Rocky Mountain Company (21 page)

He heard water ahead, a soft mocking ripple, just as the horse minced down a slippery slope and stopped suddenly. They stood on a bank, but he had no idea how it dropped to the river or how deep the Bighorn ran. He cursed, and kicked the horse again. It shrieked, plunged down a black abyss and into water, almost toppling him. Fitzhugh had no idea how high it came, but it wasn’t high enough to wet his boots or bother the horse. A path, then, unless he hit a sinkhole and got dead-wet. He sawed the rein, pulling the horse to the right, into the wind, and down the river, and kicked it into a ginger walk. He heard it splash, felt it slide and slip, but each step took him toward his camp and the fire he knew had to be there — if he could see it through the snow. Ten frozen minutes later, by his reckoning, he discerned an orange glow back from the bank on his right, a glow softened by a veil of white. He turned the stupid horse toward the bank and grabbed the horn of his Santa Fe saddle, knowing what to expect. The horse gathered itself and leaped, throwing him back into the cantle, and then shook water off itself in the middle of some sort of whipping, stabbing brush that flailed the animal and Fitzhugh. A minute later he rode up to the fire and into the stare of Samson Trudeau.

“Thank God,
monsieur,”
he said. “In a few minutes I would have started hunting with a lantern. But no one knew the way — “

Another mistake, Brokenleg thought. Not telling them where he’d shot the buffalo. “Wagon’s a mile south, maybe. We’ll need a fresh yoke if you can get them. And a lantern.” He looked around the camp. Some of his men huddled near the guttering fire, sheltered by the wagonsheet tent. Others peered out of the wagon. “Maxim’s hurt. Others half froze. Lost two ox. We got three buffler.”

But big, competent Trudeau had already turned away to issue commands. Fitzhugh clambered down, almost too stiff to move, and fell into the snow when his bad leg buckled under him. He got up and limped to the fire, finding little heat in it as the wind flailed it, and more than enough smoke to sting his eyes. He wished he could squat and hold his hands to it. Around him men raced swiftly, good uncomplaining men willing to do brutal work for a pittance. He wondered what brought them here, into an utter wild. Not money, certainly. Something else.

Yoked oxen materialized out of the whirl, and men helped him back up upon his bay, while two of them bearing glassencased lanterns broke a snow trail south. He followed silently, glad that he’d made it through another final examination at the mountain college. But he didn’t deserve the passing grade.

Harried by the wind, they reached the stranded wagon in a short time. The remaining two yoke of oxen had swung eastward, trying to put their tails to the wind. The snowy hulks of the downed oxen lay where they had fallen. Meat, Fitzhugh thought, if the cold held. Or maybe Dust Devil could jerk it.

Wordlessly, Dust Devil, Guerette, Provost and Gallard clambered out of the wagon, blinking at the lantern-light in the whirl of snow.

“Maxim all right?”

“He’s not bleeding,” she said.

The answer annoyed Fitzhugh, but he said nothing. Wordlessly, the rescue party backed the fresh oxen into place and attached the tugs, while others cracked whips and yelled at the miserable animals. From behind, the rest of the engagés pushed against the Pittsburgh until it creaked forward, a reluctant monster bucking the gale. They had to keep on pushing because the oxen weren’t helping much. Fitzhugh walked his horse ahead, carrying a lantern, following the trail back and breaking it better. The wind tortured his face and hand, but it didn’t matter. In a few days it’d be mild and sunny again.

The engagés cursed and whipped the animals back to camp in a few minutes and stopped the wagon at a place where it’d soften the wind that skimmed heat off the fire and flapped the tent. Silently, the engagés unyoked the oxen and let them drift into the cottonwoods, where they’d find shelter and branches to nibble.

“We got to git the meat out,” Fitzhugh muttered to Trudeau.

The engagé eyed him sharply, dreading to ask it of the rest.

“If that heap in there freezes solid, we’ll never get it out,” Fitzhugh said.

Wearily, grunting men lifted the quarters up, and dropped them into the snow, while others dragged them into a line, each giant piece separate. They’d have to hang it all, make it wolfproof, but not tonight. As soon as they were done, they crawled into the other wagon and pulled the canvas shut.

“Maxim, lad. You can stay in a wagon where there’s no fire and no wind, or you can try the tent, where we got both. I’m thinkin’ you might try the fire, even if she mostly blows smoke at you.”

From within, he heard a soft shuffle, and then Maxim’s bundled face popped into the firelight, and he clambered out, hunching against the wind. He’d removed his tourniquet and no blood oozed from the frozen bandage. Fitzhugh threw an arm around Guy Straus’s boy and helped him toward the fire and the tent.

“I’m so cold,” Maxim said.

“Lost some blood.”

He settled the lad on the north side of the fire, in the throat of the tent, hoping the fire’s radiant heat would warm him.

“I didn’t know it snowed so soon here.”

“Equinox storm. Common in these parts. We got a fine fall comin’ to finish the post.”

“Now I’m no good to you.”

“What do ya mean, no good? I got to have a herder, lad. Dust Devil needs her a helper, too. She’ll jerk meat and you can lay it on the drying racks with your good paw.”

Behind him, Dust Devil scraped snow from the ground. “We could be in a warm lodge,” she muttered. “This no good for anybody. I’m cold.”

Maxim settled to the frozen, snow-flecked earth and drew his capote tighter around him. Fitzhugh added a blanket.

“The cold comes up from underneath,” Maxim said.

“Whitemen got no sense,” Dust Devil snapped. “Maybe I’ll go to my people. They’re plenty warm, and happy.”

Fitzhugh had heard that often enough before, and ignored it. “We got meat. Now I can help build, Maxim. I’ll mix mud and before you know it, we’ll have walls, good and tight against the wind. And a pole roof with a foot of sod over it. Big fireplaces that’ll take a six-foot log and warm you front and rear, top and bottom. And a bunk of your own.”

He dreamed warmth because he needed it himself, the way a starving man dreams of food. And because Maxim needed it, too. Cold and injury, the slow progress of the building, as well as the terrible losses of tradegoods all had taken a toll of Maxim’s spirit.

A whorl of arctic air dashed smoke into him, and he coughed. “I reckon Dust Devil’s right about a lodge, Maxim. They can be plumb warm in the winter; if the inner lining’s up and some robes and mats are on the ground, and a hot little fire burns away at the center. The Injuns got their ways.”

“I’ll never see
papa
and
maman
again,” Maxim said.

Fitzhugh leaned over awkwardly, cursing his bad leg, and found the boy’s good hand. Icy. Then he pressed a hand to Maxim’s forehead and it burned under his palm. Brokenleg peered into the night, full of foreboding.

In two days the sun returned and pummeled a foot of snow into the earth. The air had turned brisk and transparent, and the sky blackened almost to cobalt, the whiteness of summer gone for the year. The northwind died, after rotating east and finally south. But Maxim lay fevered and black-eyed in the tent, too sick for sun and sweet air, scented with sunbaked sagebrush.

Even before the storm had cleared off, Fitzhugh had put all his engagés to work cutting poles and firewood — better employment in hand-numbing weather than spreading icy mud and pressing sandstone into it. In a single day, they’d felled and trimmed a hundred twenty-two poles, and stacked them beside the rising post. And added a mountain of firewood, some of it still green, to the camp supply.

But it didn’t lift Brokenleg’s spirit any. Maxim lay fevered, buffeted by harsh weather, protected only by flimsy canvas and a reluctant fire, and not getting better. The boy stared up at Fitzhugh now and then, hollow-eyed and inert, refusing good strong buffalo broth. Dust Devil wasn’t exactly herself either; not the lively, funny, fierce Cheyenne sweetheart he’d known. She’d turned solemn and lazy, doing as little as possible, resenting Maxim in the tent.

He’d tried to cheer her up. He’d diverted the engagés from their work to skinning the buffalo quarters and hanging them wolf-safe, and some of them bear-safe, from the stoutest cottonwood limbs. But it didn’t soothe her any. She seemed plumb angry about the whole thing — the Buffalo Company, the discomforts, and especially, not hauling the whole mess of goods off to her people, who were probably down on the Powder somewhere, south and east. It didn’t seem Injun for anyone to carry on the way she did about the cold and discomfort, but he had to admit they’d made a miserable camp, and a really severe storm could kill them.

Progress slowed down dramatically during the next weeks because of the need to build scaffolding. The walls had risen as high as his men could reach from the ground. They had only rawhide to tie the scaffolding together, but it worked well enough. He needed two more men at the building site to hand up rock to the ones on the scaffold, which meant robbing the other crews. They were further slowed by the need to hew log lintels and set them across the small windows and the two doors, front and rear. Even more difficult was finding and shaping long flawless slabs of sandstone to cap the fireplaces and support the inner walls of the two chimneys. Still, he noted visible progress each day. By late October they were laying up the chimneys at either end of the long rectangle, even as the air cooled and a skim of ice lay in the water buckets each dawn.

Maxim healed slowly, but something in the lad had changed, and Fitzhugh sensed a deep melancholy in him. His hand remained bandaged and sore, so Fitzhugh had him tend stock and bring firewood to Dust Devil, and sometimes drive the oxen tugging the stoneboats. He’d plunged into a profound silence, and worse, an apathy, an uncaring, that suggested his mind drifted far away, back among the comforts of St. Louis; warmth, a soft bed, doting parents, a sister and brother, a variety of meats and greens and sweets, and clean things to wear instead of endless mud and grime and grit, and no place to bathe. The adventure begun so bravely by the sixteen-year-old had become an ordeal and a bottomless pit of loneliness. But the boy didn’t ask to go home, and Brokenleg admired him for it.

In spite of the crisp, bright fall weather, Fitzhugh wasn’t enjoying good spirits either. Problems loomed at every hand and some of them, such as getting hay put up, involved deadlines imposed by the forthcoming winter. Nothing had gone as he’d planned. He hadn’t a single robe to show for his effort, and yet the tradegoods had dwindled from theft and storage charges, and were hostage to the whim of his competitor. He’d expected to walk into old Fort Cass and shelve his goods and open for business; instead, he and his men had toiled brutally since August trying to build a tiny trading house — he couldn’t even think of a full-sized stockaded post — that still seemed to be months from completion. The engagés had slid into a skeptical silence, too. At least one of them could well be an agent of Cadet Chouteau, planted to wreak whatever havoc he could. Dust Devil wasn’t helping any either, eroding the future trade of the Crows with her fierce Cheyenne partisanship, and more recently her sullen, lazy conduct.

Fitzhugh himself mixed mud and hunted, the only things he could manage well. The nights had grown so chill that they couldn’t last much longer sleeping in canvas tents beside dying fires. He wondered if he’d been wrong to turn Dust Devil’s ideas aside. Some good lodges, with fires in their central hearths, could be keeping them warm now if they had simply driven to the Cheyenne. He worried about icy fall rains, too, the kind that could fever men and sluice away the mud mortar from the walls before it dried hard and had eaves above it to help keep water off. But the weather held: cold sunny days and lengthening icy nights.

Soon, too, he’d have to plant corral posts behind the rising building before the earth froze. Indeed, he had to complete the roof and get sod onto it before the ground froze so solid a spade would bounce off it. Each day, Maxim was forced to drive his mixed herd of horses, mules, and whatever oxen weren’t being used, farther and farther from the building, as the nearby grass gave out.

Well, a man could worry himself half to death!
he thought.
A feller could git himself into a lather and quit, like Maxim. A man could say it isn’t gonna work, none of it, and think on high-tailing back down the big river. A man could find himself a dozen excuses to give to Guy Straus.

All these things combined to attack him like an army of biting ants, making him crazy trying to figure out how to do it all, meet the most pressing deadlines, cope with ill-humored men, a homesick boy, and always, the deepening menace of bad weather to men sheltered by flapping duck cloth. But Brokenleg Fitzhugh had a stubborn streak, and he’d learned that there’s a big difference between what-ifs and the way things are. A man could what-if himself out of anything worth fighting for. All he could think to do was drive harder, roust his silent engagés earlier, work them and himself later, race against frost and a dying sun. One November day, to the astonishment of everyone, they finished their masonry. The front and rear walls rose evenly to nine feet. Fireplaces with broad chimneys rose at either end, built into the thick, low-peaked walls. Next they would work on the ridge and roof poles, cut them down, hew them to shape, and then drag them out behind three or four yokes of oxen. It would take ox-power and a lot of rope to raise them, too.

That’s when Julius Hervey struck. Fitzhugh didn’t rightly know that for certain, but what happened certainly smoked like Hervey’s fires. One bitter night, when a full moon silvered the frosted earth, some Indians hit the livestock. The engagés, buried deep under blankets and robes in the wagons, didn’t awaken until too late. And Brokenleg missed the beginning of it too, perhaps because he usually listened, through his sleep, for the whinnying of disturbed horses or the braying of mules. But the first sound of trouble was the bawling of the oxen, which roamed freely some distance from the camp. The horses and mules, in fact, had been driven into the walled rectangle and kept there with barricades at the doors.