Lord Grizzly, Second Edition by Frederick Manfred Page B

and the Rees, Major Henry sent Old Hugh ahead to make meat for the evening meal. The boy Jim Bridger and book-learned Fitz Fitzgerald were assigned to go along with Hugh. Major Henry made it a rule never to send out a hunting or scouting party of less than three men.
    The three of them were mounted on good-looking ponies, Hugh on a grayblue stallion he called Old Blue, the boy Jim on a dashing sorrel he called Maggie, and quiet Fitz on a spotted red-and-white mare he called Pepper. Fitz’s mare had a habit of every now and then lowering its head and snorting wildly. She had once been hit by a rattler and she was still shy of the ground. She was also extremely sensitive to Indian smells, and twice she had suddenly taken her head and galloped furiously across the prairie a mile or more before Fitz could get her under control again.
    The boy Jim was tall, well over six feet, heavy-limbed, with blunt knuckles and blunt cheekbones and blunt forehead. He had the heavy elbows and large knees of a colt. He walked with a rolling, clumsy, pigeon-toed lift of foot. His hair was auburn and he wore it long, gathered up in a knot in back, with a round beaverskin capping it. He was seventeen, and for all his being a centershot and a handy blacksmith he still had the air of a greenhorn about him. Only occasionally did the beginnings of a canny Scot shine through his innocence. When excited, his blue eyes turned a very light blue, as if a moon might be coming up behind them.
    Fitz Fitzgerald was a much different kind of man. Fitz was of medium height and had the slender frame of the city-bred man. He walked stylish, toes out—a manner Hugh despised and which he attributed to Fitz’s having been exposed to a little schooling. For all his small size, Fitz was well-put-together, quick, fluid in motion, and was surprisingly tough. He had brown hair and the alert hazel eyes and pink cheeks of the Irishman. He was a downer and had turndown lips; was at all times quietly practical. He rarely laughed, and when he did, he roared all out of proportion to the humor involved. Hugh often noted that even when Fitz sat silent he looked restless, like a kettle about to tremble with boiling water.
    The three rode well ahead of the main party, some four miles, traversing a crest of long swollen slopes overlooking Worthless Creek to the west with Glad Valley coming up ahead on the north. Far to the west reared a mesa of dull red rock called Thunder Butte. The men had been using Thunder Butte as a landmark for some twenty miles and now, at last, were directly east of it. The sun was setting upon it and gold light limned all its silhouette, while red and then rust deepened the shadow on its near side. The Butte looked like a huge mammary sliced off at the top exactly at the nipple. The Sioux claimed every passing thunderstorm struck it with lightning; that the thunder which followed always knocked down some of the dull red rock from its edges and sent it crashing to its foot. The Sioux spoke of it as the pulpit of the Great Spirit Wakantanka. The Butte was also used as an aerie by golden eagles. Around it on all sides—east, west, north, south—the long tan sloping bluffs and hills lay stretched out like languorous mountain lions.
    Old Hugh had sailed all the blue oceans, from Hammerfest to the Furneaux Islands, and had seen calm seas and mad seas, and looking out from under his deep gray brows, Old Hugh saw the somber farspread oceanlike plains as another vast sea, except that it was tan not blue. The mounding waves and the hollowing troughs were hauntingly familiar. Even the occasional brush in the ravines he recognized—it was flotsam washing in the wave troughs. He also recognized Thunder Butte—it was an island volcano rising out of the black-green deeps of the Pacific. It wouldn’t have been too much of a surprise to Hugh to see the Butte suddenly blow its cap and spout red lava and gray mud over the rolling expanse.
    The far