Buffalo Palace (22 page)

“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.”

“Sometimes all the quiet out here can make a man’s mind turn to such things as womenfolk, the women a man left him back there,” Tuttle suggested as he turned away to gaze at the rest of their pack stock Cooper and Hooks were driving into the trees.

“Only natural, ain’t it—”

The loud shriek of the mule interrupted the two of them. In the copse of stunted pine, there amid the jostling mass of pack animals and horses, Bass could see Cooper lunging about, swinging a long tree limb—and each time he connected with a sound audible over the crying wind, one of the mules bawled in a painful bray.

Titus began to step in Silas’s direction. “What the devil do you think—”

But Tuttle leaped out, grabbing Bass’s sleeve, snagging it and stopping Titus in his tracks. “For balls’ sake—don’t! It ain’t none of your business, Scratch.”

“Any man beating his animals, that is my business,” he said as he whipped his arm free of Tuttle’s grip.

As Titus moved this way, then that, to cut a path through the milling stock, which Cooper and Hooks were corralling within a roped-off area strung between that stand of trees, Titus watched Silas work himself into a fury, lashing out, lunging, swinging that long tree limb at the back of the mule mare that reared and scree-hawed in pain and fear, clumsy because only half her packs had been taken from her back. As Bass got closer, he saw the limb snap in half at the back of the mule’s head. Dazed, the animal stumbled sideways, wild-eyed with fear, nostrils throbbing as it tried to swing its haunches around and kick out.

Cooper swung once more with the short half of the limb he clutched like a war club in both hands—but didn’t make contact as the mule lunged aside. His rage boiling over, Silas hurled the limb down into the skiff of snow, where he fought a moment for footing, then dragged his big smoothbore horse pistol from the wide sash that held his blanket coat closed. As the weapon came up, Cooper was cursing above the bawl of the mule and the cry of the wind, dragging the hammer back two clicks to
full-cock … then pointed the muzzle directly at the mule’s head, little more than an arm’s length from the frightened eyes that stared at the human, the beast not knowing its next breath would be its last.

Leaping and shoving his way through the anxious, milling, frightened animals, Titus landed next to Cooper, grabbing Silas’s left wrist—and clamped down with all the strength he could muster. All he could remember was how the packmare’s eye stared up at him as he pulled the trigger.

“You weasel-stoned son of a bitch!” Cooper growled as he jerked around to stare right into Bass’s face. “Let go a’me!”.

“Put it away!” Titus snapped, feeling the big man’s arm tremble in fury.

“Gonna shoot you first!”

Struggling to keep the oak-thick arm down and the pistol pointed at the ground, Bass pleaded, “Don’t shoot that mule—damn, please don’t shoot it.”

Cooper’s eyes narrowed, and he immediately quit trying to thrash his arm loose of Bass’s two-handed grip. “The mule? The mule, is it?”

“Don’t kill ’er.”

“That mare ain’t been nothing but trouble since we took ’er on,” Cooper said, his eyes still seething. “Time I got rid of what makes trouble for me. Now, y’ just let go a’me and stand back. I got work to finish—”

“I ain’t letting go,” Bass said resolutely, watching how his words startled the bigger man. “You cain’t go an kill her for no good reason.”

“No good reason?” Cooper shrieked. “I got good reason, Titus Bass … and for nothing more’n the hell of it if’n I wanna.”

Desperate not to watch another animal die with a lead ball in its brain, Titus blurted, “L-lemme have ’er.”

Something came across Silas’s face in that next moment as he stared down at Titus Bass, standing there toe to toe, only inches between them. “Y’ … y’ say y’ want this cantankerous pile of mule shit for yourself?”

“Just lemme have ’er and you won’t have to waste your time no more on the mule.”

Silas wagged his head. “But I awready give y’ a mule to use for packin’ your truck and plews.”

Titus nodded, sensing his arms growing weary as he continued to grip Cooper’s wrist. “I’ll trade you. That’s what we’ll do.”

“A trade.” Finally Silas nodded, then gazed at where Bass held his wrist. “Awright. We’ll work us a fair trade. Now, y’ best let go a’me, Titus.”

He immediately released Cooper’s arm. “You gimme that mule and I’ll give you back the one you gimme that first day you run onto me.”

Cooper rubbed the wrist Bass had held imprisoned for those long, terrifying moments. “Hold on there: it ain’t so easy to trade pack stock. You’re just a dumb pilgrim when it comes to tradin’, ain’cha, Scratch? Y’ see, y’ made the mistake of letting the other man find out just how willing y’ was to be trading—showed me plain just how much y’ wanted what I got to trade.”

“We’re just swapping the mules, one for t’other,” Bass said.

“That’s only fair, Silas,” Tuttle agreed, licking his cracked lips nervously.

“One for t’other. One for t’other,” Billy Hooks repeated with that ready smile of his as he shifted back and forth from foot to foot.

“No,” Cooper snapped. “If’n y’ want this mule so bad, then we’ll trade. But it’s gonna cost y’ more’n just that fly-bait mule I give y’ when I first took you on. That’uns the wust in our hull bunch.”

Bass swallowed. “What’s it gonna cost me?”

Silas appeared to regard that for a long moment as he peered over at the mule carrying all that Bass owned in the world. “Y’ been doing good at trappin’, Scratch.”

“I been catching on what you learned me, yeah.”

“Got better’n Tuttle, y’ have—right off.”

Bud snorted. “That ain’t hard for ary a man to do!”

“And you’re damn near good as Billy Hooks right now.”

Titus said, “I’d wager I
am
as good as Billy right now.”

“Maybeso you’re better’n me,” Hooks injected, “but you’ll never be good as Silas Cooper!”

“Maybe I will,” Bass replied, watching those coal-black eyes come back to rest on him. “One day real soon.”

Cooper asked quietly, “Y’ want this here mule, Scratch?”

“You know I do, goddammit,” he snapped, knowing full well it was going to cost him dearly.

“Then I’ll trade y’,” Cooper offered. “For your ol’ fly-bait animal, and half what plews y’ll catch this winter.”

Tuttle gasped. “T-that mean from here on out, Silas?”

“No, that means half of everything Scratch trapped up till now, and half till we reach ronnyvoo come summer.”

Titus seethed inside. “W-what’s ronnyvoo?”

Silas explained, “Where I tol’t you we was gonna barter in our beaver come next summer. Drink some whiskey and poke a squar or two … barter us plunder for next year. Ronnyvoo.”

Bass swallowed hard, knowing he had nowhere to wiggle in the negotiations. “H-half of my hides this winter … till ronnyvoo—”

“You want the mule … or don’cha?”

“I want it,” Bass said squarely.

“Then it’s a deal,” Cooper said, sticking out his bare right hand in that bitterly cold wind.

Bass yanked off his mitten, took the hand, and shook as he gazed up into those marblelike eyes of Cooper’s. “It’s a deal.”

Then he felt Silas slowly start squeezing, bearing down harder, slowly harder as the muscles and bones of his hand cried out in sudden, hot pain. When he looked back up at Cooper’s eyes, they were lit with cold, cold fire.

Behind that big grin of his, Silas said, “And … one more thing, Titus Bass.”

That hand hurt like hell, so much it was hard to speak. “What’s … what’s that, Silas?”

“Don’t y’ ever, ever again lay a hand on me …”

He interrupted, “I don’t figger I’ll have cause to lay a hand on—”

But Cooper snarled, interrupting, “Or the next time y’ll pull back a bloody stump.”

*  *  *

That mule-for-beaver bargain had been nothing short of mountain thievery.

And for certain there had been times since that very first day when Titus Bass wished he’d let Silas Cooper go right on ahead and put a lead ball in that mule’s head.

But for all the trouble she’d give him in those days and weeks that would come to pass—besides the pain of having to trade off that half of his beaver plews to boot—Scratch remained steadfastly hopeful that the sorrel mule would one day come around and behave like a decent, docile, and obedient animal … the sort that would prove herself to be a true partner to a man, just like those mules that had faithfully plowed the ground for his pap back in Boone County.

Why, Titus had even named the stubborn, stiff-backed mule—something new for him: Bass had never before named a horse or mule, ever—but feeling this time that to give her a name might not only make it seem she was just that much more special to him, but she might well come to know the sound of her own name, learn to recognize it, and might thereby figure she was pretty damned special to him.

“Hannah,” he had told her aloud the third morning of that storm, after sitting and studying her for the longest time, watching the sorrel’s big eyes study him in turn as she worked on a patch of ground he had cleared of snow. “I’ve always favored that name—for a wife of my own, thought maybeso for my daughter. So I’d like you to have it … Hannah.”

As hard as he was to work in the Weeks to come, hoping that the mule might just one day come around to his way of thinking and try a little to be his friend … well—trouble was, the two of them were still a long, long way off from that glorious day.

The early-winter storm on the pass had indeed continued another three days and nights, dumping an icy snow without stop. In their sheltering ring of trees the four men chopped what firewood they needed from the limbs and branches of that copse of stunted pine. A part of each morning they used their time to scrape and chisel down through the new snow to reach some bare ground for the horses and mules grown weary of digging for themselves
with bloody hooves. Most afternoons two of the men ventured out to hunt in relay, going as far off as they would dare—every one of them aware how a man could easily get himself turned around in the endless white blur of a blizzard.

What they managed to bring in for all their effort was hardly enough to keep one man well fed, much less four hearty appetites in that subzero cold: a few snowshoe hares, a handful of blue grouse, and a fat marmot—one more than Titus ever wanted to see again in his life. Nevertheless, that poor fare along with the one bony Indian pony they sacrificed kept those men alive enough so that after five more days, when the weather cleared, they were strong enough to urge their animals on up past timberline, across the loose, shifting talus and shale of that treacherous saddle, then down the far side of the eastern slopes into the trees, where they would surely have more luck hunting what game had been driven down, ever down, to lower elevations by the winter storms.

“That back there be Buffalo Pass,” Cooper announced near twilight of that ninth day as they reached a meadow where the snow had blown clear on the lee side.

“You been up there afore?” Titus asked.

“We have,” Tuttle answered, flicking a glance at Cooper. “But we ain’t ever come this way.”

Turning to Cooper, Titus inquired, “How’d you know what the pass is called?”

“Only know cause I just named it,” Silas admitted. “Look for yourself.”

The three others turned to look up behind them as the gray clouds were beginning to drop, hurrying in to obscure the high granite formations that marked the very trail they had made across the saddle. Stark against the darkening clouds lowering on the pass was one formation in particular that from this side appeared to closely resemble a buffalo bull’s head—horns, chin whiskers and all.

“Buffalo Pass, it be, Silas,” Tuttle agreed as he clambered to the ground, stood a moment rubbing life back into his cold knees and thighs, then started to trudge back to the pack animals. “Scratch, you and Billy get some rope strung out in them trees for a corral, an’ I’ll bring in the cavvyyard.”

“Cawy … cawyyard?” Bass repeated.

“The remuda,” Billy said with that impish grin of his. “The horses … our herd, you idjit!”

“Cawyyard,” Titus repeated again, liking the feel of it on his tongue. “I ain’t never heard it called such—and you called it something else?”

“A remuda.”

“Yeah,” he said. “A remuda.”

“Billy’s picked up all he could of that greaser talk,” Cooper explained.

Hooks defended himself. “Some of them greaser words I really took a shine to, Silas.”

Cooper sneered. “That’s all them greasers good for, Billy—an’ don’t y’ forget it.”

Billy leaned close to Titus, saying, “Silas don’t like him them greasers down south in the Mexican Territory. We run onto a few of ’em trapping with American boys outta the greaser settlements a time or two—so Silas come to hate them people more ever’ time we bump into ’em.”

As he walked past with a horse at the end of each arm trailing behind him, Tuttle said, “Maybeso that’s why this is about as far south as we ever go nowadays, don’t you figger, Billy?”

“Silas’s medicine tells him we best stay in the country somewheres atween the Blackfoots and the greasers,” Hooks continued as Titus tied off one end of a long rope to one of the trees, then began to play out the rope to another tree.

As he wrapped the weathered hemp rope around the tree once, then moved off for the next, Bass inquired, “What’s up there in that north country make a man wanna get troubled by them Blackfoots anyway, Billy?”

“Beaver,” Hooks replied.

“For balls’ sake—big beaver!” Tuttle added as he finished tying off the second horse to the first section of their rope corral.

Cooper moved past with two horses and said, “The biggest beaver a man ever lay his eyes on.”

“That’s it?” Titus asked.