Rocky Mountain Company (18 page)

“Had some river Crows come in yesterday,” Hervey said. “They’d been down the river, trading at Union, when your packet came in. Seems that pretty squaw of yours insulted a headman named Walks At Night. Those Crow, they got a bit huffy about it and told me they’ll stick with American Fur, right to the last robe. Now was I you, Stiffleg, I’d ditch her. Pitch her right outa the lodge. In fact, was I you, I’d give her to me. I’ll use her good.”

Dust Devil glared at the man on horseback. “Good! Crows all dog dung. We trade with Cheyenne.”

“Feisty, ain’t she,” Hervey said. “I’ll take her off your hands, Stiffleg. Show her who’s a man around here. I’ll even keep her for ten percent.”

Fitzhugh got hot, but wouldn’t let himself get riled — and murdered.

“There went your Crow trading, Stiffleg. And those Cheyenne, this here is a far corner for them. You’re going to have trouble with the Crow. In fact, you won’t have a horse or ox or mule around here within a month.”

“I’ll remember that, Hervey. And I’ll know who put it in their haids.”

Julius Hervey laughed heartily, reined his horse around, and trotted off toward the north, like some prince of darkness.

Brokenleg Fitzhugh sat his horse beside the gate of Fort Cass, watching his Creole teamsters whip and curse the yoked oxen and the mule team into the yard within. His oxen had become bilingual, he thought, responding to the cussing of two tongues. The creaking Pittsburghs groaned under their excess weight, their sheets flapping in the gusty breeze.

They’d made it. The stock seemed none the worse for wear, either, apart from the usual gaunting up from long hard use. Hervey’s engagés directed the wagons toward the warehouse, and then stood idly while Fitzhugh’s men began the sweaty task of unloading tons of tradegoods.

“Now I have it all, and you’ll never see it again, Stiffleg.” Julius Hervey stood solemnly at the gate, watching the Opposition’s goods slide into the bowels of his fort, while Brokenleg oversaw the unloading.

“Reckon that’s possible.”

“Let’s go in there: I want my ten percent. Not that it matters. It’s all mine, Stiffleg.”

Fitzhugh slid his bum leg over the croup, and eased down to the packed earth from the off side of his animal. His leg hurt. It always flamed into pain when he first put weight on it. Outside the gate, a crowd of Crows gathered to see the sights. More of them now than a few weeks ago. Cass had been back in business, drawing trade from all the Mountain Crows, and one village of Shoshone.

“Maybe I’ll keep your wagons, too,” said Hervey. “Now that I’ve swallowed up everything. I’m the whale, and you’re Jonah.”

“Reckon you could.”

“Not could. Will. This isn’t St. Louis.”

“I’ve got some stuff here that’s fort supplies, not trade goods.”

“Ten percent.”

“That stuff ’s stayin’ in the wagons and coming with us.”

“Glad you think so, Stiffleg.” Hervey looked almighty pleased with himself.

The warehouse eave dropped too low to permit Fitzhugh’s men to drive the lumbering Pittsburghs in, so they were unloading at the door, sweating mightily as men in the wagons lowered crates into the arms of others on the ground, while oxen stood restlessly, muttering and stinking.

“Mule work,” said Hervey.

Charles Brasseau, the black-haired engagé Trudeau had put in charge of this second trip, handed Fitzhugh the cargo manifests, and Maxim’s inventory lists. Brokenleg paged through them, until he found the separate list of post furnishings.

“Hyar’s what I’m takin’ out,” Fitzhugh said. The list included sickles, scythes, manila rope, a plow, oakum, skillets, tea pots, percussion caps, wash basins, skimming ladles and forks, soup tureens, tumblers, yellow jugs, brown havana sugar, shaving soap, ground salt, black pepper, a coffee grinder, coffee boiler, candle molds, twenty pounds of candlewick, a small iron strongbox, spoons, knives and forks, a barrel of rice, barrels of molasses, sugar, crackers, and dried apples — and a lot more of the things that were the daily tools of life at a trading post.

“Ten percent.” Hervey looked gleeful.

“We’ll see.”

“Plows and scythes and sickles. You must think you’ll stay long enough to plant a garden and cut hay.”

“Reckon so. Maybe we’ll be selling you vegetables.”

Hervey chuckled.

When at last the first wagon was emptied, the sweating men paused while Hervey wandered among the wooden crates and pasteboard boxes, taking his tenth of brass hawk bells made in Leipzig, beads made in Venice, Pennsylvania trade muskets, steel strikers made in St. Louis, DuPont powder from Delaware, French calicos, Sheffield knives and awls, and all the rest, checking lists with Brasseau, and putting his heap to one side. Fitzhugh hated it, and knew Maxim would hate it even more. He felt like he’d opened an artery. Which is why he kept Maxim back at their camp, along with Trudeau and Gallard, guarding the place. Maxim had accepted dourly.

Hervey chose his tenth well, with a knowing eye for the best colors of calico, the bluest beads, the most sought-after sizes of Wilson butcher knives. When numbers didn’t work into tenths — such as taking his share of forty-eight trade rifles — he took a dollar credit or debit from the inventories and applied it to other items, choosing with the skill of a seasoned trader on intimate terms with the tribesmen he dealt with. Brokenleg watched silently, rarely objecting, knowing that Hervey would love to taunt him into doing something reckless. Brasseau peered at him from liquid brown eyes, a look that asked whether Brokenleg was crazy, or merely demented. And so the taut afternoon unraveled.

Late in the day, the engagés finished stacking the impressive mountain of goods in a far corner of the warehouse, while Hervey’s men toted their plunder into the Fort Cass trading room, and his clerks settled it on shelves there. Each item on those shelves would sell for six or eight times its price back in the states, in part because of the costs of transporting the item so far. The prices at Fitzhugh’s post would be about the same.

“Friendly of you to bring us tradegoods. Now we can put you out of business in three months instead of six,” Hervey said.

But Brokenleg was studying the warehouse, making sure it was tight, hunting for signs of leakage from the roof. He saw no stain of water on the handsawn planks overhead, no dried and cracked mud in the earthen floor. If rats didn’t eat up his tradecloths and anything else they found tasty, his goods would be as safe as he could keep them in a wilderness. “Load up them housekeeping goods,” he said to Brasseau.

“Those stay,” Hervey said, his eyes mocking again.

Fitzhugh nodded to Brasseau, and the Creoles began dumping the scythes and pots back into the nearest wagon, with fearful glances toward a man they knew could easily murder them at a whim. But Hervey just smiled, stalking the warehouse like a joyous catamount surveying a carcass.

“Sign this,” said Fitzhugh, shoving at Hervey the manifest of goods being stored. The factor grinned, nodded, and beckoned Fitzhugh toward the trading room, where he scraped his signature on the document without looking at it — which bothered Fitzhugh almost more than Hervey’s threats.

“I’ll be back end of the year,” Brokenleg said.

“Try it,” Hervey retorted.

Out in the yard, where the sun lay flat and pummeled the east wall with yellow light, the engagés had turned the weary yokes of oxen and headed the lightened Pittsburghs toward the gate.

“Let’s git,” said Fitzhugh.

They whipped and cursed the slavering animals until the oxen hunkered down into their yokes, and lifted the wagons into a slow roll, raising dust. And then they stopped.

“Monsieur,
la porte  . . . “

The doors of Fort Cass had been closed.

Fitzhugh’s pulse rose. He peered around sharply. The yard was empty. Meat smells drifted from the kitchen. Cass’s engagés had vanished. But Hervey stood in the shadow of the warehouse, leaning idly against the doorframe.

“Open it up, Hervey, or we will.”

Hervey smiled and said nothing.

Fitzhugh peered around, studying the barracks, the offices, the spare rooms, looking for signs of war, and finding none. Orange light caught the American flag waving langorously above the gate. It came to him they’d either leave peaceably or dead. No conduct was beyond Julius Hervey, including mass murder and theft of the Opposition’s trading goods. But Fitzhugh guessed the man was bluffing, intimidating. Usually, a strange honor prevailed out here in a wild land, even among or between trading opponents. But that didn’t apply to the burly, mocking brown-eyed man with fists that pulverized whatever he chose to ruin.

“I reckon we’ll let ourselves out then, Hervey.”

Fitzhugh nodded to his teamsters. None of his engagés carried their rifles. Not when they needed whips in hand to goad the oxen and mules. Ahead, Brasseau fearfully walked toward high, roughhewn doors made of heavy sawn plank and bolted together with iron. No one stopped him. He found the doors unlocked, and began shoving them open. They creaked like gallows timbers in the hush.

“It’s after trading hours, Stiffleg. We lock before supper in the summer, sundown in the winter.” Hervey’s mocking voice told him that the truth was otherwise. “Not that it makes any difference. Say goodbye to everything now, and enjoy working on your rockpile.”

“I’ll be back, Hervey,” Brokenleg said, as the Pittsburghs lumbered out into flat light, and turned toward the Bighorn.

Work quickened at the construction site with the return of the engagés. Fitzhugh put Lamaitre and Bercier to prying up rock from the bluff; Courvet and Dauphin to running the stoneboats to the site; Brasseau and Larue to cutting roof poles and beams and sawing plank; and Guerette, Provost and Gallard to laying up the walls, using mud mortar mixed by Maxim. The boy was hard pressed to mix enough mud to keep three men supplied. When Fitzhugh wasn’t hunting, he helped Maxim with that crucial task.

They’d dug a pit beside a cutbank on the river, at a place where there was abundant moist gravelly clay. There the young man spaded clay into the pit, added buckets of water, and hoed the mud into a thick pudding. It was risky work. He had to pluck out oversized rock, and balance water and mud to get the right consistency. Provost or Guerette usually showed up with empty buckets before Maxim was ready, and helped with the final mixing. Within an hour on that first day, Maxim had reached his limit. Fitzhugh said nothing, let the boy recover his strength, and continue doing what he could.

Still, in spite of the lack of manpower, a thick rectangle of stone began to rise, day by day, but with a frightful slowness as Fitzhugh eyed the autumnal skies warily and men drew their blankets tighter around them at night. There were never enough men. The pile of poles brought in each day on the woodcutters’ wagon, one of the Pittsburghs with its sheet and bows removed, grew steadily, but not fast enough.

The erection of the post was only one of several pressing problems troubling Fitzhugh. He needed to put the whole crew to cutting prairie hay with the scythes, and stacking it. He’d need plenty of winter feed for the livestock. And firewood. He’d need a dozen cords to start with, and more as the winter progressed. And it had to be dry wood, from dead trees. The oxen, mules, and horses had to be guarded constantly, and the camp tended, and Dust Devil didn’t have enough time — or the inclination — to do it all. But the most troublesome problem of all was simply keeping his large crew fed.

Daily, before dawn, he saddled up his horse, and haltered a packhorse that tolerated a load of bloody meat, and rode out to hunt. He had found precious little of it, perhaps because game shied from the intense activity around the construction site, but also because the tribesmen camping at Fort Cass four miles away were also hunting, and perhaps because of something else — Fitzhugh had the feeling that someone was deliberately driving game away; someone employed by Hervey to do just that. Fitzhugh had found an occasional fresh pony track threading through lush bottoms where game usually lingered. A buck or doe a day wasn’t enough to feed his ravenous men. He had to add an antelope to that, or a wild turkey. He found no elk or bear. Each dawn he ranged as many as six or eight miles looking for meat, and when he found none, he repeated the whole thing in the evening, ranging south up the Bighorn river through bottoms that should be crawling with deer.

Once or twice he brought back two; most of the time he came back emptyhanded. His bum leg had made it difficult for him to limp far from his horse, or tie the animal somewhere and stalk game out of a thicket. He was tempted to give up hunting, turn it over to Bercier, who loved to hunt, and work on the construction himself — but with his leg, he’d be less useful there than out hunting, his old Hawken across his lap. As soon as he rode in with a carcass, Dust Devil wrapped its hind legs with thong, hung it with rope, and sliced down its gut. She could butcher any animal with astonishing speed, muttering and laughing as she yanked back hide and sawed at meat.

Almost daily, small parties of Indians rode in and stared at the construction. These were mostly Sioux hunting or trading bands, en route up or down the river trace. If Fitzhugh was in camp, he’d give their headmen a twist of tobacco, and invite them to come trade when the days were shortest and the cold had come. If Fitzhugh was out hunting, then Trudeau did the same thing. There was little danger, except to the horses, which were a temptation to any plains warrior of any tribe. A new trading post meant more goods, and competing prices, and they welcomed it. Still, Fitzhugh noticed, the Crow stayed away, and that became yet another thing to worry about. Neutrality was the only real safety a post had, a reality he’d never been able to pound into Dust Devil’s skull.

One night parties unknown had attempted to steal the stock, but the shrieking of a nervous mare, plus careful picketing and hobbling, had prevented it. The engagés had boiled out of their robes and fired random shots into the dark, and then checked with a lantern. All animals were accounted for. But that added to Fitzhugh’s worries: His stock was critically important, not only for construction but also for the trading strategy he had in mind, driving wagons out to the villages all winter.