“My father was a Frenchman,” the half-breed explained. “I’m chief scout taking a Europe nobleman across the west. We are camped nearby, so he sent me to ask you for supper with him tonight.”
“Supper, you say?” Bass replied, glancing at his wife. In Crow he explained, “We’ve been invited to eat with another camp.”
She nodded enthusiastically.
“Seems my wife thinks it’s a right fine idee, Mr. Clement. When you want us to show up?”
“Soon as you’re able,” and the scout turned to point to the nearby bend in the river where the grassy meadow was rimmed with wild currant bushes laden with thick clusters of resplendent red fruit. “Can’t miss us. My boss has a few unusual tents pitched in a half circle around our fire.”
Bass rose, dusting his palms on the front of his greasy leggings. “We’ll be along shortly.”
In no more than a matter of minutes did Waits-by-the-Water have herself and Magpie ready to go visiting. After looping a short length of hemp rope around Zeke’s neck, the four of them set off into the last of the day’s heat as the sun sank upon those dark timbered heights resting along the western horizon, known to the mountain men as the Black Hills.*
“Stewart is my name, Mr. Bass,” said a slight and shorter man as he stepped away from the big fire to greet them. “William Drummond Stewart.”
“Call me Titus, baptized Christian back in Caintuck,” he explained. “Or call me Scratch—you might say I was baptized that name when I first come to these here mountains.”
“Scratch, is it?” Stewart repeated with a wry smile. “I believe I’ve heard your name come up among some of your American compatriots. Perhaps Bridger himself mentioned you.”
“Me and Gabe go back some,” Titus declared. “Run onto him clear back to twenty-six.”
With a look of warm approval filling his kind eyes, Stewart cast his gaze upon the woman and that young child she clutched against her side. “And this is your wife? What tribe is she—wait. Let me see if I can guess by her clothing.” He considered a moment, studying Waits-by-the-Water up and down, then finally wagging his head. “I’m not sure, but suppose she might be Shoshone?”
“Naw, she’s Crow.”
“Crow!” Stewart clapped his hands together exuberantly. “I haven’t had much acquaintance with the Crow in my travels, even the journey I made through a corner of their country. But come, come! All of you.” He pointed to some ladder-back wooden chairs arranged around the fire. “Let’s sit and talk away the evening.”
Stepping behind one of the chairs, Stewart gripped its back and looked at Waits with a broad smile.
“He wants you to sit on it,” Bass explained in Crow, unable to come up with a word for chair.
“Sit?”
“Among the white men, this is how they sit. They have many chairs.”
She regarded the piece of furniture suspiciously, then glanced at Stewart, and down at the chair again. “Why sit on this—when they can sit on the ground, can sit on a blanket or robe?”
“Don’t make much sense, just like a lot the white man does. But”—and he shrugged—“white folks partial to this way of sitting. Go on, sit—and we’ll be good guests for this visitor from a land far, far away.”
After she had settled, Bass and Stewart took their seats as a half-breed servant stepped up with a silver tray on which rested four large pewter goblets.
The nobleman took his from the tray as the half-breed stepped between Bass and the Crow woman. “Try this, Scratch. It’s a very nice wine I brought with me. If you shouldn’t like it, we can find you something else to drink.”
As it turned out, Waits enjoyed the taste of her first glass so quickly that Bass had to warn her the white man’s powerful drink might either make her sick or cause her to act like the trappers she had seen become silly fools after guzzling at rendezvous.
“You’ve covered some ground, William,” Bass declared later as the half-breed attendant poured steaming coffee in china mugs after an elegant supper of elk tenderloin garnished with canned oysters and slabs of a tart cheese on the side. He had never seen Waits-by-the-Water eat near as much as she did once Magpie was nursed and laid to sleep on a blanket spread beside her chair.
“You said you’ve been out to Vancouver. So you must have met Doctor McLoughlin?”
“That ol’ white-headed eagle? Sure did. A good man—even for a Britisher.”
“Lord, he’s not a Britisher!” Stewart corrected. “He was born in Canada. Which might explain why he might well share no more love for the crown than do I.”
“You’re Scots, are you?”
“Not a drop of John Bull in me,” Stewart said proudly.
Scratch sipped at his coffee, then said, “My grandpap allays told us we was Scot too—leastways, back some in the family.”
At that Stewart hoisted his tin cup and merrily proposed, “Welcome to the tartan, my friend!”
“You said you been far yonder to the west, and clear up to Fort Union at the mouth of the Yallerstone,” Scratch declared. “How far south you been? See’d Bents’ Fort?”
“Indeed I did. Spring of thirty-four. We came north after a winter sojourn in Sante Fe—”
“Jehoshaphat! We was close by ourselves—down to Taos that winter!” Titus exclaimed. “That’s where our li’l Magpie was born. I first come through Bents’ Fort that spring of thirty-four too, on my way back from St. Lou.”
“We visited Taos a few days on our way north for rendezvous on Ham’s Fork,” Stewart declared. “Quite an undertaking the Bent brothers have assumed with their fortress, not unlike the construction of this post. Back in Scotland, I’ll have you know, my brother is building himself a new castle. Murthly he’s calling it.”
“What brung you all the way out here?” Scratch inquired after draining his mug. “All the yondering you’ve done, from the Missouri to the Columbia and on down to the greaser diggings—that’s a passel of tramping.”
For a moment Stewart ruminated on the question while he gazed into the fire, the thump of distant drums softly floating across the open meadow from the villages that lay beyond.
“I’m not the firstborn of my family, you see, Scratch. Among the wealthy, landed class that means I must make my own way in the world, unlike my brother John. Were it not for my gracious and loving aunts, I would still be making a career for myself in the British army. I was a captain—and I suppose it was my service in the wars of our empire that first stabbed me with this incurable appetite for travel and adventure.”
“Adventure—damned sure to get your fill of that out here!” Titus replied.
“So in turn I’ll ask you the same question: what brings you here?” Stewart inquired, his eyes intently studying the American. “Come for the beaver?”
Wagging his head, Scratch answered, “Some time back I realized it ain’t the beaver. There’s some what come for the plews, but that ain’t what makes a man stay.”
Stewart sighed, gazing now into the flames. “You Americans have something here in this country of yours that doesn’t exist anywhere else in the world.” He peered up at Bass. “Something that doesn’t even exist back east, back there in the rest of America.”
Bass shook his head emphatically now. “But I don’t callate how this here’s the United States, William. It ain’t like nothing else back there. Another land, this.”
The Scotsman abruptly raised his cup. “Huzzah! Huzzah! Here’s my toast that this country out here will never become anything like that country back east!”
With a stab of some sudden, undefinable pain sending its icy finger through the middle of his chest, Scratch gazed at the black night sky and replied, “Aye, I damn well pray this never will be anything like that land they ruin’t back east.”