The Bold Frontier

by John Jakes

  But he felt sorry for the stumbling wreck of a once-renowned detective and hired him as a messenger and general handyman. Stopper lasted for two weeks, then disappeared.

  Each evening Lamar went home to his mansion in South Park, where he resided with his wife and their eleven children. Seldom did a week go by without a parental discussion with one or the other of the children to the effect that each of them, in his or her own good time, and the Lord’s, would meet a snakehead.

  “When you do, remember this advice passed on to me by Redbird Seelbinder. He was an inebriate, which wasn’t to his credit, but he was a wise man. ‘If you meet a Chinaman,’ he said, ‘try to act like a Chinaman. If you meet a mountain lion, try to act like a mountain lion.’ That time in Nebraska, we met a poor crazy man. I decided that the only way out of our predicament was for someone else to act like a crazy man too. It confused him. That’s how I got his gun. I was full of fear, but Redbird’s advice saved the day. Keep it in mind.”

  “Yes, Father,” chorused several children.

  His beautiful, adoring wife, the former Belle Beechley, beamed and squeezed the hand of Lamar Tisdale.

  Manitow and Ironhand

  A Tale of the Stony Mountains

  Dedicated to the memory of Karl May

  THE FREE TRAPPER, A strapping shaggy white man of indeterminate age, waded into his secret stream about a quarter mile above the wide beaver dam. His darting glance revealed no dangers; nor did he truly expect any, this far into the wilderness.

  His buckskin shirt was wet, and soiled by many hasty meals. His buckskin leggings were stagged at the knees, where he’d sewn on pieces of fine English blanket, which wouldn’t shrink. Leggings and his wool-lined moccasins were last year’s tipi of a Crow chief of his acquaintance.

  Shadows of quaking aspens and bending willows were growing longer. It was nearing the twilight hour, the ideal time for setting out traps. He would set this one, his fifth of the afternoon, then one more before returning to his campsite, there to rest until he rose before daybreak to clear the traps. He shifted his campsite nightly; a professional precaution of those who worked alone. Also, he now had eighty plews to protect—a valuable mixed bale of beaver, marten, and otter, weighing nearly a hundred pounds. So far the spring trapping season had been bountiful.

  The late afternoon air was light and warm, but the water was still icy from the melted snows. The soft-burbling stream froze his bones and set his hands to aching, the good right one and the mangled left one he concealed with a filthy mitten except when he was at his trade, as now. He went by the name “Old Ironhand,” though he really wasn’t old, except in spirit. The snowy white streaks in his long hair were premature. There was a bitter cynicism in his eyes, the oldest part of him.

  Once his name had been Ewing. Ewing Something. It was a name he no longer used, and struggled to remember. Ever since he’d split with the Four Flags outfit, and Mr. Alexander Jaggers—ever since they’d crippled his left hand, causing him to compensate with exercises that strengthened the other one, welding five digits into a weapon—to the free trappers and those who still gave allegiance to the large outfits, he was Old Ironhand.

  He waded along, carrying the seven-pound trap and chain in his left hand, the pin pole in his right. He moved carefully, the small sounds of his passage undetectable because of the water’s purl. This was a fine stream; he’d been working it for a year. It yielded fat mature beaver, fifty to sixty pounds each, with choice tails he charred, skinned, then boiled as a mealtime delicacy. Hip deep in his secret stream, he felt good as he approached a natural beaver slide worn into the bank at the water’s edge. The shadowed air was sweet. The trees were a-bud, the mountain peaks pristine as a new wedding dress, the sky a pale pink, like a scene from a book about fairyland. He saw a mockingbird singing alertly on a bush. It was 1833, in the Stony Mountains, far from the civilized perfidy of other white men.

  He laid the pin pole on the bank. He crouched in the water and lowered the trap to the bottom, drawing out the chain with its ring at the end. By now he was bent like a bow, half his beard immersed. The water smelled icy and clean.

  He pushed the pin pole through the ring on the chain. Then he grasped the pole with both hands and began to twist it into the marly bottom. He leaned and pushed and twisted with his great right hand bloodless-white around the pole. If the trapped beaver didn’t gnaw his paw off and escape—if he died as he should, by drowning—the pole would site his carcass.

  In order to leave as little man-scent as possible, Ironhand worked obliquely backward toward the bank, to a willowy branch he’d already selected for its pronounced droop. He unstoppered his horn of medicine, which he compounded from secret ingredients added to the musky secretions of beaver glands, and with this he coated the end of the drooping branch. The strongly scented end of the branch hung near the pin pole.

  Hands on his hips, he inspected his work. Though by now his teeth were chattering—the spring warmth was leaching from the plum-colored shadows—he was satisfied. Felt better than he had in a long spell. One more trap to place, then he’d have his supper, and a pipe.

  He was turning to move on to the next location when the rifle shot rang out. The bullet hit him high in the back. Toppling, he thought not of the awful hot pain but instead of his failure to hear the rifleman stealing up for the cowardly ambush. Careless damn fool! Should’ve kept your eyes skinned! He was reasonably sure of his attackers identity, but that wasn’t much damn satisfaction as the muddy bank hurled up to strike him.

  And that was all there was.

  Someone had dragged him to level ground.

  Someone had rolled him on his back.

  Someone had built a fire whose comforting heat played along the left side of his seamed face, and the back of his ruined hand. The fire was vivid, shooting off sparks as brilliant as the mountain stars. A curtain of smoke blew away on a puff of breeze.

  He elbowed himself to a raised position, clenching his teeth against the pain. The Samaritan was squatting on the other side of the fire. A young Indian, with a well-sculpted nose, firm mouth, light brown skin that shimmered bronze in the firelight. His glowing dark eyes were not unfriendly, only carefully, unemotionally observant.

  Bluish-black hair hung like a veil down his back, to his waist. His costume consisted of moccasins ornamented with porcupine quills and bright trade beads, fringed leggings, a hunting coat of elk leather. Around his neck hung a small medicine bag that nestled inside his coat against his bare chest. Outside the coat, ornamentation was a three-strand necklace of bear claws. A double-barrel rifle rested within his reach.

  “I put medicine on you. The ball is still there. It must come out. Do you understand?”

  “Delaware,” Ironhand grunted, not as a question. He understood perfectly.

  “Yes.” The Indian nodded. “I am Manitow.”

  “My pardner, the one they killed at the rendezvous two year ago, he was Delaware. Named after the great old chief Tammany. Fine man.” So were most of the members of the tribe who roved the Stony Mountains. The Delaware had been driven from Eastern hunting grounds eighty to ninety years ago; had migrated over the Mississippi and successfully taken up farming on the plains. A few, more restless and independent, had pushed farther on to the mountains. Enemies of the Delaware, including ignorant whites, sneered at them as Petticoat Indians. That was not only stupid but dangerous. Ironhand knew the Delaware to be keen shots, excellent horsemen, superb trackers and readers of sign. They were honest, quick to learn, resourceful in the wilderness. You could depend on them unless for some reason they hated you.

  The Delaware could find the remotest beaver streams as handily as a magnet snapped bits of iron to itself. Thus they were prized pardners of the free trappers, or prized employees of the outfits such as Four Flags.

  The white man licked his dry lips, then said, “I’m called Old Ironhand.”

  “I have heard of you. Who shot you?”

  “I think it was the Frenchman,
Petit Josep. Petit Josep Clair de Lune. Little Joe Moonlight.”

  “Works for Jaggers.”

  “I worked for Jaggers …”

  “I know that. Don’t talk anymore. The ball must come out.” In a calm, almost stately way, Manitow rose from his crouch. His hair shimmered, black as the seepage of one of the oil springs that produced the tar trappers like Ironhand rubbed on their arthritic joints.

  Without being told, Ironhand rolled over to his belly. It hurt hellishly. In the firelight a long rustfree knife sparkled in Manitow’s hand; an authentic Green River—Ironhand glimpsed the GR, George Rex, stamped into the blade in England. It was a knife as good as Ironhand’s own, which he’d left with his possibles bag, his bale of plews, and his carbine, in what he’d presumed was a safe clearing upstream.

  Manitow laid the knife on the ground. From a pocket in his coat he took the all-purpose awl most Delaware carried. He placed this beside the knife. One or the other, or maybe both, would mine for lead in Ironhand’s back. The trapper stared at the implements with bleary eyes and made a heavy swallowing sound.

  Manitow knelt beside him. With a gentle touch he lifted Ironhand’s bloody shirt high enough to expose the wound glistening with smelly salve. With the fingers of his left hand Manitow spread the dark brown edges of the wound. A swift, sharp inhale from Ironhand was the only sound.

  “Be sure you get it out,” he said. “I don’t want to go down with the sun. That bastard Jaggers has to pay. Little Joe Moonlight will pay. Go ahead, dig.”

  “I don’t have whiskey,” Manitow said.

  “I don’t need any whiskey,” Ironhand said. “Dig.”

  A night bird trilled in the darkness. Old Ironhand listened drowsily. He was coming awake; hadn’t died under Manitow’s ministrations, which had hurt infernally. He had, however, fainted at the moment the Indian worked the rifle ball out of the wound with bloody fingers, ending the ordeal.

  Ironhand’s eyes fluttered open. Against a morning sky the color of lemons, Manitow crouched by the fire as he had the night before; a small dented pot, blue enamelware, sat in the embers.

  A white mist floated on the high peaks. The air nipped; Manitow had found a colorful trade blanket as a coverlet for the trapper. Ironhand heard a nickering; tried to rise up.

  “Your horses are safe, with mine,” Manitow said. “Your gun and plews also.” Small comfort, now that Ironhand realized the outfit was still after him.

  Manitow stretched out his hand, offering a strip of charqui, the smoked buffalo meat that was a staple of frontiersmen. The trapper caught the meat between his teeth. He lay back, gazing at the sky, and chewed.

  The enamel pot lid clinked when Manitow lifted it. “Coffee is boiling. Ready soon.”

  Ironhand grunted and kept chewing. A hawk sailed in heaven, then plunged and vanished in the mists. The cold ground smelled of damp and made him think of death, not springtime. On his back under his shirt, where the Indian had prospected for lead, a thick pad of some kind told him Manitow had improvised a dressing.

  “You have been a trapper for many years,” the Indian said in a reflective way.

  Old Ironhand pushed the jerky into his cheek, like a cud, while he answered. “Twenty years next summer.”

  “All that time. And a man stalks you and you don’t see any sign?”

  “I wasn’t looking for none.”

  “You didn’t hear him?”

  His anger was sudden, overriding his pain. “I was in the stream. It makes noise. I was thinking about my traps. I thought the outfit was done with me. Christ, they did me enough damage—why not?”

  Manitow’s grunt seemed to scorn that naive conclusion. The damn Indian made Ironhand uneasy with his quiet, unruffled manner. His air of wisdom annoyed and puzzled the trapper, because of Manitow’s relative youth.

  “Done with you?” Manitow repeated. “Not when the fur trade is sickly and you steal profits from the company by working for yourself and selling to others.”

  “You sure”—a gasp of pain punctuated the sentence—”seem to know a devil of a lot about me. How come?”

  Ironhand’s head was rolled to the side now; his old reddened eyes stared. Almost shyly, Manitow dropped his own gaze to the smoldering fire, from which he pulled the dented pot. He poured steaming coffee into Ironhand’s own drinking cup.

  “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 disr
eputable 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, Jaggers’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.