“Maybe for a small consideration,” said Duchouquette. “The Company would disapprove but there are ways, oui?”
Ways indeed. Samson sighed and rose casually. His men stood near their packs. He wandered towards his. When he lifted his rifle, his men would too.
“Oh, we’ll make a little offering,” Samson said. He lifted his piece swiftly, and his men did, too. They didn’t like it much, and neither did he. But necessity ruled.
Duchouquette stared from man to man. The rest of the boatmen did too. “I was afraid of that,” he said. “And you are Creoles like ourselves. You would shoot Creoles?”
“But yes,” Samson replied. “And then make sure you are properly buried and wept over and your widows notified.”
“We number more than you,” Fecteau announced.
“Oh yes. And after we shoot, our rifiles make fine clubs.”
But they wouldn’t try that. Not Creole against Creole. “All aboard,” Samson said, prodding the opposition forward. He nodded to Bercier who ran ahead and plunged into the cabin, emerging with a handful of rifles, powderhorns, and ammunition pouches.
“Is that all?”
“I will check again, Samson.”
Bercier vanished into the cabin again, this time emerging with powder flasks and shot flasks for the swivel gun at the bow, along with three knives.
“Now it is an empty nest,” Bercier said.
Trudeau marched his prisoners up the plank and into the cabin, and closed the door. None of them protested much. They’d come to no harm; it was fur company war, nothing personal. Nothing to expend lives and blood about, especially the blood of fellow Creoles.
Samson’s men gathered their kits, hauled them on board, and stationed themselves on the deck. Two kept their rifles trained on the door, but it wasn’t crucial. Samson himself took hold of the tiller and steered the bateau into the swift current. Peace reigned, after a fashion. He intended to travel day and night when the moon permitted. He’d stolen a keelboat, the value of which was actually less than the destroyed and stolen livestock. It would have to do.
By keelboat they were only a day and two nights from Wolf Rapids, and they’d make up some of the lost time. Not that he expected Fitzhugh to be there: the packet would be late in this low-water year.
They drifted on into the night, exploiting a quarter-moon until it sank. He let one opposition man at a time emerge, relieve himself, drink some river water, and return. He had nothing to feed them other than what the Chouteau men had on board, which was an emergency parfleche of jerky. They had been making meat as they traveled, needing little else.
When the moon vanished he began steering badly, grinding the keelboat into a gravel bar. His men poled it loose and they drifted in the black current again. Mostly, the river took them where it would, the channel running now to one side and then to the other. He kept two men at the prow with sounding poles as the cool night progressed, and whenever they told him the keelboat was sliding into shallows he veered away. It didn’t keep them entirely out of trouble but a keelboat was forgiving, unlike a steam packet.
Samson Trudeau felt no guilt at all, not even for confining his fellow Creoles down there among the bales of robes. They were hungry, no doubt — everyone was — but comfortable, spread out on robes and warm. He sighed. Hard times required hard measures. And he had justice on his side anyway.
At dawn, Brasseau shot a muley doe, and he veered toward the far bank to collect it. Brasseau himself leapt into the river, gasped at its coldness, and then dragged the doe off the shore and floated it toward the bateau, where many hands helped him up, and pulled up the doe. Trudeau didn’t want to anchor — it would be a temptation for the opposition. They paused long enough to gather firewood and then Trudeau swung the long tiller, steering the keelboat into the relentless current. Swiftly, his men hung the deer from the mast, gutted it, butchered it, and began roasting venison over the small fire crackling in the sandbox that lay aft, the only device for cooking on board.
Around noon they passed a herd of buffalo shaded up along the bank under cottonwoods. No one shot; they didn’t stop. His men hadn’t slept, nor had he, and the paralyzing weariness of a second day without sleep invaded him. Weariness meant danger. Weariness meant bad judgment. He traded watches at the tiller with each man, and encouraged each man, in turn, to stay alert. He had Corneille Dauphin load the swivel gun at the prow just in case they ran into Indians. This was an oversized blunderbuss with an inch and a half bore, almost a small cannon. It rotated on a swivel pin set in a post. It could fire miniature cannonballs or enormous charges of buckshot.
“Load it with the shot, Corneille,” he said, thinking it would be helpful against amassed warriors. But nothing transpired that hot July day. It was the peak of the trading season and most villages were camped around one or another of the posts, exchanging robes for things the tribes prized: axes, hatchets, knives, hoop iron for arrow heads, kettles, skillets, rifles and shot, awls, traps.
Sun blistered the deck making men dizzy with heat and dehydration but still he kept on, rotating the watches at the tiller so that each of his men got a rest in whatever shade he could find, which usually was none at all. The ones in the cabin had the better time of it, he thought. Now there was continuous talk and raillery among them all, the opposition men conversing through the small portholes on either side of the cabin with those on deck, almost as if they weren’t prisoners or captors. And the ones in the hold had the better of it: hot as it was in there, it was cool compared to the brutal heat and glare on deck.
Thus they traveled, rotating duties, through the day and into the second night, each fighting exhaustion. Brasseau tied a line to himself and lowered himself into the cold water to shock his body back into life. Others just lay in a stupor, glad of the cool breezes of the night.
By dawn — fortunately, because they needed the light to navigate — they slid into patches of white water, marked by occasional boulders slicked smooth with the abrasions of the current. Wolf Rapids. There wasn’t much of a fall, but between the current, the boulders, and the narrowing channel, it stopped the steamboats. They shot out of the lower end just as sun poked over the northeastern bluffs — and beheld a mountain of trade goods lying nakedly on the shore, and Fitzhugh howling at them.
Wearily, Trudeau eased the long keelboat toward the bank until it touched bottom. His men threw lines to shore. Two or three Creoles Trudeau had never seen before caught the lines and tied them to willows. Fitzhugh stared, first at Trudeau, then at his own men on the deck, and then at a strange face in the porthole of the cabin. “You,” he muttered, a crazy joy illumining his face. “All the ol’ coons.”
Six
* * *
In a few minutes Fitzhugh had the whole story. His oxen dead; his mules stolen! A keelboat for a dozen oxen and six mules seemed a fair-enough exchange although Maxim scowled about it. But Maxim was scowling about everything anyway.
“You sure it wasn’t just another Blackfeet horse-raidin’ bunch?”
“Yes,” Trudeau said. “Horse raiders, they come on foot and ride their prizes away. But these came on horseback. Horse raiders, they don’ bother with oxen. But these, they hang around and put an arrow into every ox, and steal the mules.”
That was all Fitzhugh needed. “I reckon they got a keg o’ whiskey for it. What about the wagons?”
“We cached the sheets in the woods near the river. It was all we could do.”
He pointed at the boat. “What about them in the cabin?”
“They understand. We tell them the whole story. We’re Creoles, they’re Creoles. They aren’t mad.”
“I guess you’d better let ’em out.”
Moments later, the American Fur engages stood on the riverbank, blinking at the sun.
“What’d you have in mind, Trudeau?” Fitzhugh asked.
“Trudeau’s gallic shrug said more than words. He pointed at Primeau. “He knows Anglais.”
“Unload your bales and then
help us load up. We’re borrowing this keelboat.”
“Stealing it,” snapped Maxim.
“I reckon it’s repayment, Maxim.”
“Two wrongs don’t make a right.”
Fitzhugh ignored him. “Git your bales out and you can do what you want afterward. We’ll leave your powderhorns and duffel, and drop your rifles a mile upstream.”
“Monsieur Fitzhugh, I would not wish to leave the robes exposed to the weather.”
It angered Brokenleg. “Your outfit didn’t care about us leavin’ our trade goods out hyar. Luckily there’s been no rain — yet.”
“I’ll give him the sail,” Maxim said.
Fitzhugh didn’t like it but said nothing. Unless they had a freak easterly wind they wouldn’t use the sail. When he didn’t object, Maxim stalked sullenly aboard and pulled the sail out of a bin on deck.
Silent Chouteau men hefted the heavy bales up from the hold and handed them down to others on shore. Gradually a carefully built mound of baled robes, fit together like bricks to keep it water tight, rose near the Rocky Mountain Company trade goods. And then under the watchful eye of Fitzhugh’s own armed engages the opposition men loaded the boat with Fitzhugh’s supplies.
They were sweating freely when it was done although the day’s heat had scarcely built up. The Chouteau men spread the sail over the compact load of robes, making it reasonably weathertight while his own men collected their kits and boarded.
Fitzhugh pulled Primeau aside. “You got supplies? Fire steel, and all?”
“I don’t know,” the man replied.
Brokenleg turned to Samson Trudeau. “Make sure they have what they need. All we want’s their boat.”
In short order a small heap of provisions lay on the grass, including coffee beans and tobacco, sugar and other staples, camp axes and hatchets, a few knives, and their blankets and robes.
“Primeau. About a mile up, we’ll leave your rifles right on the bank close to water. You wait a while. You come too soon and you’ll run into that swivel gun.”
Primeau grinned. “We’re in no hurry. We’ll smoke the tabac. Merci beaucoup,” he added, half mocking. It wasn’t war; it wasn’t peace. Fitzhugh grinned back. Fur Company stuff. Maxim scowled again, obviously hating it.
His men swung the keelboat loose. Just to be on the safe side Fitzhugh himself swung the swivel gun around and kept the blunderbuss aimed toward shore. His engages each grabbed a long pole with a knob at one end, and lined themselves along each side. “A bas les perches,” cried Trudeau and the voyageurs thrust their poles in unison, the ball in the hollow of their shoulders, walking toward the stern. Sluggishly the boat lumbered forward. “Levez les perches,” Trudeau cried, and the Creoles lifted their poles, ready to repeat the operation. Muscling a keelboat upriver was brutal work. Fitzhugh would have poled too but his bum leg prevented it and someone had to steer anyway. He didn’t trust Maxim with the job — not with that boy’s frame of mind. Dust Devil had scurried into the cool hold.
Less than a mile upstream they found a grassy flat next to the main channel and he steered the boat to it. They left the opposition’s rifles there. For good measure, Fitzhugh tied a red ribbon to some nearby brush. In about ten minutes those rifles would be back in the hands of their owners.
His nine engages, six from the post and the new three, poled their way upriver until they hit a place with no bottom, a place where the current shoved the boat hard against the far bank and they’d lost control. As the boat whirled backward and began to turn broadside of the eddy, Fitzhugh steered it brutally into the bank, and at once his engages caught the boat fast with gaff hooks, and dug out the cordelle. This long heavy line they tied to the mast, ran it through a bridle at the bow, and then plunged into the water next to the bank and played out the line until they were several hundred feet ahead of the keelboat. And then they began cordelling the boat forward, a task even more brutal than poling it.
For the next hour they hauled the boat forward, tromping through water, mucking through sloughs, battling brush, detouring around fallen logs, clambering up cutbanks and down rocky grades, the long line biting into their shoulders, the boat a dead whale behind them, resisting every inch, tugging, yanking them backward when currents caught it. In the end the torn muscles of nine men tromping a ragged shore overpowered a sixty-foot wooden boat with eighteen tons in its hold.
They rested through the midday inferno, coiled the endless cordelle and drooped it into its bin, and took up their poles again where the river ran broad over a gravelly bottom. Brokenleg squinted behind, watching sharply for a glimpse of the opposition engages — and saw none.
More and more, though, he fumed at Max, who sat sulking, doing nothing, daring Fitzhugh to make him pole. They were coming to trouble, he and that boy. He was ready to box the boy’s ears so soundly that the boy would be governed by fear if nothing else. But something in Brokenleg told him it wouldn’t help. Max would not yield. Boxing and tormenting that boy would only produce an angry rebel who’d slip away at the first opportunity. He had to reach Max’s mind and soul. And he didn’t even know where to start. Max was in trouble with the engages, too, who studied him sullenly, aware that the boy wasn’t sharing the toil in spite of a strapping, healthy, seventeen-year-old’s body. The time of reckoning had to come soon.
The fourth day they reached the place where the wagons and wagon sheets had been cached. Samson Trudeau steered the keelboat toward the south bank and the engages tied it tightly to stout willow brush. Nearby the carcasses of oxen rotted, filling the meadow with a sweet sickening odor. They’d been half-devoured by coyotes, wolves, hawks, skunks, and raptors. Fitzhugh gagged. Maxim vanished into the hold. Brokenleg had Bercier stay aboard and man the swivel gun against surprise while he limped off with the rest toward the dark cottonwoods that hid the wagons. He hoped they could take the wagons. He’d never see the wagons again if he left them there.
They found the three Pittsburghs untouched and still well-concealed behind walls of brush. Trudeau sent a man to pull the sheets out of the cache while the rest freed the first wagon and dragged it slowly to the riverbank. The keelboat could hold the wagon crosswise, that was plain. Maybe hold all three wagons crosswise — if they could build some sort of stage and muscle them up the steep incline to the deck. He searched restlessly along the bank, looking for higher ground, a low cutbank, and found one two hundred yards back. They unloosed the keelboat and let it slide downstream, and retied it at a place where the bank lay level with the deck. And then they shoved the cumbersome wagon there, hacked through dense brush, eased it over wobbling planks while waves careened the keelboat, and finally aboard. It looked odd and out of place there, a humpbacked camel.
Through the hot afternoon they wrestled the other wagons to the bank. It turned out there was room for two, one aft of the cabin, one ahead of it. Disheartened, Brokenleg helped them drag the third one back to its hiding place and cover it. His leg tortured him all the way, although he’d done nothing compared to the brutal toil of the engages. He stared at the fine freight wagon doubting he’d ever see it whole again. At least he had the three wagon sheets and two freighters, he thought.
They shuffled back to the keelboat and once again the engages began their promenade, this time dodging the wagons, jamming their poles into the river bottom until they bent under the fierce thrust. For boatmen heading upriver toil never ceased.
“Steer,” he said to Dust Devil. She took hold of the long sweep hesitantly, and then with an arrogant gleam in her eye guided the keelboat. He grabbed a pole and joined the parade, feeling the toil brutalize his leg. Maxim scowled.
Two days later they approached Fort Cass. Various Indians had spotted them. Crows, he thought. Crows out hunting or root-gathering while they traded. He knew he might have trouble at Cass. Old Isodor Sandoval was the trader but Julius Hervey lingered on as the factor, more vicious than ever, sulking about his damaged hands — hands half-severed by Brokenleg in a brawl a half a year earlier —
and looking for revenge. Chouteau men up on the bastions would recognize the boat; recognize the wagons on it, and know exactly what had happened — or at least part of it. The keelboat would pass close to the post and right under the post’s six-pounder — which could blow it to bits, kill his men, and destroy the resupply down in the hold. He could run for it — if toiling upriver upon the bent poles of engages could be called running. Or he could stop and tell them the whats and the whys. He knew that if Hervey or Sandoval chose to, they could pick off Fitzhugh’s engages easily with rifle shots and just as easily sink the boat or compel Fitzhugh to come to shore. It was something to think about, and Fitzhugh was thinking plenty when they rounded a gentle bend and spotted the gray palisades and bastions of Fort Cass.
* * *
Brokenleg steered the keelboat to the Fort Cass levee and his men tied it there amid a growing crowd of Crow Indians.
“Watch ’er,” he told his men. “Cut ’er loose if there’s trouble.”
He limped across an open flat crowded with lodges, heading toward the gate in the log stockade of the American Fur Company post. His flesh crawled, remembering the troubles he’d had there last winter — when Julius Hervey had almost strangled him to death.
Brokenleg knew he’d have to deal with Hervey. The man’s sheer force of will dominated the post in spite of the ruin of his hands. He found Sandoval and Hervey awaiting him at the gate, which was good. He didn’t want to enter Fort Cass.
“You have my keelboat,” said Hervey. The man looked as menacing as ever, pure muscle driven by an untrammeled will.
“You have my mules and you killed my oxen,” Brokenleg retorted. “Worth a thousand.”
Hervey laughed, that maniacal roar that always sent shivers of dread through Brokenleg — and other listeners. Hervey didn’t bother to deny it. There was not point in denying it. Blaming such things on Indians was a great joke among robe traders. “Worth a small keg,” he said, grinning. “Mess a’ Piegans.”
Cheyenne Winter Page 6
