Ride the Moon Down

12

Perhaps it was all for the best that his brother-in-law hated him for his white skin, loathed him because he was not Crow.

Bass looked over the party slowly passing by the fort on their way to one of those small clusters of buffalo-hide lodges that dotted the south bank of the North Platte. In the lead rode a white trapper resplendent in his leggings and war shirt, the unfurled wings of a black-and-white magpie adorning his bear-hide cap. Behind him on her own prized pony rode his first wife. To her right sat a child so young the boy’s legs barely reached over the wide back of his small pony. And behind them came a woman who had to be another wife followed by her own three children on their horses. Perhaps a widowed sister of the trapper’s first wife. At least ten or more riders brought up the rear of that slow procession. Old ones and young, male and female both, some goading travois horses with their peeled switches, poles kicking up hot streamers of dust that hung in the still morning air.

When a man took an Indian woman for his wife, he married her whole damned family. That meant promising to provide for his new kin. Clearly, that poor trapper had wanted a wife and had ended up with the responsibility of close to twenty of her relatives.

Scratch turned to Waits-by-the-Water with a grin. “I just decided it’s a good thing your brother hates me.”

“But Strikes-in-Camp gives my mother a home,” she said. “If he is killed, there will be no one but me to care for her now with my father and uncle gone.”

“When that time comes, you and I will see that she is warm, that she has food for her belly,” he vowed.

“My mother will not be a burden on you?”

He bent and kissed her cheek, then said, “I have no others, so your family is my family. We will take care of our own.”

“But you do have family, husband,” she reminded him. “The daughter who stays among the white men, to the east.”

“Yes,” he fondly remembered Amanda. “I have a grown daughter. A woman by now, she probably has given me a grandchild or two.”

“But this child,” Waits said, handing Magpie to her father, “she is your daughter too.”

“How about that!” he said to the little one with a grin as they continued toward the fort gate. “A man old enough to have grandchildren of his own has been blessed by the First Maker with you, my beautiful child. Let’s take your mother inside to find something so pretty she can’t live without it.”

Fort William’s trading room was a long, narrow affair, with a plank counter running down the entire length of it. The company employees reached the area behind that counter through a door that passed into a storeroom. Directly behind the three clerks rose a solid wall of shelves and cubbyholes stuffed with goods and spanning the entire length of the room, a display that extended all the way from the ceiling overhead to the bottom shelf, which served as a second narrow counter about as high as a man’s waist. From there down, the wide openings were stuffed with bales of folded blankets, small kegs of powder, along with bolts of coarse and fine cloth.

For a moment the two of them stopped there in the cool shade of that September afternoon while the clerks attended to other visitors. Bass watched his wife’s face as her eyes slowly climbed up the extent of the shelves, in utter awe of the grand display. She had seen a few of the white man’s trade goods laid out in display at the last three annual rendezvous they had attended, but most of the items were always kept back in crates and bundles and bales, covered with sheets of canvas to protect them from dust or a fickle summer thunderstorm. Here everything could be taken in at once—all of it on display, right out in the open. Each item lay little more than an arm’s length away, just beyond a person’s fingertips. Taunting, luring, entirely seductive.

Where to begin, he wondered.

“Lemme see your finger rings and bracelets,” Bass replied when a clerk moved over to ask what he could do for the trapper.

With a noisy clunk the young employee dropped a large, three-foot-square, wooden tray atop the counter. Narrow dividers partitioned the huge tray into sections where lay a glittering array of brass and copper rings, bracelets and necklaces, silver gorgets and dangly earrings, ivory brooches and other large decorative pins fashioned in the shape of sea serpents, winged dragons, snakes, and peacocks displaying their finest plumage.

Slightly breathless, Waits turned to ask her husband, “M-may I touch them?”

“Touch them all you want.”

“You trading pelts?” inquired the clerk as the woman picked up some earrings to examine.

“They’re back to our camp,” Scratch explained. “When she figgers what geegaws she’s took a shine to, I’ll have you put ’em back for me so I can go fetch my plews.”

One by one Waits chose those items that most caught her fancy. Eventually she took a step back from the counter and the tray, raising her eyes to her husband with a smile. “These are the prettiest.”

“You want these?”

“For me, and for Magpie—yes.”

Turning to the clerk, Scratch asked, “How much?”

Computing the cost, the man announced his total.

“Forty dollar?” Bass shrieked. “So what’s plew by pound?”

“Dollar a pound for prime.”

He gulped. “And you dress it down from there?”

“It ain’t prime, it don’t bring a dollar,” the clerk explained.

“Damn,” he sighed. “Prices ain’t no better here’n they are to ronnyvoo.”

A second clerk stepped up to ask, “You figgered to cut yourself a better deal here?”

“I did,” Bass admitted. “Ain’t never see’d prices so high, never see’d beaver drop so low.”

“Dollar worth the same here as it is on the upper Missouri,” the second man declared. “The company sets what we charge for goods at ever’ post. And they say what we give for furs.”

“Beaver’s on a slide,” the first clerk said, starting to scoop up the brass, copper, and silver jewelry into one hand.

Scratch snagged the man’s wrist in his hand. “Hol’t on. Don’ put those away just yet. Forty dollar, you said.”

“Yep.”

“And a dollar a pound for beaver.”

The first man repeated, “Be it prime.”

“Damn if that don’t cut deep,” Scratch grumbled, staring down at the jewelry spread across a square of black calico dotted with tiny yellow, red, and blue flowers.

“You got any buffler robes?” asked the second clerk.

“Trade for them too, eh?” Scratch commented.

“They’re bringing better money than most anything right now,” the man explained. “Just figgered you might have some robes, what with the woman here.”

“We got robes for damn sure,” he told them. “But them robes keep us warm through the winter. Can’t sell ’em off.”

As he started to amble away down the counter toward a man just come through the door, the second clerk advised, “You decide to sell those Injun robes, we’ll give you good dollar on ’em.”

Pursing his lips with resentment, Bass nudged the jewelry toward the first clerk. There was no way he could bear to see her face, that disappointment in her eyes if they walked away without that foofaraw.

“Keep all them shinies for me,” he ordered. “I’ll be back with ’nough plews to pay you your forty dollar a’fore you can finish your coffee.”

Returning Waits and Magpie to their camp beside the Laramie River, Bass untied the rawhide ropes looped around one of the last two packs of furs. Whacking the dust from them the way his mam used to smack the dirt from their cabin rugs, he quickly sorted the pelts, selecting twenty of his best. They should easily bring more than the forty dollars it would take to trade for those geegaws.

Returning to the fort alone, he flung the small bundle atop the end of the counter and waited for the clerk to finish with another customer. Eventually, the man pulled out fifteen of the pelts, laying them beneath one arm of a scale. Quickly adding weights to the other arm, the man found that he had to remove one of the pelts.

With a sigh he turned back to Titus. “I can get ’er down to forty-two dollars.”

“For the differ’nce gimme one of your best-looking glasses and the rest in your newest ’baccy. None of that ol’ stuff.”

“That ain’t gonna get you much in tobacco, mister.”

“Just treat me fair and we’ll call it even,” he said, taking up the ends of the rawhide rope he knotted around the plews left on the counter. “Fella don’t stand a chance no more,” he groused. “Appears your company is the only outfit trading in the mountains and at them posts in the upcountry. No good when you run all the other traders out.”

“Our company ain’t the only ones in the mountain trade,” protested the second clerk who had sauntered over to rest his elbows on the counter.

“I know,” Scratch said miserably. “I been to that fort the Bents got—but it’s a piece of riding, way down on the Arkansas.”

“It ain’t the only one,” the first clerk explained as he spread the small square of black calico on the counter.

“I don’t figger on riding all the way north to your Fort Union neither.”

“So I s’pose you ain’t heard,” the second man confided. “News come in the other day. We just heard some folks is raising a small post down on the South Platte a ways.”

“South Platte,” Titus echoed. “And it ain’t your company’s post?”

“Don’t belong to us,” the first man said. “We hear it belongs to one of Billy Sublette’s brothers.”

“Him and his partner, Louie Vaskiss, was here with Campbell last spring,” the second one explained. “I figger the two of ’em are throwing in together, what with big brother Sublette and Campbell calling it quits for the mountains.”

Titus tied up the four corners of the calico scrap and stuffed it into his possibles pouch. With a pat on the flap he told the clerks, “Thankee, fellas. For the geegaws, and for laying out the trail sign on that new post.”

“You gonna head that way?”

Nodding, he replied, “Figgered to do some trapping south of here anyway.”

“Good luck to you,” the second man cheered.

“Thankee—but after all these winters I know luck ain’t got much to do with me saving what I got left for ha’r,” Scratch declared. “Hard work, never giving up, and good friends … they been what keeps this nigger’s stick afloat through the years.”

“Of all the mistakes I have made in my life,” Sir William Drummond Stewart explained as darkness fell and the stars came out around them, “only two do I truly regret. All the rest I have atoned for, corrected.”

This last evening prior to Fitzpatrick’s departure for St. Louis, the Scottish nobleman had invited Bass to join him and a few guests for a final dinner before setting off for the east come morning. As soon as the sun fell, the air took on a new quality, growing crisp and chill, enough that he welcomed the fire’s warmth and the coffee that steamed in his cups.

While the conversation among Stewart’s guests had remained cheery and buoyant for some time, as the night wore on the nobleman grew more pensive.

“A child don’t get to be our age ’thout making his share of mistakes,” Bass reflected, sensing how the host was down in his mind. “Measure of a man is what he learns from the times he’s stumbled and snagged his foot.”

“Why do you say that, Titus?”

Shrugging, Scratch replied, “Don’t seem like you’re here. What’s eating your craw?”

“I’m sorry,” Stewart said, then turned to Marcus Whitman, saying, “I apologize, Doctor—and to the rest of you too. Perhaps I am brooding at the realization that with the morrow I will be abandoning these mountains, this western country where I have spent these past three summers, as well as that one winter at the mouth of the Columbia. I’ve hunted for and shot every big-game animal in this wilderness, including grizzly and elk, antelope and bighorn, mountain goat and more than my share of buffalo. More times than I can count I’ve stood shoulder to shoulder with you mountaineers, taking part in at least a dozen skirmishes with the redskin natives.”

“Can’t you ever plan to return west?” Whitman prodded.

“I will certainly do my best to return, once I’ve seen to some nagging family and financial affairs back east,” the nobleman answered, grown all the more melancholy as they watched.

“Mayhaps you should shet yourself of what nags at you,” Bass suggested. “Put it behind you here and now, no matter if you don’t make it to another ronnyvoo.”

Sighing thoughtfully, Stewart eventually nodded. “I came to my first rendezvous with George Holmes—a traveling companion. Since setting off across the plains, we had tented together. Poor George. In rendezvous camp I had arranged a liaison … arranged for a squaw to come to our bower for the night, so I prevailed upon George to sleep elsewhere.”

Stewart related how Holmes had taken this request for privacy in good humor, carrying his blanket with him to a grassy spot near their bower, and lain down to sleep beneath the light of a nearly full moon. Sometime in the deep of early-morning darkness, the barking of dogs, shouts of men, and hammer of running feet awoke the nobleman. With a curious crowd he hurried to the commotion, finding a rabid gray wolf glaring at its victim without showing the slightest fear of the men rushing up. A few feet away sat George Holmes—his face torn and bleeding.

Turning to Whitman, Stewart explained, “There was nothing our Dr. Harrison could do for poor George but bathe his wounds and bind them up. In the next few days I couldn’t shake the sickness I felt in my soul that I had been the cause of this tragedy.”

Although Holmes’s wounds healed quickly, his normal, lighthearted mood began to worsen. Over the next few weeks, the nobleman explained to his audience, George began to grow more morose and despairing, expressing his certainty that he was bound to die of hydrophobia.

“It wasn’t until weeks later that poor George suffered his most terrifying fit,” Stewart declared. “He tore off his clothing, ripped out his hair, scratched at his skin as he ran shrieking into the timber. We immediately went in search of … but we never found a trace of him.”

“Not uncommon,” Whitman replied. “There is nothing anyone can do once the hydrophobia attacks the brain.”

His eyes begging for sympathy, Stewart said, “Never has a day gone by when I haven’t reproached myself for that sad, sad night.”

“Like the doctor said, I don’t figger you can blame yourself for what the wolf done,” Bass declared. And thinking that he should change the subject, he asked, “You said you made two mistakes. What of the second?”

For some time Stewart stared at the flames, then spoke with guarded resignation. “I have shot men in the heat of great battles, where I have run them through with my sword—looking them in the eye as I killed by my own hand. But never before have I indirectly done harm to another, much less caused their death. Not only did I bring about the ruin of George Holmes, but with heedless words uttered in the heat of my anger, I as much as pulled the trigger on the gun that killed another.”

From the corner of his eye, Scratch watched Antoine Clement suddenly turn away and step into the darkness beyond the fire’s light as if he were no longer able to endure his employer’s self-inflicted pain.

“Don’t mean a damn—you didn’t shoot the man yourself,” Tom Fitzpatrick consoled gruffly.

Stewart waved off that comfort and said, “I might as well put the gun to Marshall’s head.”

“Marshall?” Whitman repeated.

“It was the English name I gave to the servant who had been with me since thirty-three when we first crossed the plains for these mountains. He was of the Iowa tribe,” Stewart explained. “From time to time I caught him stealing some trifle from me.”

“The man is responsible for his own death,” Clement argued, suddenly stepping into the firelight as if to set the record straight. “For some time you knew he was a thief. No one made him steal your horse.”

Rising to turn his rump to the flames, the nobleman began his story. “My party was working our way north after a winter in Sante Fe, several days north of Bents’ Fort when Marshall—for some unknown reason—decided that he wanted to steal my prized thoroughbred, Otholo.”

On their way north along the Front Range, Marshall stole off one night on the Scotsman’s prized horse, also purloining Stewart’s favorite English rifle. When the nobleman discovered the loss the next morning, the short fuse of his anger flared. Exploding in a fury, he roared that he would offer a five-hundred-dollar bounty to the man who brought him the thief’s scalp.

“Unfortunate that Markhead was in the sound of my voice,” Stewart declared sadly.

Although there was no braver man than this Delaware Indian come west to trap beaver, many would question if he possessed even a modest strain of common sense. As a guide for the Scottish nobleman, Markhead evidently took it as his personal quest to hunt down the young horse thief. Besides, five hundred dollars was nothing short of a fortune to him.

Without saying a word to anyone, the Delaware slipped away from camp on his own.

Two days later Markhead returned, leading Stewart’s thoroughbred and brandishing Marshall’s scalp at the end of the recaptured English sporting rifle.

“My thoughtless words, spoken in a fury, killed that Indian boy,” Stewart groaned.

Disgusted and sickened, the Scotsman tossed the scalp into the brush, but eventually paid Markhead that handsome reward so rashly offered.

“I don’t figger you can lay claim to knowing what’s in the addled brain of another man,” Bass declared, thinking back on an old friend of his own, Asa McAfferty. “Can’t none of us know what another’ll do.”

“Two deaths by my hand, as surely as if I held the payment of their eternal debt in the balance.” Stewart stood and stretched, holding his palms over the flames. “To die in battle, under the honor of arms, is one thing. But here in this wilderness, I’ve learned there is no certainty of an honorable death. What a bitter lesson this has been for me, gentlemen: learning how quick and capricious, and truly senseless, death can be.”

Whitman stood beside Stewart, asking, “Is death anything but capricious?”

The British soldier gazed at the missionary physician and said, “Men ride into battle, finding they can smell the nearness of that horror. In war, death is not capricious. It is an absolute, a veritable truth. But here in your American wilderness … I have seen truth stood on its head.”

Snowflakes big as cottonwood shavings landed on his back and shoulders, slowly seeping into his deer-hide shirt as he hunched over the last of the trap sets.

The flakes fell slow and heavy, almost audible when he held his breath, when he stilled his frozen hands and clenched his chattering teeth. Soaked all the way to the scrotum, Bass listened as the storm tore itself off the high peaks above him, careening down the slopes toward the foothills below him. Listened to these first newborn cries of another winter storm a’birthing.

Two more days and he would have enough beaver collected that he could ride back to her. They would spend a few nights together; then he would pack Samantha and take off again to try another one of those streams that tumbled down from the timbered slopes along the Front Range here below the barren hood of Long’s Peak—named by that intrepid explorer who ventured across the Central Rockies in the wake of Lewis and Clark’s expedition through the northern mountains.

For the past several months he had forged this pattern: six or seven days alone among the spruce and pine and barren quaky, then returning for two or three nights in her arms, days spent bouncing Magpie on his knee, teaching the girl and her mother a little more English by the fires at night.

Each time he rode off, Bass left behind a stack of hides for Waits-by-the-Water to scrape while he was gone. Gone long enough for a man to grow lonely for the sound of the woman’s voice, long enough for him to become ravenous for her flesh. Each time he returned, she seemed surprised with the fury of his coupling, yet responded to his hunger with an insatiable appetite of her own.

Here, deep in his forty-second winter, it seemed that he took longer to convince his joints to move each morning as he awoke in that cold loneliness before dawn. And it took all the longer for his bones to forgive him their immersion in the freezing water, longer to warm themselves when he returned from his trapline. But he nonetheless continued to find the beaver, though forced to ride farther into the hills, deeper still into rugged country. Those days of endless meadows clogged with beaver dams and lodges were gone. Gone too were the huge rodents who yielded pelts so big the mountain men called them blankets.

Gone were the days of easy beaver.

Now it was enough that a man catch something in a trap every two or three days. Not near enough beaver sign that Bass could expect to bring one to bait every day, but he still figured these long winter sojourns into the hills were worthwhile. Every winter pelt was one plew more that he wouldn’t have had if he had dallied until spring began to thaw the high country.

Maybeso the trapping would have been all the better up north in Absaroka this past autumn, but then they would have been obligated to lie in for the winter with the Yellow Belly’s Crow. Which would rub him right up against Strikes-in-Camp. And Crane too. Scratch didn’t figure he was ready to see that much grief on one woman’s face, not ready to find out how it would tear his own wife apart again. Better all around that they had turned south from Fort William, making for the South Platte where they ran onto Fort Vasquez, the new post founded just that autumn by partners Andrew Sublette and Louis Vasquez.

Louis was one of twelve children born to a father who had migrated to Canada from Spain, where he married a Frenchwoman before migrating again, south this time, to St. Louis on the Mississippi where his children grew up around that heart of the fur trade.

Andrew was the younger brother of the legendary William and Milton. After making his first trip west with his eldest brother to the Wind River rendezvous of 1830, the last for the firm of Smith, Jackson & Sublette, Andrew next accompanied Bill on that ill-fated 1831 trip to Taos that saw the tragic death of Jedediah Smith on the end of a Comanche buffalo lance. By 1832 and the famous rendezvous fight with the Gros Ventres in Pierre’s Hole, Andrew was becoming a mountain man in his own right.

The following year found him pushing upriver with his brother’s partner, Robert Campbell, to challenge the might of the American Fur Company on the upper Missouri by establishing some rival posts adjacent to the company’s established forts. Their eye-to-eye challenge to Astor’s empire quickly bore fruit, and the two competitors agreed to divide the fur company between them. Andrew was chosen to carry the articles of agreement, along with all the property the partners were turning over to the company, up the Yellowstone to Fort Cass in the summer of 1834.

From the Bighorn he had pushed south for Independence Rock on the Sweetwater, then on to the North Platte to reach the new post being constructed by his brother and Campbell by the last week of September. Later that fall, when Andrew first met the older Louis Vasquez at Fort William, Sublette and Campbell were already considering their withdrawal from the mountains. Back and forth they discussed their belief that the fur trade had reached its zenith, with profits sure to continue their slide.

Eager to step out of his brother’s shadow that autumn, Andrew marched south with Vasquez, striking the South Platte, where they constructed a temporary post they christened Fort Convenience, trading for buffalo robes from the Arapaho and some Cheyenne hunting in the area.

Then in late December of thirty-four, excited by the heavy packs of furs and their prospects, the partners set out overland for St. Louis after briefly considering whether or not they should attempt to float the furs downriver in mackinaw boats. Surely they had proved to themselves that there was a vast potential for raising a post squarely between Fort William to the north and Bents’ Fort south on the Arkansas. The future seemed theirs for the taking.

By April of thirty-five Andrew had returned to Fort William with Robert Campbell to assist with the transfer of the post to Fitzpatrick, Bridger, Drips, and Fontenelle. Early in the summer Louis was back in St. Louis where they both presented themselves to William Clark, petitioning for a license to trade among the tribes. Returning to the South Platte by late summer, the new partners started on their stockade with the help of a few men hired in St. Louis, struggling to raise enough shelter before the first winter storm rumbled down the slopes of Long’s Peak to batter them.

Reaching that high ground east of the river, Scratch and Waits-by-the-Water found workers furiously felling trees and dragging those cottonwood timbers back to an open patch of ground where they were raising stockade walls.

“Soon as the frost is gone from the ground next spring,” explained the stout Vasquez, “we can start making ’dobe bricks. Like the Bents done on their fort.”

Titus told them how he had been to that post on the Arkansas, had seen plenty of adobe construction for himself down in San Fernando de Taos.

“You bring your furs here,” the thinner Andrew Sublette promised, “beaver or buffalo—we’ll give you top dollar.”

“You don’t go so far away, not down to Bents’,” Vasquez said. “Get furs in these hills, trade them here too.”

“We’ll be back,” Scratch promised. “Maybeso camp for the winter.”

After resting nearby for two days watching the construction, Bass led his wife and animals across the sandy bottom of the South Platte and pushed into the foothills where Long’s Peak brooded over them for the next ten weeks as he worked this stream, then another. Gradually pushed down from the high country a little farther day by day, Scratch and Waits-by-the-Water worked feverishly, rising well before first light to wolf down some food before he trudged away into the dark and she began her hide scraping before Magpie awakened. Each night found them working on the hides, cleaning the weapons, making repairs in clothing and adjustments to the square-jawed American traps or those manufactured of Juniata steel.

By the middle of December when the cold had grown serious, they traipsed down from the foothills, returning to the banks of the South Platte to find that the laborers had thrown up enough of a shelter to protect the traders and their goods from winter’s furies.

Reaching the edge of the prairie at the foot of the mountains where the river meandered north, they chose a spot to camp out the rest of the winter near the new stockade. In a small copse of old cottonwood they chopped down the saplings they needed and cleared out a clutter of underbrush before erecting their shelters. The smallest protected the beaver pelts he caught and she grained and stretched. A partially enclosed bower gave her a place to work throughout the day as she cooked and tended to Magpie’s needs close by their fire. And on the opposite side of the fire pit sat their sleeping shelter, where they could lash down all the flaps the better to withstand the passing of each icy gale winter hurled at them.

In less than a week he rode off again, this time on his lonesome. Bass turned once, looking behind to find the child standing hand in hand with her mother. Waits bent to say something, and when she straightened, both of them waved. He knew the woman was crying, probably angry with herself that she could not stop the tears that might frighten Magpie.

Back again after eleven days of trapping, he moseyed up to the post one afternoon, hungry for some male conversation.

“I don’t think much of your big brother,” Bass told Andrew Sublette. “He done all he could to ruin the fur trade for other men. And now he’s run off back east when the running’s good.”

The handsome twenty-seven-year-old failed to protest. Instead, he reluctantly nodded. “I don’t agree with all what Billy’s done, but I can’t figure him for a bad sort.”

Dryly, Louis Vasquez asked, “All’s fair in love and business, eh?”

Andrew glared at his partner a moment. “No matter what any man says, Billy made a go of everything he done. So maybe if we’re gonna make it out here our own selves, you better savvy we’ll need some of Bill’s determination to see we don’t come out second-best.”

Scratch wagged his head. “How your brother cheated that Yankee fella named Wyeth, same time Billy was throwing your other brother Milton square into the middle of it—”

“Milt was already in the middle of it!” Andrew fumed.

“Don’t put that underhanded back stabbing on Milt,” Bass growled. “I heard the story of how Billy slipped around seeing to it that Rocky Mountain Fur Company refused them supplies they told Wyeth to bring out to ronnyvoo. Then your brother Billy made Milt out to be part of all his bamboozling!”

“Billy had no other choice,” Andrew answered defensively, yet without much conviction. “Don’t you see? Those five partners still owed him a debt from previous years. So when Billy learned they arranged to have the Yankee bring out their supplies, he figured they was breaking their contract with him when they was already bound to him—”

Vasquez interrupted. “Even though Billy Sublette was determined to keep every last one of them a prisoner in his grip?”

“If Billy was a better businessman than them partners were, so be it,” Andrew admitted grudgingly.

“That strikes center, it does,” Bass added. “I’ll agree that Gabe and Fitz and the rest of ’em, they was better trappers, better men than they was businessmen.”

“Don’t you remember, Andrew—how the two of us decided we wasn’t gonna be the sort of trader your brother was?” the Spaniard asked in that tiny trading room where more than a dozen men sat smoking their pipes and drinking coffee to wile away a winter afternoon.

“Billy don’t run me, Louis,” Andrew vowed. “We don’t need him no more.”

“’Sides, I heard him and Campbell ain’t ever coming back to the mountains,” Bass said.

“That’s right,” Vasquez declared, looking at Scratch evenly. “Seems them two’re buying up land back in St. Louis. Gonna be country gentlemen. So maybe Andrew’s right after all: we ain’t gonna worry ’bout Billy Sublette making trouble for anyone out here no more.”