Buffalo Palace

by Terry C. Johnston

  “There, Titus Bass,” and he pointed. “Show me what to do now.”

  Bass yanked upon the sack’s drawstring and pulled one of the square-jawed iron traps from the leather bag. Setting it upright on the ground, he squatted over it as Washburn had taught him, pushing down on the two jaws with his heels, allowing them to flap down so he could set the pan trigger within the notch filed in the pan arm.

  “Whatcha gonna do with it now, Titus Bass?” Hooks asked in a harsh whisper.

  “Set it in the water,” Bass replied, hopeful he would get some of this right.

  Billy wagged his head. “Not till you got your set made.”

  “Set?”

  Tuttle explained, “Where you gonna lay it, Titus.”

  “How?”

  Cooper nudged Hooks forward. “Billy, y’ show him.”

  “C’mere, Titus Bass,” Hooks instructed, tugging Bass’s sleeve. “I be the one to show you first whack.”

  “First … first whack?” Titus asked.

  “Right off. Means I show you right off.” Hooks held out his hand. “Gimme one of your float-sticks. You got float-sticks, don’cha?”

  “Here,” and he slapped one down in Billy’s open palm as Hooks pulled the second mitten from his hand by placing it beneath his armpit.

  That reminded Bass how much he itched, so he dug fingernails again, not only at his neck and armpits, but also stuffing a hand in there between the folds of his blanket coat where he could get at his groin.

  “You do got the varmits, don’t you?” Tuttle replied.

  Bass shrugged and said, “They ain’t been troubling me long.”

  He didn’t take his eyes off Hooks as Billy knelt on the bank, leaned over, whacked the stick against the thick rime of ice crusted at the surface of the water near the bank, and began digging and scraping beneath the surface with the end of the long float-stick. After a short time he shoved his coat sleeve up his arm, then stuck nearly the whole length of it under the surface.

  When he brought the arm out and shook it, Billy stood, saying, “Put your damned hand down there, Titus Bass—and see what I made for your trap to sit itself on.”

  Kneeling right where Hooks had, Titus stuffed his arm into the shockingly cold water, a chill that felt all the worse because of the dark at this predawn hour. His fingertips walked down the side of the bank until he felt the underwater shelf Billy had crudely dug out of the bank.

  “I feel it. So you gone and made a flat place for the trap under the water.”

  Cooper said, “Tell him what it’s for, Tuttle.”

  “Put your trap down there, under the water, so the goddamned beaver don’t see it, you idjit.”

  As he pulled his hand out of the freezing water, Bass turned to ask of Cooper, “What good does it do to hide your trap?”

  “Beaver ain’t too stupid a animal, Titus,” Silas explained. “They smell your scent—where y’ve walked, where y’ go and spit—they won’t come anywhere near. Y’ been a stupid pilgrim to leave your traps on top of the bank afore now?”

  “Yeah, I done that.”

  Silas wagged his head. “Don’t y’ see that trap got your scent, maybeso that dead horse’s smell on it from packing it out here from St. Louis,” Cooper declared. “But under water—the beaver can’t pick up no man-scent.”

  “And ’sides—you gotta have bait!” Billy added.

  Tuttle asked, “Maybeso you didn’t have no bait to set out, did you?”

  “B-bait? Hell—I ain’t fishin’ … I’m trapping beaver!”

  Hooks and the other two snorted laughter behind their hands to muffle as much of the shrill sound of it as they could—a sound that grated Titus like a coarse file drawn across rusted iron.

  “You was a lucky nigger,” Tuttle reminded him. “To catch a few old beaver ’thout no bait, and your traps sitting right on the bare ground, bold as can be.”

  “I found me a place where there was tracks,” Titus protested. “And I caught me some beaver.”

  Billy cheered, “You gotta l’arn to be sneaky!”

  “How’d y’ like to learn yourself how to catch least two beaver to every three traps y’ set out?” Cooper said.

  “That’s how good Silas here does—yessirreebob,” Billy declared.

  “T-two beaver for every three sets?”

  “And sometimes Silas fills ’em all,” Tuttle added. “Damn but he’s so good, it puts me to shame.”

  “Maybe you an’ me just ain’t got the knack of it the way Silas do,” Hooks cautioned.

  Standing, Titus measured the tall, black-haired man before him. “You really mean sometimes you fill all your god-blamed traps?”

  “These here partners of mine speak the truth. I tried to teach ’em the best I could,” Cooper said. Then he leaned forward and said in a whisper, “Y’ wanna learn how to be as good as me—y’ll have to learn from me, Titus.”

  And learn he did.

  From that morning on Bass hung on every one of Silas Cooper’s words, soaking in all he could, asking questions of all three, and being sure he was the first to rise in the morning, the last to return to camp in the evenings after checking his sets. And right from that very first morning Titus got better and better at selecting where he should set the traps, deciding which side of the stream he would use for his set, and figuring how to leave his bait behind on the long willow limbs he jabbed into the frozen ground, the other end daubed in the “beaver milk” given him by the other three until he had caught enough animals to acquire some of the smelly bait for himself.

  It did not take him long before he was able to surpass Bud Turtle’s catch at each camping site. Then for weeks he worked hard to equal the tally of Billy Hooks’s beaver. And in the end, as winter set in hard and drove the group down out of the Wind River Mountains, south for the southern Rockies, Titus Bass knew he would never be content until he beat Silas Cooper.

  Just the way he had come, oh, so close to beating Eli Gamble in that shooting match back to Boone County fifteen summers before.

  “So how old a man are y’ now, Titus Bass?” Cooper asked one blustery evening as the clouds parted enough to let the moon and some stars shine through not long after twilight.

  He shivered, knowing it would be a cold one this night. “I turn thirty-two this coming Janee-ary.”

  “Won’t none of us rightly know when that is!” Tuttle advised.

  “Maybe we go and have us a li’l celebration anyways,” Cooper said, shivering himself. “Time we get down to Park Kyack, we’ll likely have to fort up for the winter—as far out of the wind as a man can get hisself.”

  Titus dug up behind an ear, his fingertip feeling for the tiny hard vermin about the size of a small grain of rice. “Park Kyack?”

  “Where we plan on winterin’,” Bud Tuttle said.

  Hooks pointed at Bass, squealing, “Just throw that grayback in the damn fire!”

  “Your goddamned nits better not come jumpin’ over here on me,” Tuttle grumbled.

  “Titus Bass,” Silas started, “’bout time y’ owned up that you’re fixed with the nits.”

  “Rode on him alla way from the settlements, I’d imagine,” Tuttle said.

  “Whores got ’em. Ever’ last whore I knowed,” Billy said. “That and the pox too. Man takes his poison from a whore in small doses, but, damn, I hate the Irish itch the way you got it!”

  Bass’s scalp crawled all the more just for the speaking of it. Sheepishly he dug his fingers along the top of his scalp, searching, feeling more and more of the tiny varmints infesting him.

  Cooper asked, “Whores, was it?”

  Wagging his head, Bass replied, “Ain’t been with a whore since early last spring.”

  “You itch right after?” Tuttle inquired.

  “Not till I was out long the Platte.”

  Silas roared, “Say, boys—any Pawnee what had raised that varmit’s skelp—they’d get the grayback nits for all their trouble!”

  The three of them laug
hed heartily, generously, at Bass’s incessant torment. It had gotten worse since meeting up with the trio—if only because one or the other would always comment about his all-but-nonstop itching. When Titus was alone, at least there hadn’t been anyone around to remind him he played host to a troublesome infestation. But looking back at this moment, he decided it had to be that he took on those vermin from the damned soldiers at Fort Osage … that, or from the widow woman up north of Franklin.

  “Chances were good it were soldiers,” he declared, not wanting to mention Edna Grigsby as he dug at the back of his neck, pulling a louse free and pitching it into the coals, where it popped and hissed as it was quickly consumed.

  “Soldiers?” Cooper demanded.

  “Where abouts you run onto ’em out on the Platte?” Hooks asked.

  “Wasn’t there,” Titus replied. “Back to Fort Osage.”

  “Oh,” Tuttle said with relief crossing his face. “Good thing they didn’t just make you a soldier with ’em. They do that, you know? They can press you into service if’n they take a mind to.”

  Bass defended, “These were good fellas—”

  “Damn ’em all!” Hooks interrupted. “Soldiers is just like them graybacks. Serve for no good.”

  Cooper leaned over and slapped a big hand on Bass’s knee to ask, “Y’ been anywhere else’t but that soldier post where you’d take on a herd of nits?”

  A bit embarrassed at telling of his encounter with the widow, Bass looked down, away from the prying eyes, to stare at the fire. It was as good as admitting to it.

  “Where, Titus?” Tuttle demanded.

  “A woman.”

  “Tell us! Tell us now!” Billy roared, clapping his hands twice.

  “Billy loves him stories of the womens, he surely does,” Cooper declared. “So tell us your woman story, Bass. And make it a good’un. We all been without for too long, and likely be some weeks afore we winter up with some friendly Injun gals.”

  “Injun gals!” Hooks repeated with enthusiasm, rubbing his crotch and humping his hand. “Good poontang, them Injun gals for Billy Hooks.”

  “Best part of living in the mountains for the man,” Silas said. “So, y’ gonna tell us ’bout your woman?”

  “A widow woman,” Bass finally admitted. “Just a lonely … widow woman. Been ’thout a man for a long time.”

  “Them’s the best kind!” Cooper exclaimed with a smile. “They know just how a man gets—going too long ’thout a wet woman wrapped around his stinger. Damned thankful too—no matter how a fella treats ’em.”

  “Yeah—them widder-women kind get the hunger bad as us,” Tuttle added.

  “So,” Cooper announced in a loud voice suddenly, “before Titus Bass here spins his tale of the widder woman and how she give him the grayback nits … I believe it be time we give our new partner here a new name.”

  “N-new name?” Bass stammered.

  Billy chimed right in, “Yes, yes! A new name!”

  “You got something in mind?” Tuttle asked of Cooper.

  Silas shrugged. “S’pose I do, Bud. Just look for yourself. Lookee what he’s got hisself doing for days on end now.”

  “Itching,” Tuttle replied as he stared at Bass. “He’s scratching all over hisself. Damn but he’s got him a passel of them nits, and bad!”

  “Scratchin’ is what he’s doing,” Silas said. “So—I say let’s give him a new name what’s fittin’ for all them nits he’s been digging at.”

  “We gonna call him nit?” Hooks asked with a silly grin.

  “Nawww,” Cooper growled as he stood and stepped over behind Bass with his warm tin cup of coffee in hand—which he slowly began to pour on Titus’s head.

  When Bass started to jerk aside to get away, Cooper’s empty hand came down to clamp on one of his shoulders as he continued to pour the warm coffee on the newcomer’s long brown hair. His head and shoulders steamed in the cold, frosty air, just like their coffee tins.

  Then Cooper flung his cup aside and spread a hand over the crown of Bass’s head, raising his eyes to the black of that winter night, his voice booming in declaration.

  “Henceforth and for yonder time—let all men know this here pilgrim nigger no longer be called Titus Bass, greenhorn … but from now on he be the free trapper we gonna know as—Scratch!”

  *The LaRamee, or Laramic, River

  7

  “There h’ain’t no use to pushing on,” Silas Cooper announced to the other three that late afternoon as the wind and snow battered them with such force that it nearly wore a man out. “We’ll hunker down to camp here.”

  “Don’t figger we can make it?” Bud Tuttle asked before he swung out of the saddle right behind Cooper in the deep, swirling snow they had been slogging their way through.

  “Sun’s falling,” Silas explained, looking off to the west, then looked up ahead of them. “Clouds dropped on that pass up yonder. H’ain’t no way we’re gonna make it over an’ back down to timber afore dark no way.”

  Titus watched them both anxiously. In the last few weeks he had come to trust their judgment on just about everything. And now the four of them had just passed timberline into the open, where the wind battered and bruised them without respite. The animals were beginning to bog down in ever-deeper snow. All around them the soft white flakes kept on falling, gusting, swirling in what was close to becoming a whiteout.

  “We gonna get ourselves snowed in here, Silas!” Billy Hooks whined.

  “What about game?” Titus asked, anxious, his belly growling.

  “Game?”

  Bass continued, “How we gonna eat?”

  “There’ll be game, Scratch. Don’t y’ fret yourself ’bout that.”

  “And if there ain’t, for balls’ sake?” Tuttle demanded, slogging up through the snow that reached to their knees.

  “Then we’ll eat our damned horses,” Cooper replied, glaring at Bud. “Beginning with yours!”

  For a moment the two men stared at one another, shoulders loose, hands encased in those crude blanket mittens ready to snatch up a belt pistol or knife if the other jumped.

  “C’mon, boys,” Hooks finally cooed. “Let’s g’won back down there some to that last big patch of trees where we can fort up.”

  Without taking his eyes off Tuttle, Cooper said, “Plumb center idee you got, Billy. Let’s camp, boys.”

  Until Silas and Billy yanked their horses and mules around and started back down the slope on foot, followed a moment later by Bud Tuttle, Bass didn’t realize he had been gripping the butt of the big pistol he carried stuffed in the wide belt at his waist.

  There was something deadly about Silas Cooper—something always there right under the surface, something that he figured could strike with the quickness of a cotton-mouth while the man was still smiling at you, talking to you … giving you no warning of the danger. In his thirty-one years Titus had learned that some men were easy to steer clear of because you had a clear sense of who they were and the danger they posed. And then there were a few like Cooper. They were the scariest of all.

  The sort who could turn on you in the blink of an eye. When you had no idea it was coming.

  Down the gentle slope the four men slid and skidded, plunging between the sparse, wind-tortured scrub cedar until they reached the copse of stunted pine Hooks had suggested. Here at least, Titus thought as they crowded into the cluster of trees, they would be out of most of that wind driving the snow into thick, wavering banners of ground blizzard, a wind that this high could cut through a man like a hot pewter knife would slide right through Marissa Guthrie’s freshly churned butter.

  “I-I …,” and Bass worked hard to keep his teeth from chattering in the cold. “I ain’t n-never been this g-goddamned high afore.”

  Tuttle turned his head to regard the leaden sky, the clouds no more than fifty, maybe as much as a hundred, feet at the most over their heads. “You best watch your swearing, Scratch. We’re up high enough on these mountains a man might just run
hisself into a angel or two!”

  Hooks laughed easily with that. “Long as them angels is womens—I don’t mind running onto ’em at all! Yessirreebob! Been dreaming more an’ more about soft breasties and a woman humping up and down on my stinger. I’d take me a angel right about now—right here in the snow!”

  Tuttle wagged his head, looking at Bass to say, “Billy and his womens. Always got a passel of ’em on the brain.”

  “Been thinking on women my own self,” Titus admitted.

  Tuttle smiled. “Ain’t hard to figger, Scratch. Not when a man’s been doing so long without.”

  “Sounds like you think on the womens too, Bud.”

  Tuttle stopped his horse, turned toward it to throw up the stirrup and grab the cinch. “I’m a man—like any else, I s’pose.”

  “You think back on a special girl?” Titus inquired.

  “Just remember women. First one of ’em to come into my head. I ain’t never been particular when it comes to poking a woman center … so why should I be particular when it comes to thinking about ’em?”

  “I remember this one gal back along the Ohio,” Titus began to explain. “She weren’t my first, but she was a whore—so she was the first what showed me how much fun poking could be with a woman.”

  “You ’member her name?” Bud asked as he dragged the saddle and blanket from his horse.

  “Abigail—uh, Mincemeat was her given name.”

  “There been others, ain’t there?”

  “A few. Sweet farmer’s daughter and a mess of dark-skinned backwater whores.”

  “And don’t forget that widow woman what give you them passel of gray back nits.”

  “Even thought on her a time or two, I have,” Bass admitted. “All them lonely nights I camped along the Platte, even after I got out here to these mountains.”