Cheyenne Winter (18 page)

The guided nodded.

In minutes, Guy found himself at a linen-covered table with Alec and Natawista, describing their adventures up the river. Ambrose, who knew little English, excused himself and headed for the barracks and a familiar tongue.

Culbertson, a lean, dark-bearded Scot, listened attentively, saying little. Natawista, a petite and beautiful daughter of a Blood chief, understood everything but didn’t venture the English tongue. She wore a bright red calico, the color that had made her famous up and down the river.

“But Guy,” Alec said, “you haven’t told us what demons drive you two thousand miles up the river late in the season.”

“You already know.”

Alec smiled. “Our expresses are fast.”

“Tell me about Raffin.”

“Raffin?” Culbertson was puzzled. “Whoa up, Guy. Let’s start at Bellevue — and the kind attentions of the Reverend Mister Foster Gillian. Not a Presbyterian, thank God.”

Guy led them through it all, from the confrontation with Gillian to the talks with Sarpy, Charbonne, and Kipp. “Raffin was due here on
The Trapper
; he’s your man. He jumped off at Fort Pierre and no one has seen him since.”

Alec stared into a wineglass. “We gave him a three-year renewal. He’s a good man, but with limits. Not an easy man to get along with. He’s always off somewhere.”

“I think he planted those casks of spirits and altered the ship’s records. Just why, I don’t know.”

“If he did, it was something he did on his own. The company wouldn’t stand for it, Guy. For obvious reasons.”

“That’s what all of you have been telling me.”

“We’re as vulnerable as anyone else.”

“So you all say.”

“There’d be no profit in it for us.”

Guy pushed back annoyance. “That’s debatable, Alec.”

“Of course.
Ecrasez tout opposition.
You’re the first serious opponent we’ve had in several years. But Guy, we’ll do it other ways. Gifts and price-cutting.”

Guy smiled coldly. “Perhaps you could supply me with a motive then?”

Major Culbertson drummed the linen with thick fingers, apparently debating what to say to the powerful rival at his table. “I think your partner is — abrasive. I find him so. Raffin — he’s rather like Fitzhugh, in a way, something raw-edged about the man.”

“Motive?”

“Little Whirlwind. Not so long ago.”

“I’ve heard it. That puzzles me. Why wreck our company for that? It doesn’t make sense. Why buy three casks — a pretty penny for an engage, even a senior one like Raffin — three casks that incriminate my company — but not Fitzhugh in any way that Raffin could benefit from. Eh?”

“I can’t read minds, Guy. You don’t even know Raffin did it.”

“No — I don’t. Perhaps the company did it. Perhaps Pierre Chouteau had it done.”

“He didn’t.”

“We’re real opposition, Alec. With a purse.”

Alec poured more French Bordeaux from the bottle transported two thousand miles from St. Louis on an annual steamboat. “I can’t answer your mysteries for you, Guy. But take my word for it. Pierre
le cadet
would be mad to do that. He didn’t try.”

“So you all say. But Raffin makes no sense.”

“Maybe he wants to pick up the pieces, Guy.”

“How?” Guy shook his head. No ordinary engage, no matter how ambitious and unscrupled, would go to such lengths. It wasn’t in their Creole nature, he thought. And what would he get out of it? He wouldn’t hurt Brokenleg much. The Rocky Mountain Company, indeed. But not an old rival for a Cheyenne girl. “Alec, whoever planted those casks was aiming to hurt me, not my partners.”

They both stared into their wineglasses in the amber of a single candle.

Guy laughed. “Well, that’s that. I’ve never had the chance to thank you and Joe LeBarge for sending me news last year. Starting up a fur post against your outfit was — well, reckless. But we’ll see, we’ll see.”

“May the deepest pockets survive,” said Alec Culbertson, making a wry toast of it.

“Four wives and no robes. I think we will make you an honorary Creole,” said Samson Trudeau, surveying the collection of Cheyenne beauties Fitzhugh brought with him.

Abner Spoon took a long look at the sisters and turned sulky. Zachary Constable started to make ribald observations but Brokenleg silenced him with a glare.

Assorted Creoles eyed the shy wives with an assortment of expressions, none of them disinterest.

“You must be awfully tired,” persisted Zach.

“Cut it out.”

“Do you keep them all happy at once?”

“Cut it out.”

“Maybe they are just honorary wives.”

“Cut it out.”

“Do you share the wealth?”

“We got work to do.”

“We trade robes, not lie in them,” said Samson Trudeau, solemnly.

Brokenleg turned hot and choked back a retort. “How many robes did we take in?”

Trudeau shrugged. “Since you left? Over two hundred. But of course that’s nothing compared to three more wives. Three wives are worth a thousand robes, St. Louis prices.”

Fitzhugh knew they weren’t going to let him alone so he ignored them. “Who from — the robes?”

“A few Crow. Some Gros Ventres — the Atsina, not the Hidatsa — a band came in and traded, monsieur. They have no allegiances,
oui?”

“Good robes?”

Trudeau shrugged. “Some, some not.”

That’s what Fitzhugh figured. The Atsina were a wandering band of moochers. They did no more work than they could get away with. But even the robes of moochers would bring something. “They complained a lot about prices, vowed eternal friendship, and tried to steal anything not nailed down.”

Trudeau grinned.

“Better’n nothing,” Fitzhugh added.

“Indeed, monsieur. I am thinking I have nothing and you have four wives. One to hold your cup while you sip spirits. One to spoon food into you, one to dress and undress you — ”

“Dammit, Trudeau, we got things to do. Another wagon stole; harness and a whole team. No way to get robes or trade goods in and outa hyar — ”

“Four wives to tote robes, monsieur.”

“Go to hell.”

“Some men are lucky in love; others born to suffer.” He sighed. “Why am I so ugly, so humble, so poor, so lame with words, that I cannot have four wives?”

“I’ll cure you. Starting today, we’re going to build a pair of pirogues and a mackinaw. By Gawd, I’ll sweat yer smart mouth outa you.”

“Very good, monsieur. Perhaps the wives will assist. I am sure all your legs are broken.”

Fitzhugh roared, bulled toward the man, but the post’s factor danced away easily, wheezing with joy.

Dust Devil followed all this and translated wickedly to her sisters, until they stood tittering like a limbful of crows.

“Maybe Fitzhugh will share, Trudeau,” she said. “You work hard. I tell him to get slaves, lots of Absaroka women, but he likes wives.”

“You stay outa this!” Brokenleg roared.

Hide Skinning Woman muttered something in Cheyenne, and Dust Devil translated. “She says you are the blanket chief; this Creole is just a boy.”

Trudeau gaped, first at Hide Skinning Woman, then at Fitzhugh. Hide Skinning Woman smiled sweetly, her black eyes shining. She looked plumb gorgeous, Fitzhugh thought. She still wore her bridal festival dress of whited doeskin, fringed at the hem and sleeves and brightly quilled. They all looked ravishing. In fact, his life had changed radically in the space of a few days, and the anger brewing deep within him had drained away.

“Whar’s that boy?” he asked abruptly.

“Maxim? He reads in the barracks all day.”

“He still sulkin’?”

“Oui  . . . ”

“I’ve a mind to send him down the river after all.”

“Now that you have four wives, his labor is not necessary, monsieur. In fact — ”

“Trudeau!”

The Creole looked wounded.

“Git busy!”

Slowly, the raffish crowd that had gathered in the stockaded pen next to the post to witness this peculiar homecoming dissipated. Fitzhugh left the horses to the engages while his wives toted parfleches and his possibles to their quarters. Dust Devil had turned bossy, steering her sisters with a firm hand. Well, she was his sits-behind-him wife now; the senior one, who occupied the place of honor among Injun wives. He followed them into the rectangular post, past the trading room and robe warehouse, past the barracks room to his own quarters. His and four wives, he thought, suddenly alarmed. It had been divided into his office, a sitting room, and bedroom. That bed — a narrow pallet of woven rawhide tied to a frame, with a narrow tick on it — he’d have to change that. He’d have to turn the whole damned bedroom into a pallet, or stack female bodies  . . . aw, hell, he’d let Dust Devil see to it. They’d do it their danged Suhtai Tsistsista way, and he was just along for the ride.

He found them whispering and giggling, and thought they needed — he wasn’t sure what they needed. He glared at them all, or tried to. It was hard to glare at honey-fleshed smoothskinned curvy wives, all of them wild as hares. He had known he’d be in for it when he got back, but he hadn’t expected — ”Aw, hell,” he muttered and limped out.

He found Trudeau in the trading room, no doubt comparing wives and curves and dimples with Abner and Zach. They ceased their bawdy palaver when he wheeled in, at any rate. He glared at them, too. Glare was the only weapon he had against such formidable gossips.

“Can you lissen a piece?”

“Shore, pore old Brokenleg.”

The mockery didn’t escape him. “Dammit, we’ve purt’ near gone beaver and you sit thar — ”

“It’s not everyday the post is so radically improved, Monsieur Fitzhugh. Where once there were only hairy beasts ugly as apes, now there is grace  . . . ”

“Trudeau. We’re making’ boats. I want you to git any of them that was voyageurs. Larue, Bercier, Brasseau, Dauphin, Provost — you know. This hyar outfit’s gonna have us a chantier, a boatyard like them Chouteau posts. We’ll start with the pirogues, a pair of big ’uns hollered out of cottonwood. We got trees a yard and a half thick yonder. I want the pirogues hollowed out and a deck acrost the pair and a mast and a square-rigged sail. That’ll git us a load of goods up the Bighorn and Little Bighorn to the Greasy Grass. We’re meetin’ Dust Devil’s people there for some robe tradin’ in October.”

Trudeau, suddenly serious, nodded. “It takes four men four or five days to cut out a pirogue. And the rest  . . . We can make it easily.”

“I’m glad we can do something easy around hyar. I suppose they’ll steal the pirogues from us, too, like they got the robes and wagons and hosses and oxen.”

Trudeau said nothing.

“You git that done and you start on a mackinaw so’s we can float robes down next spring. That’ll take doin’.”

A mackinaw would be a large project, he knew. As much as any fur post could do in wilderness. The long, flat-bottomed boats could carry fifteen tons safely downriver. They lacked means to pole, cordelle, or sail back upstream, but more and more the fur companies were hauling them back upriver on the steamboats. Building one would be an ordeal. First logs had to be squared, and hoisted up on a scaffold. Then pairs of sawmen, one above and one below, had to hand-saw the planks. These had to be shaped into a flat bottom with thick cross pieces and pegged together because they had no nails or screws. The plank sides had to be attached to elbowlike supports, and watertight bulkheads fore and aft built to protect the cargo in the center. The gunnels stood a couple of feet above water at the middle of the fifty-foot vessel, but rose at either end. Finally a mast and sail and oars and oarlocks had to be added, along with a rudder and a platform for the steersman so he could see ahead.

It’d be a winter’s work. But a properly built mackinaw operated by five or six voyageurs could take the entire returns of Fitzhugh’s Post to market. The packs of robes would lie secure and dry under old lodge covers tied to cleats on the gunnels. It was the only option Fitzhugh had now, with his overland transportation demolished. But it had always been the way the fur companies brought the robes to market.

He watched Trudeau explain all that to his engages. And he knew that the lazy days were over for them all, and not even four Cheyenne ladies cooking and gathering firewood and keeping house would make things easier. But that was how it’d been from the beginning. In the wilderness one made do. But it wasn’t enough. The Chouteau outfit had harassed and boxed him, demolished his equipment, rendered him helpless. He’d have to do something about that or the Rocky Mountain Company would go beaver, like all the rest of the opposition companies. But what?

American Fur engages ferried Guy and Chatillon and their horses across the Missouri in a mackinaw. From the Missouri, Chatillon headed south across a nose of land until they struck the Yellowstone. Guy paused, staring at the river of his fortunes, studying its cool waters as they roiled between arid bluffs. Cottonwoods dotted the bottoms.

“We have a long way to go, monsieur. And we must find a ford. Your post is on the south bank.”

Chatillon led them cautiously upriver, avoiding the traces, hewing closer to the shoreline and the cover of brush and cottonwoods even though that route was longer and filled with obstacles.

“This is a great artery,” Chatillon explained when they rested one noon of a cool September day. “Here we are in the country of the Sioux, Assiniboin, Blackfeet, Cree, Gros Ventres, and River Crow.”

“These River Crow — they are separate from the others?”

“Oui.
These River Crows live along the Yellowstone and Missouri. The Mountain Crow live on the upper Yellowstone, the Bighorn, and in the valleys of the Stony Mountains. They are friendly — with the weapons they get from white men they are a match for the Blackfeet, a much larger tribe. But they are great horse thieves. Famous thieves. And white men’s horses — ah, monsieur, we will have to be very careful now.”

“You mean the Rocky Mountains?”

“Names change,
oui?”