Free Crack in the Sky by Terry C. Johnston Page B

shouted with glee, sidling up to fling an arm over Porter’s shoulder. “How smooth it be? Like a Natchez whore’s baby-haired bum?”
    Nathan Porter turned and looked at Bass in alarm. “Smooth? Hell, it ain’t smooth!”
    A new trapper stepped forward. “Ain’t no such a thing as smooth likker in these here mountains, friend. Ever’ drink’ll cut’cha going down and land like a bar of Galena lead when it hits bottom.”
    “I wanna know if it can take the shine off my traps,” Hatcher said.
    “An’ can it peel the varnish off my saddle tree?” Bass inquired.
    “Hell if it can’t!” the man replied with a near toothless grin.
    Bass looked over at Hatcher, and they both smiled so broadly, it nearly cracked their faces in half.
    Scratch screamed, “Then bring on that there likker, fellers—’cause I got me a two-year thirst to rid myself of!”

    Although there was indeed a small supply of crude grain alcohol at the south shore of Sweet Lake, that summer of 1828 there would be no great and boisterous revelry because Sublette and Jackson had already reached the mountains with some twenty thousand dollars in supplies the winter before. Despite the shortage of trade goods and liquor, the air of excitement, camaraderie, and fellowship swelled as the sun began to drop and twilight approached each evening.
    Rendezvous was rendezvous. Make no mistake of that. A man worked a whole year to journey off to some prearranged valley for this reunion with faces and friends he had not seen in all those months of grueling labor in freezing streams, fighting off the numbing cold of the past winter, defending himself against horse-raiders and scalping parties. This July a double handful of the new company’s men would be missing.
    Survivors of one more year in the wilderness, Hatcher’s men joined other free trappers and brigade men at their fires for swapping stories, generously lathered with exaggeration bordering on lies, catching up on any fragment of the stale news brought out from the settlements by the traders last winter—news seemingly as fresh as these men in the wilderness wished to make every report and flat-out rumor.
    As night eased down, black-necked stilts called out softly from the rushes in the nearby marsh bordering the lake.
    “Listen to that, won’t you?” a stranger said to Bass at that cluster of fires in the brigade camp where all of them had gathered.
    “A purty sound,” Titus replied, hearing the birds’ calls fade across the water.
    “If’n you think that’s purty,” Rowland said to the stranger as he strode up, “then you ain’t never heard Jack play his fiddle.”
    The man whirled on Rowland. “One of your men has him a fiddle?”
    “We do,” Bass declared proudly.
    A new stranger with a big red nose leaped up from the ground where he had been lying. “He can play it?”
    “Damn if he can’t,” Rowland declared.
    Bass nodded. “Plays so damned bad, it hurts more’n your ears when you’re nursing a hangover!”
    “Hey, Squeeg!” the man with the big red nose roared across the fire. “One of these here free men plays the fiddle!”
    “Who’s the one with the fiddle?” demanded a tall, barrel-chested man.
    “I am,” Hatcher volunteered, standing from his stump. “Jack Hatcher’s the name.”
    “Mine’s Brody.”
    Then Jack warned, “But I don’t play for free.”
    “That’s right,” Solomon Fish agreed. “None of us play for free.”
    Brody wheeled around on Fish. “What’s it you play?”
    “Gimme a kettle an’ a stick,” Solomon said with a straight face.
    “The hell with you,” and Brody turned back to Hatcher. “You play for a drink, won’cha?”
    “The devil hisself got a tail, don’t he?”
    The tall man took a wide, playful swing at Hatcher. “Go get your fiddle, coon! This bunch is half-froze for sweet music!”
    That twilight as the sky grew dark and meat broiled on the end of sharpened sticks, spitted and sizzling over the leaping