Downriver

by Richard S. Wheeler

  Spirits.

  Only Chouteau wasn’t saying it. In fact, Chouteau was speaking in Aesopean language, charging his instructions with much more than the words would, on the surface, suggest.

  “Is that good for the tribe, sir?”

  Chouteau was nonplused. “The tribe? The savages? What does that have to do with it?”

  “They are my wife’s people.”

  “Ah, but what does a mountain liaison matter? They come and go. Yes, look after the savages, of course. They will come to your door in times of war, wanting arms and powder, and you will be their savior. Eventually, Skye, you’ll come to St Louis and live in splendor. We reward our best traders very well, we assure you.”

  “I understand I must be a citizen to get a trading license from General Clark.”

  “A trifle. Don’t go to General Clark. They’ve no reason to assume you aren’t a citizen. We shall list you on our rosters as a citizen.”

  “I think I should go to the general—”

  “No, don’t do that. It would take too long. You would have to swear allegiance before a federal judge, and even then you would not yet be a citizen. No, let it lie. We have a great advantage. There is no record of you, yes? They cannot prove you are not a citizen.”

  He smiled, obviously enjoying the thought of putting one over on the authorities.

  “Ah, Skye, you are well known to us here. We have watched you from afar, but not without interest. No man comes to us better recommended. You are resourceful. You avoid fights with the Indians, so that your brigades have lived and trapped. But you are a mad dog when you’re cornered and then, beware, for Skye will perform the miraculous.” He paused, dimpling up again. “It shows in our records. More beaver pelts, better cared for, less loss of materiél, more men coming into rendezvous, and in better condition. Ah, yes, we know of these things, and we are pleased to behold the author of such profit and value in our company!”

  Skye scarcely knew how to respond, so he just ran a weathered hand through his unwashed knots of hair. There had been no place to lave himself for this interview, and he wore just what he had worn for a thousand miles of river travel.

  “You will go far,” Chouteau said, and paused pregnantly. “But of course there is always a condition—absolute loyalty. Your heart may not be divided, Skye. Not in little pieces, one for your wife, one for her tribe, one for England if you still care, one for your dear friends who organized the Rocky Mountain Fur Company, one for Hudson’s Bay or another company. Ah, no, your loyalty will be toward us. In the field, you will think only of us, and the profits we require to stay in business. The fur trade is the riskiest of all enterprises, my friend. The profits seem high, but that is how we cover the inevitable disasters.

  “So you will wring every cent out of a yard of ribbon or an awl, and every dime or bit out of a blanket or packet of vermillion. We have clerks here assiduously buying these things from all over the world—vermillion from Asia, beads from Venice, fine blankets from England, knives from Vermont.

  “We gather these, and ship them out to you at enormous cost, and expect you to turn them into hides, beaver pelts, bearskins, elk, ermine, and now especially buffalo, which makes greatcoats, carriage robes, and a host of other things, including belts for pulleys.

  “And all our labor is focused on you, at the trading window, taking in furs, examining and grading them carefully, and then offering no more than their real value. Ah, you see, it is the most important of all vocations! You can make or break us!”

  Skye listened to the lecture, not doubting most of it, but there were things here that he ached to understand, undercurrents, ideas unspoken, commands and instructions never made explicit but certainly present. Pierre Chouteau was talking about the underside of the fur trade, yet not really saying anything about it. The finger in the cup, the thumb on the scales, the cheap cast-iron tools that shattered, and especially the whiskey, watered and rewatered and offered for every robe in a lodge, even in the middle of winter.

  Skye liked and yet didn’t like him. Chouteau was good-natured and filled with humor. But he was also the man who had destroyed everyone in his path. He wished Chouteau would put it on the table, get it out in the open: Would Skye be required to chisel, or could he deal honorably in all matters?

  That was the crux of it. Suddenly, in Skye’s mind, the tables were turned. He stood there, weighing the man, gathering together the understanding he would need to come to a decision: Would he work for this man or not?

  Chouteau talked a while more, but the words were veils, and the purpose was to probe and plumb the bulky, big-nosed Englishman who stood before him, on one foot and then the other. It was odd, finally, how few questions Chouteau asked. Nothing about Skye’s background or family; nothing about his service in the Royal Navy; nothing about his philosophy or religion or experience or connections.

  It came down to an examination of a man thoroughly known to Chouteau by reputation, if not in person. And the real purpose of this endless interview was instruction, by subtle and indirect comment, about what the next trader at Fort Cass would do and not do.

  Then suddenly it was over, and the dimpled, amused master of the fur empire rose, clapped Skye on the back, and told him to report daily. There would be no decision until Chouteau had a chance to review the merits of other candidates.

  “And where shall we find you, Monsieur Skye?”

  At last, some recognition that Skye was far from home.

  “With Red Gill.”

  “That is not desirable. Can you not find some other billet?”

  Skye stood silently, awaiting what would come.

  “Ah! Gill works for the Opposition, so naturally we are concerned. Don’t believe anything he tells you.”

  That was not true. Skye made note of it.

  Skye wandered through gloomy halls and out the door, into a rainy day, splashing through silver puddles and dodging dripping eaves, intending to find Victoria. He would have to barter something that he had gotten from Peter Sarpy to feed them.

  He wandered along the waterfront, heading toward Gill’s quarters, when he saw the familiar flatboat nosing to the levee, steered by Alexandre Bonfils.

  forty–five

  Bonfils maneuvered the big flatboat toward a berth on the levee, a delicate task for a man alone at the tiller. But his luck held; a generous slot had opened because of the departure of a steam packet.

  From within the cabin, the Cheyenne squaw watched, bemused, as the city emerged from the mist like some ghostly presence. He would have given his last sou to know what was on her mind as she discovered the legendary place of many lodges before her very eyes, and saw the stained brick structures and grimy frame buildings rising rank upon rank before her.

  He was soaked and chilled, even though this August shower had scarcely cooled the summer heat this gloomy day. He did not know quite how to proceed; whether to take the squaw to see Simon MacLees, or bring her with him to Pierre Chouteau’s chambers. He was leaning toward the latter. Uncle Pierre would be amused, smile that smirky little smile of his, and elect Bonfils for the job before the whole scandal blew up.

  Bonfils laughed with anticipation.

  He swung the tiller hard, needing to angle across the steady current of the mighty Mississippi to harbor his awkward boat, but he succeeded, driving it straight toward the mucky stone-paved levee. The moment he bumped shore, he would leap from the flatboat with a hawser in hand and wrap it around any of the numerous pilings sunk deep into the levee, and make fast the vessel.

  It was just then that he saw the apparition.

  It could not be Skye. He had left the man far back at Sarpy’s Post, below Council Bluffs. The sight rendered him witless for an instant. Someone else! He could not fathom it. How did that mountaineer arrive here ahead of him? Impossible! Sacre Bleu! But it was Skye, in his top hat, thick-nosed and ugly as sin, limping along in the rain. And then Skye saw him.

  With a roar, Skye raced toward the waterfront, the li
mp slowing him scarcely at all, and suddenly Bonfils knew he was in trouble because Skye was not going to stop on land; he was going to leap straight into that boat.

  Bonfils let go of the tiller, confident that he could whip the older man if it came to that; a man barely out of the sickbed, with all-but-mortal wounds weakening him.

  Then in one bound, Skye was over the transom.

  “Got you,” he growled. “Want my outfit back.”

  “Get off the boat,” Bonfils retorted.

  Bonfils swung a haymaker that hammered only the air, and Skye landed on the younger man, knocking him to the floorboards. He glimpsed Lame Deer peering out of the cabin at them, her hand to mouth, starting to keen.

  Bonfils sprang upward, tossing Skye aside, and confidently began pummeling the older man, but Skye bore in, unafraid, though breathing hard while Bonfils had scarcely started to suck air.

  But Bonfils had not met such a man as this, and sensed that all those years as a tar, in shipboard brawls and war, had taught the Englishman a thing or two, because he felt blows rain on him, catch him in the liver, the groin, the jaw, the ears, almost as if Skye were playing with him.

  Skye quit pounding, grabbed Bonfils by the shirt, and tossed him to the planks again. The Creole leaped up, but Skye was looming over him. The flatboat had caught the current and was drifting into the side of a steam packet.

  Skye stepped back, pulled the tiller to twist the boat away from collision just as Bonfils flew at him. Skye tripped him; Bonfils landed in a heap, bloodying his lips when his teeth cut them as he landed. He wiped the blood away.

  “We’re going to see Chouteau,” Skye rasped.

  Bonfils didn’t want to. Not just then. Not until he could concoct something to explain things.

  Skye was breathing hard. The brawl had drained him. Maybe there would be some advantage in that, Bonfils thought.

  The boat had drifted into the channel, and Skye steered it past the packet, where fifty faces stared into the flatboat, and several men with pikes stood at the rail, prepared to push the flatboat away.

  Skye chose a spot several hundred yards downstream, well below the warehouses on the levee, and docked the flatboat. Bonfils tied the hawsers to a tree stump left there for the purpose.

  “Come with me,” Skye said, retrieving his top hat from the slimy floorboards.

  “What if I don’t?”

  “Then you’ll take what I give you. You can walk or I can drag you.”

  Bonfils knew he could sprint faster than the barrel-shaped, wounded man, and nodded.

  “Lame Deer, come with me,” Skye said roughly.

  The Cheyenne woman edged from the cabin, looking fearful of what might occur. She tugged her daughter with her, and they stepped to shore. She had dressed herself as closely as possible to what white women wore, and had succeeded.

  “We’re going to see Red Gill first,” Skye explained to her. “To get this boat and his gear back to him. Then Victoria and I will find the house of Simon MacLees and we will take you there so that you and he can see one another. We will help you.”

  Lame Deer nodded.

  Skye turned to Bonfils, puzzlement on his face, as if he didn’t quite know what to do. “It doesn’t matter what I do with you,” Skye said. “You’re done for. I was going to drag you to your uncle and toss you in his lap. But now I don’t know why. Chouteau knows the whole story. All I want is my outfit and Gill’s.” Skye lifted his top hat and settled it. “I’m going to unload our gear, and Red’s, and Lame Deer’s, and you can do what you please. Go visit your uncle if you wish. Or head for Tahiti. I’m not holding you.”

  Skye was dismissing him. How peculiar! Bonfils exulted uneasily.

  The Londoner simply turned on his heel and stepped into the flatboat. Little by little, he emptied the cabin of its burdens: Gill’s clothing and rifle and trunk; Skye’s and Victoria’s robes and Skye’s mountain rifle, Lame Deer’s beautiful summer robe, and the parfleches containing her few things.

  Bonfils thought feverishly. He hadn’t expected the Skyes ever to come to St. Louis, and he wondered how they did, and how they passed him. And what he should do.

  “I have connections,” he said to Skye.

  Skye stopped his unloading. “Yes, you do,” he said. “And you’ll rely on them instead of on yourself. If you want anything of yours from the cabin, get it.”

  The suggestion had an eerie quality to it, and suddenly Bonfils wanted nothing but to get away from there.

  “I leave the squaw to you,” Bonfils said. “Seeing as how that’s where you set your sights, squaw man.”

  Somehow it sounded hollow.

  Skye barely nodded, as if further concourse with Bonfils was no longer necessary. He was straightening the gear on the levee, and at the same time looking for a cart or a hack.

  Bonfils nursed his sore lip, wondering what to do. He had come this far, confident that he had eliminated Skye as a rival, and could embarrass MacLees out of contention. He stood there on one foot and the other, unable to decide, and then cockily started toward Pratte, Chouteau and Company, two hundred yards upriver. With each step, his confidence returned. He was family. What were families for, but to nurture and protect their own?

  He brushed himself off, laughed, knew he could silver-tongue his way out of trouble, and hiked jauntily toward his distant uncle’s lair. He had been there many times, watching his mother’s cousin fling his resources into a wild and unknown land, and many months later, watch the furs float down the mighty rivers and into his warehouse.

  The blood on his lip tasted salty, but the minor bleeding would cease by the time he was sitting in Pierre Chouteau’s office. He glanced behind him. Skye had summoned a hack, and was dickering with the hack driver. Lame Deer stood aside, her daughter clutched to her.

  Bonfils gathered courage, strode toward the dreary brick edifice that formed the heart of an empire, turned into its gloomy corridors, and then presented himself to Pierre Chouteau.

  “Alexandre, we’ve been expecting you,” Chouteau said, after studying the young man standing in his doorway. “Is your lip still bleeding?”

  “Bleeding?”

  “When you landed in a heap after Skye hit you in front of our warehouse.”

  Bonfils laughed nervously. He should have known that everything of consequence that happened on the St. Louis levee would reach his uncle’s ears in moments.

  “I am back from the mountains, and ready to assume whatever position you have in mind for me,” he said, and then remembered his manners. “I trust you are well, and the family is in good health?”

  That dimpled little smirk built on Chouteau’s face, and Bonfils knew all would be well.

  “New Orleans,” Chouteau said.

  “I don’t follow you.”

  “New Orleans is where you should go. But of course, we leave all that to you.” Chouteau shrugged, a gesture imbued with gallic charm.

  “I would like a trading position. Wasn’t that why you summoned me?”

  “It was. A most regrettable decision, it turned out.”

  Bonfils didn’t like the gist of all this. “I wish to inform you, sir, that no matter what the captain said of me, my swift action that morning saved an entire cargo of furs, and ensured a profit for you.”

  Chouteau looked amused, but behind that humor was a dangerous glint.

  “We would suggest, young man, that you remove yourself from this city before we do it for you. You could take that flatboat if you wish. It belongs to Gill, but we’ll make it up to him. We trust you have returned his outfit to him, and returned Skye’s?”

  “Mais oncle—” Bonfils was aghast. “You have not even let me tell my story.”

  “If you should see Skye on the levee, tell him we wish to see him. We will offer him the position. A great step upward for the man. Au revoir, mon neveu.”

  “I never really wanted that lonely job in that lonely post anyway,” Bonfils said. “It was all a game.”

  forty–
six

  Skye found Victoria on the waterfront, quietly blotting up the ways of white men. She took one look at the hack, loaded with so many possessions as well as Skye, Lame Deer, and Singing Rain, and ran to it, clambered aboard and hugged Lame Deer. It was the first carriage ride for either woman, and they sat spellbound as the hack driver steered the dray horse over the wet cobbles.

  “So?” Victoria asked, waving at the mound of goods.

  “Saw his flatboat come in. I talked him out of our possessions.”

  Victoria glanced at him sharply, noting the torn clothing. “Where is he now?”

  “Seeing the uncle.”

  “What did you say to him?”

  “I didn’t. I ran at him.”

  She smiled at him. “Where are we going?”

  “Find Red. He’s in the warehouse grading his buffalo hides, I think.”

  “Driver, the Pratte, Chouteau warehouse first,” Skye said.

  The man nodded, stared sharply at Victoria, just as he had stared sullenly at the Cheyenne woman, tugged the lines and steered the blindered dray leftward to veer across the wet expanse of the cobbles to the brick warehouse. Skye hadn’t a cent to his name, but the man accepted a blanket for an hour’s time.

  The hack pulled to a halt, and the old, wet-backed dray sagged in its harness.

  “We’ll be out directly,” Skye said to the weary man.

  He led the women into a cavernous and ill-lit place, redolent of fur and hide and the acrid odor of ancient dried flesh.

  They found Gill immediately, off in a separate bay, examining his hides one by one.

  Gill looked up, spotted Lame Deer, and started.

  “What the hell?” he asked.

  “Ship came in,” Skye said. “Got your stuff and ours in a hack.”

  “Where’s that sonofabitch?”

  “He’s gone to talk to his uncle.”

  Gill eyed them, dropped the robe without examining it, and sighed. “You want to store the stuff in my place?”

  “Just long enough so that it doesn’t walk away.”

  Gill nodded. “We’ll get it over there. You got everything of mine?”