But the sound of the word did little to bring him comfort. Not that he had ever had a run-in with the tribe, but he had heard a few stories from those who had bumped up against these powerful warrior bands pushing farther and farther west across the plains until they now had virtually reached the foot of the Rocky Mountains, claiming that prime hunting ground by right of might.
They would just do their best to stay clear of any what might stir up some trouble.
Pointing at a piece of open ground to the southwest of the fort, Waits-by-the-Water asked, “What do your people call those boxes with the round white tops and large rosettes on the side?”
With the one good eye Scratch squinted a little into the distance obscured by the summer haze, then chuckled. “We call them wagons. The rosettes turn and roll—hoops called wheels. They carry the wagons.”
“Do men push them?”
“No,” he said, and scanned those six wagons, finding that not one of them was hooked to a team. Instead, all sat abandoned, motionless on that open bottom ground, their tongues either pointed heavenward, or lying hidden among the tall grass. “Horses pull them. Most times, four horses or more. The people ride, just the way we ride a horse, or your people pull someone on a travois.”
She nodded as if beginning to understand. “I see: they are the white man’s house that he takes with him the same way my people move our lodges from camp to camp?”
With a grin he agreed. “Jehoshaphat, but you’ve got it right.”
“God dit,” she repeated with a wink.
As they ambled toward those fifteen-foot-high palisades, Titus could not remember the last time he had seen that red-and-white-striped flag. A banner every bit this big had flown from the top of the Fort Vancouver flagpole, but he figured he hadn’t seen America’s flag since reaching St. Louis to track down Silas and Billy more than a year back. With every tug of the wind, the huge flag snapped taut for a moment, allowing him to count another row of stars until he tallied up twenty-four. With each star representing a state, Bass reflected what new states had joined the union since he had abandoned the settlements back in twenty-five.
Craning his neck as they came alongside the walls, he peered up at the huge bastion that hung over the top of the northwest corner. He found another like it constructed at the southeast corner. And midway down the southern wall stood the massive gate where he reined to a halt and gazed up to take in the massive blockhouse perched atop the wall more than fifteen feet above them.
“Ho!” he called to a face he saw watching from the west window cut in the blockhouse.
“Ho, yourself,” the shaggy graying man called down.
Pointing at the gaping southern window, Scratch asked, “That your cannon?”
“It’s a cannon—but it ain’t mine,” the man replied. “Only here to visit. C’mon up an’ get yourse’f a good look-see for far an’ wide.”
“Holler down and have ’em open up the gate for us,” he asked.
Hanging partway out the window, the man shook his head. “They ain’t gonna open up these’r gates, on ’count of all them Sioux out there.”
Bass turned in the saddle to peer once again at all the lodges. “Afraid them Injuns’ll rush the fort?”
“I s’pose they are,” the man answered. “Most of ’em belong to a chief name o’ Bull Bear. Campbell invited ’em down from their country north of here to do some trading.”
“And now these fellers here won’t trade with ’em?”
“They been trading with them bucks last couple of days,” the man declared. “But the company don’t let very many come in at one time. No more’n a dozen I s’pect.”
“So how’s a man to get in?”
“She with you?” the stranger asked.
“My wife and our daughter.”
“Likely you come on round to the back side where you come in the corral gate.”
“Someone there to open up?”
“There will be in a shake or two,” he responded as he pulled his head back in the window and disappeared.
“We ride to another gate,” Bass explained in Crow.
On the river side they found a pole corral constructed along the entirety of that northern wall. Pulling back one half of a suspension gate wide enough to admit a wagon, Scratch was able to lead their animals into the corral where no more than a dozen horses grazed on dwindling piles of cut grass.
The narrow door behind them creaked open, and the older man poked his head out, looked this way and that, then spoke. “Tie off your critters there, then you come on in with me.”
Once they passed through the narrow door, the three of them entered a cool and shady part of the fort. The stranger started them for a low-railed balcony. Beyond it Titus caught a glimpse of the huge open courtyard.
“Name’s Bass,” he introduced himself, sticking out an empty hand.
“I’m Creede. Langston Creede.”
“How long you been working here?”
“Oh, I don’t work here,” Creede explained as they stepped onto the porch leading to the balcony. “I been trapping for the company. American Fur Company, that be.”
“Ain’t much else in the mountains these days,” Titus replied as they stopped at the low rail and peered into the bright September sunshine. “You come in with Fitzpatrick from ronnyvoo?”
The man nodded. “With him till four days ago when some of us got half-froze to get here on our own,” he said. “That pack train of theirs was dawdlin’ a leetle too slow for our likin’.”
“So you’re with them what’re leaving the mountains for good?”
“Naw,” and Creede leaned back to settle on the top rail of the balcony. “Ever’ three years me and a ol’ friend meet back to St. Lou and have ourselves a winter spree. Get some women, sleep on a real tick, and have some more women. Man gets a hunger for a white woman …” Then he caught himself, his eyes softening apologetically. “Sorry. Didn’t mean nothing again’ your woman here.”
“No trouble took by it, Langston. So have yourselves a good spree, then come back out to the mountains, eh?”
“I do, but Levi had him his job upriver—”
“Levi? You said your friend’s name is Levi?”
“That’s right. Levi Gamble,” Creede declared.
“G-gamble?”
“Ever you run onto him?”
“I’ll be damned,” Bass exclaimed in wonder with a grin growing big as his beard. “I knowed a man named Levi Gamble of a time. But that were so long ago, it couldn’t be the same man.”
“The nigger I know is older’n dirt,” Creede exclaimed with a chuckle. “But a damn good man. We been workin’ for American Fur a long time, Bass. Upper Missouri Outfit. The Western Department—no matter what them booshways called it, they always had plenty of work for us over the years.”
“Levi Gamble,” Titus sighed, staring at his toes and calculating the years, trying to sort through a jumble of feelings and recollections that name stirred in him. “Had to been the summer I run off from home.”
“How long ago was that?”
“A mess of winters,” he replied, his eyes moistening with rememberance. “Eighteen ten.”*
“That’s going on twenty-five years now, mister. I ain’t been out on the upriver near that long, but Levi damn well has.”
Bass grew excited. “Y-you think it’s the same feller?”
With a wag of his head Creede confessed, “Chances be, chances be. If’n the Levi Gamble you knowed first come up the Missouri to work for that Spanyard, Man-well Lisa.”
“That’s him, by damned!” Titus roared with a booming clap of his rough hands. “Levi was coming through Boone County back to the summer of eighteen ten, and I just ’bout beat him in a shooting match.”
Langston’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. “You say you just ’bout beat him in a shooting match?”
“Come this close,” and Bass held up a thumb and fingertip all but touching.
Creede shook his head. “H
ad to be a differ’nt Levi Gamble … or you must be one center of a shot,” he replied with a tinge of admiration in his disbelief. “In all these years I ain’t never knowed another man to shoot better’n Levi Gamble.”
Eagerly he asked, “So you’re meeting Levi back in St. Louie for your spree?”
“Come the end of winter we’ll be heading upriver again, on the first steamboat bound away for Fort Union,” Langston explained. “I ain’t gonna be trapping no more.” The man flexed his back with a sigh, “Find me ’nother way to make a living up on the high Missouri.”
“Levi still traps?”
“Not now, not for a long damned time,” Langston said. “You was saying how he beat you in that shoot?”
“Yeah—by the skin of his teeth!”
“Wasn’t long afore the booshway at Fort Pierre found out just how good Levi was and hired him for to be fort hunter. Since then Gamble’s sashayed on up the Missouri and been working for booshway McKenzie. But McKenzie ain’t gonna be around no more now, so I don’t know if Levi can figger on having him that sweet job no more. I s’pose I won’t know how McKenzie’s settled his dust till I meet up with Levi back to St. Lou.”
“When’s that?”
“We allays lay plans that come the first of November the year we’re spreeing, when the snow’s flying and it’s time to hunker close to a fire, we’re gonna ronnyvoo up at the Rocky Mountain House.”
“As likely a place for a hurraw or blood spillin’ as you’ll find in St. Louie!” Scratch bawled in merriment.
“That’s the God’s truth!”
“Listen now, hear? You gonna tell Levi you run onto a feller he knowed from long, long ago—”
“Eighteen ten. Summer.”
“That’s right. The summer I come this close to whupping him in the turkey shoot. It was down to just him and me. That summer he was off to St. Louie for to join Lisa’s brigade bound for the high Missouri.”
Creede held out his hand. “Chances are I’ll see you round the next few days while Fontenelle’s getting everything throwed in his wagons for the trip back, but if I don’t bump into you, it was good meeting you, Bass.”
“You get a chance, come look me up next day or so. I figger we’ll find us a likely place to camp down by the river. But no matter what, you tell Levi I’ll give it my damnedest to look him up to Fort Union next year or two.”
“We’ll keep our eyes out for you on the skyline!” Creede said as he turned and clattered down the steps into the sunny courtyard.
“I understood some of what you said to the other man,” Waits explained when Creede was leaving. “What is this Levi?”
“Levi Gamble. A nice man I knew many years ago back in the land of the whites, even before you were born.”
“He is an old man now,” she said as she adjusted Magpie on her hip.
With a grin Bass replied, “I’m getting to be an old man now too, woman!”
Together with Waits and Magpie, Titus explored the fort interior that afternoon, stepping down from the railed balcony into the dusty quadrangle. At the center of the courtyard he stopped momentarily to stare up at the tall pole that so reminded him of those sky-scratching masts bristling with monstrous sheaths of canvas at the port of New Orleans.
Staring up at that flag being nudged by the wind suddenly gave him pause, realizing that until this moment he hadn’t thought of this western wilderness as belonging to the United States, a place and people who lay more than a thousand miles away, back there in his past.
For the first time in more than ten years, Bass sensed the first pang of regret—not for having left his country behind to flee to this untamed frontier … but regret in reluctantly coming to understand that the civilized, gentrified, pacified country he had abandoned was inexorably creeping west on his heels, slowly swallowing all of what was still, at least for the present, a vast and feral unknown, for this moment known only to his breed.
When he tore his eyes from the twenty-four stars of that flag and gazed around the quadrangle, he found that in many ways this massive wood stockade reminded him of the huge adobe fort built by the Bent brothers on the north bank of the Arkansas River. Here too buildings ringed the inside of the walls, some for trading, others for sleeping quarters or storage of furs, with space for a powder magazine, blacksmith’s shop, and a cooperage.
From the base of that immense flagpole he led his wife across the trampled ground for the main entrance. To the left of the massive covered gate hung a wide set of stairs leading up to the roof over those rooms built against the interior of that front wall of the fort. Atop the roof the stairs continued upward at a right angle, leading the two of them to the central blockhouse poised across the main gate, perched high on a pair of massive cottonwood posts.
Stepping through the blockhouse door into the cool, shadowy interior, Scratch found several other white visitors, all clad in greasy buckskins or shabby woolens, leisurely peering from the windows cut in three sides of the blockhouse.
“You fellas in from the mountains?” Titus asked as he stopped in the center of the shady room with Waits at his elbow.
One of them quickly looked the woman over, then replied, “Heading back to St. Lou with the fur train.”
Moving to one of the windows with his wife, Bass declared, “My, but I never see’d anything like this out here, even back there in St. Louie neither. Can’t remember stepping higher’n the first floor of anything since I was a tad and we all had our sleeping ticks up in the rafters of our cabin.”
“That were in Missouri, ol’ man?” a fresh-faced settlement type asked, the hint of a sneer on his mouth.
Titus eyed him and smiled disarmingly, saying, “That was back to Caintuck. Likely afore you was even born.”
With a haughty huff the ruddy-faced youngster agreed, “Don’t doubt it, ol’t as you appear to be.”
“I’ll ’How as you got so much green behin’t your ears that you don’t know how to talk respectful to your elders,” Titus explained as the blockhouse grew quiet around them. “Maybeso you just bumped up again’ someone ol’t enough he could cut you two ways of Sunday a’fore your guts’d ever spill out on this floor.”
Flicking his eyes side to side, the youngster realized his companions had inched back from him. He chewed on a lower lip for a moment more, then apologized. “I didn’t mean nothin’ by it, mister.”
“I figger you didn’t know no better, son,” Bass said. “One thing a pup learns as he grows is when to bark, and when to shut his jaws. There’s a time for barking, and by damn, there’s a time for keeping his yap closed and his ears open.”
An older man dressed in greasy wool britches and a tobacco-stained calico shirt had been watching it all. He now stepped up from the far window to the youngster’s shoulder. “Those are good words anyone can live by, Joseph.”
Joseph nodded once at him and said, “I didn’t want you thinking I’m backing down a’fore this feller, Pa. Don’t go—”
“I ain’t thinking that at all, son.”
Bass cleared his throat. “Your boy?”
“Yep,” the older man said as he clapped a hand on Joseph’s back. “His first trip to the mountains this summer. Likely filled his head with wild ideas.”
With a smile Scratch agreed. “Gonna be hard taking your boy back there to them settlements and St. Louie where a young man can’t stretch his arms when he wants.”
“Still, the trip done him good,” the man replied, gently starting Joseph away toward the blockhouse door. “He’s found out there’s a big world out here where I been coming last few years. Trouble, though, Joseph still gotta learn his place in that world.”
“Don’t ride him ’cause of the way he riled me,” Bass pleaded, feeling a bit guilty now as Joseph shambled out the door and clattered down the noisy wooden steps. “Ever’ man’s gotta find his own way, make his own mistakes in the world.”
“If he don’t make the sort of mistake that takes his life.”
For a mo
ment Bass glanced at Magpie, then thought of Josiah. “It’s allays good when a man takes a step back ’cause he figgered out he’s tempted Lady Fate long enough on his own.”
“My name’s Clement,” the pecan-skinned man introduced himself as he approached.
A low, menacing growl rumbled at the back of Zeke’s throat, stopping the stranger in his tracks.
“Hush, boy!” Scratch snapped, motioning the stranger on.
“Antoine Clement,” the man said, pronouncing it with that richly expressive roll the tongue gave to Clah-mah.
“French name,” Bass declared as he stood beside the fire he and Waits-by-the-Water were starting. “Titus Bass be mine.”
“My father was a Frenchman,” the half-breed explained. “I’m chief scout taking a Europe nobleman across the west. We are camped nearby, so he sent me to ask you for supper with him tonight.”
“Supper, you say?” Bass replied, glancing at his wife. In Crow he explained, “We’ve been invited to eat with another camp.”
She nodded enthusiastically.
“Seems my wife thinks it’s a right fine idee, Mr. Clement. When you want us to show up?”
“Soon as you’re able,” and the scout turned to point to the nearby bend in the river where the grassy meadow was rimmed with wild currant bushes laden with thick clusters of resplendent red fruit. “Can’t miss us. My boss has a few unusual tents pitched in a half circle around our fire.”
Bass rose, dusting his palms on the front of his greasy leggings. “We’ll be along shortly.”
In no more than a matter of minutes did Waits-by-the-Water have herself and Magpie ready to go visiting. After looping a short length of hemp rope around Zeke’s neck, the four of them set off into the last of the day’s heat as the sun sank upon those dark timbered heights resting along the western horizon, known to the mountain men as the Black Hills.*
“Stewart is my name, Mr. Bass,” said a slight and shorter man as he stepped away from the big fire to greet them. “William Drummond Stewart.”
“Call me Titus, baptized Christian back in Caintuck,” he explained. “Or call me Scratch—you might say I was baptized that name when I first come to these here mountains.”
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