Death Rattle

by Terry C. Johnston

  “Not that none of us ever heard. Maybeso it was just cheap talk,” Mathew declared, wagging his head with regret. “Damn shame of it, here at our Pueblo we’re sitting right where Armijo’s soldados or them Texians either one could jump us real easy.”

  “If’n you hear either one’s comin’—where’s a man like you to go?” Scratch inquired.

  Kinkead gazed at him squarely. “Nowhere, Titus. Nowhere. Some men you can push out of one place after ’nother. As for me, I decided folks pushed me off from one place already. I ain’t gonna let any nigger push me outta my home again. I figger the Arkansas’s my home now, where I plan on livin’ out the last of my years.”

  “Just like Josiah’s figgering on lastin’ out his years in Taos.” Bass worked at calming his fear. “After all this time, I’ll wager the lad talks purty good Mexican.”

  Kinkead roared, “Good as any natural-born pepper-belly!”

  When out of the darkness a loud voice suddenly bawled, “To hell with ever’ last pepper-belly, I say!”

  The men at the fire whirled to find Bill Williams striding up, accompanied by two more of the raiders.

  “That whiskey in them jugs?” Williams asked as he stepped right into the corona of warm firelight. “Three of us just been over to see how the herd’s grazing—”

  His words dropped off in midsentence as Jim Beckwith stood and turned to face his old nemesis.

  “How you been, Bill?” the mulatto stated with a flat, dispassionate voice.

  The old trapper’s face went hard as slate, glaring at Beckwith. “I’ll be jiggered, boys. Seein’ how this Neegra shows his face to me here sure sours my milk, it does. Never thort he’d have the nerve to stay in the same territory I’m in—”

  “Goddamn your eyes!” Jim snarled, muscles tensing along his jaw. “You’re the child just dropping right outta the hills. This here’s my home!”

  “Y-your home, Beckwith?” Williams scoffed. “I say a low-down sack of Digger droppings like you don’t deserve no home! Maybeso you best crawl back under some shit-covered rock you come from!”

  Of a sudden, Bass reached up and grabbed Beckwith’s wrist, stopping the mulatto in his tracks. But he asked his question of Williams, “Bad blood still atween you two, Solitaire?”

  Bill’s eyes flicked to Titus, then back to the mulatto’s face. “Been some, it has. This here mongrel dog of a Neegra allays sided with Peg-Leg on ever’thing that first ride to California.” He grinned cruelly, saying, “Wish’t Beckwith been along so’s I could leave him dry up in the goddamned desert with Peg-Leg.”

  “That what you done to Smith?” the mulatto demanded, his fists clenching and unclenching. “Leave him in the goddamned desert?”

  “We give him plenty of horses to eat,” Bass said, releasing Beckwith and standing at the black man’s elbow. He took a step backward to place himself almost halfway between the mulatto and the old trapper.

  Beckwith’s black eyes bore into Scratch. “You was part of this, Titus Bass?”

  Before Scratch could answer, Williams grumbled to the others, “What with you boys ’llowing this here p’isen-brained Neegra to make his home here with you, our outfit gonna be pulling out come first light.” He sniffed the air. “Can’t stand this smell of half-dead yellow-bellied dog—”

  “You sure mighty big on calling a man bad things when you got all your friends at your side!” Beckwith snarled, his fists flexing as he glanced a hateful glare at Bass.

  “Better’n talkin’ bad behind a man’s back—just what a snake-belly black-ass like you does!” Williams snapped, his right forearm sliding up across his belly, the hard-knuckled, slender fingers coming to rest around that elk-antler knife handle. “Never you had any backbone to say a mean thing to a man’s face!”

  “You ain’t bound to change, are you, Bill?” Beckwith shot back. “Still the same ol’ soft-brained idjit you allays was. Still runnin’ off at the tongue like a ol’ woman—”

  “An’ you’re never gonna be a white man, are you, Neegra?” Williams interrupted, his bony shoulders drawing up threateningly. “No matter how hard Jimmy Beckwith tries to be white—”

  The instant Beckwith lunged for him, Williams started to yank his belt knife free of the sheath, but Kinkead snagged that arm just above the elbow.

  “No stickers, you sonsabitches!” Bass hollered as he jerked backward on Beckwith’s arm, stumbling at the edge of the flames.

  The mulatto twisted, wrenching his arm free as the rest of the men at the fire bolted to their feet. Williams whirled around on one foot, surprising Kinkead when he jammed a hickory-hard knee into Mathew’s groin and pushed himself free of the big man’s hold on him.

  “Watchit!” someone cried as Williams lurched between two of the raiders who were attempting to block his way.

  Scratch suddenly hopped in front of Beckwith, screaming at Williams, “I’ll kill you my own self, you go an’ pull your sticker, Solitaire!”

  “Best get out of my way, Bass!” Williams shrieked as he lumbered around the side of the fire, traders and raiders dodging out of the fray. “Gonna gut ’im with my bare hands!”

  Just as Titus raised his arms out before him and started toward Williams, Beckwith shoved Bass from behind, hurling Scratch aside as the mulatto leaped around him. Landing on his knees, Bass jerked around to find Beckwith yanking his pistol from his belt.

  “Goddamn you, Beckwith!” he shouted. “Don’t shoot!”

  Williams was already under a full head of steam, his neck tucked into his shoulders as he closed on the mulatto.

  But instead of pointing his pistol at Williams, Beckwith suddenly whirled the weapon around in his hand, gripping it by the barrel, swinging it backward at the end of his arm before he slashed downward the instant before the old trapper collided with the mulatto. The resounding crack reminded Titus of the dull thud a maul made as it drove an iron wedge into an old hickory stump.

  Williams went down like every bone had been ripped from his body.

  His heart pounding in his ears, anger at both men rising near the boiling point, Titus got to his hands and knees, crawling back to kneel over Williams.

  “He breathing?” Rube Purcell asked as he came up, bent at the waist.

  “Yeah, he’s alive,” Bass grumbled as he stood, not taking his hard glare off the mulatto.

  Before any one of them, much less Beckwith himself, saw it coming—Titus lashed out with the back of his hand, the oak-hard knuckles slashing across the mulatto’s, mouth.

  “You stupid bastard!” Scratch growled menacingly. “You pulled your goddamn pistol, ready to kill a man!”

  “By dogs, he was gonna kill me if I didn’t lay him out first!” Beckwith protested, then licked at a trickle of blood seeping from the corner of his mouth.

  “Maybe he should have kill’t you outright,” Titus said, a rumble of warning in the back of his throat.

  Jim’s eyes grew wide with confusion. “You takin’ his side, Scratch?”

  “I was willing to give yours a listen—till you knocked him in the head,” Bass said, tearing his eyes away from Beckwith so he could glance down at Williams. “Maybeso, you’d better go back to your Pueblo now while you got the chance.”

  “Trouble is,” Beckwith admitted, “this ain’t finished ’tween him and me—”

  “You gone mad with whiskey?” Titus demanded.

  That appeared to bring Beckwith up short. “No. No, I ain’t so drunk I don’t know ’sactly what I’m doing when a—”

  “Take him away, Mathew,” Bass commanded, wagging his head. “Get Beckwith outta here—now.”

  “I could’ve killed him. You know I could’ve,” Beckwith pleaded. “But I didn’t. Son of a bitch had it comin’.”

  Kinkead wrapped one of his big arms around the mulatto’s shoulders. “C’mon, Jim. Let’s g’won back to the Pueblo.”

  Bass turned away from Beckwith, shaking his head in disappointment.

  Kinkead started away, then stopped, still gr
ipping onto Beckwith as he asked his question, “What you gonna do when Bill comes to, Scratch?”

  “I ain’t got a notion what to do.”

  “He’s gonna be madder’n a spit-on hen,” Mathew intoned. “And he’ll be hankering to come looking for Jim here. Finish things one way or another. Gonna be messy—”

  “I’ll do what I can to keep Bill outta your Pueblo tonight, Mathew,” Titus vowed. “Then we’ll get our horses started away from here at first light.”

  Titus Bass dug at an itch at the nape of his neck and came away with a louse. Goddamn that Pueblo, he cursed, crushing the louse between a thumb and fingernail. Then looked again at Ceran St. Vrain. “How many horses did you callate for a blanket?”

  “Six,” answered the trader.

  He laid a hand on the white blanket festooned with narrow red stripes running the entire length of the thick wool fabric, which St. Vrain had unfurled down the long wooden trade counter here at Bents’ Fort on the Arkansas. “Sure it weren’t five, Savery?”

  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.