Colter's Journey

by William W. Johnstone

  Jed Reno had been at that last Rendezvous. Trappers—the free trappers and those working for the companies—got together, traded their beaver plews for whatever they would need for the coming year. Things like gunpowder and lead; coffee, kettles, and tobacco; flannels and awls and steel. Oh, the traders made off like bandits, but Jed Reno and the trappers he knew and respected—even those he didn’t know or didn’t respect—never minded one bit. The merchants had to return to civilization, while Reno and the trappers got to stay in the glorious Rocky Mountains, got to live the way they wanted to live.

  Jed Reno had been at the first Rendezvous back in 1825 on Henry’s Fork of the Green. He had hit every last one of them since, including the last, back when Bridger and Andrew Drips and Henry Fraeb had brought in the traders and even some missionaries. Father Pierre Jean DeSmet had performed a Catholic Mass.

  Civilization had reached the wilds.

  “Five years, Jed,” Murchison said.

  “Five years like he—” Reno stopped and shook his head in disgust. Malachi Murchison was right. It had been five years. Reno spit.

  Back East, beaver hats had fallen out of fashion. Silk was what those dandies wanted atop their heads now, or something from South America called a Nutria, which was cheaper than beaver, or so folks said.

  Whiskey kept befuddling him. Reno shook his head, not liking that feeling. Time was when he could’ve been drunk for a month and not felt like he did.

  “What do you say, Jed?” Malachi Murchison asked.

  Reno blew his nose. “Jackatars tell you that?”

  A shrug was how Murchison answered. “You know Louis. You know how that half-breed Métis is.”

  Sure, Jed Reno knew. He also knew how Malachi Murchison was, and would trust neither as far as he could throw them, which back in the day would have covered a considerable distance.

  Reno was forty-nine years old, older than Jim Bridger. His beard, once black as coal, had streaks of silver in it, as did his hair. His face that wasn’t covered with hair was clouded with scars, and one of his earlobes was missing, thanks to a Green River knife in the hands of a Snake Indian whom he had put under a few moments after getting his ear bloodied and mangled.

  Like Bridger, Reno had joined General William Ashley back in ’22 on that Upper Missouri Expedition, and he hadn’t returned to home in Missouri or even closer than Fort Laramie in twenty years. More than twenty, he realized.

  He had joined up with Bridger when they had bought out the General and founded the Rocky Mountain Fur Company, and then Jed Reno had decided that belonging to a company made him feel too civilized, so he had let Bridger buy out his interest, and he’d become a free trapper, that independent sort who came and went as he pleased, and sold and fought as he pleased.

  His eye remained as blue as the mountain skies on a clear summer day. The one eye he had left, his right one. A black patch covered the hole in his head, a reminder of the eye he had lost early in his free-spirited days as a mountain man, when the Blackfeet Indians didn’t cotton to being neighborly to anyone, especially a black-bearded young buck with blue eyes and the disposition of a Missouri mule.

  He didn’t feel old. Not in the summer, anyway. The winters were another matter. He stood six-foot-four inches tall, weighed right around two hundred and twenty pounds, and figured he could whip a silvertip grizzly bear if he felt like it.

  “Jed,” Malachi Murchison said as he corked the jug. “Louis wants an answer.”

  Reno turned his head and spit. “Wants an answer to what?”

  “If you’ll side him. Stir up that ruction with ’em heathens. Get us a war goin’.”

  Reno stared hard with his one eye. Murchison was a tiny man, no bigger than five-foot-two, with eyes like a rat and a nose like a hawk. His pockmarked face had a wicked gun powder burn across the left cheek, and his tiny hands sprouted only eight long, bony fingers if you counted the thumbs. He had lost both of his pinky fingers years back. Some say a beaver trap cut them off. Some said Louis Jackatars had removed them. Others argued that a Shoshone squaw had taken offense to Malachi Murchison’s manners.

  Jed Reno didn’t care one way or the other. “No.”

  The black powder burn on Murchison’s cheek darkened. So did the rat’s eyes, although he tried to smile with his busted and blackened and missing teeth. “Well”—he shrugged—“you know how that Métis can be.”

  Oh, Jed Reno knew that all too well. Reno had never liked Louis Jackatars and he had never cared for Malachi Murchison. For that matter, neither of those trappers had expressed or shown any affection or tolerance for Jed Reno, which was fine and dandy with him.

  “Just as long as you don’t go around spreadin’ no wild rumors about Louis and his plans.” Murchison tried that grin again. “You know. Don’t need nobody tryin’ to ruin our little plan, you see. That’s all.”

  “I see.”

  Their eyes locked.

  “I mind my own business, Murchison. You and that half-breed want to try to start an uprising, that’s your doings, not mine. Way I figure things, you try to start a fight with the Shoshone or Crows or any tribe in these parts, and it’ll be you and Jackatars who gets rubbed out. That’ll set right well with me, too.”

  Malachi Murchison slapped his bony hands on his greasy buckskin trousers. “You make me laugh, Jed.”

  Reno rose. The whiskey didn’t feel so warm in his belly anymore, or maybe drinking with a miserable cur dog like Malachi Murchison had soured his stomach. Besides, he had been at Bridger’s Trading Post for two weeks, blowing whatever money he had brought in in skins. It was time to get out of civilization, if anyone ever considered that ramshackle affair civilized.

  He left Malachi Murchison laughing and sipping the jug and wandered over from the corrals to the buildings.

  Old Jim Bridger and his pard, Louis Vasquez, had established the trading post on the Oregon Trail maybe a year or so back. With the beaver trade dying out, Bridger had figured to make his mark in selling to those fool white emigrants and the Indians. Old Vaskiss, part French and part Spanish—or maybe just part Mexican—hailed from St. Louis, and had been trading with the Indians since he had first set up shop with the Pawnee. Neither he nor Bridger knew much about modern comforts.

  The post had two double-log cabins about forty feet long, rough-hewn and papered with mud. The blacksmith shop was probably better built. No, the strongest structures had to be the pens that held the horses. Indians had set up teepees around the lodging, and wayfarers bound west kept stopping in.

  A passel of prairie schooners had set up camp just in front of Bridger’s post, and Jed Reno had to frown at the noise of the songs and the laughter of children from those camps. They still cooked with salt and pepper and allspice in their cook fires.

  Bridger and Old Vaskiss had loaded up with flour and coffee and sugar to sell to those fools coming west to settle, but bringing in that big, black smithy might have been their biggest moneymaker because after all those miles from Independence, fixing wagons made a body lots of money. All that hammering the smithy done, though, bellowed and bounced about inside Jed Reno’s head.

  He reached the water trough, put his hands out on the rough wood, and buried his head in the cold water. There were times when water felt good on a body. Cleared the head some, washed out the hangover or the graybacks which might burrow into a man’s beard and get to itching.

  Reno pulled his head out, satisfied, feeling the water run off his hairy face. He blinked out the water and wiped his beard with his big hands. Those emigrants from back east likely were staring at him, stopping their bartering with Bridger to make some comment about what kind of white man would wash his face in a trough used to water horses.

  Spitting out some of the water, he stared at the rippling water, waiting to see his face, to see just how old he looked. There had been a time when he could have stayed drunk for a month or six weeks, but that had been back in ’35, when they had rendezvoused near Fort Bonneville, or ’36, when th
ey had met on Horse Creek near the Green.

  He heard Bridger’s voice from the front of the post, and Reno knew the lie the old mountain man was telling the greenhorns. By Jupiter, he had heard the story first in ’32, after that set-to with the redskins at Pierre’s Hole.

  “Those red devils had me surrounded,” Bridger was saying. “Me with nothin’ but my hatchet and hair. They was forty of ’em, armed to the teeth. And all forty come at me of a sudden.”

  Reno waited for the question to come, and sure enough, one of the slickers from back East asked it.

  “What happened, Mr. Bridger?”

  Reno mouthed Bridger’s answer as he said it. “Why, son, they kilt me, of course.”

  Everyone laughed.

  Jed Reno would have laughed along with them, but the water had calmed and he saw a clear reflection. Malachi Murchison was right behind him, bringing the Green River knife in a lethal, slicing arc.

  CHAPTER 3

  Reno turned and spun away, but his age was showing. The knife’s razor-sharp blade ripped through the buckskin and carved a ditch across his side. Almost instantly, the curved blade of the knife came back. For a sneaky rat loaded up on rotgut whiskey, Malachi Murchison struck faster than a rattlesnake—and twice as deadly.

  Reno lunged backward, catapulting himself over the watering trough and hearing the blade just miss as it sliced over the empty air where the mountain man had been standing a split second before. The momentum of the swinging arm spun Murchison around, like one of those toy tops from ages ago. The would-be assassin cursed as he fell.

  Jed Reno did the same, landing on the hard-packed earth between the trough and the cabin’s walls. He bounced up and reached for his pistol, only to catch himself. Like most trappers, he usually sported a belt pistol tucked in his sash. His was an old flintlock model, small enough to carry on one’s person but powerful enough to stop a skunk like Malachi Murchison. . . if he had it.

  That’s one reason Reno had stopped at Bridger’s Trading Post. The pistol had been misfiring, not even sparking, which could get a body killed in mountain country. So he had brought it to Bridger, who figured that the frizzen was worn through.

  As he had said, “Jed, I’ve seen trees downed by beavers that wasn’t as chewed up and gouged as bad as that frizzen of yourn.” So the smithy was repairing Reno’s pistol or maybe Bridger himself was hardening the frizzen.

  Reno caught his breath.

  Murchison had climbed back to his feet and moved around the trough, grinning his broken-teeth smile, moving the knife in his right hand. “Been meanin’ to gut you for years, Reno.” He hissed the words like a serpent.

  “Have a try, old man.” Reno backed up along the edge of the cabin.

  “I don’t try, boy. I get things done.”

  The clanging of metal from the smithy’s shop had stopped. Reno kept backing up, out of the shade of the log cabin and into the sun. Behind him came the gasps of men and women—the settlers bound for the Oregon Territory—and a few grunts of approval from some of the Indians hanging out by the cracker barrel that had run out of crackers during the first month the post had been open.

  “You need some hayseed farmer to help save your hide, Reno?”

  Reno figured he had backed up far enough, so he stopped. Malachi Murchison did the same.

  “They’ve been on the trail some months now,” Reno said. “Figured they’d like to see the show.”

  “Pity you won’t live to see the end.”

  The blade came quickly, but Reno moved faster. His right hand came up with the long knife he kept sheathed behind his back. Metal clanged, Murchison cursed, his face revealing the shock of Reno’s defense. His eyes revealed fear. The rat had thought Jed Reno was unarmed. His pistol was being repaired and his Hawken rifle leaned against his traps, packs, and saddle by the corral.

  Reno kept the charge. He moved forward, slicing one way, then the other, not saying a word, but controlling his breathing, working fast and keeping Murchison backing up.

  “Stop it!” one of the wayfarers yelled.

  “My goodness!” a woman in a blue bonnet gasped.

  “You men, stop this!”

  Murchison grunted, kept moving back, away from the Conestogas and the oxen and the people. Reno never slowed his assault.

  “Do something!” someone else yelled. “Before they kill each other.”

  Bridger’s voice drawled out slowly. “Ain’t stickin’ my nose in somethin’ that ain’t my affair, ma’am.”

  “But what if they kill each other?”

  “Then it’ll be my affair, ma’am, and I’ll bury the both of ’em.”

  “You mean you’ll have one of your injuns bury ’em.” That had to be Carroll Smith. Sounded like that trapper anyway.

  “Buryin’s work, Smith,” Bridger said. “I’m a businessman these days.”

  “Ten buffalo robes says the weasel guts him,” Carroll Smith bet.

  Bridger laughed. “That’s a bet, Smith, and I thank ye in advance.”

  The weasel, the rat, the conniving little cutthroat Malachi Murchison kept retreating, which gave Jed Reno pause. He had known the rat long enough and had seen Murchison bury more than his share of men, red, black, and white. Say what you would about Murchison, but he wasn’t a fool, and he didn’t run from a fight. Oh, he’d stab you in the back or cut your throat for the gold fillings in your teeth, but he was no fool, no idiot. He had to be backing up for some reason other than fear and survival.

  Reno blinked away the sweat and stopped quickly. His side burned, and he felt the blood already staining his buckskin trousers. His lungs worked hard, and he wet his cracked lips with his whiskey-soaked tongue.

  He grinned. Murchison did not.

  Slow it down, Reno told himself. You’re bleeding like a stuck pig, and that’s what the rat wants. So he can win Carroll Smith that bet.

  He saw Murchison’s horse tethered by the corral and understood the weasel’s plan. Two pistols would be handy in their pommels, along with Murchison’s own long rifle. That’s what the rat had wanted. Keep retreating back to his horse where he could fetch one of his weapons and send a heavy lead ball into Jed Reno’s gut. Then slice his throat or gut him, as rats like Malachi Murchison were prone to do.

  The eyes told Reno that the would-be killer understood what Jed Reno knew. After licking his lips, Malachi Murchison charged.

  The blades glanced off one another. Reno backed up. Some emigrant yelled to get the children out of there.

  Murchison shifted the grip on the elkhorn handle of his knife. He brought it up, swung it down. Reno’s left hand shot up, and caught the rat’s bony wrist in a vise. Simultaneously, Reno swung his own knife in his right hand, hoping to eviscerate the assassin’s bowels.

  But Malachi Murchison was no greenhorn when it came to knife fights.

  He sucked in his gut, let the blade pass, and then his left hand locked on Reno’s arm, just below the knife.

  Both men squeezed as hard as they could. The strength in the weasel’s hands surprised Reno. He had a savage, determined grip, and those bony fingers felt like hot iron.

  Murchison’s knee came up, trying for Reno’s groin, but he deflected the blow with his thigh. They pulled each other closer, sweating, grunting. Reno felt his grip slipping, and he could smell the whiskey sweat on their bodies, smell the blood—his own—and the rancid breath of the rat.

  Suddenly, Murchison went down. A purposeful move.

  Reno felt himself sailing over. He landed on his left shoulder, came up quickly, pain burning in his side, and turned.

  The rat grabbed a handful of sand, threw it into Reno’s eye, and backed away quickly, anticipating the knife blade that caught the knot on Reno’s sash.

  The sand blinded Reno, and he swore, spat, and swung blindly with the knife, which missed. Tears washed the sand from his vision, but it remained blurred as he kicked out with his moccasin, also missing. He coughed. Tried to catch his breath. He could see, slightly, but far f
rom clearly, yet maybe just enough to stay alive.

  Malachi Murchison’s blade came up. Reno leaped back, feeling the steel just miss his stomach. He swung himself in a sweeping arc, hoping to luck out and maybe catch the rat’s throat, but connected with nothing but air. Reno backed up again and slammed into something hard.

  Some emigrant’s prairie schooner. He could smell the wood, the canvas cover, and the dust that had been picked up from Missouri and across perhaps a thousand miles of the Unorganized Territory. Catching a glimpse of the knife in the rat’s hand as it came down, he managed to move and felt the blade ram into the wooden frame of the heavy wagon.

  Murchison swore, pulled, but his hand, slick with sweat, came away empty. The knife remained stuck in the wood. It was the break Reno wanted. He swung his own knife, but that weasel moved with luck and speed. The blade ripped the buckskin shirt, but caught no flesh. Reno had swung too hard and his momentum carried him spinning past the lucky rat.

  The rat hit hard, catching Reno in the kidneys and sending spasms of pain shooting from his bleeding side. A second blow followed the first, then another, and another, and another, driving him to his knees.

  However, Reno still held his knife. With better than a foot and more than eighty pounds on the sorry cur, he turned on his knees and swung the blade, missing. Murchison danced back and kicked his moccasin up, slamming into Reno’s aching, bleeding side.

  “Arrghhhh!” Reno toppled over, but kept rolling. He felt Murchison’s feet as the little runt tried to jump down and crush his head. He sprang up on his feet, backing away, trying to get some focus, find the assassin and plant him permanently.

  “Stop them!” a woman screamed. “Stop them!”

  “This is horrible,” said another.

  Reno heard the muttering of other voices, soft, quiet, reverent, and realized that some of the emigrants had gathered together to pray. Prayers. In that lawless trading post. How long had it been since he had heard a prayer? Back in ’40 at the last Rendezvous when the padre had held that first Mass.