Bonfils discovered Victoria Skye staring at him, her face guarded. But what did she know? If he couldn’t have a Hidatsa girl tonight, after lubricating matters with a little good whiskey from his silver flask, he might try her.
Even as the first wave of dugouts sped across the choppy blue waters of the river, other craft were being prepared, as these river-dwelling people brought baskets of maize, or haunches of buffalo swarming with flies, or dead fowl hanging on a pole by their legs, to the floating store on the foredeck.
Marsh nodded to several sailors who were standing at the gangway, ready to board a few dozen Hidatsi at a time. The traders—experienced men, Bonfils thought—had swiftly set up their shop, even including some bushels and a scales.
“About twenty at a time,” Marsh yelled through a megaphone from the pilothouse.
They swarmed in, the dugouts nosing into the low coaming of the riverboat, and clambered aboard, some on the gangway, but most simply over the rail or under it.
Bonfils knew the tongue.
“Ah, we shall buy a knife! Oh, look at that blanket. I will sleep warm in the winter! Ah, what will they give me for a basket of corn?” The women were gabby; the men taciturn, lithely patrolling the deck of the boat, their quick knowing gazes settling on the heaped firewood, the horses, the master watching these proceedings with caution, the Skyes, who stood aside, with that mutt at their feet; and then at Bonfils, who had gauded himself up for the occasion in fringed buckskins, a bone necklace, a bright red calico shirt, quilled moccasins, and a flat-crowned black hat decorated with a band of rattlesnake skin.
He recognized none of them. These Hidatsi were friendly people, not armed with anything other than a sheathed knife; carrying bows and quivers of arrows would have been considered a hostile act.
It was, actually, an old crone who recognized him. She wore a simple frock of patterned purple calico, which hung from a bony body topped by a seamed brown face and a mouth lacking most teeth. But she walked directly at him, stopped, frowned, and he knew the woman was one of Amalie’s many grandmothers, venerated for her medicine and wisdom.
“Ah!” the woman said. “And where is she?”
“She is not here, grandmother.”
“You have put her out of your lodge?”
He wasn’t really sure. He’d grown tired of Amalie and had lent her to a friend. But the old crone’s challenge, which was not at all friendly, decided him.
“I gave her away to a great white chief. She is honored to be the woman of a mighty trapper, grandmother.”
“She lives?”
He smiled and shrugged.
She pursed her lips, spat, and turned away. Bonfils. was aware that Victoria Skye had listened and probably understood the Hidatsa tongue, so close to her own.
He smiled at her, and wandered toward the trading, which now proceeded furiously a few yards away.
The old woman had not been silent. Now as he approached, others turned and stared at him. He smiled and doffed his splendid chapeau, so they might see him in sunlight and confirm that yes, it was the legendary Bonfils, who had arrived in their village, wooed many a maid, and made off with the wife of Barking Wolf, a clan leader with much medicine and a bad temper, and then dispatched her brother when he came after her with a war party. Sacre Bleu!
Allors, it was time to greet them. “See, it is Bonfils,” he said in Hidatsa, jabbing a thumb into his chest. “The very same. I am going to the village of many houses now, on the fireboat, to be given a higher position. I will become a trader, you see. Maybe I will trade with you. Ah, I see you now, Barking Wolf! How swiftly your clan brothers have whispered of my presence here! See me now. I am going to return, and all your people will trade with me.”
That wasn’t quite exact. These people traded at Fort Clark, and sometimes Fort Pierre, and rarely got to the Yellowstone Country, where Fort Cass stood. But he wished to impress them. He wished to laugh merrily.
Barking Wolf was a soldier not much older than Bonfils, stocky and short and smouldering. He had always smouldered. He had smouldered in the company of Amalie, smouldered with his clan-brothers, smouldered while hoeing corn in the fields, smouldered toward his rivals in the buffalo hunts that kept the Minnetaree villages in meat.
“Monsieur Bonfils, what is all this?” asked Marsh from above.
“It is my mountain wife’s family and her former mate, monsieur le capitaine. They are discovering that I am present, without my Amalie, and they are looking forward to whatever trouble they can cause me.”
Marsh didn’t like it. “Bonfils, we are trading for food, and you must retreat to your cabin at once. I will not have trouble, and trouble is what I see here.”
Indeed, the Minnetaree people had stopped their frantic trading and jostling, and were observing the exchange.
Victoria Skye whispered something to her man, and the pair of them retreated aft. Bonfils watched them sidle away. Skye had always been too prudent for his own success, he thought.
A subchief Bonfils knew, old Standing in Water, snapped an order, and the trading ceased altogether. The clamorous crowd slipped away from the traders, until a no-man’s land stretched between the crew and the Hidatsi.
Harshly, the hawknosed elder orated, gesticulating toward Marsh, who stood above, staring at this confrontation on his boiler deck.
“What is he saying, Bonfils?”
“He’s saying that they will not let this packet leave if I am on it.”
“Why do they want you?”
“I haven’t the faintest idea,” Bonfils said, amusement playing with the corners of his mouth.
“What is the trouble?”
“Offer them a big damn gift,” Victoria Skye said.
“Don’t give them a feather,” Bonfils said easily, loving the confrontation.
And there it stood.
eleven
Skye smelled trouble, and began easing aft with Victoria. None of the sailors were armed; most of the Hidatsa wore sheathed knives. Marsh must have scented trouble too because he gestured sailors to the capstan to pull anchor if need be. Others gathered casually around the six-pounder at the prow, where an enameled chest contained powder and grape.
But there was Bonfils, a charismatic, mesmerizing figure talking volubly to the Indians, a vast smile wreathing his face, his body arched and confident and somehow larger to the eye than it really was. Skye had never seen anything quite like it: this young Creole was gradually defusing the moment, pawing about like some giant cat, the sheer force of his voice and will subduing every spirit within earshot.
The man radiated something Skye couldn’t fathom, some mysterious and commanding force that derived from his sonorous, compelling voice, the easy tenor of his tongue, a smile, warm dark eyes that feasted carnivorously upon whoever was in his sight; a line of clean and regular white teeth, not to mention that costume, the elaborately fringed buckskins, the quilled moccasins, the red shirt, the bone necklace, the splendid beaver hat with its rattlesnake band, and not least, the bronze medal on blue watershot silk decorating his chest. No Indian ever paraded in ceremonial clothing more effectively than Bonfils.
“What’s he saying?” Skye asked Victoria.
“I don’t get it all. But he’s telling them that in himself lies their future. Treat him as chief and they will be chiefs; treat him badly and there will be no more blankets, shot and powder, awls, knives, axes and hatchets, for the window of the trading company will be forever closed, and the people will be ruined.”
Whatever it was Bonfils was saying in easy oratory, the tension seeped from the charged moment, and those brown hands that clutched the hafts of knives relaxed.
Marsh, above, obviously knew enough to say nothing, and simply waited for events to play out, his relentless glare on Bonfils. The sailors ready to pull anchor—the farther from the village, the safer the Otter—no longer stood at the ready.
Then, at last, with a sweep of his red-shirted arm, Bonfils invited the Hidatsa to trade once a
gain.
Skye watched the angry ones closely. Were these warriors somehow related to Amalie? But even those most likely to spill blood seemed to retreat into themselves. Soon the trading was going again; the sailors and clerks accepting baskets of maize, pelts, squash, buffalo robes, and tanned hides, while the shoppers were examining awls, feeling the edges of hatchets, fingering flannels, and studying the three-point blankets heaped on the boiler deck.
“Sonofabitch,” Victoria said. “He did it.”
“Did what?”
“He has big medicine, Skye. Those warriors, they were going to kill him. That one there—the one called Barking Wolf, he was Amalie’s husband once. And that one there; he is a brother of Amalie, and made medicine to kill Bonfils.”
“But they didn’t.”
“Big goddam medicine.”
Even now, Bonfils, slim and confident and springy on the balls of his feet, greeted the Hidatsa like some potentate. The crowd swelled as more dugout-loads of Hidatsa arrived, clambered on board and deposited their pelts and baskets of grain and vegetables before the traders.
Marsh, red-nosed and irritable, appeared on the boiler deck, and corraled Bonfils. “Monsieur Bonfils, what was all this about?” he asked in a dulcet and icy voice.
“A private matter, mon capitaine. Some wretches in this friendly village have taken umbrage, and I reminded them forcefully that the entire village would suffer if they acted rashly.”
Bonfils smiled, and Skye felt the presence of galvanic energy, almost lightning, shooting and sparking out from him.
Marsh was not placated. “And what was this private matter?”
Bonfils laughed softly. “A woman, of course. What else?”
“Is that all? Is there more? Are you telling me everything?”
Bonfils laughed easily. “All that matters.”
Marsh struggled not to say something or other, and finally subsided. “This is a profitable stop,” he said grudgingly, swallowing back whatever was on his mind.
Bonfils smiled that galvanic beam again.
Marsh turned to Skye. “He rescued us; a cool man, wouldn’t you say? I saw you heading aft, out of harm’s way.”
It hung there, this gentle insinuation of cowardice.
Skye might have argued that he and Victoria were preparing for war by fetching some weapons. Not for nothing had he been in the Royal Navy. But he saw the captain’s mind snap shut, and let it go. This was the second time he had incurred Marsh’s disfavor. And maybe it would not be the last, given the length of the trip and the difficulties a steam vessel on the upper Missouri would surely encounter.
“Yes, sir. Mr. Bonfils has turned the tide in his favor,” he said.
“A remarkable young man,” Marsh said, satisfied with Skye’s response.
“Goddamn reckless sonofabitch, get us all killed,” Victoria said.
Marsh, taken aback, stared at her, and then smiled wolfishly. “They will enjoy you in St. Louis,” he said to her. It was not a compliment.
The trading continued for another hour, and by its end Marsh was well provisioned with meat and grain and had added scores of pelts and robes to his cargo. Skye and Victoria watched closely, alert for trouble that never seemed very far away. The unhappy young men with Barking Wolf hung together in sullen knots, refusing to leave the boat, and glancing boldly at the unarmed clerks and sailors.
“They haven’t quit,” Skye said to her. “This isn’t over.”
Bonfils, either recklessly or with incredible courage, meandered toward the sullen clique and began addressing them in the Hidatsa tongue, his confidence glossing them all like sunlight. Most tribesmen loved a show of confidence and courage, and Bonfils was oddly welcomed even among those schemers seeking his doom.
The traders were totting up ledgers, stowing unsold goods, hauling pelts and skins to the hold, or carting maize and meat to the kitchen. Most of the Hidatsa had left, and the remaining ones were stepping gingerly into their dugouts.
Firemen began stuffing big willow and cottonwood logs into the firebox, and a cloud of acrid smoke blew downward over them all. Steam began popping from the escapement.
“Mr. Bonfils, would you invite your guests to depart?” Marsh said through his megaphone from above.
The young man nodded, and gestured toward the remaining dugout snugged to the side of the packet. But this last group of six men didn’t budge. They ranged in age, the eldest showing gray in his loose-hanging hair. That one bore the marks of war: a puckered wound along a forearm; a rough-healed gash across the left side of his face. His gaze focused unblinkingly on Bonfils. The young man who had once possessed Amalie as wife was declaiming.
Skye didn’t like it.
Around him, the crew prepared to sail. Men gathered at the stem to raise a kedge that had steadied the vessel offshore.
Victoria jabbed Skye in the ribs. Startled, he followed the point of her finger. These six Minnetarees had spread slightly, two of them quartering around Bonfils. They all looked poised for action of some sort.
Slowly, the elder one slid a long and rusty skinning knife from a sheath.
Skye and Victoria edged toward the group, with No Name advancing ahead of them. Skye saw that Victoria had her own little knife in hand.
They surprised the warriors, who turned, too late, to discover the company.
Skye never paused. His massive hand clamped over the wrist of the man holding the knife; Victoria pressed her blade hard on the neck of the one on the other side. And No Name, his hair pricking upward snarled, baring a pair of canines that could only win respect.
The moment passed. No one in the work crew readying the packet to sail had seen any of it. The older man twisted around, his eyes brimming with rage, and Skye strengthened his grip with one hand, and prepared to knock the man flat with the other.
At last Bonfils grasped that he was in mortal peril, and backed out of the circle of fire.
“Tell them to get in their canoe,” Skye said, in a voice that didn’t carry.
Bonfils did.
The Minnatarees left reluctantly, in stiff, proud spasms that told the world this was not over; Alexandre Bonfils was a marked man in that clan, and maybe in that tribe. These people might have been farmers and hunters, living sedentary lives beside the great river; but they had not neglected the arts of war.
Skye released the wrist of the older warrior, probably a clan chieftain, ready to block a thrust with the knife. But it didn’t come. No Name crouched, ready to go for the man’s throat. The warrior, seething now with something so foul and raw it landed palpably on them all, backed off to the coaming and stepped over, and into the dugout.
The mate barked a command. The crew at the capstan twisted up rope until the boat drifted in the current. A shout from the pilothouse down the speaking tube energized the engineers, who engaged the pittman rod to the flywheel, and the giant paddles sliced water.
No one else on board, least of all the powerful master or his mate, had registered the last taut drama at the riverside village.
The vessel soon rounded a bight and left the Minnetaree village in memory.
Bonfils smiled brightly, but that charismatic quality that made him look larger than life had vanished. The smile was veneer; he was a shaken and angry young man.
“Well, you certainly made me look bad,” he said.
“What we made you look, Mr. Bonfils, is alive,” Skye said.
twelve
Lame Deer hoped she would not be too late. For days she had hastened along the Cheyenne River, ever eastward toward the house of the rising sun, the happiest of the four winds. No war parties had molested her and she had seen no fresh pony tracks. The buffalo were elsewhere, and so were the hunters. If she had come across Lakota, she would have been welcomed and protected, for those were ancient friends of her people. If Pawnee or Arapaho, she might have suffered a cruel fate, including captivity.
She rode a gaunt red roman-nosed pony, swaying steadily step by step, her velveteen
purple skirts hiked high to seat herself in the high-cantled squaw saddle that was one of her proudest possessions. In her bony lap sat her daughter of two winters, Singing Rain, and behind her rode her boy of four winters, Sound Comes Back After Shouting, on a sore-backed gray packhorse burdened with precious robes and pelts and a parfleche with a little pemmican and jerky in it.
Her man, Simon, had given Singing Rain another name, Molly, and had called Sound Comes Back, Billy. She was going to the place of many lodges to find her man, whom she had not seen for an autumn and winter and spring and now summer; four seasons too long. Simon MacLees was his name; he was a trader. He had a partner in the place of many lodges he called St. Louis, a man named Jonas. He had called himself the Opposition, and she gathered that meant he was a rival of the American Fur Company, like a fox pup among wolves.
He had built a sturdy log trading post on the Belle Fourche River, within sight of the sacred mountain of the Cheyenne People, Bear Butte, and there had done a good trade with the Cheyenne, the Sans Arcs, the Blackfoot Sioux, the Hunkpapa, and sometimes other peoples as well, but that business was fading because so many of her people had moved south to trade at a great fort called Bent’s.
For five winters she had been his woman, sharing his life in the post built of big cottonwood logs and chinked with mud against the winter winds. She had always been happy there; never far from her people. But she knew he had fits of loneliness and was sometimes restless, especially when the snows trapped them in their wooden lodge and there was no one else to talk to, and he paced the flagstone floors.
Four springtimes in a row, his partner Jonas had shown up in the moon of the flying geese, sometimes with other white men, bringing new tradegoods—bright-colored blankets, awls, knives, hatchets, rifles, lead and powder, and bolts of red and green and blue flannel. Then Jonas would load the packs of robes and the pelts on the big gray mules he always used, and vanish to the east.
Then last spring, Jonas didn’t come and there was little to trade. And then in the autumn, her man Simon left for the place of many lodges, St. Louis, with many promises that he would return. But he hadn’t returned. She lived alone, with her little children, waiting for his boots to print the dust.
Downriver Page 7
