm to point off to the northeast.

  “S-springs,” Scratch echoed. “You can tell us?”

  Bass hurried Hezekiah over to Williams and announced what information the freedman could provide.

  “Why don’t you come and show us?” Titus asked, hopeful.

  Peering over the other trappers for a moment, the tall Negro could not help but see how that invitation nettled some of the white men. He wagged his head and sighed, “I belong with my men—”

  “Bring them too.” Titus interrupted. “The Bent brothers got ’em a Negress for a cook over to their fort. Her husband’s the blacksmith—a Neegra too. You damn well ain’t the only black-skinned son of a bitch in the mountains—”

  “No, it’s better I show you where you’ll find them springs are—let you go on with your own kind, Titus Bass.”

  And before Scratch could protest any further, Hezekiah dropped to one knee there before them, motioning Williams and Bass to crouch with him. A handful of others came up to stand over the three. First, Christmas shoved some sandy dirt into a footlong mound. Here and there he placed some pebbles, other places he used the tip of one index finger to burrow some tiny, shallow indentions in his crude map.

  “Watch the rocks, Titus. Count the rocks,” Hezekiah instructed gravely. “Here. Here. And here too—no matter how hot it gets, you’ll still find water. But less’n you count the rocks, I fear you’ll miss the springs. Water comes out up again’ the rocks. But mind you—not all them rocks got water by ’em. Count the rocks as you go an’ you’ll be sure which ones.”

  The white men closely studied the map the Negro scratched on the ground. Then one by one Williams, then Bass stood and dusted the knees of their leggings.

  “Why’n’t you come ’long with me?” Titus pleaded.

  “My people are back there.” And Christmas pointed. “In those mountains.”

  “Go fetch your family, catch up to us. We’ll damn well go slow with this herd so you can find us. We get over the mountains we figger to sell the horses and you’ll get your share of them wild ones—”

  “Better I stay where there ain’t no question that I’m a free man,” Christmas cut off Bass’s argument, looking into the faces of the other white men not all ready to turn over any of their horses to a Neegra gone to the blanket. “Right here’s where I found some li’l peace for the first time in my life, Titus Bass. It’s plain on the faces of these others that back in that land where you’re headed with your horses … they won’t never look at me like a free man.”

  “Things don’t have to be that way up high enough, back far enough you won’t likely see ’nother white face but mine for a long time to come,” Scratch explained, hopelessness starting to sink in. “Why, there’s even a ol’ friend of mine—a Neegra named Beckwith—was a war chief for the Crow, my wife’s people. This Beckwith was—”

  “After what you done to help me all them years ago—it’s enough for Hezekiah Christmas that my friends helped save your life, Titus Bass,” he interrupted. “ ’Long with the lives of your friends too.”

  Titus looked his old friend in the eye. “Damn if you ain’t as good a man as ever come to the mountains, Hezekiah Christmas. Which way your stick float now?”

  He sighed thoughtfully, then said, “We’ll go back by way of the ground where we kill’t the Mexicans. Gather our arrows out of the dirt, pull ’em from the dead bodies too, afore goin’ on back to our wives and chimin.”

  “Your grandchildren too, Hezekiah.” He had felt this same sentiment welling up in him before. Nonetheless, after all those last and final farewells he had endured, the partings never got any easier. “Damn if you ain’t gone and discombobulated things all over for me.”

  “Why you say that?”

  “I set you free back on the Natchez Trace long ago … and here you gone and not just saved my ol’ hide once, but twice’t in two days?”

  “We’re square, Titus Bass. Never you make no mistake of that.”

  “But you pulled my hash outta the fire twice—”

  “Don’t you see,” Hezekiah snorted, “if’n you’d never set me free from that slaver’s cage, never pertected me when them slavers come after us, I’d never been out here to save your poor white hide two times for good measure!”

  Scratch stepped close to the Negro, held out his hand, and they clasped as Bass said, “You give me back my life, twice, Hezekiah.”

  “An’ I’d save your worthless white ass again if’n it come down to it, Titus,” Christmas promised as he gripped Scratch’s wrist in his big, black hand, the veins prominent on its back like an oiled, knotted Kentucky riverboatman’s rope. “No matter how many times God His own self puts it in my hands to save you … I’ll do it again without question—’cause I’d never had this life with these good Injun people less’n you set me free and took me north to the Ohio.”

  Scratch felt the instant sting of tears burn his eyes. “You’re as good a man as ever there was, Hezekiah Christmas.”

  The Negro grinned as daylight limned across the desert spread at their feet. “You give me back my life years ago. ’Bout time I done something to repay you. Now we are square.”

  “Just ’bout as square as any two men could ever be.”

  All around him the others were mounting up and Williams was barking orders for the march, sending men out to sweep in the sides of their monstrous herd of California horses. Titus finally released his old friend’s forearm.

  “You ever come to the northern mountains, you best ask for me, hear?”

  Hezekiah nodded with a smile. “Count on that. I ask for Titus Bass.”

  “It’s for damn sure most folks gonna point you the right way you ask for me.”

  “If ever I turn my back on this world here, I find you, Titus Bass. I find you no matter what.”

  He had watched the Negro turn without another word and gesture for his men to mount upon their half-wild California horses, shooing a small herd before them as they wheeled about and started back up the long, grassy slopes dotted with scrub cedar and the last of the lean Joshua trees, heading for their homeland and their families.

  Once the others were on their way, Hezekiah stopped his horse and reined around to have himself a look down the slope, long black legs dangling down from the rounded belly of his short, California pony. Bass held his arm high, outstretched, with his big-brimmed hat in his hand. Side to side he waved it in one long arc, and when he saw Hezekiah hold his bow aloft, Bass swallowed down the bitter clog of regret that lay thick in his throat. He turned his horse around and pulled his hat down over the sweat-stained bandanna.

  All he had to do now was get back to the mountain country, cross over, and sell off his share of those horses that would survive the deadly crossing. Spring to spring. From one clump of rocks to another … until he could gaze into her eyes again. Just to see her and the little ones again, he would cross this fiery furnace of a desert, he would crawl all the way over those high and terrible places. To hold them once again, and promise never, never to ride away to California again.

  Family. The feelings he had for his own kin often made him think back on those two gentile Indians the Franciscan friars had baptized with names symbolizing their new Catholic status. It made p
erfect sense for Frederico and Celita to turn back to the mountains with Hezekiah’s fighting men now. They belonged to that growing band of runaways more than they would ever belong to any cluster of cowed and brutalized neophyte slaves at the Mission San Gabriel. They were free again, just as Christmas had been given his freedom near the banks of the Mississippi three decades before.

  Many times across the next weeks Scratch had vowed he’d drink that whole muddy river by himself … if only they could find more water.

  They found that first spring—right where Hezekiah said it would be. Nestled in among the rocks where the horses fought to get at the pools formed as the warm, underground water bubbled to the surface. Williams had them lay over a long day and night at the spring before continuing the next leg of their crossing.

  That hot, dry, late-summer air sucked every drop of moisture right out of the men and the animals with a relentless brutality as they moved east-northeast, transcribing a path between each intervening landmark until they reached the second spring three days later. There they found a little less of the warm water bubbling out of the ground. Summer was torturing the desert, drying up what narrow ribbons of rivers had briefly flowed weeks ago, relentlessly sucking the seasonal life out of the underground springs a drop at a time as their subterranean moisture evaporated into air heated by a long-riding, merciless sun that refused to go down while it baked a man’s skin the way a narrow strip of gristle would sizzle in an iron skillet.

  By then they had begun to lose horses—a few at first—the weakest, the youngest perhaps. Williams and the others made sure the six Ute broodmares they had driven all the way to and back out of California were the first to drink at every stop, and the first to be allowed what skimpy grass they came across when it came time to rest the herd. The mares were vital to them all—man and beast alike—dragging the herd and the raiders all back to the mountains by a primal lure compelling them to return to their young.

  Titus was beginning to think he knew how both life and death now clung to those mares.