“One of ’em?” Bridger asked. “Who you mean?”
“Either she’s gonna kill him,” Kit replied, “or Shunar’s gonna kill her.”
From the catch in the young trapper’s voice, Titus thought he understood how Carson must feel: terribly wronged by someone so easy to loathe, so easy to hate.
Looking then into the distance over Carson’s shoulder, he saw the figures coming. Sure that it had to be—that tall one in the middle, a dozen or more clustered around on either side of him like saplings around the tall oak.
Scratch gazed directly at Carson. “So you figger to make sure Shunar don’t get that chance to kill the gal?”
“She and her pa,” Kit explained, “they don’t want nothing to do with me, not with no white man now—so this ain’t about getting myself a squaw no more.” His eyes went cold. “Now it’s about putting a bad animal out of its misery, fellas. It’s ’bout killing someone needs killing in a bad way.”
Pointing with one arm, Scratch pulled a long-barreled smoothbore pistol from his belt with the other hand and announced, “There comes your chance, Kit.”
Carson jerked around with the rest of the crowd to see Shunar striding up with his hangers-on.
Bridger said, “That’un’s bad as Blackfoot. Big mouth, but he shoots center too. Best watch ’im like a snake.”
Kit whirled back to look at Bass, gazing down at the big pistol. He took it in both hands, snapped back the hammer to half cock, flipped the frizzen forward, and peered down at the priming powder in the pan. “Thankee, Scratch,” he whispered with deep appreciation as he stuffed the loaded weapon into his belt.
As Carson turned to watch the giant’s approach, Bass was struck with how big that huge pistol looked hanging from the belt of the five-foot-four-inch trapper. The young American stood some eight inches shorter than Scratch, and Chouinard easily towered a foot or more over Titus. Suddenly Titus was reminded of an ancient, dramatic image from his long-ago childhood, a visage come as clear as rinsed crystal from those days he’d sat with his brothers and sister at their mother’s knee while she read by the fireplace from that huge family Bible draped over her legs like the curved wings of a great bird come to rest in her lap.
How vivid that image had been to him as a child: visualizing those colorful hills and armies of thousands blackening the valley, tents arrayed for as far as the eye could see as the enemies of Israel sent forth their hero—a giant called Goliath. To meet him there between the lines went a young shepherd boy, the smallest among that army of Israel. Instead of arming himself for battle with a shield, and bow or lance … David carried only three smooth stones and his leather sling—
“Amereecans!”
The crowd turned as the distant figure hurled the word like a profane slur. Slowly the Americans stepped to each side like the parting of a flock of wrens when a hawk descends through them. Carson, Meek, and Bass stood at their apex watching the monster lumber across those last fifty yards.
If this duel started close-up, Scratch knew Kit didn’t stand a snowflake’s chance in a boiling spring. He turned to the short man. “You don’t have to do this—”
“Yes, I do, Scratch,” Carson cut him off, not taking his eyes from the giant. “I ain’t running.”
From afar Chouinard pounded his chest twice and bellowed, “I want Amereecans to beat! Crunch my teeth on Amereecan bones, speet them out!”
Around the giant that motley array of cowered voyageurs and pork-eating Americans laughed as they came on in their hero’s gigantic shadow. From the glistening of the brown molasses pasting the Frenchman’s black beard, it was plain to see he’d been punishing the whiskey that morning. But as liquored up as he might be, the brazen Chouinard carried no rifle, had no pistol in sight.
“He ain’t armed,” Carson said.
Meek shook his head. “You can’t count on that.”
Ripping the big smoothbore from his belt so suddenly, it caused Chouinard to freeze nervously, Kit returned the weapon to Bass before he took a single step forward, empty-handed. “Here’s one American what’s ready to have you try chewing on me, Shunar! Look around you: Bridger’s brigade is full of men what’d thrash you good, but you’ve got ’em buffaloed. Ain’t got me fooled! By God, I may be the smallest one in this camp, but I’m gonna make you choke!”
Throwing his head back so far his tonsils showed, the St. Louis Frenchman howled with an evil laughter lusty enough that it had to make his throat raw. With a few more long strides he stopped again less than ten feet from Carson.
“You make me to laugh good, leetle Amereecan bird,” Chouinard growled. “Thees is good to laugh with your leetle bird chirping.”
“Don’t figger I said nothing wuth you laughin’ for,” Carson snapped.
The giant lost his sickly grin. “These Frenchmen here, no fun to flog no more. Now I come to crunch me Amereecans.”
Carson demanded, “What you want with an American?”
Inside his black beard Chouinard wore that same mad grin he had on his face yesterday afternoon as he mauled the four voyageurs. Pointing at the nearby brush, he snarled, “I go to trees, there. I get switch. I bring it back and switch all you Amereecans!”
“I’m standing right here. You don’t see me running, you yellow-backed bastard,” Carson rasped, his voice growing quieter each time he spoke. “Go fetch your switch and try to switch me.”
“Y-you?” Chouinard sputtered, turning left and right as his followers started to laugh with him. “B-but you are so small! Make me laugh to switch Amereecan so small!”
“I ain’t gonna take that talk from no goddamned Frenchman!” Carson bellowed, his voice grown loud once more. “There’s more’n two hunnert Americans in this camp, and any man of ’em can take your switch from you and shove it right down your goddamned throat.”
“Ho, ho!” Chouinard roared, covering his mouth as he laughed.
“Take your words back or I’ll shove ’em down your throat too!”
That only made the Frenchman laugh all the louder. “Sounds like leetle fly buzzing ’round Chouinard! Leetle fly says he stick my switch down my throat!”
“That’s right, I’m the smallest there is,” Carson declared, “but even I can brass-tack a coward like you.”
Glaring steely-eyed again, the Frenchman snorted his curse, “Enfant d’garce! I grind your bones first—let all these other peegs watch—then I see if more Amereecan peegs fight Chouinard! Moi! I beeg bull of thees lick.”
“When you gonna stop talking and go fetch your gun, Shunar?” Carson demanded.
“Gun?” the giant echoed, slowly pulling his big butcher knife from its scabbard at his side. “Sacre bleu! I like to cut when I keel.”
“You say ’nother goddamned word about crunching bones or stomping an American,” Kit warned, “I’ll blow a hole in your head, then take that goddamned knife of yours and rip your guts out with it right here and now! Leave them guts for the birds to peck over while you’re sucking your last breath!”
“I step on you like leetle bug,” the Frenchman boasted, stomping one moccasin into the trampled grass, grinding his heel into the dirt.
Carson rocked forward on the balls of his feet and hunched his shoulders menacingly. “All you can do is talk? Draw your goddamned knife, pork eater! For days now you been getting likkered up and bullying this hull camp—but now you’ve rubbed up again’ a real fighting rooster ’stead of some corn cracker’s barnyard pullet!”
For a moment Chouinard’s hand flexed and relaxed, flexed and relaxed around his knife handle.
Bass roared, “Gut ’im, Kit. Cut his heart out.”
His nostrils flaring, Carson growled at the towering Frenchman, “You’re big bull of this wallow?”
“I beeg bull of—”
“Shit!” Carson cut him off. “You ain’t much of a man, Shunar. Cain’t even take no horsehair belt off no li’l gal! You ain’t no bull no more! G’won and pull your knife so I can leave your guts out to dry for the
jays!”
Chouinard drew his shoulders back, taking in a long breath as his chertlike eyes slowly ran across the crowd behind Carson. Only when he had done that did he peer down the short American’s frame before crawling back up to glare at Carson’s face. That look of undisguised contempt was suddenly replaced by a grin.
“No fight now, Keet,” he said almost apologetically. “I like your sponk. Maybe we be friends, ami? Friends, n’c’est pa?”
To Bass’s surprise the Frenchman turned on his heel without uttering another word and brutally shoved some of his followers aside as he stomped away.
Struck dumb at the suddenness of the giant’s retreat, Scratch listened as a smattering of laughter began among the Americans. In a heartbeat more than a hundred men were guffawing as loudly as they could, hooting and catcalling after the Frenchman and his embarrassed followers who scrambled to catch up to Chouinard in his retreat.
“Why, if that hoss don’t take the circle, Kit!” Scratch marveled as they watched the giant’s back grow smaller. “The bastard was just about to wade into you till you spoke your piece ’bout that ’Rapaho gal.”
Meek asked, “Figger that’s what made him run off with his tail ’twixt his legs?”
“No matter—he’s gone now,” Bridger announced. “Let’s have us a drink for that bastard showing us the white feather!”
“Dunno, but something tells me this ain’t over, Gabe,” Bass warned, sensing that gnawing in his belly about the suddenness of the giant’s backstepping once the squaw was mentioned. He turned to Kit, saying, “Best you watch your back.”
But Bridger and Meek jointly yoked their arms over the shorter man’s shoulders and cheerily dragged Carson off toward the whiskey canopy.
“There’s other gals you can poke,” Joe declared.
Newell caught up with them. “Allays other squars, Kit!”
Wagging his head, a bewildered Titus Bass sauntered back to the awnings where the trade goods lay, sensing that nothing had been settled between the two. Chouinard’s attack on Grass Singing had served to irritate a wound that had been opened and kept oozing for some five long weeks while the Bridger and Drips brigades sat on their thumbs, impatiently waiting for the long-overdue supply caravan to reach the mouth of New Fork.
The camps already sat atop a powder keg of emotion.
During those long days of waiting, rumors had begun to circulate that Sublette and Campbell had indeed given up the mountain trade in an agreement with Astor’s successors in St. Louis. Another story confirmed that the partners were even selling the fort they had built on the North Platte last summer to the new firm of Fitzpatrick and Fontenelle—quitting the fur trade completely to become landed gentry and mercantilists back in St. Louis.
First it was General William H. Ashley who had pulled out after he made his fortune, and now Sublette and Campbell appeared poised to do the same. Could it be, rumor had it, that the two of them were following Astor’s lead: getting out while the getting was good because there was no more money to be made in the mountain beaver trade?
A man had only to look around that sprawling rendezvous camp as they waited through those last days of June, on through the entire month of July and the first week of August, to see that the bales of beaver were small, and few. More and more of the grumblers in the company camps announced their plans to cash in their chips once the caravan arrived. And once Fitzpatrick showed up more than a month late on August 12 with those pack animals swaybacked beneath trade goods, one of Fontenelle’s St. Louis clerks busied himself telling all who would listen a depressing tale that served to thicken the aura of gloom already hanging over that rendezvous of 1835.
“Back home it’s all the talk—a story come upriver from N’orleans ’bout a French duke what was over visiting the Chinee last year,” the wag related to his rapt audiences. “Seems that Frenchie lost his beaver-plug hat over there, and them Chinee didn’t have nary a beaver-plug hat to sell him.”
The clerk went on to describe how the French diplomat had a tall hat specially made for him from the silk of those productive worms, a hat he proudly wore upon his return to Paris where it became all the envy, and the fashion conscious clamored to have one just like it. In droves the best dressed of Europe had begun to abandon their beaver felts and were ordering hats of Chinese silk.
By now, the clerk explained to slack-jawed trappers, this frightening trend was gripping the States. Silk was all the rage.
Any half drunk who cared to give it a thought couldn’t help but reckon what was at that moment being scrawled on the wall: if beaver was no longer in demand, then it stood to reason that beaver men were soon to become an endangered species.
In light of all that disgruntling talk of silk, the groaning about the poor price for plews, and the moaning about the high cost of possibles, it didn’t take all that much mulling over before Scratch decided he wasn’t about to trade off all his pelts to the company then and there. What with the low dollar beaver was bringing, coupled with the exorbitant prices demanded for what trade goods were being offered, he figured instead to hang on to half of his plews he might well end up trading off at that new Fort William raised down on La Ramee’s Fork. By any reckoning that post lay closer than Tullock’s new fort going up at the mouth of the Tongue, and much closer than either Taos to the south or Fort Union in the north.
There sure as hell had to be somewhere a man could squeeze a better dollar out of his pelts.
What with having a family now, why, a man needed to give due consideration to such matters—not as he had done in past summers when he would take what value was given, trade for his possibles and some whiskey at the prices demanded, then disappear for another year.
But the more he cogitated on it now in the shade of those awnings, the angrier it made him, realizing that the fur company, the traders, all of those who acted as middlemen to supply this to, or do that service for, the trappers were lining their palms and stuffing their pockets with fruits harvested through the risks taken by others. Those with the oiliest tongues turned out to be the richest at others’ expense.
And while he had galloped west many years ago hoping to leave that obscene inequity behind, with every summer Bass was coming to realize that the monied minority and their lackeys would always find some way to reach out from the settlements and exploit those who called this wilderness home.
Beaver had to come back, he told himself as he made his final decisions with more hope than horse sense. Beaver just had to come back.
“Run this up and tell me what I owe you,” he instructed the clerk after turning back what he hoped would be more than half of the necessaries and shiny presents he had picked out for his women.
“With all this fur of yours, you’ve got much more credit than these few purchases.”
“I ain’t trading all my furs,” he interrupted the man. “Gonna keep some for—”
“The Frenchman’s coming!”
Bass turned at that warning cry stabbing the hot summer air from beyond the tree line.
“Shunar’s coming!”
More of them took up the call as Titus swung around, his eyes digging, scratching, searching for Carson as he lamented, “Goddamn—there’s gonna be a fight now!”
Once more Bass scanned the trees, finding the giant just emerging a few hundred yards off on horseback. Even at this distance he could make out the shape of the firearm Chouinard had braced atop his right thigh as his horse loped toward the trading canopies.
At the sound of footsteps and loud voices Scratch turned, finding Carson hurrying past, out of the shade and shadow, to stop in the intense light as clouds continued to scud toward the sun. Behind the Frenchman came a growing crowd of the curious. The shelters poked back in the brush and trees now began to spew many more white men as well as Indians who had been visiting the trapper camps.
“Leetle Amereecan!”
Even at this distance they could all hear the bite of Chouinard’s voice in the dry, hot air.
“Get my horse, Doc,” Carson ordered without turning.
While Newell hurried away, Bass stopped behind the short man, offering his weapon once more. “You want my pistol?”
Carson turned slightly, patted the butt of the big pistol he had stuffed into his belt this day. “Got mine, Scratch.”
Fifty yards away now, Chouinard shook the rifle overhead. “I keel you Amereecan! The squaw—she is mine!”
Turning suddenly, Carson snagged a handful of Bridger’s shirt. “Gabe, if’n this don’t turn out … promise me you’ll take my ponies, my plunder, over to that ’Rapaho camp.”
“What the hell for—”
“Promise me,” Kit begged. “Give it all to the ol’ man and try to tell him I done what I could to kill this bastard.”
“He ain’t gonna kill you.”
“Gimme your word, Jim,” Carson pleaded. “Tell him all white men ain’t lyin’, thievin’, snake-tongued bastards.”
“Awright,” Bridger agreed reluctantly.
“Keep what you want from my possibles,” Kit instructed. “It’s your’n, friend.”
With a snort from its nostrils, the horse was led up, and Newell quickly passed the reins over its ears as Carson leaped to the saddle. He yanked on the reins, and the animal lunged back against some of the growing crowd.
“Watch his eyes!” Bass shouted above the tumult.
“Scratch is right!” Bridger echoed. “The bastard’s tricky, so watch his eyes.”
Thin-lipped with determination, Carson nodded. “Them eyes 11 tell me when he’s gonna shoot.”
“Send ’im to hell, Kit!” Meek bellowed as Carson spun the nervous horse around and shot through the crowd.
Bass growled, “Make meat out of the nigger!”
The gathering throng had grown noisy as their numbers swelled. But the moment Carson burst into the meadow atop his horse, an even louder call burst from more than half-a-thousand throats.
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