Rocky Mountain Company (14 page)

He felt an ancient need, the communion with the Source of wonders and wisdom and courage. He felt the nakedness of his head, and wished he might find his yarmulke before he prayed, but he knew God would hear and care.

Everything happened too fast. Brokenleg scarcely had time to grasp that he could not simply move into Fort Cass and set up trade, before Hervey fell upon them, striding across the flat like a lord. The new
bourgeois
of the fort radiated power. Brokenleg had known him for years, and wished he hadn’t.

The wilderness affected men in various ways. In Julius Hervey, a life far from the restraints of law and moral authority had swiftly stripped away all inhibition until the remaining creature had become pure whimsical will, with not even a shred of the softening of civilization. His powerful hulking body had become a bully’s tool, used indiscriminately against anyone, red or white, who got crosswise of him.

Even as Brokenleg sat his ribby horse bracing himself against Hervey’s assault, he watched the man’s smoldering eyes survey his wagons with a rapacious glance, study Maxim, who sat in the first wagon looking pale and stern, eye Dust Devil, and then settle mockingly on him.

“It’s you, Fitzhugh. I’ve been expecting you.”

“Didn’t know American Fur had set up here again.”

Hervey smiled, slowly. “Run your wagons into the fort and we’ll unload,” he said.

It was a command. “I reckon we’ll go somewhere else, Julius.”

“Bring your woman, too. She’s something.”

Brokenleg realized that Hervey was already possessing her. His eyes did that. They made no distinction between seeing and owning. Hervey had made a long career of taking away the wives of engagés, usually by force, and daring them to do anything about it. Those who dared to resist he had pulverized, or murdered.

“Reckon we’ll be on our way.”

“No, you won’t. You’ll enjoy Fort Cass.”

“You heard me, Hervey.”

But Julius Hervey simply grinned. “You!” he said to Trudeau. “Drive them wagons on in and shelve the goods. American Fur’s bought them and bought you.”

Samson Trudeau stared helplessly at Fitzhugh, and Fitzhugh saw utter terror in the engagé’s eyes.

“Samson, turn the ox teams west,” Fitzhugh said quietly, far more quietly than he wanted to speak.

Julius Hervey looked amused as Trudeau fearfully began tugging at the lead yoke of oxen. Then, with a single catlike dart of his hand, he grasped Dust Devil’s bridle and began dragging her mare toward the fort.

“Come along, Fitzhugh, and I’ll give you payment. We’re short of tradegoods; didn’t expect so many Crow. Traded everything in two weeks. Waiting for resupply, but Culbertson’s short hisself.”

All the while he tugged on the mare’s bridle, while Dust Devil yanked her reins and resisted. “I’ll kill you, white dog,” she snapped.

Hervey chuckled. Fitzhugh knew he had to catch her fast, and that was just what Hervey wanted — a chance to pulverize Brokenleg.

But Dust Devil had her own notions, and leapt free of the horse, stumbling out of Hervey’s swift reach, and when she turned toward him, a lethal silvery blade projected from her fist.

“Sometime soon, Little Whirlwind. I always take what I want,” he said. “Unless Stiffleg there says yes. I don’t like gifts. A little squaw with a knife.” A moment later he was shoving Trudeau aside and grasping a lead ox by its nose.

Fitzhugh peered around unhappily. A mob of Crows was gathering, drawn by the wagons and the new traders. Most of them would side with Hervey, partly from fear, partly because he’d already traded with them. They were forming a wall around the wagons, one that would pen and frighten the oxen.

Hervey turned the ox and let go, laughing at Fitzhugh. “You’ve no choice, Brokenleg. No where to go, and all these nice gewgaws and pretties sitting there. First thing we did was burn the other posts, what was left of them. Lisa’s place, Benton down the river. You try building a post around here, and these Crow’ll be thinkin’ on that Cheyenne devil you got, and your own Cheyenne ways, and maybe they’ll skin your hide back, if I don’t do it first. Now you just git your skinny butt outa here, you and your Cheyenne woman, and leave the wagons and men. I just took ’em.”

Brokenleg wanted to say it wouldn’t work. Not even Pierre Chouteau would permit that. But Julius Hervey had ways of making it work, all of them deadly.

“I reckon you’ll have to kill me right now, Hervey, because if you don’t, you aren’t getting these here of my goods, and my woman  . . . and my men.”

His Hawken lay in its beaded sheath, and by the time he drew it, cocked the hammer, and aimed, Hervey would have pulled him off his horse, but he had a Bowie at his belt. He chose that, and with a sudden blur his hand held it and his arm poised to throw it. He reckoned he could plant it in Hervey’s gut without any fuss.

Hervey paused and laughed. “Now, that ain’t sociable, old Stiffleg.” The threat of a poised knife, held by a master, didn’t seem to faze the man.

“Hervey. You steal my tradegoods and I’ll kill you. You touch my woman and I’ll kill you if she don’t. You wreck my fort or kill my men, and you won’t see daylight. You whip up these tribes against me, Hervey, and it won’t be me that’ll feel it, but you — and your American Fur.” He felt a roughness in his throat that he’d forgotten lay inside of him, all those months in St. Louis. He’d become a wilderness child too, with more years of it behind him than Hervey. Some wild joy blossomed inside of him as he watched Hervey’s alert embered eyes shadow and the faint wings of death feather across Hervey’s square face.

“I never forget,” said Hervey. “A man makes a threat on me, and I figure I’ve got a right to do what I must. Even if it takes a year or two.”

“I’m making a threat.”

“And here I was going to break out your trade whiskey and have us a party tonight, with a squaw for everyone.” Hervey still mocked, as fearless as any man on earth.

“After stealing all I got.”

“Not just you, Stiffleg. It belongs to Guy Straus and Jamie Dance, too — remember?”

Fitzhugh didn’t answer. Instead he stared relentlessly at Hervey, his knife hand poised and ready. “Trudeau,” he said softly, not taking his eyes from Hervey, “turn the oxen. We’re going up the Bighorn a piece.”

“Better make it a big piece,” Hervey said. “All the way back to St. Louis. I’d hate to see anything happen to Straus’s boy there. Dumb thing for the man to do, send his boy out to get hisself scalped.” He beckoned at Maxim. “You. I heard you was coming up the river. You better get into the fort there where you’re safe, and then we’ll get you back down to your pappy.”

Maxim hesitated, subdued by the sheer force of this strange, menacing man. “I’ll go with Mister Fitzhugh. I think I can help him.”

“It’s your scalp, kid.”

Maxim peered back grimly.

“That reminds me, Hervey. You lay a hand on him, you set Injuns on him, you steal from me, you do that and you better watch your back every second of every hour because you’re not worth coming at from the front. Out here, I don’t pay no attention to things, just like you don’t. Just as soon stick a man so he feels a blade slice his kidneys afore he knows who stuck him.”

Hervey didn’t laugh that time, but subsided into a feral watchfulness. Fitzhugh judged he’d made his point and it was time to go.

“Git,” he snapped to Trudeau, never taking his gaze from Hervey.

Behind him he heard the curses of the teamsters, the crack of whips, the bawling and slobbering of oxen, and finally the heavy rumble of the Pittsburghs, threading between silent ranks of Crow people who stood solemnly after watching the confrontation. But Fitzhugh didn’t move, and sat mean-eyed on his restless bay, his bad leg jutting right at Hervey, like a sort of lance, his knife feeling sweaty and good and hard in his knotted hand, and the muscles of his fore and upper arm, his shoulder, his back and the cords that stretched down upon his chest ready to explode.

Hervey had stopped smirking, stopped doing anything except staring at that arm, that glinting blade, and the murder written in Fitzhugh’s relentless eyes. Nothing changed. The afternoon sun had stopped, along with the breeze. The flags on Fort Cass lay limp. Several hundred Crows stood frozen, like a waxworks display. The smell of rank green cowpies lifted to him from the place where the oxen had stood. But Fitzhugh waited, listening to the distant rumble of the wagons, putting distance between his party and Fort Cass. When he couldn’t hear them any more, and only the songs of meadowlarks filtered to his ears, he slid the nose of his horse to the south and touched his moccasins to its ribs.

He walked his nervous pony through the crowd, and then past hollow silent lodges, some with medicine tripods before them bearing Cheyenne scalps. And finally out upon a meadow, stripped to dust by Crow ponies, and at last out to a virgin valley, thick with cottonwood, much narrower than the miles-wide trench of the Yellowstone, but formidable in its own right. Before him the silvery Bighorn rose ever southward toward a place where it pierced through a vaulting yellow canyon. But he wouldn’t go that far. He’d build his fort on the east bank of the river, close to good trails used by the Sioux and Cheyenne, trails that led down the east flank of the Bighorn Mountains into some of the best game and buffalo country on the continent. He’d find a grassy park near the river, protected by high cliffs, with abundant cottonwoods for building his post and for fuel, and for winter horsefeed. It would be a sunny place, he knew, bright and clear skied, and well away from the blackness at Fort Cass.

Dust Devil knew exactly where the new post should be. Only three sleeps to the south, up the Bighorn, lay a broad sunny bottomland where the Little Bighorn flowed into the Bighorn. It was not far from the mountains, and thick with game, and a favorite haunt of buffalo. And it had always been a place favored by her people when they wandered north in the summers to hunt. All this she explained to her man.

“I’ll ride ahead and find the People and bring them there to trade and protect us,” she said to Brokenleg, after they’d put Fort Cass behind them.

“Too far from the Yellerstone, Dust Devil.”

“But it’s where my people come — “

“We got to think of supply, of gitting the robes out and down the river. Of staying close to the steamboats.”

“Close to Fort Cass? And all those dogs?”

“That’s how she’s got to be. I’ve got to send the wagons back at least once just to get the rest of our truck. Build a post here and then steal Hervey’s trade, right under his nose.”

“But — that Julius Hervey will murder you. And those Absaroka dogs. I couldn’t stand them. I will have a sweat to take the stink of them out of my nose. They’re nothing — they’re cowards and liars and their women are unfaithful.”

“Hope to trade with ’em, Dust Devil. They got good robes.”

“Not as good as the People. And they’re enemies.”

“I reckon we’ll fort up on the next good flat. I want three, four miles between us and old Hervey anyways, but no more’n that. In fact, we’re coming on a likely spot by my calculations.”

The news amazed her. They’d come only a little way from Cass, and she could smell them all behind her, the stinking Crows, the stinking engagés. They all stank, including Brokenleg. Not a one smelled as fresh and fragrant as her people, who smelled as sweet as sagebrush and new-tanned leather, and juniper smoke.

“But — my people won’t come here. Next to these filthy Absaroka. The Dakota won’t come either.”

“Just about every trading post I seen, they get along good enough, leastwise around the place.”

“You like them more than the Tsistsistas. More than me. More than my clan and my mother’s clan and my grandmother’s clan. More than the Suhtai.”

For an answer he grinned, and steered his bay closer to her mare. “Reckon yer an idjit,” he said.

She hated that, the way he always made light of her, as if she were a child he was addressing. Whitemen did that with women of the people, a sort of unconscious condescension. With him it didn’t seem to matter that she came from an important family that tended the sacred medicine hat, Issiwun, in its special lodge on the south side of the village circle. And even if he made fun of the Tsistsistas, he shouldn’t make fun of her Suhtai, who were a sacred people who joined the Omissis band and others not long ago to guide them and share the greater medicine of the Suhtai. Brokenleg was nothing but a smelly barbarian, and she didn’t know why she put up with him. Maybe he would divorce her, but it’d cause a scandal and her people would turn their faces from him because marriage was a sacred thing. Maybe that would be good! Then the Tsistsistas would know about the whitemen and all their evil ways — worse than the lecherous Crows — and all the things she saw in St. Louis with her own eyes. So many whitemen. Like the leaves on a cottonwood. And how they all smelled. Oh, she would need ten sweats with sweetgrass and sage smoke to cleanse herself of St. Louis and the riverboat!

“You smell bad,” she said primly.

“Not as bad as Julius Hervey,” he said, his face sober.

They’d reached a broad meadow around an oxbow, a place where sandstone bluffs would stay the northwind and catch the winter sun; a stretch of level ground flanked by massed cottonwoods to the south, and west along the riverbank. All the signs announced that it had been a favorite camping site of countless villages of various tribes for generations. Teepee rings filled the meadow, and here and there ancient firepits still held charred sticks and ash. The cliffs tamed the wind, and subdued the winter, and caught the snow to make the good grass in the spring.

She knew what he was thinking, and hated it. If they went a few sleeps more, they would be close to her people.

“I reckon if I have to choose a place for a new fort in a hurry, hyar it is about as god as it’s gittin’.”

She said nothing, glaring at him with disdain.

“We’re four miles from Cass, I reckon. Two, three miles up the Bighorn. Lotsa meadow and water. Cottonwoods for building and burning and feed. Loose rock all over them bluffs, yeller sandstone to build us some chimneys — I didn’t figure on building a fort, and didn’t bring a stove, Dust Devil. This hyar earth looks pretty soft — like we can scratch up a garden for some greens. And this hyar’s one of the most traveled traces around — everything from buffler to — “