through the gate, then into the crude pen to the right of the gate where they joined some other stock. Together Bass and the stranger tore at the knots lashing their meager possessions and packs of beaver to their backs until everything had been dropped.
“Now,” the man gasped, brushing some of the frost from his gray beard and mustache, “s’pose you tell me who the hell this friend is what’s looking after Levi Gamble.”
“My name’s Bass. Titus Bass,” he gasped, winded, weary, and more than half frozen.
“Bass. Say you know Gamble?”
“Knowed him a long, long time ago.”
“How long?”
“Back to eighteen and ten it were—”
“Jesus and Mother Mary!” the stranger exclaimed. “How the hell you ’spect a ol’ man to remember that far back? So how you know him?”
“We shot at a mark together, once,” Bass explained, dragging a coat sleeve across the lower half of his face. It wasn’t near so cold there, out of the wind the way they were. “No more’n sixteen was I, but still I nearly whupped Levi that summer—”
“The Longhunters Fair?” the stranger suddenly blurted.
Bass licked his lips, surprised at the interruption. “Y-yup. Levi come through Boone County. We shot at the Longhunters Fair they hold every summer—”
“You that skinny whiffet of a green-broke young’un nearly outshot me that summer day?”
Scratch blinked again, closely studying the stranger’s face in the dim, fading light of that stormy afternoon. Those tired eyes, their deeply etched crows’-feet and liver-colored bags of fatigue, along with that massive, unkempt gray beard and tangle of iron-colored hair beneath the crown of black-bear fur.
“Levi?” he croaked. “Levi Gamble?”
“Goddamn, it’s been so long and you changed so much,” Gamble apologized. “I’d never knowed it was you even if you’d come up and punched me in the nose!”
Bass opened his arms and flung them around this man who was a stranger no more. “Damn if it ain’t good to see a old friend!”
Gamble flung his arms around Bass, squeezed, then pounded Scratch on the back with both thick mittens. “I’ll declare, Titus Bass! What the hell took you so goddamned long to look me up?”
17
“You want me to believe this man nearly shot the pants off you, Levi Gamble?” demanded Kenneth McKenzie, the undisputed king of the high Missouri.
“That was more’n twenty-six summers ago, factor,” Levi apologized after he had introduced Bass to his employer the next evening following Scratch’s arrival at the Fort Union gates. “We was both better shots back then—wasn’t we, Titus?”
Bass grinned and winked at Gamble. “More’n half my life ago, Levi. I’m sure we both was better at a lot of things than we are now!”
“Like with the women, eh?” asked Jacques Rem, a half-breed hunter in his early fifties, better known around the fort as Jack.
“We menfolk just like dumb-witted animals,” Bass declared. “We learn slow when it comes to women: gotta make a lotta mistakes a’fore we find ourselves a good one.”
“What ever come of that purty gal you had snuggling up with you that summer at the Longhunters Fair?” Levi inquired. “I recollect how she purt’ near had you tied into a husband knot herself.”
Titus wagged his head. “We never … I run off on the Ohio a’fore I got roped into that, Levi. Been the wust to happen: marry that gal and turn into a farmer like my pap. Live and die right there never knowing what lay over the far hills.”
“Here’s to what lays over the far hills!” Gamble roared, and hoisted his pewter cup filled with a hot blend of illicit trade whiskey and strong coffee they had been drinking at this gathering of fort workers.
“And here’s to them gals what keep their men back east!” Titus bellowed.
“Levi’s got him a young family,” Rem stated. “He didn’t get married until he was an old man. So now he has young wife, young chirrun.”
“’Bout like you, Titus—with a young’un on the way,” Gamble said.
“Oh, don’t let him fool you none,” Jacques continued with an evil wink. “Levi Gamble gone through more’n one woman ever since he come north on the river many year ago!”
“Don’t listen to this soft-brained half-breed, Titus,” Levi warned with a grin. “He’s got him a big family awready—growed kids and gran’chirrun too. So now Jack’s a man with a tired pecker he can’t get hard no more— and that means he don’t care nothing ’bout women no more.”
“Hrrumph!” Jack snorted as he stood and grabbed his crotch. “Maybe better I go crawl under the blankets with your wife, eh, monsieur? Show you which of us can still be a man with the women!”
“You ain’t no older’n me, Jack,” Levi said. “’Cept that you used your pecker so much it got whittled down to nothing a long time ago!”
Rem slapped Gamble on the back as he stood, starting for the door. Turning, the half-breed looked at Titus and said, “Maybe you should shoot another match against this bag of hot wind, eh? He is so old now, he can’t shoot straight with his rifle.”
“But, Jack—you are so old you can’t shoot straight with your pecker!” Levi bawled.
“Don’t stay up too late tonight, my friend,” Rem warned. “We must be off at dawn to find some buffalo.”
“You crazy ol’ Frenchman,” Levi said. “You know I’d never let you down. We’ll ride at dawn.”
Jacques Rem slid back the iron bolt in its hasp and dragged open the door, then slipped into the night. A cold gust of air knifed into the room as the half-breed slammed the door shut again.
All through the previous night of the blizzard Titus had stayed close to Waits-by-the-Water and Magpie, unfurling their robes and blankets to sleep on the floor in what Levi called the Indian room. Early the following morning after Gamble showed up with the bail of a coffeepot gripped in one hand and three tin cups suspended from the fingers of the other, he and Levi set about hauling in Bass’s packs from the corner of the fort’s courtyard where they had dropped them during the storm.
Next they led the mule and ponies out of the fort’s cramped stables, struggling across the drifts of wind- crusted snow in that first dim light of day, leading the animals to the post’s main corral which stood more than a hundred fifty yards east of Fort Union, constructed from timbers brought there from nearby Fort William, the post abandoned by the Sublette &c Campbell more than two years before. McKenzie’s laborers had dismantled the opposition post, then rebuilt its stockade, a blockhouse, and three small cabins, in addition to an extensive corral where most of the post’s stock was kept when they weren’t let out to graze on the extensive plateau surrounding the site.
On reaching the corral with his stock, Bass felt the back of his neck burn with warning. Turning to glance over his shoulder, he spotted eyes watching from the dark windows as he and Levi dragged back the gate and led the animals through.
“Friendly folks?” he asked Gamble.
“Them?” Levi asked, stopping to look at the windows.
Scratch said, “Gives me the willies, looking at us like they are.”
Levi took a few steps until he was inside the gate, turned and glanced at a couple windows before he said, “Don’t pay ’em no mind. Just ol’ man Deschamps and his kin. His two boys and a nephew. Their ’Sinniboine women and all their chirrun.”
“My animals safe here?”
“This here’s McKenzie’s country, Titus. Deschamps figgers to stick around, wants to keep his ha’r, he knows better’n try stealing from McKenzie—”
“I asked about my horses.”
“That’s why I come over here with you, let ’em see me,” Gamble explained. “Anything happen to your stock,
