Buffalo Palace (33 page)

Bass rubbed his smoke-reddened eyes, thinking perhaps it was only because he was still groggy from napping that the packs somehow appeared smaller. Then he tilted his head to one side, appraising them. And tilted his head to the other. None of it made things appear any better.

Dropping quickly to his knees on the thick turf of fallen pine needles, Scratch worked to loosen the knots at the first of those three short packs. As his fingers clawed
feverishly, he realized his heart was hammering a little faster with apprehension. Confusion. Pure bewilderment. And a sickening lump was starting to rise in the back of his throat, making it hard to swallow.

As he flung back the four long strands of thick rawhide, Titus became all the more despairing—thinking back to that very morning at the meadow pond where he had labored to skin those fourteen beaver: when he had realized those fourteen plews would be enough to finish out his fourth pack and provide a good start on a fifth. But now as his hands quickly parted the hides, counting them silently as his lips moved, trembling and fearful—Bass knew with growing certainty that he no longer had four full packs.

He quickly tore at the rawhide lashes on a second stack and began counting.

Suddenly Bass was confronting the fact that what he had now was far from enough to make even three full packs, much less the four. And as quickly he was afraid of just what that meant.

His hands froze at the knots securing the rawhide lash on the third short pack. Instead of releasing the knot, he turned slowly, staring across camp to where the others cached their plunder, possibles, and plews.

Titus was choking on the sour taste of it as he rose shakily, his knees wobbly as the realization sank in … slowly stumbling around the fire pit toward the far side where the trio’s packs sat beneath drapes of dirty canvas.

There he stopped and stared down, seeking to weigh things before committing the unpardonable transgression of prowling through another man’s belongings. From the way things appeared, Bud Tuttle didn’t have near enough packs among his things for Bass to be concerned.

Maybe Billy. By damn, maybeso it was him. That handy smile and happy-go-lucky naybobbin’ way of his might well be just the proper cover-up that would allow a jealous Hooks to get away with the theft of another man’s furs.

Thievery.

There it was. A word yet unspoken, but big and bold all the same.

Kneeling beside Billy’s possessions, Bass hurled back
the end of the canvas, pulled the first stack toward him, and tore at the knots. But as he was beginning to count that first stack of furs, his eyes eventually, reluctantly, crawled to Cooper’s hides bundled nearby.

Lord, how he didn’t want it to be so.

Rising from Billy’s uncounted furs, Bass trudged over to Silas’s belongings with the air of a man forced to walk those last thirteen steps up to a hangman’s noose. Sinking to his knees, he drew back the canvas drape. There sat better than five whole packs.

Titus looked once more at Turtle’s piddling catch. At Billy’s best efforts. Then back again to regard how Silas’s catch outstripped the other two. It was plain to see that Cooper had a sizable lead on Titus.

His hands were shaking as he began to pull at the knots on that first pack, trembling so bad that Scratch finally pulled his knife and slashed at the rawhide ties. Setting the skinning knife aside, Titus pulled the first hide off the top. He swallowed hard as he turned it over, eyes skipping quickly over the flesh side.

It bore Cooper’s mark.

As did the second, and the third. And even the fourth.

He swept the knife up and cut free the rawhide bands on the second pack, beginning to inspect the hides in that pack. The first half dozen or so were clearly branded with Cooper’s mark. Likewise he slashed at the rawhide thongs on the third pack. Growing more desperate as he went along, Titus tore into the fourth stack of beaver pelts, wondering what was worse: thinking Cooper was the thief, or finding out that Cooper was not … which meant Titus still had a great, unsettling mystery to solve.

Then eight plews down in that fourth pack he saw it.

His mark on the backside of a large, shiny, glossy beaver pelt. His mark, sure enough—except that Cooper had attempted to scratch his own mark right over Bass’s.

Bass yanked it out of the stack, then pulled the seventh and studied it. Damn but the job was good, the way Cooper had carefully scratched a knife tip over the T B on the rough, stiffened, fleshy side of the pelt, turning the T into a careless
S
, and thickening out the
B
, adding a crude curve to the letter, which served to scrawl the C for Cooper.

Lunging for one of the stacks he had just inspected, Titus found the same to be true farther down in each pack. He hadn’t looked deep enough, nor well enough. The top six or eight hides were Cooper’s in each pack, to be sure. But they laid upon plew after plew that Scratch had trapped, skinned, and fleshed with Turtle’s help. Bass realized he hadn’t seen the crude forgery at first—how Cooper’s scrawl obscured all Titus’s hard work.

“What the hell are y’ doing in my packs, you weasel-stoned nigger?”

Bass wheeled at the growl, his hair rising on the back of his neck, skin prickling in fear as he stared at Cooper some two rods away. Just behind Silas stood Tuttle and Hooks, looking on—but not in disbelief or shock that Bass would be among Cooper’s belongings … instead, looking at the scene with masks of knowing horror. He realized they knew.

Suddenly the massive Cooper had crossed those last few ten yards, seizing Bass’s coat in one big paw, and hurled him to the ground. “Y’ fixing to steal from me, you tit-sucking son of a bitch?”

“S-steal from you?” Titus’s voice crackled as he rolled onto his knees, then arose slowly. He couldn’t believe he had been accused of theft by the thief himself.

“Looks to me what you’re fixin’ to do!” Cooper spat. His big jaw jutted there in the middle of his wide, sloping shoulders that gave him the look of a man without a neck. Silas flung out his arm, pointing across the fire to Bass’s packs torn apart and in disarray.

Titus wagged his head in disbelief and stammered, “Y-you … you’re the one what’s been—”

“Lookee there, boys!” Cooper interrupted, his long black beard waving on the breeze as he whirled on the other two. “I caught this greenhorn sumbitch fixing to line his packs with
my
furs!”

Beginning to shake in utter disbelief, Bass glanced quickly at Turtle. Bud dropped his eyes just as quickly. Then Titus took a deep breath and dared the words, “Silas—you’re the thievin’ son of a bitch!”

Cooper had him again in an instant, flinging the smaller man backward before Bass even realized Silas had snagged the front of his coat again. This time Titus collided
with a tree, knocking the wind out of him as he slid down its trunk, the shooting pain in his back so immense that he could taste it. The next time he inhaled it hurt so much he gasped—fighting to catch his breath. Scratch swallowed down his galloping heart and tried to speak as he struggled back to his feet.

Bass’s arm was shaking as he pointed. “F-found my furs in your goddamned packs, Cooper!”

Silas brought the rifle into his right hand, his monstrous thumb drawing back the hammer.

“Silas! No!” Tuttle screeched, lunging toward Cooper, then suddenly remembering that he must not interfere.

The other three watched the rifle shudder in Cooper’s grasp, as if he were tormented to keep from pulling the trigger.

Bass stared down at the muzzle. Never before had he looked at a weapon’s yawning black hole … so damned close.

There beneath the gray-black wolf hide he had sewn into a cap so the pelt spilled over his shoulders and the wolfs face was pulled down to his brow to shade his black eyes, suddenly came an ugly, taunting, vicious look to the giant’s face as he asked, “What … what’d you say ’bout me, Titus Bass?”

“You g-got my hides in your … your, p-packs.”

Hooks took a step closer saying, “Silas ain’t stealin’ your beaver, Titus. He only—”

“Shuddup, Billy!” Cooper snapped, hulking there in that lumbering side-to-side shuffle of his.

Bass watched how Hooks immediately clamped his mouth closed, eyes every bit as wide as Turtle’s, and both pairs of eyes filled with fear, the two men’s faces blanched as they studied Cooper, then Bass, then back to Cooper.

Quietly, Tuttle started, “Maybe Titus don’t under—”

“You shut your yap too, Bud!” Silas growled as he flung an arm menacingly in Turtle’s direction. “This here’s a’tween Scratch’n me. Ain’t it … Titus?”

For an instant Bass let his eyes flick to Tuttle, then to Hooks, and finally back to Cooper with the full realization. “That’s r-right, Silas. A’tween only you an’ me.”

Cooper grinned, that crooked, one-sided smile, big
and broad. He looked down at the rifle in his hand, then slowly squeezed on the trigger, lowering the hammer. “Billy.”

Hooks came up as Cooper held the rifle back at the end of his arm. Billy took it from him.

“Bud.”

“Yeah, Silas.” Tuttle stepped forward obediently too, receiving the shooting pouch Cooper pulled over his head without taking his eyes off Titus.

“Now, Scratch,” Silas began, his voice gotten strangely quiet, his eyes narrowing as his iron-strap jaw set firmly in that black beard that reached the middle of his chest. “What y’ gotta say to me, face-to-face? Man to man?”

“Found some of m-my furs in your packs,” Titus repeated, watching Cooper take a step closer.

God, how the man seemed to tower over him. Cooper possessed shoulders wide enough to carry the span of a hickory-ax handle with room to spare.

“Them’s my furs, Titus,” he said, all but in a harsh whisper, taking another yard-long step closer to Bass.

Scratch wanted to back up that same distance. Maintain that much room between him and the big, chisel-faced man. “Had my mark on alla them.”

“Un-uh. All of ’em got
my
letters on ’em, Titus. Or ain’t y’ ever l’arn’t to read, son?”

“I can read good as most any man,” he said, his throat gone parched as Cooper came another long step closer. Easing in like a cat ready to pounce on a mouse. Toying. Playing.

This time Cooper’s voice had less of a mocking tone, more of an edge. “So what’d y’ read, greenhorn?”

“Saw wh-where you scratched over my letters … put your own letters on my hides.”

Suddenly Silas snapped his shoulders back, enjoying how that made Bass flinch. He grinned again. “But them ain’t your hides, nigger.”

“I catched ’em, Silas.” Titus wanted one of the others to say something, sure they knew, certain they realized the theft.

“They’re mine, Scratch.”

Bass shook his head slowly, daring that brave gesture
as he watched the black cloud cross the big man’s face. His stomach growled with dread as he coughed loose the words, “Them’s my plews, Cooper.”

Although his eyes remained narrowed, his smile now became a wolf-slash of a grin on Silas’s lips while he said, “You ’member when y’ grabbed hol’t of my arm last fall, Scratch?”

His head bobbed once, not sure what meaning Cooper’s question had. “Yeah. I ’member. When you was fixing to kill yourself a mule.”

The grin widened in the black beard as Silas licked his lower lip. “Do y’ recollect what I tol’t you back then ’bout ever laying a hand on me?”

“Never forgot that, Silas,” he said, the furrow between his own eyes deepening in consternation at the confusing direction things were taking. “But I ain’t never laid a hand on you—”

“Y’ go an’ put your hands on what
belongs
to Silas Cooper,” he interrupted with a bellow like a buffalo bull in the rut, “y’ might as well gone an’ put your hands on Silas Cooper his own self!”

Without any more warning than that, Bass found himself shrunken in the big man’s shadow, seized, and flung backward with both powerful arms—smashing against the wide trunk of another old pine.

The breath driven out of his lungs a second time, shaking his head free of the mind-numbing stars, Titus remained helpless as Cooper yanked him up, held him out at the end of his left arm, and drew back his right arm.

“Silas!”

Cooper turned at Turtle’s screech.

“Don’t hurt ’im, Silas,” Billy pleaded too. “He don’t know no better. We can teach him. Swear we’ll teach him—Bud an’ me.”

But Silas shook his head, looking back at his two partners. “You can teach him, sure y’ can. I don’t doubt that a bit. But only after I’ve teached him my own self—”

Hanging there in the giant’s grip, Bass flung out a fist, connecting with Cooper’s left temple. God, did that ever hurt his knuckles, he thought … watching Silas turn back to look at him now, his marblelike eyes blinking a
few times in surprise. Then flecking over in reddening anger.

“Why—the hairless pup got him some sand after all, boys!”

And the stars burned a fiery path through Bass’s mind as Cooper’s fist connected with the side of his head. It felt like he’d been kicked by one of them big draft Morgans.

Somewhere off in the distance Scratch heard men shouting, watched shadows and colors blur and swim before his eyes as he was yanked back up from the ground. This time Cooper drove a fist savagely into the pit of his belly. He stopped breathing, it hurt so bad. Then a second time the fist collided with his belly, and a third before Silas let Bass collapse onto his knees.

Titus huddled there, heaving slightly, waiting for his coffee to come up. But there wasn’t enough of that in his stomach. Only angry yellow bile spewed fiery torment at the back of his throat as he fought for breath. Struggling to breathe against the pain in his ribs, slowly he raised his face to look up at the fuzzy apparition stepping over him.

“Don’t kill ’im, Silas!”

“Shit, Billy,” Cooper cried back with genuine joy as he snagged hold of Titus again, started dragging him to his feet once more, “I ain’t got no druthers to kill the man.”

Then he brought a wide left jab rocketing in to crash against Bass’s jaw. Like the head on a stuffed doll, Scratch’s skull flopped to the side, then back loosely. He could feel the teeth loosen and sensed that thick syrup of blood on his tongue. How salty it tasted.