Ride the Moon Down (21 page)

Fitzpatrick asked, “What got the two of ’em so damned fractious over white men?”

“Shunar.” Carson spat it as if he had just spoken the most vile word in his vocabulary.

Meek asked, “What’s that horse’s ass got to do—”

“I tol’t you!” Carson barked. “We run him off from here, so that snake-bellied coward went right down to the crik and waited for Grass Singing to show up for water.”

For a breathless minute, more than a hundred men stood there in absolute silence beneath the morning sun, watching Kit quake in anger—knowing all too well the outcome of that story.

“So the Frenchie …” Fitzpatrick began. “He—”

“He tried,” Carson interrupted. “Her pa signed that Shunar tore her skirt off, scratched her all over when he throwed her down in the bushes and got hisself ready to poke her. That li’l gal ain’t never had a man afore!”

“How you know for sure?” Meek inquired.

Suddenly glaring at his tall friend, Kit snapped, “Grass Singing wears a virgin’s horsehair knot,” gesturing around his waist then between his legs to symbolize the knotting of an Arapaho chastity belt. “She showed me herself, Joe. When the big bastard went to grab for his knife so’s he could cut her belt off—”

“She made her play,” Bass finished Carson’s sentence.

Kit looked over at Titus. “That’s right, Scratch. Her pa signed that she somehow wriggled away from him like a tadpole, what with Shunar just having him one hand to hold her down.”

“So for sure he didn’t …” Fitzpatrick began.

“No,” Carson answered, staring at the ground in the midst of that swelling crowd. “But my gut tells me he’ll try again till one of ’em is dead.”

“One of ’em?” Bridger asked. “Who you mean?”

“Either she’s gonna kill him,” Kit replied, “or Shunar’s gonna kill her.”

From the catch in the young trapper’s voice, Titus thought he understood how Carson must feel: terribly wronged by someone so easy to loathe, so easy to hate.

Looking then into the distance over Carson’s shoulder, he saw the figures coming. Sure that it had to be—that tall one in the middle, a dozen or more clustered around on either side of him like saplings around the tall oak.

Scratch gazed directly at Carson. “So you figger to make sure Shunar don’t get that chance to kill the gal?”

“She and her pa,” Kit explained, “they don’t want nothing to do with me, not with no white man now—so this ain’t about getting myself a squaw no more.” His eyes
went cold. “Now it’s about putting a bad animal out of its misery, fellas. It’s ’bout killing someone needs killing in a bad way.”

Pointing with one arm, Scratch pulled a long-barreled smoothbore pistol from his belt with the other hand and announced, “There comes your chance, Kit.”

Carson jerked around with the rest of the crowd to see Shunar striding up with his hangers-on.

Bridger said, “That’un’s bad as Blackfoot. Big mouth, but he shoots center too. Best watch ’im like a snake.”

Kit whirled back to look at Bass, gazing down at the big pistol. He took it in both hands, snapped back the hammer to half cock, flipped the frizzen forward, and peered down at the priming powder in the pan. “Thankee, Scratch,” he whispered with deep appreciation as he stuffed the loaded weapon into his belt.

As Carson turned to watch the giant’s approach, Bass was struck with how big that huge pistol looked hanging from the belt of the five-foot-four-inch trapper. The young American stood some eight inches shorter than Scratch, and Chouinard easily towered a foot or more over Titus. Suddenly Titus was reminded of an ancient, dramatic image from his long-ago childhood, a visage come as clear as rinsed crystal from those days he’d sat with his brothers and sister at their mother’s knee while she read by the fireplace from that huge family Bible draped over her legs like the curved wings of a great bird come to rest in her lap.

How vivid that image had been to him as a child: visualizing those colorful hills and armies of thousands blackening the valley, tents arrayed for as far as the eye could see as the enemies of Israel sent forth their hero—a giant called Goliath. To meet him there between the lines went a young shepherd boy, the smallest among that army of Israel. Instead of arming himself for battle with a shield, and bow or lance … David carried only three smooth stones and his leather sling—

“Amereecans!”

The crowd turned as the distant figure hurled the word like a profane slur. Slowly the Americans stepped to
each side like the parting of a flock of wrens when a hawk descends through them. Carson, Meek, and Bass stood at their apex watching the monster lumber across those last fifty yards.

If this duel started close-up, Scratch knew Kit didn’t stand a snowflake’s chance in a boiling spring. He turned to the short man. “You don’t have to do this—”

“Yes, I do, Scratch,” Carson cut him off, not taking his eyes from the giant. “I ain’t running.”

From afar Chouinard pounded his chest twice and bellowed, “I want Amereecans to beat! Crunch my teeth on Amereecan bones, speet them out!”

Around the giant that motley array of cowered voyageurs and pork-eating Americans laughed as they came on in their hero’s gigantic shadow. From the glistening of the brown molasses pasting the Frenchman’s black beard, it was plain to see he’d been punishing the whiskey that morning. But as liquored up as he might be, the brazen Chouinard carried no rifle, had no pistol in sight.

“He ain’t armed,” Carson said.

Meek shook his head. “You can’t count on that.”

Ripping the big smoothbore from his belt so suddenly, it caused Chouinard to freeze nervously, Kit returned the weapon to Bass before he took a single step forward, empty-handed. “Here’s one American what’s ready to have you try chewing on me, Shunar! Look around you: Bridger’s brigade is full of men what’d thrash you good, but you’ve got ’em buffaloed. Ain’t got me fooled! By God, I may be the smallest one in this camp, but I’m gonna make you choke!”

Throwing his head back so far his tonsils showed, the St. Louis Frenchman howled with an evil laughter lusty enough that it had to make his throat raw. With a few more long strides he stopped again less than ten feet from Carson.

“You make me to laugh good, leetle Amereecan bird,” Chouinard growled. “Thees is good to laugh with your leetle bird chirping.”

“Don’t figger I said nothing wuth you laughin’ for,” Carson snapped.

The giant lost his sickly grin. “These Frenchmen here, no fun to flog no more. Now I come to crunch me Amereecans.”

Carson demanded, “What you want with an American?”

Inside his black beard Chouinard wore that same mad grin he had on his face yesterday afternoon as he mauled the four voyageurs. Pointing at the nearby brush, he snarled, “I go to trees, there. I get switch. I bring it back and switch all you Amereecans!”

“I’m standing right here. You don’t see me running, you yellow-backed bastard,” Carson rasped, his voice growing quieter each time he spoke. “Go fetch your switch and try to switch me.”

“Y-you?” Chouinard sputtered, turning left and right as his followers started to laugh with him. “B-but you are so small! Make me laugh to switch Amereecan so small!”

“I ain’t gonna take that talk from no goddamned Frenchman!” Carson bellowed, his voice grown loud once more. “There’s more’n two hunnert Americans in this camp, and any man of ’em can take your switch from you and shove it right down your goddamned throat.”

“Ho, ho!” Chouinard roared, covering his mouth as he laughed.

“Take your words back or I’ll shove ’em down your throat too!”

That only made the Frenchman laugh all the louder. “Sounds like leetle fly buzzing ’round Chouinard! Leetle fly says he stick my switch down my throat!”

“That’s right, I’m the smallest there is,” Carson declared, “but even I can brass-tack a coward like you.”

Glaring steely-eyed again, the Frenchman snorted his curse, “
Enfant d’garce
! I grind your bones first—let all these other peegs watch—then I see if more Amereecan peegs fight Chouinard! Moi! I beeg bull of thees lick.”

“When you gonna stop talking and go fetch your gun, Shunar?” Carson demanded.

“Gun?” the giant echoed, slowly pulling his big butcher knife from its scabbard at his side. “
Sacre bleu
! I like to cut when I keel.”

“You say ’nother goddamned word about crunching bones or stomping an American,” Kit warned, “I’ll blow a hole in your head, then take that goddamned knife of yours and rip your guts out with it right here and now! Leave them guts for the birds to peck over while you’re sucking your last breath!”

“I step on you like leetle bug,” the Frenchman boasted, stomping one moccasin into the trampled grass, grinding his heel into the dirt.

Carson rocked forward on the balls of his feet and hunched his shoulders menacingly. “All you can do is talk? Draw your goddamned knife, pork eater! For days now you been getting likkered up and bullying this hull camp—but now you’ve rubbed up again’ a real fighting rooster ’stead of some corn cracker’s barnyard pullet!”

For a moment Chouinard’s hand flexed and relaxed, flexed and relaxed around his knife handle.

Bass roared, “Gut ’im, Kit. Cut his heart out.”

His nostrils flaring, Carson growled at the towering Frenchman, “You’re big bull of this wallow?”

“I beeg bull of—”

“Shit!” Carson cut him off. “You ain’t much of a man, Shunar. Cain’t even take no horsehair belt off no li’l gal! You ain’t no bull no more! G’won and pull your knife so I can leave your guts out to dry for the jays!”

Chouinard drew his shoulders back, taking in a long breath as his chertlike eyes slowly ran across the crowd behind Carson. Only when he had done that did he peer down the short American’s frame before crawling back up to glare at Carson’s face. That look of undisguised contempt was suddenly replaced by a grin.

“No fight now, Keet,” he said almost apologetically. “I like your sponk. Maybe we be friends,
ami
? Friends,
n’c’est pa
?”

To Bass’s surprise the Frenchman turned on his heel without uttering another word and brutally shoved some of his followers aside as he stomped away.

Struck dumb at the suddenness of the giant’s retreat, Scratch listened as a smattering of laughter began among the Americans. In a heartbeat more than a hundred men
were guffawing as loudly as they could, hooting and catcalling after the Frenchman and his embarrassed followers who scrambled to catch up to Chouinard in his retreat.

“Why, if that hoss don’t take the circle, Kit!” Scratch marveled as they watched the giant’s back grow smaller. “The bastard was just about to wade into you till you spoke your piece ’bout that ’Rapaho gal.”

Meek asked, “Figger that’s what made him run off with his tail ’twixt his legs?”

“No matter—he’s gone now,” Bridger announced. “Let’s have us a drink for that bastard showing us the white feather!”

“Dunno, but something tells me this ain’t over, Gabe,” Bass warned, sensing that gnawing in his belly about the suddenness of the giant’s backstepping once the squaw was mentioned. He turned to Kit, saying, “Best you watch your back.”

But Bridger and Meek jointly yoked their arms over the shorter man’s shoulders and cheerily dragged Carson off toward the whiskey canopy.

“There’s other gals you can poke,” Joe declared.

Newell caught up with them. “Allays other squars, Kit!”

Wagging his head, a bewildered Titus Bass sauntered back to the awnings where the trade goods lay, sensing that nothing had been settled between the two. Chouinard’s attack on Grass Singing had served to irritate a wound that had been opened and kept oozing for some five long weeks while the Bridger and Drips brigades sat on their thumbs, impatiently waiting for the long-overdue supply caravan to reach the mouth of New Fork.

The camps already sat atop a powder keg of emotion.

During those long days of waiting, rumors had begun to circulate that Sublette and Campbell had indeed given up the mountain trade in an agreement with Astor’s successors in St. Louis. Another story confirmed that the partners were even selling the fort they had built on the North Platte last summer to the new firm of Fitzpatrick and Fontenelle—quitting the fur trade completely to become landed gentry and mercantilists back in St. Louis.

First it was General William H. Ashley who had pulled out after he made his fortune, and now Sublette and Campbell appeared poised to do the same. Could it be, rumor had it, that the two of them were following Astor’s lead: getting out while the getting was good because there was no more money to be made in the mountain beaver trade?

A man had only to look around that sprawling rendezvous camp as they waited through those last days of June, on through the entire month of July and the first week of August, to see that the bales of beaver were small, and few. More and more of the grumblers in the company camps announced their plans to cash in their chips once the caravan arrived. And once Fitzpatrick showed up more than a month late on August 12 with those pack animals swaybacked beneath trade goods, one of Fontenelle’s St. Louis clerks busied himself telling all who would listen a depressing tale that served to thicken the aura of gloom already hanging over that rendezvous of 1835.

“Back home it’s all the talk—a story come upriver from N’orleans ’bout a French duke what was over visiting the Chinee last year,” the wag related to his rapt audiences. “Seems that Frenchie lost his beaver-plug hat over there, and them Chinee didn’t have nary a beaver-plug hat to sell him.”

The clerk went on to describe how the French diplomat had a tall hat specially made for him from the silk of those productive worms, a hat he proudly wore upon his return to Paris where it became all the envy, and the fashion conscious clamored to have one just like it. In droves the best dressed of Europe had begun to abandon their beaver felts and were ordering hats of Chinese silk.

By now, the clerk explained to slack-jawed trappers, this frightening trend was gripping the States. Silk was all the rage.

Any half drunk who cared to give it a thought couldn’t help but reckon what was at that moment being scrawled on the wall: if beaver was no longer in demand, then it stood to reason that beaver men were soon to become an endangered species.