Dance on the Wind (12 page)

“Titus an’ me getting married,” Amy blurted to those gathered in that ring of firelight. “Settlin’ in to start our family.”

Each of them stared at the young couple for a heavy moment. And as quickly as the young woman had shattered the mood, Levi Gamble jumped in to work his magic.

“Then congratulations are in order!” he cheered. “You there—pass over that jug of cherry flip and we’ll send her round the circle for this young couple.”

They did, and Titus took him a taste of the sweet
brandy after he and Amy settled atop a large tree trunk rolled close to the fire. At times his father cooked up some corn mash or made a strong potato beer, but nothing that had the sweet decadence of that brandy. He took a second taste upon his tongue as the first warmed his belly and handed it past Amy to Levi.

“The young lady here gave her husband-to-be a kiss when we all thought Titus was the winner of the shooting match,” Levi explained to the circle of those at the fire. Then he brought his hand to his chest expressively to continue, “But she never give me a kiss when we discovered I beat the lad by a hair.”

“Maybe next year, young Titus Bass,” a moon-faced man across the flames called out. “Levi Gamble here tells us he won’t be here to steal first prize from you.”

“Why not next year?” Titus asked.

Gamble’s eyes took on a glaze weighed both in time and distance. “I’ll be far, far from the Ohio country come this time next year.” Of a sudden he turned on Amy. “So—sweet lady. What say you to giving Levi Gamble a winner’s kiss?”

Her eyes dropped. “I cannot.”

“Why?” he asked quietly.

“I’m spoke for, and it would not be the thing to do when a girl’s spoke for.”

“Titus?” Gamble asked, raising his head to look at the youth. “What say you about my kiss? Will you let your sweet Amy put a kiss here, on the cheek of the winner who whupped you in our gallant match this day?”

“Sure,” he replied after a moment’s hesitation.

“Now, sweet Amy—come give me my prize.” Gamble turned his face to the side and leaned toward her. “I’m ready when you are.”

The girl glanced once at Titus, then turned to Levi and leaned his way with her lips puckered. Just as she drew close, Gamble suddenly turned and planted his mouth on hers with a resounding smack. Amy leaped back so far she collided with Titus, and they both spilled over the tree trunk.

Gamble rose to his feet and held out his hands to them. “I’ve never done that before, Amy. Honest. To kiss a
beautiful young woman and knock her off her feet that way—and you was even sitting down when I did it!”

The group at the fire roared anew with laughter as Titus and Amy settled once more. Gamble bowed to them.

“If I have caused you trouble in any way with my silly prank, I beg your forgiveness. It’s only my happiness to be off to the western waters, with money in my purse enough to see me on my way.”

“You said you’d be far away from here come this time next year,” Titus replied, seizing hold of Gamble’s wrist with worry. Now he was confused—wanting to know more about this Boone County neighbor. “You’re not staying on here?”

“No, I move on tomorrow.”

“You leave family behind?”

One of the men at the fire explained, “Levi’s from Pennsylvania.”

“P-pennsylvania?” Titus asked. “What brings you here to our country?”

“Just the road, Titus,” Gamble explained. “Going west to see the far mountains and the rivers so mighty they say a man can’t dare cross ’em come spring when the snow on those high places is melting.”

“W-where is it you come from?”

“I hail from western Pennsylvania. Family from a little town called Emsworth on the Ohio, just downriver from Pittsburgh. I was following the river west when I happed onto a shopkeeper in Cincinnati what knew of this fair taking place across the Ohio. Every fair I know of has a shooting match—a likely place for me to win some money to fatten my traveling purse.”

“Money to go west,” Titus repeated, his eyes going to stare at the fire as Amy took his hand in the two of hers.

“If I make good time, I should be well downriver come the first hard snow, and by then I can find me somewhere to winter up and wait out the spring if’n I have to. Work as I need to. Always work and wages along the river, I say. And if’n I ain’t there afore spring, then I can go on down to the Mississippi, north from there.”

“Where?” Titus asked. “Where is it you’re bound for?”

“St. Louie.”

A large man leaned forward, his elbows on knees as he asked, “What do you know of this St. Louie?”

“I’ve heard it’s a lively place ever since Tom Jefferson’s expedition come back from the western ocean with word of beaver and other fine furs to be got from those western lands.”

“What of the Injuns?” a woman asked, speaking for the first time as she came into the firelight, wiping her hands on a long apron.

“Yes,” a man replied. “There must be Injuns there the likes have never see’d a white man.”

“And perhaps they’re better for that,” Gamble said, “what with the way the English stirred up these Injuns agin us during the war for our freedom, as I hear it.”

“They did, that’s for sure!” one of the men roared.

“But those Injuns out there,” Levi continued, “I hear they come walk the streets of St. Louie—looking to talk with the redheaded chief who went west to find them.”

“Who’s that redheaded chief?” Titus asked.

“William Clark,” Gamble replied. “Aye, they come to St. Louie dressed in all their feathers and shells, paint and hides. From what we heard last winter back to Pittsburgh, the Injuns up the Missouri River been quite peaceable ’bout traders coming among ’em.”

“That what you’re fixing to do out west, Levi?” Titus inquired. “Go into the trade with them Injuns?”

He wagged his head. “No. I’m fixing to join up with a man called Manuel Lisa. He’s been working the Injun trade on the upriver for three years now.”

“Sound of his name,” a man commented, “he must be one of them Frenchies.”

“Spanish, he told me,” Levi answered.

In a flush of astonishment Titus asked, “You … you met him?”

Gamble nodded. “He come through Pittsburgh late winter. Town was all abuzz with it. He’d been up to Vincennes looking to supply a whole new kind of outfit. Couldn’t get what he needed up there, so he had to keep on east. Come to Pittsburgh, and that’s how I happed onto talking with him.”

The moon-faced man asked, “You said a whole new kind of outfit. What’s new about it?”

“That’s what got my attention, it did,” Levi answered. “Manuel Lisa was the first to go farther upriver than any of them Frenchies out of St. Louis, but ever before he’d allays just traded the Injuns for the furs. Took ’em blankets and powder and coffee and bells, that such.”

“What’s he figure to do now that’s so different?” the big farmer asked.

“Lisa told me that last year he was the first to take some white men upriver—not to trade with the Injuns—but to trap for themselves and sell their beaver back to him.”

“Injuns take to that sort of thing?” one of them asked. “Taking the fur out of their country like that?”

“Yeah,” agreed another of the farmers. “That Spaniard better be careful, or he’ll find his hair gone.”

“Yup—we ought’n just leave that country for the Injuns. We got plenty enough this side of the river for ourselves. Let ’em have whatever’s left over yonder.”

Gamble said, “I aim to find out just how much country is left over yonder.”

Titus watched the tall man’s eyes, his entire countenance—a bit relieved to consider that Levi Gamble just might have the same fear of taking root in one place that Titus Bass himself suffered. Ever since their afternoon match he had hoped Gamble was a Boone County man, someone Titus could look up from time to time, someone he could confide in and take solace with, kindred spirits they.

But now he had learned Levi wasn’t from Kentucky at all. And worse yet, the hunter was merely passing through, taking first place in Titus’s shooting match only to pay his way west, there to push on for a far country filled with beaver and Injuns and all the adventure a man could want for himself.

“And now,” Gamble continued, patting the skin pouch that hung at his belt with a dull clatter of coin, “I am flush enough to pay for food, lodging, and what fare my journey might need of me.”

“I still say it should have been Titus’s money,” Amy grumbled.

Gamble grinned. “Second place to Levi Gamble is nothing he can be ashamed of.”

“It’s a lot of money he should have won,” Amy added. “It would’ve give us a good start on our life raising young’uns and settling down.”

Gamble studied Titus a moment before he said, “Aye, I will admit that was a goodly sum of money I won me for first prize. But money is not the object. Leastways not for me. Look here,” and he tore the pouch from his belt, yanking at the drawstring to open it up. From the pouch he poured a few coins into his palm with a clink.

“You can go far with that, Levi Gamble,” the moonfaced man commented.

Ignoring the farmer, Gamble leaned closer to Amy and Titus. “Look there. It’s hard. It’s solid.” He bit on one of the coins. “Meaning it’s only a thing. Nothing magic about it. Don’t make this money I won more than it is, young people. You’ll be doing yourselves a great shame if you ever make money more than it really is.”

The big farmer asked, “What is it, then, if not a wondrous thing to have?”

“Ah, money can be a wondrous thing only when it lets you reach for what you want most. Money ain’t nothing in and of itself, you see. Only importance comes from how it keeps you going after your dream.”

“So money’s important, after all,” Titus concluded with a nod of his head.

“No,” Levi said quickly. “The only thing important is your dream.”

“So what’s yours, Levi Gamble?” asked one of those at the fire.

He looked up at the canopy of stars. “Those faraway rivers where the beaver pelts are so big they say a man can sleep under one of a winter’s night.”

“A blanket beaver?”

Gamble nodded to the farmer. “Aye. To lay eyes for myself on that land Manuel Lisa spoke of in the quiet tones a man uses when he’s speaking of something religious.”

“This Lisa claim he found him God out there?” snorted one of the older men at the fire, who spoke up for the first time.

With a grin Levi replied, “Perhaps he has, the way he talked. The way he told me come west to St. Louie and he’d put me to work that next season when his boats pushed upriver.”

Titus leaned forward anxiously. “You’ll go?”

“Aye—I will at that.”

“What’s those places you’re going?” Titus asked dreamily.

Gamble turned sideways on his stump to look at the youth. “Magic names, young Mr. Bass. Rivers called the Yallerstone. Another one Lisa built a post on called the Bighorn. Said there’s wild sheep out there in the hills, and the males get horns so long, they wrap right back around on themselves in a curl.”

“Pure poppycock!” someone spouted, and others guffawed.

Levi held up a hand. “Lisa and them as was with him swore by it when I told ’em I doubted all they told me, the size of animals and such. Claim everything’s much, much bigger out there in that big, big country.”

“Like what?” Titus asked.

“Take any critter. The deer, sure. But they got one Lisa called a elk. Big as a milk cow, with a rack o’ horns on his head would cover a dining table at a country inn.”

“The man’s daft, and he pumped you up with his wild stories!”

“No,” Levi told the doubters. “There’s bear out there the likes of nothing we seen here in these eastern forests. Said there’s some called silvertips. What some call grizzlies. Stand half again as tall as a man on their hindquarters. Claws a good six inches long tear the heart out of a elk or rip a man’s arm off in one swipe!”

Amy leaped back as Gamble’s arm suddenly swung in a great arc toward Titus, his fingers stiffened into the curve of imaginary claws.

Bass did not flinch at Levi’s frightful pantomime. Steady and sure, he asked, “What other critters out there what’s big?”

Gamble stared into the youth’s eyes for a moment, then answered, “Lisa told me ’bout buffalo, bigger’n a cow an’ a elk an’ a grizzly too.”

Titus whispered huskily, “My grandpap tol’t me ’bout buffalo.”

The tall woodsman held out his arms wide. “A great and shaggy animal.” Then put his crooked fingers on either side of his head. “Big black horns they scrape and keep shiny for to do battle when it comes time for the rut each year. Thick fur from the top of their head back across a big hump on their shoulders. Seems they crowd together in herds a man likely couldn’t walk through in a hull day.”

“This Lisa and his boys ever try that?”

Gamble looked across the fire at the farmer. “No, they didn’t say they ever did.”

“Poppycock stories!”

“No, listen,” Gamble said. “They saw ’em, great herds of ’em. Saw ’em with their own eyes as they was pushing north on the Missouri River.”

One man wagged his head and commented dryly, “Just hard for me to believe there’d really be such a critter, and so damned many of ’em.”

“We ain’t none of us never see’d any back here,” claimed another.

“I heard talk once, long back,” an old man spoke up for the first time, “used to be a woods buffler in this country.”

“Must’ve been long back,” the man’s grandson replied.

“Surely was,” the old one continued. “But there was always talk that a critter even bigger lived on west. Talk was we killed off all them woods buffler in this country, but folks said we’d likely never kill off all them big critters out yonder.”

“If Manuel Lisa and his men are right,” Levi added, “folks’ll never make a dent in their numbers.”

“Buffalo.”

Gamble turned back to young Bass. “That’s right, Titus. Buffalo. Biggest thing on four legs God ever made for this country.”

“A man walk all day and not get through a herd of ’em.”

Levi nodded. “For six days running, Lisa told me, they was pushing upriver, poling and warping their keelboats past just one herd. Six hull days it took ’em.”

“So that’s where you’re headed, Levi? To see them buffalo?”

He wagged his head. “I’m going for the beaver, Titus. To see for myself those mountains and them rivers a’foam with melting snow. Rivers so muddied up they’re gobblin’ away at their banks, chewing trees right outta the ground in one bite and drowning buffalo by the thousands every spring. It’s them rivers I gotta see me afore I die. And trust me, fellas—Levi Gamble being tied down to one place is a fate wuss’n dying.”