Ride the Moon Down (7 page)

“Knowed the trail better, I’d s’pose,” Bass stated as he rubbed a thumb across the edge of a camp ax.

“I couldn’t travel as fast as he with the cattle,” Wyeth explained. “Started out with more. But what I have left we’ll put to good use eventually.”

“How much for an ax?”

“Two-fifty,” Wyeth said.

“Gimme two. What you figger to do for fur season?” Titus said as he inched down the rows of crates and blankets Wyeth’s men had opened and spread across a shady patch of ground beside Ham’s Fork—not all that far south of where Bass had camped with his family so that he might stay as far away as he could from the loud and raucous company camps pitched downstream toward Black’s Fork.

“I may send some of the men out. I’ve been struggling to convince more to sign on with me when I venture into the Snake River country.”

“Beaver country there.”

“Yes,” Wyeth exclaimed, beaming. “I want to get as far as I can from that country where Sublette and Campbell are building their fort on the Platte.”

“Jehoshaphat!” he exclaimed, coming to a stop. “W-where on the Platte?”

“Mouth of La Ramee’s Fork, right there on the trail to the mountains.”

Nodding, Bass said, “I know the place. Damn, a fort just east of the mountains. And you know them two Bent brothers got theirs down south on the Arkansas. So you’re gonna trap west of the mountains, eh?”

“I’ve got these men in my employ, and a supply train filled with trade goods,” Wyeth explained. “I’ll put them to work in the Snake country before the end of August, then go on to the mouth of the Columbia. Plan to return to the Snake before winter sets in hard.”

“All the way down the Columbia,” Bass repeated. “Going to see that white-headed Doctor there?”

“No. I’m meeting a ship there. Our enterprise plans to
catch enough salmon to fill the belly of that ship before we turn it around for Boston and I turn east to rendezvous with my brigade.”

“I got a friend what’s come here with Hudson’s Bay,” Bass explained. “It was him told me about how Sublette dealt you off the bottom of the deck with Rocky Mountain Fur.”

“Ah, but Doctor McLoughlin’s spies don’t realize that I’ll be up there on the Columbia real soon to take, for myself some of their salmon!” Wyeth spouted with glee.

Titus ran his thumbnail down a bar of lead. “What’s your lead going for?”

“Dollar the pound.”

“Gimme twenty pounds,” Bass advised. “Tell me, how you figure them Hudson’s Bay men are spies?”

“Hell,” Wyeth gushed, “they couldn’t come here expecting to do much business at all. You take a look at their camp?”

“I was there yestiddy.”

“See much in the way of trade goods?” Wyeth prodded. “Anything anywhere close to what I got laid out for you here?”

Scratch looked it over, side to side, and had to admit the Yankee was right. “Didn’t see nowhere near what you got.”

“And you won’t—because they didn’t bring but enough to make a little show. They aren’t here to trade, not really. They come to be McLoughlin’s eyes and ears. Ever since Jedediah Smith stumbled into Vancouver, the Doctor wants to stay informed of just what Americans will be trapping this side of the mountains—in what Hudson’s Bay claims is their country.”

“Maybeso,” Bass replied, not really wanting to admit that Jarrell Thornbrugh could be there for the unexpressed purpose of spying in the American fur country for McLoughlin.

And this was American fur country, no matter what Hudson’s Bay believed, no matter what treaty some government fellas had signed their names to in jointly occupying this ground. But if the central Rockies ever began to
run out of beaver, Bass was damned sure the American trapping brigades would push farther and farther west, bumping right up against the British outfits with greater frequency.

Mayhaps that would leave the northern rivers for him to trap with little crowding to speak of.

Scratch turned to find one of those who had been grading his pelts now coming up behind Wyeth. “What you gonna give me for my beaver?”

Wyeth took the slip of paper, glanced at it, then stuffed it into the pocket of his canvas breeches. “You didn’t have much in the way of fur.”

“Already took care of most down to Taos.”

“Didn’t leave you with much in the way to outfit you for another year,” Wyeth explained.

“I don’t need much. ’Sides, I got some possibles cached up on the Yallerstone,” Bass replied. Then he gestured toward all that he had chosen so far. “My plews gonna cover what’s here? And still leave me a little for at least one good whiskey headache?”

“Believe me, Mr. Bass,” the Yankee said, “for bringing the last of your furs to me instead of taking them to that thief William Sublette, you’re going to get yourself a one-day bargain in trade goods—the likes of which you’ll never see again!”

Throughout the rest of that morning they arm-wrestled on the value of the last of Bass’s pelts, then on the price of each and every item Scratch had pulled from the crates and barrels of trade goods. And when it was over, they both could smile and have themselves a drink, toasting their mutual fortunes.

“I’ll be trapping up in Crow country,” Bass explained, eyeing the number of crates and bales in Wyeth’s camp. “My wife’s people. If’n the furs are good up there, I’ll stick close to home for spring too. You gonna haul this hull outfit around, supplying ’em from your winter camp?”

Wyeth stared at the last of his whiskey shimmering in the bottom of his cup a moment, then declared, “I suppose I have no choice—seeing how I’ve been left with all these
trade goods, abandoned by a faithless group of bastards who are refusing to honor their contract with me.”

“Goddamned shame a man’s word ain’t wuth near what it used to be,” Bass commiserated.

“So what does such a man with all these trade goods do, Mr. Bass?”

For a minute he reflected on the possibilities. “I been out to the Columbia where you said you was going to meet that ship of your’n.”

“You’ve been to Vancouver yourself?”

“Yep—so I don’t figger a savvy nigger would wanna build hisself a post anywhere near the white-headed Doctor.”

“McLoughlin,” Wyeth said thoughtfully. “Yes. It wouldn’t make a lot of sense, would it?”

“Mayhaps a man with all this plunder to trade”—and Bass swung his free arm in a semicircle to indicate the profusion of goods—“should stake out his own ground.”

“His own ground?”

“Find hisself a spot where he won’t have no one near to bump up again’ him in business.”

Wyeth’s eyes shone wide and bright. “Yes, yes!”

“Someplace where he would plop hisself down and be there with his post and his goods for the trappers what wander by,” Bass explained, seeing that fire of excitement flicker boldly in the Yankee’s eyes. “Someplace where that post of his would bring in the friendlies.”

“The friendlies?” Wyeth drained his cup, setting it aside.

“Tribes what cotton up to the white man.”

“Yes! Like the ones here,” Wyeth cheered. “Flathead, Nez Perce.”

“Snake too.”

“Why, the Shoshone roam that Snake River country.”

“Good place as any for a man to be when he’s got him a passel of trade goods.”

Slapping both palms down on the tops of his thighs, the Yankee vaulted to his feet suddenly. “A good place where I’ll raise my fort—squarely in the middle! Right between the Hudson’s Bay at Vancouver on the Columbia
… and the post Sublette and Campbell are raising at the mouth of La Ramee’s Fork! God bless you, Titus Bass! God bless you!”

“W-what the hell you bless me for?” and he found his cup being filled by the exuberant Yankee.

“All is not lost! Don’t you see?” Wyeth swept up his own cup again, pouring some amber fluid into it from a clay jug. “From the other outfits come here to rendezvous, I’ve somehow managed to add another thirty men to my brigade … and now I know where to base my operations! By building my own fort squarely in the western country!”

As for Wyeth, the Yankee did have little choice but to swallow the bone he had been thrown at this turn of life’s trail.

There truly was no recourse against those who had conspired against him, just as he himself admitted in correspondence written to his financial backers in the East over the last few days, “For there is no Law here.”

Fair play and honesty had apparently counted for nothing under the hot summer sun that second of July as the Wyeth brigade set out for the Snake country, escorting Jason Lee’s party of five Protestant missionaries bound for the land of the Nez Perce with what remained of their horned cattle.

A hungover Bass had finished loading up the last of the goods he had traded from Wyeth that morning as the Boston merchant eagerly prepared to pull out for the west, accompanied by a pair of naturalists he had escorted from St. Louis: Thomas Nuttall, a botanist, and John Kirk Townsend, a Philadelphia ornithologist.

Grittily shaking hands with the two partners who had done nothing to stop Sublette’s underhanded scheming, Wyeth grimly prophesied to Fitzpatrick and Bridger, “You will find that you have only bound yourselves over to receive your supplies at such price as may be inflicted on you, and that all that you will ever make in this country will go to pay for your goods. You will be kept as you have been—a mere slave to catch beaver for others.”

Upon marching away from that rendezvous in the valley
of Ham’s Fork, the Yankee tipped his hat and smiled at Sublette and Campbell, those who had done everything in their power to destroy the success of his business enterprises, vicious competitors who out of some species of curiosity had come to see him off.

To them and the remnants of the Rocky Mountain Fur Company partners, Wyeth vowed, “Gentlemen, I will roll a stone into your garden that you will never be able to get out.”

His was a threat that would echo even louder across the years to come.

The unmerciful August sun stung Bass’s eyes with the burn of mud-dauber wasps as he stepped from the cool shelter of the cottonwoods along Ham’s Fork to watch the approach of those eighteen Frenchmen and half-breeds moseying unhurriedly behind Thomas McKay and Jarrell Thornbrugh. The seething orb had just emerged from the ridges to the east, but already the motionless air felt stifling.

“Not a good day for the trail!” Titus called out as the ragged column approached.

“We better get out while we still have some fat on our bones!” Thornbrugh roared, and brought his tall horse to a halt. He swiped a hand down his sweaty face. “Not one of us used to this bloody heat, Scratch.”

“Figure we can stay and sweat in the shade,” McKay declared, “or we can start back to our country—”

“Where it’s cooler,” Thornbrugh interrupted, “and green too!”

For a moment Bass regarded the austere beauty of the burnt-sienna bluffs that rimmed the valley, shoved up like massive, mighty shoulders against the pale summer-blue of the morning sky. “Green there all the time, ain’t it?”

“Winter or summer,” McKay agreed.

“You can keep it,” he told them. “I’ll stay on here where there’s real seasons. Much as I hate the summers—I’d rather have me my seasons.”

“The snows don’t get deep in Oregon country,” Thornbrugh chided as he started to rock out of the saddle.
“And the snows don’t stay near as long as they do in your mountains.”

“You ain’t got me to worry about moving in with you, Jarrell!”

“If not, will we see you next rendezvous?”

He watched the Englishman step up before him. “’Less I’ve gone under—that’s for sartin.”

“You have all you’ll need for another year, my friend?”

“Believe I do.”

“Powder and lead—”

“Yep.”

“Blankets and beads?”

“Yes, Jarrell,” he answered with a smile. “Even got some girlews and geegaws off Wyeth in my trading.”

“That Yank’s sure to trouble the Company,” McKay snarled. “I just know it, Jarrell.”

Thornbrugh turned back to Bass. “You’ll watch what you got left for hair?”

“I got me others to watch over now,” Scratch replied.

“They’re beauties, let me tell you,” the tall man exclaimed with admiration. “Good thing the wee one takes after her mother—gorgeous as she is.”

“Wouldn’t do to have a sweet babe like that take after her mud-ugly ol’ man, would it?”

And then they stood there, motionless a long moment longer, staring at one another, growing in the unease of knowing the time had come once again.

“I said my fare-thees to you twice’t a’fore, Jarrell,” Bass stabbed the silence between them as the men sweated and the horses stamped in a semicircle around the two of them.

“What’s that you’re trying to say?”

“That this may be a fare-thee too, but it’s also a promise to cross your tracks again.”

Titus held out his hand between them, but Thornbrugh shoved it aside roughly and seized the American in both of his massive arms, pulling the smaller, thinner man into a ferocious embrace. At that very moment Scratch was grateful Jarrell nearly squeezed the breath out of his
body. For that moment Thornbrugh choked off the sob that threatened to overwhelm Titus.

When the big Englishman pulled back, their arms outstretched between them, Bass blinked several times, squinting as if troubled with the intense light. But it was the fire of those sudden tears that stung his eyes now.

Thornbrugh inched back another step. “I’ll hold you to that promise, Titus Bass—true lord of this great wilderness! If God doesn’t take me, and the good Doctor so chooses, I’ll be back here to your rendezvous next year.”

“I’ll be here, friend. Lay your set to that.” And he studied the way the huge man moved as Thornbrugh turned and stepped back to his horse, taking his reins from McKay, then rose to the saddle.

“Give my respects to the Doctor.”

“I will do that,” Thornbrugh agreed as he urged his horse away slowly.

“He’s a good man … for an Englishman!”

Jarrell bawled with a crack of sudden laughter that split the hot air. “You aren’t a bad sort either—not for a wretched American!”

Then he called out, “Watch your backtrail, Jarrell!”

Thornbrugh turned and smiled hugely with those massive teeth of his like whitewashed pickets surrounding a settlement house. He waved one last time, then twisted back around in the saddle and was swallowed up by the rest of those bringing up the rear of that column.