“Look Pa!” Zachary cried in delight. “Peoples!”
The boy was excited because visitors to their remote cabin were few and far between. Nate didn’t share his son’s enthusiasm. From bitter prior experience he knew that sometimes visitors spelled trouble, deadly trouble, and the moment he laid eyes on the trio he gently deposited Zachary at his feet and straightened, deliberately hooking the thumb on his right hand in his leather belt close to the right flintlock. He’d foolishly neglected to reload the Hawken after shooting at the panther, but he had two good pistols and a butcher knife he could employ to decidedly lethal effect should these strangers prove to be unfriendly. “Howdy,” he said, keeping his tone reserved, his features impassive.
Zachary started to move toward the men.
“Stand still,” Nate ordered severely, and the boy stopped and glanced up at him in startled surprise.
The three men were all armed, but they made no move to bring their weapons into play. All three wore buckskins, the typical attire of mountaineers and Indians alike. Two of the trio were whites; the third was an old Crow warrior whose hair was almost white from age and whose face resembled a craggy bluff. The nearest white sat astride a black gelding and wore a blue cloth cap of the type initially popular with Canadian voyageurs, Canadian trappers, and now worn by many of their counterparts in the lower Rockies. He was tall and lean and sported a full black beard. The other white man was on a bay. He was stocky and clean-shaven and wore a string of bear teeth around his neck. Both whites were showing teeth.
“Howdy, friend,” the tall one said. “My name is Milo Benteen.” He nodded at the stocky man. “This is Tom Sublette. We’re both from Pennsylvania and we came out here to do some trapping a year ago.”
Nate simply bobbed his chin. He was thinking about Winona, wondering what had happened to her, and no sooner did the thought cross his mind than she emerged from the cabin casually holding a rifle in the crook of her left arm. She looked at him and smiled, then stood still and faced the men.
All three newcomers glanced at her, at the rifle, then at Nate.
“Are you folks expecting trouble?” Milo asked.
“You never know,” Nate responded.
Milo cast a shocked expression at Tom, then turned to Nate and said, “Are you referring to us? Hell, man, we don’t mean you any harm. We came all this way searching for you to offer you a proposition.”
“Oh?” Nate said, not yet ready to accept them as friendly. Some years back he’d taken a stranger into his home, fed and sheltered the man, and when the stranger’s companions later arrived they had abducted Winona and left him for dead. He wasn’t ever going to make that mistake again.
“That is, if you’re Nathaniel King,” Tom Sublette threw in.
“I am.”
Milo beamed. “At last. Do you have any idea how hard it was for us to track you down? We heard about you at the rendezvous last year. They say you’re one of the best, as good as Jim Bridger or Shakespeare McNair. They say you brought in over six hundred pelts one year.”
“Six hundred and forty-two,” Nate said.
“They also say you’re honest to a fault and as dependable as they come,” Tom mentioned. “We were told we could trust you with our lives.”
“How did you find my cabin?” Nate inquired. So far as he knew, only his good friend Shakespeare McNair and two other trappers knew its exact location. It wasn’t wise to advertise where one lived; enemies might find out and pay you a visit.
“Once we decided it was you we wanted, we asked around,” Milo said. “Ran into a man named Cumberland who is a close friend of McNair’s. Cumberland told us he believed you lived in this general area but he couldn’t pinpoint where. So for the past two weeks we’ve been traipsing all over this stretch of mountains looking for you.”
“Why?” Nate asked.
Milo shifted in his saddle. “We’ve been riding for hours. Do you reckon we could light and sit a spell?”
Nate hesitated, thinking of the consequences for Winona and Zach if he made the wrong decision. But these men seemed sincere. All three had rifles, but they had studiously refrained from so much as touching the long guns resting across their thighs. If they’d meant to harm him and his family, they could easily have lain in ambush and gunned him down when his back was turned. He suddenly recalled the feeling he’d had earlier of being watched and gazed up at Benteen. “Were you watching us earlier?”
Milo blinked. “We first saw your cabin from across the lake yonder. I took out my telescope for a look-see. Cumberland gave us a description of you and I wanted to see if we’d lucked out and found you. How did you know?”
“I knew,” Nate said, and let it go at that. He took Zach’s small hand in his and walked to the door. “Why don’t you climb down and tie your animals at the corral? My wife will fix us a pot of coffee and you can explain the reason you’ve sought me out.”
“Thanks,” Milo said.
Winona took Zachary inside while Nate watched the three men move to the corral and dismount. The old Crow had not said a word. Nate studied the warrior’s face, trying to determine the man’s character in the many lines and creases. For such an oldster, the Crow held himself erect and displayed remarkable vitality. Nate knew quite a few elderly Indians who could hold their own with twenty-year-olds, and suspected their outstanding longevity and physical prowess was attributable to the Indian way of life, to drinking only pure water and eating the freshest of foods and breathing the clear mountain air. He remembered how it was back in New York City and other cities and towns, where the smoke from burning coal and wood in the winter would form heavy clouds that made a person cough and stung the eyes, and how food served at home or at eating establishments would be steeped in salt and invariably overcooked. It was a wonder white men lived to be sixty, let alone eighty and older as did many Indians.
He waited and allowed them to go in first, then followed and leaned the Hawken against the wall to the left of the doorway. The cabin was comfortably furnished. A large table near the center of the spacious single room was ringed by four wooden chairs. Off to one side against the wall sat the bed. A stone fireplace was directly opposite the door and a new bearskin rug lay in front of the hearth. Beaded leather curtains covered the one window, compliments of Winona. Her feminine touches were everywhere, from the flowers in a clay vase to the decorated parfleches hanging on one wall. It was her handiwork, Nate reflected, that had transformed the cabin into a home.
“Nice place you have here, Mr. King,” Milo Benteen commented.
“Call me Nate. Why don’t you gents take a seat?”
All three sat down, leaving empty the chair facing the entrance. Nate walked over, turned it around, and straddled it so he could rest his forearms on top of the crest, leaving his hands free to draw the pistols if need be. He still wasn’t taking any chances.
“We’re glad we found you at home,” Tom said. “We were afraid you’d be out doing your spring trapping.”
“A few more days and I would have been,” Nate said, glancing to his left where Zachary was playing with a toy rifle he’d whittled from a tree limb. Winona was busy preparing the coffee.
“We’ll get straight to the point,” Milo Benteen stated, leaning forward on his elbows. “Tom and I came out here with the hope of catching enough beaver to provide both of us with the stakes we’d need to buy homesteads for the families we hope to have one day. We know that an average trapper makes about two thousand dollars selling his hides at the annual rendezvous, which is quite a bit of money considering a mason or a carpenter only makes about six hundred a year.”
Nate listened patiently, well aware of the economic facts of life for trappers and laborers alike.
“But we’ll be honest with you,” Milo went on. “We’ve tried trapping for a year and had a darned hard time of it. Between the two of us we’ve only made three hundred dollars so far.”
“Trapping can be rough,” Nate said to hold up his end of the conversation.
“And we’ve heard that it’s getting harder every year,” Tom interjected. “The old-timers tells us there aren’t as many beaver around as there used to be. The best streams, those easiest to get to, have all been pretty much trapped out. To find prime pelts nowadays a person has to go deep into the remote valleys.”
“I know,” Nate agreed. He never would have believed it was possible, but beaver were becoming harder to find with each passing year. When he’d first ventured to the Rockies, there had been so many beaver that he’d scoffed at the idea the critters would ever be trapped out.
“We became discouraged,” Milo confessed, “and we were considering heading back to Pennsylvania when we bumped into Red Moon here.” He indicated the Crow with a jerk of his thumb. “He told us about a valley where the beaver are as thick as flies on a rotting buffalo carcass, where three or four men could go in, spend three or four months trapping, and come out with five hundred pelts or more apiece.”
Nate looked at the old warrior, trying not to let his skepticism show. He’d been all over the region and he knew of no such valley. He wondered if Red Moon was a drinker. Some of the Indians became addicted to alcohol and were prone to telling tall tales when they were under the influence. For that matter, many of the whites were the same way.
“Tom and I want to trap this valley,” Milo said, excitement in his tone. “Red Moon has agreed to take us there in exchange for ten percent of our profits.”
Nate performed some hasty mental calculations. If the beaver were as thick as the Crow claimed, and if Tom and Milo each made about two thousand dollars, that would give the Crow four hundred in pocket money, which was more than most Indians saw in a lifetime. He wondered what the warrior wanted with so much currency. Generally speaking, Indians had little use for the white’s man scrip.
“But Tom and I know our limitations,” Milo stated. “We’re pretty green. We figure we need someone else to throw in with us, someone who has trapped for years and knows the profession inside out, someone who has a reputation as being one of the best in the business.” He paused and bored his eyes into Nate. “Someone like you.”
So this was the reason for their visit. Nate saw all three men gaze expectantly at him and leaned back, stretching, buying time to think. He preferred to trap alone. Most trappers did, simply because each had favorite areas and didn’t want anyone else moving in and taking pelts away from them. Then too, most trappers were loners, highly independent men who could go for months without seeing another living soul and not be bothered by it in the least.
“Would you be interested?” Milo asked hopefully.
Nate had to admit to himself the proposal was intriguing. If the valley was rich in beaver, if no one had ever laid a trap line there before, then every one of them stood to earn top dollar for their peltries. He might make more money than he would trapping alone. “I’m interested,” he said, “but I have reservations.”
“What are they?” Tom Sublette inquired.
Twisting, Nate stared at the Crow. Since the warrior had told Benteen and Sublette about the valley and neither of them had been in the mountains long enough to learn much of the Crow tongue and likely weren’t greatly proficient at sign language, he figured the oldster must know English. “I’ve lived in these mountains for some time,” he noted. “Why haven’t I heard of this valley before?”
Red Moon answered in a soft voice, his English clipped and precise. “No whites have ever been there.”
“What about your people?”
“My people have not gone there in many, many winters.”
The disclosure struck Nate as peculiar. “Is it located in Crow country?” he asked.
“Yes. Far to the north.”
“Which means it’s close to Blackfeet country,” Nate said.
Benteen glanced from the Crow to Nate. “Is that important?”
“Haven’t you heard about the Blackfeet? They’re the scourge of the Rockies. They despise whites and kill every one they find. More trappers have lost their lives to those devils than to any other tribe. I’ve tangled with them a few times and I’m lucky to still be wearing my hair.”
“I’m willing to take the risk,” Tom Sublette said.
“Have you ever fought the Blackfeet?” Nate asked.
“No,” Tom answered.
“Then don’t be so eager to lose your scalp,” Nate cautioned, and turned to the Crow again. “Tell me, Red Moon. Do the Crows stay away from this valley because they don’t want to run into the Blackfeet?”
“No.”
“When was the last time the Crows were there?”
“Twelve winters ago one of our bravest warriors, Crooked Nose, went there. He never returned.”
“The Blackfeet must have got ahold of him,” Milo Benteen commented.
“No,” Red Moon said.
Nate lightly drummed his fingers on the table, pondering. He was convinced the brave had not revealed everything he knew about the valley, perhaps deliberately. But what? And why? You sound as if you know what happened to Crooked Nose. Do you?”
“Yes. He was killed.”
“If the Blackfeet weren’t responsible, who was?”
“Not who. What.”
“An animal killed him?” Nate asked. Even Indians, with their wealth of woodlore and their ability to move silently and unseen through the forest, occasionally fell prey to grizzlies or panthers or other predators.
“No,” Red Moon said, and sighed. “Crooked Nose was slain by the thing that lurks in the dark.”