* * * * *
Pike raked the bay’s ribs with his spurs, running the wiry little mustang down the slope to the side valley’s escarpment, then over the edge in a steep, plunging slide. At the bottom he lined out to the south, riding hard for the distant river.
He didn’t slow the pony’s wild gait until he was within a couple of hundred yards of the river’s wooded banks. There he pulled up to check the rifle’s priming, the sharpness of its flint within the leather-padded jaws of the cock. When he was satisfied, he tapped the bay lightly with the sides of his stirrups, riding the rest of the way at a trot, his scalp taut.
The river’s bed was fairly broad, though mostly sandy and dry. The main channel was no more than ten or fifteen feet across, meandering shallowly between low banks that were scarred and knocked down by old buffalo trails. There were deeper pools here and there that were crowded with flashing schools of minnows, the calm surfaces of these ponds spotted with water bugs and sodden leaves.
Pike guided the bay into the riverbed to avoid the crackle of dead leaves. Now only the occasional splashing of the bay’s hoofs as it crossed the stream or the dull clip of an iron shoe striking a stone interrupted the silence around him. With his nerves strained, his senses seemed to sharpen until he was acutely aware of every sound, every movement. So attuned, in fact, that he was certain he heard the slap of flint against frizzen a split second before the boom of a fusil exploded in front of him.
The smoothbore’s heavy lead slug whistled past his face, so close he instinctively jerked his cheek away. Throwing himself from the saddle, he scrambled for the shelter of a fallen log, its sun-bleached trunk as thick as a horse’s chest. Crawling into the tangle of its uprooted base, Pike peered cautiously upstream. A patch of yellow cloth was visible between a couple of trees about forty yards away. A second figure stood nearly a hundred yards beyond the first, wearing a knee-length buckskin coat and a bright green tuque. Carefully Pike slid his rifle across an exposed root. He heard the more distant half-breed shout a warning, but it came too late for the man in the yellow shirt. He was already clear of the trees when Pike’s ball took him low in the chest, slamming him back with his feet lifted high. Dropping out of sight, Pike quickly reloaded.
Silence drifted over the river. A gust of wind blew downstream, scattering leaves along the ground with a scratchy whisper. Far off, a hawk kerred. Ten minutes passed slowly, then twenty. A bee appeared out of nowhere to inspect the greased scent of Pike’s moccasins, then moved on. Pike waited expectantly, sweat trickling down his face, darkening the faded red fabric of his shirt. After forty-five minutes, curiosity finally won out, and he slowly peered around the root-knotted base. The man he’d shot was slumped against a tree, his chin resting on his chest, his long, raven-colored hair falling over his forehead. Pike watched for several minutes, but the yellow shirt never stirred. Edging forward to increase his field of vision, he studied the surrounding timber carefully. He thought the man in the yellow shirt was probably dead, but he also knew that his partner could be using the corpse as bait, hoping to lure Pike into the open. At the same time, Pike knew he could lie there all day while the second man made his escape. Finally, taking a deep breath, he rose to a half crouch and stepped clear of the log, ready to drop at the first snap of a trigger. But no report split the warm air, and nothing moved that wasn’t prodded by the wind. Slowly he began a cautious advance on the fallen ambusher.
It was François Rubiette, and he was still alive.
Pike paused behind a tree several yards away, his shoulder pressed lightly against the slim trunk as he watched the irregular rise and fall of the downed man’s chest. Rubiette’s shirt was smeared with blood, his torso twisted at an odd angle above his belt. Only his neck and shoulders were propped against the tree, the rest of him was stretched out limply in the dappled shade. His fusil lay half buried in the leaves several feet away.
François must have sensed his presence, for he tilted his head around to squint through a veil of dark hair. Coughing hollowly, he rasped: “Do not worry. Henri has left, and you have killed me.”
“You’re talking mighty free for a dead man,” Pike said.
“Sacre,” François croaked, struggling to bring Pike into focus. “Who are you?”
“A friend of a friend. Why’d you try to kill me?”
François chuckled, but the effort cost him. When he could speak again, he said: “I do not know, mon ami. We saw you on the ridge, then you came here. We thought you were a thief, or a Sioux. I don’t know. Maybe it was easier to kill you than to try to talk.”
“I’m a friend of Arch Callahan,” Pike said, watching closely for the half-breed’s reaction. His words had little effect at first, but then François’s face began to change, his eyes to widen.
Pike’s hands shook with rage. “Weendigo!” he hissed.
“Non!” the half-breed cried weakly, forcing his head higher. “It is not true! It was Henri! I swear it! Henri!”
“I reckon it was both of you,” Pike said, stepping clear of the tree.
“You are the one called Pike, non?”
He nodded, coming nearer. His rifle was aimed at François’s chest but he didn’t pull the trigger. “Tell me,” he said bluntly. “Tell me, god dammit!”
The Métis shook his head. Tears rolled down his cheeks to disappear into the curly thatch of his beard. “It was Henri,” he insisted. “Kill me, but know the truth. I tried to stop him.”
“You’re still traveling with him, and you tried to kill me without even knowing who I was. Naw, it was you.”
“Non! Non, non… non.” François’s voice faded and his head lolled. “It was Henri, I swear it.”
“Get up,” Pike snarled. “Get up, you rotten son-of-a-bitch.”
François shook his head. “I cannot,” he said. “My legs will not move.”
“You’re lying.”
“I would have run otherwise, or tried to hide. I am not lying.”
Pike glanced at François’s hands, but the bloody fingers were empty. Then he whirled, his throat closing, but there was no one behind him, either. Turning back to the wounded half-breed, he said: “You’re telling me your partner ran out on you without even trying to help?”
“Henri was not my partner. Not after last winter… after what he did to Arch. We only rode together because we both had to leave the Saskatchewan district. They would have killed us had we not fled.”
“Who would have killed you?”
“The Crees, the Blackfeet, the Assiniboines, the bois brûles. Any of them. All of them.” He forced his head up to look at Pike. Spittle shone on his lips, bubbling at the corners of his mouth. “He has done it before, you know? It was why he left the White Horse Plain. He is a dangerous man, Henri, and maybe a little crazy, but he is also a coward. Like me. Maybe that is your advantage, his fear. The dreams… they haunt him still.” He was silent a moment, then added: “They haunt me, as well.”
“What happened out there?” Pike asked, the muzzle of his rifle beginning to drop.
But François only shook his head. “You must ask Henri. I did not watch.”
“You were there. Dammit, you had to watch.”
“Non, I was not there.” He closed his eyes, his arms stiffening as if in pain. “Sacre! Kill me, Pike.”
“You have a knife?”
François opened his eyes. “Oui.”
“Use it.”
Fear crossed the half-breed’s face. “Non! I cannot!”
Pike grabbed the half-breed’s shoulder and pulled him forward. François’s body twisted to one side with a harsh grating sound, and he screamed until Pike shoved him back. “So it’s true,” Pike said, shaken.
François could only gasp for breath. In the moving his bladder had loosened, staining his trousers with the raw odor of urine. From a rawhide sheath on the half-breed’s belt, Pike withdrew a dagger similar to the one One Who Limps had used against McTavish.
“Can you use your hands and arms?”
François managed a nod.
Pike dropped the dagger on François’s chest, then stepped back. In a bone-dry voice, he said: “When you regain some strength, put the tip of that blade over your heart, then push it in with both hands. Make sure it goes all the way the first time. It’ll be easier in the long run if you get it over quick.” Numbly he turned away.
“Pike!” the half-breed cried. “Pike!”
But Pike didn’t stop. He found the bay grazing about two hundred yards downstream and pulled himself into the saddle. As he reined away, François’s cry came once more, muted and forlorn. Pike didn’t look back.
* * * * *
Stars glittered like broken glass, and in the distance a wolf bayed at the chip of the bone-colored moon, floating in the southern sky. From the west a stiff, icy breeze was driving in a bank of clouds that had earlier obliterated the sunset, and was even now gnawing into the mantle of stars.
Pike sat cross-legged in the middle of a flat plain, the bay tethered nearby. His rifle lay across his lap and his dirty white capote was pulled tightly over his chest. The square-shouldered bottle of bourbon he’d purchased from Murphy sat in the grass at his side, nearly a third gone. He was staring dully into space, oblivious to the baying wolf or the chill fondling of the wind.
Weendigo. Man-eater.
Although the half-breed had denied it vigorously, Pike considered the evidence overwhelming. He’d found Arch’s body himself, following the directions of a Blackfoot trapper to the Métis’ winter camp. They had left Arch in a wash, probably buried in a snowbank, but by the time Pike found him the body had not so much decayed as simply dried out. Pike hadn’t realized until after he’d examined the uniformity of the cuts in Arch’s thighs and buttocks and along his upper arms how much he’d doubted the Blackfoot’s story. Or perhaps how much he’d wanted to. Maybe François had told the truth when he accused Henri, but that didn’t matter. He had allowed it to happen. That was enough.
“One taken care of,” Pike mumbled darkly. He lifted the bottle and shook it, its fumes penetrating deep into his sinuses. “One put under and one more to go.” Tipping the bottle, he drank deeply.
Chapter Fifteen
It was a bleak day, the wind coming out of the northwest laden with fine grains of dust that stung Gabriel’s face and badgered his slitted eyes. His fingers, clutching Baldy’s reins, felt thick and numb. Iron-gray clouds surged thickly overhead, threatening but so far dry.
In the three days since the return of Big John and the others, the caravan had wormed free of the hills surrounding Chain of Lakes and was finally penetrating the short-grass plains of the buffalo, heading almost due west. There would be other lakes and ponds along the way, of course—the grasslands here were dotted with them—but they had left the best of the timber and the easiest hunting behind. Their next fresh meat would likely be bison, and what they carried now, the deer and fowl harvested at Chain of Lakes, wouldn’t last long among so many. Within a week, some of them would be eating a thin gruel of flour soup, with not so much as a handful of last year’s pemmican for flavoring.
Such was a hunter’s life, though, to feast one day and starve the next. With his face to the buffeting winds and his pony moving out smartly under him, Gabriel wouldn’t have traded his lot for a thousand farms.
He was riding about a league ahead of the caravan today, with Michel Quesnelle at his side. He had on his new jacket, the one Isabella had been making for him from buckskin, decorated with porcupine quills and embroidered moose hair in tight, floral patterns. The familiar odor of smoked leather was strong, and he was proud of the rich, brown-gold color of the hide that allowed the vivid blues and greens and lavenders of Isabella’s handiwork to stand out. It was perhaps a bit too light for the recent drop in temperature, but Isabella had finished the embroidery only last night, and he wore it as much for her as himself.
The two young hunters had ridden most of the morning without speaking, although Gabriel was aware of Michel’s regular glances, as if puzzled by the prolonged silence. Quesnelle’s silent scrutiny annoyed Gabriel. He wondered how much Michel had guessed about his feelings for Celine, or his uneasiness toward the American. Worse now than even the night of the dance, when Gabriel had spied her and Pike returning together from the shadows, was the bois brûles’ return to the caravan after Big John’s fight with One Who Limps. In Gabriel’s mind, Celine had tarnished the name of McTavish irrevocably that day when she’d abandoned her cart to rush to Pike’s side.
Gabriel’s face twisted in anguish at the memory. At his side, Michel Quesnelle laughed.
“You should not think of it so much,” he said. “What that woman does is not your burden.”
Gabriel threw him an exasperated look. “Does everyone know?”
“Oui.” Michel reined closer. “My mother says Celine speaks regularly with le diable, and my father wonders why you do not seek the company of Susanne Leveille.”
Gabriel scowled. It occurred to him that Nicolas and Rosanna Quesnelle were two of the worst gossips in St. Joseph, and that Michel was becoming more like them all the time. He said: “Your parents do not know Celine. They should not speak of her in that manner.”
“Isabella told my mother that Celine talks to herself all day now, and that she will spread her legs for any man.” Michel risked a sidelong glance. “I would like to horn that one myself, Gabriel, even if she is crazy. Do you think…?”
Gabriel’s fist struck out blindly, slamming into the side of Michel’s face. Quesnelle jerked back with a startled squawk and his horse jumped, tumbling him from the saddle. Gabriel was off Baldy in a flash, grabbing Michel by his coat and hauling him to his feet. He drew his fist back to strike again, but stopped when he saw the thin trickle of blood that ran from Michel’s nose to his upper lip.
“Are you crazy, too!” Michel shouted, yanking free of Gabriel’s grip. “Sacre démon, Gabriel, if you were not my friend, I would kill you good for that.” He put his hand on his knife to emphasize his sincerity.
“Shut up,” Gabriel said, turning away. Baldy had stopped where he’d jumped from the saddle, but Michel’s mount, younger and less experienced, had trotted off and was already curving back toward the caravan.
“Now my horse is gone. See? Go get him, Gabriel. It is your fault.”
“Get him yourself,” Gabriel replied sulkily. He’d let his musket fall when he’d jumped off Baldy. He stooped to pick it up, examining it carefully.
“How can I catch him myself?” Michel demanded, his arms flapping helplessly. “I cannot run as fast as a horse.”
“Then walk.” Gabriel mounted Baldy and began to ride away.
“Gabriel!”
He pulled up without looking back.
“Are we not friends?”
Gabriel wondered. He knew that last year they had been friends. Perhaps even a month ago. But he wasn’t sure of anything any more. “Tell them your pony threw you,” he said. “Even the best riders are sometimes thrown from their mounts.”
“I won’t do it! I will tell them that Gabriel Gilray struck me when I wasn’t looking, and that he left his partner afoot, alone on the prairie. They will shun you, Gabriel. They will say the crazy woman has corrupted your Métis blood.”
Shrugging, Gabriel gave Baldy his heels. The wind brought tears to his eyes. He wished it would rain, or snow. Anything to force a change, even if that change made traveling more difficult. He wished they would find buffalo.
“Gabriel, you would do this?” Michel called after him in disbelief. “You would forsake your own people?”
The wind picked up, blurring his vision even more. Angrily he kicked Baldy’s ribs, forcing the gelding into a lope.
* * * * *
Lying in his robes beneath one of McTavish’s meat carts, Pike listened to the low hum of the wind through the spokes, the restless stirring of the livestock corralled inside the carts. Wide awake, he stared up at the underside of the cart’s bed, his thoughts far away and tr
oubled.
He was growing impatient with the crawling pace of the caravan, and loneliness—even amidst so many—had begun to weigh on him. He was anxious to return to the mountains and get on with his life. He wished now that he’d gone after Duprée when he’d had the chance. At the time he’d convinced himself that the odds were too much in the half-breed’s favor, and that, if he would just stick it out a while longer, Henri would eventually make for the caravan and the shelter of his own family.
Now it was too late to go back. Whatever sign Duprée might have left would be old and wind-swept by now, impossible to follow. Yet as the days passed and the half-breed failed to appear, Pike’s hopes began to dim.
It had been just crazy bad luck that had separated him and Arch last fall. They’d spent the winter before trapping beaver for William Vanderburg, ranging the headwaters of the Snake and Green Rivers. But Arch had been growing tired of a trapper’s life. He had wanted to go back to St. Louis for a spell, to kick up his heels in a bona-fide town.
“I wanna eat meat that ain’t been scorched over an open fire,” he’d declared to anyone who would listen. “I wanna drink beer outta glass mugs.”
Pike had been less keen on the idea. He liked his meat just fine fixed over a fire, and preferred whiskey from a jug to beer any day. But when he realized Arch was serious, he knew he’d have to make a decision, and the one he came to was that he didn’t want to trap alone or break in a new partner. So he’d talked Arch into a compromise, and they’d accepted positions with James Kipp, out of Fort Piegan, on the Marias River. Arch would work at the post as a trader that winter, while Pike hunted meat for the fort’s personnel.
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