Fitzhugh knew.
Hervey turned to his engagés. “Take her outside and leave her.” They stared at him. “Now.” He swung his pepperbox toward them, a vast amusement illumining his face.
Fitzhugh clambered to his feet, helping himself up with a grip on a table. He had nothing to kill with, except his hands.
“Take him out, too. And shut the gates. And don’t give him his coat.” He glanced at Fitzhugh. “I might just shoot you. I’m debating it. A thief in our trading room. Busted right in, the Opposition and his lady.”
He swung the pepperbox toward Fitzhugh, the madness building in his eyes, a mock Fitzhugh had seen before once or twice, and understood for what it was.
No one moved.
“Why doesn’t anyone obey this morning? It must be something about eighteen-forty-two. Something new in forty-two.” He beamed. “Well, I’ll do it myself.”
Hervey swung the pistol downward toward Dust Devil, aimed at her chest, and shot, the explosion deafening. Just as Fitzhugh slammed into him. The ball struck the puncheon, shattered, sprayed lead fragments, and stirred the fire. Dust Devil winced and groaned.
Hervey laughed, delighted, and righted himself as Fitzhugh topped on his bad leg. Fitzhugh landed like a poleaxed ox, and Hervey booted him with heavy square-toed hightops. The blow landed on his bad leg, right at his injured knee, and Fitzhugh felt screaming hurt sail through him, clear into his throat. He rolled just as another shot shattered the air, and felt something pluck at his shirt.
Above him, someone landed on Hervey from behind, like a monkey riding a bear. Lemaitre. And someone pulled Lemaitre off of Hervey. Gallard. Through it all, Hervey laughed and chortled, demonic pleasure lacerating the trading room. They tumbled into a table loaded with gewgaws. Yellow ribbons sprayed outward, and blue trade beads rolled, and a box of awls clattered, along with trays of butcher knives, a silvery cascade clattering over Fitzhugh. He grabbed one and crawled, but flying boots clobbered his ribs, and above him, Hervey roared. A pistol cocked. Fitzhugh rolled into Hervey’s legs and sliced.
The pepperbox pistol exploded so close Fitzhugh’s ears rang. Blood gouted from Hervey’s leg, just at boot-top. Another table toppled, spraying bolts of red and green tradecloth outward, unrolling as they bounced. A blue bolt bounced over Dust-Devil, trailing cloth like a comet, and landed in the fire. The wool caught, pumping acrid smoke into the room, while flame rode down the bolt toward Dust Devil.
Brokenleg’s leg tortured him. He peered upward. A melee. His own former engagés fought the others — except for Gallard, who wrestled against his old colleagues. Julius Hervey grabbed a rifle and swung it, its heavy stock scything through the brawlers. He lifted it and bashed Lemaitre in the head, caving in the skull. The engagé crumpled to the floor. Hervey swung around to murder Fitzhugh, but Guerette caught the weapon and yanked it, drawing Hervey off balance. Fitzhugh couldn’t stand, couldn’t find a purchase to put his bad leg under him, so he crawled where he could, doing what damage he could. Then Hervey toppled over him, thrashing among the tables, clawing away beads and ribbons and combs, laughing crazily.
“Stiffleg!” he whispered, swinging those massive hands toward Fitzhugh’s throat from behind.
Fitzhugh felt them on his windpipe, clamp him, crush cartilage, squeeze life out of him. He thrashed under the frightful force, and felt his throat collapsing under the sheer pressure of those thick fingers. He clawed wildly, felt his lungs suck at nothing and knew his eyes were not seeing. With his last strength he sawed at the fingers with his butcher knife, sawed through the back of the hand, down to bone; slashed at the other hand clamping him, knowing a slip would cut his own throat but sawing anyway through tendon and muscle while hot blood splattered over his neck and chest. Hervey shrieked and the useless hands surrendered. Fitzhugh gasped, sucking fiery air into fluttering lungs. Hervey lay beside him, howling, the unearthly sound filling the trading room with pain.
The ghastly howl halted the rest. They stared, stunned, at the giant trader whose half-severed fingers gouted crimson blood into the floor, soaking bolts of cloth with it. Fitzhugh sat up, glaring wildly, daring anyone to do anything, wheezing through the ruins of his windpipe. The fire smoldering in the blue bolt had reached Dust Devil, making her twist and groan. He reached across the floor and batted it away. The room stank of burning wool.
Lemaitre lay dead, his mouth an open hole, his head caved in. The fort’s engagés outnumbered the others, but their chief trader lay howling like a wolf, his fingers leaking life.
Painfully, Fitzhugh struggled to his feet, panting. His throat hurt. Everything in his neck felt broken. “Fix him,” he said, pointing his bloody butcher knife at Hervey. “Fix him or I’ll kill him.”
Two of the post’s men crabbed over to Julius Hervey, tore up tradecloth, and applied tourniquets to his upper arms, twisting until the bright blood dwindled. Hervey’s hands looked ghastly, their backs and fingers severed to the bone and sheeting blood from a dozen slices. His eyelids sagged, and his eyeballs rolled upward.
“Sew him up and bandage him,” Fitzhugh snapped. “Or let him die. I don’t care which.”
“I’ll do it,” said someone, a thin, blackbearded one who looked like he might have doctored men before. He plucked a packet of needles and a roll of thread from one of the two remaining upright tables. They were popular trade items.
Fitzhugh didn’t care. He peered about. The room was a shambles. Ruined bolts of cloth hung everywhere. Beads rolled underfoot. Blankets sprawled. Sour smoke hung. Bercier knelt beside Lamaitre, weeping, holding the dead man’s hand. Emile Gallard eased toward the door, looking stunned.
Suddenly Fitzhugh understood about Gallard. “Stop him!” he muttered.
Abner Spoon and Zach Constable responded, but too late. Gallard bolted into the glare and vanished. Spoon followed, but Zach Constable stayed close, armed and ready. He and Fitzhugh locked gazes for a moment, gazes that spoke of old times, beaver days, campfires shared. A sudden pleasure filled Brokenleg. Constable hulked like an open-jawed trap near the door, his deadly throwing knife in hand, an ally.
“Don’t reckon they treated Dust Devil proper, Brokenleg,” he said so softly he strained to hear. But Constable had said a lot.
Dust Devil moaned and writhed, alive but unconscious. The door had been left open, admitting arctic blasts of air. He found a blanket and covered Dust Devil again. Outside, in the snow glare, others gathered.
Alain Lemaitre dead. A pity swept through him. Killed trying to help him; killed by the hand of Julius Hervey. He choked back a sadness for the moment, knowing later that he’d weep for one of those whose brute toil had built Fitzhugh’s Post for him.
The fight had gone out of the Cass engagés, most of whom were half-dressed and without weapons — and hungry.
“Go eat,” he said. They filed out silently, most of them looking relieved. None had wanted to carry Dust Devil back into the cold. But some, he knew, had violated her, and he hated them for it, and he’d hunt them down and deal with them like a seared conscience.
He discovered his own rifle, the one Hervey confiscated from him, in the trading-room rack, awaiting a buyer. He took it, and helped himself to his own powderhorn as well. He loaded his weapon, and felt the familiar heft and power of it in his hands. On the floor, the remaining engagés sewed up Hervey, and every time the needle poked flesh and thread drew finger muscle together, the man winced and groaned. He lay in a darkening pool of his own blood.
Fitzhugh didn’t pity him: the man who’d boasted he’d put his hands on everything, had lost the use of his hands. Or most of it. Mountain justice, he thought. A biblical justice. Those hands could never grasp again. Their tendons had been severed. The fingers could not pull a trigger or guide a nib pen or clamp a knife — unless all those severed muscles healed, and Julius Hervey became more dangerous than ever, Fitzhugh thought uneasily. His throat remembered those hands, and burned still.
“Zach,” he said. “I owe you and Abner.
We’ll get our outfit moved to my post. Get my shelves stocked with all the truck, and then you take your pick, and stick for the winter.”
Zach nodded. “Like beaver days,” he said.
“I’m thinkin’ maybe I can put you on the fort roster.”
“Aw, Brokenleg — we’re a pair of lone wolves. With all the country just out the window, it’d be worse than going back to the States.”
“Whatever you want,” Fitzhugh said curtly. His head throbbed.
And Dust Devil watched, her brown eyes expressionless.
* * *
He spent the morning fighting a headache, hovering close to Dust Devil, who lay silently under blankets in the devastated trading room, and trying to bring some order to a chaotic time. He gathered his own subdued engagés and addressed them roughly.
“I’ll put you on the roster if you want,” he said without preamble. “I need you. I owe you for helping me — and Dust Devil — and my company. I’m fixing to load up our outfit — what’s left of it — and haul it back. I got horses now, passel of Cheyenne back there, Dust Devil’s people, come in to trade and see how the stick floats. They got robes, too, and more if we open our window.”
They stared fearfully at Hervey, who still lay on the floor of the trading room, under a trade blanket.
“There’s nothing he can do to you,” Fitzhugh snapped.
Bercier and Brasseau peered at each other, and seemed to come to a decision. “Ah, oui, monsieur . . . “
“I don’t reckon you want to stay here.”
They nodded.
Zach Constable, standing sentry at the door, let two men in, Emile Gallard with Abner Spoon poking his Hawken into Gallard’s back. Gallard surveyed the ruins malevolently, his gaze settling on Hervey, and then glancing at Dust Devil.
A shudder and groan erupted from Dust Devil, and Fitzhugh saw the fear gripping her, and instantly knew Gallard had violated her. Gallard and Hervey. Maybe others. He’d find out, and find them.
“Caught him,” Spoon said. “He’s some runner and got the best of me and I lost him. But he doubled back — he ain’t clothed much — and ducked into a Crow lodge. They didn’t want none of that and fetched him out when I come back.”
Brokenleg felt something akin to murder boil through him. He discovered the bloody butcher knife still clamped in his hand, and lifted it, and then winched his arm down slowly.
“Who paid you? Chouteau?”
Gallard shrugged, fearlessly. That was the thing about men like Gallard: they’d kill and despoil without a second thought, while knowing they were protected by other men’s scruples. Fitzhugh knew he wouldn’t stick that butcher knife into Gallard, and Gallard knew it too.
“You have help dumping the blankets?”
Gallard smiled.
“You lay with her.”
Gallard’s face went blank.
“Hervey tell you to go to her?”
Gallard grinned again.
“Monsieur Fitzhugh — we make our own justice, oui?” Brasseau addressed him from across the room. “The engagés are — one. We are dishonored, oui? The Creole have the shame.”
Brokenleg remembered. The Creoles would undertake their own justice upon one of their number who dishonored and betrayed them. “Take him. Do what you want,” he said.
Fear showed at last in Gallard’s pocked face, and he eyed his former colleagues carefully. The engagés stared back, and Fitzhugh saw unspoken agreement among them, though he didn’t have any notion what they’d agreed to, or what Gallard feared so much his face ticked and spasmed.
Guerette tied his hands together with manila trade rope, and Fitzhugh wondered whether Emile Gallard would jump and struggle. He didn’t, but the temptation rode his face. Spoon grinned and lifted the bore of his Hawken. The remaining engagés led him out into the bright cold, and Fitzhugh watched from the door, not wanting to interfere. The Cass engagés watched alertly from their barracks door. Guerette separated, walked toward the small stables and pen, and returned with a coiled bullwhip in his hand. Then Fitzhugh knew. They tied Gallard to the robe press in the middle of the yard, his chest to the post, and then Brasseau sliced Gallard’s blouse away with his Green River knife, being none too careful about it.
Brokenleg expected Guerette to begin, but they did a strange thing: Bercier and Brasseau returned to the trading room and gently lifted Lemaitre, and carried the body out into the snow and the glare. They laid it close to the robe press, where Gallard could see his dead colleague. Lemaitre’s head looked ghastly, with the skull caved in on one side. Fitzhugh remembered that Gallard had pulled Lemaitre off Hervey’s back, freeing Hervey.
The whip cracked across the man’s naked back, the sound like a shot. Gallard’s body spasmed and tugged at its bindings like a distempered thing. He screamed, a bloodcurdling howl that didn’t stop, but wailed like the whistle of a steamboat. The second lash smacked home, cutting flesh and drawing redness with it. The third followed, renewing the howling, and the fourth, snapping Gallard’s body like a rag doll. Fitzhugh watched from the trading room, subdued and sickened. On the tenth or fifteen or twentieth lash — he didn’t know which — he peeled his gaze from the mesmerizing sight and turned into the room. Julius Hervey stared, ashenfaced.
And Dust Devil wept silently, her tears welling large at the corners of her eyes.
He settled to the wooden floor beside her, each crack and howl outside a toll on his sanity. The bum leg had always made sitting an ordeal, but he ignored the hurt, and the ringing in his head, and the ache of loosened cartilage in his throat.
“You don’t have to say nothin’,” he said. “I got hotheaded with you, and said things I didn’t mean none, didn’t mean at all. And I feel so bad I can’t put it in words.”
She said nothing, but her unblinking eyes were bright with tears.
“You come so close. It scares me. Your ole medicine-helper, them crow-birds, they saved you. They come nesting in that cottonwood you lay down under, and when I walk by, not knowing you was there in the dark, they busted the top of the sky out, takin’ off.”
“My medicine?” she whispered.
“Yeah, the whole ball o’ wax.”
“What does that mean, ball o’ wax?”
“The whole package. Whatever you got arranged with the universe in your Suhtai heart, it was mighty big medicine.”
“My fingers hurt so much.”
“Frostbit. Toes too, probably. Ears and nose, I reckon. you’ll be hurtin’ plenty.”
Outside, the cracks of the lash stopped, but the howling didn’t. “Take me from here,” she whispered.
“Soon. You need to get your strength up. We got to get wagons loaded, get out outfit. See them blankets?” He waved at stacks of them shelved at the rear. “I’m layin’ half over you and half under you when we go. They owe me them blankets.”
“Hurry, Brokenleg,” she said, and he heard urgency in it.
Twenty-Nine
* * *
Brokenleg stood before the robe press in the Fort Cass yard, noting the splatter of bright blood in the glazed snow. They’d taken Gallard somewhere; he didn’t care where. An eerie silence pervaded the American Fur Company post, even though it thronged with men. The bitter cold of new January had driven them to their fires, he thought. That and the morning’s terrible events. He peered into the frosty Pittsburgh wagon that hulked before the warehouse right where Hervey had confiscated it a week earlier, and in its bed he found the body of Lemaitre, carefully wrapped in a shroud of bed ticking from the trading room. The drive back to Fitzhugh’s Post would be a sad one.
He wondered whether to take Dust Devil with the first load, and decided not to. Death’s angel had hovered too close. She would go last. He crossed the yard, the snow squeaking under his boots, and entered the Fort Cass barracks, discovering most of the fur company engagés around a pot-bellied stove there, shipped clear up the river. They looked pensive, having witnessed the flogging of Gallard, but not hostile. Except for t
wo or three who glowered at him.
“Who’s your top man? Your assistant trader?” he asked.
One arose, a small, wiry man, and Fitzhugh knew him at once from the beaver days. “Sandoval?”
Isodoro Sandoval smiled. “Brokenleg. A long time from the wild days, si?”
Sandoval was one of several Mexicans in the upper Missouri fur trade, and a veteran employee of the Chouteau companies.
“Amigo,” Fitzhugh said. “You mindin’ all this?”
Sandoval shrugged. “Most of these hombres, they are happy. They never like keeping your outfit from you. They never like Gallard spying and ruining your trade.”
“You mind helpin’ me? Need a couple of your men to carry your bourgeois to his house, and look after him.”
“Hervey.” The word burst sour from Sandoval’s mouth.
“Then I need help with my outfit. Hervey’s got the inventory somewhere. I want to do it proper, see what’s there, what got took out, and get the papers signed proper by you — long as Hervey’s got no signin’ fingers at the moment.”
Sandoval shrugged into a capote, asked several engagés to fetch Julius Hervey from the trading room, and then they braved the bright cold morning.
“You think I could borrow some ox or draft horses, Isodoro? Or get the mules Hervey stole from me?” Sandoval grunted.
In the bright yard, they watched the Cass engagés help Hervey toward his quarters. Incredibly, the pale bourgeois was walking, in spite of all the blood he’d lost. He held his hands, swathed in crimsoned bandaging, upward to slow the throbbing. Hervey paused before Fitzhugh. “I never forget,” he rasped.
“I don’t forget, either.”
“I’ll even things.”
“I think they’re even now.”
“I need one finger to pull with.”
Fitzhugh didn’t say anything more. He couldn’t think of anything to say. Hervey apparently couldn’t either, and wobbled off, supported by his men.
Rocky Mountain Company Page 31
