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.
“He got a chance, Scratch?” Bridger asked in a whisper.
“If’n he gets in there close, I’ll lay he’s got a chance.”
Kit began circling off to the right slowly, raising himself in the stirrups so he could instantly spring that way or this.
“Shunar! Am I the American you’re looking for?”
Wagging his big shaggy head of black hair, the Frenchman, for some reason, recanted. “No.”
“You’re a goddamned liar!” Carson snorted with some mean laughter. “And a yellow-livered coward!”
Chouinard hurled his curse as his horse pranced closer, lowering his rifle to make certain of his shot. “Peeg! I will crunch your bones in my teeth!”
“Ain’t much of a man, are you, Shunar?” Carson taunted as he bobbed back and forth in the stirrups, intently watching where the giant swung the muzzle of his smoothbore fusil. “Cain’t even untie the knot on a young gal’s chastity rope!”
“Beeg lie!” the giant spat, flecks of spittle collecting at the corners of his thick lips.
Kit sang out, “So you’re the big bull of this wallow, eh?”
“I chew your bones—”
“Not when a li’l Injun gal get herself away from you!”
Jerking back on his horse’s reins, Chouinard stopped only a few yards from Carson. With steely conviction he said, “I gonna like to keel you, leetle bird.”
Kit inched his frightened horse to the left, transfixed on the muzzle of the rifle that followed his every move. He held the pistol close, ready.
Already the crowd was shouting, calling out to one antagonist or the other, hooting and whistling and goading until Bass could barely hear what Chouinard and Carson were shouting at one another while they worked themselves up to that deadly moment.
“You’re nothing more’n a puffed-up bag of wind, Shunar! Some young gal can spook you!”
“I keel you, Keet! Cut your heart out—”
“Gonna stuff that rifle up your ass, Shunar!”
“—cut your heart out and show it to the squaw!”
Bringing his horse up beside the American’s with a leap, Shunar rested the rifle’s barrel across his left elbow, propping it there for his shot.
“I crunch your bones today!”
Now both animals were touching, their riders making the horses shove against one another, snorting and pawing up clods of dirt and prairie grass as the two men spun them in a tightening circle, slowly wheeling round and round.
“Gonna put you in hell today, Shunar!”
Turning constantly, this way and that, each dueler twisted in his saddle to keep an eye on his enemy.
“Leetle Amereecan bird chirping till I keel him!”
Suddenly Chouinard jerked his rifle back from his left arm, inverting it to slam the butt of his fusil against the neck of Carson’s horse.
Yanking a foot free of a stirrup, Carson lashed out with a moccasin at the Frenchman’s buttstock, failing to connect. “Buzzards gonna pick your bones clean a’fore sunset!” When Kit kicked a second time, the blow landed solidly against the flank of Chouinard’s horse.
The giant’s animal sidestepped in a leap as the Frenchman struggled to regain control of the frightened horse. He twisted in the saddle to face Carson, dropping the fusil’s barrel back into the crook of his left arm again as it spat a tongue of yellow fire.
But the American had fired an instant before as that fusil was descending. Carson was already swinging to the side as his pistol erupted.
With the fusil tumbling from his hand, Chouinard shrieked in pain, clutching his bloody right arm. For a moment he gazed down at the path the bullet had taken: entering the wrist, traveling through the forearm, then exiting the elbow as it smashed bone. As his eyes glazed in agony, the Frenchman turned round to find Carson now some twenty yards away, stuffing his empty pistol into his belt.
“It’s over, Shunar!” Andrew Drips shouted, loping toward them on foot.
“No! I keel him!” the Frenchman cried like a wounded, terrified animal.
“Leave it be!” Drips commanded as he came to a halt beside the giant’s horse.
Instead of turning away, Chouinard cocked his leg back and kicked out at the company commander, sending Drips sprawling across the grass. Then the giant slowly sawed on the reins with his left hand before reaching for the scabbard at his back with that one good hand left him. The other arm hung useless, dripping gouts of blood onto the trampled, dusty grass.
“Reload, Kit!” someone hollered from the crowd.
But Carson hadn’t carried his pouch or powder horn into the fight.
“Shunar gets Kit close enough to use that knife,” Bridger grumbled, “he’ll make meat of Carson.”
Slashing his big heels into his horse’s ribs, Chouinard leaped toward the small American until his animal collided with Carson’s, wildly slashing the huge knife through the air. Kit was just regaining his balance from that blow when the Frenchman lunged out with that left arm, swinging low enough with the big butcher knife that Carson had to lean backward in the saddle.
Back and forth Chouinard slashed at the American, forcing Kit to dodge side to side so fast he could not regain his balance—eventually spilling from the saddle. Pitching headlong into the grass, Carson struggled to yank his foot from the stirrup as Chouinard savagely kicked at the American’s prancing horse, hurrying to get around to the other side where Carson hung from the saddle.
Terrified, Kit’s horse sidestepped again and again, for some miraculous reason keeping itself between Carson and the Frenchman’s horse in those frightening seconds as Kit battled to free his foot twisted in the stirrup.
He pulled his moccasin free just as the Frenchman sawed his reins in the opposite direction, deciding to spin around the rear of Carson’s horse. Kit stood, his right hand scraping at the back of his belt, fingers finding his scabbard empty. Somewhere on the ground nearby lay his knife.
But as clouds loomed across the sun, so too the Frenchman loomed over Kit. With a powerful grunt Chouinard brought his left arm down at the American who dived between the horse’s legs, rolled on a shoulder, then sprang up in a sprint.
Bass was already on his way, tearing away from the crowd the moment he realized Carson didn’t have a weapon left. “Kit!”
Right behind Carson the giant was goading his horse into a gallop, its hooves thundering like hailstones the size of cotton bolls on a hide tepee. Scratch could see Kit wouldn’t have time to reach him before Chouinard would ride Carson down from behind with that knife.
Meek yelled, “Behind you!”
The moment Kit turned his head to find Chouinard all but on him, Carson stumbled, sprawling in the grass as the Frenchman shot past. The giant reined up, his horse gone stiff-legged as the Frenchman yanked back on the reins. Kit grasshoppered out of the dirt, sprinting toward Bass once more.
When Kit was no more than ten yards away, Scratch hollered, “Now!” in warning, and heaved the heavy smoothbore pistol into an arc.
Both of Carson’s arms came up as he plucked the weapon from the sky, drew the hammer on back from half cock, and wheeled about in a crouch at the very moment Chouinard raced up, leaning off the side of his horse, attempting to impale the short American on that long knife.
But Kit dropped to one knee, gripping the huge pistol with both hands at the end of his outstretched arms, pulling the trigger point-blank in the Frenchman’s face—the force of that blow driving the giant off the far side of his horse as the huge lead ball entered just below the
left eye socket before it flattened to splatter out the back of his immense head an instant later.
Kneeling there with the smoking pistol still in his hands, Carson remained motionless as the big man drooped farther and farther in the saddle, then suddenly collapsed into the grass.
From one side rushed Bridger and from another came Drips, both of the company booshways reaching the Frenchman as some in the hushed, murmuring crowd pressed forward, step by curious step.
Drips wagged his head as Bridger stood and announced, “Bastard was dead a’fore he hit the ground.”
The crowd erupted.
Meek was at Carson’s side, pulling Kit onto his feet. “Shot him in the saddle, Kit! By jump—you been shot too!”
Staggering a moment, Carson regained his balance and touched the side of his neck. “Just a graze, Joe.”
Newell, Bass, and a gaggle of others were crowding in on Carson now as Drips was ordering some company men to drag the body away. In a moment Bridger shouldered his way through the clamoring crowd, each one of them loudly reliving the frightening seconds of that duel, all at the same time.
“Damn—if this don’t call for a drink!” Bridger hollered above the noise.
“Maybeso later tonight, Gabe,” Carson announced as he turned to Bass, his hands shaking. Passing the pistol back to its owner, he said, “Thanks, Scratch. I’m beholden to you. Saved my life.”
“Maybeso, Kit—you’ll have yourself a chance to save my ha’r one day.”
Joe Meek draped a mighty arm over Carson’s small shoulder. “C’mon with Gabe—we ought’n have us some whiskey wet our gullets now that bastard’s dead, Kit!”
Carson finished shaking hands with Scratch, then turned to Meek. “We’ll all have us that drink together after supper, Joe. Right now I got something I better tend to.”
“Tend to?” Newell echoed, scratching the side of his head. “What you gonna do that’s better’n wetting down our dry with Bridger’s whiskey?”
Carson winked at them, saying, “Right now, boys—I’m on my way to buy me a wife!”
11
Nine days after his partner Thomas Fitzpatrick had reached the rendezvous at the mouth of New Fork River on the Green, Jim Bridger started north with his brigade.
With his sixty men went not only his new wife’s family and Insala’s band of Flathead, but the Nez Perce who had once again visited the white man’s rendezvous in their unremitting hope that a man of God would come to live among them, to show them how to earn their eternal reward. After two disappointing journeys to the trappers’ rendezvous, these Nez Perce were finally returning to their native ground with just such a man and his medicine book.
Reverend Samuel Parker.
This dour, humorless fifty-six-year-old evangelist had just volunteered to press on into the wilderness while his younger associate, Dr. Marcus Whitman, returned east to enlist more recruits for their mission work among the heathen savages of the Northwest. While Whitman might not approve of all the earthy and raw habits of the mountain trappers, the doctor nonetheless chose not to preach to or condemn them—unlike the bookish and haughty Parker.
Extending an uncharacteristic and polite patience to the good reverend, a large number of the unrefined trappers listened attentively as Parker discoursed on their need to immediately abandon those worldly ways he found so deplorable, including how the white men squandered away their hard-won wages in an orgy of whiskey and debauchery, having nothing left to show for their labors than the baubles they purchased for their pagan wives and half-breed children.
Shocked less at the violence he had witnessed in that bloody duel between Carson and Chouinard, the reverend fierily preached his brimstone on the evils he had seen at rendezvous—in particular scolding the trappers on the practice of some who held up a common deck of playing cards before the visiting Indians as the white man’s holiest book. Able to purchase several of these inexpensive packs of cards from the company’s trader during rendezvous, many trappers convinced gullible Indians that unless their wives and daughters were not lent for carnal pleasures, then the white man’s powerful God would hurl down all manner of fiery and eternal torment suffered among the flames of hell. Time and again, without refusal, the women were turned over.
Those sins of the flesh, magnified by the sin of bearing false witness!
But just as Parker was working himself into a ranting lather, a horseman rushed up to announce that buffalo had been spotted up the valley. Without a by-your-please, the reverend’s grease-stained congregation leaped to their feet, grabbing rifles and horses, racing off to run those buffalo. Their sudden exit left the disgruntled Parker reassured that he was taking the right course in going to preach and convert the Nez Perce rather than attempting the salvation of those profane trappers who showed absolutely no hope of God’s redemption.
To better make his case for continued donations and funding from the American Board of Missions, Dr. Whitman was overjoyed to discover a Nez Perce boy who spoke a smattering of English. After securing permission from the youngster’s father for the trip east, the doctor christened the lad Richard. During that ceremony a second Nez Perce father promptly presented his son to accompany Whitman east where he could be taught the white man’s religion. The doctor baptized this second companion John.
Six days after Bridger’s departure for Davy Jackson’s Hole with his Flathead family and the rest of the tribe, Fitzpatrick started for Fort Laramie with the company’s fifty men, some two hundred mules bearing the year’s take in beaver along with some buffalo robes, and more than eighty former employees who were abandoning the mountains. Accompanying them on their journey was the party of scouts and hunters employed by Scottish nobleman Sir William Drummond Stewart. That long snake of men and animals strung out through the valley and beginning to wind up the hills made for an impressive leave-taking that late August morning.
Gone now was the jubilation that had rocked this fertile bottom ground like a prairie thunderstorm. Some began to realize just how late it was in the season. As far back as any man could remember, the trader’s caravan always reached rendezvous anywhere from late June to early July. But this summer’s delay translated into five lost weeks—weeks the brigades and bands of free trappers weren’t able to use in tramping to their fall hunting grounds. Now they would have to labor long and hard to make up for that lost time.
With Elbridge Gray and the other three already gone with Bridger nearly a week, and with Fitzpatrick just starting east to turn the caravan over to partner Fontenelle who was recuperating at the company’s Fort William, Andrew Drips led his eighty-man brigade south by west for the fall hunt among the Uintah and Wasatch ranges. No man among those white Americans, French voyageurs, and half-breeds would leave any record of their travels that winter.
No more trace than what any of those bands of free trappers would leave behind on the banks of the New Fork: the cold, black smudge of a string of long-abandoned fire pits and faint moccasin-clad footprints quickly erased by the ever-present autumn wind or buried beneath untold inches of icy snow. No tales of their passing were left for generations yet to come.
They might as well have been ghosts chasing down the moon.
As Zeke roamed along either side of their path, Scratch hurried Waits-by-the-Water and little Magpie east across that trampled and familiar path. Striking a little south of east, they crossed the Big Sandy, then climbed that barren saddle of the Southern Pass where they struck the first narrow channel of the Sweetwater which took them east, down to the North Platte. Day after day for two weeks they descended, following Fitzpatrick’s trail, encountering the great sprawl of his campsites until they finally caught up with the caravan one day before the entire cavalcade came within sight of La Ramee’s Fork.
Near the river’s mouth stood the tall cottonwood stockade that the year before had been christened Fort William in honor of one of its original owners. But in leaving the mountains for more sedate business ventures, William Sublette and Robert Cam
pbell relinquished this massive post to the victors who would stay to the bitter end.
While Fitzpatrick’s caravan plodded on down the gentle slope toward the impressive timbered walls, Titus pulled the pack animals to the side of the march and halted. Waits reined up beside him.
“That’s some,” he gasped in English.
Removing the hand she had clamped over her mouth in awe, she repeated, “Some.”
“Only see’d two other forts,” he continued in his native tongue. “One on the Missouri called Osage, and that post of Tullock’s they call Cass. Both of ’em small.”
She nodded, wide-eyed with wonder. “Cass.” And made a sign using her two hands, “Small.”
He chuckled and said, “Nothing like this. This here’s a hull differ’nt place, woman. A hull differ’nt place.”
Scattered across the plain within a half mile of the stockade walls stood the lodges of those bands invited there to trade—three camp circles, along with their separate herds, where riders moved to and from the fort, women and children streaming back and forth along the shady riverbanks for water, bathing, or to swim naked in the glistening waters. It struck Bass as a damned fine idea that hot afternoon.
“Who are these people?” Waits asked in Crow.
“They look familiar?”
“Those are not Crow lodges,” she said guardedly.
“I didn’t figure they would be,” he replied, a little cold water suddenly dashed on his ardor. “This ain’t Crow country.”
“Ak’ba’le’aa’shuu’pash’ko,” she said. “Your northern people call them Sioux.”
“What northern people?”
It took her a moment to consider how to explain that. “They do not talk like the men from your country,” Waits said. “Their skins are fair, like yours and your friends’, but their tongues speak a different language—”
“Parley-voos!” he roared, remembering a dim tale told here and there. “That’s right. Them parley-voos call ’em Sioux.”
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