Rocky Mountain Company (41 page)

He tugged the winter-stiff lines, and the mismatched team halted before the post. Men smiled, but he knew they wouldn’t when they saw the first item to be lifted out of the wagon.

“White Wolf,” he yelled in Cheyenne. “Much more is coming and I got to drive back. You come along, and we’ll talk.”

The chief nodded.

Fitzhugh eased to the ground, stomped life into his aching limb, and unhitched the team. He led it to the sagging, snowfilled wagons a way back, and hooked up. Maxim followed, wonder in his face.

“I’m heading back to Cass, lad, for the next. You want to come along and hear it direct? Or would you prefer to oversee the shelving here? You’ll clerk, so I guess you’d better shelve and keep an inventory. Trudeau’ll tell you what’s to tell.”

“You — talked Hervey into giving up — “

“Didn’t talk, exactly. Made some cutting remarks with a butcher knife.”

The remark plainly upset Maxim. “You killed him!”

“No, just carved on his mitts.”

That mollified Maxim a little. “Will we have everything back?”

“Naw, not everything. But enough. Lost — lost precious things. Monsieur Trudeau, he’ll tell you that. And Bercier, he’ll tell it too.”

Maxim smiled softly. Fitzhugh swung up on a wheel, brushed snow from the plank seat, and settled down on it, cursing the cold. Then he hawed the team, which jerked the wagon hard to free wheels frozen to earth. The Pittsburgh lurched and its icy wheels protested noisily as Fitzhugh guided it toward the post to pick up a few seat robes, and White Wolf.

“Well, boy,” Fitzhugh said to the youth walking the frozen snow below. “We’ll be tradin’ tomorrow, I reckon.”

All night Fitzhugh drove men and mules to exhaustion, shuttling the wagon between Fort Cass and his own post. He had pried open the jaws of Cass, and wouldn’t quit until he had extracted his entire outfit. The Cass engagés watched, amazed, as the wagon drew up before the warehouse time and time again, as the moon shot its long arc across the whited dark.

At dawn, Fitzhugh’s exhausted men loaded the last of the outfit stored at Cass into the wagon. It came to half a load, which suited Fitzhugh just fine. He wasn’t sure the drays could pull more than that, and it left room for his men, and Dust Devil.

Isodoro Sandoval, in turn, worked through the night with his own engagés repairing the chaos in the Cass trading room. Some tradecloth and blankets had been ruined; but mostly his task involved restoring order. All this they did under the watchful eye of Spoon and Constable, who hovered over Dust Devil like guardian angels.

On that first trip back, late in the afternoon, Fitzhugh had explained events to Chief White Wolf as best he could in his broken Cheyenne, and the chief listened solemnly.

“I want your trade, but a post has got to be neutral or else it becomes a target of your enemies. I don’t want to donate my scalp to some Blackfeet or Crow,” he said. “You could trade at Fort Cass, with American Fur, I reckon. But if I don’t get enough trade, and have to quit, they’ll fold up Fort Cass. They opened it again because we’re here. If that happens your people will be a long way from any post again; you will have to go clear down to Laramie, or up to Union, or east to Pierre. That’s a long way from Bear Butte, where Sweet Medicine received the Sacred Arrows.”

The chief had said nothing for a long time, and then: “Did you put away Little Whirlwind?”

“I did and took her back if she’ll have me.”

“That is good,” the chief had said.

They’d loaded up the wagon in the gathering gloom and started back without delay. At Cass, Fitzhugh had been pleased to show the chief the mountain of tradegoods still to be transferred to his own post. White Wolf had studied it, studied what was in Cass’s trading room, not missing a thing.

“Tomorrow we will open our trading season,” he had said. “I’ll want some ponies as well as robes. What do you reckon the osage orange bow wood’s worth to your people?”

“They are only sticks. Good wood for bows, but sticks. Ten for a horse; five for a robe. We have all agreed not to take these sticks for less. They are not yet good, supple bows that will put an arrow into the buffalo, or into our enemies.”

Fitzhugh had mulled that quietly, and decided to do it — for now. He needed horses. Later he’d ask more for a stick of the best bow wood these people could get, brought two thousand miles.

Now, as dawn bleached the sky, he felt so tired he wondered if he should delay trading a day. His men were asleep on their feet. And he had to move Dust Devil, too. That frightened him. She lay weak and unsmiling and death-haunted.

He hawed the weary steaming drays from the warehouse to the trading room, and clambered down stiffly, ignoring pain and cold. Inside, he found Isodoro snoozing, and he shook him awake.

“Isodoro. We got it all now.”

Sandoval yawned. “You work like madmen.”

“It’s Hervey. Old Julius is back there in his room, plotting still, and thinkin’ about his butchered hands and wantin’ to do murder on me. I reckoned I’d git while the gitting is good. You want to sign this hyar release paper now?”

He shoved a manifest of the goods removed from Cass that night before Sandoval. The man hesitated.

“Does this say what you’re taking out of the trading room here?”

“No. I been thinkin’ all night, Isodoro. If I help myself to your goods, they ain’t going to understand it back in Saint Louis — neither Cadet Chouteau nor my partners. It’ll just look like more thievin’ back there, only with me doin’ it. Hervey, he stole me blind — we got that on paper, the inventories — and the company slipped Gallard into my outfit and he cost me about three hundred trade blankets. I thought to help myself hyar, all this stuff, and you owin’ me, but I don’t think so. We’ll lay it before American Fur in court back there. I got the papers. All I’ll do for now is take five, six blankets to keep Dust Devil plenty warm going back. I figure you got no cause to argue that.”

Sandoval looked relieved. He dipped a quill pen into the inkpot they’d been using, and scratched out his name on the final inventory. “I hope I don’t get into trouble with this,” he said dourly.

“If you do, I’ll put you on at my post, Isodoro.”

The man shook his head. “I always am with the powerful company.”

“I reckon you can send a man to pick up your draft horse later. I’m opening trade, and we’re going to be busy.”

“This afternoon,” Isodoro said. “We are tired, too.”

Fitzhugh turned to Constable. “You boys ready to go?”

“Got our outfit parked at the door,” Zach replied.

“Help me, then.”

He eased clumsily down to his wife, cursing his bad leg. She lay under a mound of blankets near the fire, just as she had for a full day now. He couldn’t tell, from the blankness of her face, how she felt about any of this. “You ready to go on home, Dust Devil?”

“I am Little Whirlwind of the Suhtai,” she whispered.

It tickled him. As full of feist as ever. “I reckon that’s what you are. And I’m glad to call you my woman.”

She smiled faintly, the first time.

They carried her gently to the wagon, and lowered her into the place reserved for her at the front of the box, and tucked the blankets about her. He knew the temperature wasn’t much above zero, and he worried about it. Around him, his four remaining engagés gathered their rifles and kits, and clambered into the wagon behind Dust Devil. Spoon and Constable climbed onto their horses and grabbed the lines of their packhorses.

Fitzhugh hawed the weary mules and the dray belonging to this American Fur Company post, and they lumbered slowly toward the yawning gates, their breaths pluming the air. Around the caravan, the fort’s own engagés lounged and watched, ignoring the terrible cold. Fitzhugh drove slowly through the gates, the teeth and jaws of the Opposition, out upon a free land, and when they’d all cleared Fort Cass, he turned back to stare at Julius Hervey’s fort, which had hurt and bled them so much. The gates creaked shut behind them, and he heard the mean clank of the iron bolt sealing them out. But this time it didn’t matter. He’d left a whipped and conniving engagé behind, and had taken a loyal one’s body out, along with about four-fifths of the outfit they’d brought up the river. And Little Whirlwind. They owed him more, he thought bitterly. A lot more.

He couldn’t hurry the exhausted drays, as much as he wanted to because of Dust Devil, but by the time the sun rode the eastern ridge of the Bighorn valley, he pulled up before the new post of Dance, Fitzhugh and Straus, feeling a strange joy. They’d shelve this last load, and open trade at noon, a day late, January 2, 1842.

They carried Dust Devil in first, and laid her on a pallet of blankets near the barracks fireplace. Tomorrow, he thought, he’d string up the wagonsheeting into a sort of private place for himself and his woman. Their own apartment had yet to be partitioned off. His men began unloading and shelving, leaving them beside the fire, along with many of the Cheyenne, who waited patiently for the opening of trade. About thirty of them sat quietly, watching Fitzhugh and Dust Devil.

“I reckon this is your home now, Dust Devil.”

“Do you want me, Fitzhugh?”

“More’n ever.”

“My people are here. It is good.”

“We’ll start tradin’ in a few hours. We’ll give ’em a big howdoo, because they come so far to trade in the middle of the winter. And because you’re one of ’em and my woman.”

“I had no name. No medicine.”

“You figure sittin’ yourself under a nesting tree full of crow-birds isn’t medicine?”

“It is medicine. Will you call me Little Whirlwind? Devil in your tongue is an under-earth spirit, and bad.”

“I will, if you remind me when I forget.”

“I need a name. If I take a new name, then what they did to me at Fort Cass — it won’t matter so much, will it?”

“How about Missus Fitzhugh?”

She smiled again, and slid a hand from under the blankets to clasp his own.

Maxim watched dumfounded as weary engagés shelved the treasure snatched from Fort Cass. The forlorn trading room, symbol of all their defeats, had been transformed through the night by sleepless men, while Maxim himself kept inventory, checking each item against his endless lists. He’d never dreamed this would happen, and had let hope slide from him these last weeks. He felt ashamed of that now, ashamed that he’d lacked the faith that Brokenleg Fitzhugh had. He fought sleep desperately, feeling his responsibility to make sure everything had been done right; that nothing had been damaged. Fitzhugh appeared now and then in the long night with a new wagonload, and paused only to eye the progress of the shelving, done in the wavering orange light of the fire. And then he’d leave, braving the night once again.

Now, at dawn, men Maxim thought had defected were pulling the last of the goods from the Pittsburgh wagon and staggering in with barrels of sugar, sacks of coffee beans, crates of rifles, pasteboard boxes filled with mysterious things. Others, under the experienced Trudeau, laid these things up on shelves and roughhewn tables, until the room bulged with them: hoop iron, blue beads, boxes of tortoiseshell combs, packets of vermilion, hundreds of awls, cartons of oval fire steels, bags of flints, boxes of percussion caps, trays of Wilson Sheffield knives, bolts of bright tradecloth, scarlet and blue green; bolts of patterned calico and gingham. Bolts of unbleached linen sheeting. Double bit and single bit axes, assorted hatchets, rolls of copper wire, brass kettles heaped into nesting piles, iron skillets and pots, dutch ovens, strings of hawk bells, packets of needles, colored cotton threads, mirrors galore in every size, and even a few Witney blankets, mostly three-point white ones with black bands at either end, ones used to cover Dust Devil when they brought her. And when the trading room burst with goods, and glowed with a thousand shafts of light wrought by the cheerful fire at its far end, the engagés removed the rest to the warehouse just behind, and burned cartons and crates in the fire.

Could it be? he wondered. Would they succeed in spite of everything? With dawnlight softly penetrating the rawhide windows, Fitzhugh came into the room to supervise the last of it. He looked hollow-eyed and feverish, Maxim thought; even more worn down with responsibility and his unending leg-pain than the rest. He spoke with a rasp, from an injured throat, barking at men, fingering goods and staring at them, his gaze as unbelieving as Maxim’s own.

“You checkin’ this off, boy?”

Maxim nodded. “We lost a lot.”

“We got a profit here if we fetch the trade. Losses are kinda built into it.”

“Built in?”

“Yes, boy. An outfit hardly operates up hyar without addin’ in a loss factor to the prices. These things, they’ll fetch, five, six, eight times what we gave for them in Saint Louis. But a lot of that’s transportation, and we got wages and all the rest.”

“Did my
papa
know that?”

“Course, Maxim. He knows the business almost as well as old Cadet Chouteau himself.”

Suddenly they were done: a whole store lay before his eyes, transplanted two thousand miles and dropped into a wilderness building where nothing had stood only a few weeks before. They stared at one another, engagés, Maxim, Fitzhugh, and several Cheyenne headmen who’d observed it all. Maxim could scarcely believe it, and some wild pride inflated him, driving his weariness away.

“We’ll open the shutters at noon,” was all Fitzhugh said.

The men stood expectantly, and Trudeau became their spokesman. “Monsieur Fitzhugh, we have a sad duty now,
oui?”

Fitzhugh sighed. “We’ll do it,” he said.

Every engagé present, along with Abner Spoon and Zach Constable, and the whole contingent of Cheyenne as well, trooped into the cold warehouse where Lemaitre’s shrouded body lay. The engagés collected axes. Maxim pulled his capote over his woolen shirt, and followed them.

Gently they lifted the body and carried it out of the rear door of the post, toward the river, toward a site they seemed to have selected near the edge of the meadow, where cottonwoods grew rank. They stopped there, a couple hundred yards south of the post, and swiftly hacked limbs, turning them into thick logs which they placed around the shrouded body. They couldn’t cut into the frozen earth, so they would build a log grave for him for now, and bury him when the sun warmed the earth. Tenderly they fitted the hewn logs together so tightly no coyote or wolf could disturb what lay within, and then weighted it all down with stray rock they pried from frozen earth.