And with the mountain man’s every visit to the stockade, young Sublette gently prodded Scratch. “Ain’t you getting a little old to be traipsing off all alone into them snowy hills anymore?”
Bass’s eyes would twinkle, and he’d wink at the older Vasquez when he replied, “I ain’t so old I can’t take care of myself, you pup.”
“Man smart as you,” Sublette chided, “I would’ve thought you’d figured out some easier way to make a living.”
On that Louis Vasquez would agree. “Trapping’s gotta be some of the meanest work any man can do, Scratch.”
“Hard work never kill’t no man I know of,” he grumbled over the lip of his tin cup.
Every visit Sublette would say, “Don’t you figure it’s time you quit scratching out a living with your hands, and start making your living with your wits?”
“I told you, I ain’t fit out to be no trader,” Bass told them, a little stronger this third time, as they sat out a storm.
At the stockade walls a wolfish wind howled as dawn approached. The sudden subfreezing gale had come on so fiercely that Scratch abandoned their camp and hurried his wife and daughter through the moaning trees that loomed out of the darkness to reach the walls of the fort. In the last few hours Waits-by-the-Water and Magpie had slept snugly in a far corner of the trading room behind two bales of buffalo robes while he had dozed fitfully, his back propped against a pack of beaver in another corner.
Once Vasquez had awakened, he shoved open the plank door to start some coffee brewing over the fire Scratch kept going in the mud and river-stone fireplace. Two of the fort employees had abandoned their blankets to sit before the flames, kneading their cold hands and inhaling the luring fragrance of brewing coffee.
It wasn’t long before Sublette himself had appeared at the ill-fitting door where a sudden gust billowed a rooster tail of snow around him as he struggled to shut off the wind, forced to throw his shoulder against the rough planks. Even as he sat and accepted his tin cup from Vasquez, Sublette had begun to prod the old mountain man.
“When you going to admit you’re just the man Louis and me need to trade with the bands hereabouts?”
“There’s traders, and there’s trappers,” Titus snapped. “And one ain’t fit to be the other.”
Then he sat silent while Vasquez moved from man to man with the huge coffeepot, filling each steaming tin before moving on.
“Pretty plain our friend doesn’t want us to beg him anymore, Andrew,” the Spaniard stated with a wry look of amusement on his face. “The matter’s dead. Isn’t a concern to Scratch that the bottom is getting torn out from under the beaver trade. He doesn’t have to worry with none of it.”
“Damn right,” Scratch grumbled. “I’ll stay on trapping what I can, trading for what I need. I ain’t been a hired man in almost eleven years. So I ain’t about to sign on now.”
“You got a family,” Andrew lobbied. “How you figure to provide for them when beaver goes to hell?”
“Just the way any man would!” he shrieked, then realized how loud his voice had grown and sneaked a quick look at the far corner where wife and daughter slept. Whispering, he continued, “We ain’t gonna starve, long as I can hunt.”
Sublette asked, “How do you propose to pay for lead and powder? For your coffee and tobacco, sugar and salt—not to mention those nice things your wife deserves?”
Bass snorted with a grin. “Damn, if you ain’t got a lot of your oily-talkin’ brother Billy in you, young Sublette,” and he hoisted his coffee cup in salute. “Comes to it, a man with a strong back and his wits about him can allays find himself work.”
Vasquez said, “We got work for you right here.”
“Dammit, boys—ain’t neither of you give thought I got me a Crow wife? How you ever ’spect me to take a Crow woman into them ’Rapaho and Shian camps?”
Sublette shrugged, muttering, “I … I—”
“You doing your damndest to make me think you got horse apples for brains, ain’cha?”
“It ain’t so foolish as you’re making it out to be,” Sublette argued as he glanced over at his partner, finding Vasquez grinning in his dark face. “You been riding off from her to trap all winter long. Come back to your wife and her camp when it pleases you. Tell me what’s so different with going off to find some villages and trade for their buffalo robes?”
“Long as there’s beaver in the hills, there’s lots of differ’nce,” he answered firmly. “I’m a man gonna choose how he makes his living, how he works out the rest of his days.”
Vasquez came over and squatted down next to Titus. “Ever you consider trading with the Crow up north? You’re married to one, gotta know plenty of them bucks too. It might work out well for you and us.”
But he wagged his head. “Things ain’t so good ’tween me and them Sparrowhawks right now. Ain’t none of you been paying no notice I spent the winter here, ’stead of up there in Absaroka? Don’t that tell you nothing?”
“Just figured we might help you and you help us,” Vasquez explained. “I traded among ’em myself couple winters ago. Lost two of my men to the Blackfoot, but damn if that spring of thirty-four I didn’t haul better’n thirty packs of buffalo up to Campbell’s post at the mouth of the Yellowstone.”
“Crow trade ain’t wuth the trouble,” Bass declared. “Not long after the company bought out Campbell and your big brother Billy, they found things so tough up there on the Yallerstone in Crow country that they pulled back from the Bighorn—moved their post to the Tongue.”
Andrew whistled low. “Don’t say?”
“’Sides, the company booshways already got ’em someone living with the Crow. He sees they trade their furs off only to him and the company.”
“That Negra Beckwith,” Sublette grumbled, then grinned. “But I’ll bet you’d do fine working for us up there.”
Titus dug a fingernail at his itchy scalp. “Trader at Fort Cass, fella named Tullock, he asked me ’bout taking Beckwith’s job last spring.”
Vasquez leaned close. “Company isn’t happy with him?”
“Tullock says Beckwith spends too much time making war on the Crow’s enemies,” Bass explained. “’Stead of making them Crow warriors trap beaver for the company. Tullock ain’t figgered it out: up there near the Blackfoot country, there ain’t but one choice for them Crow. They can trap flat-tails, or they can protect their families.”
“But down here,” Sublette replied with gusto, “Injuns don’t have the Blackfoot to fret over! You agree to be our trader, you can see that the bands in these parts bring us their furs instead of taking them down to the Arkansas, or up to Fort William on the North Platte. You make ’em see how good they’ll have it trapping beaver for us, making buffalo robes for Vasquez and Sublette.”
“Naw,” Scratch answered with a dull echo as he brought his tin cup to his mouth. Waits-by-the-Water settled beside him. She kissed his cheek and rested her head against his upper arm.
“Magpie asleep?” he asked her in English.
She nodded and spoke in his tongue. “Yes. She hungry soon.”
“Storm’s ’bout played itself out,” Bass said, gazing at that one window in the room where a sheet of thin, translucent rawhide had been tacked over a square hole sawed in the cottonwood logs to serve as a crude windowpane. “Figgered to pack up and move out this morning anyways.”
“But now the snow will be so deep,” she protested in Crow, gripping his arm fiercely, as if she would physically keep him there.
“The two of us, we’ve been through worse,” he answered in her tongue. “So don’t you worry. There’s beaver yet—believe me. And I mean to trap my share of it.”