“No, Captain.”
“You know who he was?”
“George Drouillard—Corps of Discovery?”
Henry nodded his head. “Lewis and Clark man, one of their best—a scout and a hunter. In 1809 he signed up with a group I led—he led, really—to the Three Forks. We had a hundred men, but Drouillard and Colter was the only ones who’d ever been there.
“We found beaver thick as mosquitoes. Barely had to trap ’em—could go out with a club. But we ran into trouble with the Blackfeet from the start. Five men killed before two weeks was up. We had to fort up, couldn’t send out trapping parties.
“Drouillard holed up there with the rest of us for about a week before he said he was tired of sitting still. He went out the next day and came back a week later with twenty plews.”
Glass paid the captain his full attention. Every citizen of St. Louis knew some version of Drouillard’s story, but Glass had never heard a first-person account.
“He did that twice, went out and came back with a pack of plews. Last thing he said before he left the third time was, ‘Third time’s charmed.’ He rode off and we heard two gunshots about half an hour later—one from his rifle and one from his pistol. Second shot must have been him shooting his horse, trying to make a barrier. That’s where we found him behind his horse. There must have been twenty arrows between him and the horse. Blackfeet left the arrows in, wanted to send us a message. They hacked him up, too—cut off his head.”
The captain paused again, scraping at the dirt in front of him with a pointed stick. “I keep thinking about him.”
Glass searched for words of reassurance. Before he could say anything the captain asked, “How long do you figure this river’s gonna keep running west?”
Glass stared intently, now, searching for the captain’s eyes. “We’ll start making better time, Captain. We can follow the Grand for the time being. We know the Yellowstone’s north and west.” In truth, Glass had developed significant doubts about the captain. Misfortune seemed to hang on him like day-before smoke.
“You’re right.” The captain said it and then he said it again, as if to convince himself. “Of course you’re right.”
Though his knowledge was born of calamity, Captain Henry knew as much about the geography of the Rockies as almost any man alive. Glass, though an experienced plainsman, had never set foot on the Upper Missouri. Yet Henry found something steady and reassuring in Glass’s voice. Someone had told him that Glass had been a mariner in his youth. There was even a rumor that he’d been a prisoner of the pirate Jean Lafitte. Perhaps it was those years on the empty expanse of the high seas that left him comfortable on the featureless plain between St. Louis and the Rocky Mountains.
“We’ll be lucky if the Blackfeet haven’t wiped out the whole lot at Fort Union. The men I left there aren’t exactly the cream of the crop.” The captain continued now with his usual catalog of concerns. On and on into the night. Glass knew that it was enough just to listen. He looked up or grunted from time to time, but focused in the main on his rifle.
Glass’s rifle was the one extravagance of his life, and when he rubbed grease into the spring mechanism of the hair trigger, he did so with the tender affection that other men might reserve for a wife or child. It was an Anstadt, a so-called Kentucky flintlock, made, like most of the great arms of the day, by German craftsmen in Pennsylvania. The octagonal barrel was inscribed at the base with the name of its maker, “Jacob Anstadt,” and the place of its manufacture, “Kutztown, Penn.” The barrel was short, only thirty-six inches. The classic Kentucky rifles were longer, some with barrels stretching fifty inches. Glass liked a shorter gun because shorter meant lighter, and lighter meant easier to carry. For those rare moments when he might be mounted, a shorter gun was easier to maneuver from the back of a horse. Besides, the expertly crafted rifling of the Anstadt made it deadly accurate, even without the longer barrel. A hair trigger enhanced its accuracy, allowing discharge with the lightest touch. With a full charge of 200 grains of black powder, the Anstadt could throw a .53 caliber ball nearly 200 yards.
His experiences on the western plains had taught Glass that the performance of his rifle could mean the difference between life and death. Of course, most men in the troop had reliable weapons. It was the Anstadt’s elegant beauty that set his gun apart.
It was a beauty that other men noticed, asking, as they often did, if they might hold the rifle. The iron-hard walnut of the stock took an elegant curve at the wrist, but was thick enough to absorb the recoil of a heavy powder charge. The butt featured a patchbox on one side and a carved cheek piece on the other. The stock turned gracefully at the butt, so that it fit against the shoulder like an appendage of the shooter’s own body. The stock was stained the deepest of browns, the last tone before black. From even a short distance, the grain of the wood was imperceptible, but on close examination, irregular lines seemed to swirl, animated beneath the hand-rubbed coats of varnish.
In a final indulgence, the metal fittings of the rifle were silver instead of the usual brass, adorning the gun at the butt-plate, the patchbox, the trigger guard, the triggers themselves, and the cupped fittings on the ends of the ramstaff. Many trappers pounded brass studs into their rifle stocks for decoration. Glass could not imagine such a gaudy disfigurement of his Anstadt.
Satisfied that his rifle’s works were clear, Glass returned the trigger guard to its routed groove and replaced the two screws that held it. He poured fresh powder in the pan beneath the flint, ensuring that the gun was primed to fire.
He noticed suddenly that the camp had fallen still, and wondered vaguely when the captain had stopped talking. Glass looked toward the center of the camp. The captain lay sleeping, his body twitching fitfully. On the other side of Glass, closest to the camp’s perimeter, Anderson lay against a chunk of driftwood. No sound rose above the reassuring flow of the river.
The sharp crack of a flintlock pierced the quiet. It came from downstream—from Jim Bridger, the boy. The sleeping men lurched in unison, fearful and confused as they scrambled for weapons and cover. A dark form hurtled toward the camp from downstream. Next to Glass, Anderson cocked and raised his rifle in a single motion. Glass raised the Anstadt. The hurtling form took shape, only forty yards from the camp. Anderson sighted down the barrel, hesitating an instant before pulling the trigger. At the same instant, Glass swung the Anstadt beneath Anderson’s arms. The force knocked Anderson’s barrel skyward as his powder ignited.