Meek bolted to his feet, looking every bit as stunned as he had when Bridger announced his bad news. “You … you g-going to take them folks on to Oregon ’stead of trapping beaver with me, Doc? ’Stead of staying in these mountains with us?”
Newell grabbed his best friend by the forearms, gazing intently into Meek’s eyes. “Come with me, Joe.”
“C-come with you?”
Doc’s head bobbed eagerly. “We are done with this life in the mountains, so come with me, Joe.”
“Done?”
“We’re done wading in beaver dams, done with freezing or starving. Done I say—done with Injun fighting and Injun trading. Look around you, Joe: the fur business is dead in these mountains, and the Rockies is no place for us now.”
Meek gasped in surprise, “Doc Newell—fixing to leave the mountains for good?”
“Goddamned right, Joe! We are young yet, and we have all life laid out a’fore us! We can’t waste it here when this life is dead!”
“But … Oregon?” Meek asked uncertainly.
“We ain’t the sort to go back to the States,” Newell said, affectionately slipping an arm around the big man’s shoulder. “I say come with me, Joe. Let us go on down to the Willamette and take up farms.”
“Oregon,” Meek repeated the word as if trying out the sound of a mysterious lodestone for the first time. “Oregon, you say?”
“We’ll take them preachers and their wives, that Walker family too—all of their wagons on to Fort Hall where we’ll gather up our wives and light out for Oregon.”
Bass watched the glow cross Meek’s face, so contagious was Newell’s enthusiasm. It was the look of a man grown so weary and old, suddenly granted new vigor. Where resignation once was scrawled, now Titus could read the hope and joy boldly written on Joe’s face.
“There’s nothing left for you boys here,” Bass charged them as he got to his feet, flinging one arm around Newell and the other around Meek. “Man needs to find him some country what he can call his own. Sounds to me that Oregon is where you two will make your stand.”
34
Two days later, when all the beaver had been turned over to Andrew Drips and that sad little rendezvous was quietly dying with a whimper, Reverend Philo B. Littlejohn finally sought out Moses Harris to explain that he had arrived at a most difficult decision.
“My party has decided that to guide us from here to Oregon—your price is simply too high.”
“I reckon you don’t have no notion just how far a piece that is to pilot you,” Black Harris snarled caustically, glaring the missionary up and down. “I figger what I asked is only fair—seeing how I’ll miss out on the fall trapping to get you folks through to the Columbia.”
“I won’t quibble that you asked what you determined was fair for you,” the round-faced minister replied.
Realizing that he might be letting a good thing slip from his grasp, Harris suggested, “Maybe we can dicker some more to come up with a dollar more to your liking, but still gonna be fair to me—”
“That won’t be necessary now,” the preacher declared.
“What you mean: won’t be necessary?”
Littlejohn cleared his throat self-consciously, then said, “We enlisted a pilot for our journey, and for a price much lower than you demanded of us—”
“Lower?” Harris growled. “Who’s the bastard cut me outta my goddamned job?”
Red-faced, the preacher exclaimed, “There’s no call for your oaths, Mr. Harris!”
Standing there seething, his hands balling into fists before him, the mountain veteran growled menacingly, “Tell me who took my job!”
“His n-name is Newell,” the missionary confessed as he inched backward, seeking escape from Harris’s fury. “He plans to make a home for his family in Oregon—”
“Not if the son of a bitch is dead!” Harris interrupted as he whirled away in a fury, to start his search of the company camp.
Unsuccessful, he finally headed for the trader’s tent. He didn’t find Newell there that morning either, but he did find that the clerks were opening up the last of the kegs they had packed west. Harris felt a sudden, inexplicable thirst coming on. Some hard drinking was clearly in order before he continued his search for the man who had stolen his job.
By midafternoon Harris’s well-soaked despair had grown ugly. Taking up his rifle, he lumbered away from the trader’s canopy intent on finishing his deadly mission. With so few trappers attending this final rendezvous, the search didn’t take him long now. He spotted Newell crossing a patch of open ground some seventy yards off near a free man’s camp. Harris shoved his rifle against a shoulder, squinted his bleary eyes, and attempted to hold steady on his target.
When the gun roared, the ball went wild.
As a terrified Newell ran for his gun, Harris started to reload while he stumbled after his intended target— angrily cursing and growling his intention to have the younger man’s scalp.
“Goddamn you, nigger! Gonna hang your ha’r on my belt before sundown!” the drunk man roared to the skies. “And you’re gonna be sleeping with the devil hisself by nightfall!”
Step by step Harris plodded after Newell, clumsily pouring powder down the barrel as he plodded toward the trees where the trapper had disappeared. Digging at the bottom of his pouch, Harris pulled out another ball and set it atop the muzzle. He lunged to a stop as he yanked the ramrod from its thimbles at the bottom of the barrel, preparing to set the ball against the charge when Andrew Drips and a dozen others sprinted up—drawn by the racket as the lazy camps burst into action with the alarm.
“Get me some damned rope!” the trader ordered those behind him.
Someone asked, “You gonna hang ’im?”
“I damn well may do just that!” Drips spat as he dodged side to side each time Harris wildly swung his rifle at those advancing on him. “Get me the goddamned rope!”
Again and again Harris heaved his heavy weapon in a crazy arc at his attackers. The moment the drunk knocked a man down with a grunt, Drips leaped onto him. Five of them jumped in to wrestle Harris to the ground as he spewed curses at them, whipping his head side to side, snapping his teeth at anything that got too close, attempting to clamp down on an ear, a nose, a finger.
“Gimme that rope!” Drips shouted as the others struggled to hold down the figure thrashing on the ground.
“You gonna hang ’im now?” a voice cried.
“No. We’ll fix him to that tree,” the trader exclaimed as a half dozen of them dragged Harris to his feet.
The bruised and bloodied drunk man spat at Drips and two others, promising to kill them before he went to finish with Newell.
“Son of a bitch stole my job!” the old veteran bellowed like a wounded bull with his balls snagged on cat claw. “No goddamned beaver for a man to trap any-mores … and now Newell’s stole my pilot job!”
A yard at a time they dragged Harris to the closest cottonwood where they shoved him to the ground. Wrapping the rope round and round the trunk, three of them secured him as Harris roared his curses at them, then pitiably cried in despair at the end of the beaver trade—only to suddenly curse some more.
Drips knelt at Harris’s side. The drunk man angrily spit at the trader. Wiping the glob of spittle from his cheek, Drips hissed, “I oughtta shoot you right where you are—”
“Go ahead and kill me!” Harris bawled. “Ever’thing’s gone anyway!” Then he broke into a sob, “It don’t matter to live no more.”
The stunned crowd fell to a hush around them.
“Let me tell you why I don’t shoot you and get it over with, Harris,” Drips explained as he leaned closer. “You been a good man, guiding our supply trains from St. Louis every summer. I figure that’s gotta count for something.”
