Back to his ledger he went, wagging his head slightly as he added and carried numbers from column to column. While the clerk finished his computations, Bass gazed over at the rest who had finished this grueling part of the process. Hatcher and the others already stood among the stacks and kegs, crates and boxes of trade goods— fingering this and that, chattering excitedly about most everything they picked up and held to the light. There remained no more than a handful of other free men waiting patiently behind Scratch for their turn at the trader’s scales.
The clerk carefully tore a strip from the bottom of his ledger page and handed it to another man, who stuffed the strip of paper beneath the rope holding together Bass’s beaver skins. Then the hawk-nosed man wrote a little more and tore another strip of paper from the bottom of the page.
He held it out to Bass.
“Here’s your credit.”
“My credit—for over at the store?”
The clerk looked past Scratch at the trapper pushing up behind him. “Next! You’re next, now—come along lively!”
Pressed from behind, Bass stepped aside, trying to hold the rustling strip of paper still enough to read it in the breeze. It was hard for him to make out that writing scratched on the white foolscap beneath the glare from the summer sun. Stepping into the shade beneath the edge of an awning, Titus studied the marks again. Several words were scrawled there, that much he was sure of. And beneath each of them a number. In addition, at the far end of the strip was a fourth number, written bigger than the rest, and circled as well.
“Scratch—how much you got to spend?”
He looked up, finding Rufus Graham before him. “You read this?”
Rufus shook his head. “Can’t read a’t’all.”
“Near as I make it, I got me a few hundred dollars for supplies.”
“How much hundreds?”
“That looks like a nine,” he answered, squinting his eyes as his dirty fingernail pointed out a number. “Damn, but I never was a good one at ciphering numbers. Could do it once, but it’s been too long since I done any of that.”
“None of the others can help you neither,” Graham admitted. “None of us read.”
“S’all right,” he sighed, looking up. “Only place I can spend it is here anyways.”
“’Cept you go back to Taos.”
“Ain’t a chance of that,” Titus said, starting toward the rest, who were dickering with a pair of clerks beneath a far awning.
“This here tobaccy ain’t half-bad!” Caleb declared as he turned toward Bass when the two walked up to the others.
“Better’n Mexican,” Hatcher agreed.
Scratch asked, “How much?”
The clerk perched behind the wooden crates holding several hundredweight of twisted brown carrots of tobacco declared, “Two dollar the pound.”
“Same as it’s been for the last two year,” Isaac stated.
“Damn good thing too,” Bass grumbled. “Missed out on American tobaccy last year.”
Asked the clerk, “You’re ready to buy?”
“I damn well waited the better part of a day and a goddamned half to buy,” Titus snapped. “If’n that don’t take the circle! You better believe I’m ready—”
“Where’s your paper?” the clerk interrupted.
Handing the man his slip, Bass watched the clerk glance quickly at the numbers, then look over at the first of Sublette’s men. “This here right?”
“What’s right?” the other civilian asked.
“This says five hundred fifty-nine?”
The man glanced at Bass a moment before he remembered. “Five hundred fifty-nine is the right amount.”
As the first clerk went back to grading and weighing pelts, the store clerk said, “Take your pick,” and began to write in his own ledger. “You got enough to near buy what all you want.”
“Damn,” Titus said as it began to hit him. “I ain’t really had no chance to buy nothing but what it took to live on for so long now—I … I don’t know how to act, boys.”
“What you need?” Solomon said as he came up and laid a hand on Bass’s shoulder.
Hatcher chuckled, bursting out with, “The nigger needs just ’bout ever’thing!”
“I got me a gun,” Bass said.
“You need a pistol?” asked the clerk.
“I got the one Hatcher loaned me,” he replied. “How much are those you’re selling?”
“They’re smoothbore, sixty caliber—sell for fifty dollars.”
“Oooo!” exclaimed Caleb. “That hurts.”
Hatcher came up to stand beside Titus, saying, “You go ahead on and keep that’n I loaned ye long as ye want.”
“If I can buy me my own, I’ll do that. Much ’bliged, Jack,” he said, then turned back to the clerk. “Gimme one of them pistols to look at.”
After he started inspecting the weapon, slowly dragging back the big hammer to check the crispness of the lock, holding it against his ear to listen to the action, Bass had the clerk hold up this or that, quoting one price after another.
Closing his eyes in sensual pleasure, Scratch sniffed at the bag of green coffee beans below his nose.
“Two dollar a pound.”
“Better weigh out twenty-five pounds. How’s your powder?”
“Best grade is two-fifty the pound.”
Titus turned to Hatcher and Gray. “You figger it’s better’n that Mex powder we got along?”
“Gotta be,” Jack replied.
“It’s American,” the clerk asserted. “Du Pont.”
“All right,” and Scratch nodded. “I’ll take fifty pounds. What’s Galena?”
“Lead’s only a dollar and a half.”
“We got us some of that Taos lead from down in the Mexican mines,” Rufus said.
Bass cogitated a few moments, staring up at the underside of the awning over his head as the sun baked down on them. “I’ll take me a guess and go with seventy-five pounds. And I need me some good awls.”
The clerk spun around and swept up a sample from the boxes behind him. “These are three for fifty cents.”
They appeared sturdy with their fire-hardened steel points and hardwood handle. “Gimme six.”
Solomon asked, “You want ’Nother blanket?”
So Bass looked at the clerk, “How much?”
“White blankets for twenty dollars.”
“That’s a lot just to keep a man warm,” Bass grumbled.
The easterner said, “You want it sewed into a capote, them are only twenty-five each.”
“How much your striped blankets?”
“They ain’t near as much,” Hatcher explained. “He’s charging just fifteen dollar for striped ones.”
“Because they ain’t as big as the white ones,” the clerk declared.
“Better gimme a white blanket.”
As the clerk returned with the neatly folded blanket, he asked, “Need any pepper or salt?”
Scratch shook his head. “Got plenty of that down to Taos last winter.”
“Beads-or ribbon?”
“What do them hanks of beads cost a man?”
Shoving forward that heavy tray containing thick hanks of the big colored variety commonly called pony beads, the clerk answered, “Five dollars a pound.”
“Show me how much a pound is,” Bass requested.
