Ride the Moon Down

17

“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!”

“Like with the women, eh?” asked Jacques Rem, a half-breed hunter in his early fifties, better known around the fort as Jack.

“We menfolk just like dumb-witted animals,” Bass declared. “We learn slow when it comes to women: gotta make a lotta mistakes a’fore we find ourselves a good one.”

“What ever come of that purty gal you had snuggling up with you that summer at the Longhunters Fair?” Levi inquired. “I recollect how she purt’ near had you tied into a husband knot herself.”

Titus wagged his head. “We never … I run off on the Ohio a’fore I got roped into that, Levi. Been the wust to happen: marry that gal and turn into a farmer like my pap. Live and die right there never knowing what lay over the far hills.”

“Here’s to what lays over the far hills!” Gamble roared, and hoisted his pewter cup filled with a hot blend of illicit trade whiskey and strong coffee they had been drinking at this gathering of fort workers.

“And here’s to them gals what keep their men back east!” Titus bellowed.

“Levi’s got him a young family,” Rem stated. “He didn’t get married until he was an old man. So now he has young wife, young chirrun.”

“’Bout like you, Titus—with a young’un on the way,” Gamble said.

“Oh, don’t let him fool you none,” Jacques continued with an evil wink. “Levi Gamble gone through more’n one woman ever since he come north on the river many year ago!”

“Don’t listen to this soft-brained half-breed, Titus,” Levi warned with a grin. “He’s got him a big family awready—growed kids and gran’chirrun too. So now Jack’s a man with a tired pecker he can’t get hard no more—and that means he don’t care nothing ’bout women no more.”

“Hrrumph!” Jack snorted as he stood and grabbed his crotch. “Maybe better I go crawl under the blankets with your wife, eh, monsieur? Show you which of us can still be a man with the women!”

“You ain’t no older’n me, Jack,” Levi said. “’Cept that you used your pecker so much it got whittled down to nothing a long time ago!”

Rem slapped Gamble on the back as he stood, starting for the door. Turning, the half-breed looked at Titus and said, “Maybe you should shoot another match against this bag of hot wind, eh? He is so old now, he can’t shoot straight with his rifle.”

“But, Jack—you are so old you can’t shoot straight with your pecker!” Levi bawled.

“Don’t stay up too late tonight, my friend,” Rem warned. “We must be off at dawn to find some buffalo.”

“You crazy ol’ Frenchman,” Levi said. “You know I’d never let you down. We’ll ride at dawn.”

Jacques Rem slid back the iron bolt in its hasp and dragged open the door, then slipped into the night. A cold gust of air knifed into the room as the half-breed slammed the door shut again.

All through the previous night of the blizzard Titus had stayed close to Waits-by-the-Water and Magpie, unfurling their robes and blankets to sleep on the floor in what Levi called the Indian room. Early the following morning after Gamble showed up with the bail of a coffeepot gripped in one hand and three tin cups suspended from the fingers of the other, he and Levi set about hauling in Bass’s packs from the corner of the fort’s courtyard where they had dropped them during the storm.

Next they led the mule and ponies out of the fort’s cramped stables, struggling across the drifts of wind-crusted snow in that first dim light of day, leading the animals to the post’s main corral which stood more than a hundred fifty yards east of Fort Union, constructed from timbers brought there from nearby Fort William, the post abandoned by the Sublette &c Campbell more than two years before. McKenzie’s laborers had dismantled the opposition post, then rebuilt its stockade, a blockhouse, and three small cabins, in addition to an extensive corral where most of the post’s stock was kept when they weren’t let out to graze on the extensive plateau surrounding the site.

On reaching the corral with his stock, Bass felt the back of his neck burn with warning. Turning to glance over his shoulder, he spotted eyes watching from the dark windows as he and Levi dragged back the gate and led the animals through.

“Friendly folks?” he asked Gamble.

“Them?” Levi asked, stopping to look at the windows.

Scratch said, “Gives me the willies, looking at us like they are.”

Levi took a few steps until he was inside the gate, turned and glanced at a couple windows before he said, “Don’t pay ’em no mind. Just ol’ man Deschamps and his kin. His two boys and a nephew. Their ’Sinniboine women and all their chirrun.”

“My animals safe here?”

“This here’s McKenzie’s country, Titus. Deschamps figgers to stick around, wants to keep his ha’r, he knows better’n try stealing from McKenzie—”

“I asked about my horses.”

“That’s why I come over here with you, let ’em see me,” Gamble explained. “Anything happen to your stock, the Deschamps know I’ll be busting down that door to take care of it on my own. And if I come over to square it, they know McKenzie will send over all the help I need.”

“So this bunch don’t cause you no trouble?”

“I didn’t say that,” Levi added grimly, glancing once more at a pair of faces that disappeared from a nearby window when Levi caught them watching him. “But your animals gonna be safe here. Safe as any of Kenneth McKenzie’s horses.”

Later that morning Levi came to fetch Bass and his family from the Indian room, explaining they were invited to bed in with Gamble’s family. Just to the east of the flagpole and a twelve-pounder cannon in the middle of the compound stood five buffalo-hide lodges, their smoke flaps blackened by countless fires, snow piled more than three feet high in sculpted drifts around their bases. Nearby, to the north of the flagpole, stood the one-story factor’s house where McKenzie lived, along with his favored clerk, Charles Larpenteur, and Larpenteur’s family.

At daybreak that morning after the storm blew through, McKenzie had most of his sixty-some employees out with shovels, clearing icy snow off the pitched roof of his bourgeois house. Next they moved to clear the snow from the roofs of the storage rooms, apartments, trading stores, stables, and the barracks, all of which huddled under a long roof along the east wall. Finally they moved on to scrape the roof of the apartment range where the clerks and interpreters, the carpenter, tinsmith, and tailor, as well as seasonal laborers, all lived, another long building that extended most of the length of the west stockade.

By evening all the snow had been swept from the bastions and that massive blockhouse overlooking the main gate, supported on gigantic cottonwood uprights. Just before twilight most of the deep, drifted snow that had swirled into the courtyard had been removed in carts and wheelbarrows, muscled from one of the two gates, where it was dumped onto the prairie.

He was ravenous at the end of that long day of constant cold and shoveling, lending his hands to help his hosts. As the sun eased beyond the horizon and the temperature plummeted even farther, stars began to twinkle in a cloudless black sky. As their Indian wives prepared to put the children to bed, scrubbing the youngsters with the last of the hot water in a brass kettle steaming beside the fire, Gamble suggested to Bass that they mosey across the courtyard to the laborers’ quarters where they could smoke their pipes and drink a little whiskey, all the while catching up on those many twisted miles the two of them had walked since that fine summer day beside the Ohio River at the Boone County Longhunters Fair.

“I never told you something that night after you won the money what would take you to St. Louis …” And Titus’s voice dropped off as the chill left the room following Jacques Rem’s departure.

“Told me what?”

“Just how sad it made me you wasn’t a Boone County man,” Bass admitted, then sipped at more of his coffee and whiskey.

“Why’d that disappoint you?” Levi asked.

“Right after I’d found a fella what seemed to be just like me … I learned you was only passing through,” Scratch tried explaining why he had been drawn to the tall frontiersman and the lure of the unknown frontier in much the same way he had been drawn to the lure of Amy Whistler’s flesh. “You wasn’t like the others, them farmers, not even them Ohio boatmen I come to know that autumn.”

“Neither was you, Titus Bass. I hailed from Pennsylvania, looking for somewhere different, just like you was looking. You met me when I was off to a far country filled with more beaver and Injuns and hellfire adventure to last any man’s lifetime.”

“Damn, but didn’t that light a fire under my mokersons!” Bass confided. “Just knowing that I’d run onto someone else what had the same deadly fear I did, fear that I’d take root in one place and die right there ’thout seeing all I wanted to see.”

Gamble stared wistfully into his coffee cup. “Family and friends told me I ought’n stay on that side of the river and leave this here country for the Injuns. But I hankered to see just how much country was left over here, a’fore it got changed like that country we left back there got changed.”

“I’ll bet this was some in them early days, Levi.”

With a grin he said, “A sight few men ever see’d—and no man will ever see again.”

“It’s changing awready … ain’t it, Levi?” Bass asked sadly. “I see’d it some my own self, and I ain’t been out here near the time you have.”

“Others is coming, Titus. They always come. One or two families at first. Then a handful after them. And the word keeps on spreading. They come like bees to the honeycomb. Next thing there’s towns where there was only campsites. River ports and steamboat landings along this high river. Wagon roads where once there was only game trails or Injun footpaths going from one place off yonder t’other.”

“I ’member an old farmer telling us the land is bound to change … when man comes to it.”

They sat quiet for some time, each man lost in his recollections, in this portent of the future.

“You think it’s ’cause of us, Titus?” Gamble finally asked. “Is our kind to blame?”

“Blame for what?”

“For coming here first. We’re the ones to open it up and point the way. Maybe we’re gonna be to blame for ruining it all.”

“How we to blame, Levi?” he asked defensively. “All our kind ever wanted was to go someplace where men ain’t changed the land yet. To go where that country is so old and untouched that it’s brand-new at the same time.”

Wagging his head, Gamble said, “Maybe you’ll see it one day, Titus. See how there’s always been two kinds of men. Them few that comes to a place first—to discover that new land. And then there’s the others who come by the hundreds and hundreds, and even more’n that—they come pouring in like ants once a place has been found, come to settle down. And the few what come first like us, that’s when we gotta move on.”

For a long moment Bass didn’t say anything. He sat there stunned, letting the cold pain of that realization settle in. “You’re saying them what come first are to blame for opening the door for them others what come after to ruin it all?”

Nodding, Gamble said, “The others always come where we left our tracks for them to follow.”

“That don’t rightly make much sense—”

“Dammit if a man don’t get on in winters like me and he looks back to see what a god-blamed fool he’s been bringing on the ruin of everything he’s ever wanted in life.”

“You ain’t ruin’t it, Levi. None of us has. This country ain’t like that soft country back there. This here’s a hard, hard land what don’t easily forgive. Folks won’t ever leave them dark forests and that black earth where they can grow their corn and taters and ’baccy. This here country’s left for the rest of us what ain’t found a home in such a soft land.”

“Maybe you’re right,” Gamble relented, his tired eyes showing how much he wanted to believe. “Maybe their kind will try, but find out there’s too many Injuns, or the winters’re too cold, or the snows’re too deep … and they’ll skedaddle back to that soft life back yonder in the East.”

“These mountains already kill’t their share of pilgrims what figgered they had the ha’r we got, Levi.”

Gamble grinned. “Only ’cause our kind is so crazy, we don’t know no better, Titus Bass!”

“You give me a chance to live to be a old man back east, or to die a young man out here—you damn well know there ain’t but one choice for me.”

His grin disappeared, and Gamble pursed his lips in resignation for a moment, then said, “Can’t help but think we’re the last of a breed, friend. A breed come to set a foot down beside streams where no white man ever walked. But that day’s gone too. Like the sap that riz up in us when we young.”

“A differ’nt time, this is now,” Titus added.

“No more do booshways send out brigades to trap beaver. Now the booshways plop down their fur posts beside the big rivers and trade robes with the Injuns. One day this’ll all be dead, and they won’t even need me to hunt buffler to feed ’em.”

It scared Bass the way Gamble sounded. “You’re talking like you’re touched by a fever, Levi,” he protested. “Like a man gone soft in the head.”

“Ain’t much use for the like of you and me no more, Titus Bass.”

“Damn if there ain’t! Your booshways can go right ahead and build their posts where they want. Don’t make me no never mind. Beaver’s bound to rise, I say. The fur trade damn well ain’t dead while men like Jim Bridger is leading brigades off to the high lonesome. Long as there’s traders to buy beaver, there’ll be trappers like me to catch them flat-tails.”

“And when there ain’t no more beaver?”

“Ain’t gonna happen,” Bass snapped.

“When there ain’t no one to buy what’s left?”

He stared hard at Gamble a moment. “What’s took over you, Levi?”

“You’re right, Scratch,” he apologized, the tone of his voice softened. “Been out here on this river most of my life,” he explained. “Them years when Lisa retreated downriver, I worked in Fox or Osage or Pawnee country. I’ve seen more’n my share of winters in this wild county … so maybe what I see coming hurts me more’n it hurts men like you—”

The door flung open with a noisy racket and a gust of cold wind as two men leaped inside.

“They killed Papa!”

Leaping to his feet, Gamble rushed up to the young man who had spoken. Seizing the front of his blanket capote, Levi demanded, “Jack? Someone killed Jack?”

“Out!” the young man growled.

Around Titus the rest of the interpreters and clerks had bolted out of their beds, forming a tight crescent surrounding the two young men who stood shaking with fury in the open doorway.

Levi demanded, “Who, Paul? Tell me who!”

“Who else you think?” Paul Rem replied with a snarl. “The Deschamps!”

“You gonna help us, Levi?” the second son asked. “There’s too many of them—we need your help. They threaten all of us now—say they kill any friend of Jacques Rem!”

“We need men and guns too,” Paul demanded. “Give us the powder to blow all them devils to hell!”

“Hold on,” Gamble attempted to calm them. “Tell me how you know it was them what killed Jack.”

The second son, Henri, laughed in a harsh gust, then said, “OI’ woman Deschamps’s boys wanted to kill Papa for long time after Papa kill ol’ man Deschamps! Now she done it. We find him outside the wall—his face beat so bad, cut up so much, we not sure it was him at first.”

Shaking his head in disbelief, Gamble silenced the angry murmurs in that room gone cold with more than the wind. Eventually he stared round at the fort employees. “This here night been a long time coming, fellas. We got some business to see to.”

“You gonna help us kill them all?” Henri asked, grabbing Levi’s arm.

“The squaws and their young’uns—let them go,” Gamble ordered. “The rest, they don’t deserve to live to see another sunrise.” Turning to the interpreter named Bissonette, he said, “Louis, go to the arsenal. Get a rifle and pistol for every man who wants to be a part of this fight. Horns of powder and plenty of ball too. The rest of you what need weapons, go with Bissonette—now!”

They flooded past on either side of Gamble and Bass, streaming out the door behind Henri and Paul Rem. Outside on the frozen courtyard stood Jacques’s wife and daughter, comforted by several Indian women and half-breed laborers.

Titus felt rooted to the spot, stunned. “Their father … he was just here. Drinking with us, telling stories, laughing with us.”

Gamble’s eyes glowered as he ground a fist into an open palm. “Come with me, Titus: I’m going to tell McKenzie that Jack’s dead. So he knows we’re going to burn out that nest of rattlers once and for all. Then we’ll go to my lodge and fetch our weapons. Time has come to kill all the rest of Deschamps evil seed.”

On the way to the bourgeois’s house, Levi started to tell Bass how the Deschamps clan had shown up on the upper Missouri about the time Kenneth McKenzie had been building his fort. Since then they had been in the thick of every foul deed: murder, robbery from the post stores, robbing and killing friendly Indians camped nearby, as well as continually committing adultery with one another’s wives. Eventually some bad blood arose between the clan and the Rem family, going back a few seasons when one of Jack’s sons was killed during a drunken spree with some of the Deschamps band.

“The old man is the root of their evil. He’s named Francois, Senior, and it’s said he’s the one killed the British governor up at the Red River colony in Canada when Northwest Company was fighting Hudson’s Bay. The Deschamps all escaped down here after that bloody deed. There ain’t no rakehellions like that clan.”

Kenneth McKenzie, Levi explained, was able to soothe the pain of the murder and put the simmering feud to rest for some time until one of the Deschamps boys stole the Indian wife from Baptiste Gardepie, a friend of Jack Rem. Old man Deschamps and his son Francois went to the cuckolded Frenchman, offering a horse in exchange for the squaw, saying she was no more than a slut anyway and not really worth a good horse.

Seeing red, the aggrieved Gardepie refused the horse as settlement. But as Francois and his father turned to leave, he swept up an old rusted rifle barrel and clubbed both of his enemies. As the elder Deschamps lay dying, the infuriated Gardepie yanked out his dirk and finished his revenge—disemboweling the patriarch.

“Gutted him like a hog for a smoke shed,” Levi described with relish.

Titus asked, “So Gardepie killed the son too?”

“No. And that was a mistake,” Gamble answered, going on to explain how engagés from the fort rushed from the gate, saving Francois from a similar fate.

Once more Kenneth McKenzie leaped into the middle of the feud, demanding a truce between the warring families, each wary and fearful of the balance of power between them. For the better part of a year, an uneasy tension had existed around Fort Union.

“But last fall two fellas what married Jack’s daughters rode off to the Milk River to do some hunting for robes and pelts,” Levi declared.

Titus asked, “The Deschamps kill ’em?”

“Nawww—Blackfoot got ’em.”

With those two out of the way, the Deschamps clan began to feel stronger, growing more insolent by the month, increasingly resentful of McKenzie and arrogant in the face of all attempts to keep the feud at rest.

“Just the other day one of them bastards was over here at the post, bragging big as could be,” Levi said. “Told us his mother called all her boys together and said they wasn’t really men less’n they took revenge on the man who goaded Gardepie into killing their pa.”

“Jack Rem.”

“Right,” Gamble growled. “And now them bastards done it.”

By the time Levi awakened McKenzie and Larpenteur, bringing them to the door of the factor’s house, the Rems had appeared to demand use of the cannon that stood beside the flagstaff.

“Very well. Just go finish it,” the bourgeois told them. “Leave off the women and children … but you have my permission to take the twelve-pounder with you and finish this, once and for all.”

With a jubilant shriek of blood-lust, the Rem brothers whirled about with their comrades, leaping over the porch rail onto the frozen courtyard, rushing for the cannon they began to push toward the front gate while Bass and Gamble hurried to Levi’s lodge for their weapons.

The group had dragged the fieldpiece some seventy-five yards, halfway to the old Fort William stockade, when Titus and Levi caught up with them. As the engagés struggled to muscle the heavy cannon around a tall, icy snowdrift, a volley of shots split the clear, cold night, wounding one man.

“Get that loaded!” Henri ordered.

After stuffing a small pouch of powder down the breech, Paul Rem jammed a spike down the touchhole, piercing the pouch, before he threaded a short piece of fuse through the touchhole and into the pouch. Down the throat of the cannon another man rammed a ball.

“Back! Get back!” Henri Rem bellowed, waving one arm in warning as he ripped a sputtering torch from the hands of a friend.

“Wait!” Levi ordered. “Don’t touch that fuse till we get the helpless ones out!”

Paul Rem fumed a moment, glowering at the old man. “They deserve to die with the rest! Like that ol’ woman too!”

Gamble seized Rem’s arm, flinging him around to stare into his eyes. “I wanna see ’em all dead just as bad as you, Paul. But this ain’t right to kill them women what ain’t part of this feud.”

After a moment Rem reluctantly yanked his arm from Gamble’s hold and turned toward the stockade walls where his enemies hid. Shrieking at the fort, he warned, “You bastards ain’t got much time to get them women and children outta there!”

“’Less we blow you all up together!” Henri Rem bellowed.

From the distant walls came the muffled shouts of protest and cries of terror. Above them all rang the angry, profane curses of the Deschamps boys, and the shrill taunts of their matriarch.

Beneath the silvery light of a half-moon Bass and the rest watched the first dark silhouette appear. In a moment more spidery figures emerged from the rectangle.

“They opened the gate!” one of the engagés announced.

One by one the distant figures slipped away from the wall, tearing pell-mell across the bluish snow, clumsily vaulting drifts and spilling over the far side, stumbling headlong for the cluster of lodges where a small band of Assiniboine had come to camp for the winter.

Paul Rem pointed into the moonglow with his rifle. “Go, Henri! The women and children can go free! But see no men get away!”

With a whoop Henri Rem bolted off, three others right on his tail. A rifle shot split the freezing air, its muzzle flash hot and white from a loophole in the stockade fence. All the French and German laborers hurled themselves to the ground, taking cover by the cannon carriage or diving behind snowdrifts as the Deschampses opened fire.

In a heartbeat Paul Rem leaped to his feet. “Shoot! Shoot! Kill them all! Shoot!”

In the distance the women and children were screaming as Henri and his followers caught up with them. As quickly as they had sought to scatter, they were herded back together, shrieking, imploring, crying piteously. From the stockade the Deschamps men were yelling at the women. Another shot rang out, a muzzle flash from one of the dark windows near the corral.

A voice bellowed a French curse at Henri as those around Paul Rem and the rest fired a few rounds at the dark squares along the stockade timbers, sure they were gun ports or windows.

“They just say to my brother he should hang on to his pecker,” Paul snarled. “Goddamn Deschamps tell Henri they cut it off while his heart still beats.”

“Not if we can pen ’em down till they’re all dead,” Gamble bellowed.

“Are all your women and children out now?” Henri hollered as he led his men back toward the cannon to rejoin his brother.

“You are cowards!” a female voice shrieked at them.

“Mama Deschamps?” Paul yelled.

“I will spit on your grave this night!”

“This is your chance to run, Mama Deschamps!” Henri explained. “Get out now before we kill all your family!”

“Non!” she screamed. “I stay to help them kill all of you!”

Gamble yelled now, “You don’t leave, eh?”

“My boys die, I die too, Gamble,” she yelled in reply from the darkness of the far stockade. “I watch my boys kill you!”

Paul shouted, “I am happy Gardepie kill your husband!”

“Oui!” the woman shrieked. “Me happy too! Now I can sleep—my sons have killed your father!”

“Shoot them!” Henri roared in fury. “Shoot the old she-bitch too!”

At that moment it grew so unearthly quiet that Levi got to his feet. “Listen!”

It seemed they all held their breath. Bass put his ears to the breeze, hearing the faint sound of scraping, the piercing of the earth’s hard crust with a metal shovel. “That’s digging, Levi. They know you’re bound to use the cannon!”

Gamble wheeled, crying, “You gonna shoot that gun, Paul—do it now!”

With a streak of light the older brother dipped the spitting torch to the fuse which stuttered as it threw off sparks for a moment before the cannon belched, spewing a muddy yellow tongue of flame into the freezing darkness, enough that they were all blinded momentarily. Titus was just beginning to see again when the hissing ball tore through the stockade wall with a clatter. Inside the main cabin men hollered and the aging matriarch swore profanely.

“May your mother couple with dogs in hell for all eternity!” she bawled at the Rem brothers.

“Reload the son of a bitch—now!” Gamble ordered.

As three of the laborers went to swabbing and reloading, the sounds of digging resumed.

“We blow down that wall,” Henri vowed, “we’ll go right on in and finish ’em all.”

While they were preparing that second charge, a scattering of shots came from the Deschampses. Bass knelt, selecting a black square where he had seen a muzzle flash. He held on it, released half his breath, held until he had about given up hope—then the moment that far opening lit up with another bright flash, Scratch squeezed the trigger. The ball struck bone and flesh with a loud, unmistakable smack accompanied by a shrill cry.

The twelve-pounder roared a second time. Then shots from the stockade. With more guns firing back at the Deschampses.

“Levi—they got any other way out?” Titus asked.

“Maybe we ought’n be sure they don’t try sneaking out the back of the corral where we can’t see ’em.”

Running in a crouch around the far side of those drifts the wind had sculpted near the river bluff, both Bass and Gamble managed to slip right up to the southeast corner of the corral without being spotted. Inside, the animals were already frightened, milling anxiously with the nearby gunfire, all the shouting and screams. In the distance the cannon roared a third time. Followed by shrieks and moans from the stockade, more curses from the Rem forces.

Back and forth the battle swung for the next three hours as Bass and Gamble waited out the fight—keeping their eyes trained on the back side of the stockade. Henri Rem lobbed shell after hissing shell into the tattered compound, ripping ragged holes through that western wall of the cabins. Though the cannon was causing a lot of damage, the Deschampses nonetheless managed to fire back from time to time in the midst of their interrupted digging.

“I don’t figger ’em for being smart enough to wanna escape,” Levi growled in a whisper, shivering with the intense cold and inactivity while the two of them lay prostrate in the snow.

Bass glanced to the east, finding the sky graying. “Hope this is over soon. My belly’s hollering for fodder awready.”

That next hour dragged by as the sky lightened and it seemed the stars were gradually snuffed out by the approach of dawn. Every few minutes the fieldpiece roared. Men yelled in the battered cabins; women screamed from the Assiniboine camp pitched far on the other side of the stockade. Back and forth the Rems hurled taunts at the Deschampses, and the Deschampses flung their curses at the Rems.

“Look!” Levi yelled, suddenly rising to a crouch, then darting away in a lope. “It’s the old woman!”

Bass bolted to his feet, following the moment he spotted the matriarch appear, emerging from the dark rectangle into the ashen light of dawn. Overhead at the end of her arms she held an object.

“Is that a pipe?” Titus asked as they trotted along the south side of the corral.

“That ol’ she-bitch!” Gamble snapped. “After all the thieving and murders, she wants to smoke the pipe with the Rems!”

As she walked away from the wall, Madame Deschamps continued shouting at her enemies. But instead of hurling down curses upon the Rems now, she was begging them for mercy, vowing she could keep the obligations of the pipe if only they would smoke with her—

A single rifle shot rang out, a bright jet of orange flame spewing from the muzzle of Henri Rem’s gun.

A cheer erupted the instant those with Henri and Paul could see that the old woman had stopped in her tracks. Slowly her arms came down as she started to stumble forward, a dark patch spreading over her chest. Just as she had the pipe at chin level, Madame Deschamps spilled forward, her open, speechless mouth closing around the end of the pipe. As she collapsed facedown onto the snow, dead where the bullet caught her, the bloody end of that pipe pierced the back of her throat and tore out the side of her neck.

The instant she spilled onto the bloody snow in that gray light, a cheer rose anew from the Rems and the engagés. Men jubilantly jumped up and down around the cannon as Paul Rem stepped forward a few feet.

He stopped, shook his arm at the dead woman lying halfway between him and the stockade. “There’s the end to that mother of devils!”

New shouts and taunts erupted from the stockade, then a sudden volley that drove the Rems behind their snowdrifts.

“Some still alive!” shouted one of the laborers named Emile Vivie as Gamble scurried up with Bass on his heels.

“Only way is to burn ’em out,” Henri Rem warned.

“I’ll take the torch and some powder,” Paul Rem volunteered.

“Go to the northwest corner, brother,” Henri suggested as he handed Paul three pouches of the black-powder cannon charges and the sputtering torch.

“I go with him too,” Vivie shouted as he followed Paul away from the cannon.

A few futile shots followed them across the snow, but in a matter of moments the two had reached the side of the stockade where Paul handed the torch to Vivie while he ripped open the powder charges and spilled the grains at the base of the wooden pickets. As the sky brightened to presage the dawn, Titus watched the two Frenchmen leap back a few yards when Paul hurled the torch at the bottom of the wall. With a huge gush of flame and smoke the old, dried timbers of the stockade were on fire.

Inside the cabin men shouted in fury, cried out in terror, groaned in their death throes.

With the sun’s coming the wind stirred along the Missouri River valley, goading the flames over those next few electrifying minutes as the noise from the cabin rose to a crescendo, then fell off to silence.

Most of that bombarded stockade had been consumed-by flame by the time Gamble led the Rem faction toward the smoking walls. Behind them as the sun emerged over the prairie, more than half-a-hundred faces watched from atop the east wall of Fort Union, another sixty-some peering from behind the safety of their lodges in the Assiniboine camp.

Suddenly Scratch heard the sound of running footsteps and a man’s grunts as he fled the burning building, escaping his enemies.

“He’s going for the bastion!” Henri Rem announced.

“I’ll kill him myself!” Emile Vivie boasted.

The young engagé was the first to reach the east bastion of the old Fort William stockade where he called out, “Which one of you do I get to kill this morning, eh?”

“That you, Vivie?” screamed the voice from within.

“Ah, it is you, Francois!” Vivie shouted back at the man cowering inside the bastion. “Baptiste Gardepie should have killed you the day he killed your father!”

“Hah!” he bellowed with mad laughter. “I got to see the eyes of Jacques Rem when I ran my knife through his guts. I killed him for my father!”

“Y-you killed Jacques?”

“Out! His blood is still on my hands, Vivie!”

“Arrrghgh!” Emile growled, whirling about to search for a narrow opening between the pickets through which he could shove his rifle.

But inside, the murderous Francois Deschamps had already discovered just such a tiny gap. The muzzle of his gun was waiting when Vivie stepped up to the wall. As Francois pulled the trigger on his rifle, the force of the ball picked Vivie off the snow, into the air, to land more than six feet away.

As the snow beneath Vivie turned to a brownish slush, his legs thrashed and wisps of steam spiraled from the hot blood rushing from his terrible wound. Then he lay still.

“Merciful God,” Henri prayed there at the wall near the bastion, and made the sign of the cross.

“God demands vengeance this day!” Paul Rem shouted as he whirled, waving at the engagés. “Bring the cannon!”

A handful of fort employees finally managed to musele the fieldpiece across the crusty snow into position, aiming it at the bastion where Francois kept up some pitiful gunfire until his gun fell quiet.

“The bastard’s out of ball or powder,” Bass announced.

“No matter—he must die with the rest!” Henri growled.

At that moment Paul Rem touched the short fuse which sparked, sputtering its way down the touchhole an instant before the cannon leaped back, belching with a smoky roar. The ball tore through the side of the bastion with a clatter of old timbers and river rock, then a horrifying shriek from Francois Deschamps.

Then a hush fell.

The others stood around the Rem brothers for a few moments as the cannon’s roar faded in the dawn. Then Henri started for the bastion. Paul was right behind him.

In little time they were dragging the mangled body from the wreckage of the bastion, smearing the trampled snow with the dead man’s blood seeping from a dozen wounds. Around the corner of the stockade they pulled the body until they were within feet of the leaping flares busily consuming the cabins. As Henri grabbed the dead man’s arms, Paul seized Francois’s ankles—both of them heaving the body into the crackling flames.

“Now bring that old she-bitch over here!” Henri Rem demanded, his voice shrill with retribution and blood-lust.

Madame Deschamps was the last of her family the victors consigned to the flames that shockingly cold, clear dawn coming out of the east red as a butchered buffalo.

“That makes nine of ’em,” Levi announced in a harsh whisper as he stood beside Bass, watching the others dance and twirl, hearing them sing and shout their utter joy. “Let the devil do as he pleases with ’em now!”

Sensing that corona of warmth washing over him from the rising flames, Scratch turned to gaze at the eastern walls of Fort Union, thankful he did not find his wife’s face among those watching this funeral pyre.

But despite those waves of heat, Bass shuddered with the subzero chill, staring at the charred bodies as they were consumed.

“Revenge,” he told Levi, “be the cup a man best drinks cold.”