“What’m I gonna do ’thout you here?”
With a snort, he flung his thick arm around Bridger’s shoulder and shook his friend. “Same as you done afore I showed up!”
Bridger looked a little jealous of that freedom Shad was taking to wander. “Tired of that ferry work you was doin’?”
“Them seven others gonna work out slick for you,” Shad replied. “’Sides, the season is winding down awready. If them emigrants ain’t anywhere close to the crossing of the Green by now, they ain’t gonna make it through the mountains afore winter sets in. I figger we’ve see’d all but the stragglers by now.”
Jim chewed his upper lip a moment. “I’ll lay you’re right on that. Likely we’ve awready seen just about all of them what’s gonna be passing through.”
“Maybe some more of them Marmons,” Titus growled.
Turning to Bass, Jim said, “Young told me there’d be a heap more Saints come through here next season—but wasn’t no more coming through this summer.”
“A good thing too,” Bass declared with a slight shudder. “Didn’t like the read I got off that man’s sign. I seen my share of fellas glad-slap you on the back with one hand while’st the other hand’s dippin’ into your purse for all you’re worth.”
“That prophet didn’t seem like such a bad sort to me,” Bridger responded, “far as a preacher goes.”
Bass declared, “Doc Whitman—now that was a good preacher!”
With a wave of his hand, Bridger said, “Young and his flock gone on to their promised land. Even if Brigham Young don’t take ’em where I told him they should settle, I wish all good things for ’em. Sorry I couldn’t do a li’l more trading with that preacher’s folks. Likely them Saints won’t have much to do with Jim Bridger from here on out.”
“The farther they stay away from you, the better it is by me,” Titus said, then turned to Shad and asked, “Shell Woman wanna go?”
“See some new country with me,” he admitted. “Ever since I brung that gal out of Cheyenne country, her eyes has growed hungry to see more an’ more!”
Titus looked down at Waits-by-the-Water, recognizing the interest that was apparent on her face as she managed to snag a few words here and there of the men’s conversation. Roman Burwell stepped back to the fire, bringing young Lucas by the hand. Just before he had settled with the boy by his knee, Amanda rocked onto her toes to whisper something in her husband’s ear.
The emigrant turned to Shad in a huff, asking, “You say you’re riding along with Hargrove’s train, Mr. Sweete?”
“Figgered I’d come along to Fort Hall with you, lend a hand in what I could,” Shad said.
“I don’t need no … we don’t need no help,” Roman grumped. “Got this far just fine. We’ll make the rest of the way just fine too.”
Ignoring the settler’s peevishness, Sweete continued to explain, “Won’t get in your way. Comin’ only to see what I can do to help your bunch find a pilot what’d get you on to Oregon.”
Gripping her husband’s arm tightly, Amanda asked, “You really think we might find someone to guide us at Fort Hall?”
“Chances better up there at Hallee, than you waiting here,” Titus explained. “That post sits at the edge of the country you need to be showed a way through, where the crossings of the Snake are, how to ford that river, some such. You’ll do far better scratching up a pilot yonder at Fort Hall than you will anywhere along the road atween here an’ there.”
“What if we don’t find us a pilot?” Burwell asked, his long brow deeply furrowed.
Scratch thought a moment before he said, “Worst you could do’d be light out from there ’thout a pilot.”
Roman wagged his head unapologetically. “We can follow the wagon road where them who’ve gone before us come through that country. Ain’t nothing to staying on the road all the way to Oregon.”
But Scratch snorted, “What your family come through awready ain’t but a piss in a barrel put up against what you got left to go.”
“But we can’t go back if we don’t find a pilot,” Amanda groaned. “There’s nothing left for us back there but … lean times.”
Titus stepped over and gently laid a hand on her shoulder. “I ain’t sayin’ you go back. Hell, I’d be the last man to ever tell ’nother he should give in, turn around, and go back.”
That fuzzy patch between Roman’s eyebrows wrinkled testily. “Then what the blazes we gonna do when Hargrove an’ his pilot take off from Fort Hall for California … and we got no one to guide us to Oregon?”
Scratch gazed the settler in the eye. “You sit tight for the winter if’n you have to.”
“The winter!” Burwell roared. “That means I’d lose a whole growin’ season, time I finally got to Oregon next year.”
Titus saw how Amanda hung her head with defeat. He rubbed his hand on the back of her shoulders and said. “Come the first train through next season, you an’ the rest can throw in with them. But the worst thing you’d do is all you farmers set off down the Snake on your own, get stopped somewhere along the way with wagon trouble or early snows—have to fend for yourselves all winter long out in that God-forsook country.”
“Rest of us, we can take care of ourselves,” Roman snapped testily.
“This ain’t sweet an’ safe Missouri—” Titus bellowed, but immediately felt bad for it.
For a long moment he gazed down at his grandchildren, sensing a deep and nagging responsibility to see them safely through. He took a deep breath then said more calmly, “Roman, that ain’t the sort of country where you wanna get caught out with your young’uns for the winter.”
“There’ll be someone there,” Shad reassured as he inched over a little closer to Burwell around the fire. “Likely someone I know from the beaver days—someone I can vouch for. Ain’t that right, Scratch?” Sweete’s eyes pleaded a little.
Titus quickly glanced over his daughter’s family, deciding there was no choice but to agree with his friend—if only for the sake of Amanda and the others. “Shad’s right. There’s a real good chance your train will hire a pilot soon as you reach Fort Hall.”
“But if we don’t?” Roman pressed.
“Then pick you a spot to spend out the winter there within sight of the fort,” Titus reminded.
Just as Roman was about to open his mouth again, Amanda stepped up and slipped her arm through his, saying, “I know we’ll find us a pilot to hire, Roman. I feel it in my bones. So there’s no need to fret any longer over what isn’t going to happen. We’re going to Oregon, just like you said we’d do all along. No matter what Phineas Hargrove or that weasel-eyed Harris do to roll boulders in our path … we are going to Oregon, Roman!”
He turned sideways and gripped the tops of her arms a moment before he pulled his wife against him. “God bless you, Amanda. Bless you for your faith in this journey to our own promised land.”
“It ain’t the promised land I got faith in, Roman—it’s you,” she vowed. “No matter what the journey, I got faith in you.”
“We was meant to go to Oregon,” he said as he crushed her in his big arms. “It’s there we’ll have all the bad days behind us.”
As the stars had blinked into view and the tree frogs began to chirp their friendly calls down in the slough, Titus watched how Waits fluttered close to Shell Woman, as if she were reluctant to let her new-made friend go. He had felt a stab of pain for her. She was a social creature, not a loner like him. From the dawning of their first days together, he had realized that it was much, much harder for her to be apart from her family and her friends than it was for him to be alone. Back as far as those Boone County growing-up days in Kentucky he had come to know he was not meant for needing much in the way of human company. Oh, for certain he knew he could not do without Waits and those children of theirs. It would be so hard when Magpie, or Flea, or even little Jackrabbit were older and went off to make a life of their own with another. But … he would always have her, and that gave him the greatest se
nse of belonging he had ever known. Hers was the only belonging he felt he had to have for the rest of his life.
From those days when his self-knowing was awakened in Rabbit Hash, time and again he had put his faith in the wrong people, more often in the wrong women. First there was Amy Whistler, who wanted him for reasons other than loving him. And then there was Abigail Thresher, the bone-skinny whore who had given him all the love his body could stand, but never came to love who he was. And then there was Amanda’s mother, Marissa Guthrie—who had put so many restrictions and knots on him that he could do nothing else but flee while he still had the chance. By the time he reached St. Louis, Titus was not about to risk any deep affair of the heart. But try as he might, the high-born, coffee-skinned quadroon managed to get under his skin before she too went the way of all those saddest stories of unrequited love. Confused and despairing, he had learned too late what it would take to protect his heart. Titus vowed he would simply not let another woman in.
And so it was for more than ten years. While there were those who crawled in naked to join him beneath the buffalo robes, spreading legs and arms to ensnare him in their moist embrace, Bass kept hidden that most precious piece of himself. In its place, he had substituted the immutable bond of men … yet found that affection shattered by the betrayal of those who professed their protection of him. It took a long, long time for him to genuinely trust again in those who rode the same trails as he, trapped the same high-country streams, slept and snored, ate and laughed, hunted and fought, beneath the same starry skies. But he eventually found friends. Not many—for he had never, never, never been a garrulous sort who sought the reassuring company of the many. No, Titus Bass had been rewarded with a few true companions who asked no more of him than they were willing to give—that complete and utter trust as they stood at one another’s backs and dared the fates, damned the gods, and stood mighty against the wind in those days of brief and unmitigated glory.
Good men, the best friends a man deserved—even those the likes of Asa McAfferty, who went bad for reasons he had never sorted out, a compañero who, in the end, asked one final act of faithfulness from an old friend. Better it would be, Titus had come to believe after years of mind-numbing consternation, for a man to be killed at the hand of a friend than by the hate of an enemy.
Good men, the best friends a man could ever have. So many of the best gone now. Gone to where those mortals still walking the earth could only suppose. Gone where no man alive knew for certain. These good men, gone to where Titus could only pray he would see them again at last on some far-off, faraway day. Like the bullet holes in his flesh, the arrow puckers and knife wounds too, the losing of each of those good friends carved its scar upon his heart. Perhaps even deeper, unto the marrow of his very soul. Such loss was all but unbearable, one by one wounding its own piece of his being.
So he did take friends unto his bosom, the few and the most trusted he had embraced, and made a home for these in his wounded, broken-in heart. Likely he could survive, live out the rest of his days with two or three of the old ones at his side, men like Sweete and Bridger. Save for his family, Titus Bass needed little more. But, his need of Waits-by-the-Water was a different animal altogether. She left behind everything she had ever known to come and be with him. In those first seasons they were together, Waits found a new friend in Josiah’s wife. Later, Mathew Kinkead’s too. But both were a far cry from the friends who had surrounded her before he took her away from Crow country. She needed friends much more than he.
Titus could do with the few who easily moved in and out of his life, as easily as he could do with being a loner. But it near destroyed him when he was apart from her. If he had to live with but one friend for the rest of his days, it could be no other but her. Yet, he had come to realize she was different. Waits thrived and bloomed with her woman friends. She needed that companionship far more than he ever would. Watching how she fluttered near Shell Woman, her bravest and most cheerful reaction to knowing Shadrach was taking his family far away for a time, if not forever, gave Scratch a sense of remorse for his wife.
Yesterday, before the others awoke, he sought out Bridger.
Jim listened, then asked in exasperation, “You too?”
“Time’s come for me to stretch my legs a little,” Titus had explained as Jim poured them coffee from that first brew of the morning.
“Your family goin’?”
“If I go, they’ll likely wanna come too.”
Bridger had wagged his head. “Won’t be the same ’thout you, Scratch. Won’t be the same not hearing that anvil ring from first light till suppertime.”
“We’ll be back long afore winter comes hard, Shad an’ me.”
“You ain’t ever spent a winter in country cold as this here gets,” Jim warned. “Best you get turned around from Hallee as soon as you niggers can.”
“How far you make the journey?”
“I’d make it ten, twelve days on horse,” Bridger estimated. “But these sodbusters with their wagons. Gonna be double, no … triple that. A month at the outside, you don’t keep ’em moving hard.”
“Hell, we’ll be back well afore the first snowflake lands on that ugly nose o’ your’n. Three weeks at the most getting there, an’ we’ll be less time coming back. All of us on horses then—won’t nothing hold us up.”
“That’s if you two bring a pilot to bait for this bunch of corncrackers.”
Dread of that had worried Titus into sleeplessness that first still night after his daughter’s family trudged back to the wagon meadow and the others had carried sleepy children off to their beds. How, Scratch despaired, could he just drop this weighty matter into Shadrach’s lap once they reached Fort Hall, and pay no mind to the looming potential for failure once the train was beyond the horizon and out of sight?
And if he finally decided he could do nothing less than go along to Fort Hall himself—what would he do, Titus brooded, if he and Shad failed to scratch up a pilot who could be trusted? In the final dusting he admitted to no one but himself that this whole dilemma might well come down to what Roman Burwell and the other hickory-headed settlers would decide to do when they were confronted with that impossible choice of staying out the winter near Fort Hall, or pushing on without a pilot because their feet had grown far too itchy with every mile they put behind them. Exactly what happened when these emigrants reached the Snake would likely turn not only on events Titus Bass could not foresee but also turn on folks Titus Bass had no control over.
And that powerlessness was just the sort of thing that had nettled him no end since eighteen and twenty-five when he fled to the Rocky Mountains, seeking to finally seize hold of his own life, wrenching it away from the control of others. This was another of those crucial, pivotal decisions in a man’s life that offered no good choice versus the bad options. In the two paths he saw left for him, there was no solidly good choice. Only a matter of what choice appeared to come with less risk … what path came with an acceptable, manageable level of danger or the possibility of failure. Time and again in his life among these mountains, he had been confronted with less than ideal options. Only trouble now was that the safety of so many of those he cared for rested on what choices he made from here on out—beginning with the choice he had to make that very morning.
The sun was only hinting at just how hot the day would be when the three families gathered in the open square of Fort Bridger. Jim had thrown some wood on the embers and poked life back into those flames that cast their reflections as those who were departing embraced each and every one of those who were staying behind. Tears shared between the two women and Gabe’s three children, hugs between all the youngsters who had been able to play and frolic despite the language barriers. Off to the side two men said farewell to an old friend in much the same way this breed once bid farewell to their comrades when the luster of summer rendezvous had faded and the brigades were stringing out in a half dozen different directions for the high-country hunt.
&nb
sp; “Watch your topknot, Gabe!” Titus cried as he rose to the saddle, a sour ball caught in his throat, eyes stinging in the early light.
Blinking his own misty eyes, Bridger pounded Sweete on the back one last time, then let the big man go to his horse. Finally they were all mounted and turning from the timbered stockade, with Jim trudging along beside them, like a man who had one last thing to say before parting … but could not remember what he wanted to say for the life of him. In the end, he looked up at Titus with those imploring eyes.
And said, “Countin’ on you. Bring ’em back, Titus Bass. Bring ’em all back soon as you can.”
With Magpie and Flea riding the left flank among the packhorses, it was Jackrabbit, along with little Bull Hump and Pipe Woman, who giggled and shrieked with excitement as the party set off to the southwest for the meadow where the Hargrove train had put in more than two whole days of rest, recruitment, and repairs. The women chattered, their hands busy as they always were when people of different tongues wanted desperately to communicate. But there was really no need to understand Crow or Cheyenne to recognize the joy on their copper-skinned faces, the excitement in sharing this new adventure with friends. Out in the lead rode the two old comrades, as they had done countless mornings before.
One last time they both turned and gazed back at Jim’s double stockade, then waved a final farewell to Bridger’s shrinking figure before Bass held out his left hand to Sweete. Shad nudged his horse closer and took Scratch’s wrist in his right hand. Gazing into one another’s eyes with that long-buried smile of great anticipation, they squeezed hard before freeing their grip. Exactly as they had done many, many times before when setting out on a trail they knew not where it would carry them.
Even at this early hour the emigrant meadow was beginning to throb with noise and color. Oxen bellowed and mules bawled as men and boys brought back strings of the beasts from a long watering in Black’s Fork. The wind out of the west brought Scratch a cornucopia of fragrances, from fresh dung to coffee on the boil, from the strong perfume of bacon crackling in cast iron to the heavenly scent of flour biscuits or ground-corn johnnies. Here and there rode men on horseback, their eyes taking in everything as they moved slowly from wagon camp to wagon camp, rarely uttering a word that wasn’t some terse or scolding command.
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