The High Missouri (24 page)

“Then,”
he announced, “Lemieux have the clever, the quick, the crafty idea. Listen now most careful, and you agree with Lemieux.”

Dylan insisted on committing the crucial act himself, and it was damned awkward.

He sent Lemieux to see the Lords and Ladies that day. The fellow used the pretext of maybe wanting a job. The Nor’West Company fort was going to fold up, he claimed to Courtney, because the young Monsieur Davies didn’t know how to run things. Lemieux needed a job—he had his wife to support,
non
? To show his heart was in the right place, he even did a little trading with the Lords and Ladies. He gave two good winter plews for some lead and powder, permitting himself to be exploited. During the interview with Courtney he exaggerated his tics and mannerisms to a parody of himself. And he deliberately filled the room with flatulence. When Courtney rolled his eyes and even opened the window and door, Lemieux found it convenient to overcome the fresh air with more gas.

Courtney said he didn’t really have an opening now, but yes, surely, a man like Lemieux was truly valuable, so he’d see if he could create a position and would let Lemieux know tomorrow. He waved his hands in front of his nose and struggled to keep a polite face.

Yes, Lemieux was easily granted permission to visit Jack in the stink hole. Yes, he told Dylan, Jack was truly there. Oh, what a sad sight, he wailed, our leader in the sheet house. Jack was shackled to the wall, hands and feet. His hair was wild, his face gaunt, his demeanor crazy. Lemieux thought he was becoming truly Mad Jack. Which was, after all, perhaps his destiny.
L’avenir le dira
— whatever will be, will be.

Of course, as Dylan ordered, Lemieux had not told him of tonight’s rescue. Jack was to be as surprised as the Lords and Ladies. So Lemieux merely comforted the fellow a little, and gave him some pemmican with berries to keep off scurvy. Jack seemed so pathetic that Lemieux embraced him, even stroked his poor head, and told him falsely that Captain Chick was sending help.

Dylan was not to worry. When they went into the privy in the dark, Jack wouldn’t even respond, but would just think someone else was coming in to give offense with his bowels.

When Lemieux left Jack, of course, he remembered to leave the new powder, plus his own powder horn, and Dylan’s. They were hanging from one of the roof joists in the left-hand corner highest away from Jack.

Dylan looked at himself in the full-length mirror in the trade room. He was surprised how much he liked the cut of his own jib in breechcloth and leggings. And the feel of the leather shirt on his skin was good. The whole thing was damn good. It wasn’t even the look or the feel of Piegan dress he liked—it was the element of shape-shifting. You had to get used to that in this lunatic wilderness, he told himself. He changed stances in the mirror. He smiled at himself. He wiggled. He and the Balmat gave each other conspiratorial grins.

Now Dylan stripped off the clothes and went to work on his face, hands, and forearms. This was even more fun. Lemieux had brought some of the brown dye Indians used for face paint, for the two whites to disguise their skin. Dylan worked it well into his face and all the way up to his elbows. They needed to darken themselves thoroughly—they’d be walking into the fort in broad daylight. Dark skins for dark deeds.

Dylan studied his face in a hand mirror. Nut brown looked good on him, but it made conspicuous lines on his eye-to-ear scars. He would convert those giveaways into… double lines with slashes of lightning in between.

Yes, it looked grand. Liking it so much made him nervous. Maybe he missed his calling—everyone else around here was a half-breed.

When he was finished dyeing his skin, Dylan put bear grease thick on his hair, to darken it. Then he donned the wolf-skin cap Lemieux had brought for him. It fit down snugly, the wolf’s head atop a white lining of strouding, the entire beast hanging down Dylan’s back and the tail dangling to the knees. Wonderful. Marvelous.

Beneath the wolf skin he strapped his knives. He would now feel naked without them. And over everything he wrapped a
gangaro
, a white Witney blanket with red stripes. It covered him entirely, chin to toes. He could let go of the blanket at his throat and have a quick reach to a knife handle. He stood in front of the full-length mirror and preened.

The Balmat stepped into the image next to him. The Balmat’s fair hair was hidden beneath a buffalo hat elaborately feathered, his whole body draped in a solid red blanket. His face was dark, his eyes glinting with humor. They made a perfect pair of savages. Shape changers. Devil magicians.

Now they would turn demons loose.

Dylan just walked into the Hudson Bay fort and went to the privy. Natural enough. Indians didn’t use privies, and were closely watched in the fort anyway. But by his clothes he was a breed. Inside he used the privy—his fear helped him with that. And he called softly, “Jack. Mad Jack.”

A whining moan came from the other side. Lemieux said Jack was in bad shape. Dylan had to prepare him, and keep him from crying out. The biggest risk in this whole enterprise was Mad Jack.

The Balmat went to the trade room. Little enough danger there. Neither the factor nor the clerk had ever seen him, or certainly hadn’t taken notice of a mere smith. Low status in the world made a fine mask. He traded for gunpowder. Plus lead, just to make it look good.

Then he walked quickly around through the compound. Though he’d been told to waste no time, he wanted to see the layout for himself. It’s my arse, he told himself. Then he headed for the privy. So far fine and dandy.

Mad Jack was whimpering on the other side of the partition. “You tell him?” asked the Balmat. Dylan nodded. Jack sounded like a whipped cur. Was the man scared half to death?

The Balmat hung the new gunpowder high on a nail in the joist. The old powder was still there. Then he got a crowbar from under his blanket and removed two boards from behind the sitting shelf. He and Dylan slipped through into the gaol room. Jack crawled around on the floor, circled on his spot in the straw, curled up with his chains like a cur. Jack would be no good for anything anymore, which was fine with the Balmat.

He pulled the boards into place behind him. Dylan patted Jack’s shoulder. The Balmat got the nails right back into their old holes. The job would stand a glance, but not a tug.

Then he showed Jack the files and pointed to the chains. The noise of the files was a risk. The Balmat mouthed to Dylan to wail and moan, and the new leader did a fine job. In the Balmat’s opinion, Dylan was just daft enough to be a good fellow.

Jack started in wailing too, and Dylan stopped. The Balmat kept working on the rivets of Jack’s chains with the files. He didn’t know if Jack understood. I’m going to set you free with these tools, old boy.

Someone came in the other side to use the privy. Jack whimpered and the Balmat stopped filing. Dylan and the Balmat looked at each other silently. Instead of the sounds of bowels they heard the scraping of powder horns. Lemieux.

“The bastards, they give me a job,” Lemieux said softly from the other side. “I am in my new quarters. Midnight. The start, it is mine. You won’t have to listen so careful.” He laughed at his own joke.

It was weird to talk to Lemieux when you couldn’t see him. You couldn’t hear him without imagining his crabbed posture, his wheedling face, his sly eyes.

“All right,” said Dylan. Dylan and Balmat nodded at each other. “Get gone.”

The stage was set.

About dark, Mad Jack started babbling again. Some of it was gibberish, as far as Dylan could tell. Some was childhood imaginings. Some was dire vision of Judgment Day, and of hell. That was worthy of Dylan’s nightmare of Hieronymus Bosch, and made him lust once more for Fornicating Woman. Some of Jack’s babbling, unfortunately, was about the escape.

He was inconsolable. They were all going to be killed. Their heads were going to be crushed by great mills, their brains ground into mush for the Lords and Ladies’ breakfast. They were going to be shattered, their bones cracked open for stew. After that, they were going to be lashed to horses that ran to the four winds, dragging and dribbling pieces of Nor’West men behind.

He could be neither gentled nor quieted. Occasionally someone would come in to use the privy. The variety of noises was remarkably and alarmingly varied on its own terms, but Jack added a wonderful music. Dylan almost put his hands on Jack’s throat to silence him, but that might have led to a half-coherent protest. He thought of putting his hands to his own throat to choke back his insane desire to scream. Dylan was sure Jack had given them away. Once he even cried out Dylan’s name, and Dylan raged to reach for a knife. Under his blanket he could feel his twin blades tingle.

The privy users seemed to take little notice of Jack, though. Only one acknowledged his rantings at all, and he howled at the moon like a prairie wolf, competing with the gaolbird, and then cackled nastily.

Dylan hated crouching here in the dark, silent. He couldn’t see more of Jack and the Balmat than their shapes, couldn’t see their eyes, didn’t know what they were thinking, didn’t dare speak. If someone caught on, the Lords and Ladies would catch them in the gaol like beaver with one foot trapped, then drowned.

As he waited for the signal to start the explosion, Dylan imagined that immense sound over and over. He thought of how much powder Lemieux had. He whispered to the Balmat, “We’ll make the crack of doom sound like a tinkle.”

Lemieux was mesmerized. As he sat doing his work, he was transfixed by his own mind, his picture of what would happen. He was stunned, dazed, stupefied by this event. Which had not happened.

His three wives and the two children still at home watched him. The wives were miffed at being moved about—today from Augustus into these new rooms, tonight back to Augustus in flight. They were sure they were going to end up without some of their belongings. They’d long since lost respect for their husband, and patience with him, so they paid no attention while he worked. The children had learned to live in mystification.

Lemieux was making a bomb. He meant it to be nasty. He started with a three-legged trade kettle. It was badly cracked, but he’d bound it together with shrinking rawhide. He coiled a fuse on the bottom and ran an end out a crack. He poured half of a small keg of gunpowder on top of the fuse. But that didn’t fill the kettle. On a whim he went to the corral, got a handful of dry manure, and stuffed that on top of the loose powder. Still didn’t fill. He went to the courtyard and gathered a double handful of small rocks. Now the kettle was full, but there were little spaces everywhere. He poured powder onto the lot until everything was snug.

Now he liked his bomb. Since the kettle was twice the size of a man’s head, it ought to knock some things down. Oh,
quelle
bomb.

He gazed at the explosion in his mind. In his imagination the bomb was like a cannon. He set it by the main gate, and the cannon shot the pickets of the gate into the air like arrows. He pictured them arcing gracefully away, trailing fire, like Chinese fireworks.

Ah, Ceran, he said to himself—only he used his Christian name—ah, Ceran, you devil.

He went to the one of the pair of blockhouses that was occupied, leaving the bomb in a dark corner outside. It was only a matter of saying he couldn’t sleep, sitting with the guard overlooking the main gate, and then slyly revealing that he had two gills of rum to help pass the night. Before long he left, with the guard slumped against one wall, rum in hand, singing bawdy songs incoherently.

The improvised bomb of Ceran Lemieux was even more grandly destructive than his childish imagination hoped. It did blow up the main gate. It also blew down most of the front palisade, and the blockhouses atop it. A splinter of wood the size of a man’s forearm ran through the drunken guard. The blockhouses rolled across the ground like giant dice, broke, and fell apart in huge shards.

Ceran Lemieux was standing a hundred feet away. The blast picked him up like flotsam on the crest of a tidal wave and flung him against the nearest wall. He fell to the earth, crumpled and broken. He saw nothing and heard nothing—the blast blew his eardrums out. In his mind exploded the Chinese fireworks he’d always heard about and yearned to watch. The show in his head was almost as good as the one in real life, until it faded, dimmed, and went out.

Dylan’s mind was still in the roar. The Balmat acted fast. He jerked the two boards off the partition, picked up Mad Jack like a child, and pushed him roughly through the hole. Dylan followed Balmat’s behind. Then they were outside and running for the corral. Even carrying Mad Jack, the Balmat almost kept up.

Where was Lemieux?

Dylan looked around the corral in the light of the half-moon. Pandemonium among the horses—they were milling, tossing their heads and manes and hooves and tails, crying out like men drowning in a storm of high seas. Where was the guard? Dylan saw no guard. Where was Lemieux?

Looking back, Dylan saw the fellow sitting against a wall. Cursing, he ran back. He shouted, “Lemieux! Lemieux!”

He shook Lemieux by the head, and when he did, he felt it. The back part of the skull was mush.

Dylan looked for a long moment into the lifeless eyes, then ran.

He saw movement at the far end of the corral—the guard. No, one of Lemieux’s wives. She had the gate open. The guard surely went to see about the blast. “Where’s Lemieux?” shouted the Balmat.

Dylan waved him forward. No matter, no matter anything. Get the devil out of here.

The horses broke for the open gate. As the lead horses escaped, others clogged the narrow way, bumping, falling, trampling each other.

The Balmat set Jack on the ground and threw his rope over a horse—wonderfully active man, the Balmat. Dylan heaved Jack up behind him and screamed at him to hold on.

In an instant Dylan roped his own horse, looped the rope into a primitive bridle, and jumped on. It was wonderful. In a crisis he could do anything.

He turned the horse toward the gate. The beasts were galloping out now, onto the prairie, bursting free, Dylan and his mount in the midst of them. But there were too many. They were choking the exit.