Rocky Mountain Company (11 page)

Quickly, then — a dozen bronzed headmen waited politely on the levee — he led these three down to the boiler deck and the saloon, intending to show them a few staterooms. They plunged through ornate doors into the men’s saloon, and discovered Fitzhugh and Dust Devil still there, the stiff-legged trader with an empty glass in hand and a look about him of drunken anger. And beside him, Dust Devil, utterly sober and looking like a wasp’s nest.

Brokenleg simply glared, unfathomable thoughts ticking through his saturated brain. But not Dust Devil. She stood, examining the headmen with those disdainful eyes of hers, reading tribe from the shape of moccasins and the set of feathers and the decor on breechclouts.

“Aiee, Assiniboin dog-vomit and Crow horseturds,” she said in English, and repeated it with the hand-language of the tribes. “It’s bad enough to have a Crow on board, but Assiniboin dogs too. We will never trade with you.”

The headmen froze, understanding the insult perfectly, and recognizing a Cheyenne woman before them. They eyed her menacingly, but did nothing. The Crow, Walks at Night, memorized her with glittering eyes, and then studied Fitzhugh with contempt.

“Mrs. Fitzhugh, that will be quite enough.” LaBarge snapped. “These headmen are guests of the LaBarge Brothers, and I’ll not have them insulted.”

“What you bawlin’ about?” Fitzhugh muttered, rising up on his stiff leg.

“You’re not in any condition to discuss the matter, Fitzhugh. And if you want my opinion — which you don’t — you’ve just destroyed your hope of trading with two important tribes up on the Yellowstone.”

He herded his guests out onto the deck before real trouble erupted, suddenly aware that Guy Straus’s company was doomed. He had contracted to haul their outfit as far as he could up the Yellowstone, and he would do that. And leave the whole pile there along with the angry drunk and the fanatic Cheyenne and their hopeless engagés. He was going to have to talk with Guy Straus when he got back to St. Louis — and perhaps spare that good man further loss and grief. Maybe he could talk Maxim into going back as well. Or Alec Culbertson could. Fitzhugh was too small of heart to fill a trader’s shoes.

Brokenleg knew they’d come as far as they could, even before Captain LaBarge told him. For two hours he’d watched crewmen in a yawl sound the rapids ahead, peering at boulders that cleaved the water viciously. It wasn’t much of a rapids, but enough rock lay in it to daunt a master of a packet.

“Mister Fitzhugh,” the master said curtly, “this is it. I see no islands, so I presume you’ll wish to unload on the south bank,”

The master’s curtness, ever since Fort Union, irked Fitzhugh, but he ignored it, “Any spit of land or something we can defend?”

LaBarge shook his head. “Good cottonwood grove a mile back,” he said.

“No chance of your laying over for two weeks, I suppose.”

“None. The water’s dropping daily and I’m in danger of getting caught. In fact, sir, I will be starting at dawn.”

“Back to the woods, then,” Fitzhugh said. He hated to lose ground. They’d come only about seventy or eighty miles up the Yellowstone, and needed to go about two hundred fifty. It’d be a long hard haul from here; and they’d have to do it twice, and maybe send one wagon back a third time, to carry all the goods in the three Pittsburghs. “We’ll need to hide the goods and hope some band or other doesn’t follow the wheel tracks.”

LaBarge nodded, and began instantly to wheel the packet around in the narrow, rapid channel, a tricky business. An hour later they anchored along a thickly forested bank, with towering cottonwoods that screened the area from a river trace a half a mile away that ran along the foot of the bluffs. It had taken some doing. They needed to find a slot where the great wagons could escape the woods; where the packet could glide close to the shore, and where the mountain of tradegoods could be hidden, because it would be guarded by only two engagés while the rest drove the loaded wagons to old Fort Cass, a distance of about a hundred and eighty miles. Fortunately, they’d seen no sign of a passing village, probably because it was still the trading season, and most bands were camped close to the trading posts.

They ran the wagons down the stage first, and then began lifting goods out of the hold, using a spar and block and tackle, and bit by bit the hold emptied and a heap of goods, looking oddly vulnerable and out of place, grew on the grassy bank. At nine in the evening, when all that was done, they loosed the livestock and herded it to shore, the last task. The bawling of the oxen troubled Fitzhugh; he wished the whole thing could be accomplished in perfect silence.

At once LaBarge ordered his crew to prepare to sail.

“You’re not staying the night?” Brokenleg asked, amazed.

“We can make ten or fifteen miles. Especially with that moon,” LaBarge said, pointing to the orange globe perched on the eastern slopes.

“I could use the protection.”

“Mister Fitzhugh, I’ll be running on sand as it is. Have I fulfilled our agreement?”

“  . . . Yes.”

“Then I’ll have you sign this document saying you’ve taken possession of your goods.”

Brokenleg signed it unhappily, scratching with the goose-quill nib the master gave him.

Swiftly, deckmen raised the stage and retrieved the hawsers that had pinned the
Platte
to the bank. And then with barely a splash, the paddles wheeled over, cut into water, going with the current now, and the packet ghosted out toward the channel, silently so as not to alert any curious ear. Slowly it merged into the murky golden light of the summer’s eve, vanishing by degrees rather than sliding around a bend. Fitzhugh watched it go, a wraith returning to civilization some infinitude away, the vibration of its engines dulling into deep silence. Dust Devil stood beside him watching the vessel slowly vanish, and the engagés watched too, filled with a strange solemnness that comes upon a group suddenly isolated and utterly alone.

“Load the wagons,” Fitzhugh said quietly. “I want everything that can be rain-damaged — the ribbons and tradecloth especially — under the sheets right away. That, plus the fusils, powder — and those casks of turpentine and vinegar. We’ll load tonight, and leave at dawn.”

But no one moved. The wilderness closed about them suddenly, a chill on the hot summer’s air. He heard crickets. Something splashed on the river, a dusk-hunter. After the daily hum of the boat, comforting in its way, the smallest sounds of nature seemed alarming. Even the snort and snuffle of horses grazing made him jumpy, and set engagés into spasms of watchfulness. Far away, up on a bluff somewhere north, a coyote barked just once. Men peered fearfully into the surrounding cottonwoods, whose thick canopy plunged the ground at their feet into blackness.

“Monsieur Fitzhugh,” said Trudeau softly. “I think while a bit of light remains, the men might reconnoiter the woods, and the grass here, and see what is best to hold the livestock. We don’t have hobbles.”

“Do it,” Fitzhugh snapped. He’d had the same notion himself, getting oriented, probing outward, looking to defenses. Ten men, even armed with good percussion locks, weren’t much of a force.

Dust Devil watched them all disdainfully. She looked utterly at home here; in fact, everything had reversed. She’d been uncomfortable in St. Louis and on the riverboat but once she set foot on land under the benign watch of Sweet Medicine, all that had changed. It suddenly occurred to Fitzhugh, as he watched her wicked grin, that she would come to him one of these nights full of fierce passion and joy.

“Monsieur Trudeau,” he added, as men fanned out quietly, “we’ve all spent our lives in places like this.”

They were back in ten or fifteen minutes, having probed out to the looming bluff and the silent trace below it to their satisfaction. The golden moon afforded enough light to load up the wagons with the important and vulnerable things to be taken on the first passage. The livestock settled down to contented grazing, freed at last of the miserable confines of the packet.

By the time the day faded into a faint blue memory on the northwestern horizon, they’d made a camp of sorts. But not a comfortable or cheery one because he’d banned fires, and mosquitos whined like bullets around them. The Creoles brooded, which was quite unlike them. He’d expected quiet humor, small ribald jokes. Still, they’d done what they could. He’d appointed two men to each of the watches and made sure they were well armed. He himself would take the third watch. There’d be only five hours of true darkness in this northern clime, this time of year.

It irked him that LaBarge had pulled out so fast. That the captain had been cool to him ever since Fort Union. Brokenleg resolved to tell Guy Straus about it. There wasn’t even a parting drink, a round of spirits, a warm clasp of hands, a big hooraw, the way it had happened at the rendezvous when things were breaking up until the next year. No. Just some tart, hasty au revoir. He got the feeling that the master didn’t like him. Well, too bad. Maybe he didn’t like that master and his thieving blanket-stealing crew.

The river glittered by, bouncing stars off its oily surface, on its long, mysterious passage to the sea. Somewhere to the south and west snow from the gulches of towering mountains, the backbone of the continent, melted into rivulets that found their way to tributaries and finally to the Yellowstone — the Elk River, the Crows and Blackfeet called it — and on to the Missouri, still snow-cold and crystalline. And then at some unfathomable moment, having tumbled down a continent, these waters flowed, warm and muddy, into the Gulf of Mexico at New Orleans. A light steamer could come the whole distance bringing goods from anywhere. From England. From Europe. Independence lay some unspeakable distance down its path, and beyond it St. Louis, farther than a man could walk in many months. The rivers were a golden cord stretching from this silent wilderness back to a land of brick buildings and frame houses, places he didn’t like much, but whose steel and gunpowder he badly needed.

“Sweet Medicine,” said Dust Devil, breaking into his sad reverie. “Ah, it is good. My people aren’t far. Maybe along the Powder. I can almost tell you where, even though I can’t see them. See, Fitzhugh, this is the place where Sweet Medicine sees me. If Crow dogs come, we will kill them.”

“I reckon we won’t,” he retorted. “We’re gonna trade fair and square. You got to cut that out.”

She laughed, disdain back in her throat. “Well then, we’ll kill Assiniboin. Or Blackfeet. Or Gros Ventre. Or Hidatsa. All dogs.”

“You’re a bloodthirsty whelp tonight.”

“Tonight I am home.”

“I reckon you are, and I reckon there’s a few around hyar who’d like to lift your scalp.”

“Not as much as they’d like yours — what’s left of it, redhair.”

“I ain’t got me enough up front to scalp.”

She laughed, a child’s glee silvering out into the night, caught his hand with one of hers, snatched up their robe with the other, and dragged him along the bank to a hummock where tall grasses grew thick.

No tribulation on earth could stay the swift blossoming of Brokenleg Fitzhugh’s soul. It began, actually, with the departure of the
Platte
, although he’d been too irked and worried to notice. But the next day broke upon joy, and not even the maddening difficulties and delays involved with yoking oxen and harnessing mules, assigning engagés to wagons, and choosing the two who would stay behind, could arrest the sweetness of this life in the wilds that began to percolate through his hot blood.

They made sixteen miles that day, by Fitzhugh’s reckoning, along a trail that had never seen a wheeled vehicle. The trace along the south bank of the Yellowstone had been cut by buffalo and other animals, widened by horseback Indians, and rutted by the poles of countless travois. Only now and then did sagebrush or juniper or a fallen cottonwood log impede their progress. And none of these bothered him in the slightest.

He didn’t understand what pressures he’d been wrestling with until he no longer felt them. Even the riverboat, that last vestige of polite society and manners, had managed to bottle him up, force him into a taut silence, and build in him a dour, rank sullenness. He scarcely paused to consider his own mood. Overland travel had been torture for him ever since he’d ruined his left leg. He had a special saddle with a long left stirrup to accommodate that stiff limb, but it didn’t save him from pain. He could take only two hours of that sort of torture, and then he had to tie his horse to a wagon, and slide aboard until its jarring had tortured his leg in new ways.

But the odd thing was, he didn’t mind it. He scouted ahead as much as his leg permitted, and when pain drove him back to a wagon, Dust Devil automatically rode ahead, her skirts hiked high and her jet hair blowing wild as the wind. His attention had returned to an older, atavistic, primitive knowing of the land. He read the circling bald eagle with his eyes, spotted a purple summer thunderhead off to the south, watched a pair of whitebellied antelope skitter up a long slope and then pause on its crest to watch the strange procession of carts, things new to antelope-eyes. Once he watched the two spare horses lay back their ears and stare into a cottonwood copse, and he knew intuitively they’d scented or sensed a catamount in there. That day, like the ones before it, burnt hot and breathless through the afternoon, but the dry air sucked the sweat away as fast as it formed, and he scarcely knew discomfort.

By that evening he should have been exhausted, but he wasn’t; he felt elated. His engagés were savvy about the ways of the wilderness and didn’t shy from the toil it required. Like Brokenleg, they belonged here and knew what to do without being asked; knew how to remove obstacles from the trail, how to sound a bottom and a ford, how to rest the sweating, lowing oxen and comfort the nervous mules. He let Samson Trudeau choose the stopping place, and the engagé did it expertly, on a grassy flat in a vast side-coulee where bluffs would conceal their fires and the livestock could be easily herded. The place lay higher and drier than the Yellowstone bottom, and there was not a mosquito to torment them. Men and stock would sleep well.