And of course, MacLees’s downfall would clear the way for the appointment of Bonfils to the trading post. MacLees was the rival to worry about: a shrewd trader, experienced in the art of running a trading post, a man of great talents—and a little squaw no one in St. Louis knew about!
Bonfils chuckled. The woman was his ace. She sat there in the front of the flatboat, her back to the cargo box, fussing with her daughter, oblivious to the white men behind her. Little die she know she was a future debutante, and Bonfils would arrange for her coming out, right down to her ball gown.
Skye could be easily dealt with. A simple visit with Gen eral Clark would do the job. Clark was the man who issued permits and licenses. Anyone trading with Indians in Unitec States Indian Territory had to have a license, and had to be ar American citizen to get that license. Skye was an Englishman That detail had been overlooked by Pierre Chouteau. Bonfils laughed. It was all so simple, so easy. General Clark migh even eject Skye from the United States. A pity. Poor devi might have to rejoin the Royal Navy.
Still, it would take some doing. A flatboat was scarcely the speediest mode of travel. But if it progressed continually night and day, it would indeed reach St. Louis ahead of the river packet, which could not navigate at night unless the moon shown bright. It was crucial to get to Pierre Chouteau first, tell him that Marsh stole the packs from Gill. That woulc put Marsh on the defensive. Uncle Pierre had gone to grea lengths to transport spirits to the posts far from the prying eyes of the government, and now Marsh had ruined the fragile and private arrangement. Ah, what fun to know how things worked. If Uncle Pierre dreaded anything, it was the exposure of his whiskey-running.
The other matter would be more entertaining, like watching a Moliere comedy. Introducing the lice-ridden Cheyenne squaw around town, as MacLees’s mountain lady, and her breed child with the blue-green eyes and light brown hair, would start things in motion. That would be the coup de grace.
He meandered back to Gill.
“We must never stop. Night and day, we must never stop.”
“Got to eat, rest, sleep—” Gill said.
“Non, non, we must catch up. Marsh is leagues ahead of us!”
“Don’t know that he is. He’s got to take on wood once, twice a day, and we just keep on a-going.”
“You sleep; I will steer at night. I am not afraid of night. And this bateau, it draws only four, five inches. We go over bars, over snags, over the top. We get to St. Louis ahead of Marsh, and I will get your furs back from Uncle Pierre.”
Gill shrugged.
Bonfils paced restlessly, back and forth, from stern to stern, aware of the gazes following him. The river had broadened into a noble stream, carrying a vast burden of water from the distant mountains and the everlasting prairies ever south and east. The country had become monotonous. Who was there to talk with? The only interesting person was Skye, who lay abed.
He would talk with Skye anyway. The man had been sitting up; his fever had vanished. He was taking some broth. Bonfils ducked through the low door and into the dark and grimy cabin where Skye lay. His squaw sat across from him, silently watching the river.
“Bonjour, mon ami, how are you this day?”
Skye nodded curtly but said nothing.
Bonfils tried again. “Soon we will be in St. Louis, eh? Now what will you be saying to Uncle Pierre? I will tell him that we had a little bad luck.”
Skye looked better; less flushed, quieter. But he didn’t respond.
Bonfils felt faintly defensive and annoyed. “Ah, it is that you do not wish to talk with the one who put some grape into you. This I understand. But of course it was purely an accident. No harm intended. And it did stop a war party from pillaging the company furs, or capturing the riverboat.”
Skye would tell Pierre Chouteau a different story, and it was necessary to find out what the Englishman would say, so it could be dismissed. But Skye wasn’t cooperating; he just lay there, eyes closed, as if he wanted Bonfils to leave.
“Madam, your man recovers nicely because of your care,” he said to Victoria.
She made no sign of having heard.
“Truly, he will be almost fit by the time we reach St. Louis. Well enough to hobble around, don’t you think? Pierre Chouteau will admire him for his courage, coming clear down the river with a body in such need of repair and rest. Do you suppose he will need to winter in St. Louis, where he can get good care, before he ventures back to the mountains?”
She didn’t respond; didn’t smile, didn’t nod, didn’t speak. He felt as if he were being examined, not by some savage woman but by a surgeon, or maybe by a confessor listening through the grille.
“The Cheyenne squaw, she sings well, oui? I am listening to her send her boy along the spirit trail, and am filled with utmost admiration. She sits quietly at the front of the boat, like a goddess, watching the river and singing. Truly, she will be the queen of St. Louis! I myself will present her to society, letting all the world know she is Simon MacLees’s wife, and that the pretty little creature is his daughter!”
Neither of the Skyes responded, which annoyed him. So that’s how it would be! Here he was looking after them, making sure they got to St. Louis ahead of Marsh and his vitriolic accusations, but they showed no appreciation. Very well, then.
“Bonfils,” Gill yelled.
“Ah, pardon, mes amis, the man wants me,” he said, rising to leave. He ducked through the low door, into sunlight, and headed for Gill, who was steering for shore.
“Why is it that you stop? Are we not trying to keep on going no matter what? Go on, go on!”
But Gill just shook his head and pointed.
Ahead was a great turmoil. Bonfils strained to see what Gill had spotted. On the left bank was a swarming brown mass, slowly undulating toward the broad, sparkling river. And clear across the river, forming a barrier, was a brown band, quietly and powerfully moving from shore to shore, a thousand snouts and horns and heads; buffalo. And on the right bank were thousands more, clambering upslope, rivering the water out of their brown hair, and following the rest of the gigantic herd up and up and over the crest of the bluff, as if they were all marching into the heavens.
“Buffalo crossing,” Gill said.
“It’s amazing. There must be tens of thousands.”
“All of that.”
“How long will it last?”
“Who knows? Hour, day, several days.”
“Mon Dieu! I have heard of such a thing, but never have I seen it!”
He clambered up on the roof of the cargo box to see better. Countless bison were moving sinuously down the far slope, driving into the river at a good launching place that had turned into muck, and were slowly paddling a third of a mile across the water, their heads and horns and snouts making vee-shaped waves. They were six, ten, twenty, fifty in a rank, and the ranks spread like a brown carpet clear across the Missouri.
Gill was heading for the right bank, and he clearly intended to hole up until the herd had crossed. But that was foolish.
“Just go ahead, go ahead. The beasts will let you through.”
Gill shook his head. “Them buff’lo, they can hook a horn right through the planks. Don’t matter if they’re in water. Get into the middle of them, and the buff would cut this poor flat boat to splinters.”
“How do you know that?”
“Just do.”
“We’re losing time!”
“Nothing anyone can do about it.”
Bonfils could see no end of the herd, no stragglers topping the left bluff; only a vast brown column of animals appearing on the ridge and working downslope to the river. He had never seen such a sight; more buffalo in this one herd than he thought existed in all herds everywhere. None of the beasts bawled; yet a faint rumble, the impact of thousands of hooves, the struggles of tens of thousands of animals to swim, the shuddering and labored climb up the mucky right bank and the walk up the slope, made a faint hum, but what struck him most was the odd silence in the
midst of so much motion.
Gill reached a point a hundred yards upstream from the crossing and close to the right bank, and there he turned the flatboat into the shore until it ground to a halt. He eased off the gunnel with a rope in hand, and splashed to shore in a foot or two of water, to tie the rope to a sapling.
Bonfils endured it for a while, growing more and more restless. The great flow of animals never ceased, never slowed, and with each passing minute, his patience eroded and his temper mounted.
twenty-seven
Barnaby Skye struggled to sit up so he could see the herd swimming the Missouri. He fell back weakly, the shattered ribs shooting pain through him. He gasped for breath, and tried again, this time struggling upright. Ahead, he saw the procession slowly wending down the left slope, swimming across the river like some brown tide, and emerging slick and wet on the right bank, just a hundred yards below where the flatboat was tied to river brush.
The sight awed him. He was seeing a majestic wave of buffalo that vibrated the boat even as it lay quietly beside the shore. He scarcely heard the noise of passage, and yet the air was not still, and some obscure thunder filled it, and some suffocating force seemed to draw the oxygen out of it. The herd possessed within it so much energy that it was unfathomable; all the energy of thousands of square miles of grasslands; more muscle and breath than the whole human race. He thought that never in the rest of his days would he see such a spectacle, and he counted himself privileged to witness it.
He had never felt so helpless. His body was not obeying him. He could not will his pain away. He could not exist now without the help of others. Victoria spooned broth into him and changed the poultices on his three wounds. Red Gill steered the flatboat and looked to its safety. Even the Cheyenne woman, Lame Deer, took her turn looking after him.
This weakness was new to him. He had been helpless in the Royal Navy, too; imprisoned and dependent on others. But not ill, not so drained of vitality that he could barely manage to sit up. That was different. He had never before been gravely injured, and now he realized how fragile was his flesh, and how much his very life depended on others.
The only person who no longer visited him was Bonfils. Maybe it was just as well that the aristocratic Creole stayed away; whenever Skye contemplated his wounds, and the unending ache in his shoulder and thigh, and the sharp pain that rose and ebbed every time he breathed, and his dead dog, he knew he could not endure Bonfils; not for an instant.
How strange it was to be weak; to be cared for, to be so helpless.
As soon as Gill tied up, he collected his Pennsylvania long-rifle from the cabin, along with his powderhorn.
“Gonna have some good cow for supper,” he said.
Skye nodded. He might manage some broth, and a few bits of meat, but he would not be able to eat even the most succulent of the parts of the cow, the humpmeat, one of his favorite foods.
He watched Red Gill progress down a plank he had run from the flatboat to the sedge-lined shore, and then walk downriver toward the awesome herd. A while later he heard a crack, oddly obscured by the gutteral noise of the passage.
Gill had gotten his cow.
Skye watched the vast herd, wondering when it would end. He had heard somewhere that sometimes they tied up a riverboat for two or three days.
Gill shouted toward the boat.
“Bonfils, ladies, help me butcher,” he said. “The cow strayed out from the herd; we’re safe enough.”
Skye heard movement forward, and low voices. Then he watched Victoria and the Cheyenne woman, with her little girl, edge down the shaky plank to shore, and start toward the carcass somewhere ahead, beyond Skye’s vision.
Where was Bonfils?
Skye heard footsteps toward the front of the flatboat, but plainly the young brigade leader was not leaving the boat, even to cut up the buffalo or start a fire to cook it. Skye was on the wrong side of the cabin to see much of what was happening on shore. But he knew the women would be gutting the cow, cutting out the tongue, and sawing away at the shoulder hump, which made the best of all roasts. It would take a long while to butcher the huge animal and cook a haunch or boil the tongue.
He drifted in and out of awareness, as he often did in his sickbed. Some moments, he smelled the sharp, rank odor of the herd, or listened to the muted rumble of its passage, or followed the soft patter of footsteps on the planks of the flatboat. Other moments he was far away, in the past or future, his mind roaming far from his wounded body.
Sometime soon he would be in St. Louis, facing a powerful and ruthless man he had never met, seeking a position that would ensure him a life of relative comfort and ease, as well as the prospect of a good future. Or maybe not. He had heard enough to know that he might not be appointed; Bonfils or MacLees might well receive Chouteau’s favor. Maybe this trip would all be for nothing. Maybe these wounds, which had bled the strength out of him and rendered him little more than a bedridden wreck, might defeat his purposes.
He heard footsteps, and knew his rival was heading aft. A moment later Bonfils darkened the door and stepped in.
“Ah, Monsieur Skye, we are alone at last. How do you fare?”
Skye stared.
“Truly it was regrettable that you were trapped in the middle of those thieving Sioux.”
Skye was tempted to argue that Bonfils had been a damned fool, but he held his peace. The man was obviously here for a purpose.
The young Creole found a seat on the opposing bunk, which was nothing but a stretch of planking, like that which supported Skye. “You are progressing?” he asked politely.
“No fever. No infection.”
“A blessing. You have a gifted woman.”
“She packs the wounds with a blue moss she scrapes off the north side of trees.”
“The Indians, they are crafty healers, oui?”
Skye nodded. These pleasantries were not why Bonfils had settled his lean and dark self in the cabin. Skye wondered what would come next.
“I myself am mad with eagerness to go again. These buffalo are an unexpected frustration,” he said.
“Most amazing thing I’ve ever seen,” Skye said. “I’ll remember it the rest of my days. More buff than I’ve ever seen in all of my life; brown river of them.”
“Ah, you are a sentimentalist! I see only hides and meat.”
Skye settled deeper into his robes. Speaking taxed him and made his ribs ache. “I think you’re here for some reason,” he said. “I am very tired.”
Bonfils smiled brightly. “You are discerning, mon ami.”
“Now I’m your friend, am I? Would I be more of a friend if you had put four holes in me instead of three?”
Bonfils laughed easily. “You have wit, monsieur. No, what I wish to discuss with you is simply your future.”
Skye waited. Breath came harshly because his lungs rebelled when his ribs ached.
“I shall tell you exactly what my plan is. First, I must overtake the riverboat and reach my mother’s cousin, Pierre Chouteau, before Marsh does, to settle certain accusations he will make against me, things that might damage my chances. And of course, introduce him to the Cheyenne woman, MacLees’s squaw. That will be a very pleasurable moment, taking her and the little breed child in hand and into that handsome house, where the women will stare at the squaw and see whether there really are lice in her hair.” He laughed softly.
Skye was hurting from his attempt to sit up, so he lay very still, listening.
“I think that once Lame Deer is known, MacLees will no longer be a contender for the post on the Big Horn River.”
“I didn’t know he was a contender.”
Bonfils laughed. “There is much you don’t know. MacLees abandoned his squaw and is soon to marry a lovely white girl, Sarah Lansing, stepdaughter of Captain Marsh, and related to General Pratte. But when Lame Deer reaches St. Louis, I suspect the outcome might change.”
“And?”
“That brings us to you. You are an Englishman, oui?�
��
Skye nodded.
“A deserter from the Royal Navy, is it not so?”
Skye waited for whatever was coming, staring at Bonfils, who was enjoying himself.
“You know, if you become a trader for the company, you must become an American citizen. General Clark does not license foreigners for the fur trade, or people of bad character such as deserters. Nor does he permit them access to Indian lands held by the United States. You are here illegally.”
That was a revelation to Skye.
“My design, Skye, is to tell the general that you are not an American … . should you arrive in St. Louis.”
Skye absorbed that. Chouteau must have known, must have counted on him becoming an American citizen. Still, the subject had never been mentioned, and it irritated him.
“We are rivals, mon ami. And I will do what I must to acquire the post. It is the boulevard to success. A little while out there, earning the company a good profit and befriending the Crows, and I will have the credentials I need. Chouteau insists on practical experience. The senior men are very rich, monsieur, and so shall I be.”
“And what’s your design for me?”
“Bellevue, Skye. Get off the flatboat at Bellevue and head west with your woman. You will be safe. No official will know of your whereabouts or try to remove you from Indian Territory. You see? What I propose is in your interests!”
Bellevue was the site of an American Fur Company post near the confluence of the Platte River and the Missouri, a trading center run by Peter Sarpy for the Omahas and other plains tribes, a depot for the furs coming down the Platte River, and a supply point for much of the mountain trade. It would be only a few days away once they were traveling again.
“Sorry,” Skye said. “We’re going to St. Louis to try our luck with Chouteau. We’ll not turn back now. And there’s no way Clark can keep me from returning to my wife’s people if I choose to go there.”
Downriver Page 16
