Ride the Moon Down

9

Waits-by-the-Water watched in rapt fascination as the blood oozed out of the wound in the trapper’s back where another white man delicately worked the point of his honed knife.

Surely the one wielding that instrument must be some sort of shaman, if for no other reason than the trapper he was cutting on sat there so calmly, without the slightest movement nor flinch, as the bloody knife scraped deeper and deeper into his upper back. There must be some magic that kept this terrible, painful ordeal from hurting!

From time to time she glanced up at her husband, to gauge his thoughts by the wondrous expression on his face as they stood among those hundreds of awestruck trappers and gaping Indians who stared transfixed, witnessing what truly had to be a powerful magic.

“I’ve had arrows pushed and pounded right out of me,” Bass whispered to her as that bare-backed trapper wrapped his whitened knuckles around a tent pole two others held upright for him. “But I never have seen anything like what’s being done to of Gabe right now.”

Waits repeated with growing proficiency in her English, “G-gabe?”

“Bridger. Jim Bridger.”

“Bri-ger,” she echoed, then asked him in her tongue, “You know Bri-ger?”

“Known him a long time. Good a man as they come. The sort I’d want at my back in a hard scrape.”

“Is this magic? This shaman cuts on Bri-ger and it doesn’t hurt?” she inquired, picking Magpie up from the ground to put the girl astraddle her hip.

“Naw,” he answered. “Bridger’s just taking it bravely. Look there at his teeth—see how he’s biting down on a thick chunk of rawhide real hard.”

“So the cutter is not a medicine man among the whites?”

With a grin Titus brushed a little of Magpie’s brownish hair from the girl’s eyes. “Yes, the cutter’s a medicine man. A shaman who does his work with knives, sometimes mixing up potions to drink like a Crow medicine man will do.”

Still confused, she asked, “No magic?”

He chuckled softly as he took Magpie from her arms and hoisted the girl onto his shoulders where she settled high above the attentive crowd. “No magic. Just Bridger’s cast-iron will.”

The white shaman wiped a damp cloth across the trapper’s back, smearing the glistening blood from the edges of the wound.

“All this, to pull out the Blackfoot arrowhead,” she observed wryly, wagging her head.

Bass had come to fetch her late that morning. When he sprinted into their camp, he was flush with excitement as he told her she must grab Magpie and mount up, to follow him back to the big camp because there was about to occur something he wanted her very much to see. By the time they reached the two huge awnings that were stretched overhead in the cottonwood trees near the bank of New Fork as it meandered toward its junction with the Green River, a boisterous crowd of white men were already encircling that shady spot they were keeping open, holding back those curious members of the Ute and Shoshone who were joining the Nez Perce of Tai-quin-watish and Insala’s Flathead who had come to witness this magic.

Two tall, muscular trappers trudged in with a thick section of a cottonwood trunk and pitched it onto the grass in the middle of the open ground. Bass had called out to one of the two, saying his name was Meek after the man waved to her husband. By then four men had moved toward the log where the one called Bri-ger settled and removed his faded cloth shirt. As a pair of trappers set a tall shaved pole near Bridger’s feet, the fourth man began to probe with a finger at a spot between Bridger’s shoulder blade and his backbone.

Then the medicine man waved another out of the crowd, a trapper carrying a small iron kettle filled with water that steamed even as the day’s temperature continued to rise. From it the shaman extracted a short-bladed knife, flung off the excess water, then asked something of Bridger who sat hunched over below him.

When the trapper shoved that piece of rawhide between his teeth, then gripped both hands around the tent pole, the medicine man laid the point of his knife against a particular spot on Bridger’s back and made his first cut—a gesture that caused every one of the hundreds of onlookers to fall silent at that very instant, the entire circle of them craning their necks forward.

From time to time the medicine man and the trapper shared a few words; then the knife continued its work.

And now the medicine man inched around in front of Bridger, kneeling so he could peer closely into the trapper’s eyes, and began to speak as his bloody hands appeared to make signs.

“What is he signing?” she asked her husband in that expectant hush of the crowd.

“He isn’t signing,” Titus explained. “Just telling Bridger that the arrow point he’s digging for is stuck deep, buried in the bone.”

She swallowed hard, vividly picturing that—having seen enough of the iron arrowheads that had wedged and embedded themselves into the thick bones of the buffalo her people hunted through the seasons.

“He says the tip of the arrow is bent, stuck in Bridger’s back,” Scratch continued. “And Bridger just said he figures that’s why they couldn’t get the arrowhead out three years ago.”

“Three years,” she repeated, transfixed on the medicine man’s hands as he crooked a finger, describing something to the trapper.

“The medicine man is telling Bridger it’s gonna be even harder to get the arrowhead out than he first thought.”

“Why?” She gazed up to pat her daughter’s hand before she stared back at the doctor who was getting to his feet and returning to his work at the trapper’s back.

“Can’t think of the Crow words for it—but there’s some new bone what’s growed around the arrowhead,” he explained, stabbing a single finger on one hand between two other tight fingers to show her.

Waits nodded in understanding. “Three years the bone has grown around the arrow, yes.”

With Bridger chomping his teeth on the chunk of rawhide as never before, the medicine man pressed on with his cutting, delicately working the tip of his knife down and around the wound that was freely flowing now. Then, by slicing sideways and prying slightly, after agonizing minutes of torture the medicine man pulled from the wound a dark, glistening object he immediately held up at the end of his arm.

Her husband and the others instantly hooted and hollered, screeched and whistled, as Bridger shuddered, huffing deeply after he spit out the thick slab of rawhide. He grumbled at the medicine man who stepped to the trapper’s knee and handed the bloody object to the bleeding man.

“Goddamn, if that ain’t some!” Bridger commented quietly, as if much of his strength had just been tested.

“Damn right!” the one named Meek roared as he lunged over to slap the medicine man on the back, then held up the shaman’s bloody arm while the trappers went wild again with their whooping and shrill Indian calls.

“That was ’bout as slick as warm buff tallow!” her husband bellowed at those old friends of his who stood nearby, these trappers he had traveled the high places with in years gone by before he had chosen to journey the mountains and plains with her.

Now he turned to her quickly, chuckling, his eyes filled with wonder, his face lit with exuberance as he said, “A friend just told me that medicine man is named Whitman. He’s one who reads the book of God.”

“A holy man, yes,” she said, finding it made perfect sense for a true holy man to possess such remarkable healing powers. Among her people the spiritual men healed the physical body.

Bass whispered to her, “The knife cutter just told Bridger he is amazed the arrowhead didn’t cause more trouble in the last three winters … but Bridger claimed his back only hurt when the winter cold was deep and long.”

“Just as your wounds hurt you a little more with every winter?”

“As long as I have your fire to warm me, woman—I’ll never mind the coming winters,” he told her, gathering Waits beneath his arm.

As she gazed up to smile at Magpie, four of her husband’s old friends pierced the crowd that was breaking up and stopped around them. She recognized a few of those words they spoke back and forth as the white men looked upon Magpie with smiles of admiration, touching the girl’s dusty feet or rubbing her bare arm as they cooed at her and jabbered with her husband.

Bass slipped the child from his shoulders and saddled her on his hip. Cupping her chin in his hand, he asked Magpie in Crow, “You want to come with me to visit my friends?”

Then it sounded as if he asked the same thing in the white man’s tongue.

“I don’t think she understands me,” Bass sighed.

“One day soon she will understand what we say,” Waits explained, taking the child into her arms. She watched her husband turn away and dig among his things in search of something. “And when she gets older, I hope she will know just how special she is to learn two languages while she is still a child.”

From a rawhide pouch Titus pulled a greasy deck of cards tied with a narrow whang cut from his legging fringe, and said, “With these, sweet woman—I just might win something extra from my old friends in a game of chance.”

“Chance? Like the game of hand my people play?”

“Just like it,” and he bent to kiss her. “Wish me your luck so I can bring back a present for you and one for little Magpie too.”

“Just bring yourself back, husband,” she said with laughter lighting her eyes. “And I will give you a present beneath the blankets tonight.”

He kissed her again. “Do you realize how special you are? To let your husband go off to gamble with his friends?”

“A man needs to be with his friends,” she replied. “You are with us the rest of the seasons—I think it is good we come here each summer so you visit your old friends. A man like you—to live alone in the mountains and on the banks of the far rivers away from the village—such a man needs a few good friends.”

For a moment her husband sighed, his eyes looking over the four white men who stood around them. Then Titus gazed at her with a sad smile and said in Crow, “As I grow older, I greet fewer friends here every summer. So it is right that with the passing of the seasons, what friends I have left grow more special to me, grow more dear in my heart.”

“If’n that hoss don’t take the circle!” Elbridge Gray roared as he and the others joined Titus in recounting the missionary doctor’s operation on Jim Bridger four days before.

Half bent over with laughter, his copper beard dusted with cornmeal, Rufus Graham demanded, “Say it again, Scratch—what-Gabe told that sawbones preacher.”

“When Whitman asked Bridger why that arrowhead didn’t give him more fits in the last three years”—Scratch could barely sputter between side-aching guffaws—“Bridger tol’t him—meat don’t s-spoil in the m-mountains!”

All five of them pounded their feet on the ground or drummed their thighs, clutching their bellies as they laughed.

“Caleb would’ve loved seeing that!” Isaac Simms said with a great chuckle, then realized the sad import of what he had uttered.

“Damn them red buggers anyways!” Bass swore as they all went serious with the flicker of a jay’s wing. “Cutting down a good man like Caleb Wood—right in his prime.”

For a few moments the five grew thoughtful, staring at the ground, or out at the sky, perhaps up at the leaves dancing in the warm breeze that wound its way through the American Fur Company camp.

Finally Solomon Fish said, “Jack would’ve bust his gut to stand there and hear that story too.”

“Shit,” Titus bawled with a huge smile. “Mad Jack was the sort stepped right up there and offered to cut that goddamned arrow right outta Gabe’s back for him his own self!”

The others looked up to find Bass grinning, and in an instant all of them were chuckling again. It was a good feeling, being there among old friends who had stood at his back when together they had faced down Comanche and Blackfoot. Now these friends sprawled around the fire, drinking their potent whiskey, smoking harsh trade tobacco, and stuffing themselves with the beans, cornmeal, and pumpkins Lucien Fontenelle’s mules had packed all the way from the settlements.

“That’s purely some, fellers,” Scratch declared, fighting the sob in his throat as the group fell silent once more. “Chirk up, boys! It shines to laugh when you’re thinking ’bout an old friend. What would Mad Jack and Caleb think of us if we was to get all mopey and down in the tooth whenever we was to ’member on them?”

“Bass is right,” Elbridge reminded them as he turned those slabs of aromatic pumpkin frying in his skillet with a fragrance that reminded them all of a home long ago left behind. “’Specially Jack.”

Scratch bobbed his head. “Hatcher was the life-lovin’ fool now. And Caleb loved playing the sourpuss for Hatcher too.”

“Ain’t that the saint’s truth?” Isaac agreed, wiping more of the dark yellow-brown streaks of tobacco juice into his pale, whitish beard. “When Jack was gone and Caleb took over this bunch, why—that’s when Caleb started getting a funny bone hisself.”

“Damn them Blackfoot,” Bass growled, brooding again on how the four had described Caleb Wood’s horrible death at the hands of the Blackfoot early this past winter.

Ever since Scratch had thrown in with Jack Hatcher’s bunch back in the summer of twenty-seven, one by one they had been whittled away: first by Rocky Mountain tick fever, then two had decided they would fare better hanging back to Taos with their Mexican wives, and finally their last two leaders had fallen to the enemy—Hatcher in the Pierre’s Hole fight^*and now Wood had gone under as Bridger’s brigade hacked its way back out of Blackfoot country. Where they had once been ten—now there were but four. And as much as they had hoped their lot would improve by throwing in with Bridger’s men seasons ago, things hadn’t gotten any better at all.

“Damn good thing Jack ain’t around to see what’s become of the mountains,” Solomon grumbled. He swiped at his hatchet of a nose dotted with huge pores forever blackened with fire soot and dirt.

“Trader’s got us crumped over a barrel with his high prices,” Scratch groaned.

“And our beaver ain’t ever gonna be wuth much anymore,” Rufus added with a faint whistle between those four missing teeth.

“Time was, we free men was the princes in this land,” Elbridge declared beneath that big bulb of a nose scored with tiny blue veins. “But now we’re so poor we’re barely hanging on with our toenails.”

Simms wagged his head, complaining, “Man cain’t hardly make a living catching flat-tails no more.”

All too painfully true. This year almost a fourth of Bridger’s and Tom Fitzpatrick’s trappers had declared their intentions of dropping out of the brigades, choosing to return east with the fur caravan, waiting until they reached St. Louis so they would be paid in cash rather than take out their wages in trade goods for the coming season. Hard to believe that more than eighty men, not to mention Fraeb and Gervais—Bridger’s and Fitz’s old partners—were giving up on the mountains!

“Let ’em run on back,” Scratch had snorted when Elbridge Gray told him the surprising news. “There’ll allays be them what don’t belong out here. I say hurraw for all of ’em skedaddling with their tails a’tween their legs—goddamned flatlanders anyway!”

At rendezvous this summer there were no more than two hundred company trappers and well less than a hundred free men. For damned sure those Hudson’s Bay men who had followed Thomas McKay and John McLeod there again didn’t count. Where once more than six hundred red-eyed white hellions had run wild with rendezvous fever, buying whiskey and bedding squaws until they were sore-dicked, hungover, and once again deeply in debt … rendezvous this summer paled when compared to those robust carnivals of recent years. Not near the fun, nor near the trade goods and liquor. And even if there had been plenty of supplies and grain alcohol, there simply wasn’t all that many men who could afford the rampant, glazed-eyed sprees of bygone years.

Plain as summer sun this August of 1835, no longer was there anywhere near the beaver there had been.

Why, if it hadn’t been for that Presbyterian missionary Dr. Marcus Whitman cutting that iron arrowhead more than three inches long out of a three-year-old growth of bone and cartilage in Jim Bridger’s back, so far there had been little to make this rendezvous remarkable in more than a decade of summer fairs.

No sooner had he finished running spidery threads of elk sinew through holes he’d jabbed in Bridger’s skin to close the wound than another American Fur trapper stepped up to Whitman and yanked his own grimy shirt off to point at the lump of cartilage hardened around an arrowhead right under his skin—a wound almost as old as Bridger’s. And for the next three days this quiet man of God from the East had entertained one gamy patient after another—both white trapper and redskin alike—performing his minor operations and dispensing calomel to those who had grown bilious, even bleeding others. The Reverend Doctor Whitman had made a lifelong friend in Jim Bridger, and convinced the others that while all the rest of the religious Bible-thumpers who came west for the Nez Perce country were the sort to glower down their noses at the little fun these men allowed themselves every summer at rendezvous, there was at least one missionary who took the chalk.

It wasn’t long before news began to circulate from the American Fur camp that Lucien Fontenelle’s supply train might well not have made it to rendezvous if it hadn’t been for the good Dr. Whitman. Back along the Missouri, even before turning west along the Platte River Road, cholera had begun to burn its way through the caravan. And though he had little strength remaining in his own reserves, Whitman began to nurse the sick and dying, able to save all but two by the time every last man in Fontenelle’s train had been laid low by that terrible scourge.

They had lost a month there on the bluffs overlooking the muddy river: at least two weeks to let the epidemic run its course through the hired hands, and another two weeks until the men recuperated enough to continue their journey for the mountains.

To those unlettered laborers who had muscled Fontenelle’s wagons and mules west, to those illiterate but savvy princes of the wilderness, Whitman became no less than an unvarnished hero. As he began the next three days of recovering from the crude, open-air surgery, no less a mountain veteran than Jim Bridger himself had declared that the doctor would clearly do to ride the river with.

That praise was enough for any man jack of them there at the mouth of the New Fork.

Then, as if having that arrowhead cut out of his back four days ago wasn’t enough, Bridger handed the camps another reason for celebration.

“C’mon!” the burly trapper bellowed as he lunged back among the blanket bowers and canvas-covered shelters where Bass sat among old friends and company men.

“Grab yore guns!” roared the flush-faced man scurrying up on Joe Meek’s heels.

“Injun trouble?” Isaac Simms shrieked as he scrambled to his feet.

“Shit,” Meek huffed, coming to a halt. “Just bring your guns to shoot off when the marryin’ is done!”

“M-marryin’?” Rufus asked.

Robert “Doc” Newell leaned an arm on Meek’s shoulder, huffing as more than fifty company trappers hurried close to hear the news. “Booshway’s give us a half hour to gather a crowd, boys. Then he’s gonna let a ol’ hide-thumper marry him off to a gal he’s took a shine to.”

“Booshway?” Bass repeated. “You mean that ol’ whitehead Fitzpatrick? If that don’t beat all—Broken Hand’s getting hisself hitched!”

“Goddammit—Doc here didn’t say nothing ’bout Fitz tying the knot with a squaw!” Meek snorted.

Scratch shook his head. “But he said booshway—”

“Bridger, gol-dangit!” Newell bawled. “Bridger’s taking him a bride!”

Gabe must have been feeling more than pert. What with having that arrowhead cut out of his back, he must have been feeling downright cocky.

After more than a dozen years in the mountains, after bedding squaws every summer at rendezvous and occasionally of a winter encampment, Jim Bridger likely decided he was ready to settle down with a squaw. And not just the first one that caught his eye, Scratch discovered. This beauty was the cherished daughter of Flathead chief Insala.

Bass hurried back to camp where he fetched Waits-by-the-Water and Magpie, all three of them quickly donning their finest clothes. As his wife finished brushing her own black tresses, Titus dabbed a little purplish vermilion dye along the part of their child’s hair after he had dragged a porcupine-tail brush through her locks already reaching her shoulders. Then he tied Zeke to a tree with a long length of rope and gave the dog a new antelope bone to content himself with before the three of them mounted up and loped off for the Flathead village erected on the far side of the American Fur Company encampment.

Beyond Insala’s people stood more camp circles crowding this lush bottom ground: Nez Perce, Ute, Shoshone, and even a few lodges of Arapaho who had dared come trade with the trappers rather than to fight the white men. More than a thousand Indians all told, and most of them were streaming into the Flathead village with close to two hundred of the company trappers who were singing a variety of discordant songs, pounding on brass pots and iron kettles, one man even blowing reedily through an out-of-tune clarinet while several men dragged air through concertinas and others sawed catgut bows across the strings of their violins as the many processions threaded their way toward the center of the camp like throbbing spokes on a wagon wheel.

It was there the Flathead were not to be outdone as the old rattle shakers and thick-wristed drummers were already taking up their chants and high-pitched songs while the crowds shoved together, shoulder to shoulder, neck-craning to get themselves a good gander at the bridegroom riding into camp with an escort of the most dandified trappers Bass had ever seen. Wearing war paint of their own, feathers tied in their long hair as well as in the tails and manes of their horses, with strips of blue and red wool tied around their arms and legs or bands of brass wire encircling their wrists and upper arms, those half dozen who accompanied Bridger were a sight to behold.

Then all went hushed as Bridger and his men halted before the central lodge, dismounting. Handing their horses to those in the crowd, the booshway and his best men strode up to the handful of old counselors who stood at the lodge entrance. Dressed in the spanking-new knee-length morning coat and canvas pantaloons Lucien Fontenelle had purchased in St. Louis specifically for him, Gabe respectfully removed his hat to bare his hair greased back and freshly combed for this momentous occasion. Swallowing audibly, he spoke as clearly as he could those halting Flathead words, stuttering nervously.

A wrinkled oldster turned and called out to the lodge, whereupon a middle-aged warrior emerged to stand before Bridger.

“That’s Insala,” Bass declared in a whisper as Waits stood on tiptoe to have herself a better look through the expectant crowd.

In but a moment Bridger turned and waved his arm—signal for more of his men to push their way out of the crowd with more than a dozen ponies, two of them laden with blankets he pulled off and laid before the Flathead chief. Upon the blankets the best men then spread a glittering array of knives and tomahawks, kettles and beads, cloth and ribbon, finger rings and hawksbells. Packets of vermilion and indigo ink joined the rest as Bridger stepped back, gestured across his gifts, then crossed his arms and waited ceremonially for the chief’s answer.

Dramatically, Insala stepped forward and knelt at the first blanket, fingering this, inspecting that, closely peering at most everything before he moved on to the second blanket … slowly, thoughtfully studying it all while the crowd murmured quietly, the hundreds upon hundreds of witnesses waiting in the bright summer sun as the chief decided if the gifts were enough compensation for this sale of his daughter.

Eventually the old warrior stood and moved over to stop inches from Bridger, gazing into the white man’s eye as Gabe dropped his arms to his side and gulped, clearly showing his anxiety, his face bright with sweat.

Suddenly Insala raised his arms and brought his hands down on Bridger’s shoulders four times as the Flathead people set up a huge roar, laughing and cheering, women keening while the drums began thumping again. While Bridger grew wide-eyed, the chief quickly turned and pointed to his lodge door, calling out in his tongue.

As one of the old counselors pulled aside the flap, a head emerged, just as the crowd fell silent once more. In that noiseless pause the chief’s beautiful daughter came to stand beside her father, a red-striped white trade blanket folded over her left arm. Taking it from the bride’s arm, Insala nudged Bridger a step closer to the shy young woman. Then the chief unfurled the blanket so he could wrap it around his daughter and her new husband.

Taking hold of Bridger’s wrist, Insala stuffed two corners of the blanket into the trapper’s hand so the white man held the blanket around himself and his new bride—then the chief suddenly raised both of his arms into the air and shouted.

His Flathead people answered in kind and took to singing once more as they surged in and began circling the newlyweds, shoving against one another, against members of the other tribes, against the outnumbered white men, everyone slowly dancing in a great sunward swirl as Bridger self-consciously put his forehead against his bride’s brow and gazed into her eyes.

“By damn,” Scratch exclaimed to his friends nearby as they all craned their necks for a good look through the throbbing, dancing, celebrating masses, “if’n it don’t look to be that Gabe’s a’blushing!”

“It’s his wedding day, goddammit!” Rufus Graham snarled.

Elbridge Gray bellowed, “I figger he’s thinking ’bout his wedding night!”

“She sure be a purty-enough gal to make a feller get all het up,” Isaac added.

After a matter of minutes Bridger and his escorts started to knife their way slowly through the celebrants who spread out in a wide cordon along either side of the path the bride and groom were now taking to begin their journey back to the American camp. Drumming and singing continued, laughs and snorts and wild music floated on the afternoon air all along those two miles of valley bottom ground where the tall grass, bluestem, and wild flax waved in the summer breeze.

By the time the parade had reached the trapper camp, most of the Indians were turning about, making their way slowly back to their villages where fires would be kindled and supper put on the boil. Meanwhile the trappers were streaming around a large open meadow where a few were feeding wood to huge bonfires and beginning to stake out slabs of meat to roast, some rolling up small kegs of whiskey and stumps for that time when the musicians would settle around the leaping fires while the sun continued its fall toward the western hills.

Of a sudden Bass became aware of a change in the tone of the celebration when a knot of trappers nearby began shouting, cheering, jeering, hollering in that way of angry, worked-up men.

“You stay with Magpie, here,” he told his wife, lifting the child from his shoulder, passing the girl to Waits-by-the-Water. “I’ll be back soon.”

Motioning the four old friends to follow him, Titus loped with many others toward the growing commotion. Back and forth the crowd surged, stretching itself this way and that so it always left just the right amount of open ground for the brutal, bare-knuckled sport raging at its center. On the ground lay three white men, by their vivid dress plainly some of Fontenelle’s and Drips’s French voyageurs. Of the trio, two sprawled across one another, clearly unconscious, while the third struggled clumsily, attempting to drag himself from the ground as he wagged his head. In their midst a fourth voyageur gamely tried to duck as he flailed away with wild, ineffective haymakers at the lone man the four of them had been fighting off.

A tall tree trunk of a man—a frightening, slab-shouldered giant bigger than Silas Cooper had been, a giant every bit as imposing as was Emile Sharpe, the half-breed Red River Metis who had come west to the Green River in search of Josiah Paddock.

Laughing sinisterly, the giant quickly stepped aside as the lone voyageur lumbered past, grabbing the shorter man’s hair and using it to hurl his victim around in a tight circle as the Frenchman shrieked in torment, clawing at the big man’s wrist. But as the monster of a brute guffawed and spouted in broken English, it was immediately clear he too was a Frenchman.

“Enfant d’garce!”

Slowly the giant raised his left arm, hoisting the voyageur by the hair until the shorter man dangled, his toes barely brushing the ground. Mule-eyed, the voyageur clung to the giant’s left wrist, completely helpless as the monster roared his foreign French oath, spat a wad of phlegm into the small man’s face, then flung his maul-sized fist squarely between the struggling voyageur’s eyes.

Then let his victim go.

Stunned senseless, the short man crumpled to his knees, watery-legged and totally oblivious as the giant shadowed him once again, looped a big hand around his throat, then flung him up at the end of his arm again where the voyageur swung freely. This time the giant smashed his fist into the middle of the small man’s face with a sickening crackle of cartilage and bone, blood spurting from the crushed tissues.

Again the monster cocked back his arm, ready for another blow—

“Shunar!”

A hush descended upon the spectators like a blanket.

The voyageur hung limp as a length of buffalo gut at the end of the huge tormentor’s arm, as if no more than a clump of oiled canvas swaying in the hot afternoon breeze. Slowly, the Frenchman turned from the victim he had imprisoned at the end of his left arm to stare narrow-eyed at the one who had cried out his name.

Amid the sudden silence, Isaac Simms leaned in and whispered to Bass, “That’s Drips—company booshway!”

Still this giant named Chouinard did not release his fourth victim.

“Let ’im go, Shunar!” Drips demanded as he stepped within six feet of the giant, his hand resting on the butt of his belt pistol.

It was as if the entire crowd of hundreds, white and red alike, waited to draw a breath—watching this small, spare man dare to stop within easy reach of the monster.

Slowly considering the command, Chouinard gazed at his prisoner for a long moment, then flung the voyageur to the ground with an audible snap of bone.

“Goddamn you!” Andrew Drips shrieked as he went to one knee beside the crumpled victim.

Immediately the giant took a step to loom over Drips. The company leader jerked his head up to glare at the giant and yanked that pistol from his belt—holding it out at the end of his arm, the hammer coming back to full cock with one swift motion.

“I’ll kill you,” Drips said with studied coolness. “You big pigheaded Frenchman, don’t you doubt that I will shoot you between your goddamned eyes where you stand.”

“Maybe I grab your gun first,” Chouinard growled in reply, “keel you before you can pop your leetle gun.”

The pistol held steadily on its target as Drips slowly rose to his feet, never taking his eyes off the giant, nor the muzzle of that pistol from that spot between the giant’s slitted eyes.

“I’ll let you have this chance, you parley-voo bastard,” Jim Bridger said as he stepped from the edge of the crowd with his pistol drawn, flanked by the huge, bear-chested Meek and the smaller tow-headed Carson. “You so much as move torst Drips—I’ll drop you.”

“Lookee here,” Meek said on the far side of Bridger, wagging the end of his short-barreled smoothbore. “This here’s what I call a camp clearer, you son of a bitch. Loaded with a good handful of drop shot. I touch this’r trigger and it’ll cut you in half.”

“That’s right,” Carson added, his blue eyes flashing with menace. “Then the whole crowd gonna see you piss on yourself while you breathe your last.”

Drips slowly lowered his pistol, eventually stuffing it into his belt again as he said, “I figure Shunar here can see the deck’s stacked again’ him, don’t you, Frenchman?”

The giant smiled wickedly as his dark eyes glowered at Bridger, Meek, and Carson. “Amereecans. Like buffalo dung—you Amereecans are everywhere.”

“I oughtta shoot a gut-load of drop shot in you just for that!” Meek snapped.

“There’ll be no more blood here today!” Bridger ordered.

“Jim’s right!” Drips said as he knelt again beside that fourth victim. “Damn you anyway, Shunar. You better pray these men of mine recover enough to ride out of here for the fall hunt.”

“I have some fun—”

Shooting to his feet, Drips stood all but toe to toe with the giant, staring up at the huge man who stood more than a head taller, interrupting the Frenchman with a fist he shook beneath Chouinard’s chin. “And I’ll kill you if it happens again! I might kill you yet—goddamn you! Costing me four men. Even you aren’t worth four goddamned men!”

Drips lowered his fist, spun on his heel, and furiously spat, “You go costing me my men—I’ll put you down my own self!”

“If you want some help, Drips,” Meek growled, “I’ll be glad to kill him for free.”

Chouinard immediately raised his two fists like mauls and took a step toward Meek, but Carson and Bridger lunged forward a step at the same moment Drips whirled on the giant.

“I’ll give you a five count for you to get out of my sight, Shunar,” the booshway ordered.

“Ahh, but I come here to dance and drink some with—”

“There’ll be no dancing for you here today,” Bridger warned. “This here’s my wedding, and you ain’t welcome round here no more. Go back to your camp and make your own fun there.”

A childlike look crossed the monster’s face, something hurt, wounded. “Shunar no dance? No sing and drink?”

“You heard the booshway!” the bandy-legged Carson snarled, glaring up crane-necked at the giant who stood more than a foot taller than he. “Get outta here, Frenchie!”

For a moment more his breath heaved in his ironmonger’s barrel of a chest; then Chouinard hurled himself around and flung his way through the crowd, knocking men aside if they weren’t quick enough to leap out of his way.

“Damned good thing he’s gone,” Bridger sighed, relief in his voice.

Dragging a hand through his shoulder-length light-brown hair, the thirty-year-old Carson glanced at Meek and the others who stood close at hand, then glared at Chouinard’s back as the giant disappeared through the crowd. “That there’s a killing just waitin’ to happen.”

* Carry the Wind