He had been a brigade leader, but what did it matter? Any seasoned mountaineer, like the barbarous Skye, could reach that position with a few trapping and survival skills, and a way with men.
But being the factor at a trading post, being a licensed trader for the company, that was something else. A trader was advanced up the chain of command if he did well. A trader could swiftly take his share of the profits and retire in St. Louis a wealthy man, high in the ranks of the fur company, an annual annuity comforting him. A trader operated a wilderness enterprise, lived in solid comfort within a building instead of freezing or boiling or starving or thirsting or running from savages. A trader was a weighty man, not some hireling bought and sold by the company. A trader was noticed; an engage lived in obscurity. And a trader could do whatever he had to do far from prying eyes, the sovereign of his own kingdom.
He knew all about traders, having grown up in the business. The man who put his thumb in the cup while measuring out sugar or flour or whiskey or coffee was the man who tweaked a profit. The man who watered the second or third gill of spirits sold to the savages was the man who got good robes at less cost. The man who sent agents skulking into the night to bribe chiefs away from the opposition was the man who got the furs. The company that sold cheap cast-iron hatchets and axes, instead of steel ones, was the outfit that pocketed the profits, not only from the cheaper tools, but because the savages returned again and again for more soft-metal tools. Poor red devils never grasped the difference.
It all amused him.
Bien. He would be a trader, and it would not matter that Skye was senior in years and experience. Skye would be dealt with, and that is what occupied his every thought, even as he stared, unseeing, at a stationary horsed Indian on a distant bluff, without seeing the man; why he scarcely noted the riverboat slowing and stopping. Why he didn’t watch the steersman in the yawl row ahead, make soundings, and then direct the packet toward a newly washed channel where the riverboat would not ground on a bar.
It would have struck a stranger observing Bonfils that this was an odd man, stationed exactly where he could see everything, but gazing on the day’s events with a blind eye. Bonfils didn’t even hear the quiet exchanges between the pilot, the captain, and the helmsman as they negotiated a dangerous passage where the murky Missouri broadened, the shifting sands built new barriers, and murderous sawyers, dead trees, lurked just out of sight under the placid sun-washed surface of the river.
How much did Skye know, and how much would he tell in St. Louis? It came down to that. A word from Skye would carry weight in the Gateway to the West. Bonfils had no illusions about family connections. The fur trade was exacting, brutal, cruel, risky, and precarious. Pierre Chouteau and General Bernard Pratte wanted the best men in the field; profit depended on it. Men without an excess of honor, which certainly qualified him.
He laughed softly. Being a relative wouldn’t count for much, at least not at a certain level of responsibility. The hard-eyed seigneurs who ran the Upper Missouri Outfit would not permit mere blood or lineage to affect their choice—but neither would his connections hurt him. The company was closely held.
Alexandre Bonfils had advanced with breathtaking speed; a brigade leader after only one year in the mountains! And now he would be celebrated as the man who brought the most beaver packs to St. Louis, a fortune snugged in the gut of this riverboat!
But certain matters needed to be concealed, and certain rumors squelched. He had no way of knowing how much Skye knew, or what the gossips at the rendezvous had been whispering, or how much of all that Skye would drone into the ear of old Pierre Chouteau, thus ending Bonfils’s career in the mountains, and his hopes of being a dashing dauphin of Creole society in St. Louis, with an unending supply of supple and eager mademoiselles to brighten his life and warm his bed.
Both the Chouteaus and the Prattes knew why he had escaped to the distant fur country in the first place at the tender age of seventeen. He had gotten Marie Therese Lachine with child, and faced with marrying or fleeing St. Louis for the fur country, he had fled, spending time clerking at Fort Clark and Fort Pierre before drifting west to the beaver country.
He was a father, but had never seen the child, for the maiden had swiftly been sent downriver to Baton Rouge, where she was hastily married to a Robidoux cousin. What a relief! He might have been stuck with that whiny and simpering little snip for the rest of his life. All she had to offer was a pubescent sweetness, which no doubt had already vanished under layers of lard. He smiled. He fancied that the little episode had made a man out of him. It would not count against him. What man in the mountains hadn’t just that sort of difficulty in his past?
He spotted Skye leaning over the beak of the boat, watching the mysterious river eddy by, the man’s black beaver hat glued to his unkempt locks. What a comic figure the barrel-shaped man was, ruffian to the core, ill-kempt, his body webbed with scars, his little pig eyes caught between a glacier of a nose. And yet the man evoked fear in Bonfils. That disreputable slug from the Royal Navy had hamlike fists that could pulverize a foe, a catlike grace that belied his awkward top-heavy carcass, and a withering stare that caused most men to turn away.
But that wasn’t what evoked fear in Bonfils. There was something uncompromising about Skye; something simple and solid and unyielding that set the man apart. Skye would do what he had to do, and say what he had to say, without a scintilla of social grace or cunning. Maybe it was some sort of brutal honesty, exactly the sort of transparency that Bonfils detested in a man. He himself was more civilized and saw life’s nuances.
He wasn’t sure just why he feared Skye. He didn’t fear anyone else. And that fear cropped up every time he encountered Skye, turning him into pudding.
Skye probably knew everything there was to know about Bonfils; all the rumors, all the gossip that passed quietly from man to man in the mountains, especially when they were sharing a jug of mountain whiskey. He would know … about the dead Blackfeet. He would know … about the losses of trappers. He would know … about killing the Piegan woman. He would know … about that business with the five Cheyenne women. He would know about the sly coup against the Hudson’s Bay Company, and how he snatched twenty-three packs of beaver just by taking them when the fools weren’t looking. Surely he would know everything, and that was rankling Bonfils now, as he stared down upon his fellow passenger.
Maybe Skye hadn’t heard a word.
A shudder ran through the boat, followed by a lurch, and then sudden immobility. The Otter had struck something.
From his aerie he watched deckhands peer over the bow, beside Skye. One had a pole, and when he thrust it into the brown water, it hit bottom only eighteen inches or two feet down. They were grounded. Men peered over the side, looking for damage. Others scurried down the hatch, seeing whether they were taking water. Behind him he heard the captain and the pilot shouting directions. He heard a clank and a thunk, and then the snap and hiss of steam rattling out of the escapement pipe, and the rumble of the pistons. The paddle wheels thrashed thunderously, churning up foam. The Otter backed away from the bar, and soon floated free.
These crewmen knew what to do. They lowered the yawl from its davits and the steersman and his fellows began taking soundings, looking for passage around that new sandbar, a barrier that hadn’t existed only a few weeks before when the boat had thrashed upriver. The riverboat slowly backed upstream, propelled by the reversed paddle wheels, and waited for the crew in the yawl to find a way, if a channel existed.
Bonfils didn’t much care. What was all this to him? He studied Skye, who was observing the whole operation with the experienced eye of a seaman.
Bonfils knew suddenly how to proceed. He badly needed to befriend Skye, share confidences, reveal the soul, and maybe find out what Skye knew or suspected; find out what his adversary would do in St. Louis—if he ever reached St. Louis. There might be an accident, man overboard in the night, plainly drunk. And his squaw too, dead from the effort to save
her lout of a man. Bonfils had a splendid cache of Kentucky bourbon in his kit; maybe he could put it to use.
He smiled. Who could offer more bonhomie than the young man who had invented the art? He abandoned his post near the helmsman, tipped his straw hat to the mate, and clattered down the companionway to the boiler deck. Bonfils then went forward to the place where Skye leaned over the rail, his moccasined foot on the coaming, his shoulder pressed against the jackstaff, his mutt watching warily.
“Ah, there you are. A close call, eh, Mister Skye?”
Skye nodded, his gaze quietly measuring his fellow passenger.
“They know how to proceed. I imagine they’ll find the channel, and we’ll be off.”
“What brings you down from the pilothouse, mate?”
“We haven’t really had a chance to talk, mon ami. I want you to know that whoever is chosen, I will abide amiably with the decision of the company officers. You’re a man I’ve always admired, Mister Skye.”
“What do you want?”
Bonfils laughed. The man was so crude. “Want? We have a fortnight of travel before us, time to enjoy the adventure. Perhaps we’ll shoot buffalo together, or drop ducks for our supper, or saddle these horses and hunt …”
Skye didn’t reply. The crew in the yawl had found deep water, and he was watching them jab their sounding pole deep into the river, and measure an opening for the ship.
“Actually,” Bonfils said, “I’ve always regarded you as my mentor, and studied your ways. You’re a legend, Mister Skye, and now at last I have a chance to learn more about you, how you think, what you do, how you approach the company throne at St. Louis … and what advice you have for a poor, young supplicant.”
Skye shrugged, his smile contained. “I’ll meet them, we’ll palaver, and they’ll decide,” he said. “And so will I.”
In that artless answer, Bonfils found menace.
eight
Through much of that first day on the river, Skye suffered the unwanted company of the young brigade leader. Bonfils made a show of patrolling the vessel, acquainting himself with its operations, but sooner or later he arrived again at Skye’s side, there to flatter the older man with small, adroit compliments, admiration that Skye supposed was more feigned than real, and all of that combined with a peculiar humility, in which Bonfils derided his own skills while inflating those of the man next to him.
Skye had had no experience with flatterers; they were unknown in the mountains, and he had never heard a word of flattery aimed in his direction during all the time he spent in the Royal Navy. But here was this honey-tongued Creole admiring Skye’s hunting skills, his ability to survive in bad weather, his handling of tough scrapes, his skilled dealing with Indians, his bluntness. The man had plainly inquired about Skye, and seemed to know more about Skye than Skye knew about himself.
What did it mean? Skye imagined that the young man wanted his approval; maybe a kind word given to General Pratte or Pierre Chouteau. Maybe he wanted to find out something to use against Skye.
At one point, Skye pointed at a distant cliff where half a dozen Indian women stood.
“Ah! What fine vision you have, Monsieur. I would not have seen such a sight, myself.”
“I think you would have, Mister Bonfils.”
“Ah! No. Now I am beginning to understand why you are a legend in the mountains. You see around corners and over the brow of hills, to the war party lurking on the other side.”
Skye felt annoyed, but held his peace. Whatever Bonfils was up to would become clear in due course. In the space of half an afternoon, Skye had received more compliments than had come his way over an entire life.
But once in a while, Bonfils probed a bit. “What are your plans, Monsieur? If you become a trader, I would envy you. A good life, settled in a comfortable place, oui?”
“Yes, a good life. I would see to it that the company has the loyalty of my wife’s people … and I would see to it that they receive good value for the skins and furs they bring me. The Crows aren’t numerous, and they need weapons and powder and everything else white traders offer. The Sioux and Blackfeet outnumber them. So, sir, my loyalties would be evenly divided between the company, and the Crows.”
Bonfils smiled brightly. “Quell magnifique!” he said, but Skye knew that his own words would be used against him in the privy chambers of St. Louis, where profit mattered most and fairness to the Indians was a consideration only so far as to keep their allegiance. But he would not alter his position.
He was a stubborn man. If he traded with Victoria’s people, he would see to it that they were generously treated. There would be no fingers or thumbs in a measuring cup, and no extra river water in the spirits, and no weaseling down the price of good furs placed on the trading counter, in order to pay less. Not for Victoria’s people. Not for any people, anywhere, ever.
The Otter rounded a sweeping bend flowing between low gloomy bluffs, and headed for a notch on the left bank where the green of a wooded patch bloomed brightly in an ochre world. The vessel slowed, and the thunder of the wheels muted into a soft sloshing, and the rattle of steam popping out of the escapement dwindled to a mutter.
“Wood stop,” yelled the mate. “All able men report.”
Skye had heard of these episodes. The crew and every male passenger would soon be debarked at that patch of trees, to chop, saw, cut and haul seven or eight cords of firewood aboard.
“Ah! A chance to stretch!” Bonfils said.
Skye wondered whether the young man would contribute. These wood stops would be a good test of a passenger’s character. There would be slackers, and there would be workers, and he wondered which category Bonfils would fill.
The boat drifted into shore, and bumped gently into the bottom. Two boatmen, one fore, one aft, slipped into the muddy river and waded ashore, carrying manila hawsers, which they tied to tree stumps. Other deckmen lowered a gangplank. It didn’t quite reach shore, so they added a few oose scantlings to the gangway until a small dry passage ran rom the coaming to the grassy riverbank.
A deckhand gave each parting crewman an axe or a saw, and the crew, save for the master and pilot and engineers and iremen, fanned into the cottonwoods and willows and box elders.
Skye received a huge two-man crosscut saw, and headed onto shore.
“Monsieur, that’s a two-man saw; we can work together,” Bonfils said, catching up.
Skye grunted.
Behind him, the last of the crewmen abandoned the vessel, and he saw Victoria slip down to land, along with No Name, and begin to hike upslope. He knew her thinking: here were ll these stupid white men cutting wood, vulnerable, not knowing who or what lay just over the brow of those yellow luffs. She would look. That was her nature, bred into her by generations of her ancestors, whose life and safety depended on just such caution. He blessed her and loved her. Maybe, on me of these woodcutting stops, her vigilance would spare hem disaster.
Four deckmen with axes headed for green trees and began girdling them, chipping through bark and cortical fibre so that hese trees would be dead and dry next riverboating season. But the rest headed for the gray skeletons of trees killed the previous year and now ready to fell and burn.
“Ici, monsieur,” Bonfils said, pointing at a gray giant that once was a noble cottonwood.
Skye stared up at the noble ruin, a tree so grand he was sure a dozen cords of firewood might be gotten from it. But it vas close to other less noble trees, and would be dangerous to ell so close to so many toiling men.
“Maybe we’d better pick something smaller. It’d take an hour just to saw through that trunk,” Skye said.
“We shall do it. We shall show them what we’re made of.”
“That’s what I’m hoping to avoid,” Skye said gently.
Nonetheless, Bonfils grabbed one end of the long saw anc stationed himself beyond the gray trunk. Skye peered about decided a warning or two would clear the area before the tre fell, and they began to work.
Bonfils didn’t shrink or slack. The saw bit fiercely through cottonwood as they scraped it back and forth. They cut notch in the direction they hoped the tree would fall, and then attacked the other side, the keen-edged saw ripping noisily into the dry wood. Skye began to sweat, even in the coolness of the woods.
In the distance he saw Victoria clamber the last fifty feet to the edge of the bluff and stand there, a tiny statue against an azure sky, with No Name beside her. She was beautiful, he thought; a guardian of her family, and all these other blind white men.
A breeze eddied through the woods, carrying the scent of grass and sun and the day’s heat. Bonfils sawed furiously, and Skye wondered whether the man regarded this as some sort of competition; whether the man, in his own soul, would brag to himself that night about how he sawed harder and produced more than old Skye. How odd that was to Skye. How odd that Bonfils. had to prove himself, if that was what he was doing.
The cottonwood teetered on its dwindling base, and Skye shouted at the deckmen nearby, pointing the way the giant would fall. For his efforts he received only curses: it meant that the deckmen would have to abandon their own valuable la bor, and perhaps deal with the giant tree. Skye privately cursed his luck, and vowed never to let Bonfils draw him into trouble again.
They sawed furiously while the sweating and suller sailors backed away, and then with a creak and a snap, the giant toppled down, carrying four smaller trees with it. The crash shook the earth, and caused others to pause fearfully until the mate roared at them to get busy.
Just as Skye expected, the downed giant was so tangled with the lesser trees that the hands had no choice but to cut up the larger one. Skye heard them muttering; the blame came in his direction, and he owned up to it. It had been a stupid and vainglorious act to fell that tree.
Downriver Page 5
