Like his torso, his face was square; it was a large strong face with no weak feature except the eyes, which were the eyes of a liar. Jeb had a heavy black beard an inch long that covered nearly all his face, and in this beard his grin showed two rows of even teeth that were shockingly small in a face so large and dark. When he smiled he merely drew his well-fed cheeks back, and except for two wrinkles at the corners and his exposed teeth you saw no sign of a smile. He was proud of his beard and of the hair over his body, for he thought that hair was a sign of virility. It was his private opinion that all thin-bearded men were cowards.
Jeb came over to Mick and those with him, and when he felt that he was near enough to be cordial he grinned at them, and the next moment cut a heavy-footed caper. He shot his arms up in the position they would have taken if they had held a gun; and his deep voice said, "Boom-boom!" With a gesture he indicated that two birds had fallen. He next closed his hands and presented to Cy the pose of a boxer on guard, and did a few fancy steps. Mick was gravely watching him, his elongated skull held high, his eyes staring down his long nose. That he didn’t like Jeb was plain all over his face. Mick, Cy, and Zeke were not the kind to dress down a braggart. McNees was. He came over and looked at Jeb.
"Ya heard about it?"
"Some," said Jeb, and made his mechanical grin.
"Ya kallate to be at the rondyvoo at Three Forks?"
Jeb was not a talkative man and he was never quick to reply. He loved to play the part of a deep silent person, with an extremely sensitive sense of honor and a lightning hand on the draw.
"When?" he said at last.
"About August first, ain’t it?" McNees asked, one eye on Zeke and the other on Mick.
"Bout then," Mick said.
"Hey, Sam!" Sam, standing by a pile of robes and tanned skins, looked over at the men. Then he walked over, his gaze moving from man to man as he went.
"Jeb here," McNees said, "is dyun ta kill a few Bloods. Wants to know when the rondyvoo will be."
"I think most of the men want around August first."
A Jeb, McNees said, was snorting like a buffler bull with a badger hanging from his balls. Jeb was looking at Sam.
"Taking a nap?" he asked.
"Just as well have been," Sam said. "Fact is, I was trying to figger out how to unhitch two bulls with their horns locked. I was about to chop a horn off when all I could see around me was the ends of gun barrels."
"Five or six?" asked Jeb, his tone saying that any man could take care of live or six.
Sam looked Jeb in the eye and said, "Fifty-seven when I left them."
"Jeb is an expert with niggers," McNees said. "How much is a third of fifty-seven?"
Jeb turned on McNees his wide unemotional grin.
"About nineteen," Mick said.
"Only three for each of us?" said McNees. "Can’t we git a extra fer Jeb?"
"Jeb will want at least five or six," said Sam.
Jeb’s cheeks were still stretched back in a meaningless smile.
Mick’s long homely face had opened in a grin that spread to his forehead. Two Blackfeet were about all he cared to tackle at one time, he said; Jeb could have one of his and that would make four for him.
Where were they to find them? asked Zeke. Anywhere, Sam said. Had they let the squaws squat on him?
"They never got that far."
McNees said: "Count on us to be there, Sam. August first."
He fixed one black eye on Jeb, studied him a few moments and said, "We’l1 see ya there."
It was a long time till August. Meanwhile Sam had work to do in Crow country and a debt to pay to a woman, without whose food and bedding he would have died. During his second evening at the post the men sat around a big fire, a few of them drinking, all of them smoking or chewing. The talk turned to Kate. Wind River Bill had come in, and on Kate, as on most matters, he was an authority. When someone wondered if the woman was crazy or only pretended to be, Bill said he had been there six or seven times and never once had she looked at him or spoken to him. She seemed not to know that he was there, she shorely didn’t.
"Did she ever know you vmz thar, Sam?"
"I never could be sure," Sam said. "I never saw her look at me."
"How long’s she been there?" someone asked.
"Wall now. In forty-three I wuz on the Belle Foos; forty-four I wuz on the Tetons; forty-five I wuz on Little Powder; forty-six I wuz on Hoback; forty-seven—" The mountain men liked Bi1l’s catalogue of places; they loved all the names. Bill searched his memory and thought he might have been on the Snake but he could be as wrong as hell, he shorely could. When was he with Abner Back? Anyway, the woman had been there a long time. She had aged a hundred years and she had grieved enough to turn a whole nation gray.
"True she talks to herself?"
Not to herself, Bill said; she talked to her children. They came and knelt in the sage bushes, or sat—he had never figgered it out; and she read the Bible to them and talked to them. "Ya Figger she sees them'?"
Wall now, Bill said, and turned his face to the sky, as though to find the answer there. This here life, it was a riddle for sure, and no man had figgered it out.
"Spect she’l1 die there, unh?"
"Spect so.” A trapper passing by someday would find her bones and would bury them between her children. Then the lnjuns would burn the cabin and the winds would level everything, and there would be no sign that a mother had lived there for years, reading God’s words to her angels.
A voice said, "Our mother she never loved us that way."
Not many mothers did, Bill said, for he was an authority on that matter too. He had never known a mother with such devotion as this woman’s. Had they ever stopped to think that of all things there had been, or someday would be, this was the greatest? There had been only one Eve, and of all the women the Almighty had made since taking the rib from Adam she was the one that every stud whinnied at. Waugh! There had been only one Mary, one Cleopatra, one Elizabeth, and there was only one Kate. He expected that God had put her there to show the world what mother love should be. Mebbe He had put Sam here to show what a father should be, for he had heard that Sam took to the bones of his wife and child the loveliest flowers he could find. The eyes of all the men turned to Sam but he was smoking and looking into the fire and he pretended to be unaware of them.
"Heerd say she never makes a fire."
Never, Bill said. Sam he had dragged in enough wood for ten years and it hadn’t growed none but it warn’t no smaller neither. Jeb interrupted Bill’s talk to say that he had ridden past her shack last fall. Boom-boom! Two ducks fell from the sky. He had taken the ducks to her and a deer but she had seemed not to want them. It was a fine fat deer. He had broken its neck on a dead run at almost half a mile.
Some of the men glanced at one another. They all knew that no man on earth could hit a deer on a dead run at half a mile. Jeb’s shooting was like rain on the talk. Even Bill fell silent. Greenhorns came out from the East and boasted their heads off about their wing-shooting of partridge and dove; but with a Hawken rifle they couldn’t hit a buffalo bull standing broadside a hundred yards away.
McNees was the only man who had looked straight at Jeb. When Three-Finger looked at a man he usually squirmed a little and got his tobacco smoke down the wrong hole. While one small black eye looked deep into you the other looked off at the sky or the mountains; and if after a few moments you swung your gaze from the eye boring into you to the one staring at eternity the man’s head would turn and the other eye would look into you. Three Finger was one of the few men who kept the hair shaved off their faces. He was a tall long-legged man who, like Bill Williams, had always lived and trapped alone, a hermit deep in the mountains who minded his own business and took insults from no man. His right eye, fixed on Jeb, had that black-bearded boaster powerful oneasy; and after a few moments McNees said, "Heard it said you took some Blackfeet scalps. Next August will be a great day for you." The men all knew that Jeb had never taken Blackfeet scalps. After the Missouri Fur Company had to abandon its post on the Three Forks it had been a bold trapper who had ventured far into Blackfeet land and a rare day when one took a Blackfoot scalp.