“Sweete,” the tall one answered. “An’ my ugly friend here is named Bass.”
Bordeau turned and started toward the tall, heavy gate being held open by another man. “Come in—and bring your children.”
“You’re booshway here?” Titus asked as they followed.
“No,” Bordeau answered as the group stepped inside the inner courtyard. “Monsieur Papin is chief factor, but he is gone east. Gone downriver with a load of furs for St. Louis.”
“Papin,” Titus repeated the name. “That’s a French name, just like yours.”
“Oui.” He turned them slightly on the path for the trading room.
Scratch looked at Shad. “American Fur ain’t very American no more, Shadrach. All these Frenchies leavin’ St. Louie behind an’ makin’ for the High Stonies. From the sounds o’ things, there likely ain’t a Frenchie left on the Mississippi River by now.”
Bordeau stopped at the wooden door and, with his hand on the iron latch, quickly appraised the two Americans again, then asked, “Did you, or you, trap the beaver for our company before the beaver was good no more?”
“I worked for Jim Bridger,” Sweete explained. “When he hired on to run a brigade for American Fur.”
“And you, monsieur?” Bordeau asked, his eyes falling on Bass.
“Never,” he snorted. “It stuck in my craw when I was made to trade my plews* over to American Fur at ronnyvoo after Billy Sublette was bought out of the mountains. I dunno who done the worst to kill off my way of life—you niggers with American Fur or them John Bull niggers with Hudson’s Bay.”
Bordeau unlocked the bolt and shoved open the door, promptly stepping behind a nearby counter where he turned up the wick on a lamp. “But American Fur is the American company holding the English out.”
“From the looks of you and that parley-voo booshway Papin, and all them other Frenchies working down at Bents’ mud lodge down on the Arkansas—I don’t know if there’s much of what you’d call American in the fur trade no more. Them fat, rich Frenchmen back to St. Louie, they near bought up ever’thing. Their kind’s been doin’ business outta these posts where they don’t need no American trappers like me an’ him.”
“This is my business, the furs that come to this place,” Bordeau said as he stepped behind the counter and turned the wicks up on two more lamps that slowly pushed back the twilight’s growing darkness. “The furs, are they your business still, monsieur?”
Sweete shook his head. “No, can’t say as they are.”
The trader asked Titus, “You do the fur business still, like me?”
“Not since fellas like you squeezed beaver to death and killed the way I made a life for myself and my own,” Scratch replied sourly.
Bordeau grinned. “So you see? I am the American in American Fur now. You two and all the rest of your kind—you are no longer around. But I am still here. I work hard, work my way up. Learn the business. You two, like the rest, you nevair want to learn to work for the company—so the company does not need men like you no more.”
“A damn shame,” Bass grumbled. “Badger-eyed li’l weasels like you come in and took over this business from men who stood tall and bold of a time not so long ago. None of you Frenchies ever gonna be half o’ the men I knowed back in the glory days!”
Shad latched his hand around Scratch’s arm and held him tight at the very instant Titus leaned toward the counter where Bordeau’s face was darkening with crimson.
Bass glanced down at Sweete’s hand, then at his friend’s face. “Don’t you worry, Shadrach. I ain’t about to pop this parley-voo in the jaw.”
Shad slowly released his grip. “It’d be hard as hell to trade with this booshway after you busted his nose an’ made him bleed all over his purty shirt.”
With a snort, Titus said, “Mon-sur Bordeau ain’t gonna throw me out, Shadrach. No matter how low he thinks of me.”
“Because I am a gentleman … and you are not.”
Shaking his head, Scratch said, “Wrong, mon-sur.”
Bordeau said, “Because you do not fight with blood in front of your half-breed children?”
“That’s wrong too, pork-eater.” Titus stuffed his hand inside the flaps of his coat. “No matter how bad you wanna throw me outta your fort, you won’t do it because I got some Mexican gold you want pretty bad.”
Between Bordeau’s lips appeared the pink tip of his tongue. He licked the lips, then rolled them inward over his teeth with anticipation. Glee twinkled in his eyes as Titus brought out the small skin satchel and clanked it on the counter.
“Let me see these coins of yours.” Bordeau rubbed his hands together.
“I’ll show you one,” he advised as he unknotted the leather string wrapped around the top of the pouch. From it he pulled a coin, which he loudly thumbed onto the counter and pushed toward the trader.
As Bordeau raised it into the light for an inspection, the gold shimmered.
“You held on to that Mex money a long time,” Sweete commented.
“Most times, I got some furs, something to trade off. Not no more. So it seems like this is as good a place as any to dicker on some goods for these here coins,” Titus said as he watched the factor slip the coin between his teeth and clamp down with zeal. “Appears to me Mon-sur Bordeau here knows good gold when he sees it.”
“Is real,” the trader attested.
“’Course it is,” Scratch replied.
He watched Bordeau turn away, still clutching the coin, moving aside some objects on a shelf behind him before he pulled out a small set of scales and weights. Placing the coin on one side of the scale, Bordeau selected one of the smallest weights. After he had it balanced, Bordeau looked up at the American again.
“How many of these you have, Monsieur American?”
“What’s that’un worth to you?”
“How many you want to spend?”
“Only one,” he said stiffly. “I figger it’s more’n enough to buy some earbobs and hangy-downs for our womenfolk. A play-pretty or two for each o’ the young’uns.”
Removing the coin from the scale, Bordeau leaned back against the shelves and held the gold piece before his eyes, turning it this way and that in the lamplight. “Pick out what you want for your women and the children too.”
How excited the youngsters became as Bordeau pulled wooden trays from the shelves behind him and laid them side by side on the counter, each one filled with hanks of sewing beads, or large multicolored glass beads from faraway Venice and the continent of Africa too, along with many styles of finger rings, an assortment of tin bracelets, and small rolls of brass wire. Magpie went right to work touching every single item to her satisfaction. Next, Bordeau set a small wooden pail on the counter; inside were nestled a bevy of tin whistles and string toys that snared the eyes of young Flea and Shadrach.
Scratch was bending over the trays with his daughter when the trader spoke.
“What do you think of this?”
Magpie and her father both looked up together, finding Bordeau holding a colorful shawl, delicately sewn with a tassel fringe at the hem around the bottom V of the broad triangle. Scratch noticed how his daughter clamped her hand over her mouth, eyes going wide as muleprints.
“She likes, eh?”
“Let ’er try it on, trader,” he demanded.
Bordeau passed the shawl to her. With her father’s help, Magpie laid it over her shoulders while Bass lifted her long black hair. She clutched the shawl closed at her breast and spun this way and that. As he watched her twirl to make the tassels flutter, Titus suddenly spotted six faces pressed against the thick window glass, six pairs of eyes watching Magpie preen, the young girl lost in her own little world.