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This was not the outco Glass with Bridger and Fitzgerald differed little froer was barely more than a boy In his year with the Rocky Mountain Fur Company, he had proved hiht to Fitzgerald Fitzgerald was a ht the captain, wasn’t that the essence of the course he had chosen? Wasn’t he si 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 canored him

A rock for Massive boulders stood in a rocky stack, as if titanic hands had piled them one on top of the other and then pressed

Frorew a lone, twisted pine

The tree was a sibling to the lodgepole pines that the local tribes used to frain had been lifted high above the fertile soil of the forest below A sparrow had pried it froht above the clearing The sparrow lost the seed to a crevice between the rocks There was soil in the crevice, and a tier in part for the exposure of the outcropping There was no straight path to sunlight, so the pine grew sideways before it greard, wor toward the sky A few gnarled branches extended from the warped trunk, each capped with a scruffy tuft of needles The lodgepoles belo straight as arrows, so 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 erald had little confidence in their position on the creek The little strea The charred remains of campfires made it clear that others had availed theerald feared that the clearing was a well-known caade and theor 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 ar, 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 Cajunthe ten years of e before his ship went down in the Caribbean On each call to New Orleans he left his fertile ith the seed of a new addition to the fa 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 faht survived to adulthood The two eldest sons took over the sundry shop when the old irls ot lost somewhere in the middle

Froerald de 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 classerald had no interest in the hard labor of following his father to sea, but heskills 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 becaers 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 nas of their relationship, the full iister with Fitzgerald When he walked in on Do her trade with the fat captain of a keelboat, the younginto the streets He stole eighty-four dollars froe on a boat headed north up the Mississippi

For five years hein and around the taverns of Mee for room, board, and a small salary at an establishrasp, as the Golden Lion His official capacity as barkeep gave hi 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 ga For a while he was content to squander his paltry stipend froher stakes These new gaerald found no shortage of lenders

Not long after borrowing two hundred dollars fro 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 hi skills and a ravenous hunger for ht toat cards His luck veered sharply south, and a month later he oo thousand dollars to a loan shark naed Robinson for several weeks before two henchave him a week to pay the balance due