Cheyenne Winter (7 page)

Sire looked apologetic. “There is a small matter. A cabin door was damaged. The lock broken, wood splintered. I have a small claim here — ”

“One of our men? But only Maxim and Fitzhugh had cabins — ”

“Maxim’s, monsieur. It was his cabin door.”

“Ridiculous! He’s a gentle boy — I won’t pay this!”

“I was afraid of that. Monsieur Straus, a cabin boy saw Monsieur Fitzhugh smash it open and drag your son — drag him out. At Wolf Rapids.”

Fitzhugh! A vicious anger stabbed through Guy, setting off his ulcer again. “I’ll delve into this. And after I have answers, you may be paid or not  . . . Did the cabin boy say what this was about?”

Sire shrugged. “Nothing. He merely saw it. Now as for the claim, it’s not a lot. But my word is my bond — ”

“I’ll pay,” Guy growled. He stabbed the quill into the ink pot and scratched his initials. “They’ll honor it. I’ll deduct it from Fitzhugh’s share — if there is any share.”

The clerk returned with the passenger list, and Sire made a hasty exit. Guy rubbed his eyes, scarcely believing the bad news, knowing that the company hung by a thread — and much of his investment as well. Sabotage. He’d march over to that grubby office of Pierre le Cadet and wring his slippery neck. Chouteau’d hired some thug to slip those incriminating kegs on board and doctor the cargo manifest. Chouteau or one of his suave, bland relatives, which he had by the score.

And Maxim. Witless child. For a moment the full force of his fury landed on his seventeen-year-old son, but Guy curbed it. He’d yank the boy down the river and put him to work here. Too young. Much too young. Not an ounce of judgment  . . . 

He swept out of his offices, grabbed his gold-headed walking stick, and pierced into the steaming heat outside. He marched straight down Chestnut Street, bringing up a sweat under his arms with every step. It didn’t matter. He found the ornate federal building near the riverfront, the place where the fate of the Rocky Mountain Company would be decided. He pushed through the chipped brown double doors and turned right, steering toward the Indian Bureau — once the lair of General William Clark, who’d governed the Indian territories ever since he’d returned from his great expedition to the Pacific with Merriwether Lewis, except for a few years as governor of Missouri Territory. But the present superintendent, David Mitchell, was another type altogether.

Guy pushed in, swept past a clerk in shirtsleeves, and waited at the open door. Mitchell was reading something — and Guy knew exactly what. The man looked as weathered as any mountaineer — which Mitchell was. He’d tromped the whole west, befriended the bribes, worked for Chouteau for years — and knew the fur trade. There’d be no pretending here.

“Expecting you,” Mitchell said, waving Guy to a straight-backed wooden chair. “The Reverend Mister Gillian writes a remarkable report. Ninety-nine percent fulmination, one percent fact. But the one percent is bad news for you.”

“May I see it?”

“It’s your privilege. It don’t say nothing you don’t already know.”

“I don’t know anything for sure.”

Mitchell grinned skeptically. “I can’t stop this, you know. If it happened, you lose your trading license.”

“We know nothing about those casks.”

Mitchell scratched his brow with a pencil. “You’re in an odd position, Guy.”

“We didn’t buy or load those casks. You might ask le Cadet who put them there.”

Mitchell laughed. “I appreciate your indignation,” he said slowly. “But you know how it’ll go.”

Guy knew. The evasions of all the fur companies were common knowledge. Everyone knew the companies shipped spirits upriver, contrary to several laws of Congress. William Clark had winked at it if it wasn’t too blatant. Chouteau’s American Fur had been caught at it more than once and the great man had bought and politicked his way out, with the powerful Senator Benton bullying the administration and the Senate as well. If Pierre Chouteau had barely escaped, then Guy had no chance at all.

Guy sighed. “The reformers will love the whole spectacle,” he muttered. “And I’ll be ruined. And Pierre will go on, just as he has.”

Mitchell shrugged. “You’re in an odd bind. You can’t claim innocence. Whether or not those casks are yours, I’m sure you’d made arrangements of some sort.”

Mitchell stared directly at Guy. Guy refused to respond.

“Sergeant Bluff, I’d wager, old coon.”

David Mitchell knew the robe trade, Guy thought. “What do I do to escape the licensing hearings?”

Mitchell shrugged. “You can’t escape them. At least not unless someone confesses to the crime. It is a crime, you know. A serious one in the eyes of some.”

“I have to find who did it and wring a confession?”

Mitchell scowled. “A
believable
confession, Guy. Not one that can be bought on the levee. And that might not get you off either. When the hounds start baying after witnesses, they’ll find witnesses.”

“You were Chouteau’s man for years, David.”

The superintendent stared back. “I can’t say as I appreciate your implication.”

Guy sighed. “I’m sorry. You’re a man I trust totally. It’s that — everything I posses is at stake.”

“For the record, Guy — I play no favorites. I’m charged with governing a vast territory  . . . and every enterprise in it. I do it as fairly as I know how. I worked for Pratte, Chouteau and Company for years, yes. I poured many a cup of diluted spirits upriver for my employers, yes. If that’s what you want me to say, I’ll say it.”

“I misspoke, David. All right. I ask one thing. Could you delay this a while? I’m going upriver.”

“You? What’ll that do?”

“Maybe nothing. But I’m going to try.” Guy astonished even himself because he hadn’t intended to go upriver at all.

“Oh, I can sit on it a few weeks, Guy. Good luck.”

Three days Samson Trudeau and his men trudged down the Yellowstone staying close to the river. And then luck floated by. Just as Trudeau had hoped, the keelboat wending its way from Fort Cass to Fort Union drifted around a bend. One man operated the tiller; six others lounged amiably on the deck fore and aft of the low cabin, watching the banks roll by.

Trudeau hailed the low vessel and it veered toward shore. Within moments, the engages had tied it and were pouring the
tabac
into their pipes and gossiping about their respective employers, Chouteau and Company, and Rocky Mountain. It was the amiable way of engages everywhere in that unhurried world. Trudeau hated what he and his men had to do but the fur wars were rough. He hated it also because he knew most of the other side’s engages: he’d spent many a trapping day with Duchouquette, Labone, Dorion, Barada, Croteau, and Dubruille. The other two, Fecteau and Labusier, he hadn’t met.

“Ah, messieurs, we have had misfortune indeed,” he said, a signal to his own men, who drifted amiably toward their packs. “The Indians — Pieds Noirs, we think — stole our oxen and mules. A fortune lost! A thousand dollars lost!”

“Oxen? What Indian ever wanted oxen?” asked Duchouquette, who was the man in charge.

“Ah, Emile, it was a sad thing. They put arrows into them. The mules they drove off in the night but our oxen they slaughtered. It is not the way of horse-stealers.”

Duchouquette smoked silently in the late afternoon quiet. Trudeau knew exactly what all the American Fur engages were thinking, and they were right to think it.

“At any rate,
mes amis,
we wish to be transported down the river to Wolf Rapids. It would save us many a blister and spare our boots.”

Emile Duchouquette considered that, puffing fragrant
tabac
as if decisions depended on smoke.

“We will have a party,” Trudeau said. “At Wolf Rapids are several casks of spirits.”

Barada and Croteau laughed happily, and knocked the dottle from their pipes.

“Maybe for a small consideration,” said Duchouquette. “The Company would disapprove but there are ways,
oui?”

Ways indeed. Samson sighed and rose casually. His men stood near their packs. He wandered towards his. When he lifted his rifle, his men would too.

“Oh, we’ll make a little offering,” Samson said. He lifted his piece swiftly, and his men did, too. They didn’t like it much, and neither did he. But necessity ruled.

Duchouquette stared from man to man. The rest of the boatmen did too. “I was afraid of that,” he said. “And you are Creoles like ourselves. You would shoot Creoles?”

“But yes,” Samson replied. “And then make sure you are properly buried and wept over and your widows notified.”

“We number more than you,” Fecteau announced.

“Oh yes. And after we shoot, our rifiles make fine clubs.”

But they wouldn’t try that. Not Creole against Creole. “All aboard,” Samson said, prodding the opposition forward. He nodded to Bercier who ran ahead and plunged into the cabin, emerging with a handful of rifles, powderhorns, and ammunition pouches.

“Is that all?”

“I will check again, Samson.”

Bercier vanished into the cabin again, this time emerging with powder flasks and shot flasks for the swivel gun at the bow, along with three knives.

“Now it is an empty nest,” Bercier said.

Trudeau marched his prisoners up the plank and into the cabin, and closed the door. None of them protested much. They’d come to no harm; it was fur company war, nothing personal. Nothing to expend lives and blood about, especially the blood of fellow Creoles.

Samson’s men gathered their kits, hauled them on board, and stationed themselves on the deck. Two kept their rifles trained on the door, but it wasn’t crucial. Samson himself took hold of the tiller and steered the
bateau
into the swift current. Peace reigned, after a fashion. He intended to travel day and night when the moon permitted. He’d stolen a keelboat, the value of which was actually less than the destroyed and stolen livestock. It would have to do.

By keelboat they were only a day and two nights from Wolf Rapids, and they’d make up some of the lost time. Not that he expected Fitzhugh to be there: the packet would be late in this low-water year.

They drifted on into the night, exploiting a quarter-moon until it sank. He let one opposition man at a time emerge, relieve himself, drink some river water, and return. He had nothing to feed them other than what the Chouteau men had on board, which was an emergency parfleche of jerky. They had been making meat as they traveled, needing little else.

When the moon vanished he began steering badly, grinding the keelboat into a gravel bar. His men poled it loose and they drifted in the black current again. Mostly, the river took them where it would, the channel running now to one side and then to the other. He kept two men at the prow with sounding poles as the cool night progressed, and whenever they told him the keelboat was sliding into shallows he veered away. It didn’t keep them entirely out of trouble but a keelboat was forgiving, unlike a steam packet.

Samson Trudeau felt no guilt at all, not even for confining his fellow Creoles down there among the bales of robes. They were hungry, no doubt — everyone was — but comfortable, spread out on robes and warm. He sighed. Hard times required hard measures. And he had justice on his side anyway.

At dawn, Brasseau shot a muley doe, and he veered toward the far bank to collect it. Brasseau himself leapt into the river, gasped at its coldness, and then dragged the doe off the shore and floated it toward the
bateau,
where many hands helped him up, and pulled up the doe. Trudeau didn’t want to anchor — it would be a temptation for the opposition. They paused long enough to gather firewood and then Trudeau swung the long tiller, steering the keelboat into the relentless current. Swiftly, his men hung the deer from the mast, gutted it, butchered it, and began roasting venison over the small fire crackling in the sandbox that lay aft, the only device for cooking on board.

Around noon they passed a herd of buffalo shaded up along the bank under cottonwoods. No one shot; they didn’t stop. His men hadn’t slept, nor had he, and the paralyzing weariness of a second day without sleep invaded him. Weariness meant danger. Weariness meant bad judgment. He traded watches at the tiller with each man, and encouraged each man, in turn, to stay alert. He had Corneille Dauphin load the swivel gun at the prow just in case they ran into Indians. This was an oversized blunderbuss with an inch and a half bore, almost a small cannon. It rotated on a swivel pin set in a post. It could fire miniature cannonballs or enormous charges of buckshot.

“Load it with the shot, Corneille,” he said, thinking it would be helpful against amassed warriors. But nothing transpired that hot July day. It was the peak of the trading season and most villages were camped around one or another of the posts, exchanging robes for things the tribes prized: axes, hatchets, knives, hoop iron for arrow heads, kettles, skillets, rifles and shot, awls, traps.

Sun blistered the deck making men dizzy with heat and dehydration but still he kept on, rotating the watches at the tiller so that each of his men got a rest in whatever shade he could find, which usually was none at all. The ones in the cabin had the better time of it, he thought. Now there was continuous talk and raillery among them all, the opposition men conversing through the small portholes on either side of the cabin with those on deck, almost as if they weren’t prisoners or captors. And the ones in the hold had the better of it: hot as it was in there, it was cool compared to the brutal heat and glare on deck.

Thus they traveled, rotating duties, through the day and into the second night, each fighting exhaustion. Brasseau tied a line to himself and lowered himself into the cold water to shock his body back into life. Others just lay in a stupor, glad of the cool breezes of the night.

By dawn — fortunately, because they needed the light to navigate — they slid into patches of white water, marked by occasional boulders slicked smooth with the abrasions of the current. Wolf Rapids. There wasn’t much of a fall, but between the current, the boulders, and the narrowing channel, it stopped the steamboats. They shot out of the lower end just as sun poked over the northeastern bluffs — and beheld a mountain of trade goods lying nakedly on the shore, and Fitzhugh howling at them.