So it hurt now to think of Jim Bridger, gone blind, gone sad and melancholy tucked away there on his daughter’s farm back to Missouri, tricked out of the deed to his fort by the army he said could use it. A sad, sad man who had made many fortunes over in his lifetime, forced now to spend his last days penniless, what with the money the government had stole from him.
Then Shad found out about Carson.
Already a year dead. Sweete didn’t get word of it off the army grapevine until Kit was long gone. Buried a year last May.
Why, it seemed like only yesterday that Carson himself had lost his beloved Josefa, his Mexican wife.
Could it be true? So much time gone?
From the tales around Fort Lyon, Kit’s last year was one that saw the old trapper’s own ailments increase in number, especially the severity of the pains in his neck and chest.
“I come to be troubled with this great affliction because of that footrace I had with the Blackfoot, you know,” Carson had explained to Shad many a winter ago—five, maybe six. “Staying alive back then just may be what’s gonna kill me now.”
“Always better to wear your hair and die a old man, Kit,” Shad told him.
Carson had said he wasn’t so sure.
An old man.
Damn, but Carson was no older than Shad himself was. And that realization shook Sweete to his roots now as he gazed down into the wide river valley covered with rolling swales of belly-high grass, the watercourse clearly marked by the leafy cottonwood and scrub plum brush.
Losing his Josefa likely had just about meant the end of Carson’s string, Shad thought, staring west into the brilliant golden rays of crimson light as the sun sank out there on Colorado Territory where a year ago that old friend had taken his last breath.
“Damned shame too, Little Kit,” he spoke to the hot summer breeze, squinting his eyes to make a vision of the short trapper swim before him in the shimmering waves of heat rising from the plains. “Damned shame any of us grow old afore our time.”
More than anything Shad felt a sense of being lost, more that than he felt any sense of loss upon learning that Kit had gone ahead and crossed the great divide that one last time. Seemed he felt lost a little more every year, feeling as if he were being left with fewer and fewer of the fragments of his memories of those seasons spent with the old ones. What were Meek and Doc Newell and some of the rest doing out to Oregon now? How about Scratch—was he still lodged up with that Crow gal and their young’uns, high up on the Yellowstone? There were a few who hung on by their fingernails, refusing to give in to the women and the canting preachers and the whining barristers come to curse this great, open, free land.
But now even Jim Bridger had give up and gone east to die. And Christopher Carson more than a year buried in Taos.
Kit was no older than Shad.
Fact was, the army was hiring younger and younger scouts all the time. All Shad had to do was look around him every morning when the scouts rode out ahead of the column, every evening when they came in to report on the day’s foray. This was a young man’s business—this making war on the Indians of the high plains.
For the better part of the last year Carr’s Fifth Cavalry had employed the services of two youngsters who knew their business—both William F. Cody and James Butler Hickok. At first a sullen Shad Sweete had no choice but to figure the army was intent on driving him out—what with the way it was bringing in all these young, snot-nosed kids.
Still, as time went on, two of those youngsters had proved themselves up to muster during Sheridan’s grueling winter campaign. Cody and Hickok would do to ride the river with. Sweete figured he could trust them both to cover his backside in any tough scrape of it.
Shad gazed off to the right, finding the distant rider on the big buckskin horse he had traded from one of the Indian trackers. Bill Cody, chief of scouts for Major Carr and the Fifth. Between them rode a half-dozen trackers from Frank North’s Pawnee battalion. Behind those Pawnee came Can’s cavalry and the rumbling wagons of their supply train. Cody was signaling to Sweete, waving his big slouch hat at the end of his arm, reining his horse around and heading back to the head of the column. Likely they’d make camp down on the good grass there in the valley beside the creek. The Driftwood.
