Ride the Moon Down Read Online Free PDF Page A

was.
    No, there had been no civil-folks preacher to say the proper words over the two of them as they stood before their families and friends as they did back among the settlements. Such folks in the States would likely mule up their eyes and scrunch their lips in a sneer at the very thought that a man like him and a creature such as Waits could be so much in love that they would privately vow to one another every bit as strong as any white folks’ ceremony, promising they would be there until death ultimately parted them.
    One more reason why he figured he’d made his last trip back east. St. Louis was in the past, and all those white folks too. Titus figured he wouldn’t live long enough to ever want to see settlements again, their sprawl stretching farther and farther west the way they always had.
    Maybe he wouldn’t live long enough to see settlers and wagons, white women and preachers, reach the high plains, much less make it to the Shining Mountains. Why—a mountain man sure as hell ought’n die a’fore he had to witness such a goddamned confabulation as that! Damn ifit wouldn’t likely pull the heart right out of a feller to see all this get ruin’t with settlers and civilizing.
    By bloody damn, he prayed there’d still be plenty of wild in the wilderness, enough to last him all the rest of his days.
    “You are going to see your tall friend this morning?” Waits asked him in a whisper as she gently scrubbed his grimy fingers one by one, scratching at the layers of grease and blood, grit and camp-black that had encrusted itself down deep into every knuckle, hardened into dark crescents at the base of every fingernail.
    “Yes. Jarrell,” he said in English.
    “Jer-rel,” she repeated.
    “Jarrell Thornbrugh,” he completed the friend’s name with just the proper burr to the last name. “A John Bull Englishman.”
    “That is more of his name?”
    He chuckled and explained in Crow, “Just Jarrel Thornbrugh. Englishman is where he’s from, what he is. Like I’m American from the States, and you’re a Crow from Absaroka.”
    “It was good to have a friend near when death loomed close last summer,” * she reflected.
    “He saved our lives,” Bass agreed. “Saved Josiah’s life. Mine too.”
    “This man, he comes to trade his furs like you?”
    “No. Last summer Jarrell told me that his boss, a man I met out to the western sea, sent him to rendezvous all alone only to look things over. That boss, a white-headed eagle named McLoughlin, had plans to send a brigade of men here this summer.”
    “More of the English white men?”
    “Yes, woman—all sent by a man who wants to carve off a piece of this rendezvous trade for himself.”
    Worry tinged her voice. “Will the English push the Americans out of these mountains?”
    Bass snorted, shaking his long, damp hair. “Not a chance of that. If the English know what’s good for them, they’ll stay to their own country and leave this to the rest of us.”
    “You will go this morning to throw the tall white man out of this country?”
    After some hesitation Bass said, “I don’t figure I got the right to throw any man out of what country isn’t mine.”
    “But many times you’ve told me this land is your home.”
    “True, woman. But it still isn’t mine, the way folks put down claims on the ground back east. No, I’m content to live out here where none of this is really mine, to pass on through a lot of country where I’m only visiting.”
    “There is Crow country farther north,” she tried to explain as she wrapped his arms over the tops of her heavy breasts. “And this country is the land of the Shoshone and Bannock. All fight to keep the powerful Blackfoot from taking away their lands. So why aren’t you going to fight the English now that they have come to take this country from you?”
    “I don’t think they have come here to take any land from me,” he declared.
    “But they came for the beaver,” she maintained. “And some