Cheyenne Winter (34 page)

He didn’t know what to do. This was his second winter in the mountains and he’d reached the ripe age of seventeen. Responsibility had fallen on him too soon and he resented it. More and more he sought out Samson Trudeau, but the veteran of many a trapping brigade had no suggestions.

“You think we could parley with the headmen?” he asked.

Trudeau shrugged. His shrug was a Gallic expression of defeat. “Ah, Maxim, I don’t know the tongue. A little of the hand-language. I never learned much. The partisans who led us, they knew the finger signs.”

Maxim sighed. He couldn’t even communicate with his captors. “Maybe they know English or French. Lots of trappers wintered with them.”

Trudeau shrugged. “I think she is over. Soon we have disease, scurvy. The water, it doesn’t come. The shed gives up its last firewood. Why do we wait?”

“Brokenleg would.” He said it stubbornly.

“Brokenleg, he’s got magic. He goes and talks to them. He makes things different.”

“And I don’t.”

Samson glanced away.

“My father taught me something. When Hervey held him in a dark storeroom he fought back by surrendering life itself. He told Hervey that he would choose death.”

“Ah,
oui,
Maxim. He chose that for himself. He didn’t choose it for you. He didn’t choose death for the engages. We are loyal — every one of us. But are you going to choose death for us? A bad death from thirst and disease and empty bellies?”

Responsibility again. It crushed Maxim’s young shoulders. He stared bitterly into the wintry distances seeing blanket-wrapped Crows amble from one lodge to another. “You can go. All of you can go. They know the white flag. Take a white flag and go — go to Hervey, go on down the river. Take the rifles and some shot.”

Trudeau grunted. “They might kill us if they don’t see you surrendering.”

“I’m staying. My family has tens of thousands tied up here.”

“It’d be a great scandal in St. Louis.”

“What do you mean?”

“Why, Maxim, not even rival fur companies can do such a thing — starving out the opposition with a siege.”

“American Fur would just blame the Crows. Hervey would say he tried to stop it, and it’d die away. A scandal in St. Louis won’t help us any.”

Trudeau joined him at the unshuttered window. “I’ll tell the engages,” he said. “Some may go. I think all will go.”

“Bien.”

“Give them each a gill of spirits to bolster them, eh?”

Maxim didn’t want to. But he sighed and nodded. Better to give the engages a gill than to give the spirits to Hervey.

Trudeau left him at the glassless window and went to inform the men out in the yard. Maxim was letting icy air into the barracks but he didn’t care. It was over. He leaned into the window, brooding, watching the Crow village. There’d been no sign of Hervey ever since Maxim had shot his horse, but Maxim knew the man’s purposes had influenced these Crows; that Hervey hulked out there in spirit if not in person. Maxim thought about murder, and it shocked him that he could even imagine shooting Julius Hervey on sight. He knew that Hervey would shoot him on sight now — no matter whose son he was.

One by one the weary engages wandered into the gloomy barracks, warmed their numbers fingers over the grudging fire in the stove, and glanced furtively at Maxim. It didn’t take Trudeau long to collect them. At last they were all present: Trudeau, Larue, Bercier, Brasseau, Courvet, Dauphin, Guerette, Provost, and the three new ones, Lebrun, Grevy, and Poinsett. All good men and true. All etched with fatigue and despair.

Maxim couldn’t find words. He stared helplessly at them, the bitterness lumping in his gullet. “You can go. I’m releasing you.”

They stared.

“You can go! Pack our kits. Take your rifles. Take whatever stores you need.”

No one said a word.

Trudeau cleared his throat. “Monsieur Straus is releasing you. He’s staying here. He tells me he will not surrender the post. If it is taken it will be captured, not surrendered. He tells me that you each may have a gill of spirits now. We have enough water left to cut the spirits a little. It’s his way of saying
bon voyage.”

Oddly, the engages did not seem to jump at the offer. They glanced at one another nervously, uncertain. At last Gaspard Larue spoke. “They might kill us if we walk out.”

“Take a white flag,” Maxim replied.

“You are not surrendering?” asked Lebrun.

“It’s my family’s property. And the partners’ property.”

“Ah, Monsieur Straus, they’ll kill you. Hervey — ”

“Have a gill.”

“That is a good idea,” said Corneille Dauphin. “I can’t think on an empty stomach.”

No one laughed.

“We are far from water. Five feet down and solid cobbles,” muttered Jeannot Provost.
“Oui,
I’m thirsty. Spirits and snow.”

Five of the six thirty-gallon casks sat in the storeroom. The sixth, tapped by a faucet and half empty, lay hidden in a corner of the trading room. Courvet wandered off to fetch it. Brasseau gathered tin cups. Grevy lifted the kettle of precious snow-melt from the stove.

Solemnly, Courvet poured a gill into outstretched cups and Grevy ladled ice water until they all were served. All except Maxim who didn’t touch spirits. They peered nervously at one another, oddly afraid to touch their lips to the spirits, as if doing so would seal the fate of the post. But this was a wake anyway, and Maxim eyed them impatiently.

At last Trudeau broke the spell. “To our employers,” he said and sipped. The rest muttered something. They all sipped silently, wheezing as the fiery spirits burnt their throats. But no one spoke. This business had a funeral quality to it and the spirits would do nothing but ease the pain. It was midday, an odd time for this anyway. The January sun hung low in the south but fired the snow into brilliance that would blind a traveler.

Maxim watched them moodily, wondering where they would go. To Hervey? Up to Fort Union? None of them had spoken of salary. He could give them chits if they asked. They could trade for supplies here or at any post. But the subject of wages seemed out of bounds and not a man brought it up.

Maxim squinted out upon the brilliant flat again and spotted something. Three blanketed Crows approached, headmen from the look of their headdresses. One carried a white rag on a stick. The surrender party. How uncanny was their knowledge, he thought. Not so uncanny, though. Crows had often peered through the cracks in the stockade walls, missing nothing.

“They’re coming,” he said.

Engages crowded to the window to watch the threesome walk across the snow-pocked flat, but no one said a word.

Maxim left them and walked to the front gate next to the trading window, opened it, and waited. He recognized the three: two war chiefs and a shaman. He knew their rank but not their names. They weren’t armed — as far as he could see. Blanketed Indians were famous for hiding rifles under cover.

They paused at the door, surveying Maxim. He peered back, half afraid, half angry.

“You will surrender?” asked one in clear English.

They could communicate. Maxim waved them inside without answering, and steered them into the barracks. His engages peered over their cups at the Crows, and the Crows peered back, studying the cups, the cask with its brass bung faucet, and the cold room.

That’s when the devil took Maxim Straus.

The potbellied coal stove in the Federal Annex held January at bay. The three supervisors up on the dias looked like ravens on a limb hunting for scraps of meat. Guy sensed that one of the two out from Washington city, Superintendent Philander P. Roscoe, had missed his calling: he should have been a hangman by trade. He had those wounded glistening eyes, set in a cadaverous face beside a nose sharp enough to cut glass, of a fanatic. He occupied the center chair as chairman, a bad omen. The other man who’d made the arduous trip, Major J. Broderick Eastwood, USA Ret., looked merely venal and Whig, a Tyler appointee fattening at the public trough. He sat to Roscoe’s right; Davey Mitchell to the left.

In spite of the blistering heat boiling out of the stove, Roscoe wore a silky scarf around his scrawny neck, and a thick woolen waistcoat underneath his frock coat. Fever leaked from him like the heat of righteousness. He dabbed at reddened nostrils with a slimy handkerchief, sniffed and honked.

Worse yet, the Reverend Mr. Foster Gillian had skated down the wintry river after all and now rested his corpulent funeral-clad person on an oaken witness bench alongside the natty Captain Sire. The pink-cheeked divine looked positively triumphant, as if this were the climax of his earthly sojourn and upon the completion of his testimony the heavens would open, a shaft of golden light would pierce down, and cherubim and seraphim would escort the man to this reward. Guy hoped he wouldn’t rattle on too long.

Guy himself wouldn’t testify though he had abundant things to say. He did not wish to be asked embarrassing questions about the liquor traffic in the Indian territories. He noted that Cadet Chouteau had likewise made himself scarce and for the same reasons, though Chouteau would have dearly loved to witness the demise of his rival. But Robert Campbell was present behind Guy, a mountain of moral support if nothing else. He wished Yvonne were beside him as well but his little Cassandra couldn’t bear it. Guy himself would entrust his case to his counselor, Hiliodore Billedeaux, a man of flowing white mane and vast simplicity.

“It’s past the hour and we shall begin,” said Roscoe in a voice surprisingly mellifluous. “This is not a court trial. It’s a licensing hearing and will be decided administratively by the Indian Bureau. However, normal rules of evidence shall obtain. The superintendents themselves will call forth testimony and evidence. We are gathered to determine the suitability of a certain Rocky Mountain Company, also known as Dance, Fitzhugh and Straus, to conduct a trading business in the Indian territories. Our business here is licensing — but we may turn over evidence of criminal acts to federal prosecutors for further action.”

A hanging then, Guy thought. Davey Mitchell looked uncomfortable; the other ravens positively rapturous. Eastwood picked his nose surreptitiously, his fig-leaf fingers covering the boring of his thumb.

“We’ll begin with the Reverend Mr. Foster Gillian, and remind all witnesses that your testimony will be sworn and subject to prosecution for perjury. Mr. Gillian, do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing else, so help you God?”

“Oh I do, I do, I certainly do, before Almighty God.”

“Are you the appointed Indian Agent for the Otos and Omahas, located at Bellevue?”

“Indeed, sir. They are my blessed charges, my sheep, my little ones.”

“We have before us three affidavits prepared by you, your wife, and one Marshall Landress, your assistant I believe?” He handed the copies to the reverend. “Is one yours and do you know for a fact that the others were prepared by those whose signatures they bear?”

“I do, sir. These are the very documents we drafted.”

“Would you tell us what happened upon the occasion of the arrival of a packet named
The Trapper
last summer — the second trip, I believe?”

Foster Gillian did. This was his moment of glory and he hoarded every second of it. His jowly face turned holy; his gaze direct and bright; his spirit lofty, radiating sublime joy upon the assemblage. Little by little, leaving no nuance unplowed, no stone unturned, he wove his tale of discovery, there in the dark hold of the packet, of nefarious spirits being smuggled upriver by a notorious combine of grafters out to debauch poor savages.

He had a tongue, thought Guy. A lot of Sundays in the pulpit had given him the golden voice and the mesmerizing glow. The three ravens watched and listened and nodded and scratched notes with Josiah Mason steel nibs. When the reverend finished, like a thunderstorm receding into twilight, the heavens didn’t part.

“Counsel may examine,” said Roscoe, dabbing at his flaming nostrils.

Hiliodore rose, smiled benignly, introduced himself to the ravens, complimented Gillian on his elocution, admired Gillian’s exact recollection of passages from the Psalms, St. Mark, St. Luke, and Second Corinthians, and asked the reverend what whiskey looked and smelled like.

“Why, I know what you’re driving at. Straus pestered me with it. Pure grain spirits have little odor and are transparent. Still, I had no trouble — no trouble at all — discerning the contents of the casks.” He dug into his commodious coat and extracted a phial. “Here! I have brought some, taken from one of those casks.” He turned to the commissioners. “See whether it’s vinegar or lamp oil!”

The commissioners tasted and smelled. Hiliodore did, too.

“I think,” said Roscoe, “that we are satisfied that these are pure grain spirits. We’ll turn this over to a chemist for analysis if you wish, Counsel Billedeaux.”

“That won’t be necessary.”

“I have a phial taken from each cask,” announced the reverend. “Here. This was labeled vinegar; the other lamp oil.” He passed two more to the commissioners, with the same result.

Trumped by Gillian, Hiliodore Billedeaux turned to the other pivotal question. “Mr. Gillian, how do you know that these casks were the property of my clients?”

“Why! They were there, right there, on top of crates of firearms — right in the middle of Dance, Fitzhugh, and Straus dunnage. And of course we all know how these nefarious companies debauch — ”

“Stick to the question, Mr. Gillian.”

Foster Gillian let himself deflate a moment, and smiled. “It was right there on the ship’s cargo list — the list for Dance, Fitzhugh, and Straus.”

“At the very bottom, was it?”

“Indeed, right there, the last item. They’d made it last hoping it’d be ignored.”

“You’re speculating, Mr. Gillian. But tell me, my friend — was this in the same hand as the rest?”

“I didn’t notice.”

“It is in a different hand. Have a look.” He plucked up the cargo manifest from the pile of papers before the commissioners, and handed it to Gillian. “Is this the list you looked at, and is the last entry in a different hand?”