Ride the Moon Down (74 page)

Newell grabbed his best friend by the forearms, gazing intently into Meek’s eyes. “Come with me, Joe.”

“C-come with you?”

Doc’s head bobbed eagerly. “We are done with this life in the mountains, so come with me, Joe.”

“Done?”

“We’re done wading in beaver dams, done with freezing or starving. Done I say—done with Injun fighting and Injun trading. Look around you, Joe: the fur business is
dead in these mountains, and the Rockies is no place for us now.”

Meek gasped in surprise, “Doc Newell—fixing to leave the mountains for good?”

“Goddamned right, Joe! We are young yet, and we have all life laid out a’fore us! We can’t waste it here when this life is dead!”

“But … Oregon?” Meek asked uncertainly.

“We ain’t the sort to go back to the States,” Newell said, affectionately slipping an arm around the big man’s shoulder. “I say come with me, Joe. Let us go on down to the Willamette and take up farms.”

“Oregon,” Meek repeated the word as if trying out the sound of a mysterious lodestone for the first time. “Oregon, you say?”

“We’ll take them preachers and their wives, that Walker family too—all of their wagons on to Fort Hall where we’ll gather up our wives and light out for Oregon.”

Bass watched the glow cross Meek’s face, so contagious was Newell’s enthusiasm. It was the look of a man grown so weary and old, suddenly granted new vigor. Where resignation once was scrawled, now Titus could read the hope and joy boldly written on Joe’s face.

“There’s nothing left for you boys here,” Bass charged them as he got to his feet, flinging one arm around Newell and the other around Meek. “Man needs to find him some country what he can call his own. Sounds to me that Oregon is where you two will make your stand.”

Two days later, when all the beaver had been turned over to Andrew Drips and that sad little rendezvous was quietly dying with a whimper, Reverend Philo B. Littlejohn finally sought out Moses Harris to explain that he had arrived at a most difficult decision.

“My party has decided that to guide us from here to Oregon—your price is simply too high.”

“I reckon you don’t have no notion just how far a piece that is to pilot you,” Black Harris snarled caustically, glaring the missionary up and down. “I figger what I asked is only fair—seeing how I’ll miss out on the fall trapping to get you folks through to the Columbia.”

“I won’t quibble that you asked what you determined was fair for you,” the round-faced minister replied.

Realizing that he might be letting a good thing slip from his grasp, Harris suggested, “Maybe we can dicker some more to come up with a dollar more to your liking, but still gonna be fair to me—”

“That won’t be necessary now,” the preacher declared.

“What you mean: won’t be necessary?”

Littlejohn cleared his throat self-consciously, then said, “We enlisted a pilot for our journey, and for a price much lower than you demanded of us—”

“Lower?” Harris growled. “Who’s the bastard cut me outta my goddamned job?”

Red-faced, the preacher exclaimed, “There’s no call for your oaths, Mr. Harris!”

Standing there seething, his hands balling into fists before him, the mountain veteran growled menacingly, “Tell me who took my job!”

“His n-name is Newell,” the missionary confessed as he inched backward, seeking escape from Harris’s fury. “He plans to make a home for his family in Oregon—”

“Not if the son of a bitch is dead!” Harris interrupted as he whirled away in a fury, to start his search of the company camp.

Unsuccessful, he finally headed for the trader’s tent. He didn’t find Newell there that morning either, but he did find that the clerks were opening up the last of the kegs they had packed west. Harris felt a sudden, inexplicable thirst coming on. Some hard drinking was clearly in order before he continued his search for the man who had stolen his job.

By midafternoon Harris’s well-soaked despair had grown ugly. Taking up his rifle, he lumbered away from the trader’s canopy intent on finishing his deadly mission. With so few trappers attending this final rendezvous, the search didn’t take him long now. He spotted Newell crossing a patch of open ground some seventy yards off near a free man’s camp. Harris shoved his rifle against a shoulder, squinted his bleary eyes, and attempted to hold steady on his target.

When the gun roared, the ball went wild.

As a terrified Newell ran for his gun, Harris started to reload while he stumbled after his intended target—angrily cursing and growling his intention to have the younger man’s scalp.

“Goddamn you, nigger! Gonna hang your ha’r on my belt before sundown!” the drunk man roared to the skies.
“And you’re gonna be sleeping with the devil hisself by nightfall!”

Step by step Harris plodded after Newell, clumsily pouring powder down the barrel as he plodded toward the trees where the trapper had disappeared. Digging at the bottom of his pouch, Harris pulled out another ball and set it atop the muzzle. He lunged to a stop as he yanked the ramrod from its thimbles at the bottom of the barrel, preparing to set the ball against the charge when Andrew Drips and a dozen others sprinted up—drawn by the racket as the lazy camps burst into action with the alarm.

“Get me some damned rope!” the trader ordered those behind him.

Someone asked, “You gonna hang ’im?”

“I damn well may do just that!” Drips spat as he dodged side to side each time Harris wildly swung his rifle at those advancing on him. “Get me the goddamned rope!”

Again and again Harris heaved his heavy weapon in a crazy arc at his attackers. The moment the drunk knocked a man down with a grunt, Drips leaped onto him. Five of them jumped in to wrestle Harris to the ground as he spewed curses at them, whipping his head side to side, snapping his teeth at anything that got too close, attempting to clamp down on an ear, a nose, a finger.

“Gimme that rope!” Drips shouted as the others struggled to hold down the figure thrashing on the ground.

“You gonna hang ’im now?” a voice cried.

“No. We’ll fix him to that tree,” the trader exclaimed as a half dozen of them dragged Harris to his feet.

The bruised and bloodied drunk man spat at Drips and two others, promising to kill them before he went to finish with Newell.

“Son of a bitch stole my job!” the old veteran bellowed like a wounded bull with his balls snagged on cat claw. “No goddamned beaver for a man to trap any-mores … and now Newell’s stole my pilot job!”

A yard at a time they dragged Harris to the closest cottonwood where they shoved him to the ground. Wrapping the rope round and round the trunk, three of them
secured him as Harris roared his curses at them, then pitiably cried in despair at the end of the beaver trade—only to suddenly curse some more.

Drips knelt at Harris’s side. The drunk man angrily spit at the trader. Wiping the glob of spittle from his cheek, Drips hissed, “I oughtta shoot you right where you are—”

“Go ahead and kill me!” Harris bawled. “Ever’thing’s gone anyway!” Then he broke into a sob, “It don’t matter to live no more.”

The stunned crowd fell to a hush around them.

“Let me tell you why I don’t shoot you and get it over with, Harris,” Drips explained as he leaned closer. “You been a good man, guiding our supply trains from St. Louis every summer. I figure that’s gotta count for something.”

“Just lemme kill Newell! Then you can do what you want with me! Nothing counts for nothing no—”

“If you’d killed him, I would have shot you dead myself,” Drips interrupted, shaking the man quiet. “Maybe better still, I would have hanged you with that rope holding you to this tree.”

“Hang me?” he spat. “I’m wuth more’n a hanging!”

“Look at you.” Drips slowly got to his feet. “You sure as hell ain’t worth a lead ball now.”

“I’ll kill you when I get these here ropes off—”

“Let’s hope you feel different come morning, Harris.”

Once more the drunk trapper whimpered, “M-morning?”

“You’ll be good and sober by then,” Drips declared, seeing Newell emerge from the trees armed with his pistol and a rifle. “Maybe by then the missionaries will be on their way, and there won’t be any cause for more trouble from you.”

With their eyes trained on the Columbia country, Newell, Meek, and William Craig started the three missionary couples west at first light, just as Andrew Drips had suggested they do. The rumble of their wagons and the clatter of their leave-taking awoke a hungover, blood-crusted Moses Harris still firmly lashed to his tree.

Red-eyed, the old veteran watched them depart, struggling
to keep from showing his utter grief at being left behind. He bit his tongue and didn’t utter one word, not one curse, as the wagons rolled from the valley. Joining the missionaries when they set forth on this last momentous leg of the overland journey to Oregon were Joel P. Walker and his wife, along with their four children and his wife’s younger sister. They were to be the first family to ply what would soon become a great emigrant road.

With Dick Owens having thrown in with Philip Thompson’s bunch who had headed west to steal California horses, Kit Carson found himself alone when the end came. No more would he trap beaver, Kit had decided. Instead, he chose to ride south across the mountains for the Arkansas where he would apply to become a hunter for St. Vrain and the Bent brothers.

But hardest for Bass to take would be Shad Sweete’s decision.

“What’s come of their gumption?” Titus asked his partner as Carson left their camp after announcing his plans to abandon the fur business. “Won’t no one ride into these mountains to trap beaver no more? Looks to be we’re the last, Shadrach!”

The moment he turned to peer at Sweete’s eyes, Scratch’s stomach shriveled as if he’d swallowed a mouthful of pickling salt. He knew, even as he asked, “W-what is it? Why you got that look on your face?”

For a while longer the tall man stood there before his friend, shuffle-footed and dumb, unable or afraid to speak.

Bass said, “Them words are like cockleburrs choking you, so you best spit ’em out now. Ain’t nothing you’d say ever hurt me, for you’re my friend.”

“Beaver’s done, Scratch.”

“It ain’t done,” he snapped.

“Then maybeso … I’m done with beaver,” Sweete explained gently, seeing how he had wounded Bass. “Done splashing round in freezing streams and allays looking over my shoulder for red niggers. I’m done chasing after something I know I ain’t ever gonna find.”

Titus blinked back the sting at his eyes and asked, “What you been chasing, Shadrach?”

“Maybe I allays figgered I’d make me a little money at this, leastways enough to fix up a post for myself where I could do some trading.” Then Sweete shrugged. “But the last few seasons I come to figger the best I’m gonna do is have myself some steady work as a hand for someone else.”

“Who … who you figger you’ll work for?”

He gazed squarely at Bass, seeming a bit more confident. “Been thinking ’bout heading down to the South Platte. Maybeso that post you said Sublette and Vaskiss got.”

“There’s work down there, Shad,” Scratch admitted, choking back the pain already ripping his gut in two at this parting. It never got easy. Damn, but it never got any easier.

“I’ll find me something—”

“Bill Williams told us there’s other posts down in that country too,” Bass said. “Won’t be hard for a likely lad such as yourself to find work.”

Wearing a look of unashamed gratitude for Titus making it easier on him, Sweete nodded. “I’ll hunt for ’em. Maybeso do some trading for Vaskiss. You said yourself that’s dead center in the ’Rapaho and Cheyenne country.”

“I’d wager my last beaver dollar on you, Shadrach. You’ll make a life for yourself on them plains.”

“How—how ’bout you, Scratch?” Sweete asked, worry suddenly carving deep furrows on his brow.

“Don’t you fret over us none,” he said, glancing momentarily at the woman and their children. “Likely stick close by these mountains come fall, maybe winter up down to Sinclair’s post in Brown’s Hole. I’ll lay off that north country till it’s for certain them Blackfoot been took by the pox and ain’t gonna play the devil no more.”

“Things for sure gonna be a mite safer for you in this’r country.”

Splitting his shaggy beard with a grin, Titus said, “Won’t no Injuns be troubling me anywhere I go, Shad—not as far back in them hills as I plan to hide.”

“To get that high, and go back so far, that be a load of work and time on a man.”

“Hardscrabble for sure,” he admitted. Then, shrugging, Titus pointed at the woman. “But we don’t got nothing else to do, nowhere else to be now, but up there where the Injuns ain’t likely to roam … so it don’t matter a lick if I gotta work hard and high to find them flat-tails.”

“Bridger told me him and Frapp gonna hook up again, fixing to work the rivers hereabouts. He asked me to join in, but I told him I’d give the traps a rest. Maybeso you’d wanna ride with them?”

Wagging his head slowly, Titus confessed, “I spent me some seasons throwed in with Jack Hatcher’s outfit. Since then I got old and set in my ways. Better off on my lonesome.”

Slowly Shad Sweete grinned, then flung his long arms around the thin man and squeezed him fiercely. His voice so quiet that it was barely heard over the rustle of the breeze, he whispered into his friend’s ear, “Likely you always will be better off, going where it feels right, and being on your own, Titus Bass.”