Merline Lovelace (6 page)

Perhaps she didn’t want to remember anything else. Perhaps she thought of herself as French instead of Quapaw because her mother’s people had shunned her. Fighting an all-too-familiar sense of loneliness, she edged to a far corner of the lodge.

Louise might not be welcome, but the Quapaw were known for their hospitality to strangers. She wasn’t surprised when Big Track ordered the women of his lodge to begin preparations for a feast and sent criers to invite the more senior warriors to join him. Louise kept to her dark corner, guessing her uncle’s wife would not want her assistance. She’d guessed right. Running Deer sent her one cold look and spoke
not a word to the female who’d once shared her lodge.

“We will smoke while we wait,” her uncle told his visitors, inviting them to the fur-covered platform.

It was a time-honored ritual, sometimes spiritual, sometimes social. The long-stemmed pipe decorated with beads and feathers was passed from man to man. Smoke drifted through the lodge, light and fragrant, another memory from Louise’s years with her mother’s people. Breathing in the familiar scent, she sat with her legs crossed under her and her hands folded loosely in her lap, while the lieutenant dug into his haversack.

“I bring you a gift from my father. A bronze medal to show he wants only peace and friendship with the Osage.”

One Eye’s lip curled as the young officer held out a disk dangling from a blue ribbon. “He gives this same gift to all chiefs,” the Osage guide advised the Big Track. “Even those who lead few warriors.”

Her uncle grunted, but hung the bit of bronze around his neck. “Tell him I have heard many tales of his father. I accept his gift and will consider what to give in exchange.”

“My father wants only peace with the Osage,” the lieutenant replied after the words were relayed to him. “As military governor of this territory, it is his sole desire to protect you and the lands where you hunt.”

Protect them? Louise knew better. The whey-faced
one spoke a great lie. If he were truthful, he would tell Big Track of this absurd plan to move the Cherokee and Choctaw into Osage Country.

“My father is also very interested in expanding trade with you and your people,” the officer continued. “This area is rich in furs.”

“Very rich.” The chief’s gaze was thoughtful as it rested on his visitor. “I, too, wish to see trade increase between your people and mine. I will give you a place between the rivers for a trading post.”

Surprised, Wilkinson blinked his owl’s eyes. “I, uh, thank you, but we don’t have any immediate plans to—”

“Lieutenant.” Daniel leaned forward, his words quiet and urgent. “Accept the offer. What better spot for a fort than where three major rivers converge?”

“My father gave me no instructions regarding a fort.”

“Think, man! We might well need a contingent of troops in the area if we want to keep the Spanish out and control the trade on these rivers.”

And control the Osage, Louise thought, if their Great Father proceeded with his plan.

The urge to warn her uncle that he had invited a pack of hungry wolves into his lodge battled with her bone-deep reluctance to call attention to herself. If she spoke up, if she predicted another disaster for her people, she would be blamed for it as she’d been blamed for the scarcity of game and the boy-child born with no arms.

Biting her lip until she tasted blood, Louise sat
alone in her dark corner all through the feast that followed. Her pride kept her head high, but she wanted nothing so much as to see the end of this night and the resumption of her journey with Daniel.

Her glance lingered on his broad back and wide shoulders. He didn’t want her as a man wants a woman. He’d made that clear enough. Yet he continued to honor his vow to Henri by throwing the shield of his authority over her. He would pay for that, Louise knew with a sick feeling in her stomach, as soon as the feast was finished and her uncle turned his attention to his niece.

She knew the moment had arrived when Big Track hooked a finger and beckoned her forward. Throat dry, Louise rose and wove her way through the cross-legged warriors.

“You say Chartier is dead.”

“Yes, Uncle.”

“Who among these men claims you?”

“None of them claims me.”

“What? None of them has offered you his protection?”

“Yes, the tall one, with the hair the color of tobacco. He made a promise to Henri.”

Frowning, the chief eyed Daniel’s ragged buckskins and boots held together with strips of rawhide.

“Tell him he has taken a woman of my house. He must pay a bride price.”

“He doesn’t want me for a wife, Uncle.”

“Does he share your blanket?”

“Yes, but—”

“Then he must pay. Tell him,” he ordered sternly.

Helplessly, Louise turned to Daniel. “He asks if we share a blanket. I tell him yes, but that you do not take me to wife. It makes no difference. He says you will pay a bride price.”

“The hell I will.”

She was too proud to beg, but she couldn’t keep a hint of desperation from seeping into her voice. “If I am to go with you to Arkansaw Post, this must be done.”

“Louise, I couldn’t buy you if I wanted to. I don’t have two lead pennies to rub together. I won’t until I return to St. Louis and draw my pay.”

The one called Huddleston leaned forward, his eyes gleaming. “I’ve got a silver dollar tucked in my haversack. Tell the chief I’ll buy her.”

“No!”

This was what she had feared, what she had dreaded. Her uncle would give her to one who stunk like a dead fish to be rid of her, just as he’d given her to Henri. Trying to keep the desperation from her face, she turned to the sergeant.

“Daniel—”

He blew out a long breath and reached for his rucksack. His face set into grim lines as he pulled out a small package wrapped in oilskin. Carefully, he peeled back the folds. Inside lay a gold pocket watch.

“My wife gave me this the day we were wed.”

By now Louise had come to know the rise and fall of his voice. It grieved him to part with the watch.
She heard the reluctance in his words, saw the fleeting pain in his eyes. He must hold this wife in St. Louis in great regard, she thought with something close to envy.

“The case is gold. It’s worth many beaver and muskrat pelts.”

Carefully, Daniel wound the stem and held it to Big Track’s ear. After a moment, the chief nodded and folded his fingers around the watch.

“Tell him it is good,” he instructed Louise. “But not enough.”

“Uncle! You sold me to Chartier for a sack of dried corn and two beaver pelts.”

“You were young then and had no more meat on your bones than a stewed rabbit. Now you are a woman, worth more. It is not enough.”

As angry now as she was desperate, Louise bitterly regretted the loss of her furs. She had nothing to contribute to the trade.

Except, she remembered suddenly, the cougar’s claws.

“I will add to the bride price myself.”

Rushing back to the corner where she’d left her things, she searched through her depleted stores for the claws Daniel had brought her.

“Here.” Her heart hammering, she spilled the shiny black talons into her uncle’s hand. “These were taken from the cat that killed my husband. They have powerful medicine. They and the timepiece are enough, Uncle. More than enough.”

Big Track debated the matter for long, agonizing moments before nodding in agreement.

“They are enough. I give you to this man.”

When Louise spread her blanket beside Daniel’s later that night, he grunted and rolled over so that his back was to her. It piqued her pride a bit that he did not want her even now, when her uncle had joined them in the ways of the Quapaw. But she was so relieved at the outcome of the negotiations, she merely drew her buffalo robe up to her ears and let the snuffles and snores of the lodge’s occupants lull her to sleep.

B
y the next morning, the storm had passed and the sun smiled down from a cold, clear sky.

Louise stumbled out of her uncle’s lodge, anxious to be away. After extracting such an exorbitant price for his niece, Big Track showed a more generous mood. He gifted the expedition with a good supply of meat and dried corn. He provided as well two sturdy canoes.

Louise climbed into the second. Wind That Cries took the prow, Daniel the back. Torn between relief and the shame of being so unwelcome in her uncle’s lodge, she stared straight ahead as Daniel pushed away from the bank.

The expedition’s three boats caught the current and moved swiftly on the river swollen by the recent snows. Ice still narrowed the channel, and the paddlers had to work to avoid another dunking, but the banks flowed by rapidly.

The days passed just as rapidly. They stopped at several small Osage villages, and hailed two hunting
parties. Gradually, the river channel widened and the high, pine-studded mountains of Osage Country gave way to the rolling hills of the Wichita.

Louise had never journeyed this far south. She’d visited St. Louis once with her father, and had traveled to a fur traders’ rendezvous on the Missouri with Henri. But those places lay north of Osage Country. This land was new to her. Not as cold, not as rugged. She saw only open skies, stunted trees that would not make good lodge poles and villages less than half the size of the Quapaw camp.

With the flattening of the land came the rapids. Not violent washes of stone and water, such as Louise had seen on other rivers, but fast, rippling currents that carried the boats swiftly and required constant vigilance. So much vigilance that when the exhausted men dragged the boats ashore each night, they ate their meals in sullen silence and dropped onto their blankets.

With the lessening of the brutal cold, there was no need for them to huddle together at night. Or for Daniel to curl Louise into his body to share his warmth. She told herself it mattered not, that she would soon part from him, but with each new dawn the feeling grew within her that she was leaving behind all she knew and entering a strange and unfamiliar world. For now, for the few remaining days of their journey, Daniel formed the one link between her past and an uncertain future.

So it was with a mix of joy and relief that she recognized the red-bearded Englishman who ap
proached them as they made camp late one afternoon, led by a scout from an Osage war party.

“Robert!”

The trapper’s face folded into lines of lively astonishment. “Louise Therese!”

Hobbling to her on the stumps that remained of his feet after a savage mutilation by the Pawnee some years ago, he bussed her heartily on both cheeks. “What the devil are you doing here?”

“I travel to Arkansaw Post.”

“Do you? I’ve just come from there.” He threw a glance around the camp. “Where’s Henri?”

“He dies in the place where the river runs and the stones carry strange marks.”

“Damnation! I’m sorry to hear that.”

The flame-bearded Robert McFarlane dropped a sympathetic hand on her shoulder. He and Henri had often shared a campfire, swapping news of the fur trade and the endless wars that pitted their distant countries against each other. Like Henri, McFarlane held nothing but bemused contempt for Napoleon for selling the rich wilderness of Louisiana Territory to the United States for mere pennies an acre. And, like Henri, he’d heard the rumors whispering through the oaks and pines. Rumors he put directly to the lieutenant when that worthy introduced himself.

“So you’re General Wilkinson’s boy, are you?”

“I am.”

“What’s this I’m hearing about a scheme to set up a separate kingdom west of the Mississippi?”

The lieutenant’s already pale face went gray. “Are you—? Are you speaking of the proposal to move the eastern tribes off their lands and into this part of the country?”

“No. I’m speaking of the brouhaha about your father’s old friend, Colonel Burr.”

“What—? What brouhaha?”

“You haven’t heard?”

When the lieutenant couldn’t seem to choke out a reply, Daniel stepped forward and answered for him. “We departed St. Louis in July and separated from Lieutenant Pike’s expeditionary force in October. We’ve had no news at all since then.”

McFarlane’s shrewd brown eyes sized him up. “And who might you be, sir?”

“Rifle Sergeant Daniel Morgan.”

“Well, Sergeant Morgan, if you’ll let an old man warm what’s left of his feet by your fire, I’ll tell you what I know. It makes for a lively tale, I promise you.”

It made, Louise soon decided, for an astonishing tale. She struggled to make sense of the names and places McFarlane tossed out, but Daniel and his men had no such difficulty. Seated on fallen logs, they listened avidly as the Englishman told of a web of treachery and deceit spun by one called Aaron Burr, once a great chief of the whites.

From what Louise could grasp, this Burr was a soldier, a warrior. He rose to hold a powerful rank in his tribe, second only to the Great Father, Jefferson. As great as this Colonel Burr’s stature was, how
ever, it did not satisfy him. He laid plans to seize lands from both the Spanish and the Great Father, and found a separate nation where he would be chief. He had gathered warriors to his cause, bought arms, and was moving to implement his scheme, when he was betrayed.

“It was your father who put Jefferson wise,” McFarlane informed the lieutenant.

The young officer looked as though he’d been hit with a war ax. “My…? My father?” he stuttered.

“The general sent President Jefferson a letter he had received from Burr. The letter was in cipher, it seems, and gave details of the boats and troops Burr was amassing in New Orleans and at Blennerhassett Island on the Ohio.”

The lieutenant opened his mouth as if to speak, but no sound emerged.

“The Ohio militia seized the Blennerhassett boats,” McFarlane related, “but the troops escaped. Jefferson has issued an order for his navy to seize and destroy any boats under Burr’s command in New Orleans. Your father has been relieved of his duties as governor of Louisiana Territory and sent to New Orleans to provide the governor of Orleans Territory military support.”

“What of the Spanish?” Daniel asked. “How are they involved in this scheme?”

He was thinking of the Spanish agent Henri had heard rumors of, Louise guessed, the one she’d told him of.

“The Spanish have no involvement that I’ve heard,” the trapper answered with a shrug, “though I’ve no doubt they were glad to have the plot uncovered. One rumor has it Burr hoped to incite the citizens of Spanish Texas to revolt and join his empire.”

“How did General Wilkinson uncover evidence of the plot?”

The Englishman glanced at the lieutenant. “Some are saying he was in on the scheme from the start.”

Wilkinson jumped up, his cheeks as flushed now as they had been white just moments ago. “How dare you, sir!”

“But only to lure Burr into betraying himself,” McFarlane finished. “Why else would he provide Jefferson with the coded letter?”

“Why else indeed?” Daniel murmured.

Louise studied his face, as familiar to her now as her own. Beneath his beard, his jaw was set. His gray eyes stared into the campfire, but she guessed he saw something other than the dancing flames.

The talk went on and on. McFarlane spoke of captains called Lewis and Clark, who’d made a journey of many, many moons and recently returned to St. Louis. He spoke as well of the war between France and Britain, and how the chief of the French, the very Napoleon whose name had so often caused Henri to spit into the fire, had made his brother chief of some kingdom called Naples.

Bored with names and places she knew nothing about, Louise yawned. After a moment, she drifted
away from the circle of men to go into the woods and relieve herself. McFarlane met her as she returned. His beard flamed with the same fire as the rapidly setting sun and his eyes were kind as they skimmed her face.

“Do you mean to stay at Arkansaw Post?”

“For a while.”

“You’re welcome to hitch along with me. Henri taught you well how to work the traps and clean pelts. I could use a companion with those skills.”

She arched a brow. “Only those skills?”

A quick grin split his bushy beard and displayed rows of blackened stumps. Stepping forward, he chucked her under her chin.

“All right, I’m not ashamed to admit it. I wouldn’t mind if you warmed my old bones the way you did Henri’s.”

Louise tipped her head, considering his offer. He was of her world, had traveled its rivers and forests. Henri had judged him to be a brave hunter and skilled trapper. McFarlane would be kind to her, as Henri had been kind in his own way. Part of her wanted to snatch at the world she knew. But she had only to glance over McFarlane’s shoulder to know how she would answer him.

Daniel stood a few yards away. His face wore a fierce scowl as he took in the way McFarlane cupped her chin. A scowl, and something more. Something that made her heart rush and skip like the rapids they’d traveled over earlier.

It was gone in a flash, and when the trapper
glanced behind him to see what had caught her gaze, Daniel showed only an expression of polite interest.

“Do I interrupt?”

“Yes,” McFarlane replied testily.

“No,” Louise countered, smiling as she pulled her chin from his grasp. “Robert and I, we speak of Henri.”

And the possibility of Louise warming McFarlane’s bones. Daniel had heard the words. Damned if they weren’t ricocheting around inside his skull like spent musket balls. With some effort he kept his hands from fisting at his sides. The idea that she might snuggle up with McFarlane put a tight, painful twist in his gut.

“Robert asks me to go with him,” she said. “But me, I do not wish to share his blanket.”

He didn’t stop to question her decision. Or the relief that knifed through him.

“Then you’d better go back to camp and get packed up. The lieutenant wants to push on.”

“By night?”

“There’s a full moon rising and the river’s flowing fast. He thinks we can make another five miles or more.”

McFarlane tugged at his beard. “That news about Burr got his feathers up, did it?”

“Something did.”

“Well, I’d best go and make my farewells, then.”

The trapper tucked Louise’s arm in his and hobbled back to the fire. The men had already begun to gather their possessions and break camp, muttering
among themselves as they did so. Private Huddleston’s complaints were the loudest and earned him a sharp reproof from Daniel.

“It was good sharing a fire with you,” McFarlane told the lieutenant. “See that your sergeant there takes good care of Louise Therese here. She’s got ties to royalty, you know. Henri always claimed he could trace his line back to the Sun King.”

“Did he?” Still distracted by the news that the man had imparted earlier, Wilkinson merely nodded. “I’m sure that will be of interest to my father.”

McFarlane grinned and turned away. For the life of him, Daniel couldn’t tell whether the Englishman was jerking on the lieutenant’s powder horn or trying to provide a mantle of respectability to the penniless, half-breed widow of an old friend.

After the meeting with McFarlane, the lieutenant pushed his men as hard as he dared. He made only sketchy notes in his journal, jotting down just the names of the major tributaries feeding into the Arkansaw and the rough location of various Indian villages.

On the last day of 1806, they passed the mouth of the Poteau, named for the Frenchman who’d first skimmed its bounty. From there, the land flattened even more and the shores were lined with cane, indicating rich bottomland.

Several days beyond the Poteau, they stopped at the plantation of a Monsieur Labomme, who treated the bedraggled party with far less civility than the
Osage had. Finally, on the ninth of January, the detachment rounded a bend of the river and spied the rambling settlement of Arkansaw Post.

As the boats angled across the rippling water, Louise’s heart thumped against her ribs. This outpost marked the boundary between her two worlds.

Behind her lay the land of the Pawneee and Osage and Wichita, an endless sea of high bluffs, sparkling rivers and rolling prairies where thousands upon thousands of buffalo grazed.

Ahead…

Ahead lay the land of the whites, who wore strange, uncomfortable clothes, rode in wagons and carriages, and built great villages of brick and stone.

She was part of both worlds, yet belonged to neither. Gripping the sides of the boat with tight fingers, she took a last look over her shoulder before turning her face to the bustling outpost.

Called Poste de Arkansea by the Frenchman who’d claimed this bend of the river some twenty miles above the point where it emptied into the Mississippi, the village had grown into a thriving trade center. A hundred or more lodges lay scattered along a riverbank crowded with dugouts and canoes. Dogs yapped, children chased feather-covered balls and women bundled in furs chattered as the latest arrivals pushed their boats up on the bank and wearily climbed out.

A wooden palisade of tall, sharp-pointed logs housed the buildings of the chief factor, a Frenchman
of considerable girth and loose loyalty to the government that now claimed jurisdiction over his post.

“So many flags have flown here,” Pierre Duval said as he tipped generous portions of brandy into pewter mugs for the tired travelers. “These days I know not whether I’m to pay taxes to the French, the Spanish, the English or the Americans. Perhaps soon,” he added with a shake of his head, “I will run another flag up the pole. One belonging to Colonel Burr, the man who would be king.”

His eyes watering from the fiery brandy, Daniel lowered his mug. “So the rumors about Burr are true?”

“But, yes! News comes up the river daily. The latest is that Burr gathers some thousands of men in Natchez.” Duval nodded to the lieutenant. “Your father has declared martial law in New Orleans. He thinks to keep the citizens there from joining forces with Burr.”

Face flushed, Wilkinson downed his drink in a single gulp. Daniel’s heart sank. It wasn’t just the brandy putting that high color in the man’s cheeks. He looked to be coming down with another bout of fever.