Ride the Moon Down by Terry C. Johnston Read Free Book Online Page B

moccasins from a section of smoked buffalo hide, she heard him moving, groaning. In her cradleboard their daughter was asleep, propped against a bale of beaver hides. Without a word Waits laid her work aside and kneed up to the fire, pouring coffee into a dented tin cup.
    “Drink this,” she said to him in Crow, holding the cup out between them. Then, as he peered up at her with grateful eyes, Waits spoke in English. “Coffee … for husband’s s-sick head.”
    He tapped his puckered lips with a fingertip. After she leaned over to kiss him, Bass whispered, “What’d this ol’ bonehead ever do to deserve such a good woman like you?”
    After swilling down several pint cups of coffee and gnawing on some flank steak from the antelope carcass they had hanging in a nearby tree, Titus started to feel halfway human again. By early afternoon the roll of thunder had eased at his temples, and that greasy pitch and heave to his belly had departed.
    “Do you want my help?” she asked when he brought the mule into camp and dragged over the two small bales of beaver he had to trade.
    “You’re a pure delight,” he said in English.
    “Dee-light?” she repeated.
    Grinning, “Do you know the word smile?”
    “Smile, yes,” and her whole face lit up.
    “You make me smile in here,” he said using her tongue, tapping his chest. “A big, big smile in here.”
    “Too, me,” she attempted in English as she pulled up the thick, woolly packsaddle pad made from a mountain sheep and lapped it over the mule’s back.
    Minutes later beneath the painful glare of a summer sun he encountered a pack train on the move that afternoon, migrating toward him, moving up Ham’s Fork.
    “This here Wyeth’s outfit?” he asked as he brought his pony alongside three of the horsemen who were wrangling less than a dozen horned cows at the far side of the march.
    “It is,” one answered.
    “Where’s Wyeth?”
    “At the head, yonder,” and that second man gestured toward the front of the cavalcade stirring dust from every hoof into the still, hot air.
    “Thankee,” Bass replied as he kicked heels into the pony and they bolted into a lope, crossing the narrow bottomland that meandered between bare bluffs and the twisting stream.
    In no time he was standing in the wide cottonwood stirrups, hollering, “Wyeth! Wyeth!”
    One of the figures ahead turned in the saddle, bringing a hand to his brow as he peered from beneath the brim of his hat. “I’m Wyeth.”
    Slowing his pony to match the pack train’s pace, Bass found himself suddenly grown anxious that his afternoon of reunion and celebration had put him one day late in trading for what the three of them would need through the coming year. The Yank’s brigade was clearly on its way.
    “You pulling out?” he asked of the leader. “Leaving ronnyvoo?”
    “Not yet,” the man answered. His small eyes in that overly narrow face squinted in the shade beneath his hat brim. “That time will come soon,” and he sighed with resignation. “But for now, we’re only migrating upstream to find more grass for our stock.”
    “Them cows I see’d over there?”
    Wyeth grinned. “That’s what’s left of the herd we started with.”
    “You gonna open for trading?”
    That question plainly startled Wyeth. His eyes blinked in surprise as he appeared to consider his response. “W-why, there hasn’t been anyone wanting to … not a soul’s come to me, our tents to trade. Suppose I would be willing to trade. Uh, yes—well, we do have near everything we brought west with us from Missouri to supply RockyMountain Fur.” Wyeth grinned. “Yes, mister—I’ll be open for business tomorrow morning after breakfast.”
    With great relief Bass inquired, “You eat early or late of a morning, Wyeth?”
    The trader smiled even bigger, the sharply chiseled edges to his lean face easing somewhat with mirth. “I’m one to eat early.”
    Bass held out his hand and shook with the Yankee before he loped