Wind Walker (30 page)

“It will be a long journey,” he reminded.

“Not as far as it is from here to the land of my people,” she declared. “You still did not answer my question.”

For a moment he watched her as she laid more kindling on the feeble embers in the fire pit. “I thought you would stay here, for the children.”

“They go everywhere we go, Ti-tuzz.”

He heard the rustling of blankets. Looking over his shoulder, he found Magpie sitting up at the edge of the darkness. “You do your best not to make noise.”

She whispered, “I wanted to tell you something before you decided you were going alone.”

“I am not going alone,” he explained again in Crow. “Shadrach and his family are going with me.”

Magpie pushed some of her long hair out of one of her
almond-shaped eyes. “We belong with you more than we belong here waiting for you at Bridger’s post.”

Scratch looked back at his wife again. “Much of that country will be new to me. Parts of it I’ve never been through.”

“Many summers ago, that was the country where you met Big Throat for the first time.” Waits-by-the-Water used the Crow’s name for Bridger as she leaned back and put some larger wood on the fire that began to cast a warm glow on the inside of the small lodge. “But I would not worry even if it was a completely strange land to you.”

“My popo will see us through it,” Magpie chimed in.

He grinned, his heart feeling much lighter. “Then you want to go with me when the wagons leave this morning?”

Waits leaned over and laid her hand on his. “Magpie and I will take care of everything in the lodge—taking only what we need for the journey. Flea can see to the horses. So that means you will see to Jackrabbit.”

“Do you want to take down the lodge and drag a travois with us?”

“We have enough of the heavy cloth we can tie up if we need shelter from the rain,” she stated. “I will leave the lodge here. Big Throat can care for it while we are gone to this Snake River I have heard so little about.”

So it was decided, not so much by him as by the two women in his family. They would be setting out together on this long journey this morning, all of them, as a family. Somewhere over the past day and a half he had first come to believe it would be far better for him to go alone, to leave her and the children behind at Bridger’s post when he set off with Shadrach’s family in following Hargrove’s wagon train to Fort Hall. Sweete had eagerly volunteered to ride along during their big supper inside the fort walls two nights ago after Hargrove’s meeting at the wagon camp.

After that brief and clearly unfinished confrontation with the wagon captain and his bully-boys, Amanda’s family had come back to the post with the old trappers for what was to have been a supper to celebrate this reunion of father and
daughter and families. But for a while there it had all the makings of a wake, what with Amanda and Roman quietly despairing on what they would do once the train reached the Snake River and Phineas Hargrove pointed his nose southwest on the California Trail.

But by the time Shadrach returned from fetching his family for supper, the tall trapper sashayed up to the fire as cocky as any prairie grouse, plainly ready to bust his buttons with what he just had to tell Titus before he would burst.

“We’re gonna light out with the wagon train day after tomorrow.” He unloaded his news the moment everyone fell quiet around that fire crackling in the pit at the center of the stockade.

Bridger’s face grew worried. “You’re leaving me, Shad?”

Sweete looked at his old friend. “Wanna see some new country, Gabe. I’ll get to Fort Hall, then turn around. I’ll be back afore you can miss me.”

“What’m I gonna do ’thout you here?”

With a snort, he flung his thick arm around Bridger’s shoulder and shook his friend. “Same as you done afore I showed up!”

Bridger looked a little jealous of that freedom Shad was taking to wander. “Tired of that ferry work you was doin’?”

“Them seven others gonna work out slick for you,” Shad replied. “’Sides, the season is winding down awready. If them emigrants ain’t anywhere close to the crossing of the Green by now, they ain’t gonna make it through the mountains afore winter sets in. I figger we’ve see’d all but the stragglers by now.”

Jim chewed his upper lip a moment. “I’ll lay you’re right on that. Likely we’ve awready seen just about all of them what’s gonna be passing through.”

“Maybe some more of them Marmons,” Titus growled.

Turning to Bass, Jim said, “Young told me there’d be a heap more Saints come through here next season—but wasn’t no more coming through this summer.”

“A good thing too,” Bass declared with a slight shudder. “Didn’t like the read I got off that man’s sign. I seen my
share of fellas glad-slap you on the back with one hand while’st the other hand’s dippin’ into your purse for all you’re worth.”

“That prophet didn’t seem like such a bad sort to me,” Bridger responded, “far as a preacher goes.”

Bass declared, “Doc Whitman—now that was a good preacher!”

With a wave of his hand, Bridger said, “Young and his flock gone on to their promised land. Even if Brigham Young don’t take ’em where I told him they should settle, I wish all good things for ’em. Sorry I couldn’t do a li’l more trading with that preacher’s folks. Likely them Saints won’t have much to do with Jim Bridger from here on out.”

“The farther they stay away from you, the better it is by me,” Titus said, then turned to Shad and asked, “Shell Woman wanna go?”

“See some new country with me,” he admitted. “Ever since I brung that gal out of Cheyenne country, her eyes has growed hungry to see more an’ more!”

Titus looked down at Waits-by-the-Water, recognizing the interest that was apparent on her face as she managed to snag a few words here and there of the men’s conversation. Roman Burwell stepped back to the fire, bringing young Lucas by the hand. Just before he had settled with the boy by his knee, Amanda rocked onto her toes to whisper something in her husband’s ear.

The emigrant turned to Shad in a huff, asking, “You say you’re riding along with Hargrove’s train, Mr. Sweete?”

“Figgered I’d come along to Fort Hall with you, lend a hand in what I could,” Shad said.

“I don’t need no … we don’t need no help,” Roman grumped. “Got this far just fine. We’ll make the rest of the way just fine too.”

Ignoring the settler’s peevishness, Sweete continued to explain, “Won’t get in your way. Comin’ only to see what I can do to help your bunch find a pilot what’d get you on to Oregon.”

Gripping her husband’s arm tightly, Amanda asked, “You really think we might find someone to guide us at Fort Hall?”

“Chances better up there at Hallee, than you waiting here,” Titus explained. “That post sits at the edge of the country you need to be showed a way through, where the crossings of the Snake are, how to ford that river, some such. You’ll do far better scratching up a pilot yonder at Fort Hall than you will anywhere along the road atween here an’ there.”

“What if we don’t find us a pilot?” Burwell asked, his long brow deeply furrowed.

Scratch thought a moment before he said, “Worst you could do’d be light out from there ’thout a pilot.”

Roman wagged his head unapologetically. “We can follow the wagon road where them who’ve gone before us come through that country. Ain’t nothing to staying on the road all the way to Oregon.”

But Scratch snorted, “What your family come through awready ain’t but a piss in a barrel put up against what you got left to go.”

“But we can’t go back if we don’t find a pilot,” Amanda groaned. “There’s nothing left for us back there but … lean times.”

Titus stepped over and gently laid a hand on her shoulder. “I ain’t sayin’ you go back. Hell, I’d be the last man to ever tell ’nother he should give in, turn around, and go back.”

That fuzzy patch between Roman’s eyebrows wrinkled testily. “Then what the blazes we gonna do when Hargrove an’ his pilot take off from Fort Hall for California … and we got no one to guide us to Oregon?”

Scratch gazed the settler in the eye. “You sit tight for the winter if’n you have to.”

“The winter!” Burwell roared. “That means I’d lose a whole growin’ season, time I finally got to Oregon next year.”

Titus saw how Amanda hung her head with defeat. He rubbed his hand on the back of her shoulders and said.
“Come the first train through next season, you an’ the rest can throw in with them. But the worst thing you’d do is all you farmers set off down the Snake on your own, get stopped somewhere along the way with wagon trouble or early snows—have to fend for yourselves all winter long out in that God-forsook country.”

“Rest of us, we can take care of ourselves,” Roman snapped testily.

“This ain’t sweet an’ safe Missouri—” Titus bellowed, but immediately felt bad for it.

For a long moment he gazed down at his grandchildren, sensing a deep and nagging responsibility to see them safely through. He took a deep breath then said more calmly, “Roman, that ain’t the sort of country where you wanna get caught out with your young’uns for the winter.”

“There’ll be someone there,” Shad reassured as he inched over a little closer to Burwell around the fire. “Likely someone I know from the beaver days—someone I can vouch for. Ain’t that right, Scratch?” Sweete’s eyes pleaded a little.

Titus quickly glanced over his daughter’s family, deciding there was no choice but to agree with his friend—if only for the sake of Amanda and the others. “Shad’s right. There’s a real good chance your train will hire a pilot soon as you reach Fort Hall.”

“But if we don’t?” Roman pressed.

“Then pick you a spot to spend out the winter there within sight of the fort,” Titus reminded.

Just as Roman was about to open his mouth again, Amanda stepped up and slipped her arm through his, saying, “I know we’ll find us a pilot to hire, Roman. I feel it in my bones. So there’s no need to fret any longer over what isn’t going to happen. We’re going to Oregon, just like you said we’d do all along. No matter what Phineas Hargrove or that weasel-eyed Harris do to roll boulders in our path … we are going to Oregon, Roman!”

He turned sideways and gripped the tops of her arms a moment before he pulled his wife against him. “God bless
you, Amanda. Bless you for your faith in this journey to our own promised land.”

“It ain’t the promised land I got faith in, Roman—it’s you,” she vowed. “No matter what the journey, I got faith in you.”

“We was meant to go to Oregon,” he said as he crushed her in his big arms. “It’s there we’ll have all the bad days behind us.”

As the stars had blinked into view and the tree frogs began to chirp their friendly calls down in the slough, Titus watched how Waits fluttered close to Shell Woman, as if she were reluctant to let her new-made friend go. He had felt a stab of pain for her. She was a social creature, not a loner like him. From the dawning of their first days together, he had realized that it was much, much harder for her to be apart from her family and her friends than it was for him to be alone. Back as far as those Boone County growing-up days in Kentucky he had come to know he was not meant for needing much in the way of human company. Oh, for certain he knew he could not do without Waits and those children of theirs. It would be so hard when Magpie, or Flea, or even little Jackrabbit were older and went off to make a life of their own with another. But … he would always have her, and that gave him the greatest sense of belonging he had ever known. Hers was the only belonging he felt he had to have for the rest of his life.

From those days when his self-knowing was awakened in Rabbit Hash, time and again he had put his faith in the wrong people, more often in the wrong women. First there was Amy Whistler, who wanted him for reasons other than loving him. And then there was Abigail Thresher, the bone-skinny whore who had given him all the love his body could stand, but never came to love who he was. And then there was Amanda’s mother, Marissa Guthrie—who had put so many restrictions and knots on him that he could do nothing else but flee while he still had the chance. By the time he reached St. Louis, Titus was not about to risk any deep affair of the
heart. But try as he might, the high-born, coffee-skinned quadroon managed to get under his skin before she too went the way of all those saddest stories of unrequited love. Confused and despairing, he had learned too late what it would take to protect his heart. Titus vowed he would simply not let another woman in.

And so it was for more than ten years. While there were those who crawled in naked to join him beneath the buffalo robes, spreading legs and arms to ensnare him in their moist embrace, Bass kept hidden that most precious piece of himself. In its place, he had substituted the immutable bond of men … yet found that affection shattered by the betrayal of those who professed their protection of him. It took a long, long time for him to genuinely trust again in those who rode the same trails as he, trapped the same high-country streams, slept and snored, ate and laughed, hunted and fought, beneath the same starry skies. But he eventually found friends. Not many—for he had never, never, never been a garrulous sort who sought the reassuring company of the many. No, Titus Bass had been rewarded with a few true companions who asked no more of him than they were willing to give—that complete and utter trust as they stood at one another’s backs and dared the fates, damned the gods, and stood mighty against the wind in those days of brief and unmitigated glory.

Good men, the best friends a man deserved—even those the likes of Asa McAfferty, who went bad for reasons he had never sorted out, a compañero who, in the end, asked one final act of faithfulness from an old friend. Better it would be, Titus had come to believe after years of mind-numbing consternation, for a man to be killed at the hand of a friend than by the hate of an enemy.

Good men, the best friends a man could ever have. So many of the best gone now. Gone to where those mortals still walking the earth could only suppose. Gone where no man alive knew for certain. These good men, gone to where Titus could only pray he would see them again at last on some far-off, faraway day. Like the bullet holes in his flesh, the arrow
puckers and knife wounds too, the losing of each of those good friends carved its scar upon his heart. Perhaps even deeper, unto the marrow of his very soul. Such loss was all but unbearable, one by one wounding its own piece of his being.