This was not the outcome the captain had expected. A part of him felt that leaving Glass with Bridger and Fitzgerald differed little from abandonment. Bridger was barely more than a boy. In his year with the Rocky Mountain Fur Company, he had proved himself to be honest and capable, but he was no counterweight to Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald was a mercenary. But then, thought the captain, wasn’t that the essence of the course he had chosen? Wasn’t he simply buying proxies, purchasing a substitute for their collective responsibility? For his own responsibility? What else could he do? There was no better choice.
“All right, then,” said the captain. “Rest of us leave at dawn.”
FIVE
AUGUST 30, 1823
IT WAS THE EVENING of the second day since the departure of Captain Henry and the brigade. Fitzgerald had dispatched the boy to gather wood, leaving himself and Glass alone in the camp. Glass lay near one of the small fires. Fitzgerald ignored him.
A rock formation crowned the steep slope above the clearing. Massive boulders stood in a rocky stack, as if titanic hands had piled them one on top of the other and then pressed.
From a crack between two of the great stones grew a lone, twisted pine.
The tree was a sibling to the lodgepole pines that the local tribes used to frame their teepees, but the seed of its origin had been lifted high above the fertile soil of the forest below. A sparrow had pried it from a pine cone decades before, carrying it to a lofty height above the clearing. The sparrow lost the seed to a crevice between the rocks. There was soil in the crevice, and a timely rain for germination. The rocks drew heat in the daytime, compensating in part for the exposure of the outcropping. There was no straight path to sunlight, so the pine grew sideways before it grew upward, worming its way from the crevice before turning toward the sky. A few gnarled branches extended from the warped trunk, each capped with a scruffy tuft of needles. The lodgepoles below grew straight as arrows, some towering sixty feet above the floor of the forest. But none grew higher than the twisted pine on top of the rock.
Since the captain and the brigade left, Fitzgerald’s strategy was simple: lay in a supply of jerked meat so they were ready to move fast when Glass died; in the meantime, stay away from their camp as much as possible.
Though they were off the main river, Fitzgerald had little confidence in their position on the creek. The little stream led straight to the clearing. The charred remains of campfires made it clear that others had availed themselves of the sheltered spring. In fact, Fitzgerald feared that the clearing was a well-known campsite. Even if it were not, the tracks of the brigade and the mule led clearly from the river. A hunting or war party couldn’t help but find them if they came up the near bank of the Grand.
Fitzgerald looked bitterly at Glass. Out of morbid curiosity, he had examined Glass’s wounds on the day the rest of the troop left. The sutures in the wounded man’s throat had held since the litter spilled, but the entire area was red with infection. The puncture wounds on his leg and arm seemed to be healing, but the deep slashes on his back were inflamed. Luckily for him, Glass spent most of his time unconscious. When will the bastard die?
* * *
It was a twisted path that brought John Fitzgerald to the frontier, a path that began with his flight from New Orleans in 1815, the day after he stabbed a prostitute to death in a drunken rage.
Fitzgerald grew up in New Orleans, the son of a Scottish sailor and a Cajun merchant’s daughter. His father put in port once a year during the ten years of marriage before his ship went down in the Caribbean. On each call to New Orleans he left his fertile wife with the seed of a new addition to the family. Three months after learning of her husband’s death, Fitzgerald’s mother married the elderly owner of a sundry shop, an action she viewed as essential to support her family. Her pragmatic decision served most of her children well. Eight survived to adulthood. The two eldest sons took over the sundry shop when the old man died. Most of the other boys found honest work and the girls married respectably. John got lost somewhere in the middle.
From an early age, Fitzgerald demonstrated both a reflex toward and a skill for engaging in violence. He was quick to resolve disputes with a punch or a kick, and was thrown out of school at the age of ten for stabbing a classmate in the leg with a pencil. Fitzgerald had no interest in the hard labor of following his father to sea, but he mixed eagerly in the seedy chaos of a port town. His fighting skills were tested and honed on the docks where he spent his teenage days. At seventeen, a boatman slashed his face in a barroom brawl. The incident left him with a fishhook scar and a new respect for cutlery. He became fascinated with knives, acquiring a collection of daggers and scalpers in a wide range of sizes and shapes.
At the age of twenty, Fitzgerald fell in love with a young whore at a dockside saloon, a French girl named Dominique Perreau. Despite the financial underpinnings of their relationship, the full implications of Dominique’s métier apparently did not register with Fitzgerald. When he walked in on Dominique plying her trade with the fat captain of a keelboat, the young man fell into a rage. He stabbed them both before fleeing into the streets. He stole eighty-four dollars from his brothers’ store and hired passage on a boat headed north up the Mississippi.
For five years he made his living in and around the taverns of Memphis. He tended bar in exchange for room, board, and a small salary at an establishment known, with pretensions that exceeded its grasp, as the Golden Lion. His official capacity as barkeep gave him something he had not possessed in New Orleans—a license to engage in violence. He removed disorderly patrons with a relish that startled even the rough-cut clientele of the saloon. Twice he nearly beat men to death.
Fitzgerald possessed some of the mathematical skills that made his brothers successful storekeepers, and he applied his native intelligence toward gambling. For a while he was content to squander his paltry stipend from the bar. Over time he was drawn to higher stakes. These new games required more money to play, and Fitzgerald found no shortage of lenders.
Not long after borrowing two hundred dollars from the owner of a rival tavern, Fitzgerald hit it big. He won a thousand dollars on a single hand of queens over tens, and spent the next week in a celebratory debauch. The payoff infused him with a false confidence in his gambling skills and a ravenous hunger for more. He quit his work at the Golden Lion and sought to make his living at cards. His luck veered sharply south, and a month later he owed two thousand dollars to a loan shark named Geoffrey Robinson. He dodged Robinson for several weeks before two henchmen caught him and broke his arm. They gave him a week to pay the balance due.