“I was running like nothing you ever seen when I smacked square into something that throwed me back a good twenty feet.”
“What was it?” Whitman asked. “Did you run into a tree?”
He looked over at the missionary with a dead-serious look on his face. “Weren’t no tree I run into, doc.”
“A bear?” Spalding prodded.
“Weren’t no bear neither,” Bridger explained. “Didn’t know what it was, cause there weren’t a thing ’tween me and that bull. Open as all get-out ’tween me and him! So I picked myself up off the ground, grabbed my rifle up too, dusted myself off, and started running to knock him in the head again—when, bam! I’m throwed off my feet again.”
Bridger went on to tell how angry he was when he yanked up his rifle and started racing for the elk a third time, only to find himself hurled off his feet once more.
“Now, I’ll admit this here fella ain’t the smartest child ever come to the mountains, so I figgered it was time to go a leetle slower at this,” Jim told them gravely, the way a man confided a deep secret. “I started walking slow toward that elk … when of a sudden I come smack into a wall.”
“A wall?” Whitman repeated.
“Weren’t a wall, ’sactly. But it were a solid mountain, clear all the way through. Took me near all the rest of that day, but I got over that mountain, where I saw that elk chewing his grass on the far side. Why, that bull had to be more’n twenty mile away from me when I’d tried to shoot him!”
Spalding snorted dourly. “Twenty miles? How could you even see the animal?”
“Don’t you see, Rev’rend?” Bridger said respectfully, grinning a bit as he pulled on the pilgrim’s leg. “That there mountain was so big, clear as glass, that it were just like a giant looking glass that made the bull seem big and close—just the way folks use a looking glass to see things far, far away!”
“Your looking-glass mountain!” Narcissa squealed with glee, clapping her hands. “Marvelous, marvelous!”
“How true, Mrs. Whitman,” agreed the tall man in the showy buckskins as he stepped to the edge of the fire pit. Holding out his tin cup, Joshua Pilcher said, “Bridger is a consummate storyteller. And one of the finest booshways these mountains have ever seen. I’m sure Jim will join me in proposing a toast now that he and his partners have wrapped up our business and we no longer have to keep our talks under wraps.”
“Why all the secrecy, Joshua?” Stewart asked.
“My benefactors demanded it of me,” Pilcher explained. “At least until we came to terms, shook hands, and the matter was sealed.”
Stewart turned to Bridger, asking, “What matter, Jim?”
“We sold our company to Joshua’s bosses,” Bridger confessed. “Today.”
“Pratte, Chouteau and Company,” Pilcher said. “But they’ll continue to be known as the American Fur Company out here in the mountains.”
“Because they’ll be the only American fur company out here in the mountains,” Tom Fitzpatrick added.
“So here’s to a united front,” Pilcher proposed, lifting his tin cup. “One American company, to face down the threat of that giant Hudson’s Bay Company.”
“Hear! Hear!” slurred Lucien Fontenelle, clearly inebriated already.
Andrew Drips reluctantly nodded and held his cup high as Fitzpatrick stood.
Bridger finally got to his feet. The smile that he had worn while he’d been regaling them with his whoppers was fading quickly. In its place this veteran of the mountains wore a grave expression of defeat.
Bass instantly felt a sharp stab of sorrow for the younger man who had made an honorable name for himself after a youthful indiscretion had marred a reputation yet unborn. At seventeen Bridger had come upriver with Ashley and Henry. Green as a willow, he had volunteered to stay behind with the badly mauled Hugh Glass, then agreed to abandon the old frontiersman—running off with rifle, pistol, knife, and shooting pouch. But unlike most, who would have made excuses for the wrong they had done, year by year Bridger put in a yeoman’s work protecting those under his care.
But no matter the times that Bridger had attempted to better his lot by joining in one partnership after another, Lady Fate steadfastly refused to smile on him. Once again the fickle dame had turned her face from him. It damn well didn’t seem fair, not fair at all.
“Here’s to success, to our American company,” Pilcher repeated, then swilled down the potent libation from his cup.
“No,” Bass demanded as he stood and held his cup up to Bridger. The others froze. “I won’t drink to no bunch of tie-necked booshways back east, or the fancy two-faced struttin’ prairie cocks they send out here to do their thievin’ for ’em.”
Pilcher’s face went ashen, his eyes dark in that sullen face. “Are you r-referring to me, sir?”
For but a moment Bass glared at Pilcher; then he quietly said, “You damn well know I am.”
The partisan’s ashen face flushed red with anger in the firelight. His lips moved, but it was a moment before the words came out. “Are—are you a company man?”
With a snort of laughter Bass said, “Hell, I’m a free man, Pilcher! Ain’t no turncoat like you!”
“How dare you—”
Already Bass was turned to Bridger and Fitzpatrick, interrupting the angry cackle from the company lackey by saying, “It ain’t gonna be no goddamned rich niggers like them parley-voos back in St. Louie, and it won’t be bastards with a high opinion of themselves like Pilcher here what’s gonna beat John Bull at the beaver business. Mark the words of this one man. What’s gonna drive Hudson’s Bay outta the mountains, and keep ’em out, ain’t fellas like Joshua Pilcher and all his snuff-snortin’, sheet-sleeping kind.”
“Hear! Hear!” bellowed Shad Sweete with a bull’s roar.
Warmed to his toast, Scratch continued. “It’s gonna be men the likes of Jim Bridger what keeps the beaver trade alive in these here mountains. Brave and honorable men like Jim Bridger what pertect this here land for America!”
Two days later, John Bull rode into rendezvous again.
As they had done for the last two years, half-breed Thomas McKay and factor John L. McLeod led a small brigade of guides and trappers to visit the annual American trading fair during their three-year-long expedition through the Snake River country. When Scratch rode over to look up an old friend, he was confronted with a pair of surprises.
The first was finding Kit Carson and his young Arapaho wife riding in with McKay’s outfit.
“We wintered over at Fort Hall,” Carson said. “So come spring, seemed a good idee for me and Godey, ’long with four others, to throw in with the Hudson’s Bay brigade.”
That news was nothing short of astonishing to Titus Bass. From time to time faithless belly-draggers like Joshua Pilcher offered to work for the British, but no one the likes of Christopher Carson who had stood up for the flag back when that Frenchie Shunar was boasting he would switch any American who chanced to cross his path.
It struck him hard. “S-so you trapped for John Bull, Kit?”
Carson shrugged. “We worked all the way down the Mary’s River this spring. Didn’t get but a few beaver and we near starved. Come close to eating ever’ last horse we had, so McKay headed for Fort Walla Walla to get some stock. Meantime, we managed to make it in to Fort Hall. McKay come there with plenty of new mounts so we could ride on in here to ronnyvoo.”
“Damn if that don’t take the circle,” Bass brooded. “You going over to the Englishers.”
“Not that way at all,” Thomas McKay said as he stepped up. “Carson doesn’t want to go back with us.”
With a nod and a grin Kit explained, “I’m gonna look for Bridger. See if Gabe’ll have me back. I’ve had enough of starving in that English country.”
Just then the Yankee trader, Nathaniel Wyeth, approached. He too had just arrived with the Hudson’s Bay brigade that mid-July day. Bass anxiously looked over the brigade dismounting to start dropping packs from their mules. For this second summer in a row he didn’t see the familiar face of his old friend.
“I’m asking after Jarrell Thornbrugh,” Titus announced as Wyeth came to a stop near McKay and McLeod.
Then he saw how the men dropped their eyes, their smiles disappearing as they self-consciously turned away.
