“Help me sit up. Then answer my damn question.”
There followed a slow and elaborate ritual of raising him, Manitow gently pulling on his forearms rather than pushing at his back. Resting on his elbows worsened Ironhand’s pain again, but his position enabled him to suck some of the bitter hot coffee out of the cup Manitow held to his lips. At length the Indian said, “The people in the Stony Mountains know Old Ironhand. They know the evil ways of Four Flags, too. For five winters and summers I have been north, Canada, hunting and trapping. Even so far away, we heard of the crimes of Four Flags. No more talk. Rest awhile now.”
“I’ve got to go,” the trapper protested, wriggling on his elbows and accidentally falling back, a terrific jolt that made him cry out. “Got to go,” he repeated in a hoarse voice. “Catch that Little Joe …”
“In a day or two. No sooner.”
The Indian’s flat declaration angered the trapper again. Then a bolt of guilt struck him; he was being an ungrateful bastard. After licking a drop of coffee from his droopy mustache, he said, “I didn’t thank you proper yet. For taking care of my wound and all. For coming along when you did. That was a piece of luck.”
Manitow silently watched the ethereal mist drifting over the hidden peaks.
“Anyway—it’s a debt I owe.”
Manitow’s eyes, black and opaque, met his again. “I am sorry I did not come in time to stop the assassin. Fortunately he was a bad shot.”
“Little Joe has a big opinion of himself. I ’spect he thought he couldn’t miss.”
“And I was coming close, so he couldn’t wait to find out. I was not far behind him, though approaching from a different direction. That’s why I didn’t see his sign, only heard his rifle. Until then I did not know there were two hunting you.”
Confusion was followed by a stab of fear. “Two? Who else …?”
Manitow stared.
“You? Why?
“To see what kind of man you were. Are. I hold you responsible.”
“For what?”
“The death of my brother. The one who was your pardner.”
Ah, Christ, Christ, Ironhand cried silently, stunned harder than he was when the rifle ball struck him. He’s no friend. He saved me for the pleasure of killing me himself.
BUT THERE WAS no apparent hostility in the Indian’s speech or demeanor. He merely asked the trapper to give him a brief history of the quarrel that had led to his brother’s death, and the cowardly attack by the lackey of Four Flags.
“I’d have to go back a few years,” Old Ironhand said. “The summer rendezvous of ’28. I had quit as a brigade leader for the outfit a year before, but on good terms with Jaggers—we had an agreement that Four Flags would take all my plews and I’d work for no other.” Four Flags was a fur company as big and powerful as Astor’s. English, French, Russian, and American interests had pooled money to establish it. The boss west of St. Louis was Alexander Jaggers, who headquartered at Kirk’s Fort.
The annual summer rendezvous was a combination trade mart and revel; a great gathering where spring plews were sold, and trappers bought new equipment pack-trained out from St. Louis, all in the midst of much drinking and horse racing and woman swapping and other familiar entertainments of the frontier. Manitow said that before he went to Canada he had come down from the Wind Rivers several times, to the barren and unlovely Upper Valley of the Green, there to take part in the rendezvous himself. Ironhand didn’t remember meeting him, or hearing his name.
Speaking slowly, taking occasional sips of the cooling coffee, the trapper explained that it was at the summer rendezvous of ’28 that he saw his first black silk topper. A disreputable German merchant of traps, cutlery, and other metalware was wearing it. The hat was already hard-used, soiled by filthy stains, and pierced by a bullet front and back. Ironhand had quickly understood it was the enemy when the peddler said, “These they are wearing on the Continent now. Gents in the East are taking up the fashion. It’s the modern style, beaver hats will go out, you mark me. Also my cousin in Köln writes me to say inventors are perfecting machines to manufacture fine felting cheaply from all kinds of materials, even paper. This trade will die. Is dying now.”
The following two years confirmed it. In the great days, the high days of the trade, when Ironhand was still a brigade leader, the company paid as much as $9 a plew to certain free trappers to keep them working exclusively for Four Flags. By 1830 all was changed; average plews selling for $4 at St. Louis slipped to $3.75, no matter who trapped the animals. Then buyers at the summer rendezvous refused to go above $3.50. Ironhand was haunted by memories of the silk topper.
ALEXANDER JAGGERS WAS a short, prim Scot; a Glaswegian. A bachelor, his two passions were Four Flags and his religion. When he first came out to Kirk’s Fort in 1822, he had transported a compact gleaming Philadelphia-made pump organ on which he played and sang Christian hymns in a stentorian voice.
In 1831 Jaggers spoke to Ironhand about the price of plews. They were still dropping. Every free trapper working for Four Flags would have to accept $3, St. Louis, or further business was impossible. Ironhand refused.
Alexander Jaggers showed no visible anger, merely turned his back, swished up his coattails, sat at the organ, and began to play and sing “Saviour, Like a Shepherd Lead Us.” But to bring Ironhand in line, discipline him, show him his error, Jagger’s henchman, Little Joe Moonlight, set on Ironhand’s pardner at the summer rendezvous.
Little Joe, a mustachioed weasel-chinned fellow, turned up with a couple of the bravos who frequently backed his most brutal plays. They cornered Ironhand’s pardner while the trapper was occupied with a comely Snake woman, the Snake women being universally conceded as the most attractive, and the most generous with their favors, of all the women of the many tribes.
Little Joe and his cronies pretended they were merely sporting with Tammany, hazing him, before the accident happened. As Ironhand learned afterward, Little Joe and his bravos seized the Indian’s wrist and swung him round and round in circles, cracking his arm like a whip. Tammany tried to fight them but the odds were wrong; he was soon reeling.
One of the bravos knocked the bung from a small whiskey keg and poured the contents over the Delaware. The bravos and Little Joe roared. But they swore ever afterward that the dousing was supposed to be the end of it. How the stray ember from a nearby cook fire accidentally fell on Tammany, igniting the spirits, was a mystery. Damn shame, but a mystery. Little Joe and his bravos fled the rendezvous before Ironhand could catch up to them. Ironhand’s pardner lived a day and a night, in broiled black agony, before the mercy of death.
Ironhand, who at the time went by his old name, left the encampment at once. He rode night and day for Kirk’s Fort, there to confront Alexander Jaggers, who never personally went to the rendezvous. Little Joe Moonlight had beaten Ironhand to the fort and was hovering in Jagger’s quarters when Ironhand, full of drink, kicked the door down and leaped on the Scot to strangle him.
“Little Joe whistled up his bravos,” Ironhand said to Manitow. “They swarmed on me. Looking pious as a deacon, Mr. Jaggers said that in a spirit of Christian forgiveness, Little Joe would only break the hand I used least.”
He held up the twisted crooked fingers; Manitow had removed the dirty mitten while he slept.
The misshapen claw was sufficient to suggest the scene: Little Joe’s helpers knocking Ironhand to the floor, stomping him into a stupor. Little Joe slapping Ironhand’s outstretched arm over a table while the bravos held fast to the groggy trapper’s shoulders; the bravos had flung him to a kneeling position.
Gleefully, Little Joe raised a trade hatchet and smashed the blunt end of the blade on the outstretched hand. At the organ, his back turned to the mayhem, Mr. Jaggers pumped and sang:
“We’ve a story to tell to the nations
That shall turn their hearts to the right!
A story of truth and mercy!
A story of peace and light!”
Little Jo
e Moonlight grasped Ironhand’s index finger, bent it, and broke it. Then he broke the middle finger. Next the ring finger. After a few more blows with the now-bloody hatchet, he broke the little finger. To Ironhand’s everlasting disgust, when Little Joe bent the thumb backward and that snapped, he screamed. More than once. Sweaty-cheeked, Mr. Jaggers pumped faster, and sang to drown the noise:
“We’ve a song to be sung to the nations
That shall lift their hearts to the Lord!
A song that shall conquer evil
And shatter the spear and sword!
For the darkness shall turn to dawning …”
He remembered his hand lying on the table like a bloody red piece of buffalo hump. He remembered starting to swoon.
“And the dawning to noonday bright!
And Christ’s great kingdom shall come on earth,
The kingdom of Love and Light!”
Then Ironhand heard Little Joe, his voice very distant, as though he were shouting in a windy cave. “You don’t need to play no more, Mr. Jaggers, he’s all done screaming.”
Little Joe lifted his head by the hair and let it fall, thump …
Out of some perverse piety that governed him, Mr. Jaggers rushed Ironhand to a comfortable bunk in the fort barracks, and saw to it that he was given excellent treatment until he recovered his senses.
His hand, of course, was permanently maimed. This Mr. Jaggers totally ignored when he and Ironhand parted. Jaggers shook the trapper’s right hand—the left was already concealed by the first of many mittens. “The account book is closed, laddie.” It was not, but Ironhand was too enraged to do anything except glare. “We part as competitors, but eternal friends. Christ counsels forgiveness above all.”
“Forgiveness,” Ironhand muttered, waving his mitten in an obvious way. Mr. Jaggers merely beamed and pumped the other hand …
“That was two years back,” Ironhand explained to Manitow in a weary voice. “After awhile I came to believe his crazy cant about forgiving and forgetting. I wanted to mend my life, so I didn’t take after him as I could have. I sold my plews to Astor, though they say he’s tired of falling prices too and will get out… . What a fool I was, wouldn’t you say? Trying to get on with keeping alive, forgetting Jaggers?”
The spring sun had burned off the spectral mist; the snow peaks were brilliant against hazy lavender sky. Ironhand was exhausted from speaking. Manitow chewed on a strip of charqui and considered what he’d heard. At last he said, “Many traps are set in this wilderness. You were caught in the cruelest of all. Trust.”
And do I dare trust you, you ring-tailed savage? Not so far’s as I could throw you. I daren’t turn my back.
Still, there were necessities.
“Will you help me up? I have to pee.”
“Clasp my arm with both hands.”
Ironhand braced his boot heels and was slowly, painfully raised to standing position. His eyes were close to Manitow’s a moment but he could read nothing there, except what he imagined was there—an intent to murder. The trap of trust, was it? Well, not a second time …
As he hobbled toward a grove of white birch trees, he bit out, “This time I won’t turn my cheek. I’m going after that pissant who does the dirty work for Jaggers.”
“I will go with you.”
Ironhand twisted around, causing a hell-hot pain in his bandaged back. “Why? So’s you can pass judgment?”
His face a smooth bronze mask, Manitow said, “It may be so.”
I won’t turn my back, you red devil …
But he hobbled on, grasping Manitow’s arm for support; for the present he was at the mercy of the unavoidable necessities.
THEY RODE SOUTHEAST, the direction of Kirk’s Fort. The fort stood sixty miles beyond the foothills of the Stony Mountains, at the confluence of two shallow muddy streams. It was the jumping-off place for St. Louis. Ironhand presumed it was also the destination of the quarry whose sign they were following. He was in constant pain, but it was bearable. Hate was a stronger painkiller than opium.
He trailed his three pack mules behind his old roan. Manitow could have sped ahead because he had a better horse, which he rode with only a scrap of blanket and his moccasined heels. The Indian’s horse was small, with spots like swollen inkblots on his white rump. The trapper enviously compared his faithful but sorry saddle animal, Brownie, with the other horse, which the Cayuse tribe had bred and sold to the Indian. Cayuse and Nez Perce horses were the best a man could find. Ironhand had evidence of it the first morning. He woke in his odorous blankets to find Manitow gone. A distant drumming stilled sudden alarm. Somewhere in the foothills Manitow was galloping his spotted horse.
Another thing bred envy, in the same dark inner place as Ironhand’s suspicion of murder being planned: Manitow’s skill with sign. The second noon, examining horse dung, Ironhand said, “He’s near a day in front of us.”
Manitow shook his head. “Less than half a day. Moving slowly. Not fearful he will be caught.”
Ironhand’s cheeks turned red above his beard that still held crumbs of ship’s biscuit from breakfast. “Why ’n hell not? He knows he didn’t put me down for good.”
“That may be so, it may not. I will show you why he doesn’t worry.” Manitow led him to a clump of stunted shrubbery, stepped around it, pointed. Ironhand saw more droppings. “There are three now. Your assassin and two more.”
“Since when in hell—?”
“Sunset, yesterday.”
“You damn well should’ve told me.”
Manitow smiled. “It would have spoiled our supper. If I had told you then, would you have stopped this chase?”
“Not likely.”
The Indian bobbed his head, vindicated.
They talked intermittently as they tracked Little Joe Moonlight and his companions moving southeast ahead of them. Manitow expressed no surprise at the treatment the trapper had received from Four Flags. “Theft, ambush, murder—it is the way of the strong companies against the single weak rebel. It is the way of those while men who are evil.”
Which should have soothed Ironhand’s suspicion a little, since it was clear from Manitow’s voice and expression which side he favored. But Ironhand wasn’t soothed. He continued to insist that Manitow ride ahead of him; they had sorted that out before they started. Ironhand still believed Manitow would try to murder him at the first opportunity.
They exchanged stories of their trials in the wilderness. Manitow pushed up the sleeve of his hunting coat to reveal a snakelike scar on his left forearm. Ironhand, who had seen plenty of horrors in his time, was nevertheless a little sick at the sight of the healed tissue, because of what had made it. Manitow had survived the bites of a rabid wolf, in the land of the Apaches, far south. He didn’t explain why he had been in the land of the Apaches.
Ironhand told of nearly starving to death several times during his career. “I slew my mules and drank their blood once. I ate my moccasins twice. Another time, all I could find to feed on after five days were ants from an anthill.” Manitow seemed to find these exploits unremarkable; almost to be expected.
He did express admiration for Ironhand’s carbine. The trapper explained that it was a custom creation from the armory of the legendary Wyatt Henry of St. Louis. The revolving magazine, Henry’s unique design, held five rounds.
Manitow asked to handle the piece. Ironhand said no. Manitow looked at him, and seemed to sneer just before he trotted his spotted horse ahead again.
As the mountains fell behind, the twisted gullies straightened; the shale ridges sank; the spring prairie rose up to greet them. They saw a migratory herd of buffalo passing southward in a dust cloud that boiled nearly to the apex of the sky. “Thousands upon thousands of shaggy brothers,” Manitow said. Ironhand growled something under his breath; he already knew the herd was huge; they had been watching it the best part of an hour. The upstart savage was beginning to anger as well as worry him.
Or was it the sign they’d read—two unk
nown bravos and a third smug killer lolling their way toward Kirk’s Fort without concern? Manitow insisted the trio was only a couple of hours ahead now.
A sunlit dust seemed to float above the silent plain surrounding them. The sky was tawny, like the earth, only a few cottonwoods with twisted shapes breaking the horizon. The vista had the serene quality of a landscape painting, but the diffuse light and dust gave it a touch of the unreal, like a picture from one of those fables of old Greek gods Ironhand dimly remembered reading from a hornbook when he was a child, in a civilized place somewhere.
At sunset they stopped to camp and eat. The trapper took some kindling from a parfleche strapped to a mule. Manitow watched him build a small pyramid of sticks, then said, “If you cook they will see the smoke.”
“Hardly matters, does it? We’ll find each other one way or another. That’s the idea.”
Late next day they approached a wide turgid stream Ironhand identified as Paint River, though the only artist’s color represented in its flow was dirty brown. Natural features surrounding Kirk’s Fort had been named by the fur men passing through.
While they watered and rested their animals, Ironhand advised the Indian that one more day would bring them to the headquarters of Four Flags. “I have to speed. Leave the mules. Catch them before they’re safe inside the fort.”
“Even with three against you?”
Ironhand answered with a nod.
Manitow sighted ahead. “I will go on a little way.”
He didn’t ask permission, hitting his spotted horse with his heels and splashing on across Paint River. Ironhand hunkered down on the long narrow hump of an island in the middle of the water, where they’d pulled up. What the hell was the upstart savage about?
Manitow galloped away till he was a speck, then galloped back. He threw himself off his spotted horse, looking unhappy.
“One has gone on ahead, leaving two. Their tracks turn north. I think they saw the smoke and are circling back.”
Ironhand’s gaze crawled to stunted trees on the northern horizon. Nothing moved there, nor anyplace. Manitow said, “We should camp. I do not think you need to chase your enemy anymore. He will find you. He knows you are hurt. But he will think you are alone.”
A Century of Great Western Stories Page 33