Cheyenne Winter (30 page)

“It makes snow,” Chatillon said, pointing to a few flakes driven before the brisk breeze.

“But we’re here,” Guy said. “Just in time!”

Even as they spoke Chatillon swung the tiller and drove the pirogue toward the levee directly below the great Chouteau warehouse where the bales were destined to go. Expertly, Chatillon swung the craft close to the bank until a hull scraped. Not a soul stood on the levee that wind-whipped gray day. Chatillon leapt to land and secured the pirogue with braided rawhide lines to posts there. Guy felt a sudden sadness. This craft, hewn from wilderness logs, had been his home and a good one. He could hardly bear to give it up. He clambered down to the moist clay of St. Louis and peered around, dumbstruck by what he had achieved in four months. He, a sedentary financier, had traveled two thousand miles into a vast wilderness and back again. And not a soul waited on the bank to welcome him. It was as if he’d gone to the North Pole, or sailed a bark to unknown South Pacific atolls.

He and Chatillon stared at one another uneasily. They’d shared hardship, danger, and adventure, and now it was coming to an end. No barriers of class or wealth had ever separated them, and they’d often talked in rapid French long into the evenings.

Ambrose Chatillon shrugged deferentially, as if to say that St. Louis and polite society made things different. “Ah, Monsieur Straus. I’ll get the clerks and warehouse men to unload. I’ll have a dray bring your things to Chestnut Street,
oui?”

“Get a receipt for the bales,” Guy said, concealing his feelings with business matters.

“Indeed. I’m ready for some grog.”

“You’ll be wanting the rest of your fee, ah, Monsieur Chatillon.” Against his will, formality had crept into his words. “You’ll find me in my salon, or my house.”

Chatillon shrugged again. “I will sample some grog first. My throat is parched and the grog shops
là-haut
— he waved his hand at the dives along Front Street — have pretty serving wenches.” He smiled woefully. “I will come visit you later,
oui?
After a day or two.”

“We’ll say
au revoir
then,” Guy said, relieved. He was no good at partings.

He stood silently while his wiry friend walked to the Chouteau warehouse to rouse some clerks and stevedores. When at last Chatillon, a pasty-faced clerk — how whitefleshed they looked here in St. Louis! — and two slaves emerged from a dark doorway, Guy stirred.

Half a continent and back! He studied the gloomy offices of Chouteau and Company there on the riverfront, and a nearby building that housed David Mitchell and his Indian Bureau, and decided to see both men later. His family awaited him. He walked lithely up the steep slope to town, a slope he’d puffed his way up before the wilderness had hardened him. He wondered if they’d recognize him in his rough clothes, gray woolen britches and elkskin jacket and low-crowned beaver felt hat. He wore a deep tan, too, the product of months of blistering sun and unchecked wind. He felt faintly disappointed, wending his sole way up Chestnut Street after such a journey. But what had he expected? A brass band and bunting and speeches? Ah!

Gregoire admitted him, staring blankly at the stranger before him for a moment until recognition flooded into his bituminous face. “Monsieur Straus!” he whispered. “Monsieur Straus! I never expected, ah — ” The slave fumbled for words. “I will fetch the madame,” he muttered and fled.

Guy laughed and pursued Gregoire back toward the conservatory where the glottal sound of a harpsichord echoed. He found her there, bolting up from her stool.

“Guy!” she cried, staring at the stranger. “Guy!” Yvonne stood, her figure garlanded in severe black, and closed upon him. He swept her into his embrace, feeling her rigid body slowly melt as she hugged.

“I made it,” he muttered into her silky hair. “All the way. Maxim is well.”

“Oh, Guy.”

She sounded so distraught that Guy gently pried himself free to look at her, noting the black. “Has something happened?” he asked, dread geysering up in him.

“Why — why do you ask?”

“You are in mourning.”

“But — ” She laughed hysterically. “For you. I just knew I’d never see you again. I had Madame make me  . . . mourning dresses.”

Guy roared. He couldn’t help himself. Yvonne had always been the pessimist, seeing the worst possible conclusion to everything. Seeing doom before doom came visiting.

“My little Cassandra,” he said, between wheezes.

“But Guy — I just knew  . . . ” Tears welled up in her bright eyes and she clung to him desperately. “I just knew,” she muttered into his shoulder. “I’d never see you again. It’s so far and so — so terrible  . . . ”

“It’s not my ghost you’re hugging,” he said. From the corner of his eye he spotted his servants peering into the conservatory.

“Gregoire! Fresh coffee!”

They fled.

“And Clothilde is well?” he asked.

“Of course. But she won’t listen to me. She wears summer frocks in this  . . . this  . . . ”

“You are beautiful in black. You are beautiful in anything — or nothing.”

“Oh, Guy!”

He had much to tell her and some things to conceal because she couldn’t bear them. He had decided not to say anything about his imprisonment by Hervey, his lonely vigil in that cubicle in which he came face to face with his own mortality and understood death and life for the first time. And he wondered, too, what to say about Maxim and Maxim’s scruples. He’d tell her that, he thought, but not just yet. In the dark, during their communion of souls and bodies, when they lay beside each other. Then he would talk about Maxim’s anguish of soul and the bitter compromises that life imposed on all mortals, including himself. Actually, Guy was proud of his son, proud of Maxim’s stringent scruples, proud that the young man’s restless soul sought those things that were right, and tried to make the world right.

For now it was enough to assure his dear Yvonne that all was well — and not well. Fitzhugh had traded for only a few robes and had lost several hundred he’d traded from the Cheyenne, along with two freight wagons and all his stock. He’d been checked and defeated by American Fur at every hand. But that wasn’t the worst of it either. It occurred to him that his gargantuan effort had failed. They’d lose their license; they might have to pay a fine or see their robe returns confiscated, depending on what the Indian Bureau chose to do.

“There is this sadness,” he said to her later as they sat on the settee and sipped the chicoried coffee. “I stopped at all the posts and talked to the traders. I did find out some things. I have a name and even a motive. One named Raul Raffin — an engage of Pierre
le cadet
for many years. Everything points to him. None among the bourgeois at the posts thinks the company did such a thing. Putting those casks aboard among our dunnage. But Raffin, ah, madame. He was a rival of Brokenleg long ago for the affections of Little Whirlwind.”

“I wish they’d both failed,” she replied tartly.

He nodded. “And I can’t prove a thing. I have the name, the man — and nothing to present to David Mitchell. I will tell him what I know — and he will shake his head and remind me that rumors and scapegoats won’t rescue the Rocky Mountain Company. I fear we’ll lose our license after all.”

“I knew it would fail,” she said. “I wear my mourning clothes for Straus et Fils.”

Nothing in Pierre Chouteau Jr.’s riverfront office spoke of power except the man himself. He welcomed Guy with a small Gallic pucker of the lip and then settled himself behind his battered desk among his dusty Indian artifacts and fossils. But Guy knew that this dark-haired man with the sardonic smile was the lord of half a continent. No one, not the United States Government and its agents and armies, exerted as much dominion over a territory that extended from the Mississippi River westward to the Mexican possessions and the disputed Oregon country.

“Ah, my friend Straus, you’re safely back in St. Louis. I trust your business goes well?”

“Couldn’t be better,” Guy responded.

They both chuckled. Like God, Pierre Chouteau knew the flight of every sparrow.

“That’s good and bad. Too many robes. The market can’t absorb them all. Why, Ramsey Crooks and I have just agreed to hold some back to keep the prices up.”

“Sorry to bring them down again.”

Chouteau shrugged. “Four hundred robes.”

Fencing. One never talked with Pierre Chouteau forthrightly, cards on the table, Guy thought. It was always a tradeoff — a peek at something in exchange for a peek at something else. And Chouteau played his games as well. Like telling Guy how many robes Guy had brought down the river in his double pirogue. This banter was the only kind of business negotiation that Chouteau understood. And it took a quick mind to understand it and counter it. Anyone who didn’t understand Pierre
le Cadet
would suppose it was banter over steaming tea.

“You have an engage named Raul Raffin.”

Chouteau looked puzzled and pursed his lips. His eyes gleamed. “Why, the name is unfamiliar. What post is he at?”

“Wherever you assign him, Cadet.”

“Ah, my poor tired brain.
Oui,
I recollect. We have such a man. They come and go, the Creoles.”

Guy smiled. Raffin had been with American Fur for years. “He interests me. Do you know his whereabouts?”

“I suppose you wish to steal him from us. Ah, the opposition. We put up with many trials from the opposition.”

More banter, Guy thought. “He failed to show up at his post last summer.”

“Ah, I hadn’t heard. And which post was that?”

“You’d know better than I, Cadet. I suppose you’ve removed him from your rolls. A deserter.”

“We don’t like deserters, Guy. Let a man abandon his contract with us for no reason, and he never works for Chouteau and Company again. I’ll check.” He rang a small silver bell and a ruddy clerk in a shabby black suit materialized.

“Have we a Raffin on our roster, Hieronyme? Be swift, if you please.”

The clerk back away and Guy swore he left dust floating in the sunbeams.

“Now we will know for sure. I trust this man has behaved himself?”

Fishing, Guy thought. Chouteau revealed nothing and sought everything. “No, he has not. He probably damaged my company.”

Chouteau arched an eyebrow. “Men have their foibles. Perhaps it was a love rivalry. I always ascribe rash conduct to love, to rejection by a beautiful woman. Ah, women! How they govern the affairs of the world!”

Chouteau knew a lot, Guy thought. He probably knew everything his own factors and traders had told Guy upriver. He obviously knew that Brokenleg and this Raffin had once competed for Little Whirlwind. Maybe it was true. Maybe raffin had some longstanding grudge against Brokenleg. It made a good story. The sort of story that could conceal darker purposes.

Guy smiled gently. “An engage would have to spend more thana year’s salary to buy three casks of spirits. How could he live, eh? An engage spends his annual salary and more at the posts. No, Cadet. There’s more.”

The faint smirk returned to Chouteau’s face again. “Ah, logic,” he said. “The downfall of accountants. Men with passions act — no matter the costs! Especially the French!”

Hieronyme returned bearing a battered ledger and set it before Chouteau.

“Why, he’s engaged — this year and the next two. But if he’s abandoned his contract, why, we’ll scratch him off. We’ve hired our share of loafers and scoundrels — and discharged them. We want good men up the river. I must look into this Raffin.” He handed the ledger to the clerk. “Hieronyme, find out what you can about this Raffin. Monsieur Straus believes we have an unruly engage who has fled his post.”

“Bien,”
said the clerk, dusting his way out of the office.

It was a charade, Guy knew. Something about Cadet Chouteau led Guy to believe that none of this was news. Every conversation Guy had had with the American Fur factors and traders up the river had been duly reported, in minute detail, to this man across from him. In a way, though, the whole interview had helped. Cadet Chouteau would not be fencing so much if he had nothing to conceal. He might even be helpful. Neither of them had broached the subject of the three planted casks of spirits in the cargo of
The Trapper
— and Cadet’s lack of curiosity said a lot.

Guy stood abruptly and gathered his walking stick and cape. “I must be off, Pierre. You’ve been most gracious, as always.”

“But you’ve barely arrived — ”

“I found out what I needed to know,” Guy said roughly.

For a second, Cadet’s gaze froze, only to melt again into his purse-lipped mockery.
“A bientíôt!”

It had been a typical session with Cadet, Guy thought as he pushed into a biting wind toward that other place on the waterfront he wished to visit. Not a candid word; everything buried in veils of wit and deception. Not lies, really. He’d never discover Cadet in a naked lie. But simply layers of innuendo and deceit that concealed truth.

He found the Indian Bureau’s superintendent, David Mitchell, shoveling sticks of wood into his potbellied office stove. No polite minions guarded his door even though this complex of offices in a waterfront building was a bureaucratic empire rather than a commercial one.

“Guy!” cried the commissioner. “I’d heard you got back yesterday with forty bales. Back your tail up to the seat and tell me.”

Word of his return seemed to have whipped through St. Louis, Guy thought, remembering their lonely docking on a silent levee.

With Davey Mitchell there’d be no pussyfooting around the thing that interested them both. And even the upriver gossip would wait. “I have the name of a man,” Guy began without preliminaries. “An engage named Raul Raffin. He’d been with AFC for a decade or so.”

“I remember him. Big dark Creole.”

“That’s what they told me. He went up on
The Trapper
with several other engages — beginning his new term. And abandoned the company at Fort Pierre, striking west. He’s living with the Cheyenne in White Wolf ’s village.”