“We shot at a mark together, once,” Bass explained, dragging a coat sleeve across the lower half of his face. It wasn’t near so cold there, out of the wind the way they were. “No more’n sixteen was I, but still I nearly whupped Levi that summer—”
“The Longhunters Fair?” the stranger suddenly blurted.
Bass licked his lips, surprised at the interruption. “Y-yup. Levi come through Boone County. We shot at the Longhunters Fair they hold every summer—”
“You that skinny whiffet of a green-broke young’un nearly outshot me that summer day?”
Scratch blinked again, closely studying the stranger’s face in the dim, fading light of that stormy afternoon. Those tired eyes, their deeply etched crows’-feet and liver-colored bags of fatigue, along with that massive, unkempt gray beard and tangle of iron-colored hair beneath the crown of black-bear fur.
“Levi?” he croaked. “Levi Gamble?”
“Goddamn, it’s been so long and you changed so much,” Gamble apologized. “I’d never knowed it was you even if you’d come up and punched me in the nose!”
Bass opened his arms and flung them around this man who was a stranger no more. “Damn if it ain’t good to see a old friend!”
Gamble flung his arms around Bass, squeezed, then pounded Scratch on the back with both thick mittens. “I’ll declare, Titus Bass! What the hell took you so goddamned long to look me up?”
17
“You want me to believe this man nearly shot the pants off you, Levi Gamble?” demanded Kenneth McKenzie, the undisputed king of the high Missouri.
“That was more’n twenty-six summers ago, factor,” Levi apologized after he had introduced Bass to his employer the next evening following Scratch’s arrival at the Fort Union gates. “We was both better shots back then—wasn’t we, Titus?”
Bass grinned and winked at Gamble. “More’n half my life ago, Levi. I’m sure we both was better at a lot of things than we are now!”
“Like with the women, eh?” asked Jacques Rem, a half-breed hunter in his early fifties, better known around the fort as Jack.
“We menfolk just like dumb-witted animals,” Bass declared. “We learn slow when it comes to women: gotta make a lotta mistakes a’fore we find ourselves a good one.”
“What ever come of that purty gal you had snuggling up with you that summer at the Longhunters Fair?” Levi inquired. “I recollect how she purt’ near had you tied into a husband knot herself.”
Titus wagged his head. “We never … I run off on the Ohio a’fore I got roped into that, Levi. Been the wust to happen: marry that gal and turn into a farmer like my pap. Live and die right there never knowing what lay over the far hills.”
“Here’s to what lays over the far hills!” Gamble roared, and hoisted his pewter cup filled with a hot blend of illicit trade whiskey and strong coffee they had been drinking at this gathering of fort workers.
“And here’s to them gals what keep their men back east!” Titus bellowed.
“Levi’s got him a young family,” Rem stated. “He didn’t get married until he was an old man. So now he has young wife, young chirrun.”
“’Bout like you, Titus—with a young’un on the way,” Gamble said.
“Oh, don’t let him fool you none,” Jacques continued with an evil wink. “Levi Gamble gone through more’n one woman ever since he come north on the river many year ago!”
“Don’t listen to this soft-brained half-breed, Titus,” Levi warned with a grin. “He’s got him a big family awready—growed kids and gran’chirrun too. So now Jack’s a man with a tired pecker he can’t get hard no more—and that means he don’t care nothing ’bout women no more.”
“Hrrumph!” Jack snorted as he stood and grabbed his crotch. “Maybe better I go crawl under the blankets with your wife, eh, monsieur? Show you which of us can still be a man with the women!”
“You ain’t no older’n me, Jack,” Levi said. “’Cept that you used your pecker so much it got whittled down to nothing a long time ago!”
Rem slapped Gamble on the back as he stood, starting for the door. Turning, the half-breed looked at Titus and said, “Maybe you should shoot another match against this bag of hot wind, eh? He is so old now, he can’t shoot straight with his rifle.”
“But, Jack—you are so old you can’t shoot straight with your pecker!” Levi bawled.
“Don’t stay up too late tonight, my friend,” Rem warned. “We must be off at dawn to find some buffalo.”
“You crazy ol’ Frenchman,” Levi said. “You know I’d never let you down. We’ll ride at dawn.”
Jacques Rem slid back the iron bolt in its hasp and dragged open the door, then slipped into the night. A cold gust of air knifed into the room as the half-breed slammed the door shut again.
All through the previous night of the blizzard Titus had stayed close to Waits-by-the-Water and Magpie, unfurling their robes and blankets to sleep on the floor in what Levi called the Indian room. Early the following morning after Gamble showed up with the bail of a coffeepot gripped in one hand and three tin cups suspended from the fingers of the other, he and Levi set about hauling in Bass’s packs from the corner of the fort’s courtyard where they had dropped them during the storm.
Next they led the mule and ponies out of the fort’s cramped stables, struggling across the drifts of wind-crusted snow in that first dim light of day, leading the animals to the post’s main corral which stood more than a hundred fifty yards east of Fort Union, constructed from timbers brought there from nearby Fort William, the post abandoned by the Sublette &c Campbell more than two years before. McKenzie’s laborers had dismantled the opposition post, then rebuilt its stockade, a blockhouse, and three small cabins, in addition to an extensive corral where most of the post’s stock was kept when they weren’t let out to graze on the extensive plateau surrounding the site.
On reaching the corral with his stock, Bass felt the back of his neck burn with warning. Turning to glance over his shoulder, he spotted eyes watching from the dark windows as he and Levi dragged back the gate and led the animals through.
“Friendly folks?” he asked Gamble.
“Them?” Levi asked, stopping to look at the windows.
Scratch said, “Gives me the willies, looking at us like they are.”
Levi took a few steps until he was inside the gate, turned and glanced at a couple windows before he said, “Don’t pay ’em no mind. Just ol’ man Deschamps and his kin. His two boys and a nephew. Their ’Sinniboine women and all their chirrun.”
“My animals safe here?”
“This here’s McKenzie’s country, Titus. Deschamps figgers to stick around, wants to keep his ha’r, he knows better’n try stealing from McKenzie—”
“I asked about my horses.”
“That’s why I come over here with you, let ’em see me,” Gamble explained. “Anything happen to your stock, the Deschamps know I’ll be busting down that door to take care of it on my own. And if I come over to square it, they know McKenzie will send over all the help I need.”
“So this bunch don’t cause you no trouble?”
“I didn’t say that,” Levi added grimly, glancing once more at a pair of faces that disappeared from a nearby window when Levi caught them watching him. “But your animals gonna be safe here. Safe as any of Kenneth McKenzie’s horses.”
Later that morning Levi came to fetch Bass and his family from the Indian room, explaining they were invited to bed in with Gamble’s family. Just to the east of the flagpole and a twelve-pounder cannon in the middle of the compound stood five buffalo-hide lodges, their smoke flaps blackened by countless fires, snow piled more than three feet high in sculpted drifts around their bases. Nearby, to the north of the flagpole, stood the one-story factor’s house where McKenzie lived, along with his favored clerk, Charles Larpenteur, and Larpenteur’s family.
At daybreak that morning after the storm blew through, McKenzie had most of his sixty-some employees out with shovels,
clearing icy snow off the pitched roof of his bourgeois house. Next they moved to clear the snow from the roofs of the storage rooms, apartments, trading stores, stables, and the barracks, all of which huddled under a long roof along the east wall. Finally they moved on to scrape the roof of the apartment range where the clerks and interpreters, the carpenter, tinsmith, and tailor, as well as seasonal laborers, all lived, another long building that extended most of the length of the west stockade.
By evening all the snow had been swept from the bastions and that massive blockhouse overlooking the main gate, supported on gigantic cottonwood uprights. Just before twilight most of the deep, drifted snow that had swirled into the courtyard had been removed in carts and wheelbarrows, muscled from one of the two gates, where it was dumped onto the prairie.
He was ravenous at the end of that long day of constant cold and shoveling, lending his hands to help his hosts. As the sun eased beyond the horizon and the temperature plummeted even farther, stars began to twinkle in a cloudless black sky. As their Indian wives prepared to put the children to bed, scrubbing the youngsters with the last of the hot water in a brass kettle steaming beside the fire, Gamble suggested to Bass that they mosey across the courtyard to the laborers’ quarters where they could smoke their pipes and drink a little whiskey, all the while catching up on those many twisted miles the two of them had walked since that fine summer day beside the Ohio River at the Boone County Longhunters Fair.
“I never told you something that night after you won the money what would take you to St. Louis …” And Titus’s voice dropped off as the chill left the room following Jacques Rem’s departure.
“Told me what?”
“Just how sad it made me you wasn’t a Boone County man,” Bass admitted, then sipped at more of his coffee and whiskey.
“Why’d that disappoint you?” Levi asked.
“Right after I’d found a fella what seemed to be just like me … I learned you was only passing through,” Scratch tried explaining why he had been drawn to the tall frontiersman and the lure of the unknown frontier in much the same way he had been drawn to the lure of Amy Whistler’s flesh. “You wasn’t like the others, them farmers, not even them Ohio boatmen I come to know that autumn.”
“Neither was you, Titus Bass. I hailed from Pennsylvania, looking for somewhere different, just like you was looking. You met me when I was off to a far country filled with more beaver and Injuns and hellfire adventure to last any man’s lifetime.”
“Damn, but didn’t that light a fire under my mokersons!” Bass confided. “Just knowing that I’d run onto someone else what had the same deadly fear I did, fear that I’d take root in one place and die right there ’thout seeing all I wanted to see.”
Gamble stared wistfully into his coffee cup. “Family and friends told me I ought’n stay on that side of the river and leave this here country for the Injuns. But I hankered to see just how much country was left over here, a’fore it got changed like that country we left back there got changed.”
“I’ll bet this was some in them early days, Levi.”
With a grin he said, “A sight few men ever see’d—and no man will ever see again.”
“It’s changing awready … ain’t it, Levi?” Bass asked sadly. “I see’d it some my own self, and I ain’t been out here near the time you have.”
“Others is coming, Titus. They always come. One or two families at first. Then a handful after them. And the word keeps on spreading. They come like bees to the honeycomb. Next thing there’s towns where there was only campsites. River ports and steamboat landings along this high river. Wagon roads where once there was only game trails or Injun footpaths going from one place off yonder t’other.”
“I ’member an old farmer telling us the land is bound to change … when man comes to it.”
They sat quiet for some time, each man lost in his recollections, in this portent of the future.
“You think it’s ’cause of us, Titus?” Gamble finally asked. “Is our kind to blame?”
“Blame for what?”
“For coming here first. We’re the ones to open it up and point the way. Maybe we’re gonna be to blame for ruining it all.”
“How we to blame, Levi?” he asked defensively. “All our kind ever wanted was to go someplace where men ain’t changed the land yet. To go where that country is so old and untouched that it’s brand-new at the same time.”
Wagging his head, Gamble said, “Maybe you’ll see it one day, Titus. See how there’s always been two kinds of men. Them few that comes to a place first—to discover that new land. And then there’s the others who come by the hundreds and hundreds, and even more’n that—they come pouring in like ants once a place has been found, come to settle down. And the few what come first like us, that’s when we gotta move on.”
For a long moment Bass didn’t say anything. He sat there stunned, letting the cold pain of that realization settle in. “You’re saying them what come first are to blame for opening the door for them others what come after to ruin it all?”
Nodding, Gamble said, “The others always come where we left our tracks for them to follow.”
“That don’t rightly make much sense—”
“Dammit if a man don’t get on in winters like me and he looks back to see what a god-blamed fool he’s been bringing on the ruin of everything he’s ever wanted in life.”
“You ain’t ruin’t it, Levi. None of us has. This country ain’t like that soft country back there. This here’s a hard, hard land what don’t easily forgive. Folks won’t ever leave them dark forests and that black earth where they can grow their corn and taters and ’baccy. This here country’s left for the rest of us what ain’t found a home in such a soft land.”
“Maybe you’re right,” Gamble relented, his tired eyes showing how much he wanted to believe. “Maybe their kind will try, but find out there’s too many Injuns, or the winters’re too cold, or the snows’re too deep … and they’ll skedaddle back to that soft life back yonder in the East.”
“These mountains already kill’t their share of pilgrims what figgered they had the ha’r we got, Levi.”
Gamble grinned. “Only ’cause our kind is so crazy, we don’t know no better, Titus Bass!”
“You give me a chance to live to be a old man back east, or to die a young man out here—you damn well know there ain’t but one choice for me.”
His grin disappeared, and Gamble pursed his lips in resignation for a moment, then said, “Can’t help but think we’re the last of a breed, friend. A breed come to set a foot down beside streams where no white man ever walked. But that day’s gone too. Like the sap that riz up in us when we young.”
“A differ’nt time, this is now,” Titus added.
“No more do booshways send out brigades to trap beaver. Now the booshways plop down their fur posts beside the big rivers and trade robes with the Injuns. One day this’ll all be dead, and they won’t even need me to hunt buffler to feed ’em.”
It scared Bass the way Gamble sounded. “You’re talking like you’re touched by a fever, Levi,” he protested. “Like a man gone soft in the head.”
“Ain’t much use for the like of you and me no more, Titus Bass.”
“Damn if there ain’t! Your booshways can go right ahead and build their posts where they want. Don’t make me no never mind. Beaver’s bound to rise, I say. The fur trade damn well ain’t dead while men like Jim Bridger is leading brigades off to the high lonesome. Long as there’s traders to buy beaver, there’ll be trappers like me to catch them flat-tails.”
“And when there ain’t no more beaver?”
“Ain’t gonna happen,” Bass snapped.
“When there ain’t no one to buy what’s left?”
He stared hard at Gamble a moment. “What’s took over you, Levi?”
“You’re right, Scratch,” he apologized, the tone of his voice softened. “Been out here on this river most of my life,” he explained. “Them years whe
n Lisa retreated downriver, I worked in Fox or Osage or Pawnee country. I’ve seen more’n my share of winters in this wild county … so maybe what I see coming hurts me more’n it hurts men like you—”
The door flung open with a noisy racket and a gust of cold wind as two men leaped inside.
“They killed Papa!”
Leaping to his feet, Gamble rushed up to the young man who had spoken. Seizing the front of his blanket capote, Levi demanded, “Jack? Someone killed Jack?”
“Out!” the young man growled.
Around Titus the rest of the interpreters and clerks had bolted out of their beds, forming a tight crescent surrounding the two young men who stood shaking with fury in the open doorway.
Levi demanded, “Who, Paul? Tell me who!”
“Who else you think?” Paul Rem replied with a snarl. “The Deschamps!”
“You gonna help us, Levi?” the second son asked. “There’s too many of them—we need your help. They threaten all of us now—say they kill any friend of Jacques Rem!”
“We need men and guns too,” Paul demanded. “Give us the powder to blow all them devils to hell!”
“Hold on,” Gamble attempted to calm them. “Tell me how you know it was them what killed Jack.”
The second son, Henri, laughed in a harsh gust, then said, “OI’ woman Deschamps’s boys wanted to kill Papa for long time after Papa kill ol’ man Deschamps! Now she done it. We find him outside the wall—his face beat so bad, cut up so much, we not sure it was him at first.”
Shaking his head in disbelief, Gamble silenced the angry murmurs in that room gone cold with more than the wind. Eventually he stared round at the fort employees. “This here night been a long time coming, fellas. We got some business to see to.”
“You gonna help us kill them all?” Henri asked, grabbing Levi’s arm.
“The squaws and their young’uns—let them go,” Gamble ordered. “The rest, they don’t deserve to live to see another sunrise.” Turning to the interpreter named Bissonette, he said, “Louis, go to the arsenal. Get a rifle and pistol for every man who wants to be a part of this fight. Horns of powder and plenty of ball too. The rest of you what need weapons, go with Bissonette—now!”
Ride the Moon Down Page 28
