eh?”
“I do, but Levi had him his job upriver—”
“Levi? You said your friend’s name is Levi?”
“That’s right. Levi Gamble,” Creede declared.
“G-gamble?”
“Ever you run onto him?”
“I’ll be damned,” Bass exclaimed in wonder with a grin growing big as his beard. “I knowed a man named Levi Gamble of a time. But that were so long ago, it couldn’t be the same man.”
“The nigger I know is older’n dirt,” Creede exclaimed with a chuckle. “But a damn good man. We been workin’ for American Fur a long time, Bass. Upper Missouri Outfit. The Western Department—no matter what them booshways called it, they always had plenty of work for us over the years.”
“Levi Gamble,” Titus sighed, staring at his toes and calculating the years, trying to sort through a jumble of feelings and recollections that name stirred in him. “Had to been the summer I run off from home.”
“How long ago was that?”
“A mess of winters,” he replied, his eyes moistening with rememberance. “Eighteen ten.”*
“That’s going on twenty-five years now, mister. I ain’t been out on the upriver near that long, but Levi damn well has.”
Bass grew excited. “Y-you think it’s the same feller?”
With a wag of his head Creede confessed, “Chances be, chances be. If’n the Levi Gamble you knowed first come up the Missouri to work for that Spanyard, Man-well Lisa.”
“That’s him, by damned!” Titus roared with a booming clap of his rough hands. “Levi was coming through Boone County back to the summer of eighteen ten, and I just ’bout beat him in a shooting match.”
Langston’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. “You say you just ’bout beat him in a shooting match?”
“Come this close,” and Bass held up a thumb and fingertip all but touching.
Creede shook his head. “Had to be a differ’nt Levi Gamble … or you must be one center of a shot,” he replied with a tinge of admiration in his disbelief. “In all these years I ain’t never knowed another man to shoot better’n Levi Gamble.”
Eagerly he asked, “So you’re meeting Levi back in St. Louie for your spree?”
“Come the end of winter we’ll be heading upriver again, on the first steamboat bound away for Fort Union,” Langston explained. “I ain’t gonna be trapping no more.” The man flexed his back with a sigh, “Find me ’nother way to make a living up on the high Missouri.”
“Levi still traps?”
“Not now, not for a long damned time,” Langston said. “You was saying how he beat you in that shoot?”
“Yeah—by the skin of his teeth!”
“Wasn’t long afore the booshway at Fort Pierre found out just how good Levi was and hired him for to be fort hunter. Since then Gamble’s sashayed on up the Missouri and been working for booshway McKenzie. But McKenzie ain’t gonna be around no more now, so I don’t know if Levi can figger on having him that sweet job no more. I s’pose I won’t know how McKenzie’s settled his dust till I meet up with Levi back to St. Lou.”
“When’s that?”
“We allays lay plans that come the first of November the year we’re spreeing, when the snow’s flying and it’s time to hunker close to a fire, we’re gonna ronnyvoo up at the Rocky Mountain House.”
“As likely a place for a hurraw or blood spillin’ as you’ll find in St. Louie!” Scratch bawled in merriment.
“That’s the God’s truth!”
“Listen now, hear? You gonna tell Levi you run onto a feller he knowed from long, long ago—”
“Eighteen ten. Summer.”
“That’s right. The summer I come this close to whupping him in the turkey shoot. It was down to just him and me. That summer he was off to St. Louie for to join Lisa’s brigade bound for the high Missouri.”
Creede held out his hand. “Chances are I’ll see you round the next few days while Fontenelle’s getting everything throwed in his wagons for the trip back, but if I don’t bump into you, it was good meeting you, Bass.”
“You get a chance, come look me up next day or so. I figger we’ll find us a likely place to camp down by the river. But no matter what, you tell Levi I’ll give it my damnedest to look him up to Fort Union next year or two.”
“We’ll keep our eyes out for you on the skyline!” Creede said as he turned and clattered down the steps into the sunny courtyard.
“I understood some of what you said to the other man,” Waits explained when Creede was leaving. “What is this
“Levi Gamble. A nice man I knew many years ago back in the land of the whites, even before you were born.”
“He is an old man now,” she said as she adjusted Magpie on her hip.
With a grin Bass replied, “I’m getting to be an old man now too, woman!”
Together with Waits and Magpie, Titus explored the fort interior that afternoon, stepping down from the railed balcony into the dusty quadrangle. At the center of the courtyard he stopped momentarily to stare up at the tall pole that so reminded him of those sky-scratching masts bristling with monstrous sheaths of canvas at the port of New Orleans.
Staring up at that flag being nudged by the wind suddenly gave him pause, realizing that until this moment he hadn’t thought of this western wilderness as belonging to the United States, a place and people who lay more than a thousand miles away, back there in his past.
For the first time in more than ten years, Bass sensed the first pang of regret—not for having left his country behind to flee to this untamed frontier … but regret in reluctantly coming to understand that the civilized, gentrified, pacified country he had abandoned was inexorably creeping west on his heels, slowly swallowing all of what was still, at least for the present, a vast and feral unknown, for this moment known only to his breed.
When he tore his eyes from the twenty-four stars of that flag and gazed around the quadrangle, he found that in many ways this massive wood stockade reminded him of the huge adobe fort built by the Bent brothers on the north bank of the Arkansas River. Here too buildings ringed the inside of the walls, some for trading, others for sleeping quarters or storage of furs, with space for a powder magazine, blacksmith’s shop, and a cooperage.
From the base of that immense flagpole he led his wife across the trampled ground for the main entrance. To the left of the massive covered gate hung a wide set of stairs leading up to the roof over those rooms built against the interior of that front wall of the fort. Atop the roof the stairs continued upward at a right angle, leading the two of them to the central blockhouse poised across the main gate, perched high on a pair of massive cottonwood posts.
Stepping through the blockhouse door into the cool, shadowy interior, Scratch found several other white visitors, all clad in greasy buckskins or shabby woolens, leisurely peering from the windows cut in three sides of the blockhouse.
“You fellas in from the mountains?” Titus asked as he stopped in the center of the shady room with Waits at his elbow.
One of them quickly looked the woman over, then replied, “Heading back to St. Lou with the fur train.”
Moving to one of the windows with his wife, Bass declared, “My, but I never see’d anything like this out here, even back there in St. Louie neither. Can’t remember stepping higher’n the first floor of anything since I was a tad and we all had our sleeping ticks up in the rafters of our cabin.”
“That were in Missouri, ol’ man?” a fresh-faced settlement type asked, the hint of a sneer on his mouth.
Titus eyed him and smiled disarmingly, saying, “That was back to Caintuck. Likely afore you was even born.”
With a haughty huff the ruddy-faced youngster agreed, “Don’t doubt it, ol’t as you appear to be.”
“I’ll ’How as you got so much green behin’t your ears that you don’t know how to talk respectful to your elders,” Titus explained as the blockhouse grew quiet around them. “Maybeso you just bumped up again’ someone ol’t enough he could cut you two ways of Sunday a’fore your guts’d ever spill out on this floor.”
Flicking his eyes side to side, the youngster realized his companions had inched back from him. He chewed on
