“That puts me right next to you, Titus Bass!” he said as he hoisted his cup in toast again. “For you surely be the ugliest man I ever did see!”
Smacking his lips, Titus licked the tip of his tongue through the shaggy ends of his unkempt mustache, savoring every drop of the sweet fruit brandy the American Fur Company sneaked upriver only for the use of its post factors, but not in the robe trade itself. “Meldrum, you ol’ Scotsman,” Scratch grumbled, “you’re doin’ your damnedest to get me hooked on the company’s goddamned stuffed-shirt brandy!”
“What—you’re acquirin’ a taste for brandy, Titus Bass? Why, you ol’—”
“Mr. Meldrum!”
They both turned at the call, spotting one of the trader’s three employees riding toward them from the direction of their log-walled post. As the crowd stepped out of the way of the man’s horse, Titus spotted the five buckskinned riders close on the employee’s tail.
“Mr. Meldrum!”
The trader wiped his lips with the back of the same hand that held the cup, and his eyes narrowed on the newcomers as they approached. “What is it, James?”
“Visitors, sir! You got visitors from far away!”
By the time the six riders halted their horses several yards away, Scratch could see the five strangers weren’t Indians at all. Instead, they appeared to be French-blood half-breeds.
“Far away?” Meldrum asked as he took two steps closer to James.
Bass gently lowered his wife’s arm, then inched away from her so he could stay at the trader’s elbow.
“Fort LaRamee,” one of the strangers announced.
It suddenly struck him that Meldrum was an employee of the same company that Bordeau worked for down at Fort John on the North Platte—the site that was only now becoming better known as Fort Laramie. Quickly he peered at the faces of those five strangers, looking for a hint of someone familiar … perhaps one or more of them had been a part of that bunch who had tried to harm Magpie, who had made trouble for him and Shad Sweete back in the spring of ’47, bad blood more than four years gone now. If Bordeau had made it back to the post on his own hook, would he have carried a burning grudge this long? Finally tracking down Titus Bass and sending a handful of half-breed gunmen to kill the old trapper?
Meldrum demanded, “There’s trouble?”
With a shake of his head, the half-blood who had spoken waved his hand at the young white clerk. “Give him now.”
The employee reached inside his belt and pulled out a folded piece of foolscap about as big as a man’s palm. As he held it down to Meldrum, Titus saw it had been sealed with a huge dollop of dark blue wax, at the center of which was imprinted a seal. “Here, sir. This is what they brung for you.”
“When they get here?” Meldrum asked as he reached up to take the folded packet.
“Just now,” the young man explained. “Give me the note—but I didn’t want to open it. Brung it to you right away.”
“Good man,” he said, gazing down at the symbol hardened in the wax. “Who’s this from?”
Clearing his throat, the clerk said, “These here couriers said it’s very important, Mr. Meldrum. They’ve come all the way north from Fort Laramie, carrying this here letter from a man they called Fitzpatrick.”
Scratch took a step closer now, studying the dark, swarthy faces of those five strangers. That name of an old companion from their beaver days just did not fit into the scenario he was constructing with Bordeau tracking him all the way to Fort Alexander—
“Thomas? Thomas Fitzpatrick?” Meldrum asked.
The half-blood who had spoken before now nodded, echoing the name. “Oui, Thomas Fitzpatrick. He is … my booshway.”
The trader held his finger beneath the dollop of wax as he inquired, “Your booshway?”
“Hay-gent, In-gee-an hay-gent for all the mountains,” he said in a thick, barely understandable accent.
“If that don’t beat all,” Titus said with apparent relief that this special day would not be marred by the eruption of violence. “You hear that, Meldrum? Ol’ Broken Hand’s a’come the Injun agent out in these parts!”
“I heard tell of that last year, as I recollect,” the trader explained as he turned to the trapper. Then he looked back at the half-breed. “That ol’ white-headed boss of your’n sent this note to me?”
The half-breed nodded. “Is your name Meel-drum?”
“Close enough, it is.”
“Thomas Fitzpatrick write it for you,” the horseman declared. “You name on dis let-tair.”
Meldrum immediately turned over the folded paper. There it was, written in a strong hand.
Robert Meldrum, Trader to the Crow
Fort Alexander on the Yellowstone
He immediately flipped the folded paper over and dragged his index finger beneath the folds held down by that thick dollop of cracked and faded blue wax. Quickly he spread the paper with his hands, and his eyes danced over the neat swirls of ink made upon the foolscap. When he was done reading it in silence a third time, his lips moving soundlessly, Meldrum raised his eyes from the paper, gazing up at the older trapper.
“How you feel about making a journey with me, Titus Bass?”
He glanced at his wife, then asked, “What sort of journey?”
“South to Fort Laramie.”
“That’s where Fitzpatrick wrote you from?”
“Yes. You’ll come?”
“I … I dunno,” Scratch said. “Like I told you couple years back … last time I was there, I left ’thout good terms. Bordeau an’ some of his Frenchies—”
“That was long, long ago.” Meldrum interrupted. “I don’t even think Bordeau’s around anymore. ’Sides, you’ll be with me—I’m part of the company too.”
“Be with you?”
The trader nodded. “I want you to make this important journey with me.”
Despite Meldrum’s enthusiasm, it still didn’t sound all that good: the two of them riding off with these five half-breeds who might have been put up to some murder by an old antagonism. “Just you an’ me goin’?”
“Hell, no!” Meldrum exclaimed with his engaging smile, shaking that stiff sheet of wrinkled foolscap.
“I ain’t never trusted the Frenchies—”
“Them?” asked the trader. “They’ll be outnumbered all the way south.”
“Outnurnbered?”
He stuffed the paper inside his shirt and poured a little more brandy in their cups. “I’m s’posed to bring along the chiefs and headmen of the Crow nation: Pretty On Top, Flat Mouth, Falls Down, and young Stiff Arm, all of them comin’ with us. And more too.”
He wagged his head in deliberation, holding out his arm for his wife to come stand by his side. If the chiefs and headmen were coming along, then it made sense that his family could ride along with the delegation as well. Titus asked, “What in tarnation for?”
“Sounds of it, Fitzpatrick is callin’ in all the tribes to join him for talks at Laramie,” Meldrum said dramatically, patting the paper he had placed between the folds of his shirt. “Broken Hand says he’s gonna sit down with all them chiefs, and he’s gonna make ’em all smoke a pipe with their enemies.”
“Fitzpatrick figgers he’ll get all them war bands to make peace, one to the other?”
Meldrum nodded. “So I want you to come with the leaders of the Crow.”
Turning to Waits-by-the-Water, Scratch asked her, “You understand what Round Iron’s sayin’?”
“Yes.”
“We’ll go together?”
She nodded. “Yes.”