Sitka (5 page)

A rustle of movement in the brush behind him made Sam start, then relax slowly.
 
Fud was weaving uncertainly as his slow brain attempted to cope with the situation, a situation already beyond him. The shock of the trap was too much for Fud.

“You’ll drop your weapons!” Walker’s voice was crisp. “If you do not comply at once, we shall shoot to kill!”

Fud found his voice. “What’s this?” he blustered. “Can’t a man travel the high road ‘thout bein’ held up?”

“Our point exactly,” Hutchins replied cheerfully. “I’m Hutchins, if you’d like to know. I understand you planned to meet me later. Now tell us: where’s the boy?”

“What boy?” Fud tried to seem surprised.

“Don’t pretend, man.” Hutchins walked up to him. “You have been found out so you’d best tell us. If that boy has been harmed I shall personally attend to your hanging.”

Rob’s attention had been riveted upon the tense scene in the road’s center. All at once his eyes swung to the edge of the road. Sam was still there, a man behind him with a gun at his back, but the third man was gone.
 
“Father!” he called sharply. “The other man’s gone!” Before anyone could speak, Sam lifted his voice. “Hutchins, you’d better get to the cabin and save that boy. Ring’s got away and he hates the lot of you. He’ll kill that lad. I know Ring. He’ll kill him certain sure.” Fud turned his heavy head to glare at Sam. “Why don’t you keep shet?” he demanded.

Sam shrugged, smiling wryly. “You heard the man. If anything happens to that boy, we hang. Do you want to hang, Fud?”

“Did you say Ring?” Walker crossed the road to Sam. “I thought we’d killed the lot of them.”

“This here’s Bob Ring. You killed his father and brother. They were the first of the Carters.”

Walker turned to his son. “Rob, can you take us to the cabin? I don’t like to ask you. I know you’re tired, but ...”

“I want to go!” Rob slid from his horse. “I know the way.” Four men took Sam and Fud, their hands tied behind them, and started for the village. The others followed Captain Hutchins and Walker into the woods, and Rob led the way. Out there in the stone house Jean LaBarge waited for help, and he was bringing it.

The light outside the knothole slowly turned gray. Unless Rob had reached them in time Captain Hutchins would now be approaching the place where the Carters lay in wait for him on Mill Creek Road.

What if Rob was not believed? But he would be, for Rob was a serious boy, not given to pranks, and he had a way of making people listen to him. He knew how to talk, and had the words for it. That was because he read books. Jean made a mental resolution to read more ... if he got out of this.
 
He got to his feet and went to the door. The cabin smelled of dirty clothes and stale tobacco smoke. He tried to get his fingers into the crack between the door and the jamb but there was no space for them, nor could he budge the heavy planks at the window.

Somewhere out in the woods there was a sound, and he went to the knothole, peering out. The grass of the clearing beyond the hemlocks was gray with morning dew; with the rising sun it would turn to silver. A bird came out of a tree and sat on a stump, preening his feathers. There was no sound, there was no other movement.

Yet there was ... a stirring of leaves, a branch that moved, and a man peering furtively out. The bird, frightened, took off in a low swoop for the trees, and the man named Ring came from the forest and started toward the house.
 
Jean’s throat tightened with fear. Ring was back and he was alone. He had been running: his breath came in ragged gasps and he walked with swift, jerky steps.
 
That meant something had happened—

Ring hesitated, staring back at the forest and listening. His lank black hair hung around his ears, his eyes were wild and staring. There was a pistol tucked in his waistband. He ran on to the stone house and Jean heard him fumbling with the hasp on the door.

Frightened, his mouth dry, Jean hid where the opening door would conceal him until the last moment. They would be coming. Rob must have gotten help; Ring was being chased. If only he could...

The door slammed open and Ring stepped into the room, glaring about like a wild animal, looking for Jean. Gasping hoarsely from his run, the man was beyond reason, beyond thought, filled with murderous rage. He stepped on into the room, and instantly Jean ducked around the door and ran.
 
Wheeling with amazing swiftness, the black-haired man grabbed for him. Jean felt the fingers clutch at his arm, slide off. Then he was out of the door and around the corner of the house. The man was like a cat. He sprang after him, but Jean ducked behind a hemlock and froze in place, eyes wide, fear choking him.
 
Ring stood in the clearing before the house and looked around him slowly. When he spoke it was in an amazingly cool, almost conversational voice. “You surely needn’t try to get away. I know these here woods better’n anybody. My name is Ring and I growed up here.”

Jean looked toward the brush, judging the distance. The black-haired man would not want to use his gun and draw the pursuers to him. The brush was only fifteen feet away, yet for the time it took to cover that distance he would be in full view.

“I’m surely goin’ to kill you, boy. They done kilt my daddy, an’ I’m a-goin’ to kill you.”

Jean sprang out and leaped for the brush.

Ring swore, a shrill, whining scream, then lifted his pistol. Realization of what it might bring made him lower it again. He raced after the boy, but Jean LaBarge was already into the woods and once more in his own element. He ducked, dodged, then plunged out into an unexpected little clearing. Behind him Ring yelped a cry of triumph. And then out of the bushes ahead of them stepped Captain Hutchins. “It’s all right boy,” Hutchins said quietly. “Let him come.”

The hardest part had been saying goodbye to Walker, for they had always planned to go west together, and now he was going and Rob was staying behind. The next hardest part was to leave the swamp.

Before he left he walked alone to the Honey Tree, and he sat down there where he and Rob had sat so many times together, and where he had sat so many times alone. Around the towering tree millions of bees hummed unceasingly, and he watched them, a lump in his throat.

He told himself he would come back and take that old Honey Tree yet, but deep down inside he knew he never would, and suddenly he found himself hoping that nobody else would, either...

Neither Rob nor he had felt like talking. They just stood there, and he kicked a clod out of the grass on the Walker lawn.

“Guess you’ll be seein’ Indians, and everything,” Rob said.

“I guess so.”

“You going to write me? You going to tell me all that happens?” “I’ll write ... maybe won’t see any post carrier for a long time, but I’ll write.”

It was his first goodbye, and he did not like it. A long time later, sitting under the cottonwoods and watching the campfire on the little creek west of Independence, he thought of that. He missed Rob, and he missed the swamp, too, but he missed them only a little now because there was so much to see.
 
Not that there was no trouble, for trouble seemed to go with him wherever he went. He remembered what had been said when the others of the westward-bound company discovered he was a boy. The objections had been violent and profane.
 
But Captain Hutchins faced them, his feet a little spread, cool as he had been that morning when he killed Bob Ring. “The boy goes or I do not. I’ve a notion he’s worth the lot of you, and he’ll walk as far or trap as much fur as any of you.”

Captain Hutchins owned most of the horses, and Captain Hutchins had been free about providing powder and ball and the others knew they would be a while finding a man to replace him. It finally simmered down until only one man objected and Captain Hutchins faced him. “If it’s a choice between you or the boy,” he said coolly, “I’d rather have the boy beside me. If you don’t like his going, I’d suggest, sir, that you find a party more suited to your temperament.” A man named Peter Hovey, leaning on his elbow against a wagon wheel, had said, “Was I you, Ryle Beck, I’d back up an’ set down. I’ve a notion you’ve overmatched yourself.”

Beck glowered and grumbled, but after a little bluster he shut up and went back to the fireside.

Captain Hutchins turned to Hovey. “Thanks, man. It’d be a bad thing to begin a journey with trouble.”

“Aye, an’ trouble enough for us all will be seen before we’ve found our bait of fur.” He glanced at Jean. “Are you a trapper, boy?” “I caught my living at it, furs and herbs, more’n four years now,” he said, “but it was swampland and not the mountains. I’d be obliged if you’d teach me.” “You’ll do.” Peter Hovey grinned. “I’ve a thought you’ll do your share.”

And so it began.

Days later, moving westward, Captain Hutchins swung a wide arm at the country about them. “One man, Jean, a man with a vision, gave us this. If Tom Jefferson hadn’t gone ahead, overriding the little men without vision, all the frightened little men, we’d not have this. By signing the Purchase agreement he risked his political future, but he doubled the size of the nation. You might even say he created a nation. Before the Louisiana Purchase we were a cluster of colonies; after it we became a world power.”

“Is that good, sir?”

“Who knows, Jean? But nations and men are alike: they go forward or they stagnate and die.”

There was new respect for him when it was learned he was the son of Smoke LaBarge. Peter Hovey had known him, had trapped with him on the Upper Wind River. Smoke had been killed by Blackfeet the following year, Hovey thought. But you could never be sure. He had a way of turning up.
 
They went to Pierre’s Hole and traded there, and for the first time the others began to see that young Jean LaBarge knew fur. He had learned it by selling his own, and had learned trapping, too. Although only a boy, his take for the season was almost as good as the men’s.

With Captain Hutchins and a party of twenty mountain men they went up through the country along the Wind River and the Teton Peaks, and then floated down the Missouri to St. Louis. It was the biggest town Jean LaBarge had seen, and it was there, from old Pierre Choteau, that he first heard the magic name ... Alaska.
 
“Alaska,” Choteau said, “you know ... Russian America. Talked to a man who had been there to trade with Baranov. A rich land he said, the furs are thicker there because of the cold. Untrapped country. If I was younger ...” Alaska was an exotic name like Kashgar, Samarkand and Bagdad, but different, stronger, stranger. It was wild, untamed, lonely ... or so it sounded to him.
 
That night he had written to Rob Walker about it, his first letter home, after so long a time. He told him, in pages of writing, what they had done, of the mountain men he had met—Jim Bridger, Milton Sublett, Peter Hovey. But he wanted to go to Alaska. Rob must meet him in San Francisco and they would go together.
 
Was that when their love for Alaska began? Or had it begun in that other so-called wasteland, the Great Swanp? Others despised and feared it, yet Jean had lived there, made his way there, known its richness and its beauty. The experience made him wary of the term wasteland.
 
Now he was seeing great western lands that old Mister Dean had disparaged. He was seeing millions of geese, millions of buffalo, streams with beaver, forests of splendid trees, and the waters of the Missouri. He remembered a big, hairy-faced trapper who grinned at him and said, “Takes a man with hair on his chest to drink from the Missouri. Cowards cut it with whiskey!” Rob had been away at school when Jean next heard from him, receiving the letter at Astoria, and a package containing a translation of Homer. Captain Hutchins had already given him a Bible. Later, a drunken trapper gave him a copy of Plato’s Dialogues.

He read his books at night beside the campfire, and read them lying in his bunk at Astoria, and later in San Francisco. Several times after they arrived there he took trips with Captain Hutchins back into the Sierras or the Rockies, and each time he took a book with him.

At sixteen he had read just seven books, but had read them over and over, and at sixteen he was a veteran of nine battles with Indians, and victor in a man-to-man fight with a drunken trapper.

When his seventeenth birthday came around, he had read only one more book, but had read it, Plutarch’s Lives, four times. He had a fight with Comanches under his belt by that time, carried the scar of his first wound, and had recuperated in Santa Fe.

By the time he was twenty he had covered the length of the Rockies and the Sierras, had nearly died of thirst, carried the scar of another wound and was over six feet tall, lean as any savage warrior, and stronger than any man he had so far met. That was the year he lost all his furs on the Green River when his canoe upset, and lived two months with Ute Indians while they made up their minds whether to kill him or not. By the time they decided he had chosen his horse and rifle, and the night before his captors came for him, an Indian who had befriended him loosed the rawhide bonds they had finally tied him with, and he slipped out of camp in the darkness and rode south until he struck the trail from Santa Fe to California. Two months later, broke, ragged and hungry, he had showed up at Captain Hutchins’ office on the wharf at San Francisco.
 
The following year he bought furs for Captain Hutchins, read twelve more books and tried prospecting in the gold fields without luck. Twice he made strikes but both petered out.