“Ho, ho!” Chouinard roared, covering his mouth as he laughed.
“Take your words back or I’ll shove ’em down your throat too!”
That only made the Frenchman laugh all the louder. “Sounds like leetle fly buzzing ’round Chouinard! Leetle fly says he stick my switch down my throat!”
“That’s right, I’m the smallest there is,” Carson declared, “but even I can brass-tack a coward like you.”
Glaring steely-eyed again, the Frenchman snorted his curse, “Enfant d’garce! I grind your bones first—let all these other peegs watch—then I see if more Amereecan peegs fight Chouinard! Moi! I beeg bull of thees lick.”
“When you gonna stop talking and go fetch your gun, Shunar?” Carson demanded.
“Gun?” the giant echoed, slowly pulling his big butcher knife from its scabbard at his side. “Sacre bleu! I like to cut when I keel.”
“You say ’nother goddamned word about crunching bones or stomping an American,” Kit warned, “I’ll blow a hole in your head, then take that goddamned knife of yours and rip your guts out with it right here and now! Leave them guts for the birds to peck over while you’re sucking your last breath!”
“I step on you like leetle bug,” the Frenchman boasted, stomping one moccasin into the trampled grass, grinding his heel into the dirt.
Carson rocked forward on the balls of his feet and hunched his shoulders menacingly. “All you can do is talk? Draw your goddamned knife, pork eater! For days now you been getting likkered up and bullying this hull camp—but now you’ve rubbed up again’ a real fighting rooster ’stead of some corn cracker’s barnyard pullet!”
For a moment Chouinard’s hand flexed and relaxed, flexed and relaxed around his knife handle.
Bass roared, “Gut ’im, Kit. Cut his heart out.”
His nostrils flaring, Carson growled at the towering Frenchman, “You’re big bull of this wallow?”
“I beeg bull of—”
“Shit!” Carson cut him off. “You ain’t much of a man, Shunar. Cain’t even take no horsehair belt off no li’l gal! You ain’t no bull no more! G’won and pull your knife so I can leave your guts out to dry for the jays!”
Chouinard drew his shoulders back, taking in a long breath as his chertlike eyes slowly ran across the crowd behind Carson. Only when he had done that did he peer down the short American’s frame before crawling back up to glare at Carson’s face. That look of undisguised contempt was suddenly replaced by a grin.
“No fight now, Keet,” he said almost apologetically. “I like your sponk. Maybe we be friends, ami? Friends, n’c’est pa?”
To Bass’s surprise the Frenchman turned on his heel without uttering another word and brutally shoved some of his followers aside as he stomped away.
Struck dumb at the suddenness of the giant’s retreat, Scratch listened as a smattering of laughter began among the Americans. In a heartbeat more than a hundred men were guffawing as loudly as they could, hooting and catcalling after the Frenchman and his embarrassed followers who scrambled to catch up to Chouinard in his retreat.
“Why, if that hoss don’t take the circle, Kit!” Scratch marveled as they watched the giant’s back grow smaller. “The bastard was just about to wade into you till you spoke your piece ’bout that ’Rapaho gal.”
Meek asked, “Figger that’s what made him run off with his tail ’twixt his legs?”
“No matter—he’s gone now,” Bridger announced. “Let’s have us a drink for that bastard showing us the white feather!”
“Dunno, but something tells me this ain’t over, Gabe,” Bass warned, sensing that gnawing in his belly about the suddenness of the giant’s backstepping once the squaw was mentioned. He turned to Kit, saying, “Best you watch your back.”
But Bridger and Meek jointly yoked their arms over the shorter man’s shoulders and cheerily dragged Carson off toward the whiskey canopy.
“There’s other gals you can poke,” Joe declared.
Newell caught up with them. “Allays other squars, Kit!”
Wagging his head, a bewildered Titus Bass sauntered back to the awnings where the trade goods lay, sensing that nothing had been settled between the two. Chouinard’s attack on Grass Singing had served to irritate a wound that had been opened and kept oozing for some five long weeks while the Bridger and Drips brigades sat on their thumbs, impatiently waiting for the long-overdue supply caravan to reach the mouth of New Fork.
The camps already sat atop a powder keg of emotion.
During those long days of waiting, rumors had begun to circulate that Sublette and Campbell had indeed given up the mountain trade in an agreement with Astor’s successors in St. Louis. Another story confirmed that the partners were even selling the fort they had built on the North Platte last summer to the new firm of Fitzpatrick and Fontenelle—quitting the fur trade completely to become landed gentry and mercantilists back in St. Louis.
First it was General William H. Ashley who had pulled out after he made his fortune, and now Sublette and Campbell appeared poised to do the same. Could it be, rumor had it, that the two of them were following Astor’s lead: getting out while the getting was good because there was no more money to be made in the mountain beaver trade?
A man had only to look around that sprawling rendezvous camp as they waited through those last days of June, on through the entire month of July and the first week of August, to see that the bales of beaver were small, and few. More and more of the grumblers in the company camps announced their plans to cash in their chips once the caravan arrived. And once Fitzpatrick showed up more than a month late on August 12 with those pack animals swaybacked beneath trade goods, one of Fontenelle’s St. Louis clerks busied himself telling all who would listen a depressing tale that served to thicken the aura of gloom already hanging over that rendezvous of 1835.
“Back home it’s all the talk—a story come upriver from N’orleans ’bout a French duke what was over visiting the Chinee last year,” the wag related to his rapt audiences. “Seems that Frenchie lost his beaver-plug hat over there, and them Chinee didn’t have nary a beaver-plug hat to sell him.”
The clerk went on to describe how the French diplomat had a tall hat specially made for him from the silk of those productive worms, a hat he proudly wore upon his return to Paris where it became all the envy, and the fashion conscious clamored to have one just like it. In droves the best dressed of Europe had begun to abandon their beaver felts and were ordering hats of Chinese silk.
By now, the clerk explained to slack-jawed trappers, this frightening trend was gripping the States. Silk was all the rage.
Any half drunk who cared to give it a thought couldn’t help but reckon what was at that moment being scrawled on the walclass="underline" if beaver was no longer in demand, then it stood to reason that beaver men were soon to become an endangered species.
In light of all that disgruntling talk of silk, the groaning about the poor price for plews, and the moaning about the high cost of possibles, it didn’t take all that much mulling over before Scratch decided he wasn’t about to trade off all his pelts to the company then and there. What with the low dollar beaver was bringing, coupled with the exorbitant prices demanded for what trade goods were being offered, he figured instead to hang on to half of his plews he might well end up trading off at that new Fort William raised down on La Ramee’s Fork. By any reckoning that post lay closer than Tullock’s new fort going up at the mouth of the Tongue, and much closer than either Taos to the south or Fort Union in the north.
There sure as hell had to be somewhere a man could squeeze a better dollar out of his pelts.