“So Sublette figgers Jackson’s been rubbed out too?” Solomon repeated.
Leaning an elbow on a stack of pelts, the clerk said, “Jackson was up in Flathead country. And Sublette says that’s right near Blackfoot country. I suppose it ain’t hard to figure Jackson’s run into trouble and got himself killed too.”
Caleb clucked, “Damn well might be a real stroke of luck, for that leaves Sublette the whole company, don’t it?”
“Maybe, but Mr. Sublette figures to wait on here for a week or little more, then if Mr. Jackson doesn’t show, Mr. Sublette said he’s going to head on west to the Snake River with what he’s got in supplies to search for some sign of Jackson’s brigade before he turns back for the fall hunt.”
“That Smith feller’s gone,” Hatcher observed flatly. “This long and ain’t none of his bunch showed … why, it’s for sartin he’s been rubbed out. But Jackson, now, that’s a savvy booshway. I reckon he could pull his fat out of just about any fire.”
Caleb asked, “Sublette say if he figgered this was a good year for beaver?”
“I saw him just twice today, when he come around my tent with Campbell.” The clerk wagged his head and rolled his eyes heavenward. “Mr. Sublette just shook his head each time he looked through them furs his men brought in over the last season.”
“Don’t sound like he’s a happy man to me,” Bass observed.
“Not when he don’t have near all the beaver he was counting on taking in,” the clerk stated.
“And now he figgers he lost him his two partners,” Solomon added.
“So tell me if Sublette’s gonna trade for our furs come tomorrow?” Titus asked.
“He ain’t said nothing ’bout it, neither way,” the clerk admitted. “But from what I see, he’ll likely open up trade with all you fellers come morning. There ain’t any more company fur to take in. Leastways, not till he finds. Jackson’s brigade.”
“If he finds ’em at all,” Hatcher declared.
“What’s your tobaccy?” Scratch inquired of the hawk-nosed clerk who stood impassively writing down the value of the pelts another of Sublette’s employees was reciting from his weighing of Titus Bass’s plews.
“You buy your supplies down there.” The man jabbed a finger at another awning. “I just record your take.”
Bass felt as if Sublette and the company had everything arranged just so they could skin a cat every which way of Sunday. No matter if a man worked hard trapping, skinning, fleshing, and packing them beaver plews all the way through from last autumn, the St. Louis trader always held the high cards. But for those suspicious Mexicans down in Taos, there wasn’t another trader for better than eighteen hundred miles of the Popo Agie.
“This all you’re trading in?”
Bass looked up at the second of the clerks, a moon-faced man without distinguishable characteristics: he looked like every other settlement sort, town hanger, and citified nabob.
“That’s all I’m trading with you.”
The man went back to peering down at his ledger, dipped his quill, and went back to writing. “Not a good year for you, was it?”
“That ain’t all the fur I got.”
The clerk stopped his hand and glared at Scratch with the crimson creeping up from his neck. “I just asked you … if this was all you was trading.”
“It is,” Scratch repeated, flashing the man his teeth. “But it ain’t all I caught. Only what I trapped this last spring.”
Now the clerk was clearly angry at the confusion caused him. He sputtered for a moment, his face growing as red as the Indian paintbrush that dotted this high valley in early summer. “Do you want to do business with us or—”
“I ain’t got no more furs to trade to you,” Titus explained, eager to settle the dust. “The rest I sold in Taos last winter.”
With a great rush of air the clerk sighed as if he had been asked to coax milk from a stone. “Very well.”
Back to his ledger he went, wagging his head slightly as he added and carried numbers from column to column. While the clerk finished his computations, Bass gazed over at the rest who had finished this grueling part of the process. Hatcher and the others already stood among the stacks and kegs, crates and boxes of trade goods—fingering this and that, chattering excitedly about most everything they picked up and held to the light. There remained no more than a handful of other free men waiting patiently behind Scratch for their turn at the trader’s scales.
The clerk carefully tore a strip from the bottom of his ledger page and handed it to another man, who stuffed the strip of paper beneath the rope holding together Bass’s beaver skins. Then the hawk-nosed man wrote a little more and tore another strip of paper from the bottom of the page.
He held it out to Bass.
“Here’s your credit.”
“My credit—for over at the store?”
The clerk looked past Scratch at the trapper pushing up behind him. “Next! You’re next, now—come along lively!”
Pressed from behind, Bass stepped aside, trying to hold the rustling strip of paper still enough to read it in the breeze. It was hard for him to make out that writing scratched on the white foolscap beneath the glare from the summer sun. Stepping into the shade beneath the edge of an awning, Titus studied the marks again. Several words were scrawled there, that much he was sure of. And beneath each of them a number. In addition, at the far end of the strip was a fourth number, written bigger than the rest, and circled as well.
“Scratch—how much you got to spend?”
He looked up, finding Rufus Graham before him. “You read this?”
Rufus shook his head. “Can’t read a’t’all.”
“Near as I make it, I got me a few hundred dollars for supplies.”
“How much hundreds?”
“That looks like a nine,” he answered, squinting his eyes as his dirty fingernail pointed out a number. “Damn, but I never was a good one at ciphering numbers. Could do it once, but it’s been too long since I done any of that.”
“None of the others can help you neither,” Graham admitted. “None of us read.”
“S’all right,” he sighed, looking up. “Only place I can spend it is here anyways.”
“’Cept you go back to Taos.”
“Ain’t a chance of that,” Titus said, starting toward the rest, who were dickering with a pair of clerks beneath a far awning.
“This here tobaccy ain’t half-bad!” Caleb declared as he turned toward Bass when the two walked up to the others.
“Better’n Mexican,” Hatcher agreed.
Scratch asked, “How much?”
The clerk perched behind the wooden crates holding several hundredweight of twisted brown carrots of tobacco declared, “Two dollar the pound.”
“Same as it’s been for the last two year,” Isaac stated.
“Damn good thing too,” Bass grumbled. “Missed out on American tobaccy last year.”
Asked the clerk, “You’re ready to buy?”
“I damn well waited the better part of a day and a goddamned half to buy,” Titus snapped. “If’n that don’t take the circle! You better believe I’m ready—”
“Where’s your paper?” the clerk interrupted.
Handing the man his slip, Bass watched the clerk glance quickly at the numbers, then look over at the first of Sublette’s men. “This here right?”
“What’s right?” the other civilian asked.
“This says five hundred fifty-nine?”
The man glanced at Bass a moment before he remembered. “Five hundred fifty-nine is the right amount.”