“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.