catch them flat-tails.”
“And when there ain’t no more beaver?”
“Ain’t gonna happen,” Bass snapped.
“When there ain’t no one to buy what’s left?”
He stared hard at Gamble a moment. “What’s took over you, Levi?”
“You’re right, Scratch,” he apologized, the tone of his voice softened. “Been out here on this river most of my life,” he explained. “Them years when Lisa retreated downriver, I worked in Fox or Osage or Pawnee country. I’ve seen more’n my share of winters in this wild county … so maybe what I see coming hurts me more’n it hurts men like you—”
The door flung open with a noisy racket and a gust of cold wind as two men leaped inside.
“They killed Papa!”
Leaping to his feet, Gamble rushed up to the young man who had spoken. Seizing the front of his blanket capote, Levi demanded, “Jack? Someone killed Jack?”
“Out!” the young man growled.
Around Titus the rest of the interpreters and clerks had bolted out of their beds, forming a tight crescent surrounding the two young men who stood shaking with fury in the open doorway.
Levi demanded, “Who, Paul? Tell me who!”
“Who else you think?” Paul Rem replied with a snarl. “The Deschamps!”
“You gonna help us, Levi?” the second son asked. “There’s too many of them—we need your help. They threaten all of us now—say they kill any friend of Jacques Rem!”
“We need men and guns too,” Paul demanded. “Give us the powder to blow all them devils to hell!”
“Hold on,” Gamble attempted to calm them. “Tell me how you know it was them what killed Jack.”
The second son, Henri, laughed in a harsh gust, then said, “OI’ woman Deschamps’s boys wanted to kill Papa for long time after Papa kill ol’ man Deschamps! Now she done it. We find him outside the wall—his face beat so bad, cut up so much, we not sure it was him at first.”
Shaking his head in disbelief, Gamble silenced the angry murmurs in that room gone cold with more than the wind. Eventually he stared round at the fort employees. “This here night been a long time coming, fellas. We got some business to see to.”
“You gonna help us kill them all?” Henri asked, grabbing Levi’s arm.
“The squaws and their young’uns—let them go,” Gamble ordered. “The rest, they don’t deserve to live to see another sunrise.” Turning to the interpreter named Bissonette, he said, “Louis, go to the arsenal. Get a rifle and pistol for every man who wants to be a part of this fight. Horns of powder and plenty of ball too. The rest of you what need weapons, go with Bissonette—now!”
They flooded past on either side of Gamble and Bass, streaming out the door behind Henri and Paul Rem. Outside on the frozen courtyard stood Jacques’s wife and daughter, comforted by several Indian women and half- breed laborers.
Titus felt rooted to the spot, stunned. “Their father … he was just here. Drinking with us, telling stories, laughing with us.”
Gamble’s eyes glowered as he ground a fist into an open palm. “Come with me, Titus: I’m going to tell McKenzie that Jack’s dead. So he knows we’re going to burn out that nest of rattlers once and for all. Then we’ll go to my lodge and fetch our weapons. Time has come to kill all the rest of Deschamps evil seed.”
On the way to the bourgeois’s house, Levi started to tell Bass how the Deschamps clan had shown up on the upper Missouri about the time Kenneth McKenzie had been building his fort. Since then they had been in the thick of every foul deed: murder, robbery from the post stores, robbing and killing friendly Indians camped nearby, as well as continually committing adultery with one another’s wives. Eventually some bad blood arose between the clan and the Rem family, going back a few seasons when one of Jack’s sons was killed during a drunken spree with some of the Deschamps band.
“The old man is the root of their evil. He’s named Francois, Senior, and it’s said he’s the one killed the British governor up at the Red River colony in Canada when Northwest Company was fighting Hudson’s Bay. The Deschamps all escaped down here after that bloody deed. There ain’t no rakehellions like that clan.”
Kenneth McKenzie, Levi explained, was able to soothe the pain of the murder and put the simmering feud to rest for some time until one of the Deschamps boys stole the Indian wife from Baptiste Gardepie, a friend of Jack Rem. Old man Deschamps and his son Francois went to the cuckolded Frenchman, offering a horse in exchange for the squaw, saying she was no more than a slut anyway and not really worth a good horse.
Seeing red, the aggrieved Gardepie refused the horse as settlement. But as Francois and his father turned to leave, he swept up an old rusted rifle barrel and clubbed both of his enemies. As the elder Deschamps lay dying, the infuriated Gardepie yanked out his dirk and finished his revenge—disemboweling the patriarch.
“Gutted him like a hog for a smoke shed,” Levi described with relish.
Titus asked, “So Gardepie killed the son too?”
“No. And that was a mistake,” Gamble answered, going on to explain how engages from the fort rushed from the gate, saving Francois from a similar fate.
Once more Kenneth McKenzie leaped into the middle of the feud, demanding a truce between the warring families, each wary and fearful of the balance of power between them. For the better part of a year, an uneasy tension had existed around Fort Union.
“But last fall two fellas what married Jack’s daughters rode off to the Milk River to do some hunting for robes and pelts,” Levi declared.
Titus asked, “The Deschamps kill ’em?”
“Nawww—Blackfoot got ’em.”
With those two out of the way, the Deschamps clan began to feel stronger, growing more insolent by the month, increasingly resentful of McKenzie and arrogant in the face of all attempts to keep the feud at rest.
“Just the other day one of them bastards was over here at the post, bragging big as could be,” Levi said. “Told us his mother called all her boys together and said they wasn’t really men less’n they took revenge on the man who goaded Gardepie into killing their pa.”
“Jack Rem.”
“Right,” Gamble growled. “And now them bastards done it.”
By the time Levi awakened McKenzie and Larpenteur, bringing them to the door of the factor’s house, the Rems had appeared to demand use of the cannon that stood beside the flagstaff.
“Very well. Just go finish it,” the bourgeois told them. “Leave off the women and children … but you have my permission to take the twelve-pounder with you and finish this, once and for all.”
With a jubilant shriek of blood-lust, the Rem brothers whirled about with their comrades, leaping over the porch rail onto the frozen courtyard, rushing for the cannon they began to push toward the front gate while Bass and Gamble hurried to Levi’s lodge for their weapons.
The group had dragged the fieldpiece some seventy-five yards, halfway to the old Fort William stockade, when Titus and Levi caught up with them. As the engages struggled to muscle the heavy cannon around a tall, icy snowdrift, a volley of shots split the clear, cold night, wounding one man.
“Get that loaded!” Henri ordered.
After stuffing a small pouch of powder down the breech, Paul Rem jammed a spike down the touchhole, piercing the pouch, before he threaded a short piece of fuse through the touchhole and into the pouch. Down the throat of the cannon another man rammed a ball.
“Back! Get back!” Henri Rem bellowed, waving one arm in warning as he ripped a sputtering torch from the hands of a friend.
“Wait!” Levi ordered. “Don’t touch that fuse till we get the helpless ones out!”
Paul Rem fumed a moment, glowering at the old man. “They deserve to die with the rest! Like that ol’ woman too!”
Gamble seized Rem’s arm, flinging him around to stare into his eyes. “I wanna see ’em all dead just as bad as you, Paul. But this ain’t right to kill them women what ain’t part of this feud.”
After a moment Rem reluctantly yanked his arm from Gamble’s hold and turned toward the stockade walls where his enemies hid. Shrieking at the fort, he warned, “You bastards ain’t got much time to get them women and children outta there!”
