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and Charles Bent in case they had to gallop on outta there with the Mexicans comin’ down on their asses!”
    “But look around you, Mr. Bass,” Garrard roared. “Do these men look like the sort to walk off without those horses?” Most of the half-breeds and hard-cases laughed heartily. “Not after what they had been through to get to the ranch on foot!”
    Bransford went on to explain how his bunch had been hampered for more than a day when they were forced to take shelter during a howling snowstorm. Later, they hadn’t found much water in the dried-up creekbed of the Timpas—and what little they scratched up was so laced with alkali that even coffee was undrinkable.
    “For two nights we were without anything that would burn for firewood,” Garrard explained. “Bill here offered to let me sleep with him and share our blankets—but first we had to convince his damn dog!”
    “Back when we reached Hole in the Rock, we thought we had Injuns or Mexicans slipping up on us,” Bransford said. “That’s when my dog here set up a awful bark. Must’ve only been a coyote or some other critter.”
    “You fellas gonna find yourselves in greaser country soon enough,” Bass sighed, then blew across the surface of his coffee again. “Keep your ears open and your eyes peeled back—ain’t likely this bunch will lose their hair.”
    “Where you leave your family?” the group’s leader asked.
    “Back ’round the end of the ridge aways.”
    “Go fetch ’em and bring ’em here to spend the night.”
    “Naw,” Titus replied, then took a long gulp of the coffee. As he tipped up the coffee tin to drain the last sip, the decorative beads suspended from his long ear wires clinked against the rim of the cup. “Time I get back, them young’uns gonna be sleeping.”
    “That’s a shame,” Garrard admitted.
    Bass stood and held out his hand to the adventurer. “Grateful for the coffee, and the palaver too.”
    “Thanks for your news on Taos,” Bransford said as he stood and they shook. “Maybeso we’ll run onto you up to Bents’ some day.”
    Scratch wagged his head and set his empty cup down near the fire ring, then tugged his coyote fur cap down so that it covered the earrings dangling from both lobes. “Don’t figger that’ll happen. Sure enough we’ll stop by there to let my family have a look-see in the next few days, but I can’t think of a thing ever gonna bring me this far south again.”
    As Titus Bass started out of the circle of strangers, Bransford called out, “Watch your topknot!”
    He stopped, turned, and patted the back of his well-worn coyote fur cap. “I been skelped once’t awready. Got more holes in this ol’ hide than I care to callate. I aim to ride out for that north country, where this nigger won’t have to worry ’bout them what wants to lift his topknot. I aim to live out all the rest of my days up where a man can die at peace, fellas. I reckon I’ll die a old man wrapped up in my buffler robes.”
    *
Ride the Moon Down
    *
Death Rattle
    * Purgatoire (Purgatory) River
    * Term used by Americans during this early time period to refer to anything English.

TWO

    Like a great, golden pumpkin the adobe walls of the post glowed in a last glittering benediction of winter’s late light that third afternoon after leaving Bill Bransford to press south with his avengers to put down the Taos rebellion.
    Bass pulled back on the old horse’s reins. As the rest of his family came to a halt on either side of the old trapper, he felt his wife’s leg press against his as her pony snorted a gauzy mist.
    Waits-by-the-Water tugged the thick woolen scarf below her chin so she could speak, exposing the cheeks scarred with the white man’s pox. She asked, “This is where the seeing was taken from your eye so many winters ago?” *
    Leaning off his horse, Scratch rubbed the small of her back a moment, then answered with a thick voice, “Yes. I come here to find Cooper, afore I finished my