the Deschamps know I’ll be busting down that door to take care of it on my own. And if I come over to square it, they know McKenzie will send over all the help I need.”
“So this bunch don’t cause you no trouble?”
“I didn’t say that,” Levi added grimly, glancing once more at a pair of faces that disappeared from a nearby window when Levi caught them watching him. “But your animals gonna be safe here. Safe as any of Kenneth McKenzie’s horses.”
Later that morning Levi came to fetch Bass and his family from the Indian room, explaining they were invited to bed in with Gamble’s family. Just to the east of the flagpole and a twelve-pounder cannon in the middle of the compound stood five buffalo-hide lodges, their smoke flaps blackened by countless fires, snow piled more than three feet high in sculpted drifts around their bases. Nearby, to the north of the flagpole, stood the one-story factor’s house where McKenzie lived, along with his favored clerk, Charles Larpenteur, and Larpenteur’s family.
At daybreak that morning after the storm blew through, McKenzie had most of his sixty-some employees out with shovels, clearing icy snow off the pitched roof of his bourgeois house. Next they moved to clear the snow from the roofs of the storage rooms, apartments, trading stores, stables, and the barracks, all of which huddled under a long roof along the east wall. Finally they moved on to scrape the roof of the apartment range where the clerks and interpreters, the carpenter, tinsmith, and tailor, as well as seasonal laborers, all lived, another long building that extended most of the length of the west stockade.
By evening all the snow had been swept from the bastions and that massive blockhouse overlooking the main gate, supported on gigantic cottonwood uprights. Just before twilight most of the deep, drifted snow that had swirled into the courtyard had been removed in carts and wheelbarrows, muscled from one of the two gates, where it was dumped onto the prairie.
He was ravenous at the end of that long day of constant cold and shoveling, lending his hands to help his hosts. As the sun eased beyond the horizon and the temperature plummeted even farther, stars began to twinkle in a cloudless black sky. As their Indian wives prepared to put the children to bed, scrubbing the youngsters with the last of the hot water in a brass kettle steaming beside the fire, Gamble suggested to Bass that they mosey across the courtyard to the laborers’ quarters where they could smoke their pipes and drink a little whiskey, all the while catching up on those many twisted miles the two of them had walked since that fine summer day beside the Ohio River at the Boone County Longhunters Fair.
“I never told you something that night after you won the money what would take you to St. Louis …” And Titus’s voice dropped off as the chill left the room following Jacques Rem’s departure.
“Told me what?”
“Just how sad it made me you wasn’t a Boone County man,” Bass admitted, then sipped at more of his coffee and whiskey.
“Why’d that disappoint you?” Levi asked.
“Right after I’d found a fella what seemed to be just like me … I learned you was only passing through,” Scratch tried explaining why he had been drawn to the tall frontiersman and the lure of the unknown frontier in much the same way he had been drawn to the lure of Amy Whistler’s flesh. “You wasn’t like the others, them farmers, not even them Ohio boatmen I come to know that autumn.”
“Neither was you, Titus Bass. I hailed from Pennsylvania, looking for somewhere different, just like you was looking. You met me when I was off to a far country filled with more beaver and Injuns and hellfire adventure to last any man’s lifetime.”
“Damn, but didn’t that light a fire under my mokersons!” Bass confided. “Just knowing that I’d run onto someone else what had the same deadly fear I did, fear that I’d take root in one place and die right there ’thout seeing all I wanted to see.”
Gamble stared wistfully into his coffee cup. “Family and friends told me I ought’n stay on that side of the river and leave this here country for the Injuns. But I hankered to see just how much country was left over here, a’fore it got changed like that country we left back there got changed.”
“I’ll bet this was some in them early days, Levi.”
With a grin he said, “A sight few men ever see’d—and no man will ever see again.”
“It’s changing awready … ain’t it, Levi?” Bass asked sadly. “I see’d it some my own self, and I ain’t been out here near the time you have.”
“Others is coming, Titus. They always come. One or two families at first. Then a handful after them. And the word keeps on spreading. They come like bees to the honeycomb. Next thing there’s towns where there was only campsites. River ports and steamboat landings along this high river. Wagon roads where once there was only game trails or Injun footpaths going from one place off yonder t’other.”
“I ’member an old farmer telling us the land is bound to change … when man comes to it.”
They sat quiet for some time, each man lost in his recollections, in this portent of the future.
“You think it’s ’cause of us, Titus?” Gamble finally asked. “Is our kind to blame?”
“Blame for what?”
“For coming here first. We’re the ones to open it up and point the way. Maybe we’re gonna be to blame for ruining it all.”
“How we to blame, Levi?” he asked defensively. “All our kind ever wanted was to go someplace where men ain’t changed the land yet. To go where that country is so old and untouched that it’s brand-new at the same time.”
Wagging his head, Gamble said, “Maybe you’ll see it one day, Titus. See how there’s always been two kinds of men. Them few that comes to a place first—to discover that new land. And then there’s the others who come by the hundreds and hundreds, and even more’n that—they come pouring in like ants once a place has been found, come to settle down. And the few what come first like us, that’s when we gotta move on.”
For a long moment Bass didn’t say anything. He sat there stunned, letting the cold pain of that realization settle in. “You’re saying them what come first are to blame for opening the door for them others what come after to ruin it all?”
Nodding, Gamble said, “The others always come where we left our tracks for them to follow.”
“That don’t rightly make much sense—”
“Dammit if a man don’t get on in winters like me and he looks back to see what a god-blamed fool he’s been bringing on the ruin of everything he’s ever wanted in life.”
“You ain’t ruin’t it, Levi. None of us has. This country ain’t like that soft country back there. This here’s a hard, hard land what don’t easily forgive. Folks won’t ever leave them dark forests and that black earth where they can grow their corn and taters and ’baccy. This here country’s left for the rest of us what ain’t found a home in such a soft land.”
“Maybe you’re right,” Gamble relented, his tired eyes showing how much he wanted to believe. “Maybe their kind will try, but find out there’s too many Injuns, or the winters’re too cold, or the snows’re too deep … and they’ll skedaddle back to that soft life back yonder in the East.”
“These mountains already kill’t their share of pilgrims what figgered they had the ha’r we got, Levi.”
Gamble grinned. “Only ’cause our kind is so crazy, we don’t know no better, Titus Bass!”
“You give me a chance to live to be a old man back east, or to die a young man out here—you damn well know there ain’t but one choice for me.”
His grin disappeared, and Gamble pursed his lips in resignation for a moment, then said, “Can’t help but think we’re the last of a breed, friend. A breed come to set a foot down beside streams where no white man ever walked. But that day’s gone too. Like the sap that riz up in us when we young.”
“A differ’nt time, this is now,” Titus added.
“No more do booshways send out brigades to trap beaver. Now the booshways plop down their fur posts beside the big rivers and trade robes with the Injuns. One day this’ll all be dead, and they won’t even need me to hunt buffler to feed ’em.”
It scared Bass the way Gamble sounded. “You’re talking like you’re touched by a fever, Levi,” he protested. “Like a man gone soft in the head.”
“Ain’t much use for the like of you and me no more, Titus Bass.”
“Damn if there ain’t! Your booshways can go right ahead and build their posts where they want. Don’t make me no never mind. Beaver’s bound to rise, I say. The fur trade damn well ain’t dead while men like Jim Bridger is leading brigades off to the high lonesome. Long as there’s traders to buy beaver, there’ll be trappers like me to
