Rocky Mountain Company (23 page)

“My dear Straus,” said Chouteau effervescently. The man approached amiably, patting Guy’s shoulder and arm. Chouteau was a patter and toucher, and Guy supposed it was a form of ownership rather than some sort of affection. “We’ll have tea, unless you’d prefer something else?”

“Tea,” Guy said, handing his cape to a waiting poxscarred clerk. Another flunkey had already appeared with a silver tray bearing a steaming teapot and china cups and saucers.

“Come tell me your news. I’ve scarcely seen you since you went into opposition. How I miss your services, Guy.”

“I have very little,” Guy said, taking a cup. “Letters from my sons.”

“Ah, the waiting! It’s unbearable. But my people send down a winter express, and I’ll get a report early in the year. And of course I send back my instructions.”

Guy smiles and sipped delicately.

“Ah, Guy, what a pity you plunged in just now, and half-capitalized. There’s a glut of robes. Ramsey Crooks can’t sell his, and neither can I. We tried the Germans but they want sheep. Prices barely holding — forty-eight dollars for a twelve-bale in New York, eleven winter and one summer robe. Crooks and I are holding some back to keep the price up. I fear your returns will fetch less and drive the prices down.”

“I’m looking into it. I’ve approached General Clark about turning some into greatcoats for the army, and bedrolls. Maybe ambulance robes.”

Pierre Chouteau looked amused. “Good for a few hundred at best. No, carriage robes are it. But tell me, how goes your enterprise?”

“I wish I knew!”

Chouteau paused, amiably. Then, “I hear you lost all your blankets. From LaBarge’s boat.”

It didn’t surprise Guy that Chouteau knew it. The Chouteau company made it its business to know everything. “Perhaps you can give me some clues, Pierre,” he said softly.

“Ah, a bad business. Blankets are at the center of it. They must have their blankets. Good warm Witneys, white so they can steal horses without being seen. We trade mostly the white, Guy. A few indigo, an occasional scarlet. And greens are coming up a little. We’ve some warehoused, and I’d sell you a hundred or so, a small profit. It’s quite a wait when you order from Early.”

“I’ve already ordered next year’s.”

“Ah, if there is a next year. But that’s a tragedy indeed. Why, if some lackey stole ours, I’d have him flogged and brought down the river for justice. You must be wondering about your engagés.”

Guy smiled and said nothing.

“A mean business. I’ve alerted my traders. If any show up for sale, they’re to hold the man. A common thief. And of course, not shelve a one. I suppose you’re stocking the same ones as we are, though. Hard to tell them apart. Did you put a label on?”

Guy decided not to answer that. “It’s good of you to instruct your traders to keep an eye out. But I gather from LaBarge that they’re probably skimming the bottom of the river.”

“A bad business,” Chouteau said, but his face said otherwise. “You’ll lose trade to us, except maybe the Cheyennes. We haven’t Dust Devil to help us with them. Oh, a lovely lady, she is. Stirs the juices of a man. Culbertson wrote me she’s a bit of a partisan, you know. Offending the Crows up at Fort Union. But that’s no loss for you, I imagine.”

Guy waited expectantly, because Chouteau was about to boast again. “Oh, it’s a loss,” he said slowly.

“Ah, Straus, we locked up the Crows before Fitzhugh got there. Cass, you know. We should have burned it. We always do when we abandon a place. But we didn’t, and now we’re back in, and doing a business. No one’s traded much with the mountain bands for several years. Some of the river Crow came in to Fort Union, of course. I put Hervey there and sent him an outfit on the
Trapper
.”

Fort Cass, Guy thought, alarmed. They’d known where Brokenleg was heading, known our plans, and reopened the old post. And with Julius Hervey running it. Something sagged in him. “Hervey’s an able trader,” he said quietly.

“Oh yes, one of the best. A bit headstrong some times, and given to madness when he’s taking spirits. But a fine man.”

And a murderer, Guy thought, suddenly worried. Maxim, Brokenleg, Trudeau and the rest. A slaver, too. Stories had drifted down the long Missouri of the women he stole, kept and sold.

“You’ll do well with the Cheyenne, I imagine,” Chouteau continued cheerfully. “Fitzhugh’s got a ticket there I wish we had. He’s probably setting up his store on the Tongue or the Powder somewhere, or maybe they’ve headed for the Black Hills country. My, how fortunate you are to have Dust Devil. We have Natawista Culbertson, of course, and with her, the Blackfeet.”

Guy returned the pleasantry. “If I know Fitzhugh, he’ll be right there on the Bighorn now,” he said. “Building a post.”

Chouteau’s eyes were merry. “Well, now, how are you progressing against the Bents? Is Dance set up? Now down there, it’s the opposite, with Charles Bent’s wife a Cheyenne. But Dance’s wife is Mexican, isn’t she? A good help for getting a license in Santa Fe.”

Guy shrugged. “No word as yet,” he said. “A letter from David en route, delivered by eastbound trades.”

“I must say, Guy, Dance, Fitzhugh and Straus is a strange outfit, going against us in the north and the Bents down there. Why didn’t you slide in between, on the Platte, and try the Arapaho and Utes?”

“My partners like to bloody noses,” Guy said, ambiguously.

“Theirs or ours?” Chouteau smiled and sipped.

They talked a while more, but Guy learned nothing. And what he did learn alarmed him: Chouteau back in Cass, and Hervey the trader there! Fitzhugh scarcely had men or tools to build a new post, and lacked furnishings for it. Where was he? What would he need? Would Brokenleg need supplies by packtrain?

“Ah, my
cher ami
Straus, come again, come again. I enjoyed our visit,” Chouteau said, as his minions materialized from somewhere, bearing Guy’s cape and gathering teacups.

A moment later Guy stood on the doorstep, peering across the bleak Father of Waters, noting the iron-gray sky — did the sun never touch St. Louis? — and began his journey home, a chill on his face and in his soul. Maxim there, and Julius Hervey prowling. Hervey sober was one of the best men to go up the river; Hervey drunk didn’t know good from evil. No blankets, no fort. Dust Devil alienating every tribe except her own. Had he been mad to listen to his young partners? A fatal moment of weakness?

He found Yvonne in their bedroom, being fitted by Mme. Ledoux, her dressmaker. Her camisole popped out from opened seams of a water-shot green silk dress.

“Guy! I’m getting plump.”

“You’re beautiful.”

She sighed. “My looking glass doesn’t flatter the way you do.”

Mme. Ledoux curtsied and excused herself.

“No, stay. Finish it up, madame. What did you learn from Pierre,
cher?”

Guy peered out of their window, across the black rooftops of the bustling city to the Mississippi running a gray streak across the east. Several packets bobbed at the levee, their chimneys spiking the clouds. This was the city of the west; it pulsed with the trade of the west, up the Missouri, out to Santa Fe. The west had been his income and his father’s before him. His plunge into a robe venture had been as natural to him as the fur talk at the Planters House, something entirely known and understood, every risk and every possibility. Almost.

“Our northern outfit’s in trouble,” he began, reluctant to worry her. But he hadn’t kept secrets, and her pessimism had often been a valuable anodyne.

She sighed, but didn’t tell him she had known it all along. He felt grateful for that. “What did he say?” she asked, her gaze settling on him.

“He said there’s a surplus of robes, and he and Ramsey Crooks are holding some back to keep prices up.”

“Ow!” she cried, glaring at Mme. Ledoux, who cowered back like a whipped puppy.

“He’s put Cass back into trade, and put Julius Hervey there.”

She remained silent, and he admired her for it. Yvonne had developed qualities of character over the long years that made her more endearing than when he’d met her. But he knew her mind whirled with disasters, and Maxim was among them. “I hope I can pay Mme. Ledoux,” she said.

“He had a full report on Dust Devil’s conduct,” Guy added.

Yvonne snorted unkindly. She was always less kind to women. “I could have told you,” she said, succumbing at last.

Guy smiled faintly.

“What are you going to do?”

“Go up there, I think. I’m not sure yet. I would have to leave my business for months. But I need to know what Brokenleg’s doing, whether there’s a post, whether he’s got robes, whether I should cancel next year’s orders. How much I’ve lost. Whether Maxim’s safe.”

“Will you ever come home?”

He didn’t reply. “I’m not sure what I could accomplish up there,” he said at last. “Maybe I should have a talk with Robert Campbell. Cadet toys with us. I feel like a marionette. Like a fly he’s brushing off.”

He had the sensation that the whole west, clear to Mexico, clear to the British possessions, belonged to Cadet Chouteau; that the lord of St. Louis was lord as well of a domain beyond the grasp of the human mind — and that he knew of every sparrow that fell within it.

The thing had to be settled. Either he’d see the next sunset, or Hervey would, but not both. Brokenleg didn’t know what he would do or how he’d do it. He limped north through the night, letting starlight guide him, cradling his Hawken. He had that and his throwing knife. His leg ached. He’d rarely put four miles on it since it’d been wrecked, and even the half mile he’d come had tortured it, building sharp pain at his hip and in his ankle as well. Walking humbled him, and only his smoldering anger propelled him onward.

He turned over the possibilities as he walked, so absorbed that he didn’t feel the frost nipping his cheeks and piercing through his elkskin jacket. It’d been Hervey’s work all right. The usual horse-stealing party wouldn’t have bothered to slaughter the oxen. Tribesmen didn’t care about oxen, but they cared plenty about horses, and the squaws loved mules to pull their travois. These Crow had been paid to do it, probably with the very tradegoods Fitzhugh was storing at the fort. That’d be a typical Hervey stunt, he thought. Hervey’s mind ran that direction, finding amusement in it. And Julius Hervey would be expecting him and would be ready. In fact, one devilish thing about Hervey was that he knew exactly how people reacted to anything he did. He always knew who wanted to kill him and why, and the knowledge had been fatal to several men.

Brokenleg realized he probably was marching to his own slaughter, just the way others had, in a rage. It didn’t matter. When his leg began torturing him, he found a boulder and sat down, studying the streak of gray perched on the eastern bluffs. He’d arrive at Cass in full daylight. If he survived, he didn’t know how he’d walk back. Maybe he’d ride back, he thought. Cass had a few horses. As few as possible. At most posts, horses were a luxury. It was so difficult to lay up fodder for them, winter them, keep them from being stolen, that no post could manage more than a few. It meant cutting wild hay some place far from the post because the grasses closer in were all eaten down by the herds of the tribal villages that had come in to trade. Hauling oats up the river was equally tedious and expensive. Even so, most posts had a couple of absolutely essential saddle horses, and a team or two of draft animals for a wagon or plow.

After he’d killed Hervey he’d commandeer one to carry him back. Preferably a draft horse they could use to drag roof beams. But first things first, and his business was murder. He stood, stomped on his bum leg until he felt savage pain lance through, and knew it to be alive and taking him on his death-trip. Pain felt right, and he welcomed it. The sheer hurt kept his mood vicious and his mind as keen as a butcher knife. Then he limped north and east again, in a quickening blue light that turned obscure shadows into trees and slopes.

The Hawken felt good, a trusted friend he loved more than Dust Devil. The throwing knife, sheathed at his waist, felt lithe and ready. It would be one of these: with his bum leg he would be no match for Hervey in a brawl. He didn’t ask himself why he walked, or whether it was right. He knew. He didn’t ask whether he had proper proof that Hervey had set the Crows upon him. He knew. And if he was wrong, he still knew. It made no difference whether he was right or wrong. Let lawyers debate such things. He’d worry about it after Julius Hervey lay cold on the bloody earth — if he worried about it at all.

At length he raised Fort Cass, glowing in a low sun that gilded the Yellowstone River gold. and blazoned the bluffs on the far side of the river. Everything had turned to gold. Only three lodges, Crow he thought, were pitched nearby. Nothing moved. Life at a fur post did not begin at dawn. All the better, he thought. He paused, letting his leg-pain sandpaper all his body until everything hurt, his calves and chest and biceps and neck, all of it enraging him like a picadored bull. He peered about, hoping to find some hobbled or picketed horses, or a milch cow or two, but he spotted none. They’d been run into the fort for the night and would soon be driven out to a distant pasture by a herdsman. He felt disappointed, for it had been in his mind to shoot them all, one by one.

A peculiar light caught the silvered cottonwood palisades and plated them gold, until the east side of the fort looked like it had been erected of precious metal. He paused, just within effective rifle range, and lifted his Hawken, aiming at the heavy double doors. Then he squeezed, and the hammer clapped the cap, and the rifle jammed into his shoulder, spewing blue smoke and a fine boom. He could not tell where the ball had smacked the shadowed gate. He set the Hawken on its crescent butt and opened his powderhorn, pouring a practiced handful into his palm and then down the barrel. He rarely used his measure. He was more interested in watching the fort than in his familiar labor. He saw no movement. He dug in his possibles bag, ignoring the contents of his patchbox, and found a soft patch and a ball, and jammed them into the muzzle, driving them home with the hickory rod that fit under the rusted octagonal barrel. Then he checked the nipple for fouling, and slid a fresh cap over it.