Crack in the Sky tb-3

by Terry C. Johnston

  He turned to the stranger. “You know him?”

  “Sure sounds like Beckwith. He was half-Negra, if’n that’s what you’re trying to get at with the talk of his mama being a slave.”

  “Jim Beckwith, that’s him,” Titus replied, remembering all the more now. “So what become of him? He off north with Davy Jackson’s outfit?”

  The meat carver shrugged. “No. Beckwith signed off the books with Campbell middle of the winter last. Decided to go out on his own and live with the Crow.”

  Scratch asked, “Why’d a man like him wanna go off and live with them Crow ’stead of staying with his own kind?”

  The new arrival looked at Bass. “Beckwith said he figgered them Crow was closer to his own kind than we white folk was.”

  “Seems that last fall some of us boys played a joke on him, figgering to have us a hoot making them Crow think Beckwith was one of their own what was stole from ’em when he was just a child,” said the coffee maker.

  The meat carver chimed up, “Don’t you know Beckwith even had him a mole on his eyelid, just like a li’l child what was stole from them Crow years back! So when we told them Crow that Beckwith was their own kin, why—one of them ol’ squaws spotted that mole!”

  “And she was dead sartin Beckwith was her long, lost boy come back home to roost once more!” roared the coffee maker, slapping his knee.

  “Beckwith figgers to be something big on a stick with them Crow now,” explained the new arrival at the fire.

  The round-faced meat carver said, “Could be you ’member some others, eh?”

  Staring into the smoky fire, Titus wagged his head and grumbled, “’Cept for them friends of mine what ride with Jack Hatcher, ain’t a man around I know anymore.”

  15

  Near everyone he knew was gone. Hatcher had said that’s what become of most of them what ventured out to the far mountains.

  Some time ago Jack declared theirs was the sort of man who discovered they wasn’t cut out for what it took to make a life for themselves out here … so they skeedaddled back east. If they were lucky enough to keep their hair until they fled, like Daniel Potts. Bass figured there was a lot of men who had no business being out here, men who hadn’t been fortunate enough to get back east before their luck ran out.

  Even Jim Beckwith—giving up on the mountain trade and throwing in with them Crow. Much as he liked Bird in Ground’s people, Titus couldn’t imagine himself staying on as a full-time member of the tribe. It was getting to be all he could do to stay on as a member of Jack Hatcher’s little brigade of free trappers.

  Maybeso he just wasn’t the joiner sort. Perhaps by the time winter arrived, he might decide to go his own way, see how his stick would float all on his lonesome. Maybe he’d be able to rendezvous with Mad Jack’s men every summer. Leastwise, it sure didn’t seem none of them were the kind to give up and skedaddle back east like Potts, not the sort to turn over and go to the blanket like Beckwith done. Hatcher’s bunch was cast-iron, double-riveted beaver trapper, all the way to the muzzle, by damned.

  But he suddenly remembered Kinkead and Rowland. Both of them Hatcher’s men, both of them the hardy, hang-on sort who wouldn’t turn around for the backtrail. Yet they had given up the mountains in exchange for a life among the inhabitants of a foreign people in a faraway Mexican village.

  For every man who ventured west beyond the Missouri, perhaps there did indeed come a time when that man had filled his life with all the mountain peaks and ribbons of valleys, with all the sparkling beaver streams and snowy, untrammeled meadows that his soul could contain. Perhaps he realized his kind needed something more that only the settlements could offer: something that only women and crowds, buildings, clutter, and closed-in skies could give him.

  But damn the settlements while there was still beaver in the mountains!

  Damn them white women and their whiny ways, getting a man all bumfoozled the way they could so a man didn’t know fat cow from poor bull and damn well didn’t even care a cuss!

  And damn them all them tight places where folks back east chose to live, crawling all over themselves with a racket of wagons and carriages and surreys too, shoving down narrow streets, squeezed in by buildings so tall a man was hard-pressed to see all the sky a man was made to see.

  Not to mention the smell of such places where folks lingered far too long!

  Not that he wasn’t glad most folks were content to live that way, satisfied to stay back east in their settlements and towns and big, sprawling cities. Better for them that they kept themselves back there beyond the rolling prairies where the buffalo ruled. And damn well better for men like Titus Bass that the crowds were so content to huddle together back east rather than come swarming out here.

  Bringing along their white women with those harsh stares they shot a man just about every time he got set to have himself some fun. On their coattails came the constables and preachers with their Bibles too. Raising jails and schools and churches right alongside one another … till the crush of them drove near all the joy right on out of life.

  Always seemed that in the wake of wagons came white women. Where a wheel could roll, some high-necked, glary-eyed white gal was bound to show up before a man really had himself a chance to snort and prance. Wagons and white women—why, they’d be the ruin of the West!

  This wasn’t no land fit for the likes of them, he thought. This was a man’s country, a man’s country fit only for a certain type of man, at that. Now that land back east, all closed in with little bumps of hills and all the crush of trees … now, that was a woman’s country if ever there was one.

  But out here where the hills had grown on up into huge, hoary chains of impenetrable granite and ice and mazelike passes … this was a man’s country, by the everlasting! Back there the country was all closed in, and a person damn well couldn’t see very far: just the way things ought to be in a land where little minds reigned.

  Not here! Where only a man with a heart big enough, with a soul mighty enough, could expect to take it all in. From horizon, to horizon, to horizon and back again under an endless blue dome.

  He could only hope that Bridger would be back. Likely Jim was the sort to stay on out here, no matter what. Maybe a man like him had to return east just once in his life after he had eventually discovered where his heart was truly at peace. To return east so he could put things to rest with his family, to settle with all that was so he could get on with living all that was to be. Perhaps Bridger had him just that sort of healing and burying the past to accomplish … and then he’d be back.

  Titus hoped, figuring that the young fella was the sort who could no longer live back in the States. After all, it seemed Bridger was the sort to take life on its own terms, the sort to take each day by the horns, the kind who could build himself a bullboat, wave fare-thee-wells to his friends, and take off floating downstream into an adventure and a salty lake of such great proportions that few believed him when he finally returned with his tall tales of a land never before touched by the eyes of a white man.

  Bridger would be back, he told himself. While others ran from the danger and the risk and the challenge, men like Jim Bridger and Titus Bass would run to embrace the danger and the risk and the challenge each new day brought them with the rising of the sun.

  Of a sudden in his reverie there intruded a clamor of activity as company men burst into the groves where they had tied up their blanket and willow-branch bowers, scooping up their saddles and bridles with an excited chatter.

  “What’s going on?” Titus asked as he got to his feet at the shady base of the cottonwood where he had been watching the lazy passing of the Popo Agie.

  All around him more and more of the company men were hurrying to saddle up their mounts, the first beginning to sweep up their loaded rifles and pistols.

  Should he seize his weapons?

  Someone had to answer him—“Injuns?”

  But before it appeared any of them had heard him, Campbell’s men we
re whooping at the top of their lungs, gushing in unbounded joy.

  Finally one of the brigade stopped long enough to blurt out to the free trapper, “God-bless-it—the trader’s come in!”

  “Trader?”

  Trembling with excitement, the skinny whiffet of a man whirled and shot out his arm toward the red-rimmed southeastern hills that framed this verdant, emerald valley. “Sublette’s train comin’ in!”

  Squinting into the resplendent midsummer’s light, Bass stepped to the edge of the shade and stared expectantly at the upvault of those crimson bluffs where a long file of horsemen and burdened mules were fanning out across the skyline, backlit by the late-morning sun. More than fifty riders were up there now, all gawking down at the valley below them. And there had to be at least three times that many pack animals, every last one of them reluctant to hurry before their eager masters. Despite the distance, Scratch could almost hear the newcomers barking and bawling at their contrary charges.

  A gray mushroom puffed from the end of a distant rifle, a tiny blot against the summer’s blue—a heart’s throb later came the low boom of that rifle held aloft by the pack train’s leader.

  Good thing, too, that was. Out here in this country a man never rode up silently on a camp. Prudence dictated that you always announce your arrival, and even discharge your weapon to show peaceful intentions. That gunshot only confirmed Bass’s fervent hope.

  “Trader!” he screeched wildly as his feet lurched into motion beneath him, almost as if they were in that much more of a hurry to be off announcing the news to Hatcher’s outfit.

  But Jack and the rest were already caught up in a flurry of saddling and mounting by the time he reached them.

  “Comin’ to find you!” Elbridge Gray shouted as Bass sprinted up through the trees. Red-faced, the big-nosed trapper tugged on the reins to his own horse with one hand, which also held his rifle, while in the other he gripped the reins to Scratch’s saddle mount.

  “Thankee, Elbridge!”

  Gray turned and vaulted into the saddle, kicked his toes into the huge cottonwood stirrups. “Get high behind, Scratch! That’s Billy Sublette and he’s bringing likker to ronnyvoo!”

  “Likker, Titus Bass!” echoed Hatcher himself as he goaded his horse past them at a trot, then kicked it in the ribs the instant he reached the edge of the meadow. The pony was off like a shot.

  By the time Bass swept the rifle from his blanket and stuffed a foot into a stirrup, swinging his horse around, the rest were already on their way across the grassy flat, a wide fan of company trappers and free men gradually streaming together toward that grassy point where the first of those arriving riders were making their way down a gentle slope slanting off those far red hills.

  Those dark horses and indistinguishable riders were no more than five hundred yards away now as the last of the pack animals lumbered off the top of the ridge, spilling toward the valley.

  “Likker!” Scratch cried as he kicked the horse into a gallop.

  “Likker!” he bellowed when he caught up with the rest of Hatcher’s bunch.

  “Likker!” was the cry echoed by another two dozen free trappers and nearly the whole of the Campbell brigade.

  At four hundred yards Titus could recognize how the nervous greenhorns were bringing up their weapons, waving rifles in the air, shouting at one another.

  “Goddamn pilgrims!” Bass growled as he kicked the horse in the flanks again, urging even more speed from it so he wouldn’t be among the last to greet the supply train.

  Past three hundred yards the dry-throated riders raced at a full gallop, that wide fan narrowing as the frantic horsemen galloped full tilt, their wide hat brims whipped back by the run, some hats whipped right off their heads, careening back into the belly-high grass.

  At Bass’s left a trapper was shouting, “Get ready to give ’em a salute!”

  Most already had their rifles in the air by the time those in the lead sprinted past 250 yards.

  “Give them pork eaters a mountain how-do!” a voice called out somewhere in that cluster where Bass found himself as the trappers funneled closer and closer together with every yard.

  Horses’ nostrils flared as big as their frightened eyes, straining at the bits and hackamores, lunging forward across the uneven ground at a maddening gallop.

  At two hundred yards the rider at Bass’s elbow shouted, “Whiskey for my whistle!”

  That journey to the last hundred yards took no more than a matter of heartbeats…. Then he could see their faces.

  The pilgrims’ eyes and mouths grew as wide and gaping as were the eyes and nostrils of the trappers’ horses. And those leaders of that pack train were already standing in the stirrups, shouting something to the first horsemen racing their way. They raised their long rifles into the air and fired: mushroom puffs of smoke immediately followed by the dull echo of a half-dozen scattered booms carried off on the summer breeze.

  Immediately echoed by a gunfire greeting from a handful of the charging riders … then another ten … and now two dozen more. Gray smoke hung in tattered shreds just above Scratch’s head as he raced on.

  The headman coming down off the slope toward them was warwhooping and waving his rifle like a fiend. Suddenly he reined up in a flurry of dust and leaped to the ground, his horse wheeling away in the excitement. Snatching the broad-brimmed felt hat from his head, he started sprinting on foot toward the oncoming riders.

  One of those horsemen just ahead of Bass yanked back on his reins, his horse’s head twisted to the side as it stiff-legged to a halt and the rider lunged to the ground, nearly spilled, then was up and finding his gait, running those last few steps until he and the leader of the pack train met one another with a violent collision, banging into one another, then dancing round and round as they pounded on each other. As Scratch shot on by, beginning to rein back his own horse, he recognized Robert Campbell as one of the two. Then, as the pair continued their spin, he recognized Bill Sublette—the trapper chief called Cut Face by Washakie’s Shoshone, whom Sublette had helped fight against the Blackfoot back to the summer of 1826.

  All around him now the free trappers were popping their hands against their open mouths, whoo-whooing and hoo-hooing like attacking savages, not slowing in the slightest as they exploded through the ranks of the pack train—bawling mules, rearing horses, and frightened men fresh from the settlements, all of them gone white-faced and gulping at the long-haired, buckskinned, half-naked mountain men wheeling round and round the long train as if they were attacking their quarry.

  On all sides more guns went off. Puffs of gray clouds hovered in the hot air, barely dissipating on the gentle breeze as old hands shrieked their war cries and Sublette’s greenhorns grumbled and cursed, fighting their frightened, balky mules. More and more of the company men breathlessly slowed their attack, reining up and leaning off their horses to shake hands, calling out their greetings, some even managing to hug a newcomer here or there in the ragged procession.

  As he reined about, Bass saw that Campbell and the pack-train leader were remounted and loping on toward the brigade encampment, where a few well-browned lodges bordered a small glade.

  By then more than three dozen Indians had splashed across the Popo Agie—warriors, women, and naked brown children, along with half a hundred barking, baying half-wild dogs who weaved between the legs of man and horse alike, adding their voices to the excitement as Campbell and Sublette slid to the ground, the reins to their horses taken by one of the company men who led the animals away.

  “By damn, it’s Billy Sublette his own self!” Hatcher roared as he reined his horse from a gallop to a walk beside Titus.

  “Any man know if he brung likker this year?”

  Jack’s head bobbed like a young child’s on Christmas morning. “Some of them greenhorns say Sublette brung him some likker all the way from the States!”

  “Damn if I could ever feel this dry again!” Scratch bellowed.

  Hatcher himself dragged a
forearm across his lower face. “Let’s get these here horses tied off, then get back afore that trader opens up his packs!”

  But tapping those whiskey kegs wasn’t the first item of business.

  As Hatcher’s men sprinted back through the trees toward Campbell’s lodge and that scattering of bowers tied here and there among the saplings, those shelters made from oiled Russian sheeting or thick Indian trade blankets, the last of the pack train reached the company camp. As the newcomers dismounted, Sublette ordered them off in one direction or another. Back in the trees the unloading of the first mules began, while at three other points to the north, east, and south more divisions were made, particular bundles dropped at each location according to the trader’s instructions.

  Only then did William Sublette have one of his clerks unlash the two leather trunks from the packsaddle atop a weathered old mule the booshway kept close at hand. With both of those three-strap trunks resting at his feet, the trader knelt to unbuckle the straps across the first chest.

  Quickly flinging back the top and reaching inside, Sublette said, “Bob—get that other’n open and we’ll give out the mail.”

  The moment Campbell crouched over the second trunk, the anxious crowd of boisterous men began to shove close.

  “Get back! Get back, there!” Sublette growled at his eager employees. “You’ll all get mail if’n you got mail comin’!”

  “You heard the man!” hollered a young, clean-shaven trapper as he shouldered his way toward the center of the mass. “You damn well waited more’n a year for mail—you niggers can wait a li’l more!”

  Damn, if that wasn’t Bridger himself!

  “Jim!” Bass hollered, lunging toward the younger man known among his brigades as the “little booshway.”

  He hadn’t given up on the mountains!

  Bridger turned, his eyes squinting in the bright light, giving measure to the onrushing trapper.

  “Titus Bass!” hollered Scratch as he held out his hand and came to a stop. “You ’member me from twenty-six?”