“I think Mr. Hockaday deserves the chance to turn me down hisself,” Bridger said firmly.
“It’s up to him, although he is a government employee,” Chilton declared. “If he wants to put himself at risk, I can’t stop him.”
“Why’d this surveyor be puttin’ hisself at risk?” Titus asked.
The major explained, “Because he would be caught with Mr. Bridger here.”
“Ain’t no Mormons gonna catch me,” Jim said. “They tried once, a hunnert fifty of ’em. I got away from Blackfoot an’ Sioux, Cheyenne an’ Pawnee too. Ain’t no soft-headed Mormons gonna catch me.”
“Mr. Bridger,” Chilton warned, “for the last time I’m suggesting in the strongest of terms that you stay well clear of your fort.”
“Why?”
“Fort Bridger lies inside the boundaries of Utah Territory, where you—like it or not”—Chilton sighed—“are a wanted man.”
“Mr. Hockaday?” Titus Bass addressed the surveyor as the man emerged from his simple A tent pitched just outside what was left of the charred stockade of Fort Bridger. “You any good with a gun?”
John M. Hockaday shifted the shooting pouch on his shoulder and tapped the hunting rifle he held across his body. “I’ve been known to hit my share of game.”
Bridger stepped up to him. “You ever shoot at a man before?”
The surveyor swallowed hard, but there was no fear in his eyes. “No. Never had to shoot at a man, white or red.”
“You’re a good sort, Hockaday,” Bass replied as he flicked his gaze at the distant rider laying low against his horse’s withers. “Chances are, if’n you was born earlier, you’d been out here years ago. I figger you’d do to ride the river with.”
“That some sort of compliment?”
“Damn right it is,” Sweete said as he walked up with the six other old mountain men, who had returned to the ruins with Bridger the latter part of October, camping their families in a protected valley miles away.
Grim-faced, they were all bristling with weapons as they turned, the sound of galloping hoofbeats becoming distinct, peering at the lone horseman racing toward them. The gray-bearded man dressed in buckskin leggings and a heavy blanket capote pushed back the hood at the same time he yanked back on the reins and skidded to a halt by Jim Bridger.
“They comin’ on down the valley?” the trader asked the horseman.
He swung out of the saddle and said, “More’n three dozen of ’em, Gabe.”
“Doesn’t sound like good odds,” Hockaday said grimly, looking over the old trappers.
Bass patted the surveyor on the shoulder. “I figger you can find yourself a place to lay into, place where you can stay outta the way, somewhere back inside the walls. Keep your head down an’ you won’t catch a stray ball—”
“I’m not going to hide from this fight,” Hockaday interrupted with firm conviction.
With a smile of admiration, Scratch replied, “Like I said, you’re a good man. Stay close to me an’ we’ll show these Marmons how to shoot center.”
Knowing full well that he might be venturing into what could well turn out to be a deadly confrontation, government surveyor John M. Hockaday nonetheless had accompanied Bridger, Bass, Sweete, and the other ferrymen on their return trip from Fort Laramie following their unproductive talks with the dragoons about righting the wrongs committed by Brigham Young’s “Avenging Angels.” In a matter of a few autumn days, Hockaday had completed his survey of Bridger’s claim on Black’s Fork—a site both Jim and Louis Vasquez had long ago claimed the Mexican government had given them title to back in the days prior to that brief war with Mexico. Rod by rod, Hockaday had carefully measured the ground Bridger had heretofore marked with piles of stream-washed stone. By the afternoon of November 6, the surveyor had completed his duties and been paid what Bridger could afford. As it turned out, Hockaday had reveled in the company of the old trappers and preferred staying around the gutted ruins of Fort Bridger for a few more days rather than immediately returning to Fort Laramie. Those few days turned into nine by that midafternoon of the fifteenth, when the sentry came racing up with his news.
Bass and Bridger turned the sentry back around with orders to keep a watch at the far end of the valley, more than four miles off—not returning to the burnt-out hulk of the post until he was certain of the riders’ destination.
“They got wagons too,” the sentry declared as his winded horse tugged at the reins he looped around one hand.
That news worried Titus. He turned to Bridger. “They’re comin’ to settle in, Gabe. First they burn you out, take ever’thing the two of us own. Them wagons mean they come back to stay—just like folks with a eye to settle down in Oregon.”
His brow wrinkling beneath the brim of his hat, Jim looked at the sentry. “Was there any women along?”
“Didn’t spot a one, but … couldn’t rightly tell.”
Shad stepped up to ask, “Possible they got their women inside the wagons?”
With a shake of his head, the sentry said, “Ain’t nowhere to hide anyone in them wagons. They ain’t covered with bows—just got oiled sheeting tied over their plunder an’ sech.”
“Three dozen of ’em—all men,” Titus reflected. “An’ they’re gonna come sashayin’ on in here—figgerin’ there won’t be a soul around, Gabe”
“Let’s fix us a li’l surprise for ’em,” Bridger declared.
On the face of it, most men wouldn’t have dared face more than three dozen armed Mormons with only ten men. But, nine of these weren’t your ordinary settlement folk. No, not these double-riveted, iron-mounted, battle-scarred mountain men. Their sunburned, wrinkled, lined, and weary faces were nothing less than the war maps of their lives—and the light aglow behind their eyes now as they prepared to go into battle once more was like a lamp turned on all the victories they had won and the coups they had earned. As things stood, they knew they were outgunned … but this bunch sure as hell wasn’t outmanned. Scratch looked around the small group of friends for a moment, his heart growing stronger. One of these old hivernants was clearly the equal of five, six, or more of those Mormon thieves riding back in to occupy what was left of Bridger’s post.
Jim sent Shad with three of the men off to the timber on the north side of the meadow and another three just south of the half-standing walls. Then he and Bass took Hockaday and secreted themselves just inside the charred ruins of the corral, where they hunkered down out of sight and watched to the west, up the fork, for the first sign of the invaders. It was here in the cold they waited and shuddered as the shadows inexorably crawled with the low tracking of the late-autumn sun, and when the sentry returned with word that the Mormons were near, they waited some more.
“There!” Bridger whispered harshly, the breathsmoke spewing from his lips in the freezing air.
“It’s yours to open the dance, Jim,” Titus reminded. “This here’s your show.”
Gabe turned to look at him. “You lost almost as much as me when they drove us out, Scratch. This is gonna feel good to us both.”
He patted the scratched, nicked, octagonal barrel of “Ol’ Make-’Em-Come,” his .54-caliber flintlock rifle. “Ever since last August, I been waitin’ to get them thievin’ murderers in the buckhorns of my sights, Gabe. That’s a mite long for a man to wait for justice—don’t you think?”
“But we ain’t really like them, are we?” Jim asked.
“Not in no world I’d ever be part of,” Titus replied.
“You ’member how Shad told us them Mormons shot our friends down in cold blood up there at the ferry?”
Titus took his eyes from Bridger’s face and stared through the gap in the timbers where his barrel lay … peering out at the oncoming riders and wagons, the muted sound of voices, the jangle of bit chains and clopping of hooves just beginning to reach their ears. Brigham Young’s Avenging Angels came on slow, riding easy and not at all on the alert. Gabbing as men do when they don’t have a concern in the world that they are being watched and are riding into an ambush. He sensed a cry for justice welling up within his empty belly, burning at the back of his throat—or, was it a scream for revenge? To shoot four or more of these Mormons out of their saddles the way they had cut down five of his unarmed, defenseless friends at the Green River crossing might go a long way to quieting its angry voice.