Текст книги "Mountain Man"

Автор книги: Vardis Fisher

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Текущая страница: 20 (всего у книги 24 страниц)

29

IT WAS A LONG, cold, and dangerous journey but Sam covered it in seventeen days, stopping only one night with Bill and one with Dan. Outfitted at Bridger’s and several hundred dollars in debt, he was ready to trap, but the things he had just bought did not take the place of the ones he had lost. His rifle was new and a good one but it was not the gun that more than once had saved his life. The revolver was new, the Bowie, the packgear, his leather garments, his cooking utensils; but he liked none of it. Bridger told him that his mount, a sorrel stud, was one of the finest horses from the Crow nation, but Sam knew it would take a lot of training to make it as smart as the bay. Until he stared with dismay at his new fixens he had not realized that the Blackfeet had robbed him of things almost as dear to him as his own name and honor. Wall now, as Bill had said, Sam was now the sworn enemy of two nations; and it didn’t seem likely, said Jim Bridger, that he would live long. "You’re a big credit risk," he had said, and he had urged Sam to trap up Black’s Fork and its tributaries, where he would be safe.

Sam spent two nights with Jim and heard all the news and it was all bad news. Brigham Young and his hordes of Mormons were busy building a kingdom in the valley of the Salt Lake; and west of them, across the alkali flats and the Sierras, a million damn fools were rushing around yelling gold, and towns were springing up like the ancient Babble. There had been a town named Babble, hadn’t there? Jim asked, casting an uneasy glance at Sam. The whole Western country, he said, would soon be overrun by criminals, religious blowhards, tin-cup greenhorns, and every kind of simpleton on earth; and there would be no buffalo left, no beaver, no clean spot where a man could stretch out and smell sweet earth—nothing but foul water and foul air, sewers, junk heaps, noise, and people. He was thinking of going to Canada.

Sam told him briefly, as he had told Bill and Dan, of his capture and escape. Jim had fixed on him his strange eyes decked with tiny glittering lights and had said Sam wouldn’t last long now. Elk Horns? Hank said. With Bloods and Crows after him Sam ought to get his prayers said and write a goodbye note to his mother. "I’ll try and be at your funeral," Jim said. While Sam trapped on Black’s Fork news of his capture and humiliation spread over the area, from trapper to trapper and post to post; and not a mountain man heard the story but asked when the rendezvous would be. Most of them intended to be there. Those with posts, like Bridger, could not get away, or those like Rattlesnake Pete, who, thrown from a horse, was laid up with broken legs, or Bill Williams, crippled with rheumatism and holed up somewhere in the Uintahs. By the first of April it was known that the meeting would be at the Three Forks, right in the heart of Blackfeet country. By mid-April, Sam came in with two packs of pelts and settled most of his account and then headed for the Laramie post. Bridger said that unless he was plum hankering to die he had better stay out of Crow country. At the Laramie post Three-Finger McNees looked at Sam with one black eye while the other gazed off in the direction of Powder River. Doggone it, he said, he intended to be there, but if Sam was to get himself captured again and again they could not spend half their time avenging him.

Hearing the words, Mick Boone came over and said surely Sam was not heading through Crow country again.

Right through the middle of it, Sam said. McNees wondered how many of the twenty Sam had killed. Mick said that not only the Crows would be after Sam, but the whole Blackfeet nation.

The humiliation of both the Crow and Blackfeet people was the chief topic of gab at the Laramie post. The Sparrowhawks, Charley said, had been aroused to insane furies on learning that their enemy had been captured and allowed to escape. The Blackfeet were not able to hide or to explain away the fact that their prisoner, defenseless and half naked, had slain one of their mightiest warriors right in their camp and that the whole fifty-seven of them had not been able to capture a man who had neither food nor weapons and had two hundred miles to go. The story of Sam’s escape became embellished in the telling, by both redmen and white, until his long trek in below-zero weather, without food or gun or bedding, became the greatest feat of courage and endurance in all of human history. Mountain men with a gift of gab and invention loved to elaborate it; they liked to describe the murderous furies of the Blackfeet braves when, rising from their rumpots with bloodshot eyes, they discovered that a bound and helpless captive, half dead from hunger and cold, had with his bare hands throttled a warrior who boasted of six coups.

At the post their efforts to lead Sam out got them little. Zeke Campbell, who had spent the winter in the Medicine Bow Mountains, walked around with a tin cup of strong rum in his hand and studied Sam with the strangest eyes in the country. Back under large, coarse, bushy brows the color of golden sandstone were small eyes that seemed to be only two glittering lights. He would have bought Sam a drink but he knew that Sam did not drink. So after staring at Sam across the top of his cup he went over to Mick Boone, one of the tallest of the mountain men, with an abnormally long neck on the front of which was a huge Adam’s apple. Mick was a dark, watchful, silent man, who looked slow and deliberate but was fast on the draw. His large homely face, with its big curved nose and wide mouth, usually broke into a self-conscious grin, even if he were asked only an ordinary question.

The question Zeke asked was not ordinary. "For a man who lost all his fixens he looks good, don’t he?"

"He lost my bay," Mick said, shooting his brows up.

Cy Gregg came over. He had wintered on the waters of the Belle Fourche. That was Crow country but Cy years ago had taken a Crow girl and had paid, in the opinion of most men, a king’s price for her. He was now a Crow brother; if the Crows did not love him or covet his scalp they at least did not molest him. Like Bill and Charley, Cy spoke their language and knew their ways and what they were saying and thinking. As he moved toward the two men they fell silent, for they did not trust him.

A moment later Jeb Berger entered the storeroom. Jeb was the only mountain man whom no other mountain man liked. He was a big fellow—more than six feet and about two hundred and twenty pounds, square, deep-chested; and he was a fair shot and a fair hunter. The thing that made men uneasy around him was his pantomime: he was forever pretending that he was shooting ducks or geese out of the sky or the heads off chickens; or, squaring off, that he was ready to lick the world’s champion. Few mountain men were show-offs; they had courage but they did not think about it or wonder if they had it. They felt that there was something timid in a man who had to be eternally telling the world that he was an expert boxer, a dead shot, and a brave man, Jeb belonged to the boasters and braggarts, among whom in a later time a famous one would be known as Buffalo Bill. He did not really belong to the tribe of Kit Carson and Jim Bridger and Tom Fitzpatrick. He must have known that, for he seemed to be trying, morning, noon, and night, to convince other men of his skills and his courage.

Like his torso, his face was square; it was a large strong face with no weak feature except the eyes, which were the eyes of a liar. Jeb had a heavy black beard an inch long that covered nearly all his face, and in this beard his grin showed two rows of even teeth that were shockingly small in a face so large and dark. When he smiled he merely drew his well-fed cheeks back, and except for two wrinkles at the corners and his exposed teeth you saw no sign of a smile. He was proud of his beard and of the hair over his body, for he thought that hair was a sign of virility. It was his private opinion that all thin-bearded men were cowards.

Jeb came over to Mick and those with him, and when he felt that he was near enough to be cordial he grinned at them, and the next moment cut a heavy-footed caper. He shot his arms up in the position they would have taken if they had held a gun; and his deep voice said, "Boom-boom!" With a gesture he indicated that two birds had fallen. He next closed his hands  and presented to Cy the pose of a boxer on guard, and did a few fancy steps. Mick was gravely watching him, his elongated skull held high, his eyes staring down his long nose. That he didn’t like Jeb was plain all over his face. Mick, Cy, and Zeke were not the kind to dress down a braggart. McNees was. He came over and looked at Jeb.

"Ya heard about it?"

"Some," said Jeb, and made his mechanical grin.

"Ya kallate to be at the rondyvoo at Three Forks?"

Jeb was not a talkative man and he was never quick to reply. He loved to play the part of a deep silent person, with an extremely sensitive sense of honor and a lightning hand on the draw.

"When?" he said at last.

"About August first, ain’t it?" McNees asked, one eye on Zeke and the other on Mick.

"Bout then," Mick said.

"Hey, Sam!" Sam, standing by a pile of robes and tanned skins, looked over at the men. Then he walked over, his gaze moving from man to man as he went.

"Jeb here," McNees said, "is dyun ta kill a few Bloods. Wants to know when the rondyvoo will be."

"I think most of the men want around August first."

A Jeb, McNees said, was snorting like a buffler bull with a badger hanging from his balls. Jeb was looking at Sam.

"Taking a nap?" he asked.

"Just as well have been," Sam said. "Fact is, I was trying to figger out how to unhitch two bulls with their horns locked. I was about to chop a horn off when all I could see around me was the ends of gun barrels."

"Five or six?" asked Jeb, his tone saying that any man could take care of live or six.

Sam looked Jeb in the eye and said, "Fifty-seven when I left them."

"Jeb is an expert with niggers," McNees said. "How much is a third of fifty-seven?"

Jeb turned on McNees his wide unemotional grin.

"About nineteen," Mick said.

"Only three for each of us?" said McNees. "Can’t we git a extra fer Jeb?"

"Jeb will want at least five or six," said Sam.

Jeb’s cheeks were still stretched back in a meaningless smile.

Mick’s long homely face had opened in a grin that spread to his forehead. Two Blackfeet were about all he cared to tackle at one time, he said; Jeb could have one of his and that would make four for him.

Where were they to find them? asked Zeke. Anywhere, Sam said. Had they let the squaws squat on him?

"They never got that far."

McNees said: "Count on us to be there, Sam. August first."

He fixed one black eye on Jeb, studied him a few moments and said, "We’l1 see ya there."

It was a long time till August. Meanwhile Sam had work to do in Crow country and a debt to pay to a woman, without whose food and bedding he would have died. During his second evening at the post the men sat around a big fire, a few of them drinking, all of them smoking or chewing. The talk turned to Kate. Wind River Bill had come in, and on Kate, as on most matters, he was an authority. When someone wondered if the woman was crazy or only pretended to be, Bill said he had been there six or seven times and never once had she looked at him or spoken to him. She seemed not to know that he was there, she shorely didn’t.

"Did she ever know you vmz thar, Sam?"

"I never could be sure," Sam said. "I never saw her look at me."

"How long’s she been there?" someone asked.

"Wall now. In forty-three I wuz on the Belle Foos; forty-four I wuz on the Tetons; forty-five I wuz on Little Powder; forty-six I wuz on Hoback; forty-seven—" The mountain men liked Bi1l’s catalogue of places; they loved all the names. Bill searched his memory and thought he might have been on the Snake but he could be as wrong as hell, he shorely could. When was he with Abner Back? Anyway, the woman had been there a long time. She had aged a hundred years and she had grieved enough to turn a whole nation gray.

"True she talks to herself?"

Not to herself, Bill said; she talked to her children. They came and knelt in the sage bushes, or sat—he had never figgered it out; and she read the Bible to them and talked to them. "Ya Figger she sees them'?"

Wall now, Bill said, and turned his face to the sky, as though to find the answer there. This here life, it was a riddle for sure, and no man had figgered it out.

"Spect she’l1 die there, unh?"

"Spect so.” A trapper passing by someday would find her bones and would bury them between her children. Then the lnjuns would burn the cabin and the winds would level everything, and there would be no sign that a mother had lived there for years, reading God’s words to her angels.

A voice said, "Our mother she never loved us that way."

Not many mothers did, Bill said, for he was an authority on that matter too. He had never known a mother with such devotion as this woman’s. Had they ever stopped to think that of all things there had been, or someday would be, this was the greatest? There had been only one Eve, and of all the women the Almighty had made since taking the rib from Adam she was the one that every stud whinnied at. Waugh! There had been only one Mary, one Cleopatra, one Elizabeth, and there was only one Kate. He expected that God had put her there to show the world what mother love should be. Mebbe He had put Sam here to show what a father should be, for he had heard that Sam took to the bones of his wife and child the loveliest flowers he could find. The eyes of all the men turned to Sam but he was smoking and looking into the fire and he pretended to be unaware of them.

"Heerd say she never makes a fire."

Never, Bill said. Sam he had dragged in enough wood for ten years and it hadn’t growed none but it warn’t no smaller neither. Jeb interrupted Bill’s talk to say that he had ridden past her shack last fall. Boom-boom! Two ducks fell from the sky. He had taken the ducks to her and a deer but she had seemed not to want them. It was a fine fat deer. He had broken its neck on a dead run at almost half a mile.

Some of the men glanced at one another. They all knew that no man on earth could hit a deer on a dead run at half a mile. Jeb’s shooting was like rain on the talk. Even Bill fell silent. Greenhorns came out from the East and boasted their heads off about their wing-shooting of partridge and dove; but with a Hawken rifle they couldn’t hit a buffalo bull standing broadside a hundred yards away.

McNees was the only man who had looked straight at Jeb. When Three-Finger looked at a man he usually squirmed a little and got his tobacco smoke down the wrong hole. While one small black eye looked deep into you the other looked off at the sky or the mountains; and if after a few moments you swung your gaze from the eye boring into you to the one staring at eternity the man’s head would turn and the other eye would look into you. Three Finger was one of the few men who kept the hair shaved off their faces. He was a tall long-legged man who, like Bill Williams, had always lived and trapped alone, a hermit deep in the mountains who minded his own business and took insults from no man. His right eye, fixed on Jeb, had that black-bearded boaster powerful oneasy; and after a few moments McNees said, "Heard it said you took some Blackfeet scalps. Next August will be a great day for you." The men all knew that Jeb had never taken Blackfeet scalps. After the Missouri Fur Company had to abandon its post on the Three Forks it had been a bold trapper who had ventured far into  Blackfeet land and a rare day when one took a Blackfoot scalp.

It was going to be a mighty pleasure to run that band of varmints into the ground. August first, they reminded one another the next day. and vanished in all directions from the post. Sam was again well-equipped but he missed the familiar feel of the gun he had lost, of the saddle, of the horse under him. He was in buckskin garments so new that the smoke-and-tanning smell of them was stronger than that of horse lather and tobacco smoke. It was Crow smell. After he had ridden a few hours the Rawhide Buttes were on his right, the North Platte on his left; and as far as he could see was only the pale light above the vast area between the Platte and the Powder and Belle Fourche. The Belle Fourche and the Powder were the heart of Crow country. Because of what Cy had told him Sam had decided to ride across the Sparrowhawk nation clear to the Yellowstone.

Cy had told him that the Crows were frantic with frustration and disgust. Even: girls were vowing to take the warpath against him. The old chief didn’t know how many of the twenty Sam had killed but a dozen warriors had been found with Sam’s mark on them. As though that were not humiliation enough, the rum—guzzling Blackfeet had let him slip out of their halter and were now saying that they had captured him only to let him go so that they could capture him a second time. It was an unspeakable shame for the proud Sparrowhawks. They had not yet with their bravest men been able to put as much as an arrowhead in Sam, yet the Blackfeet had taken him, spat in his face, slapped him with tomahawks starved and frozen him, and let him go. Cy said the Blackfeet were saying that capturing Sam had been so easy that they intended to capture him once a year as long as he was fool enough to stay in the country. They would get huge ransom, including rum, and show their ancient enemies, the Crows, that as lighters they were no better than sick old women. The Crow chief knew that there would be a vengeance wreaked by mountain men and begged for a chance to exterminate the band that had captured Sam. If denied that. the Crows would vow on their medicine bags and by all their ancestors that they would take Sam’s trail and never sleep day or night till they had brought him down.

"They flgger twenty aren’t enough?" said Sam, grimly amused. "You say about a dozen of them are still after me?"

"They kallate."

"A1l the best ones?"

Oh, hell no, Cy said; Sam had slain three of the best ones, maybe four.

"And the girls are coming after me?"

"Some of them."

"Mebbe I can capture one for a wife," Sam said.

He didn’t know how he would feel if he saw a girl trailing him. He didn’t know how much of Cy’s gossip to believe or whether to believe any of it. North of Lightning Creek in an area so forsaken that he saw no sign of any living thing he tried his new weapons; when with the rifle he was able at two hundred yards to hit an object the size of a beaver hat nine times in ten he turned to the revolver. He was not the kind of revolver shot who knocked the heads off grouse at fifty feet but he had learned during his years in the mountains that the man who saved his life in a pinch needed a cool head more than expert marksmanship. There actually had been greenhorns out from the East who at target practice could outshoot most of the mountain men but when they went out for big game and were charged by a bull buffalo or a grizzly bear their trembling hands dropped their weapons. Boom—boom! they said, when miles from danger. They had hunted tiger in India and lion in Africa (they said), but the next day they went to pieces with buck fever and shook all over when an old bull turned in the chase and looked at them with half-blind eyes.

Sam thought his weapons would do. He was not so sure of his horse.

30

THE STUD DID not fail him when a week later he had one of his narrowest escapes. He had reached the upper waters of Powder River and was in the heart of Crow land when his senses told him he was being followed. He had seen no fresh Indian tracks and no ashes of recent fires. On his way up he had rolled in sage and rubbed various plant essences over his weapons, the saddle, and the horse. He had made no fires since entering Crow country.

He looked round him and studied the physical situation. Powder River flowed north through a lovely valley, with the Bighorns on the west and the Black Hills on the east. It was prime buffalo land. Except for the growth along the river there was no heavy cover between him and the foothills, thirty or forty miles distant. He thought of hiding and waiting and trying to shoot the leader off his horse but his sixth sense told him that that would not be enough to stop them. They were desperate and they were bolder than they had been. If he were to shoot one in a party of four or five he would then have to ride at top speed while reloading; and all the while they would be firing at his horse.

At the post he had been told that his packhorse was such a well-trained beast that he could turn him loose and he would follow. He guessed he would have to do that, for in a race for his life he could not hang onto the rope of a packhorse. While thinking of his problem and wondering why he was here he kept a sharp eye on the landscape and studied the river. He thought his best chance was to plunge into the river and cross and flee to the mountains. A few moments later he was no longer allowed to sit and think; a decision was abruptly forced

on him.

A mile southwest of him an Indian rider appeared on the crest of a hill. In no time at all there were two, then three, and four; and at last there were seven. He could tell that it was a war party in full paint, well-horsed and well-armed. He supposed that they were all picked warriors. Pretending not to see them, he now followed the river path at a slow pace and studied the river bottoms. The river along here had cut deep in the earth and was fifteen or twenty feet below the top of its bank. Would his horse take a leap from that height? Would the packhorse follow? Most of his fixens were on the packhorse, as well as Kate’s rifle and food for her. The seven Indians had disappeared. Sam would have risen to an elevated spot and waited for them but there was none around him.

He now took a branch path leading toward the river, which was fifty yards from him; and leaving his horses, he went back to the main trail. When at the edge of the woods he peered out he had a good view of the country, except the river bottoms. The main buffalo trail here skirted the edge of the woods, with many paths meandering through them. He knew that seven Indians would not try to approach him on horses; some would detour and come in from the north, others would come up from the south; and somewhere they would have a lookout watching the river. He still had time to plunge in and cross, while they were scouting his position, but he had never run from a fight and he didn’t like to run from this one. There were only seven of them, he told himself, and Lost-Skelp would say they were only an hour’s work for a boy. He was thinking bravado and he knew it. He wondered a moment if the ordeal of captivity and flight had impaired his faculties, for he didn’t seem to be his usual self. Convinced that he was being stupid, he ran to the horses, led the packhorse to the edge and with one heave shoved him off. He then mounted, faced the river, dug with his heels, and with no hesitation at all the beast made the plunge to the swirling waters. The horse went under and Sam with it, except his right hand, which held his rifle high. The moment his eyes came up out of the water and he had shaken the wet off his lashes he saw something that so astounded him that he could only stare. On the high bank above him stood a naked Indian, with nothing on him but some kind of headdress, and nothing in his hands but an object that looked like a knife. If Sam was astonished by sight of the red youth he was utterly amazed by what the youth now did. He stood only an instant on the bank, tall and red and naked, when with the war cry of his people, he put the knife between his teeth and plunged in, and at once  was swimming like an otter, his absurd headdress and the knife flashing above the waters. Sam’s horse was swimming toward the far bank, almost side by side with the packhorse. Sam hung his rifle from the horn, swung his right leg across the beast’s neck, and turned in the saddle to face the swimmer. The stud was a strong one but the Indian was gaining. As Sam watched the headdress coming closer he could no longer doubt the incredible fact that this brave, a mere youngster, was determined to count coup on Sam Minard.

Because it was not Sam’s way to shoot an almost defenseless enemy he loosened the knife at his belt. He then waited, eyes staring, his mind slowly grasping the fact that this was the most spectacular act of courage he had ever seen. As the Indian came on, the black eyes never left Sam’s face. Sam saw more than that. He sensed that this young one had been so outraged in his tribal and personal pride that he was resolved to prove that a Crow warrior could be a braver man than The Terror. If able to touch Sam he would in the next moment plunge the knife, and if he died in the next instant would that matter? He would be remembered by his people as the bravest warrior of them all, living and dead.

Wall now! Sam thought. Having decided what was in the youth’s mind, he moved fast. If this young brave wanted a fight with knives he could have it; and so Sam slid back over the stud’s rump and into the water. At that moment his enemy was no more than ten feet away. In the next moment the Indian’s chest came up, like an otter’s, and in a flash he flung himself on Sam. In that same moment Sam’s powerful hands seized the redman’s right arm and broke the knife from his grasp. The next move caught Sam unprepared. With fantastic speed the Indian came up and almost out of the water, and both desperate hands seized Sam’s throat. The move had been made like a trout’s, in an arc, and with such perfect timing that for a few moments as the hands closed his windpipe Sam could only bug his eyes and wonder what had happened. He was to realize later that the Indian could have seized the knife at Sam’s waist and plunged it through him.

Like a horror in a nightmare of memory Sam saw the grizzly with the badger’s teeth set in its nose. With all the strength he could bring to bear, from the position he was in, treading water, he took the Indian’s wrists and tried to break the grasp. In that moment he was conscious of the redman spitting in his face. In that moment he caught a dreadful picture of eyes so full of hate that they were like black molten steel; and of teeth bared back into the cheeks. Sam sensed next that blackness was about to engulf him, and with the last of his sanity he did the only thing he could do: he grasped the terrible knife at his belt and plunged it deep into the Indian just under the breastbone. When the hands did not instantly relax he drew the knife and plunged it again. As he then fought to remain conscious he saw the change in the black eyes, and that change he would remember to the day of his death. He was to think of it afterward as the kind of change a father would never want to see in the eyes of a son.

Sam thought he must have been unconscious a few moments, for he had water in his lungs. Coughing, he looked round him and saw patches of red. The hands were gone from his throat, and the dead Indian was floating down the current. Putting the knife in his belt and looking at the far bank where his horses stood, Sam began to swim, keeping his head under except when he turned his mouth up for air. Once through veils of water hanging from his brows and lashes he saw his two beasts moving toward a wooded area, a half mile from the river. While he swam the thought came to him that this intrepid youngster was not one of the seven he had seen, but a lone warrior, who had left his people to count coup or die. He was as brave a man, Sam was thinking, as any he had known; and after reaching the bank, exhausted and subdued and feeling a strange shame, admiration compelled him to look down the river, hoping for a last view of this brave youth. But there was no sign of him on the slate-blue waters; he was dead and he was gone. Sam drew the knife. The river had washed it clean except for a tiny spot that had rested between belt and buckskin. With a forefinger Sam wiped off the blood smear and then touched his skin over his heart. It was the only way he could think of to salute the valor of a foe who had been more than worthy of him.

After running into the woods he turned to look back. There was still no sign of the seven. Mounting the stud, he rode at a gallop west by north to the foothills and entered a black forest. He was feeling nausea, and a sadness that was not at all natural to him. Riding by night and hiding by day, he began to wonder about a matter that only now had occurred to him. Here he was, a human male, hunted by a thousand warriors from two nations; and yonder was Kate, a female, whom all befriended and no man wished to kill. If the old Crow chief would now come to him and say that his people were sorry for the murder of his wife and child, and that the braves who killed them would be punished, he would sheathe his l?ife and smoke the

pipe of peace ....

It was true (he told himself) that Kate had killed in a frenzy of hate and passion that no man could excel and few could equal but since then she had given her whole being to her children and their flowers. Sam doubted that she had killed anything, even a bug, since that terrible morning. She watered her plants, talked to her angels, and waited for the Lord to call her home; whereas he, who only now had slain a brave boy, would soon join a war party that would try to exterminate to the last man and dog an entire band.

He suspected that he was not thinking clearly. There surely were aspects of the matter to which he was blind. If the Crows had him in their hands there would be in their hearts no compassion and no mercy; and if the warrior in the river had been able to kill him he would have become a national hero, possibly the greatest hero in all of Crow history. It was an eye for an eye, the holy book said. It was not Kate’s devotion to gentleness that had made her secure; it was the mountain men who had set the skulls on four stakes at the four corners of her tiny world. If the laws of life, of weakness and strength, of timidity and courage, had taken their inexorable course, with no protection of the weak by the strong, she would have been scalped long ago and her bones would now be white somewhere along the Musselshell.