Wind Walker (31 page)

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.

“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.

“You figger ’em for Hargrove’s bully-boys?” Shad inquired.

“That’un, see how he just spotted us,” Titus replied. “Lookit him turn ’round an’ lick it back to give Hargrove the word that trouble just showed up.”

They watched that first rider off to their left give his horse a kick and lope away into the midst of the busiest place in camp, just before a second bullnecked horseman dared to ride a bit closer, standing in his stirrups for long moments while he satisfied his curiosity and got himself a good long look at the newcomers, then suddenly reined aside and tore off at a gallop.

“We ought’n find Roman’s camp straightaway,” Scratch declared sourly. “I figger company’s gonna come callin’ soon enough.”

“Never thought about it,” Shad admitted. “What if Hargrove an’ his boys say we can’t go along?”

Bass snorted. “You ever ask a by-your-please of ary a man to ride where you wanted to ride, Shadrach?”

“No. Onliest I ever give a thought of it was my first time in Blackfoot country up north.”

“What if they tol’t you, ‘No, you can’t ride across our country’?”

Sweete said, “We damn well rode across it anyways.”

“Now ain’t the time to change our ways, Shadrach.”

“Titus!” Roman Burwell shouted as he stepped from the corner of the wagon. “Come to see Shadrach off with us?”

He waited a few moments longer until he had stopped near the wagon and dropped to the ground there as Burwell, Amanda, and their children came flocking toward the horses and those two happy, yipping dogs.

“My stick floats with Shadrach,” he confessed. “Thort the young’uns an’ Waits might like to see some new country!”

“Y-you’re really coming along?” Amanda asked breathlessly, reaching out to take her father’s hand in both of hers.

“Till we get you to Fort Hall,” he confessed. “The two of us, we’ll run down a pilot to lead your bunch the rest of the way.”

Roman’s eyes flicked away, then he turned back to the
two old trappers. “Seems Hargrove is coming to welcome you to the train himself.”

They all turned their heads, watching the three men approach. Train captain Hargrove, with two of his biggest men hard on his tail.

“Don’t that appear to be a big ol’ smile of welcome on that bastard’s face?” Titus grumbled with mock cheer. “Amanda, why don’t you take Waits and Shell Woman around the other side of the wagon with all the young’uns? Find ’em something to eat, maybe. Put ’em to helping you pack up your goods in that wagon.”

She could read the seriousness in his eyes. “All right, Pa.”

For a moment longer he watched Amanda gesture to the women, then start them around the back of the canvas-topped prairie schooner, where she would get them involved with more than the arrival of the wagon captain.

“Good morning, Burwell!” Hargrove sang out in that easygoing way of a man who always carried a smirk on his face and self-righteousness in his heart.

“Hargrove,” Roman responded.

The hair at Digger’s neck ruffed menacingly, and the dog growled, low at the back of his throat. Bass quieted him with a whisper. “Hush, boy!”

The captain’s eyes raked over the trappers. “I trust you’re here to bid farewell to these members of your family.”

With a shake of his head, Titus said, “That ain’t why we’re here.”

Straightening in the saddle and pressing his chin down against his puffed-up chest, Hargrove tried again. “Then it’s probably for the best that you’ve come to try talking Burwell and his wife into staying behind with you here until another train comes through for Oregon. Admirable, my good man—that you should place their welfare so highly, rather than see them risk it all on an unwise gamble on their own.”

“They won’t be on their own,” Titus declared. “My friend here, Mr. Shadrach Sweete, he was first to jump up an’ offer to ride along to Fort Hall. Likely find some fella there what
can lead the train on to Oregon country after you an’ Harris gone off to Californy.”

Hargrove’s eyes appraised Sweete a moment. “You’ll be part of the Burwell family since you’ll be making the journey by yourself?”

Shadrach picked at an old scab on the back of one hand and said, “I ain’t goin’ alone. Got my family comin’ too.”

“Family?” the wagon captain repeated uneasily.

“Wife, two young’uns.”

“Wife? She’s come out from the East?”

Crossing his big forearms across the saddle where he stood on the ground beside his horse, Sweete peered over the animal at the man, saying, “She ain’t been no farther east than the Little Dried River, or the Smoky Hill. She’s Cheyenne.”

“So you’re a squaw-man?”

Bass slowly stepped aside and laid his rifle atop his saddle so that it pointed in Hargrove’s direction. “That’s a word you don’t wanna use with neither of us, Cap’n Hargrove. Some things just get under a man’s skin, an’ make him see red.”

He turned back to Sweete. “You’re married to a squaw.”

“Cheyenne, like I told you.”

“An’ my wife’s Crow,” Titus advised. “Her people come from far to the north. Likely you ain’t heard of ’em.”

Hargrove blinked a few times, then asked of Sweete, “Your … wife and children—you’ll be part of Burwell’s camp?”

“We will,” Bass replied for them all.

The wagon master’s head jerked in his direction. “We?”

“I figgered to go along, show my family some country, give a hand to Roman when he needed it—”

“I can’t allow all of you to join our train!”

“That don’t callate to me,” Bass argued. “Two day ago you was tellin’ ever’one how you an’ Black Harris was taking off for Californy on your own. So what the hell say you got in who throws in with these other folks when you’re dropping out soon as you reach Fort Hall?”

“It’s my train,” Hargrove growled. “I formed it, I—”

“You was elected captain,” Burwell interrupted as he stepped up suddenly, causing a horse ridden by one of the hired men to shy and shuffle backward awkwardly. “You don’t own none of us. Not our wagons. An’ you sure as the devil don’t own this trail.”

“We’ll see what the others have to say about that!”

Scratching the side of his cheek, Titus said, “No man’s got a right to tell me where I can ride and where I can make camp for the night, Cap’n.”

Hargrove glanced to his right, then to his left, in a way that unmistakably indicated his hired men. With a smile he said, “I think we understand one another. In this wild country, might always makes right.”

“Most times,” Sweete responded.

Hargrove wagged his head meaningfully and clucked, “It can make a man nervous, forced to watch over his shoulder for trouble creeping up on him all the time.”