Jim said slowly, “I don’t reckon your mistresses would really hold that against you.”
Mathilda’s mouth pinched tight. “That’s a terrible thing to say.”
He guessed it was, but it was not said in anger. His sisters had a position in society, a very good one. They were of the aristocracy, almost as far above the black field hands as their employers. They were house servants, body servants. They were light-skinned and well-mannered, they were respectable, and they were not slaves. They were proud of themselves. Jim understood how they must feel about him, and he did not resent it. He pitied them, immensely. Suddenly he knew that for him everything, even the loss of Cherry, had been worth it. He knew what it was to live free. They never would. But that was not why he pitied them. It was because they would never feel the lack of it.
“Even when you were a little boy,” Mathilda was saying, “you were a bad one. She spoiled you, Ma did, because you were a boy and you looked like him.”
“I’ll try not to shame you,” Jim said. “Good-bye.” He left them secure behind their lace curtains.
But now the city smelled hot and evil and the streets were like places of ambush.
Lynched. You’ll get yourself lynched, Jim Beckwourth. Let them try it. Let them see what happens when they put their hands on a Crow chief.
He went to the offices of the Western Division of the American Fur Company and asked to see Mr. Chouteau. When he came out again he found Dave Richards waiting for him.
“Don’t look so surprised,” Rich said.
“You have the damndest way of turning up.”
“I ain’t the only one knows you’re here. You’ve got a mighty lot of people that don’t like you, and some of ’em happen to be in town. They knew you were back as soon as you stepped onto the wharf.” He looked Jim up and down. “You ain’t exactly hard to notice.”
Jim grinned. “How’d you know where to find me?”
“How do I know beaver’ll come to bait? And anyways, where else is there for a trapper to go?”
Jim grunted. Things had changed, all right. The King of the Missouri, the mighty McKenzie, had got into trouble over a still he was running to get around the liquor law that everybody else was getting around. He was out. John Jacob Astor had sold his interests to Pratte and Chouteau. He was out. The Rocky Mountain Fur Company had foundered. It was out. Bill Sublette had capitulated to the enemy. So had Fitz and Bridger, who were now on the American Fur Company’s payroll. And as Rich said, where else was a trapper going to go? North of the Platte, anyway. South of it, from the Arkansas to Santa Fe, it was St. Vrain and the Bents who were almighty. There were some small outfits still grimly hanging on in the Rockies, but Jim felt no desire to tie up with them. They were likely to die before you could turn in your catch, and then you had to let your furs go for whatever the company or some other competitor was minded to give you.
“How’d you make out?” Rich asked.
“If I go back to the Crow they’ll be happy to go on paying me.”
“But you ain’t going back?”
“Not now, anyway. Not for a while.”
Rich, with rare delicacy, let it rest at that.
“They don’t need another booshway,” Jim said, “but they’ll be happy to have me on as an ordinary trapper. Usual deal, their outfit against my catch. But I can buy my own outfit. I don’t know.” His eyes roved restlessly along the muddy street where they stood. “Maybe I don’t want to do anything right now. Maybe I just want to raise a little hell.”
That’s what all the trappers came to town for, to raise hell. And he had been longer in the wilds than any of them. He had it coming.
Rich said, “Before any of that gets started, Fitz wants to see you.”
“Is he here?”
“Yeah. Fittin’ out. He seemed real fired up about talking to you.”
“All right,” Jim said. “Let’s go.”
They walked side by side as they had walked here once before. And Jim was glad of Rich.
They found Fitz buying mules. He took Rich and Jim aside where they could hear themselves talk over the hee-hawing and the clatter. Jim started to speak and Fitz stopped him.
“Give me my say, Jim. Don’t get me riled before I start.” He faced Jim squarely. “I was riled there on the Big Horn, and plenty. I wrote about it, to General Ashley and Milton Sublette, and word got spread around. But that’s all. And if I’ve got a score to settle with a man I don’t have to do it with a lynching party. I want that understood.”
“Lynching party?”
“I understand there’s one out looking for you.”
Jim said, “Hell. I ain’t overfond of you, Fitz, but I know that isn’t your style.”
“I ain’t overfond of you, either,” Fitz admitted. “But we shared a lot of campfires together and I like these polecats a lot less than I do you. Watch out for ’em.”
Jim remembered Ginger Beard and Old Joe, and the friend on Tongue River. There had been others.
“Whisky traders.”
“Lice,” Fitz said. “Trouble was, you weren’t really an Indian. If you were, they might have been sore but they wouldn’t have taken it personal.”
“I know,” said Jim. “They’re white folks.”
Rich sighed. “I warned you, Jim. You didn’t have to bust their kegs. Most of all you didn’t have to talk about lifting hair. You’d be surprised at the kind of a reputation you’ve got.”
Jim shrugged. He said to Fitz, “You still think you’ve got a score to settle with me?”
“You weren’t square with me, Jim. I know what went on, even if nobody would admit it.”
“You weren’t square with me, either. What were you going to do with all that whisky and trade goods—swap ’em to the beaver for their skins?”
Fitz glowered at him. “I’d have done better if I’d tried it that way.”
They both laughed.
“What the hell,” Fitz said, “we’re all working for the enemy now. I’m heading back out in three days. If you’re still alive and tired of the city, I can always use a man like you to help kick the fat off the pork-eaters’ bottoms.”
He went back to his mules.
Jim said, “I meant to ask him what Captain Stewart did.”
“He was mad,” Rich said. “Real mad. He screamed like a wounded buffalo. A kind of an important man, a baronet, whatever that is, and not used to being rough-handled that way.”
“Too bad about him.”
“He ain’t a bad sort at all. Real man, in spite of his ways. If you was two other people you’d get along fine.”
They walked away from the mulepens. Carts and wagons creaked and jangled through the streets, their big wheels walloping the rutted mud into new and worse confusion. People trotted busily along or lounged idly in doorways. Now and again heads turned to watch the Crow chief go by. Jim felt cold between his shoulders.
Rich said, “I got an extra horse.”
They walked a while.
“Don’t suppose,” Rich said, “you’d consider getting onto him and riding away?”
“No.”
“A sensible man would call that being pretty smart. I suppose you’d call it running.”
“I got a right to be here,” Jim said.
Rich looked up into Jim’s face. In Crow he said, “He is a Crazy Dog, he wants to die.” In English he added, “Just plain crazy.”
They walked. Dusk thickened in the alleys and around the clustered rooftops. The river showed a pale glimmer of yellow that faded into gray.
“It’s the waiting I don’t like,” said Rich in a high, complaining voice. “Gets me all fidgety. Gives me the bloat and the heartburn. Let’s make it easy for ’em to find you, and we can sit and get drunk a little while we wait.”
They went into the quarter that was called Vide Poche, the Empty Pocket, because that was where the trappers went to empty theirs just as fast as they could, with friendly barkeeps and friendlier girls to help them do it. A
nd it never occurred to Jim to tell Rich that he didn’t have to get mixed up in this. He figured Rich knew that. He figured Rich had sought him out of his own free will. He figured to talk about it later sometime, if they both lived.
They went into a cramped little place with low ceilings and battered walls. There was a powerful smell of alcohol, sweat, dirty wool, and dirty leather. Jim coughed.
“Everybody says Indians smell so bad,” he muttered. “Hell, the Crow take a bath every morning even when they have to break holes in the ice to do it. Wonder how long it’s been since these boys washed?”
“Since the last time they fell in a creek,” said Rich affably. “Just like it always was, remember?”
Jim laughed. The other seven or eight men in the place looked at them, especially at Jim in his Indian shirt and his fine blue blanket with the red edging, but nobody questioned him. The Vide Poche was used to ’breeds and all odd sorts of wild humanity. Rich got whisky from the bar. They sat down at one of the rough tables. They drank slowly. And they waited.
Men drifted in and out. Trappers in buckskins black with the grease and blood of many butcherings, the smoke of many campfires. Mule skinners and drovers from the Santa Fe trade, with a look of sun and dust about them and a special profanity all their own. There was a lot of talk. Taos, Bent’s Fort, Bayou Salade, Fort Union, Fort Nonsense, who had been where, seen whom, done what. After a little while Jim became aware that one of the men sitting nearby was watching him with a heavy, fixed stare.
He was by himself. He looked as though he had been drinking for a year, and would be capable of drinking for another before he fell over. He was a powerful, thick-shouldered man with a crop of curly dark hair already gray-shot, though he was fairly young. He wore a filthy, beautifully made hunting shirt that had cost some squaw many hours of patient work. He watched Jim, and watched him, and Jim’s belly tightened with the approach of trouble. The big man reminded him of a buffalo bull with his big hairy head sunk and snorting just before the charge.
Rich said, apropos of nothing in particular, “Jim, why do you reckon Astor sold out?”
“Maybe he got tired counting his money,” Jim said, not caring.
Rich said darkly, “Astor’s a smart man. And when a smart man gets hold of everything he wants and then turns around and sells it, there’s only one reason. He figures he’s had the best of it.”
The big man leaned over his table and pointed at Jim’s shirt with the quill embroidery.
“Crow?”
Jim nodded.
“Crow!” He looked Jim in the eye. “You don’t talk like an Indian.”
“I was with them a long time.” A lifetime, Jim thought. Time you don’t measure in years. He stabbed his finger at the big man’s breast. “What’s that, Bannock?” The contemptuous way the other had said “Crow!” annoyed Jim, and he was being deliberately insulting. The Bannocks were considered not very much above the Diggers.
“Ute,” the man said. He sneered. “Crow. Horse thieves.”
Jim asked, “When did the Utes start going to church?”
“Church? You mistake me, brother. The Utes are horse thieves. The Crow just like to think they are.”
“Is that right.”
“How many horses do your piddling little Crow raids take? Maybe five or six. Maybe twenty. Maybe even a whole forty or fifty, if you’re lucky.” He breathed in Jim’s face. “My Utes think they’ve had a bad day if they only lifted four hundred.”
He let that sink in. Then he added, “Utes can’t only out-steal the Crow, they can outfight ’em, too.”
“Well, now,” Jim said, “I can’t remember any of ’em coming north to prove it.”
A great wide smile spread over the big man’s face. “Now you’ve done it, brother,” he sighed. “It do beat hell how a man can’t sit peaceful in a room drinking without some bastard comes along and starts a fight.”
Beaming, he started to rise.
Rich said, “I’m sorry, stranger, but you’ll have to wait your turn.” He touched Jim’s arm.
Ginger Beard stood in the doorway.
He looked at Jim, showing his big broken teeth. “There’s the Crow,” he said. Behind him the doorway was crowded with men. Jim recognized Old Joe with the cold hard eye, and a couple more he had had run-ins with, including Old Joe’s friend from Tongue River. The rest of them he didn’t know, but he was willing to bet that not one of them had ever been more than ten miles west of St. Louis. They looked as though they made their living in dark alleys, and went on lynching parties for pleasure. He counted nine men in all, and three of them had ropes. One of these laughed and said, “A real black crow!”
Rich said querulously, “Goddern it, Jim, why didn’t you lift their hair and be done with it, ’stead of just talking? Won’t you ever learn to either do a thing right or don’t bring it up at all!”
The bartender leaned over the bar and spoke to Old Joe. “Go take your trouble someplace else. I don’t want it in here.”
Old Joe said quietly, “We got business with that black son-of-a-bitch, nobody else. But we got rope enough for anybody that asks for it.”
The little mob moved into the room, looking ugly. Old Joe swept his cold fishy gaze around, from the bartender to the handful of trappers and drovers. In the uneasy silence Jim got out of his chair and stood beside it, letting the blanket drop from his shoulders.
“Anybody,” said Old Joe.
The trappers and drovers sat quiet, not particularly afraid of the mob but not sure whether they wanted to fight right then, about something they had nothing to do with, and on the whole deciding they didn’t. But the big drunken man finished getting up, with a lurch and a hop, and out of the comer of his eye Jim saw that he had a peg leg. He said to Old Joe in an aggrieved voice, “I tell you, brother, I don’t like my plans upset. This fella here just started a private fight with me—”
“We’ll take care of it for you,” said Old Joe, and moved on.
Ginger Beard let go a yell. He capered in front of Jim. “Where are your warriors, Crow? Where are your goddam lousy thieving bucks? Who have you got to hide behind now?”
Jim threw his chair. It caught Ginger Beard on his hastily upflung hands and bore them back, smashing into his face. He went down howling. Jim sprang onto the table. He drew his scalping knife, gave the Crow war whoop, and launched himself straight at Old Joe.
And he could almost have laughed at the expression on Old Joe’s face. He had expected Jim to run, or beg, or cry. They all had. It was funny, how astonished they were that he would fight. Lynchings were not supposed to go this way at all.
He bore Old Joe down but he did not get the knife into him. Old Joe had hold of his wrist, and while they were rolling and grunting on the floor the others were using their boots and their fists on Jim. They grabbed him and tried to drag him off, to pull him away into the street. Rich climbed onto the bar, carrying his rifle with the heavy barrel. Muttering and growling, he laid that long length of browned steel across everything he could reach, heads, faces, backs, arms. The bartender ran toward the door bawling for the watch. Somebody tripped him and kicked him under the chin to keep him quiet. Jim got his left hand free and pounded it into Old Joe’s face but the others kept yanking and kicking at him and then he felt the rough rasp of hemp across the side of his neck. He went crazy. He surged up through them ripping and slashing, screaming like a panther, and they drew back, shocked.
Jim charged them.
Rich jumped down off the bar to back him up. The fight swirled around, confused, vicious, and quiet. The men were too full of killing to talk or shout. This was not the kind of fight a man joined into for pleasure, and the drovers and trappers went outside and watched through the window, all except the big man in the Ute shirt who stood where he had in the beginning, watching Jim. He was nodding his head and grinning fiercely. He began to unstrap his wooden leg. It was a good stout heavy one, and well-balanced. He took it off and held it in his hand.
“Hang on, Crow!” he shouted. “Here come the Utes!”
He gave a tremendous whoop and hopped powerfully into the fight, swinging the peg leg like a war club.
Jim, fighting in a blind fury, heard the head bones cracking and sensed that the tide had turned. He was aware now of men trying to get away. He saw them going toward the door and he pursued them. Rich was yelling at him, but he did not pay any attention. The big man roared and pounded the stragglers with his club. And then there was nobody left except the bartender on his hands and knees, shaking his head to clear it, and two men lying on the floor.
Jim turned to Rich. “What did you say?”
Rich wiped blood off his cheek with his sleeve. “Never mind. I was talking sense, and that’s just a waste of time.”
Jim cleaned his knife blade on the shirt of one of the men who lay on the floor. He sheathed it and went stiffly to pick up his blanket. His body ached. He had been cut twice, but not deeply. He threw the blanket around him and said to the big man, “Much obliged. I won’t forget this.”
The big man was strapping on his leg. “Mighty useful weapon,” he said, “and I always got it with me. Whittled it myself. And I done the butchering on myself, too, when everybody else was scared to touch it.” He seemed proud of that. Probably it was the first thing he told anyone he met that didn’t know. “I had me a fight coming, remember? I take it back, Crow—there’s one of you can fight as good as a Ute, anyway.”
The bartender had made it to his feet and was lurching toward the door. Rich watched him sourly.
“He’ll get the watch here pretty quick, and I’d just as soon not wait around for them.” He reached out his foot and nudged the head of the man Jim had cleaned his knife on. It rolled soggily.
“There’s a back way,” said the big man, and stomped out behind the bar, into a dark and narrow alley full of evil smells.
Follow the Free Wind Page 15