Ride the Moon Down (26 page)

With a sigh he turned back to Titus. “I can get ’er down to forty-two dollars.”

“For the differ’nce gimme one of your best-looking glasses and the rest in your newest ’baccy. None of that ol’ stuff.”

“That ain’t gonna get you much in tobacco, mister.”

“Just treat me fair and we’ll call it even,” he said, taking up the ends of the rawhide rope he knotted around the plews left on the counter. “Fella don’t stand a chance no more,” he groused. “Appears your company is the only outfit trading in the mountains and at them posts in the upcountry. No good when you run all the other traders out.”

“Our company ain’t the only ones in the mountain trade,” protested the second clerk who had sauntered over to rest his elbows on the counter.

“I know,” Scratch said miserably. “I been to that fort
the Bents got—but it’s a piece of riding, way down on the Arkansas.”

“It ain’t the only one,” the first clerk explained as he spread the small square of black calico on the counter.

“I don’t figger on riding all the way north to your Fort Union neither.”

“So I s’pose you ain’t heard,” the second man confided. “News come in the other day. We just heard some folks is raising a small post down on the South Platte a ways.”

“South Platte,” Titus echoed. “And it ain’t your company’s post?”

“Don’t belong to us,” the first man said. “We hear it belongs to one of Billy Sublette’s brothers.”

“Him and his partner, Louie Vaskiss, was here with Campbell last spring,” the second one explained. “I figger the two of ’em are throwing in together, what with big brother Sublette and Campbell calling it quits for the mountains.”

Titus tied up the four corners of the calico scrap and stuffed it into his possibles pouch. With a pat on the flap he told the clerks, “Thankee, fellas. For the geegaws, and for laying out the trail sign on that new post.”

“You gonna head that way?”

Nodding, he replied, “Figgered to do some trapping south of here anyway.”

“Good luck to you,” the second man cheered.

“Thankee—but after all these winters I know luck ain’t got much to do with me saving what I got left for ha’r,” Scratch declared. “Hard work, never giving up, and good friends … they been what keeps this nigger’s stick afloat through the years.”

“Of all the mistakes I have made in my life,” Sir William Drummond Stewart explained as darkness fell and the stars came out around them, “only two do I truly regret. All the rest I have atoned for, corrected.”

This last evening prior to Fitzpatrick’s departure for St. Louis, the Scottish nobleman had invited Bass to join him and a few guests for a final dinner before setting off
for the east come morning. As soon as the sun fell, the air took on a new quality, growing crisp and chill, enough that he welcomed the fire’s warmth and the coffee that steamed in his cups.

While the conversation among Stewart’s guests had remained cheery and buoyant for some time, as the night wore on the nobleman grew more pensive.

“A child don’t get to be our age ’thout making his share of mistakes,” Bass reflected, sensing how the host was down in his mind. “Measure of a man is what he learns from the times he’s stumbled and snagged his foot.”

“Why do you say that, Titus?”

Shrugging, Scratch replied, “Don’t seem like you’re here. What’s eating your craw?”

“I’m sorry,” Stewart said, then turned to Marcus Whitman, saying, “I apologize, Doctor—and to the rest of you too. Perhaps I am brooding at the realization that with the morrow I will be abandoning these mountains, this western country where I have spent these past three summers, as well as that one winter at the mouth of the Columbia. I’ve hunted for and shot every big-game animal in this wilderness, including grizzly and elk, antelope and bighorn, mountain goat and more than my share of buffalo. More times than I can count I’ve stood shoulder to shoulder with you mountaineers, taking part in at least a dozen skirmishes with the redskin natives.”

“Can’t you ever plan to return west?” Whitman prodded.

“I will certainly do my best to return, once I’ve seen to some nagging family and financial affairs back east,” the nobleman answered, grown all the more melancholy as they watched.

“Mayhaps you should shet yourself of what nags at you,” Bass suggested. “Put it behind you here and now, no matter if you don’t make it to another ronnyvoo.”

Sighing thoughtfully, Stewart eventually nodded. “I came to my first rendezvous with George Holmes—a traveling companion. Since setting off across the plains, we had tented together. Poor George. In rendezvous camp I had arranged a liaison … arranged for a squaw to come
to our bower for the night, so I prevailed upon George to sleep elsewhere.”

Stewart related how Holmes had taken this request for privacy in good humor, carrying his blanket with him to a grassy spot near their bower, and lain down to sleep beneath the light of a nearly full moon. Sometime in the deep of early-morning darkness, the barking of dogs, shouts of men, and hammer of running feet awoke the nobleman. With a curious crowd he hurried to the commotion, finding a rabid gray wolf glaring at its victim without showing the slightest fear of the men rushing up. A few feet away sat George Holmes—his face torn and bleeding.

Turning to Whitman, Stewart explained, “There was nothing our Dr. Harrison could do for poor George but bathe his wounds and bind them up. In the next few days I couldn’t shake the sickness I felt in my soul that I had been the cause of this tragedy.”

Although Holmes’s wounds healed quickly, his normal, lighthearted mood began to worsen. Over the next few weeks, the nobleman explained to his audience, George began to grow more morose and despairing, expressing his certainty that he was bound to die of hydrophobia.

“It wasn’t until weeks later that poor George suffered his most terrifying fit,” Stewart declared. “He tore off his clothing, ripped out his hair, scratched at his skin as he ran shrieking into the timber. We immediately went in search of … but we never found a trace of him.”

“Not uncommon,” Whitman replied. “There is nothing anyone can do once the hydrophobia attacks the brain.”

His eyes begging for sympathy, Stewart said, “Never has a day gone by when I haven’t reproached myself for that sad, sad night.”

“Like the doctor said, I don’t figger you can blame yourself for what the wolf done,” Bass declared. And thinking that he should change the subject, he asked, “You said you made two mistakes. What of the second?”

For some time Stewart stared at the flames, then spoke
with guarded resignation. “I have shot men in the heat of great battles, where I have run them through with my sword—looking them in the eye as I killed by my own hand. But never before have I indirectly done harm to another, much less caused their death. Not only did I bring about the ruin of George Holmes, but with heedless words uttered in the heat of my anger, I as much as pulled the trigger on the gun that killed another.”

From the corner of his eye, Scratch watched Antoine Clement suddenly turn away and step into the darkness beyond the fire’s light as if he were no longer able to endure his employer’s self-inflicted pain.

“Don’t mean a damn—you didn’t shoot the man yourself,” Tom Fitzpatrick consoled gruffly.

Stewart waved off that comfort and said, “I might as well put the gun to Marshall’s head.”

“Marshall?” Whitman repeated.

“It was the English name I gave to the servant who had been with me since thirty-three when we first crossed the plains for these mountains. He was of the Iowa tribe,” Stewart explained. “From time to time I caught him stealing some trifle from me.”

“The man is responsible for his own death,” Clement argued, suddenly stepping into the firelight as if to set the record straight. “For some time you knew he was a thief. No one made him steal your horse.”

Rising to turn his rump to the flames, the nobleman began his story. “My party was working our way north after a winter in Sante Fe, several days north of Bents’ Fort when Marshall—for some unknown reason—decided that he wanted to steal my prized thoroughbred, Otholo.”

On their way north along the Front Range, Marshall stole off one night on the Scotsman’s prized horse, also purloining Stewart’s favorite English rifle. When the nobleman discovered the loss the next morning, the short fuse of his anger flared. Exploding in a fury, he roared that he would offer a five-hundred-dollar bounty to the man who brought him the thief’s scalp.

“Unfortunate that Markhead was in the sound of my voice,” Stewart declared sadly.

Although there was no braver man than this Delaware Indian come west to trap beaver, many would question if he possessed even a modest strain of common sense. As a guide for the Scottish nobleman, Markhead evidently took it as his personal quest to hunt down the young horse thief. Besides, five hundred dollars was nothing short of a fortune to him.

Without saying a word to anyone, the Delaware slipped away from camp on his own.

Two days later Markhead returned, leading Stewart’s thoroughbred and brandishing Marshall’s scalp at the end of the recaptured English sporting rifle.

“My thoughtless words, spoken in a fury, killed that Indian boy,” Stewart groaned.

Disgusted and sickened, the Scotsman tossed the scalp into the brush, but eventually paid Markhead that handsome reward so rashly offered.

“I don’t figger you can lay claim to knowing what’s in the addled brain of another man,” Bass declared, thinking back on an old friend of his own, Asa McAfferty. “Can’t none of us know what another’ll do.”

“Two deaths by my hand, as surely as if I held the payment of their eternal debt in the balance.” Stewart stood and stretched, holding his palms over the flames. “To die in battle, under the honor of arms, is one thing. But here in this wilderness, I’ve learned there is no certainty of an honorable death. What a bitter lesson this has been for me, gentlemen: learning how quick and capricious, and truly senseless, death can be.”

Whitman stood beside Stewart, asking, “Is death anything but capricious?”

The British soldier gazed at the missionary physician and said, “Men ride into battle, finding they can smell the nearness of that horror. In war, death is not capricious. It is an absolute, a veritable truth. But here in your American wilderness … I have seen truth stood on its head.”

Snowflakes big as cottonwood shavings landed on his back and shoulders, slowly seeping into his deer-hide shirt as he hunched over the last of the trap sets.

The flakes fell slow and heavy, almost audible when he held his breath, when he stilled his frozen hands and clenched his chattering teeth. Soaked all the way to the scrotum, Bass listened as the storm tore itself off the high peaks above him, careening down the slopes toward the foothills below him. Listened to these first newborn cries of another winter storm a’birthing.

Two more days and he would have enough beaver collected that he could ride back to her. They would spend a few nights together; then he would pack Samantha and take off again to try another one of those streams that tumbled down from the timbered slopes along the Front Range here below the barren hood of Long’s Peak—named by that intrepid explorer who ventured across the Central Rockies in the wake of Lewis and Clark’s expedition through the northern mountains.

For the past several months he had forged this pattern: six or seven days alone among the spruce and pine and barren quaky, then returning for two or three nights in her arms, days spent bouncing Magpie on his knee, teaching the girl and her mother a little more English by the fires at night.

Each time he rode off, Bass left behind a stack of hides for Waits-by-the-Water to scrape while he was gone. Gone long enough for a man to grow lonely for the sound of the woman’s voice, long enough for him to become ravenous for her flesh. Each time he returned, she seemed surprised with the fury of his coupling, yet responded to his hunger with an insatiable appetite of her own.

Here, deep in his forty-second winter, it seemed that he took longer to convince his joints to move each morning as he awoke in that cold loneliness before dawn. And it took all the longer for his bones to forgive him their immersion in the freezing water, longer to warm themselves when he returned from his trapline. But he nonetheless continued to find the beaver, though forced to ride farther into the hills, deeper still into rugged country. Those days of endless meadows clogged with beaver dams and lodges were gone. Gone too were the huge rodents who yielded pelts so big the mountain men called them blankets.

Gone were the days of easy beaver.

Now it was enough that a man catch something in a trap every two or three days. Not near enough beaver sign that Bass could expect to bring one to bait every day, but he still figured these long winter sojourns into the hills were worthwhile. Every winter pelt was one plew more that he wouldn’t have had if he had dallied until spring began to thaw the high country.

Maybeso the trapping would have been all the better up north in Absaroka this past autumn, but then they would have been obligated to lie in for the winter with the Yellow Belly’s Crow. Which would rub him right up against Strikes-in-Camp. And Crane too. Scratch didn’t figure he was ready to see that much grief on one woman’s face, not ready to find out how it would tear his own wife apart again. Better all around that they had turned south from Fort William, making for the South Platte where they ran onto Fort Vasquez, the new post founded just that autumn by partners Andrew Sublette and Louis Vasquez.

Louis was one of twelve children born to a father who had migrated to Canada from Spain, where he married a Frenchwoman before migrating again, south this time, to St. Louis on the Mississippi where his children grew up around that heart of the fur trade.

Andrew was the younger brother of the legendary William and Milton. After making his first trip west with his eldest brother to the Wind River rendezvous of 1830, the last for the firm of Smith, Jackson & Sublette, Andrew next accompanied Bill on that ill-fated 1831 trip to Taos that saw the tragic death of Jedediah Smith on the end of a Comanche buffalo lance. By 1832 and the famous rendezvous fight with the Gros Ventres in Pierre’s Hole, Andrew was becoming a mountain man in his own right.