Sitka (14 page)

The wounded man was cursing now, in a low, monotonous voice. Gingerly, the others picked him up and helped him from the room.
 
At the bar the man in the dark, suit turned to face them. “That was mighty cool,” he said to Jean. “I don’t know whether I like it or not.” “I don’t like dry-gulchers trailing me.”

“We don’t know they were dry-gulchers.”

“You’ll have to take my word for it, and if you have any thinking to do, do it quietly. I’m hungry.”

At the bar there was subdued muttering and glances cast in their direction. More men drifted into the bar, but a difference of opinion was obvious. Jean knew there would be no chance to sleep here now. They must ride, and at once.
 
The man in the dark suit turned on them. “You two stay in town until we decide what to do about this, you hear?”

LaBarge got to his feet. “Listen to me, mister. You said before this wasn’t your fight, so don’t make it yours. Those men were trailing us to rob us, and if any of you want to keep us here, you just stand out in the street. In ten minutes we’ll be riding out with our rifles across our saddlebows.” He paused, letting it sink in. “And, mister, if you feel lucky, you just try stopping us.”

Ten minutes later, mounted on a horse loaned him by Charley Brastow of the stage company, Jean LaBarge rode out of town with Ben Turk beside him. The man in the dark suit stood on the steps of the saloon chewing on a cigar, several men around him, but he made no move.

“I seen them come in,” Brastow had said, “an’ I can smell a bad one further’n most. They sized up your horses and asked where you went.” He looked over their horses. “I’ll credit you with fifty apiece for the horses and you can leave mine at Johnson’s Camp on Hungry Creek. Tell him you’re to have the two grays.”

Johnson met them at the corral as they rode up. He was a tall man with no chin and he came from his clumsily built log cabin on the run.
 
“Get the grays for us, will you? Brastow said we were to have them. We’re riding on to Portland.”

Johnson’s Adam’s apple bobbed against his frayed collar. “That’s crazy, stranger! Pure dee crazy! Them Modocs killed a trapper up the crick yestiddy, and burned a couple of farms! Mister, you two wouldn’t have a chance against ‘em!”

Jean took a rope from the corral post and shook out a loop. One of the grays shied but he swung his loop and made an easy catch. Both were magnificent horses, and as he roped them, Ben stripped their gear from the others. Still protesting, Johnson watched them mount up and ride off.
 
Both men were dead tired. Their plan to sleep in Yreka had been blasted by impending trouble. Jean’s eyelids felt thick and heavy, and he rode as did Ben, in a sort of stupor.

Hours later they were walking their horses along Bear Creek bottom when a bullet struck water ahead of them and whined away into the brush. Glancing around they saw five Modocs come out of the trees on their right rear, and fan out as they came down the meadow at a dead run, whooping shrilly.
 
“Make the first one count, Ben.” Jean lifted his rifle and looked down the barrel. He was wide awake now. He took a long breath, let it out easy and tightened his finger on the trigger. The rifle jumped in his hands and the foremost Modoc fell face forward from his running horse. The report of Ben’s rifle was only an instant behind his own, and a horse fell, spilling its rider.
 
Both men were using the Porter Percussion Turret rifle, .44 caliber, firing nine shots. Steadying himself, Jean fired twice more and saw Ben’s second man swing away, clinging to his horse with only a mane-hold, his body slumped far forward.
 
The Modocs drew off, two men gone, another wounded, and shaded their eyes after Jean and Ben Turk. Accustomed as they were only to single-shot rifles, the burst of firing was too much for them.

At Jacksonville they stopped for coffee and sandwiches, and an hour farther along they mounted a tree-covered knoll and caught an hour’s sleep, trusting the horses to awaken them if Indians approached. Twice more they exchanged horses, giving up the grays with reluctance, knowing such horses were rare. They passed the place called Jump-Off Joe, and later, crossing Cow Creek, they saw more Indian signs. At Joe Knott’s Tavern they exchanged horses again. After a meal and a short rest they pushed on.

An hour out of Knott’s it began to rain and with less than two hundred miles to go they spotted a cabin, barn, and corrals. Beyond was some forty acres of stubble. They rode toward the cabin, hallooing their presence.
 
A man with yellow side-whiskers stood in the door, rifle in hand. “Light an’ set, strangers,” he invited, “you’re the first folks we seen in two weeks.” “Modocs are raiding,” Jean explained, then jerked his head to indicate the stubble. “What was that ... wheat?”

“Uh-huh.”

“I’ll buy it. How much have you?”

“Done sold it, mister. Feller name of Bonwit from Oregon City bought wheat all through here. Why, he must have upward of two thousand bushels headed for the Willamette.”

A meal and thirty minutes later they stepped into the saddle. Bonwit of Oregon City was the man to see.

He was a stocky man in a store-bought suit and a cigar clamped in his hard mouth. His face was wide, his hair sparse and rumpled. He rolled his dead cigar in his jaws and spat into a brass spittoon. “I’ll sell,” he said flatly, “for cash!”

“I’ll take two thousand bushels, delivered in Portland,” LaBarge said, and began counting out the gold.

Bonwit rolled his cigar again and shot a glance at LaBarge from astonished eyes.

“You carried that over the trail ... just you two?”

“Part of the way we had Modocs with us.”

They sold their horses in Portland and pocketed the money. They had ridden six hundred and sixty-five miles in one hundred and forty-four hours.

Baron Paul Zinnovy sat at his desk in a San Francisco hotel. The wheat had been destroyed but LaBarge had vanished, and it worried him. A close watch had been kept on the schooner until it sailed; LaBarge was not aboard.
 
He paced the floor, scowling. Rotcheff seemed willing to remain right here in San Francisco, and as long as he did so, he would be safe. He had his instructions as to Rotcheff but nothing could be done here. If Rotcheff was lost at sea farther north there would be no investigation but his own. Or at a landing on one of the lesser islands they might be attacked by the Kolush...
 
Officially, the Russian American Company was losing money, but actually a few key men were doing very well indeed between paying low prices to the promyshleniki and padding expenses in stockholders’ reports. If Rotcheff succeeded in getting wheat to Sitka conditions would be alleviated and prices could no longer be held down.

It was dangerous to leave Rotcheff unwatched. There were Boston men here in San Francisco who could offer evidence on the cruelties of the Company, and Rotcheff could choose his own time to come north—perhaps one inopportune for Zinnovy.
 
None of his agents had learned anything of LaBarge. On the evening of the fire he had been seen riding with Helena de Gagarin, but had dropped off the world right after that, and whatever she knew she was keeping to herself. Without wheat LaBarge could not really cause any serious trouble, and yet it was strange that he should have disappeared. Still, the thing to do was to take one thing at a time and the first was Rotcheff.

The Susquehanna, as Jean LaBarge had renamed the schooner, arrived in Portland only a few hours after he did. Knowing that if he reached Sitka before the Baron Zinnovy his chances would be greater to get the cargo of fur he wanted, he laid his course for Queen Charlotte Sound as soon as the last of the wheat was aboard.

Clearing the mouth of the Columbia with a cold wind kicking up whitecaps around them, the Susquehanna lay over on her side and took the bone in her teeth, pointing her bows into the cold northern seas as if anxious for the green water that lay ahead.

LaBarge, his wind-brown face wet with flying scud and spray, stood beside Larsen at the wheel, watching her move along under a full head of sail. His sea boots and oilskins were shining wet, the sky was gray and lowering with clouds, but the wind was good.

“How was the trip up the coast?”

“Flying fish sailing ... it was good time.”

“How about the Russian ship?”

“I think she go to sea soon. We see her loading stores.” He went below to study the charts again, glancing at Kohl asleep in his bunk, his body moving slightly to the roll of the schooner. If the wind held...
 
Hours later when he came down to shake Kohl awake, the mate opened his eyes at once. “How is she?”

“Holding steady, and we’re making knots.” He took off his sou’wester. “She’s raining a little, and we’re catching some spray, but the wind is right. Just what the doctor ordered.”

Kohl shrugged into a thick sweater. “You figuring on trouble in Sitka?” “Not if we can get out before Zinnovy gets there. Sitka should be glad to see the wheat.”

“What then?”

“We discharge as quickly as possible, stock with whatever we can get of food and water, then lay a course for Cross Sound. With luck we’ll have our furs and be on our way south before Zinnovy can get his patrol boat to watching us.” “We’ll be lucky to find furs that fast. There’ll be ships ahead of us.” Jean grinned. “Don’t worry about it. I know where there’s furs to be had ...
 
plenty of them.”

Kohl cocked an eye at him. “Seems to me you know a lot.” LaBarge shugged. “I know enough. Listen, Barney, I hired you because you’re one of the’ best men with a ship on the west coast. I hired your ability, all your knowledge, but this much I know. You may know things I don’t about particular bits of this northwest coast, but I know more about the whole coast than any man alive. I’ve made it my business to know.”

“That won’t help if Zinnovy gets you.”

“One thing at a time.”

LaBarge rolled in his bunk. Outside the hull, just beyond his ear, he could hear the whispering wash of the sea, rustling by with its strange secrets, its untold tales. On deck the sky would be gray with the last of the day’s light, and there would be phosphorus in the water. There would be no stars tonight, or if any, a mere glimpse between rifted clouds. Yet he was strangely content.
 
This was the world he wanted, this was the way. Sailing north in command of his own ship to trade along that coast that had so long held his thoughts.

Rising some hours later, Jean shrugged into a sweater and his oilskins and went topside. A pale-hearted moon hung above the fo’m’st and the sea rushed past in the half-darkness. Spray blew against his face and he put out his tongue, tasting the salt.

Walking forward along the deck he watched the black, glistening water as the great waves rose and then slid away beneath the hull. Aft there was no sign of anything else upon the sea; they were a tiny microcosm, a little lost world of their own, moving upon the sea with their own heart beating in time to the sea’s great rhythm and the talking of the wind in the shrouds.
 
Far behind him there was a girl with green eyes and dark hair, a tall and regal girl who had walked beside him briefly, a girl who was not his and could never be his, yet a girl who held his heart now and would hold it always.
 
He walked aft and found Kohl, wide as a door in his bulky clothes, standing by the port rail.

“How does she go?”

“She’s a dream ship, this one. If the Russkies get her, I’ll shoot myself.”

“See anything back there?”

“Once I thought I saw a light ... probably a star.” For a long time Jean LaBarge watched the sea behind them, and saw nothing; if there was a ship back there it was almost certainly the square-rigger.
 
If Zinnovy was following him, would he have Helena aboard? Could that light Barney thought he had seen be hers?

Helena. He wished he could drive her out of his mind. Wanting her did no good.
 
She belonged to somebody else, and that was that. He had never thought of himself as a lonely man before, but Helena had made him realize just how alone he was.

No man should have to walk the earth alone. A man should have a mate, to share his luck and his strength, but his sorrows as well. He had seen a Blackfoot squaw fight to her death beside the wounded body of her mate, and he had come upon a Chinese woman alone in the hills, giving birth to her child while her man worked five hundred feet underground to earn money to support them. Life had flavor when people had such courage. Strange how it was always the spoiled who weakened and cried first, and it was the injured, the maimed, the blind, and the poor who fought on alone.

Perhaps there was a life hereafter, a man thought of those things at sea, but he had never worried much about it because if he was not himself—this same collection of good, evil, bone, muscle, and blood—it wouldn’t matter anyway.
 
This was what he was, the bad with the good, and if he was anything less than this he wouldn’t be himself, not Jean LaBarge.

He knew his faults, or most of them. Knew the kind of sinning he liked and where to put his salt and he did not want to get acquainted with new likes and dislikes. As for sinning, most of the things he enjoyed were sins in the eyes of somebody. Except for reading ... and most of his books were written by pagan authors.

He was what he wanted to be, a free man. With luck he would not only keep his liberty but sail south with a cargo of furs, all the more precious because he’d taken them from under the nose of Zinnovy. He shrugged ... here he was wasting his watch below. That was the trouble with the sea and the mountains, they made a man think. It was always the little men who huddled together in cities who believed themselves important, and they had a conspiracy among them to keep up the illusion. They huddled in cities because a man at sea, in the desert or mountains had time to know himself, to examine what he was ... so they stayed in their cities, knowing they could not stand to ever really look at themselves.
 
Spray blew over the rain and against his face. It had a fine, briny taste to it.