Hank said nothing. He figured that Sam Minard knew his own mind. But when Sam picked up only Kate’s old rifle and the one robe Hank said, "Hyar now." Sam would need more bedding than that, and some baccy and a pipe, some coffee and a pot, some salt and flour. Sam knew that Hank had only one pot. Did Sam have steel and flint, or matches? Sam said he had matches from Kate’s hoard. Hank hustled around in his slow way and came to Sam with a good robe, pipe and tobacco, a pound of coffee and the pot, and some flour. He tossed the robe across Sam’s shoulders and said, "Worse cold to come."
Sam looked over the bedding in the cabin to see if Hank would have enough. He thought he would not. So he dropped the robe to the bedding, saying, "Might be too much to carry if I get in deep snow." Hank knew that was not the reason but he said nothing. Sam also set the pot inside the shack. He would find something, he said; maybe Bill would have an extra pot.
"Watch your topknot," Hank said.
"Watch yours," said Sam, and with a wave of his hand was gone.
Hank entered the cabin and stood a few moments in its gloom, feeling the presence of one who had just been there. Then he turned to the doorway to look out. He looked down the river the way Sam had gone but there was no sign of him and no sign of a living thing.
29
IT WAS A LONG, cold, and dangerous journey but Sam covered it in seventeen days, stopping only one night with Bill and one with Dan. Outfitted at Bridger’s and several hundred dollars in debt, he was ready to trap, but the things he had just bought did not take the place of the ones he had lost. His rifle was new and a good one but it was not the gun that more than once had saved his life. The revolver was new, the Bowie, the packgear, his leather garments, his cooking utensils; but he liked none of it. Bridger told him that his mount, a sorrel stud, was one of the finest horses from the Crow nation, but Sam knew it would take a lot of training to make it as smart as the bay. Until he stared with dismay at his new fixens he had not realized that the Blackfeet had robbed him of things almost as dear to him as his own name and honor. Wall now, as Bill had said, Sam was now the sworn enemy of two nations; and it didn’t seem likely, said Jim Bridger, that he would live long. "You’re a big credit risk," he had said, and he had urged Sam to trap up Black’s Fork and its tributaries, where he would be safe.
Sam spent two nights with Jim and heard all the news and it was all bad news. Brigham Young and his hordes of Mormons were busy building a kingdom in the valley of the Salt Lake; and west of them, across the alkali flats and the Sierras, a million damn fools were rushing around yelling gold, and towns were springing up like the ancient Babble. There had been a town named Babble, hadn’t there? Jim asked, casting an uneasy glance at Sam. The whole Western country, he said, would soon be overrun by criminals, religious blowhards, tin-cup greenhorns, and every kind of simpleton on earth; and there would be no buffalo left, no beaver, no clean spot where a man could stretch out and smell sweet earth—nothing but foul water and foul air, sewers, junk heaps, noise, and people. He was thinking of going to Canada.
Sam told him briefly, as he had told Bill and Dan, of his capture and escape. Jim had fixed on him his strange eyes decked with tiny glittering lights and had said Sam wouldn’t last long now. Elk Horns? Hank said. With Bloods and Crows after him Sam ought to get his prayers said and write a goodbye note to his mother. "I’ll try and be at your funeral," Jim said. While Sam trapped on Black’s Fork news of his capture and humiliation spread over the area, from trapper to trapper and post to post; and not a mountain man heard the story but asked when the rendezvous would be. Most of them intended to be there. Those with posts, like Bridger, could not get away, or those like Rattlesnake Pete, who, thrown from a horse, was laid up with broken legs, or Bill Williams, crippled with rheumatism and holed up somewhere in the Uintahs. By the first of April it was known that the meeting would be at the Three Forks, right in the heart of Blackfeet country. By mid-April, Sam came in with two packs of pelts and settled most of his account and then headed for the Laramie post. Bridger said that unless he was plum hankering to die he had better stay out of Crow country. At the Laramie post Three-Finger McNees looked at Sam with one black eye while the other gazed off in the direction of Powder River. Doggone it, he said, he intended to be there, but if Sam was to get himself captured again and again they could not spend half their time avenging him.
Hearing the words, Mick Boone came over and said surely Sam was not heading through Crow country again.
Right through the middle of it, Sam said. McNees wondered how many of the twenty Sam had killed. Mick said that not only the Crows would be after Sam, but the whole Blackfeet nation.
The humiliation of both the Crow and Blackfeet people was the chief topic of gab at the Laramie post. The Sparrowhawks, Charley said, had been aroused to insane furies on learning that their enemy had been captured and allowed to escape. The Blackfeet were not able to hide or to explain away the fact that their prisoner, defenseless and half naked, had slain one of their mightiest warriors right in their camp and that the whole fifty-seven of them had not been able to capture a man who had neither food nor weapons and had two hundred miles to go. The story of Sam’s escape became embellished in the telling, by both redmen and white, until his long trek in below-zero weather, without food or gun or bedding, became the greatest feat of courage and endurance in all of human history. Mountain men with a gift of gab and invention loved to elaborate it; they liked to describe the murderous furies of the Blackfeet braves when, rising from their rumpots with bloodshot eyes, they discovered that a bound and helpless captive, half dead from hunger and cold, had with his bare hands throttled a warrior who boasted of six coups.
At the post their efforts to lead Sam out got them little. Zeke Campbell, who had spent the winter in the Medicine Bow Mountains, walked around with a tin cup of strong rum in his hand and studied Sam with the strangest eyes in the country. Back under large, coarse, bushy brows the color of golden sandstone were small eyes that seemed to be only two glittering lights. He would have bought Sam a drink but he knew that Sam did not drink. So after staring at Sam across the top of his cup he went over to Mick Boone, one of the tallest of the mountain men, with an abnormally long neck on the front of which was a huge Adam’s apple. Mick was a dark, watchful, silent man, who looked slow and deliberate but was fast on the draw. His large homely face, with its big curved nose and wide mouth, usually broke into a self-conscious grin, even if he were asked only an ordinary question.
The question Zeke asked was not ordinary. "For a man who lost all his fixens he looks good, don’t he?"
"He lost my bay," Mick said, shooting his brows up.
Cy Gregg came over. He had wintered on the waters of the Belle Fourche. That was Crow country but Cy years ago had taken a Crow girl and had paid, in the opinion of most men, a king’s price for her. He was now a Crow brother; if the Crows did not love him or covet his scalp they at least did not molest him. Like Bill and Charley, Cy spoke their language and knew their ways and what they were saying and thinking. As he moved toward the two men they fell silent, for they did not trust him.
A moment later Jeb Berger entered the storeroom. Jeb was the only mountain man whom no other mountain man liked. He was a big fellow—more than six feet and about two hundred and twenty pounds, square, deep-chested; and he was a fair shot and a fair hunter. The thing that made men uneasy around him was his pantomime: he was forever pretending that he was shooting ducks or geese out of the sky or the heads off chickens; or, squaring off, that he was ready to lick the world’s champion. Few mountain men were show-offs; they had courage but they did not think about it or wonder if they had it. They felt that there was something timid in a man who had to be eternally telling the world that he was an expert boxer, a dead shot, and a brave man, Jeb belonged to the boasters and braggarts, among whom in a later time a famous one would be known as Buffalo Bill. He did not really belong to the tribe of Kit Carson and Jim Bridger and Tom Fitzpatrick. He must have known that, for he seemed to be trying, morning, noon, and night, to convince other men of his skills and his courage.