Ignoring the turncoat, Bass inquired, “You throwed in with them, Bill?”
Williams’s voice came closer to the gate. “I was here when Thompson’s outfit rode in with them horses. That’s when I tol’t ’em the Bent brothers need horses over there on the Arkansas.”
Walker asked, “Need horses?”
“Them Bents and Savary sell ’em, or trade ’em off,” Williams declared. “So Thompson was fixing to start over to the Arkansas with them horses next day or two … ’cept you come breaking things up.”
“How’s your stick float, Bill?” Titus asked. “You gonna jump in the middle of this?”
For a moment Williams didn’t answer. Then he said, “I figger there’s ’nough bean-bellies and red niggers for this child to raise hell with. I don’t need to kill me no white men.”
“You ain’t gonna come to Bents’ with us?” Peg-Leg squealed.
“Nawww,” Williams confessed. “You ain’t got no horses now, so I’ll have to go off to get me some in Californy.”
“I hear them Mex got a passel of horses out there, Bill,” Peg-Leg cried. “I’ll throw in with you, and we’ll steal us some Mex horses we can bring back to the Arkansas.”
Outside the walls there arose some disgruntled murmuring, then the noise of footsteps moving away from the walls.
“You still there, Thompson?” Walker yelled.
“I’m here—just figgering a way to kill you, Walker.”
“It’s over,” Walker said. “You ain’t got no Injuns to do your killing for you. And from the sounds of it, you’re losing some of your own white men too. Why don’t you just step off to the side and we’ll just ride on out of here with the horses—nobody getting hurt.”
“Damn you to hell, Walker!”
Now Bass shouted, “What made you go bad, Thompson? You was partners with Craig and Sinclair—had yourselves a nice post there in Brown’s Hole. What went wrong?”
“Beaver’s done!” Thompson hollered, his voice cracking with deep regret. “Ain’t no future in hunting plews no more. Last year or so, I could see there weren’t no future in supplying you trappers neither. Prices too high on goods I brung out, dollar too low on beaver … I could see trappers like you fellers wasn’t gonna make it, what with the world turn’t upside down on us the way it is.”
“Maybeso you can make your fortune on horses,” Scratch declared.
“Just what I figgered I was doing,” the trader snorted. “English horses. Injun horses too.”
Walker said, “Go to Californy with Bill Williams and get you some Mexican horses.”
“Craig!” Thompson yelled.
“I’m here, Phil.”
“S’pose you figgered it out: when I took off to steal some horses, you knowed our partnership was done.”
“I thought as much,” William Craig responded. “Just me and Sinclair now.”
Thompson said, “I wish you boys best of luck.”
Craig looked at Walker in wonder. “What you fixing to do about these horses now?”
“I reckon me and the fellas here aim to let you boys ride on by with them horses you can take back to the Snakes,” Thompson admitted. “Ain’t got no more heart to fight you.”
Walker and Meek dragged back the monstrous rough-hewn log some six inches square, withdrawing it from the cast-iron hasps to crack open the gate.
Peering out carefully, Walker said, “You fellas step aside, we’ll come on out now and this whole thing be over.”
“Awright,” Thompson agreed. “You boys come on out and we’ll make no trouble. Just see we get our own horses from that bunch you got in there first. We’ll need ’em for that long ride to Californy.”
“For sure that’s a long trail,” Scratch said with nothing less than admiration. “You boys will need good horses under you.”
By that time the winter sun was sinking and dark was coming on. Walker stepped back and ordered Meek and Sweete to throw open the gate. In shuffled some angry and a few shamefaced horse thieves to reclaim their own horses from the herd. One by one the riding horses and pack animals were broken out until Walker’s men were left with thirty-five horses. Thompson reluctantly shook hands with his old partner before Craig mounted up with the others and started wrangling their stock out the gate.
Lean, angular Bill Williams was standing in the long shadows of the fort wall that afternoon as Sweete and Bass brought up the rear of the herd. Titus reined around and came to a halt.
Williams asked, “You gonna hunt flat-tails?”
“Yep. Figure I ought’n till the plews ain’t wuth a damn.”
“If’n a man can find beaver.”
“Yep,” Bass said dolefully. “If a man can find beaver.”
“Ever you thort of coming to Californy with us?”
“Nawww.” And for some reason he felt sorry for Williams, the others too. Then, suddenly, he felt very sorry for himself as well. “When beaver’s gone under, then I’ll find me something else to do.”
“Ain’t gonna be long,” Williams claimed.
“Not ready to be a horse stealer, Bill. When I can’t find no more flat-tails in the mountains, or when the trader says my plews ain’t wuth a red piss … till then Titus Bass be a trapper. It’s who I am, Bill.”
“Here’s to shining times, then, Titus Bass,” Williams said with as much cheer as he could muster, bringing up a long-boned paw.
He shook the offered hand. “Here’s to Californy, Bill Williams. Here’s to Mexican horses.”
The moment he pulled his hand away from Williams, Bass kicked his pony into a lope, riding away feeling unsettled as he stuffed the hand back into a blanket mitten.
It seemed as if he didn’t understand this world anymore. While he wasn’t watching, wasn’t paying attention, the world Titus Bass knew had been changing unseen and unheard. It was as if one of those big prairie winds had picked him up in one place and in one time, then set him right down in a different place and in a different time…. Scratch felt unhitched. Adrift. His belly cold with uncertainty.
No longer sure what the seasons ahead would bring.
33
It had taken Joe Walker and the rest more than eight days to get that small herd of horses back to Fort Davy Crockett and the Shoshone. Two of those days were spent rounding up the strays after a freak winter thunderstorm blew in from the southwest—pelting the countryside with a hard, icy rain driven by tempestuous winds and accompanied by flashes of lightning and prolonged peels of thunder that promptly frightened the skittish ponies and set off a wild stampede across miles of muddy ground. The Shoshone were satisfied.
But Prewett Sinclair was furious that Craig hadn’t come back with Thompson’s scalp. After some heated debate Sinclair and Craig decided they had best part company. Once their present stock of goods was disposed of, their partnership at Fort Davy Crockett would be dissolved.
Late in February, just before Bass was preparing to set off for the foothills in search of beaver, Sinclair formed a new venture with a trapper grown weary of dangerous work and poor prospects. While Sinclair remained at the post, Robert Hewell loaded more than three hundred pelts onto their packhorses and headed out for Fort Hall to barter for trade goods and supplies.
Down in the spring Shad and Titus had run onto Kit Carson. Because Dick Owens had ended up turning around on them to throw in with Thompson, Williams, Peg-Leg, and those others headed for the California ranchos, Carson had enlisted Jack Robinson as his new partner for the spring hunt. After a night of pitching tales and swapping lies the trappers saddled up to go their separate ways the next morning.
“See you to ronnyvoo on the Seedskeedee!” Bass had cried.
Carson wagged his head. “I can’t figger there’ll be no more ronnyvoo, Scratch.”
“You ain’t coming to Horse Creek?” Sweete asked.
“Ain’t planning to,” Kit confessed. “Don’t see no sense in making a long ride to somewhere there ain’t gonna be no trader, no trade goods.”
Sadly, Titus asked, “So what you gonna do, Kit?”
“We’ll see if Robidoux treat us fair down at his Winty post. He better—seeing how we should’ve burned him out for hiding them horse thieves.”
“Fort Robidoux, eh?” Bass brooded. Then sighed as he gripped Carson’s hand tightly. “You boys watch your topknots, hear? One day we’ll run across your sign again.”
“Keep your eye on the backtrail,” Carson called out as he and Robinson started away.
The backtrail. That’s about all it seemed they had anymore, Bass ruminated more and more throughout that spring and into the first part of summer as he and Sweete started for the Green River. The backtrail. There sure as hell wasn’t any future to speak of, what with the way the company had threatened not to show up at all for the coming rendezvous.
When he really got down in his mind, it seemed as if everything he had ever wanted, all that had ever mattered in his life, it all lay behind him. Then he would look at Flea and Magpie … or feel Waits-by-the-Water’s head rest against his shoulder, and he would grow hopeful anew.
Maybe the beaver were about killed off. Maybe folks weren’t wearing beaver any longer and the fur companies didn’t give a damn about trappers no more … and maybe the only folks who would ever come through these mountains would be settlers destined for the fertile ground of that rainy place called Oregon Territory.
That was all right, he convinced himself as he held her tight through those nights when he couldn’t sleep for brooding on the terror it gave him. He had his powder and lead so his family would never go hungry. But what of those pretty things he wanted to provide for her—what if the trader didn’t show this summer? Never showed again? Would he have to go to Fort Hall, or Fort Union, or over to the South Platte if he didn’t ride over to see Robidoux or Sinclair?
He wasn’t sure just how he felt one day to the next as he and Shad continued north. One morning he found himself hopeful, but the next he was sure that life as he had known it was over. His emotions were taking the same sort of ride a broken twig would endure racing down a swift mountain stream swollen with spring run-off.
For all these years he figured he had come to count on things outside himself. Now, Scratch realized … he could not put his faith in anything but Titus Bass. In this world turned upside down, that faith in himself might well be all he could count on.
This summer of 1840 the Flathead had come again to the Green near Horse Creek, waiting for the man of God who had been promised to them for many years. In those warm days while they all kept a patient vigil, Bass came to feel sorry for those Flathead, seeing how they sent out riders every day to watch for the approach of the trader’s caravan from the States. For years now missionaries had come overland, briefly visiting rendezvous before they continued on to the far northwest to establish themselves, their schools and their churches among the Palouse and Nez Perce … always passing the Flathead by. Every summer the missionaries had taken their potent medicine from God elsewhere.
So there was no small celebration in the valley of the Green that thirtieth day of June when the first Flathead rider came racing back to rendezvous screaming with delight.
Those trappers who understood the Flathead tongue quickly translated the happy news emanating from the village. The trader was coming! Carts had been spotted. Many people. And four wagons.
Surely, now, with the white man’s lumbering white-topped wagons, there had to be missionaries along. And—dare they hope after all these years—those new missionaries had finally come to bring their power to the Flathead?
Three Protestant ministers and their wives had come west with Andrew Drips and his caravan. But to the soul-flattening disappointment of those joyous Flathead who turned out to greet these arrivals from the States, the six missionaries were bound for the Oregon country. While the Shoshone gave the caravan a raucous greeting, firing guns and racing round and round the column, the Flathead were turning back for their village in despair.
Sympathizing with their unfathomable grief, Scratch watched with curiosity as a lone man peeled off from the caravan on foot, calling out in his heavy accent for the Flathead to stop, to turn around and wait for him. Having walked on foot all the way from St. Louis, the stranger was nothing short of slit-eyed and sunburned beneath his flat-brimmed black hat. With stinging alkali dust coating his long wool frock, Belgian friar Pierre Jean deSmet shook hands with the head men. An amused contentment was written on his face at the joy the Flathead wore on theirs when he announced he had come alone to teach them how to turn their faces to God.
But no one could have been more happy than Titus Bass.
With Flea on his shoulders, Scratch walked out from the trees, Shad Sweete at his elbow. It was as if his hopes, his very prayers, had been answered by the arrival of that caravan. The fur trade wasn’t dead. No … not yet.
“Truth be, didn’t really figger we’d see a supply train this year, Shadrach.”
“Me neither. But there it comes, Titus!”
What with the way the company partisans had been grumbling about the poor returns, the dwindling number of trappers to work the mountains, and of course the sinking number and quality of furs harvested, more than half of those men gathered in the valley of the Green River were genuinely surprised that their patience had been rewarded.
For days now the white men had reminded one another that they really wouldn’t be disappointed if Drips didn’t show. After all, summer was not the time to be chasing beaver anyway. The fur wasn’t worth much, so a man might as well follow the Flathead, Nez Perce, and Shoshone on down to Bonneville’s old fort on Horse Creek to look up some old friends, share some stories of the glory days, and keep one eye on the horizon.
Maybe Drips would show with a few carts and trade goods and a little whiskey. Maybe the mountain trade wasn’t dead yet. Just maybe …
Bass turned to his tall friend, tears glistening in their eyes. His voice cracked as he said, “Damn the settlements while there’s still beaver in the mountains, Shadrach.”
Sweete’s moist eyes grew big, his mouth moving with no sound coming forth as he started to point. “L-lookee there, Scratch!” he finally gasped. “It’s Jim! By God, it’s Jim Bridger!”
“Gabe?” and he squinted into the bright distance. “Damn if it ain’t Gabe hisself!”
Patting little Flea on his back, Shad roared, “And ol’ Frapp too!”
Sure enough, out in front of the short caravan Andrew Drips was leading into the creek bottom was none other than Jim Bridger and his old partner, German-born Henry Fraeb, whose family had emigrated to America, on to St. Louis when Henry was but a child.
Racing out on horseback to meet the train was Joseph Walker. He tore the hat from his head, waving it wildly as another man on foot suddenly angled away from the wagons and sprinted his way, kicking up dust with his ill-fitting boots. Walker reined up in a spray of yellow dirt, vaulting to his feet where he embraced the stranger who threw down his rifle to wrap his arms around the trapper.
“Who you figger that is with Joe?” Titus asked.
“Maybe its Joe’s brother,” Shad said with a smile. “You recollect Joe said he’d be on the lookout for his brother, ever since Joe got a letter from him saying he was gonna be coming west to settle in Oregon this summer.”
“Settlers?” He nearly choked. “Now there’s settlers going to Oregon?”
Shadrach nodded, his smile disappearing. “Maybeso they’ll just keep on going, Scratch. And you won’t have nothing to fret about. I imagine them folks’ll just pass on through and won’t ever stop to fill up these here mountains.”
“Oregon can have ’em,” Bass snarled. “That wet, rainy country is fit for the likes of farmers … such as my pap. Fit for the likes of them Bible-spouting preachers too. With their angry eyes, and sad mouths, and their bitter tongues spouting against ever’thing natural a man gonna do. You damn bet their kind better just pass on through. Let Oregon have ’em, I say!”
The ne
xt day after their reunion with Bridger, when Drips opened his packs and set up shop, instead of hurrying for the trading canopy, Bass and Sweete turned in a few furs for that first kettle of whiskey, then sat in the shade of a cottonwood calmly watching the bartering begin.
Wiping droplets from his shaggy, unkempt mustache, Titus asked, “You was with Ashley, wasn’t you?”
“Just a sprout then.”
“I come west in the spring of twenty-five, year Ashley had his first ronnyvoo,” Titus explained. “But I didn’t see my first ronnyvoo till twenty-six.”
“That first’un wasn’t nothing more’n the Gen’ral taking in furs and passing out supplies. Not a drop of whiskey. And there sure weren’t no such thing as a free man anywhere in sight since we was all Ashley men in twenty-five,” Shad reflected.
They fell quiet, listening to the drone of big green-bottle deerflies and the noisy murmur of trappers and clerks, the clatter of beads and tacks, the clink of tin cups inside whiskey kegs.
“Summers, they were good back then,” Bass sighed. “For a time there, every new ronnyvoo was better’n all the ones that’d come a’fore it.”
“I’ll say. Ever’ one got bigger. Wilder. More men and mules, more whiskey and women too. If’n a man only got one chance to celebrate all year long in a year of hard, dangerous living … then them was the celebratingest times a child could ever hope to have.”
And now those days were gone. Bass told himself he had better admit that beaver would never shine again, not the way that beaver had shined back then.
It almost made a growed man wanna cry, it did. Sitting here sipping cheap puke-up liquor, watching a handful of sad, old hivernants try to wrangle themselves a square deal from a bunch of Pierre Chouteau’s slick city types out from St. Louis. Men like him and Shad who had seen the sun set on better than five thousand days of glory in these high and terrible mountains … men who had withstood freezing winters and blazing-hot summers … men who had stared right back into the eye of sudden, certain death and withstood the grittiest test of wills … the sort who had always treated every other man fairly and given more than a day’s work for what wages the company offered him when it came time for an accounting beneath the trading canopy.
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