Ride the Moon Down (36 page)

The steam of his coffee warmed his face as Scratch held it beneath his chin. “These Absorkees ain’t got nowhere else to go, Sam’l. They ain’t about to ride north through Blackfoot country to trade at the Marias post, so if you wasn’t here—they’d be banging on the gates of Fort Union for powder and coffee.”

“It ain’t powder and coffee these bucks come for,” Tullock growled. “They don’t believe I ain’t got no whiskey.”

Titus snorted with laughter and glanced over at Magpie standing at her mother’s knee, gazing up at the warriors. He sensed that the girl must realize how those men looked more like her than did her father.

“Whiskey, is it? Ain’t that just what we taught ’em? We done our best to make these poor niggers want what’s the wust for ’em.”

“You was down on the Green?”

“Yup, a hot, dry one too, that was.”

“What’s news from ronnyvoo?” Tullock asked. “Last boat of the year, word down from Union said St. Louis has gone and bought up ever’thing.”

After sipping at the scalding coffee, Titus declared, “Your outfit owns the hull mountains now. It be a’tween you and Hudson’s Bay.”

The trader patted, then settled back against a stack of folded buffalo robes. “Beaver’s ’bout done.”

“I ain’t give up, Sam’l. Gonna ride this horse till it drops dead a’tween my legs.”

“What brings you here to the Tongue?” Tullock asked. “You been trapping nearby?”

“Been up the Rosebud, hung round the big bend for a few weeks till I trapped it out and weren’t wuth the trouble putting my steel in water. We moseyed north for the Yallerstone. Aiming to make it downriver to Fort Union. Look up an old friend.”

“Who that be?”

“Levi Gamble. You hear of him?”

“Never thought you’d know Levi,” the trader responded, stepping over to the ill-fitting door to brush away some of the snow sifting in around the jamb. “A fair man, good of heart too. Gamble’s been out here longer’n most.”

Nodding, Bass replied, “Met him back in Caintuck when he was on his way to St. Lou. Gonna meet up with Lisa and ride up the river for to be a beaver hunter.”

“That man’s got him some rings, all right,” Tullock declared with his back turned.

“Didn’t ever figger to run onto him,” Scratch admitted. “It’s been over twenty-five year now.”

The trader turned from the door as the wind keened all the more loudly, rattling the crude planks, whining as it shinnied through the chinking, moaning as it sulled around the sharp corners on this low-roofed log hut. “Figure it’s better for you and your family to stay here the night.”

“Thankee, Sam’l,” Scratch replied. “Gonna be dark soon.”

“You speak better Crow’n me—why don’t you tell them others they can bed down right here with us if they choose.”

After translating for the warriors, Scratch removed his buffalo-hide vest from his shoulders. Settling near the fireplace, he held out his arms to Magpie. A smile instantly blossomed on her face, her black-cherry eyes glowing as she trundled across the uneven floor, tripping once
and catching herself before she reached her father’s arms, giggling as he smothered her face and neck in kisses.

Two of the Crow followed Waits over to the fire and squatted cross-legged on the ground as the woman leaned against Bass’s shoulder.

“You will have another child soon,” one of the Crow said, nodding toward Waits’s belly. “Perhaps it will be a boy.”

Smiling, Titus patted the rounding belly. “Yes. A boy, perhaps.”

“A good thing, this—your wife birthing a boy,” the second man commented. “He will become a Crow warrior.”

Scratch took his eyes from the young man and stared at the flames. “Better that the boy become a beaver trapper like his father.”

“Just who in hell’s asking for Levi Gamble?”

Gazing up at the man yelling down at him, Scratch craned his neck there beside the wall of that massive wooden stockade rising some twenty feet beside the hulking stone bastion erected at the southwestern corner of the fort. A second and third man now joined the first to stare over the top of those pickets near the bastion’s stone wall. All three studied the visitors in that cold swirl of a ground blizzard.

For much of the day he and Waits-by-the-Water had struggled through the storm, making no more than a half-dozen miles, fighting to reach the walls as the afternoon light waned.

“An old friend,” he shouted at the trio above.

“You speak good English, friend,” a voice called down, the words all but hurtled away before they reached Bass at the foot of the giant timbers. “Better’n any Injun I know can speak English.”

“Well, now—I figger you for a white nigger too,” Titus growled. “My wife an’ young’un near froze out here, so what say you crawl on down here and let us in a’fore we can’t move no more.”

“Said you was a friend of Levi Gamble’s?”

“From a long time ago,” he replied. Bass was relieved when he saw the speaker’s head disappear. The other two-faces peered at him for a few seconds more before they were gone as well.

The snow stung his eyes as it flung itself against the wall, ricocheted off with a glancing blow and a howl of fury, then hurled sharp, icy shards at him from several directions at once.

He heard Magpie whimper again inside his coat where he clutched her against his warmth. Patting her back with one hand, Scratch pulled the buffalo robe more tightly around her. The moment the storm had descended upon them that morning, he had stopped, turned the girl around so that she faced him, her little legs straddling him in the saddle. Untying the flaps of his elk-hide coat so he could admit her, he had Magpie loop her arms around him, burying her face and head into the furry warmth of the buffalo-hide vest. When he had retied the coat around her, Bass dragged a buffalo robe across the neck of the pony, positioning it over Magpie’s back, wrapping it securely around their legs as the wind began to shriek through the cottonwoods that lined the northern bank of the Yellowstone.

Able to see no farther than their ponies’ noses, they had taken the better part of the afternoon to locate a place where they could ford to the north side of the Missouri, upriver from the post. Now they stood waiting on the tall, barren bluff overlooking the muddy river, at the mercy of the cruel wind, their animals caked with a brutal mix of ice from the Missouri and frozen snow.

“Over here!” a voice called gruffly as the wind died momentarily. “Hurry, goddammit!”

Through the swirling, wispy gauze of the dancing ground blizzard, Bass spotted a dark rectangle appear in the solid bank of wall timbers. He blinked and the rectangle disappeared. But as that gust of wind died, the dark rectangle reappeared, beside it now a figure swathed in a furry coat, his head like a huge, disproportionate grizzly’s resting atop his shoulders.

“C’mon!” Scratch snapped at Waits, reaching for her reins.

Their head-bent, tail-tucked ponies and Samantha required some extra nudging, heels and yanking both, to encourage the animals to move.

Near the fur-wrapped figure at the gate Scratch dropped to the ground with the girl in his arms. “You got a place in there for these here animals?”

“How many you got?” the voice grumbled beneath the hood of fur.

“Six. Less’n I take ’em somewhere back down the bank outta the wind, they ain’t gonna make it.”

“Bring ’em in,” the man relented. “We’ll make room for the night. Soon as the storm lets up—”

“I’ll pay for their k-keep,” Bass stuttered, shifting the little girl in his arms when she whimpered with the cold.

“That your young’un you got in there, mister?”

“My daughter.”

Beneath the frost-glazed brow of his bear-fur cap the man peered up at the Crow woman now. “You better get them both in here outta this wind.”

Scratch watched the man reach out and seize the reins to Waits-by-the-Water’s pony, removing them from Bass’s thick glove. The stranger turned and led the woman’s horse into that narrow rectangle, pushing aside the huge gate only wide enough to admit the animal and its rider who sat hunched over in the howling fury of the storm.

Hoisting the small child into his arms, Titus struggled to clutch the buffalo robe around them both as he started forward, tripping on the robe and dropping it.

“Magpie?”

“Yes, popo?” she said in English, her voice faint, muffled against his chest.

“I’ll get you warm soon,” he told her as he turned to discover the mule and the other ponies slowly drifting away before the wind, angling from the wall toward the tall fur press, its top completely obscured in the foggy swirl of snow.

“Get in here, mister!” the stranger bellowed as he reappeared at the gate, waving violently.

As a gust of wind died, Bass cried out, “Samantha!”

He tried to whistle, but his swollen, bleeding lips would not cooperate. Instead he called her name a second time, then started for the dark slash in the wall where the man stood holding open the gate.

Magpie shivered against him. “Popo?”

“Said I’ll get you warm soon.”

“Cold. Cold,” she whimpered, shaking against him.

Of a sudden that word reminded him how Josiah had whispered in his ear in the bloody aftermath of chasing after an old friend, moments after killing Asa McAfferty.

“M-my wife?” he stammered as he inched through the gate the stranger held open.

“She’s safe. I put her in the trade room round the corner,” the man said, bracing his arm against the wall to his left, propping open the heavy gate. “Take your young’un round there too.”

His weary arms barely able to hold on to Magpie, his legs stubborn and leaden, Scratch shuffled through the door with Zeke at his heels. As the sudden warmth brushed his bare cheeks, Titus noticed how the shriek of the wind disappeared behind him. This place smelled of coffee and beeswax, gunpowder and new wood slats on the crates of every trade good imaginable.

“Leave the child with its mother,” the stranger ordered.

Waits sat side-legged on the floor, wiping the melting snow from her damp face as she pulled back her hood. When he stumbled toward his wife, she looked up, held out her arms. Waits pulled aside the flaps of his coat and vest, reaching inside to grab the child, murmuring at Magpie in Crow.

He eased the girl into her mother’s lap with a whimper, then turned slowly.

“C’mon, mister,” the stranger said. “Let’s get them animals put up or they’re lost.”

It took long minutes of struggle to account for the five horses and Samantha, cajoling them toward the walls, through the gate, then into the crude pen to the right of the gate where they joined some other stock. Together
Bass and the stranger tore at the knots lashing their meager possessions and packs of beaver to their backs until everything had been dropped.

“Now,” the man gasped, brushing some of the frost from his gray beard and mustache, “s’pose you tell me who the hell this friend is what’s looking after Levi Gamble.”

“My name’s Bass. Titus Bass,” he gasped, winded, weary, and more than half frozen.

“Bass. Say you know Gamble?”

“Knowed him a long, long time ago.”

“How long?”

“Back to eighteen and ten it were—”

“Jesus and Mother Mary!” the stranger exclaimed. “How the hell you ’spect a ol’ man to remember that far back? So how you know him?”

“We shot at a mark together, once,” Bass explained, dragging a coat sleeve across the lower half of his face. It wasn’t near so cold there, out of the wind the way they were. “No more’n sixteen was I, but still I nearly whupped Levi that summer—”

“The Longhunters Fair?” the stranger suddenly blurted.

Bass licked his lips, surprised at the interruption. “Y-yup. Levi come through Boone County. We shot at the Longhunters Fair they hold every summer—”

“You that skinny whiffet of a green-broke young’un nearly outshot me that summer day?”

Scratch blinked again, closely studying the stranger’s face in the dim, fading light of that stormy afternoon. Those tired eyes, their deeply etched crows’-feet and liver-colored bags of fatigue, along with that massive, unkempt gray beard and tangle of iron-colored hair beneath the crown of black-bear fur.

“Levi?” he croaked. “Levi Gamble?”

“Goddamn, it’s been so long and you changed so much,” Gamble apologized. “I’d never knowed it was you even if you’d come up and punched me in the nose!”

Bass opened his arms and flung them around this man
who was a stranger no more. “Damn if it ain’t good to see a old friend!”

Gamble flung his arms around Bass, squeezed, then pounded Scratch on the back with both thick mittens. “I’ll declare, Titus Bass! What the hell took you so goddamned long to look me up?”

“You want me to believe this man nearly shot the pants off you, Levi Gamble?” demanded Kenneth McKenzie, the undisputed king of the high Missouri.

“That was more’n twenty-six summers ago, factor,” Levi apologized after he had introduced Bass to his employer the next evening following Scratch’s arrival at the Fort Union gates. “We was both better shots back then—wasn’t we, Titus?”

Bass grinned and winked at Gamble. “More’n half my life ago, Levi. I’m sure we both was better at a lot of things than we are now!”