Buffalo Palace (2 page)

Tapping the pony’s ribs, he moved out once more. North this time. Back four miles to St. Louis. By the time he reached town and Second Street once more, the day was birthing to the east across the mighty river.

Titus Bass hadn’t felt this new in more years than he cared to remember.

While he owned far less than his pap had owned at thirty-one, far less than his grandpap before him, at this moment Titus now possessed more than he had ever claimed before in his life. Not much in the way of prize stock: not this hand-me-down Indian pony he was riding, nor Hysham Troost’s gift of an old dun mare to use as a packhorse. And there sure as hell wasn’t all that much strapped in two modest blanket-wrapped bundles lashed on the back of the mare as he was taking his leave of this place. Yet in that moment as the sun rose at his shoulder, Titus Bass realized he was a wealthy man nonetheless.

Most men would simply never be this free.

Second Street ended at the far edge of town where the muddy, rutted road northwest to St. Charles began. The sun had climbed above the tops of the leafing trees by the time he left the last huts and shanties behind. No more did the air reek of offal and refuse pitched carelessly into the streets. No more did his nose discern the tang of woodsmoke on the damp dew of the morning. It lay behind him now. So much lay behind him now.

While the rest of his ever-living life was spreading itself before him.

Turning in the saddle to watch the last of the hovels disappear behind him, Titus gazed at the smoke columns rising from hundreds of chimneys and stacks above the thick green canopy. Then he took a deep breath. And a second, his eyes half closing as it sank into his lungs. No morning had ever tasted sweeter.

That early spring morn, in the year of 1825, Titus Bass was barely thirty-one. Not a youngster by any means. He’d been broke to harness more than once. Time and again in his life he had come to know the value of hard work. And, too, Titus realized he was near twice the age of a few of those fellows who had been hiring out to the fur companies pushing their keels up the muddy Missouri River lo these past four-odd years. While he might be green at what he’d set his course to do, he sure as the devil wasn’t wet behind the ears.

By damn, those years under his belt ought to count for something besides mere seasoning. Why, a hiring man would be hard-pressed to find any new hand more eager
to pit himself against those prairies and plains, those high and terrible places that now lay before Titus Bass.

Where the well-traveled road twisted itself up the long, gradual slope and emerged from the oak and elm, Bass reined up and turned about to gaze back at the riverside town. Stone estates hid behind high walls where the French protected themselves from the lower classes. Those long rows of warehouses along Wharf Street, tiny shops of all descriptions pressed elbow to elbow along Main. And on the outskirts lay the smoke-blackened shanties where the whiskey and rum was poured, where the women of all hue and size plied their ancient trade.

In many a way it felt as if he had only lived there but a brief time. In other ways, it seemed as if he had been there nearly all his life.

“That’s right, girls—gonna take myself a last look,” he spoke quietly to the animals. “Don’t have much a notion I’ll ever see St. Lou again. Leastways, not for a long, long time to come.”

He watched as the sun tore itself fully from the edge of the earth across the great, brown, meandering swath of the Mississippi, then nudged the horses into motion and put the place behind him. Turning his back on the scars and the women too. Those years of pain as he did his damnedest to waste away to nothing at the bottom of one mug after another of metheglin, sweet rum, or apple beer. Not that he didn’t figure he would ever escape that good, clean hunger for a woman, or suppress that honest thirst for something heady and raw washing down his gullet from time to time. Just that Titus realized that out where he was heading, such hungers and thirsts might not trouble a man the way they did with so many folks living damn well on top of one another, breathing the same air.

Out where away he was bound, there would surely be other lures.

He drank in another long draft of morning cold as he pointed his nose toward St. Charles and the Missouri. Yes-siree. A whole new batch of temptations waited out there to dangle themselves before a man.

By the time he felt the sun strike his back, warming the long, unkempt curls that spilled across his shoulders, Titus suddenly thought of Eli Gamble. A tall, lanky backwoodsman
who had been traveling down the Ohio on his journey to St. Louis and beyond some fifteen summers before. Those long, warm days of the Longhunter Fair when the hill folk gathered to celebrate another planting season, peruse the cart vendors’ and drummers’ wares, drink and dance, and compete in tests of skill.

“Wonder if you’d beat me if we had us a shooting match today?” Titus asked out loud, surprised at the sound of his voice after so many miles of virtual silence put behind him.

That summer of 1810 he had been a green sixteen-year-old youth shooting in competition with the menfolk for the first time, pitted in that final relay of the fair against a frontiersman bound away to St. Lou for to join up with the Spaniard Manuel Lisa, trading and trapping for furs on the Upper Missouri. While Titus went on to ply the great waters of the Ohio and Mississippi aboard a Kentucky flatboat, Eli Gamble disappeared into the west, determined to go where Lisa was luring frontiersmen eager to see for themselves the tall peaks and open country.

Bass wondered if Eli ever made it.

And now he regretted never asking Isaac Washburn if he’d ever heard tell of a man called Eli Gamble. Chances were they had to know of one another—what with both of them attached to Manuel Lisa’s outfits. But then … maybe Eli never made it upriver with Andrew Henry that season of 1810–11—the same Andrew Henry who a decade later led Ashley’s brigade overland to the northern rivers.

“The Bighorn.” Titus repeated that magical name as he had so many times across this past year … after Washburn had shown up at Troost’s Livery to kindle that flame of yondering. One after another the names of other rivers came rolling out like mystical, even mythical, places, so far from everything Bass had ever known.

“The Powder,” he sighed this morning. “And Tongue. Yallerstone too.”

Yet first he had to reach the Platte. And that’s when he remembered Hugh Glass. How Washburn and Glass had crossed the Platte River country after they were put afoot by Pawnee, the pair eventually stumbling into Fort
Lookout on the Missouri. Glass went one way—back to the mountain country to pit himself against fate once more—and Isaac Washburn turned south to St. Louis to have himself a well-deserved spree.

If Gamble weren’t up there still, was Glass? Nigh onto fifteen years now for Eli, but not anywhere near that long since Hugh Glass turned back to the Rockies—alone.

The French and American settlers in St. Charles paid Bass little mind as he entered their village of squat huts and tiny stone houses, many thatched with hay in the old French style, others roofed with cedar shakes split when the sap was down to be sure they did not curl. Smoke whispered up from every chimney here as the day began to age. Smells assaulted his nostrils in this muddy lane leading through town to the Missouri River itself. And the sounds of folk and farm animals grew loud upon his ears.

How might total silence feel about him?

Even in those forests where he had grown into a man, especially on the mighty rivers, there was always some noise. Wings flapped and birds called out. The wind soughed through the trees. Water lapped against the yellow poplar side of Ebenezer Zane’s broadhorn Kentucky flatboat as it floated down the great eastern rivers.

So naturally he wondered how would it be to find himself out where Washburn claimed the land went on for days and days beneath an endless blue dome of sky, a distance so immense that it seemed to swallow all sound itself—a piece of country so quiet that a man could hear his own thoughts rattle noisily about inside his head.

“I damn well don’t believe it!” Titus had protested to the cantankerous fur trapper one night as they sat over their brown bottles of sugared rum freighted upriver from New Orleans, brought there on high-masted ships from the islands of the far Indies.

“You don’t gotta believe me just how quiet it be,” Gut Washburn said matter-of-factly. “Hell, coon—you’re gonna find out for yerself one day soon.”

Here he was, for God’s sake! On his way to find out for certain. Had it not been for Washburn showing up at Troost’s Livery that rainy night a year back, Titus himself might well be dead by now and laying in a pauper’s grave.
As it turned out, Bass had been the one to lay Isaac to his eternal rest.

Now he was heading west … alone.

At St. Charles he had turned southwest with the Missouri. At times the road lay wide in spots, other times it narrowed. Barely enough room through the trees and brush for a single wagon to pass, slashing its iron rims down into the rich black loam. This was plainly a farmer’s land, Titus thought to himself. Good land, this—for a man such as his father, Thaddeus.

So it was he thought on his mother, back across these many years. Fifteen winters already since last he had seen those gray sprigs in her hair; heard her voice soothing one child or another; felt the sure touch of her hand upon his shoulder, warm at the back of his neck whenever he felt unsteady of himself. After all this time he thought now on those biscuits she had baked that last night and left out for him. And the new shirt just finished for Thaddeus, lying there on the rough-hewn plank table. As certain today as he was that autumn morn as he slipped off from hearth and home—that she had left the shirt out for him to take in his leaving.

Little settlements, each one, he rode through as the Missouri River Road led him past St. Albans, then Labadie, and after more than a week he put Gasconade behind him. Two days later he passed Bonnots Mill. Eventually the river meandered back to the northwest. By the time he reached the tiny settlement of Rocheport, Titus found himself growing more comfortable with the long stretches of country wherein he did not lay eyes on another human. Each day becoming content with the Indian pony and the dun mare, with the company of nothing more than the sounds of the hardwood forests where he arose every morning and hurriedly ate what was left of the meat he had cooked for last night’s supper. Finding himself content with those nightsounds in the timber—calls of owls and all the tiny animals that hid from those wide-winged predators as the sun went down and the stars winked into view overhead through the leafy branches where the smoke from his fire rose and dispersed.

Never did he go hungry—in fact, his belly had never
been so full with the rich, fat meat of the field. Here in this country of thick timber he encountered more game than he thought possible. Better hunting was it here than it had ever been for him back in Kentucky.

Then he sorted through to the reason for that: surely there were far fewer people here to stir up the critters, to drive them this way and that, to harry them and deplete their numbers. Clearly this was country where a man could provide for his family, live off the land without ever slashing a plowshare through the earth’s crust. Yet as good as that might be for some, Titus pushed on west.

For three cents he was ferried across the river to the settlement of Franklin, which sat on the north bank.

“Right here you’re standing where the Santa Fe Trail begins,” explained the stocky, pockmarked storekeeper. “Takes a man a little south of west, eventual to the land of them greasers.”

“Greasers?”

“Mex,” came the reply. “Some of the fellers travel the trail last few trading seasons call ’em sun-grinners. Damn, but from the sounds of what I been told, they’re a people ain’t worth a shit but for their handsome women.”

Titus swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing as he thought back on those hungers he had been pushing down, like an aggravating tickle. “W-women.”

“Dark-skinned they be—so I’m told by them what pass through here bound for Santa Fe.” The man scratched at a two-day growth of patchy whiskers sprouting on his cheeks, eying the slight stranger who stood just shy of six feet on that rough-plank floor. “Greaser women what wear they’s skirts up to the knees, and their shirts clear down to here: so they all but hang right out for a man to see near ever’thing.”

“This trail you’re talking about,” Titus asked, hopeful, “it go west by way of the Platte?”

The fat jowls waddled as the man shook his head, eyes squinting as they took measure of the newcomer. Dirt and smoke stained every one of the storekeeper’s deep pockmarks and the crow’s-feet wrinkling both corners of nis bloodshot eyes. “That be too far north of here, mister—the Platte would. Like I tol’t you, Santa Fe Trail takes a man off southwest from here.”

“Sounds to me that this be the place a man makes up his mind, don’t it?”

The jowly storekeeper nodded. “Head south to the land of the greasers. Or push on upriver.”

“And the Platte?”

“Still upriver a goodly piece.”

“Was hoping to run onto it afore now,” Titus said with disappointment. “Seems like I been riding forever already.”

“Something on the order of two hunnert thirty miles.”

“What’s two hundred thirty miles?”

The man scratched at his chin absently and replied, “That’s how far you come from the mouth of the Missouri.”

“Happen to know how long I got to go to reach the Platte?”

“Hmmm,” the man considered. “That’s a handsome piece.”

“Farther’n I come already?”

“Dare say, mister. Yep, a good bit farther’n you come already.”

That depressing news sank within him like a stone tossed into the swimming pond back in Rabbit Hash, Boone County, Kentucky. For a moment he wondered on another option. “How’s the country lay on that trail to Mexico?”

With a sudden, broad smile the storekeeper said, “Now, that’s something to show you’ve got a good head about you. I can outfit you for such a trip right handily.”

“The country. Tell me ’bout the country.”