Company partner Jedediah Strong Smith hadn’t shown up at Sweet Lake that summer. The carousing men drank toasts to him and his California brigade, hoping that Jed’s boys had not bumped up against disaster. Maybe next year they would all be together once more.
“It’s been a good season!” cheered William Sublette as he started his caravan on its return trip to St. Louis. “We’re out of debt, and in control of the mountain trade.”
“Let Astor have the rivers,” Davy Jackson had proposed.
“Damn right,” Sublette agreed. “The mountain trade is ours.”
“See you on the Popo Agie next summer, Bill!”
“See you on the Popo Agie!”
This business was growing, slow and sure. And rendezvous had proved to be the way to supply the company men, the way the partners could secure the biggest return from the trappers’ dangerous labor in the mountains. That first day of August, Sublette turned east with more than seventy-seven hundred pounds of beaver that they had purchased for three dollars a pound, fur that would bring them over five dollars per in St. Louis. In addition Sublette had forty-nine otter skins, seventy-three muskrat skins, and twenty-seven pounds of castoreum aboard his pack mules.
After paying off General Ashley the twenty thousand dollars they owed him for the year’s supplies, the three partners were left with a profit of more than sixteen thousand dollars.
It had indeed been a good year in the mountains.
5
“Say, Mad Jack!” the fiery-headed trapper cried as he tottered up atop one good leg, the other a wooden peg, his face rouged with the blush of strong liquor.
“Tom! Ye ol’ she-painter!” Hatcher shouted back as he took the fiddle from beneath his chin. “Thought ye’d took off with Jackson or Bridger awready.”
“Nawww,” the peg-legged trapper said as he came to a weaving halt, his bloodshot eyes glassy. “Me and some boys are moving southwest in a few days. See for our own selves what lays atween here and California.”
“Yer favorite tune still be ‘Barbara Allen’?”
“Damn right,” Tom Smith replied. “That squeezebox feller know it good as you?”
Jack laughed. “Elbridge knows it better’n me!”
“Sing it for me, boys,” Smith said as he collapsed onto the grass, stretching out that battered wooden peg clearly the worse for frontier wear. “Sing it soft and purty.”
In Scarlet town where I was born,
There was a fair maid dwellin’,
Made ev’ry youth cry, “Well a day,”
Her name was Barb’ra Allen.
’Twas in the merry month of May,
When green buds they were swellin’,
Sweet William on his deathbed lay,
For the love of Barb’ra Allen.
“I ain’t never see’d a man stand so good having him only one good leg,” Titus whispered to Matthew Kinkead.
“Peg-Leg Tom?”
Scratch nodded. “How he come by it?”
Isaac Simms answered, “Cut it off hisself, Scratch.”
“The hell you say!” Scratch replied in amazement, staring at the crude whittled peg.
He sent his servant to the town,
The place where she was dwellin,
Cried, “Master bids you come to him,
If your name be Barb’ra Allen.”
Well, slowly, slowly got she up,
And slowly went she nigh him;
But all she said as she passed his bed,
“Young man, I think you’re dying.”
“Isaac speaks the bald-face truth,” Caleb Wood stated with one bob of his jutting chin.
“Injun’s rifle ball broke both bones in the leg, right here,” Kinkead declared as he bent over and tapped his own leg just below the knee.
Simms snorted, “Figger on how much that’d pain a man!”
She walked out in the green, green fields,
She heard his death bells knellin’,
And every stroke they seemed to say,
“Hard-hearted Barb’ra Allen.”
“Oh, father, father, dig my grave,
Go dig it deep and narrow.
Sweet William died for me today;
I’ll die for him tomorrow.”
“Lookit the man just sitting there easylike, tapping the end of that ol’ peg on the ground like it was his foot,” Solomon said.
Scratch prodded, “So tell me who really cut it off him.”
“Isaac tol’cha: Smith done it his own self!” Kinkead declared. “Well, most of it anyways. First off he got good and drunk afore starting down through the meat with his own scalping knife.”
“Shit,” Bass whispered with a shudder.
“Passed out by the time it was to cut on bone,” Simms took up the story. “Two other’ns had to finish the job for him. They burned the end of that stump with a red-hot fire iron to stop the bleeding, then went off and buried the leg far ’nough away that Smith could never go lookin’ for it.”
“Go looking for it?” Scratch repeated.
“Damn, if that ain’t what I seen happen with ever’ man lost a arm or leg,” Solomon Fish stated. “Like something pulling, an’ yanking ’em to find that missing part of themselves.”
They buried her in the old churchyard,
Sweet William’s grave was nigh her,
And from his heart grew a red, red rose,
And from her heart a briar.
They grew and grew up the old church wall,
’Til they could grow no higher,
Until they tied a true lover’s knot,
The red rose and the briar.
“Most ever’ man I know of in the mountains calls Tom by the name Peg-Leg Smith now,” Caleb said.
“Never have I seen a man get around so good on a peg,” Bass observed with fascination.
As Hatcher and Gray finished the song, Smith clapped and hooted, then asked, “How ’bout something a man can get up an’ stomp to, Jack!”
Hatcher thought a moment, then suggested, “Say, Tom—how ’bout a tune writ special for all of us bachelors?”
Smith asked, “Bachelors? What the hell’s that?”
“What we are, ye stupid nigger!” Hatcher roared. “Any man ain’t married, he’s a bachelor!”
“Then sing it, by God!” Smith cried merrily as he struggled to rise, clambering clumsily onto his leg and peg, clapping and hobbling about in exuberance. “Sing it for all us happy bachelors!”
Come all you sporting bachelors,
Who wish to get good wives,
And never be deceived as I am,
For I married me a wife makes me weary