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THB FIRST of the avengers to arrive in the Three Forks area was Bear Paws George Meek, a big blond smiling man whom men called Bear Paws for his habit of collecting the claws of bears, chiefly of the grizzly, which he washed in urine and other astringents, and polished with clays and powders and leathers until they were as clean and gleaming as jewels. George was a happy-go-lucky fellow, or seemed to be; he had gentle blue eyes and a broad smile and pleasant words for all men, except the red, whom he despised because they had killed his brother. Under his jolly surface he was a sharp man with a bag full of tricks. He was always smiling—Bi1l said George smiled when he slept; and this seemed likely, for his dreams were usually of deceptions and stratagems and sharp practices, with which he outfoxed those who dealt with him. “I allus try and git the saddle on the right horse,” was his definition of himself. He cut his pants according to his buckskin; he sailed near the wind; and he never waded when he couldn’t see bottom. But he was a convivial cuss who didn’t like to live and trap alone through five cold months, as Zeke and Hank did, and Lost-Skelp, Bill Williams, and Sam Minard. Pore ole Bill, he was dead now, and Windy was writing a poem about him:
He chomped life down jist all the laws of God allow,
leastwise
till now.
They ain’t no longer any sign he’s climbun up the hill.
I spect he’s
had his fill.
He had been found down in the Uintahs, a bullet through his heart and an old Eutaw rifle across his lap. There was two feet of snow on him. George had sometimes spent the winter with Hob Niles (dead now, like Bill), who had shared his skill with hands (they had both carved things from wood), an artist’s love of exquisite detail, and tall lies around a fire. They had both preferred chewing to smoking and had brown beards on which the patches of deeper brown were the stain of tobacco juice.
George had come up from Henry’s River, and a few hours behind him came Tomahawk Jack, as mean a critter as ever scalped an Injun, and one of the best revolver shots in the West. Jack, like Dave Black, another expert with revolvers, was not much larger than Kit Carson, and had that man’s feline instincts and small-man deadliness. If Jack or Dave had ever smiled it had been when looking at the dead face of an enemy. Thirty-five and thirty-eight the year the mountain men met at Three Forks, both were clean-shaven and rather boyish in appearance, and not much good in a fight except with weapons. Jack was almost as skillful a rider as the best of the Crows, and his Crow horse was thought by some to be the fastest horse in the mountains. That, Mick Boone had said, his large homely face cracking in a slow grin, was only because Jack was such a little man. He was bigger than Jack when he was born, Mick said. That, Bill had said, didn’t mean a thing cept he’d allus been a big target.
The next of the mountain men to ride in was said by army men to be one of the three best scouts in the West. That, said the irrepressible Bill, was because McNees saw twice as much as any other man; while one eye scanned the northeast the other scanned the northwest. That he saw equally well with either eye, like a horse, was proved, Bill said, by the fact that he would look at you with either eye; and sometimes like a bird he would look at you with one and if he didn’t like what that eye saw he would look at you with the other. In Roger McNees, half Scot and half German, there was no monkey business—no sense of fun and no tall tales. After he came west fifteen years ago there had been a rumor that he had slain his father and fled, but no man west of the Missouri knew if it was true and no man cared. Three-Finger loved tracking and scouting; it was said that he could stuff both nostrils with sage foliage and still smell out an Indian trail faster than a wolf pup on a rabbit track. The other men had supposed that he would do a little scouting on his way to the rendezvous, and so were not surprised by his reply to Meek’s question, “Do ya know whar the varmints is?”
He knew where they were and he knew how many were in the pack. Did Bear Paws know where the sulphur springs were east of the Big Belts? “Well as my own mother’s face,” said George. “I been thar man an boy a thousan times.” Did he know where the creek was on which Black Harris had hidden from the Blackfeet two days and a night, when they sat so close to him playing roulette that one of them touched him? “Wall, now!” said George. That was the time when Black’s legs wouldn’t work, on leaving the hiding place; for miles he had dragged himself along by his arms. “Allus thought that wuz Broken Hand,” George said. One black eye studied George. Did he know where the Seven Mile Creek was? “Well as I know the mole on top uv my pa’s nose. It had two hairs in it.” Halfway between Seven Mile and the springs you turned west to the Big Belts, and in no time a-tall the camp was plum before you, as plain as the whiskers on a bull buffalo.
“Thet ain’t too fur from here,” George said.
“How many?” asked Jack, scowling.
If the varmints were all in camp there were fifty-eight. One musta had a baby, said George. Sam had killed one. And fifty-eight, doggone it, wooden be three apiece. As the nigger stud said, twarn’t no more than a few minutes’ work.
“See Elk Horns?” asked Dave.
Three-Finger looked at Dave. “Would I count him if I never seen him?”
“Ya mean,” said Dave bitingly, “ya seen his scars.”
“He sees everything,” said George quickly, for the two men were looking at one another.
This evening Lost-Skelp Dan and a dozen others came in. No man, not even the cold McNees or Tomahawk Jack, could look at Dan without feeling a slight chill. It was not that he was a big fellow, six feet two and all muscle and bone, with a girth of eighteen inches around his neck or his flexed biceps. It was not his big skull with neither hair nor hide on it above the ears. It was his eyes. Forty now, he had been a mountain man for nineteen years. How he lost his scalp nobody knew, for not even the snoopy nose of Wind River Bill had been able to smell out the secret. Whoever took the scalp was a greedy cuss: the knife had made the incision where the top part of the ear was fastened to the scalp but instead of pushing the top of the ear down and away the Indian had slashed across it, so that Dan was earmarked and cropped like a steer. His big gleaming skull was all hairless bone except a fringe about two inches wide across the back of his neck. Instead of cutting along the hairline on the forehead the scalper had gone halfway down to the eyes; and now almost straight across and about an inch above the brows Dan had an ugly scar that was like a welt. It seemed to fill with blood when he became angry.
Powder River Charley was speculating that if it was the Blackfeet who had scalped Dan this foray would be for him a special pleasure. Charley liked to tease a little, though he knew that teasing was for Dan like liniment in a raw wound. Dan, Bill had said, had the sense of humor of an old sick bull with a pack of wolves around it. If they all got three apiece, Charlet said, they dotta give Dan the biggest one, for mebbe it could be tanned into a wig for him. Dan at the moment was pulling his pipe. He looked over at Charley, not quickly but like a man who took his time about things. His large pale-blue eyes seemed puffed softly out of his skull, like a toad’s. He looked at Charley, his large strong smooth-shaven face immobile, and George decided at this point that it would be safe for him to come in with a little flight of whimsy, like a jolly sally upon a besieger;and so, rearranging his quid, he said, “Trouble is the red varmint didden leave enough hair so’s we kin match it, an the hair on a man’s belly is never the same color as on his head. I’ll be dogged and gone iffen I kin see how we kin do it.” Bear Paws looked round him, slyly, to see if his jest was setting well.
Dan now turned his cold eyes on George and went on sucking his pipe. Well, one thing you could say about Dan, Sam Minard might have said if he had been here, was that he had avenged himself on his enemies ten or twenty times. Dan had a shack far up the Madison near the headwaters, and the only time Sam had looked into it it had seemed to him that half the walls were covered with Indian scalps. Dan combed the black hair and glossed it up the way he did with beaver pelts, and as G
eorge put it, kept everything nice and purty. Once in a while, when his whole skull itched under mosquito bites, Dan would go forth to get another scalp. He always cut it across the ears and forehead and low on the neck. He was a lone and deadly killer. If Sam had been asked which of all the men he knew might give him buck ager if he had to face him in a fight he might have thought first of Dan.
The next morning there rode into camp the man whom all mountain men would have chosen by private ballot as the ablest of them all. It was not because Sam Minard was the biggest man in the West and physically the most powerful. It was not because he was the deadliest shot—there were many deadlier ones; or the most courageous—there were others more foolhardy; or that he was the coolest when faced with appalling challenge—perhaps no man on earth had nerves of colder steel when confronted by charging grizzly or redman with raised tomahawk than Hank Cady or Kit Carson, Lost-Skelp Dan or Three-Finger McNees. It was not because he was the most successful Indian Eghter; in this, Kit or Dan or Jim Bridger or a dozen others were more than his match any day. It was because he had in ample measure all the traits and skills that made the superlative mountain men. There was none of Jeb Berger in him. Though Windy Bill was a brave man and a superb fighter in a pinch, there was a little of Jeb in him. Though Mick Boone would have faced any man on earth, he always felt gooseilesh when his life depended solely on his nerve.
The men who gathered here—there were twenty-three of them before they rode forth—were probably as daring and able a group of warriors, for their number, as had ever been brought together. Any one of them could be put down for two Indians, most of them for three, and a few of them for four or five. In varying degrees they were all eager for the fight. They all felt competitive, and some of them were afraid they would not get their share of the scalps. A few, like Dan and McNees and Jack, were ambitious to be recognized as the outstanding killer, when it was all over. Others—George, for one, Hobe Isham, a quiet man, for another—felt that they hadn’t the killer talent to be first, and so would be content to do the best they could. A few, like Sam, David Black, and Zeke Campbell, were strategists at heart and killers only secondarily.
McNees said Scarface and his pack were encamped on a small stream against a sheer bluff with a heavy stand of timber on its crest. That was the west side. The prevailing wind when he was there was from that side but the winds in that area were like a woman’s mind and changed for no reason. On the north side and back about fifty yards was dense aspen and spruce. A stream flowed past on the south side. With the men gathered round him, Three-Finger drew on bare earth a map of the area. When he scouted their position they had two sentinels out—one here, one over there, on the northeast and southeast points; and he supposed they had a lookout on the bluff above, though he had seen no sign of one. They had only seven tepees standing; he had assumed that the largest, which stood in the center and
back toward the bluff, was the chief’s.
It was possible that they had moved and would have to be scouted again. Looking up at a lowering sky, he said one hell of a storm was getting its belly full of water; if they could move in under thunder that would be fine.
George at last had been able to divide fifty-eight by twenty-three and now said that some of them would be cheated. There wouldn’t be three apiece, all the way around. There would be three apiece for thirteen of them, two apiece for nine of them, and only one for him. Someone said that Sam dotta have an extree, since it was his huggin party; but someone else said Sam was to have the chief. A third suggested that most of the varmints should be divided equally and the remainder should be extrees, on a free range, for the men who got there first. S am now spoke up and said one of them should be allowed to escape, to carry the glad tidings to the Blackfeet nation; and Dan said that would be fine, if he was scalped first. They would let Dan scalp him, and then give the bugger a fast horse with a cactus under its tail. “Wal1 now,” said George. “Lotta mathmaticians here.”
Some of the men talked about the imminent killing of fifty-seven Indians as if they were about to go on a buffalo hunt. Some, like Hank Cady, said nothing. For nearly all of them a redman was no more human than a blackman. “They looks a little more like a man,” George had said, “but they issent when ya come right down to the marrow. When the Almighty made the Injun he had plum run out of stuff cept ferrosities. They ain’t no devil as hisses down in hell half as froshus as a red varmint.” Some of the men had come from points as far away as Bear Lake and the North Platte and felt that two pesky redskins were lean pickings for a long journey. One of them said it was like riding a hundred miles to eat two doves. If he’d knowed, Mark Hillers said, there’d be a hull army here he would of stayed home. His pa would be ashamed if he saw his son riding a thousand miles for two scalps.
“Mebbe we’d best give him three,” George said. “Me, I kin stay and tend camp.” Windy Bill thought that a good suggestion. Mark, he said, was plum down there torst the other side of the world, almost to Bent’s Fort, and he had crossed fifty rivers and a thousand mountains to get here. Pretty soon, said George, there wouldn’t be any extrees left. They’d jist hafta let the men have them who first got their knives in them.
That was about it, Zeke said; he didn’t kallate any man would get his sights on anything. There would be no moon and probably no fires. The night would be so black it would be like crawling back into your ma’s womb. That was right, Bill said, scanning the dark sky; they would have to tell by the feel of the skin if it was red or white. By the smell, Mick Boone said. But how was Sam to tell elk horns from wolf paws or beaver tail? It was David Black speaking, and when he spoke, according to Bill, his brain swole up like a pregnant belly.
“He will smell like a chief,” George said.
Sam, Bill said, would go to Elk Horns like a calf to its mother. But what if he didn’t? Dan asked. Would the man who got there first hold him by the halter and wait for Sam?
The chief, Bill said, had spit his stomach in Sam’s face. He had smacked his jawbone with a tommyhawk. He had tied him to a tree and near froze his gizzard out and he had boasted and threatened almighty awful. They would have to let Sam have him. He guessed Sam would have the chief by his topknot in less time that it took a wolf to turn around.
The men spent two or three hours with their weapons. They examined the parts, cleaned and greased them, and wiped the barrels as gently as they would have touched the mechanism of a watch. Their knives they honed on fine-grained hard stones that they had saturated with goose oil, and then stropped them on soft leather. To their horses—and every man was superbly mounted—they gave a devoted care that they never gave to themselves, examining their hoofs, teeth, hams, and neck and shoulder muscles; searching under their flanks and up against their scroturns for ticks and other bloodsuckers; letting them drink only in streams clear of heavy clays and poisonous silts; and pasturing them in the most luxuriant spots. If four hundred Blackfeet warriors had moved against them their chance at life would have depended almost entirely on the strong beasts under them. A mountain man thought of his horse and his gun and knife as parts of himself—an extension of his reach and a trebling of his speed.
When the twenty-three men in this comitiva felt that no more mountain men were coming they spent another night here, waiting for storm, with sentinels in three-hour watches at the four corners. The next morning they saddled their beasts, secured their bedrolls and fixens behind their saddles, and headed north down the Missouri. Ahead of the main body went three scouts, and a mile behind it the sharp-eyed Dave Black brought up the rear. A few of them, with Dan as their spokesman, had proposed that after this band was wiped out they should push north and find another band; but the cooler heads said no, for they knew that the massacre would arouse the nation to wild frenzies. The squaws would slash their flesh and spill blood over themselves, and shriek and yell with such insane furies that the braves, like wasps spilled out of a nest, would rush around in all directions, their eyes wild for sign of something to kill.
After all, Bill Williams would have said, if alive and with them, their job was to avenge the insults on the head of a mountain brother. After that they would slip silently away down the valleys and through the forests, in all directions but north, leaving the red hornets to wear themselves out in their tantrums. The important thing, they had all agreed, was to let one man live so that he could carry the news to his people. How they would shriek and gouge themselves when the lone survivor, his skull bald and red, told them what had happened! The first night out they made camp near the foothills of the Big Belt Mountains. McNees slipped in about midnight to report that the band was still there against the bluff but showed signs of getting ready to move. Their lookouts were as before, one varmint a mile from camp on the northeast, another on the southeast, and possibly a third on the bluff. The wind was from the northwest. He kallated that it was about ten miles to the Indian camp.
The three sentinels would have to be taken out. The choice of executioners was given to Sam. He knew that it would be foolish to call for volunteers; they would all volunteer. Knowing that Dan was dying to be one of them, he assigned to him the varmint on the southeast. Because the one on the bluff would be the most difficult of the three to ambush he gave him to Three-Finger. He then looked round him at the men and thought he saw in the night gloom a special eagerness in the eyes of David Black. “All right, Dave, the one on the northeast is yours.”
It was a dark night with wolves baying and the hoot owl forecasting storm. All the men lay down but they were all awake. Listening, the only sounds Sam could hear were from a night bird, a wolf, and an owl. Two hours later the party rode two thirds of the way and concealed their horses in an aspen thicket. The sky was low and dark, and huge drops of rain were falling when the men resumed their journey. How wonderful it would be, Sam thought, looking up at the dark wet sky, if at the moment of attack the Creator would fill the world with a thunderous theme of vengeance, with chords like those that opened the Fifth!
Mountain Man - Vardis Fisher Page 33