The next day he thought to linger and play again for her but reflection told him that this would be an unkindness. If she did indeed think the music was from heaven it would be best not to overdo it, lest she find out that it was not. For the artist in him said that heaven had to be a thing that one could touch only rarely, and hope to touch once more. It would be best to slip away, for she now had an abundance of fruits and nuts, sugar and flour. He might come again this fall, after the Three Forks rendezvous, to lay in meat for the winter, and again open a heavenly window to let the music out, so that melodies of long ago could touch her soul in memory of her dead ones, hers and his.
31
THB FIRST of the avengers to arrive in the Three Forks area was Bear Paws George Meek, a big blond smiling man whom men called Bear Paws for his habit of collecting the claws of bears, chiefly of the grizzly, which he washed in urine and other astringents, and polished with clays and powders and leathers until they were as clean and gleaming as jewels. George was a happy-go-lucky fellow, or seemed to be; he had gentle blue eyes and a broad smile and pleasant words for all men, except the red, whom he despised because they had killed his brother. Under his jolly surface he was a sharp man with a bag full of tricks. He was always smiling—Bi1l said George smiled when he slept; and this seemed likely, for his dreams were usually of deceptions and stratagems and sharp practices, with which he outfoxed those who dealt with him. "I allus try and git the saddle on the right horse," was his definition of himself. He cut his pants according to his buckskin; he sailed near the wind; and he never waded when he couldn’t see bottom. But he was a convivial cuss who didn’t like to live and trap alone through five cold months, as Zeke and Hank did, and Lost-Skelp, Bill Williams, and Sam Minard. Pore ole Bill, he was dead now, and Windy was writing a poem about him:
He chomped life down jist all the laws of God allow,
leastwise
till now.
They ain’t no longer any sign he’s climbun up the hill.
I spect he’s
had his fill.
He had been found down in the Uintahs, a bullet through his heart and an old Eutaw rifle across his lap. There was two feet of snow on him. George had sometimes spent the winter with Hob Niles (dead now, like Bill), who had shared his skill with hands (they had both carved things from wood), an artist’s love of exquisite detail, and tall lies around a fire. They had both preferred chewing to smoking and had brown beards on which the patches of deeper brown were the stain of tobacco juice.
George had come up from Henry's River, and a few hours behind him came Tomahawk Jack, as mean a critter as ever scalped an Injun, and one of the best revolver shots in the West. Jack, like Dave Black, another expert with revolvers, was not much larger than Kit Carson, and had that man’s feline instincts and small-man deadliness. If Jack or Dave had ever smiled it had been when looking at the dead face of an enemy. Thirty-five and thirty-eight the year the mountain men met at Three Forks, both were clean-shaven and rather boyish in appearance, and not much good in a fight except with weapons. Jack was almost as skillful a rider as the best of the Crows, and his Crow horse was thought by some to be the fastest horse in the mountains. That, Mick Boone had said, his large homely face cracking in a slow grin, was only because Jack was such a little man. He was bigger than Jack when he was born, Mick said. That, Bill had said, didn’t mean a thing cept he’d allus been a big target.
The next of the mountain men to ride in was said by army men to be one of the three best scouts in the West. That, said the irrepressible Bill, was because McNees saw twice as much as any other man; while one eye scanned the northeast the other scanned the northwest. That he saw equally well with either eye, like a horse, was proved, Bill said, by the fact that he would look at you with either eye; and sometimes like a bird he would look at you with one and if he didn’t like what that eye saw he would look at you with the other. In Roger McNees, half Scot and half German, there was no monkey business—no sense of fun and no tall tales. After he came west fifteen years ago there had been a rumor that he had slain his father and fled, but no man west of the Missouri knew if it was true and no man cared. Three-Finger loved tracking and scouting; it was said that he could stuff both nostrils with sage foliage and still smell out an Indian trail faster than a wolf pup on a rabbit track. The other men had supposed that he would do a little scouting on his way to the rendezvous, and so were not surprised by his reply to Meek’s question, "Do ya know whar the varmints is?"
He knew where they were and he knew how many were in the pack. Did Bear Paws know where the sulphur springs were east of the Big Belts? "Well as my own mother’s face," said George. "I been thar man an boy a thousan times." Did he know where the creek was on which Black Harris had hidden from the Blackfeet two days and a night, when they sat so close to him playing roulette that one of them touched him? "Wall, now!" said George. That was the time when Black’s legs wouldn’t work, on leaving the hiding place; for miles he had dragged himself along by his arms. "Allus thought that wuz Broken Hand," George said. One black eye studied George. Did he know where the Seven Mile Creek was? "Well as I know the mole on top uv my pa’s nose. It had two hairs in it." Halfway between Seven Mile and the springs you turned west to the Big Belts, and in no time a-tall the camp was plum before you, as plain as the whiskers on a bull buffalo.
"Thet ain’t too fur from here," George said.
"How many?" asked Jack, scowling.
If the varmints were all in camp there were fifty-eight. One musta had a baby, said George. Sam had killed one. And fifty-eight, doggone it, wooden be three apiece. As the nigger stud said, twarn’t no more than a few minutes’ work.
"See Elk Horns?" asked Dave.
Three-Finger looked at Dave. "Would I count him if I never seen him?”
"Ya mean," said Dave bitingly, "ya seen his scars."
"He sees everything," said George quickly, for the two men were looking at one another.
This evening Lost-Skelp Dan and a dozen others came in. No man, not even the cold McNees or Tomahawk Jack, could look at Dan without feeling a slight chill. It was not that he was a big fellow, six feet two and all muscle and bone, with a girth of eighteen inches around his neck or his flexed biceps. It was not his big skull with neither hair nor hide on it above the ears. It was his eyes. Forty now, he had been a mountain man for nineteen years. How he lost his scalp nobody knew, for not even the snoopy nose of Wind River Bill had been able to smell out the secret. Whoever took the scalp was a greedy cuss: the knife had made the incision where the top part of the ear was fastened to the scalp but instead of pushing the top of the ear down and away the Indian had slashed across it, so that Dan was earmarked and cropped like a steer. His big gleaming skull was all hairless bone except a fringe about two inches wide across the back of his neck. Instead of cutting along the hairline on the forehead the scalper had gone halfway down to the eyes; and now almost straight across and about an inch above the brows Dan had an ugly scar that was like a welt. It seemed to fill with blood when he became angry.
Powder River Charley was speculating that if it was the Blackfeet who had scalped Dan this foray would be for him a special pleasure. Charley liked to tease a little, though he knew that teasing was for Dan like liniment in a raw wound. Dan, Bill had said, had the sense of humor of an old sick bull with a pack of wolves around it. If they all got three apiece, Charlet said, they dotta give Dan the biggest one, for mebbe it could be tanned into a wig for him. Dan at the moment was pulling his pipe. He looked over at Charley, not quickly but like a man who took his time about things. His large pale-blue eyes seemed puffed softly out of his skull, like a toad’s. He looked at Charley, his large strong smooth-shaven face immobile, and George decided at this point that it would be safe for him to come in with a little flight of whimsy, like a jolly sally upon a besieger;and so, rearranging his quid, he said, "Trouble is the red varmint didden leave enough hair so’s we kin match it, an the hair on a man’s belly is never the same color as on his head. I’ll be dogged and gone iffen I kin see how we kin do it." Bear Paws looked round him, slyly, to see if his jest was setting well.