“I ain’t for certain sure,” Bridger admitted, his face long and sad. “But somethin’ tells me I got to have a look at things down there on Black’s Fork.”
Titus could not believe his ears. “You mean—head back to your post where all them Marmons is waitin’ for you to show back up in that country?”
Resolutely, Jim nodded once. “I reckon I better see what’s become of them Saints, what they’re doin’ to what’s mine.”
“No tellin’ what’11 happen, they catch us out in the open, Gabe,” warned Shad.
“You can stay here, any of you,” Bridger suggested. “I ain’t askin’ you to come back with me to my post.”
“Your mind’s made up?” Titus inquired.
“This here’s my country,” Jim answered. “I was here long afore Brigham Young. So as long as the mountains is free, I’ll be here long after Brigham Young an’ his Saints is gone. Just as long as these here Rocky Mountains stay free—”
“I’ll ride with you, Jim,” Titus vowed as he stepped up to his old friend. “I’ll even ride with you to Salt Lake City so you can lay your hands on Brigham Young hisself. Don’t you ever doubt me, Jim Bridger. You can count on Titus Bass to ride into hell with you.”
Ghostly tendrils of gray smoke still rose from the half-burned timbers.
The valley of Black’s Fork stank, the late-summer air heavy with the stench of those smoldering piles of hides the Mormons had set ablaze.
But nowhere they looked as they slowly advanced on the blackened gates of Fort Bridger did they see a sign of life. Not one of Brigham Young’s Saints. Not a single horse or mule. Not even so much as a wagon or a milk cow left in the paddock of the corral.
“They cleared out, Jim,” Shadrach Sweete said as they all came to a halt at the edge of the cottonwood in the chill of that early morning.
“Appears to me them Marmons put great stock in what your Mary told ’em ’bout her papa bein’ Washakie, chief of the Snakes,” Titus observed. “I figger they woke up with their achin’ heads, an’ got to thinkin’ they didn’t have the stomach for fightin’ the Shoshone. Their kind allays gonna skeedaddle when they gotta fight men even up.”
Sweete said, “I bet they scared themselves, Jim. Once they found Mary gone, figgered she went off to fetch her pa an’ his warriors.”
Bridger said nothing but continued to wag his head as he started slowly toward the smoldering walls of what had been his peaceful bastion in the wilderness. An uneasy silence hung over the valley … not at all the sort of silence the man had settled here to enjoy. This was the utter lack of sound after a piece of ground had been gutted of all life. Not the twitter of a sparrow, the caw of a magpie, or the shriek of a robber jay. Only the occasional whisper of the breeze that kept the last of the embers glowing, their smoke rising, an oily-black stench filling their nostrils as they stopped at the open maw where the double gates had once hung. The charred ends of those timbers lay in a heap on which a small fortune in buffalo, bear, and other skins had been sacrificed to the flames of a bonfire.
A sudden creak made them all spin about, their hearts leaping to their throats … but it was only the dawn breeze nudging what was left of one half of the broken corral gate as it swung on a huge iron hinge. A lonely, forlorn sound. Where once this place had reverberated with life unleashed, now it felt like it was the empty pit of a man’s belly, gone hungry three days or more.
“You cache anything, Gabe?” Titus asked quietly as he stopped at Bridger’s elbow.
“No. Did you?”
Bass shook his head. “S’pose we ought’n look to see if the sonsabitches left anythin’ behind when they set fire to the place.”
Jim sighed, his face long and gray with despair. At least half of every low hut was burned, the logs tumbled to the ground, charred and smoking. About a third of the outer stockade still stood, but the rest had burned nearly to the scorched earth, both the walls around the fort itself and the adjacent corral.
“The wagons’re gone,” Bridger said. “No sign they burned ’em.”
“They took them too,” Sweete declared.
“After they loaded ’em with ever’thing they wasn’t gonna burn,” Jim growled, a fury finally beginning to glow behind his eyes. “After they stole ever’thing right out from under me for Brigham Young.”
“This ain’t right,” Jack Robinson said in a weak voice. “This just ain’t right. Even if they said they come to arrest you for sellin’ weapons to the Injuns … it ain’t right they just up an’ steal ever’thing from you an’ your family.”
“From me an’ my family too,” Titus reminded him.
Robinson muttered, “Stealin’ an’ murder ain’t right—”
“These folks ain’t like you an’ me, Uncle Jack,” Titus interrupted. “Ever’thing these Marmons do agin us an’ our kind … why, they figger it’s the work of their god and his awmighty prophet, Brigham Young.”
“Damn Brigham Young!” Bridger shrieked. “I give him my hand. I offered to guide his people down to a valley where they could settle in peace an’ grow their crops an’ no one’d ever bother ’em again! The night I took supper with that bastard Prophet, he told me he an’ his people was runnin’ from folks what wanted to hang him, folks what wanted to kill all his faithful believers.”
Jim turned to his friends, tears of frustration and rage pooling in his eyes. “Can you believe I was took in by the son of a bitch? Here I was gonna do all I could to help him an’ his folks who he said just wanted a place of their own to live out their lives an’ believe the way they wanted to believe … an’ Brigham Young puts a butcher knife atween my shoulders!”
“You just say it,” Titus offered. “I’ll ride with you to the valley of the Salt Lake so you can strangle that evil son of a bitch with your own bare hands, Gabe.”
“Th-there ain’t near ’nough of us no more,” Bridger said quietly. “Time was, we could ride out in the four directions an’ be back inside of two weeks with more’n a hunnert … likely two hunnert trappers. Time was we could’ve rid right down on Salt Lake City an’ dragged Brigham Young out of his house—quakin’ an’ shudderin’ an’ blubberin’ for me to spare ’im before we dropped a rawhide rope round his fat preacher’s neck … but not no more.”
“There ain’t a hunnert of our kind in these mountains anymore,” Titus declared. “Ain’t nowhere near half that many, not all the way from the Marias on the north to Taos an’ Santy Fee on the south. Them what ain’t gone west to Oregon like Meek an’ Newell, or run back east to what they used to be … the rest is standin’ right here with us.” He swept his arms around the group. “Lookit us, fellas. Just lookit us. We’re all that’s left of a glory breed … an’ ever’ last one of us is barely hangin’ on to what was by our fingernails.”
Slowly the handful of men drifted off in different directions, not one of them uttering another word, each of them wallowing in his own thoughts, recollections, memories of a brighter day, shining times when they were still kings of this mountain empire, before the big fur companies choked the very life out of the beaver trade … long, long before the settlers’ wheels cut through the heart of these mountains. Long, long before these self-anointed Saints came to murder, plunder, and steal everything worth living for.
Funny, Titus thought as he and Waits-by-the-Water walked arm in arm toward the smoldering log hut near the southeastern corner of the stockade, the one that Bridger had turned over to them, but that night back in ’47 when Gabe had supper alone with Brigham Young by the crossing of the Sandy, the Prophet had swayed Jim with tales of how the Saints had been persecuted by the majority of folks wherever they had attempted to build their temples and live out their lives according to the dictates of their holy leader. Funnier still it was, now that Brigham Young’s Saints had come to this land and through the sheer strength of their numbers had become the majority for the first time in the history of their church.