Crack in the Sky (46 page)

But the meat carver commented, “Then there’s most what your Dame Fate might as well spit on—like poor Daniel Potts.”

“I met a couple other fellas that same ronnyvoo,” Bass explained, suddenly remembering faces. “I ain’t seen either of ’em here. One was named Bridger.”

“Jim Bridger?” the first trapper asked. “Bridger did go back east with Sublette last year—see his ol’ home and family some … but he ain’t give up on the mountains.”

“He’s got him some family he wanted to see back to Missoura,” the other man explained.

And the coffee maker said, “Likely Jim’ll be back out with Sublette’s pack train when it shows up in the next few days.”

For a while Titus watched the flames in the fire pit as more men began to stir in their blankets, some rising to move out to the bushes, where they relieved themselves. A few came over to join the three at the fire, while most simply returned to their bedrolls and drifted back to sleep as the chilly air brightened with the sun’s first appearance in the east.

“Knowed me ’Nother fella—his mama was a slave and his daddy was a Virginia tobacco grower,” Bass began to explain. “They come out to Missouri when he was a tad. That feller had him his mama’s dark skin and curly hair—”

“And he wore it long and fancy,” interrupted one of the new arrivals to the fire as he came to a halt. “Fact be, all his clothes was damned fancy, wasn’t they?”

He turned to the stranger. “You know him?”

“Sure sounds like Beckwith. He was half-Negra, if’n that’s what you’re trying to get at with the talk of his mama being a slave.”

“Jim Beckwith, that’s him,” Titus replied, remembering all the more now. “So what become of him? He off north with Davy Jackson’s outfit?”

The meat carver shrugged. “No. Beckwith signed off the books with Campbell middle of the winter last. Decided to go out on his own and live with the Crow.”

Scratch asked, “Why’d a man like him wanna go off and live with them Crow ’stead of staying with his own kind?”

The new arrival looked at Bass. “Beckwith said he figgered them Crow was closer to his own kind than we white folk was.”

“Seems that last fall some of us boys played a joke on him, figgering to have us a hoot making them Crow think Beckwith was one of their own what was stole from ’em when he was just a child,” said the coffee maker.

The meat carver chimed up, “Don’t you know Beckwith even had him a mole on his eyelid, just like a li’l child what was stole from them Crow years back! So when we told them Crow that Beckwith was their own kin, why—one of them ol’ squaws spotted that mole!”

“And she was dead sartin Beckwith was her long, lost boy come back home to roost once more!” roared the coffee maker, slapping his knee.

“Beckwith figgers to be something big on a stick with them Crow now,” explained the new arrival at the fire.

The round-faced meat carver said, “Could be you ’member some others, eh?”

Staring into the smoky fire, Titus wagged his head and grumbled, “’Cept for them friends of mine what ride with Jack Hatcher, ain’t a man around I know anymore.”

Near everyone he knew was gone. Hatcher had said that’s what become of most of them what ventured out to the far mountains.

Some time ago Jack declared theirs was the sort of man who discovered they wasn’t cut out for what it took to make a life for themselves out here … so they skeedaddled back east. If they were lucky enough to keep their hair until they fled, like Daniel Potts. Bass figured there was a lot of men who had no business being out here, men who hadn’t been fortunate enough to get back east before their luck ran out.

Even Jim Beckwith—giving up on the mountain trade and throwing in with them Crow. Much as he liked Bird in Ground’s people, Titus couldn’t imagine himself staying on as a full-time member of the tribe. It was getting to be all he could do to stay on as a member of Jack Hatcher’s little brigade of free trappers.

Maybeso he just wasn’t the joiner sort. Perhaps by the time winter arrived, he might decide to go his own way, see how his stick would float all on his lonesome. Maybe he’d be able to rendezvous with Mad Jack’s men every summer. Leastwise, it sure didn’t seem none of them were the kind to give up and skedaddle back east like Potts, not
the sort to turn over and go to the blanket like Beckwith done. Hatcher’s bunch was cast-iron, double-riveted beaver trapper, all the way to the muzzle, by damned.

But he suddenly remembered Kinkead and Rowland. Both of them Hatcher’s men, both of them the hardy, hang-on sort who wouldn’t turn around for the backtrail. Yet they had given up the mountains in exchange for a life among the inhabitants of a foreign people in a faraway Mexican village.

For every man who ventured west beyond the Missouri, perhaps there did indeed come a time when that man had filled his life with all the mountain peaks and ribbons of valleys, with all the sparkling beaver streams and snowy, untrammeled meadows that his soul could contain. Perhaps he realized his kind needed something more that only the settlements could offer: something that only women and crowds, buildings, clutter, and closed-in skies could give him.

But damn the settlements while there was still beaver in the mountains!

Damn them white women and their whiny ways, getting a man all bumfoozled the way they could so a man didn’t know fat cow from poor bull and damn well didn’t even care a cuss!

And damn them all them tight places where folks back east chose to live, crawling all over themselves with a racket of wagons and carriages and surreys too, shoving down narrow streets, squeezed in by buildings so tall a man was hard-pressed to see all the sky a man was made to see.

Not to mention the smell of such places where folks lingered far too long!

Not that he wasn’t glad most folks were content to live that way, satisfied to stay back east in their settlements and towns and big, sprawling cities. Better for them that they kept themselves back there beyond the rolling prairies where the buffalo ruled. And damn well better for men like Titus Bass that the crowds were so content to huddle together back east rather than come swarming out here.

Bringing along their white women with those harsh
stares they shot a man just about every time he got set to have himself some fun. On their coattails came the constables and preachers with their Bibles too. Raising jails and schools and churches right alongside one another … till the crush of them drove near all the joy right on out of life.

Always seemed that in the wake of wagons came white women. Where a wheel could roll, some high-necked, glary-eyed white gal was bound to show up before a man really had himself a chance to snort and prance. Wagons and white women—why, they’d be the ruin of the West!

This wasn’t no land fit for the likes of them, he thought. This was a man’s country, a man’s country fit only for a certain type of man, at that. Now that land back east, all closed in with little bumps of hills and all the crush of trees … now, that was a woman’s country if ever there was one.

But out here where the hills had grown on up into huge, hoary chains of impenetrable granite and ice and mazelike passes … this was a man’s country, by the everlasting! Back there the country was all closed in, and a person damn well couldn’t see very far: just the way things ought to be in a land where little minds reigned.

Not here! Where only a man with a heart big enough, with a soul mighty enough, could expect to take it all in. From horizon, to horizon, to horizon and back again under an endless blue dome.

He could only hope that Bridger would be back. Likely Jim was the sort to stay on out here, no matter what. Maybe a man like him had to return east just once in his life after he had eventually discovered where his heart was truly at peace. To return east so he could put things to rest with his family, to settle with all that was so he could get on with living all that was to be. Perhaps Bridger had him just that sort of healing and burying the past to accomplish … and then he’d be back.

Titus hoped, figuring that the young fella was the sort who could no longer live back in the States. After all, it seemed Bridger was the sort to take life on its own terms, the sort to take each day by the horns, the kind who could
build himself a bullboat, wave fare-thee-wells to his friends, and take off floating downstream into an adventure and a salty lake of such great proportions that few believed him when he finally returned with his tall tales of a land never before touched by the eyes of a white man.

Bridger would be back, he told himself. While others ran from the danger and the risk and the challenge, men like Jim Bridger and Titus Bass would run to embrace the danger and the risk and the challenge each new day brought them with the rising of the sun.

Of a sudden in his reverie there intruded a clamor of activity as company men burst into the groves where they had tied up their blanket and willow-branch bowers, scooping up their saddles and bridles with an excited chatter.

“What’s going on?” Titus asked as he got to his feet at the shady base of the cottonwood where he had been watching the lazy passing of the Popo Agie.

All around him more and more of the company men were hurrying to saddle up their mounts, the first beginning to sweep up their loaded rifles and pistols.

Should he seize his weapons?

Someone had to answer him—“Injuns?”

But before it appeared any of them had heard him, Campbell’s men were whooping at the top of their lungs, gushing in unbounded joy.

Finally one of the brigade stopped long enough to blurt out to the free trapper, “God-bless-it—the trader’s come in!”

“Trader?”

Trembling with excitement, the skinny whiffet of a man whirled and shot out his arm toward the red-rimmed southeastern hills that framed this verdant, emerald valley. “Sublette’s train comin’ in!”

Squinting into the resplendent midsummer’s light, Bass stepped to the edge of the shade and stared expectantly at the upvault of those crimson bluffs where a long file of horsemen and burdened mules were fanning out across the skyline, backlit by the late-morning sun. More than fifty riders were up there now, all gawking down at
the valley below them. And there had to be at least three times that many pack animals, every last one of them reluctant to hurry before their eager masters. Despite the distance, Scratch could almost hear the newcomers barking and bawling at their contrary charges.

A gray mushroom puffed from the end of a distant rifle, a tiny blot against the summer’s blue—a heart’s throb later came the low boom of that rifle held aloft by the pack train’s leader.

Good thing, too, that was. Out here in this country a man never rode up silently on a camp. Prudence dictated that you always announce your arrival, and even discharge your weapon to show peaceful intentions. That gunshot only confirmed Bass’s fervent hope.

“Trader!” he screeched wildly as his feet lurched into motion beneath him, almost as if they were in that much more of a hurry to be off announcing the news to Hatcher’s outfit.

But Jack and the rest were already caught up in a flurry of saddling and mounting by the time he reached them.

“Comin’ to find you!” Elbridge Gray shouted as Bass sprinted up through the trees. Red-faced, the big-nosed trapper tugged on the reins to his own horse with one hand, which also held his rifle, while in the other he gripped the reins to Scratch’s saddle mount.

“Thankee, Elbridge!”

Gray turned and vaulted into the saddle, kicked his toes into the huge cottonwood stirrups. “Get high behind, Scratch! That’s Billy Sublette and he’s bringing likker to ronnyvoo!”

“Likker, Titus Bass!” echoed Hatcher himself as he goaded his horse past them at a trot, then kicked it in the ribs the instant he reached the edge of the meadow. The pony was off like a shot.

By the time Bass swept the rifle from his blanket and stuffed a foot into a stirrup, swinging his horse around, the rest were already on their way across the grassy flat, a wide fan of company trappers and free men gradually streaming together toward that grassy point where the first
of those arriving riders were making their way down a gentle slope slanting off those far red hills.

Those dark horses and indistinguishable riders were no more than five hundred yards away now as the last of the pack animals lumbered off the top of the ridge, spilling toward the valley.

“Likker!” Scratch cried as he kicked the horse into a gallop.

“Likker!” he bellowed when he caught up with the rest of Hatcher’s bunch.

“Likker!” was the cry echoed by another two dozen free trappers and nearly the whole of the Campbell brigade.

At four hundred yards Titus could recognize how the nervous greenhorns were bringing up their weapons, waving rifles in the air, shouting at one another.

“Goddamn pilgrims!” Bass growled as he kicked the horse in the flanks again, urging even more speed from it so he wouldn’t be among the last to greet the supply train.

Past three hundred yards the dry-throated riders raced at a full gallop, that wide fan narrowing as the frantic horsemen galloped full tilt, their wide hat brims whipped back by the run, some hats whipped right off their heads, careening back into the belly-high grass.