by J. R. WRIGHT
It wasn’t that Hans was mean to him. There was little love there, but at least he didn’t yell at him like he did some of the other help. And when business was slow, Hans often allowed him to catch up on his rest or just leisurely walk the docks. Hans paid him very little, but Luke figured he had to consider the food and the cot in the basement, which cost nothing. He had the run of the kitchen and could eat anything he wanted. And the occasional time off meant a lot to him.
He often dreamed of places he’d heard talked about at the docks: the Rocky Mountains, the Yellowstone, and the Oregon Country. They were all fascinating, even talk of the Indians had its allure. He couldn’t wait to venture out himself someday, as it seemed everyone else was. But for now he just wanted a job that carried with it a bit more respect, even if he had to work harder at doing it.
Luke finally gathered the courage to speak with Hans. At first Hans had several objections, “Who’ll do the mopping and the kitchen work – and who’ll load the lift?” were among them. But eventually he gave in, providing Luke agreed to continue with some of his regular chores when he was about the place. That was fine with him as long as he wasn’t made to mop up after the customers. Hans assigned that job to Breanne, a rather undesirable and reluctant would-be whore, who had little to do anyway and needed the money.
Hans instructed Luke on his first morning out to always keep a watchful eye out for an attractive prospective whore. They were a valued commodity in St. Louis, and hard to keep. It seemed they were perpetually running away to the west with some dashing frontiersman harboring dreams of riches, never to be seen again. A surprise to many of these ladies, however, was that once it was too late to turn back, their lovers often hired them out to other lonely travelers, either by consent or by force. Others were traded or sold, sometimes to Indians, when their mates tired of them. Seldom did one experience the happiness and love she had dreamed when first bowled over with the propositions of these adventurous strangers.
The riverboats brought many such would-be ladies-of-the-night up from New Orleans. They were mostly Cajun, with an occasional fair haired European or eastern girl who had found her way to the port of New Orleans with no means of support once they arrived. Finding employment difficult for a respectable woman there, they often sought transportation on to St. Louis, where business was reportedly booming. But what form of business? Many hadn’t a clue, but most were wise enough to know desperate times often required desperate measures, if one was to survive.
The boat captains collected a fee from the saloon owners for these girls, mostly to cover their fare, but if her looks were exceptional, a great deal more was requested. Hans had been known to pay as much as two hundred dollars for one if he figured she was worthy of the investment. This amount, whatever it may be, was expected to be repaid by the girl from her share of the proceeds collected for her services. Once she had paid in full, she was free to come and go as she pleased, as long as the Blue Bear received its percentage. Before that time, however, she was closely watched and not allowed to leave the confines of the saloon building.
It was Luke who had talked Hans into putting up the fare for Breanne. The fare was only fifty dollars, but she was, at least in Hans’ eyes, a poor investment. She was very young, only sixteen, shy and skinny. From the side she looked very much like a boy, with little or no breasts, long legs and a tiny rump. When Luke discovered her on one of his outings, she had been at the docks for several days with no apparent takers. When the boat captain, whose care she was in, presented her to various saloon owners, they often laughed and walked away without even an offer of a lesser amount. Of course, Breanne wasn’t helping matters any with her haggard appearance and her way of shyly ducking away when any attention was paid to her.
Luke knew little of what attributes were necessary when selecting a proper whore, but he saw something in Breanne that others had obviously overlooked. She had sharp smiling blue eyes, a cute nose, and above all, he saw a likeness to himself in her. Like her, his hair was fair, and he was slim and tall and possessed blue eyes. But more than any of that, she had an aura of loneliness about her. Peering into those pools of blue was like taking a dip into his own lonesome soul.
Finally, to persuade Hans to take her in, Luke promised to repay him if she didn’t work out, and she hadn’t. She wasn’t called on by a single customer to go upstairs in the two months she had been at the Blue Bear. The only value Hans could see in her was that she made the fuller bodied gals look even better by comparison, and he himself bedded with her on occasion. It was his way of getting something, at least, for his money.
Finally, even Hans tired of her, and Breanne was moved from her room upstairs to a corner in the basement. She was no longer considered a whore, but rather a chore woman.
At first Luke didn’t know what to make of sharing his private space in the basement with another person, let alone a female. They hardly spoke at first. Breanne pretty much kept to herself when she wasn’t upstairs cleaning or helping Pierre out in the kitchen from sunup until late into the night. But it was he who made the first effort toward creating a friendship.
It was awfully cold that night, and he went over with the treasured bearskin robe Pierre had given him years earlier and placed it over her.
It was plenty warm in the kitchen with a fire in the range all the time. And the rest of the building had its pot-bellied stoves. But the basement had no stove on purpose, to assure the beer stored there remained cold, the way the patrons of the Blue Bear liked it.
“Thank you,” she said softly, peeking from under the single blanket that covered her.
“Well, I thought you might need it. Gets awfully cold down here in the winter.”
“You want to talk some?” she asked.
“Sure. What do you want to talk about?”
“I don’t know, just talk. I don’t get much chance to do that anymore.”
“You might start by telling me about yourself?”
“Ain’t much to tell, really. I was told my mother died when I was born, and my daddy died just before I come here.”
“Why here? I mean, I can think of a lot of places I would rather be than here.”
“It was the closest place to get to. I didn’t have any money and was offered the fare to here for free. They told me my passage would be paid by whoever gave me a job. I had no idea what was expected of me. I just knew I had to get out of New Orleans. I didn’t like my life there either.”
Even in the dim light of a single oil lamp, from his cot ten feet away, he could see her eyes water up.
“Are you planning to stay on here?”
“I don’t know as I have any choice. Hans don’t pay me anything, so I guess I have to stay till he’s gotten back the money he put up.”
“He should forgive it for what he put you through. Bedding with you an’ all,” he said bitterly.
Ever so softly she began to cry, and pulled the blanket up so he could no longer see the tortured look on her face. She didn’t think anyone knew about her and Hans. And she especially hadn’t wanted Luke to. Seeing him around the saloon was her only joy in an otherwise dismal existence. At first she had rejected Hans’ advances, but when the hulking man became violent and slapped her hard, she hopelessly gave in. She had bled with that first time, but had no idea what that meant, having never had a mother to tell her of such things.
“I’m sorry…” Luke said.
After a long silence, Breanne spoke from beneath the blanket. “That’s okay. He’s done with me now.”
Luke knew Hans had of late diverted his attention to a Cajun woman who was brought in to fill Breanne’s old room upstairs. Hans had picked her himself and paid a pretty penny to the captain who brought her up from New Orleans.
After another time of silence, she exposed her face again. “Now you’ve left yourself with only blankets.”
“That’s okay,” he said. “I’m wearing flannels.”
“Me too!” She tossed back the blanket along with the
heavy bearskin for him to see her red woolens, and giggled.
Luke didn’t know what to think of that and remained silent. Of course he was no virgin. The ladies upstairs had seen to that on numerous occasions over the past two years. They seemed to take great pleasure in educating the kid on the finer points of how to treat a lady in bed. ‘Do it this way..., don’t do that..., get on my back..., let me get on you..., stop that..., slow down, this is not a horse race, young man…, that’s no way to treat a lady..., can’t you go any faster…, you done already…! Bite your tongue next time, a woman needs more than a howdy and a thank you…’
“We can push our beds together and share, if you want,” she offered, feeling a sudden need to be close to him. “That way it will be easier for us to talk.”
“Sure,” he simply said and got up to move his cot.
“No funny stuff though,” she said. “Just for warmth, okay?”
Soon they were both snugly beneath the bear and toasty warm. But as far as talking, no more of that happened once they were together. That alone seemed to be enough to comfort Breanne for now.
CHAPTER THREE
The following morning, when Luke pulled the last of three carts of foodstuffs up to the rear door of the saloon, Pierre emerged, business-like, and inquired, “Any fish today?”
Pierre LeBlanc had been the chief cook at the Blue Bear for the past eleven years. Before that he and his brother Franz were fur trappers and traders with various tribes of Indians in the Yellowstone and Green River countries. And when those areas petered out, Pierre moved on to the North Country and Canada. He loved the wild and spoke of it often. Luke was fascinated with the stories he told and looked forward to those times when they worked together in the kitchen or at butchering out back, to hear more of them.
“Grouper and Amberjack today,” Luke said and began unloading the crates. “Fresh caught last week.”
“No snapper?” Pierre complained.
“Don’t belly ache, old man! This is the first fresh fish we’ve had in weeks.”
“No snapper?” Pierre said again.
“Yep, they had snapper, but it was slimy. Hans would fire me if I came back here with rotten fish – and you for cooking it. You know how finicky he is about the fish being fresh.”
“Bedding with that French whore, are you?” Pierre said casually. “Went to the cellar to fetch potatoes and saw the two beds married up.”
“Yep,” Luke said, then glanced around to see if Breanne was about. “She was cold.”
“It’s no wonder. She ain’t got any meat covering her bones.”
“Then maybe you ought to feed her better, old man.”
“The woman doesn’t eat. She just picks at leftovers.”
With the fish packed away in the ice room, Luke went in search of Breanne. He spotted her lugging two chamber pots down from upstairs and rushed up to take them from her.
“These the last of them?” he asked.
“Two left, in seven and nine. They’re not up yet.”
“I’ll get them. You best wash up and go to the kitchen. Pierre is cooking some eggs and side pork for you.”
Without another word, Breanne did as he said. She was hungry and was grateful that at least Luke was looking out for her now. She could eat and rest for a while, knowing Hans wouldn’t emerge from his room next to the kitchen until noon, and she wouldn’t be under his watchful eye until then.
When Luke returned to the kitchen, Pierre was in the middle of one of his stories. It was one he had heard before, but Breanne seemed to be glued to every word as she ate the hearty breakfast Pierre had made for her.
“We were friends with most a’ them tribes, me and Franz. We lived with ’em, et with ’em, and took their women. We learnt the tongue enough to get by. It was great times – difficult, but good times. Not much to fear in the early days ‘cept a scuffle amongst the neighbor tribes, which happened once in a great while. Oh, they was a mischievous lot, a stealing from one another ever chance they got. Then the battle was on. Me an’ Franz never took sides in any a’ them wars. Didn’t wish to make no enemies. Where there was an uprising, we stayed clear for a spell till things settled.”
“How did you know when a tribe was friendly?” Breanne asked, while taking more fried side pork from the platter near her.
“Mostly we didn’t, ‘cept we talked with other traders at the Rendezvous and traded with some a’ them Injuns there before venturing to their villages. There were tribes that were hard to get to be friends with, an’ some we never did. Them Blackfeet was the worst. Some white man passing through had kilt the son of one of their chiefs some time before, and they still hadn’t got over it. They were a crazy lot. They never got along with other tribes, let alone whites.
“Well it was Franz’s idea. He heard from one a’ the traders at a Rendezvous over on the Green River that them Blackfeet had many a fine beaver pelt for the trading if a man had the courage to go in there with some decent trading goods. These Injuns were no fools and weren’t about to settle for no trinkets, the man said. But they would do some trading if we were to take some better things, such as bolts of cotton cloth, and blankets, and rifles.
“Even after this Franz still wanted to give it a try. I guess I was interested as well, so we traded what pelts we had collected for the trade goods and headed out looking for them devils. What a mistake that was. I coulda kilt that man that told us to do such a fool thing.”
Luke didn’t want to be around for the rest of this story, so he slipped out the back before it got to the bad part – the part where Pierre cries. He didn’t want to see that again for a third time. There was something about a grown man crying that he never wanted to witness again.
Breanne saw him go and thought about chasing after him, but she wanted to hear the rest of the story. After sharing the bed last night, she almost felt attached to Luke now, even though she hardly knew him on a personal basis, except for the close attention she had paid to him around the saloon these past months. She hoped now their new arrangement didn’t change. She liked being close to him, even if only at night.
“We knew no other tribe’d settle anywhere near them Blackfeet, so when we come up on the village where we’d been told to find ‘em, we knew this was them. The village was about a mile down the river from where we were. We decided to just keep an eye on them for a while. I had two a’ them rifles we had brought for trading all loaded up – one in each hand. I could almost smell them devils, feeling their eyes on me.
“Finally we decided to take our two pack mules to a clearing not far from their camp, an’ lay out a sample of what we had to offer: a couple of mackinaw blankets, a flint rifle, and a bolt of red cloth. We put it out in plain sight for them to see it if they should happen by. We then mounted our horses and moved back to a little rise so’s we could see all around us for quite a distance. It wasn’t long till they took the bait. At first, it was just a young buck that rode up. He didn’t even get off his pony. He just looked the goods over, then looked us over, then rode full out back to the village, whooping and hollering all the way. It wasn’t long now till the squaws were running for the stuff. When they got to it, they began to fight over what there was. They were pulling at the blankets and the cloth, each wanting a share. It wasn’t long though before what appeared to be a chief, all decked out in feathers an’ paint, came riding up to ‘em, followed by a dozen or so bucks. They were painted too.
“Well, they shipped their spotted ponies at them squaws and drove ‘em away. That chief dismounted and began looking the rifle over. He musta liked what he saw, ‘cause he began dancing around, waving it over his head an’ letting out the most god awful yells. My brother Franz was very happy when he saw this. He just knew with that, we had them hooked. They’d be bringing out the furs we’d been told about, ready for trading.
“After we watched for a while, and they appeared to settle down some, Franz decided it was safe enough to take the mules on down with the rest of the goods and tal
k a trade. Neither of us knew their tongue, so we planned to make ‘em understand with signs. Franz was to go on ahead, leading the two mules, while I was to follow close behind, still clutching those two flintlocks, one in each hand.”
Pierre stopped and appeared to be searching for words. But in reality he was choking up on what he was to tell next.
“Well, those crazy animals weren’t waiting for us to reach them. They rode right up on us. For a while I thought of firing on them rifles, but Franz was brave and waved me up. Soon they surrounded us, and they began cutting at the ropes that held the trade goods to the pack mules until it all fell to the ground. The frightened mules were then dancing all over it.” Pierre paused again briefly. Then, as if lost for words, he went to the ice room and came back a moment later with a hindquarter of beef and began slicing off steaks for the noon rush, which would soon begin.
Breanne was beginning to wonder if she was going to get the rest of the story, when Pierre began again.
“When things appeared not to get any better, Franz began to make signs at the chief, throwing in some Hidatsa just in case he might pick up some of it. But it was soon clear to me, there was no beaver pelts to be had. They had more’n likely already traded away last season’s pelts. But whatever it was, it now appeared that chief was making some angry signs. His gibberish was anything but friendly, that was for sure.
