Rocky Mountain Company (17 page)

Everywhere he trudged along the river, the cottonwoods towered majestically, with trunks three feet in diameter, dividing crookedly into thick limbs that erupted outward toward a giant crown of leaves. The sight dismayed him. It’d take several men with several axes a whole day to fell one of these lords, and then the logs would be too big to drag to the site, hoist, and fit into a wall. Some willows nearby looked better, but they were too few. Dourly he stared at the unpromising groves, wondering if he’d have to move upstream, to a different meadow.

Maxim showed up carrying two axes, and looking solemnly at the noble trees.

“This hyar’s not good for building a post, boy,” Brokenleg said. “Too big and too crooked. We may be needing to move a piece.”

Maxim looked relieved.

“Well, let’s see what we got for rock,” he muttered, limping away from the river toward the tan sandstone bluffs a quarter of a mile distant. His leg bothered him. It always did, but he swore it hurt more when he was puzzling things out, as if his brains were in his bad knee. They passed the supplies lying nakedly in the grass, while Dust Devil watched them skeptically, and trudged slowly up a soft grassy grade toward the rock. “Watch out for rattlers. This here’s what they roost in when they’re in rattler heaven.”

Maxim walked warily.

Fitzhugh liked what he saw. At every hand he found stratified rock, weathered and rotted loose by frost and water and wind, lying in slabs that were there for the taking. More tan treasure than he could ever use. Enough, laid up with mud mortar, for good strong wind-tight walls; enough for a flagstone floor some day. And best of all, something that could be laid up almost without tools. “I think we’re going to build us the Bighorn House outa rock. I think we can lay up more good wall in a day than if we wrestle them giants down.”

“There’s nothing here!” cried Maxim. “How can we build a house out of nothing? Where’s the windows?”

“Oh, we won’t have real glass windows, at least not this year, boy. We’re gonna have them someday, though. But we’ll have windows, and they’ll let light in; light enough, anyway.”

Fitzhugh was getting notional the longer he stared at the loose rock. A building grew in his mind, a long rectangle with yellow rock walls and wide fireplaces at either end, a peaked roof with a good layer of sod over the poles since he lacked nails and anything else to build a nice shake roof. Maybe the following year they could strip the sod off and make a better roof. But this year, his choices ran from bad to desperate.

Maxim grasped a slab of sandstone and tried to lift it, but couldn’t. He wobbled it but couldn’t even raise it an inch. He turned to Brokenleg, a question in his eyes.

“Oh, you’re goin’ to be the mud boy. The mortar man. We’ll have some strong men here to pry these loose; haul them on a stoneboat — gotta build a couple of stoneboats — and you’ll be there at the post, mixin’ mud faster than they can lay it up.”

“Will mud work?”

“Well, we don’t have lime for mortar. When settlers chink up a log cabin, they throw in some horse manure, and maybe grass, to make it stronger. But this clay’s all we got, and that’s what we’ll use with the stone.”

“I could do that.”

“You’ll be plumb sick o’ running mud, but yes, Maxim, you could do that. We got to build a few tools today. A couple of stoneboats, and dig a pit near the river where you can mix up mud, real nice, accordin’ to yur fanciest Frenchie recipe, and haul buckets. I got to make some wooden trowels, too, to spread the stuff.”

“Have we got buckets?”

“One here, and a couple comin’ in with the load.”

For the first time, Fitzhugh thought, Maxim didn’t look completely overwhelmed. “I reckon we can have the walls up by the end of October, and we can hang some wagonsheets for a roof over part of it whiles we roof the other. There’s lots of yeller jackpine up yonder, and that’ll make good roofpoles — not straight like lodgepole, but good enough.”

“What’ll the inside be like, Brokenleg?”

“Why, I reckon we’ll have the tradin’ room over on one side, and storage for robes behind it; and the other side, we’ll all squeeze in for bunking and cooking. That’s why we’ll have a fireplace each end, one for the business area, one for the livin’. Then we’ll have to build us some pens out back for the stock — and lots of stuff. Sheds and all. And that don’t cover half of it. We got to cut hay off these flats and get in firewood afore we get snowed under.”

Off to the north, he spotted two horsemen approaching slowly and he realized he didn’t have his Hawken in hand, and thus had violated the most basic rule of survival.

“Let’s git,” he said sharply, limping toward Dust Devil’s little camp.

“That’s the first rule,” he muttered to Maxim. “And I plumb forgot it, my head’s so full. You don’t go anywhere without you got yur rifle. Mostly this hyar is friendly country — Crow people. But it just could be Bug’s Boys, and they could just take a fancy to your topknot.”

“Bug’s Boys?”

“The Devil’s Boys. Blackfeet. Sorta everyone’s enemy around hyar. Including us, unless maybe we can try some tradin’. But they dicker mostly with Hudson’s Bay up in British country, and some with American Fur, and use all that lead and powder they git on the rest of us.”

“How’ll I know?”

“I can’t rightly explain now, but you’ll learn soon enough, or leave your scalp on a medicine tripod.”

The lead horseman was Trudeau. He had Emile Gallard with him. Gallard always evoked thoughts as elusive and fragile as the dust on butterfly wings, something he could never pin down in his head. He wondered at Trudeau’s choice — whether there had been design in it.

He found his Hawken back at the camp, propped up against the cask labeled vinegar, just where he’d left it. He lifted it anyway, just to get rid of the naked feeling that beset him when his fingers had nothing but air to grasp.

Trudeau pulled up, and slid off the gaunt pony. “Ah, Monsieur, it is done. We unloaded the wagons, and I have sent them on their way, as you instructed.”

“Hervey cause you trouble?”

“Non,
Monsieur. He just stand and smile like a cat, and peek at everything we pull out of the wagons. We haul it all into the warehouse, into the rear corner, and then we do the division. We count the bolts of tradecloth, and he takes a tenth.
Sacre bleu!
He takes the best colors! Red! We count the kettles, and he takes a tenth. I stand and grieve, watching his engagés take away the tenth into the trading room. He asks where the trade blankets are, and I say we lost them, and he says, is that so, and I nod, and he smiles like a man making love to a virgin. But after we are all done, I make him sign the paper, that he is storing the rest — the inventory list here — and he takes away the tenth. It is what you wished?”

Fitzhugh examined the inventory list, and Julius Hervey’s signature on the receipt, and the separate list of Hervey’s share. Brokenleg sighed. American Fur was now back in business, and using Dance, Fitzhugh and Straus trade items. It irked him, and filled him with a helplessness against the ironies of fate. He nodded curtly.

“The wagons are off? The men well armed and provisioned? The wagons and stock in proper condition?”

“Oui,
Monsieur. And I bring Gallard here because he is strong and can help make the fort.”

“But he’s our best teamster — has a way with the oxen, Trudeau.”

Trudeau shrugged. “Ah, indeed. But I think to myself, here is a man to build a post,
n’est-ce pas?”

Something lay unsaid in all this, but whatever it was, Fitzhugh couldn’t fathom it.

“All right then. Hyar’s what we’re going to do,” he said.

They toiled through the hot August days making pitiful progress. Everything had gone harder than Brokenleg had visualized. Just making the stoneboats turned into an ordeal because they lacked bolts or nails to anchor any sort of platform or crosspieces to the runners. But they had rawhide, and a bit and auger to drive in pegs, and gradually the two cumbersome sleds took shape.

He put Trudeau and Gallard to work at the bluff, prying rock loose and knocking the larger pieces into smaller ones with the maul so they could be handled. Maxim learned to drive the horse dragging the stoneboat. And Fitzhugh, along with Maxim, tumbled the rock off the stoneboat at the building site, chafing their hands in the process. The result seemed pitiful. A stoneboat worked well in the winter, on frozen ground, snow or ice, but not on dry meadow. So the dray couldn’t pull as much, and the pile of rock pried loose by the engagés grew faster than the rock at the building site.

Each time Fitzhugh helped Maxim drag the rock off the stoneboat, his bum leg tortured him. The mid-day August heat sucked water out of them all, and hung oppressively in the valley, but Dust Devil didn’t come bearing cold river water. In fact, she disdained the whole business, and tended camp silently, glaring at the sweating, slaving whitemen around her as if they were mad. There were times, too, when Fitzhugh had to saddle up and make meat, and when the hunting went badly he disappeared all day, further slowing the progress. And yet, in spite of their difficulties, the heaps of dun slab rock piled along the site of future walls grew bit by bit. Brokenleg wanted a mountain of it ready, within easy reach, for the time when they all laid up the walls.

And so they labored, from before dawn until darkness choked off their progress. But even then work didn’t cease. Maxim learned to wipe down his weary horse and balm the flesh with tallow where the harness had chafed it. And each morning, the boy had to unhobble the horse, brush it carefully, and begin the long business of harnessing, easing on the collar, the surcingle, the tugs, the bridle and reins. Maxim worked silently, his skinny frame growing even thinner under the terrible duress of brute labor. Fitzhugh watched, worried, because the lad’s spirit had sunk back inside somewhere, and no one had the faintest idea what Maxim was thinking. Fitzhugh’s days didn’t end with the darkness and cool either. Often after his evening meal, he stood on his aching legs, got an ax, and trudged down to the wood areas along the river to girdle trees. They’d need dry wood later.

Only Trudeau and Gallard seemed to prosper during the ordeal. Like most engagés up the river, they were used to brutal toil day after day, and asked little more than a pipe of
tabac
at the day’s end. Fitzhugh watched Gallard closely without quite knowing why, but detected no signs of disloyalty. The man’s gaze seemed direct enough, and his manner steady. Fitzhugh never asked Trudeau about the engagé, having learned back on the
Platte
to let the Frenchmen deal with their own, the way they chose.

Frequently tribesmen came by — usually Sioux or Crow — and that delighted Fitzhugh because word of the new post would spread swiftly. He would begin trading when the winter was coldest, when the sun scraped the southern horizon, when the nights were longest. He gave the headmen twists of tobacco, hoping it would last, and made the finger-talk with them while Dust Devil sulked and glared. Only once did a party come through painted for war — Sioux, going on a horse raid against the Crow. They stopped, stared at the Hawken cradled in Fitzhugh’s arms, studied the growing rectangle of tumbled rock, peered covetously at camp goods, especially the keg labeled vinegar, almost as if knowing what was within it, and then walked on. Like most horseraiding parties, they were on foot. They planned to ride back to their village.

All this cut into work time, but still pleased Brokenleg. The lower Bighorn valley was a great highway, and the highway led straight past his new post. But if it delighted him, it obviously displeased Dust Devil, who saw only enemies of her people among these visitors, and peered at them with such hostility that they took notice, and eyed her thoughtfully with long, silent looks.

One morning Julius Hervey rode in on his buckskin stallion, his bright eyes surveying the heaps of yellowish rock forming a rectangle where future walls would rise.

“A rock house, and nothing inside,” he taunted, as Fitzhugh labored at a stoneboat.

Brokenleg stood slowly, feeling his leg torture him and sweat collect at his waist. “Permanent,” he replied.

“Make a nice barn after you leave. All that labor for nothing.”

“I reckon it won’t burn.”

“You chose a good place. Now, if you had something to trade, you might get some robes. But you won’t. Do you think you’ll ever see all that stuff again?”

“I reckon.”

Hervey laughed. “We were resupplied. Mackinaw poled up from Fort Union. I sent twenty bales of robes back. We’re fixed for the year. With the stuff you gave us, and ours, and all the rest of yours sitting in my warehouse, if I feel like dickering for it.”

Hervey was needling him, he knew. Maybe even looking to murder him. One never knew about Hervey, except that when he was in fine fettle, as now, he got cocky.

“Reckon you would,” Fitzhugh said.

Maxim looked stricken. Fitzhugh shoved the rest of the sandstone off the boat. “You git on over there, boy,” he said roughly. Maxim stared bitterly at Hervey and then hawed the horse, snapping its lines over its croup.

Hervey grinned. “City boy. He’ll make some muscle, if he survives.”

Fitzhugh stood, wearily. “Rest of my stuff ’s due in a day or two, at least if they didn’t have no trouble. From Wolf Rapids. We’ll keep it at Cass like the rest.”

“And I get a tenth. I’m giving it away, Stiffleg. I’m bribing whole tribes with your stuff. And after I give away the ten percent, I’ll mostly give away the rest.” Hervey’s bright eyes bored relentlessly into Fitzhugh.

“Always comes a bill of reckoning, Julius. I’m an old reckoner.”

Hervey’s gaze went cold, and then slid back to mockery.

“I admire your industry. It’s amazing what a man will subject himself to for a fool dream. That’s all it is, you know.”

Fitzhugh had wearied of the taunting, and peered out upon the golden meadow, and then up into a cloudless sky with a blue so intense it hurt his eyes. Somewhere to the east, and close now, three heavy wagons were slowly rolling toward him, along with eight men. He’d have them together, his whole crew. And then things would happen.