In desperation, Fitzgerald found a second lender, a German named Hans Bangemann, to pay off the first. With the two thousand dollars in his hands, however, Fitzgerald had an epiphany: He would flee Memphis and start someplace new. The next morning he took passage on another boat north. He landed in St. Louis late in the month of February 1822.
After a month in the new city, Fitzgerald learned that two men had been asking at pubs about the whereabouts of a “gambler with a scar on his face.” In the small world of Memphis moneylenders, it had not taken long for Geoffrey Robinson and Hans Bangemann to discover the full measure of Fitzgerald’s treachery. For one hundred dollars each, they hired a pair of henchmen to find Fitzgerald, kill him, and recover as much of their loans as possible. They harbored little hope of getting their money back, but they did want Fitzgerald dead. They had reputations to uphold, and word was spread of their plan through the network of Memphis taverns.
Fitzgerald was trapped. St. Louis was the northernmost outpost of civilization on the Mississippi. He was afraid to go south, where trouble awaited him in New Orleans and Memphis. That day Fitzgerald overheard a group of pub patrons talking excitedly about a newspaper ad in the Missouri Republican. He picked up the paper to read for himself:
To enterprising young men. The subscriber wishes to engage one hundred young men to ascend the Missouri river to its source, there to be employed for one, two, or three years. For particulars enquire of Captain Henry, near the lead mines in the country of Washington, who will ascend with, and command, the party.
Fitzgerald made a rash decision. With the paltry remnants of the money he had stolen from Hans Bangemann, he bought a weathered leather tunic, moccasins, and a rifle. The next day he presented himself to Captain Henry and requested a spot with the fur brigade. Henry was suspicious of Fitzgerald from the beginning, but pickings were slim. The captain needed a hundred men and Fitzgerald looked fit. If he’d been in a few knife fights, so much the better. A month later Fitzgerald was on a keelboat headed north up the Missouri River.
Although he fully intended to desert the Rocky Mountain Fur Company when the opportunity presented itself, Fitzgerald took to life on the frontier. He found that his skill with knives extended to other weapons. Fitzgerald had none of the tracking skills of the real woodsmen in the brigade, but he was an excellent shot. With a sniper’s patience, he had killed two Arikara during the recent siege on the Missouri. Many of Henry’s men had been terrified in their fights with various Indians. Fitzgerald found them exhilarating, even titillating.
* * *
Fitzgerald glanced at Glass, his eyes falling on the Anstadt lying next to the wounded man. He looked around to make sure that Bridger wasn’t returning, then picked up the rifle. He pulled it to his shoulder and sighted down the barrel. He loved how the gun fit snug against his body, how the wide pronghorn sites found targets quickly, how the lightness of the weapon let him hold a steady bead. He swung from target to target, up and down, until the sights came to rest on Glass.
Once again Fitzgerald thought about how the Anstadt soon would be his. They hadn’t talked about it with the captain, but who deserved the rifle more than the man who stayed behind? Certainly his claim was better than Bridger’s. All the trappers admired Glass’s gun. Seventy dollars was paltry pay for the risk they were taking—Fitzgerald was there for the Anstadt. Such a weapon should not be wasted on a boy. Besides, Bridger was happy enough to get William Anderson’s rifle. Throw him some other crumb—Glass’s knife, perhaps.
Fitzgerald mulled the plan he had formed since he volunteered to stay with Glass, a plan that seemed more compelling with each passing hour. What difference does a day make to Glass? On the other hand, Fitzgerald knew exactly the difference a day meant to his own prospects for survival.
Fitzgerald set the Anstadt down. A bloody shirt lay next to Glass’s head. Push it against his face for a few minutes—we could be on our way in the morning. He looked again at the rifle, its dark brown striking against the orange hue of fallen pine needles. He reached for the shirt.
“Did he wake up?” Bridger stood behind him, his arms full of firewood. Fitzgerald startled, fumbling for an instant. “Christ, boy! Sneak up on me again like that and I swear to God I’ll cut you down!”
Bridger dropped the wood and walked over to Glass. “I was thinking maybe we ought to try giving him some broth.”
“Why, that’s mighty kind of you, Bridger. Pour a little broth down that throat and maybe he’ll last a week instead of dying tomorrow! Will that make you sleep better? What do you think, that if you give him a little soup he’s going to get up and walk away from here?”
Bridger was quiet for a minute, then said, “You act like you want him to die.”
“Of course I want him to die! Look at him. He wants to die!” Fitzgerald paused for effect. “You ever go to school, Bridger?” Fitzgerald knew the answer to his question.
The boy shook his head.
“Well, let me give you a little lesson in arithmetic. Captain Henry and the rest are probably making around thirty miles a day now that they’re not dragging Glass. Let’s figure we’ll be faster—say we make forty. Do you know what’s forty minus thirty, Bridger?” The boy stared blankly.
“I’ll tell you what it is. It’s ten.” Fitzgerald held up the fingers of both hands in a mocking gesture. “This many, boy. Whatever their head start is—we only make up ten miles a day once we take after them. They’re already a hundred miles ahead of us. That’s ten days on our own, Bridger. And that assumes he dies today and we find them straight away. Ten days for a Sioux hunting party to stumble on us. Don’t you get it? Every day we sit here is another three days we’re on our own. You’ll look worse than Glass when the Sioux are finished with you, boy. You ever see a man who got scalped?”
Bridger said nothing, though he had seen a man scalped. He was there near the Great Falls when Captain Henry brought the two dead trappers back to camp, butchered by Blackfeet. Bridger vividly remembered the bodies. The captain had tied them belly down to a single pack mule. When he cut them loose, they fell stiffly to the ground. The trappers had gathered round them, mesmerized as they contemplated the mutilated corpses of the men they had seen that morning at the campfire. And it wasn’t just their scalps that were missing. Their noses and ears had been hacked away, and their eyes gouged out. Bridger remembered how, without noses, the heads looked more like skulls than faces. The men were naked, and their privates were gone, too. There was a stark tan line at their necks and wrists. Above the line their skin was as tough and brown as saddle leather, but the rest of their bodies was as white as lace. It looked funny, almost. It was the type of thing that one of the men would have joked about, if it hadn’t been so horrible. Of course nobody laughed. Bridger always thought about it when he washed himself—how underneath, they all had this lacy white skin, weak as a baby.