“Your stuff, Shorty’s stuff, and whatever was lying around that flatboat.”
“You got the boat, too? How the hell did you persuade him to give it up?”
Skye smiled, flexing his fists. Gill looked alarmed.
“You get hurt?”
“Some.”
He nodded at Lame Deer. “She all right?”
“Ask her.”
“Yes,” she said. “It was a long trip.”
“He hurt you or … do anything?”
“No, because I showed him my skinning knife and told him he would not sleep well if he touched me.”
Red Gill hoorawed.
They clambered aboard the groaning hack, and the driver took them to Gill’s room, and even helped unload the gear. When they were done, there was no space left in that small place. Lame Deer studied the gloomy chamber closely, her lips compressed.
“I like a lodge more,” she said softly.
“So do I,” Skye said.
The bewhiskered hackman wasted no time whipping his bony dray away from the tenement and back toward the levee, clutching Skye’s good blanket as his pay.
“Tell me the story,” Gill said, settling on a corner of his narrow cot and pulling out a pipe that Skye had never before seen. “And if I forgot it, thank you. This is a big bundle of stuff, me and Shorty’s gear, and worth something. Them rifles alone cost a month’s pay.”
“A lucky break,” Skye said. “Red, you know this town?”
Gill nodded.
“MacLees’s place?”
“Think so; if not, I’ll find out.”
“Think you could take us there? Lame Deer has some business to attend, and I don’t aim to leave her alone here in St. Louis.”
Gill tamped yellow leaf tobacco into his pipe and struck a lucifer. After he had a fire blooming in the bowl, he nodded. “I think we owe it to her, she being alone and under our care.” He gazed at her. “You want to pretty up?”
“I’ll help, dammit,” Victoria said. “She don’t know nothing about big places.”
“Skye, let’s you and me leave these ladies alone. I’ll fetch them some water and good lye soap.”
Lame Deer trembled, and Skye realized that this ordeal was coming to its conclusion, and that she was a lonely, frightened, desperate woman of the plains caught at last in the strange and mysterious world of white men. She had borne her troubles well, but he saw in her face a whiteness and exhaustion that bespoke her true condition.
“Go, dammit,” Victoria said, pushing them both out the door.
“First time I got booted out of my own room, and by a damned squaw,” Gill said, and then apologized to Skye with a grin.
They lounged about under a small portico, awaiting the women. The rain had almost stopped, but water dripped steadily from eaves.
“Tell me where MacLees lives,” Skye said.
“He lives with his pa. I’ll take you there but I ain’t going in,” Gill said.
“With his father?”
“Yeah, since he come back from the mountains. I knew him some. Pretty fancy house. They ain’t poor.”
“What does the father do?”
“Brian MacLees is a banker and what they call an arbitrageur, buying and selling money mostly. St. Louis, it’s got no one money, so it’s dollars, pence, shillings, state bank notes, pieces of eight, ducats, reals, francs, guilders—you name it, after being part of Spain, France, and the United States. And there’s English coin out of Canada to deal with too. Old MacLees, he’s made him a pile just straightening the mess out.”
“Brian MacLees put his son in business?”
Gill shrugged. “Simon got the money somewheres, but went through it. Chouteau don’t let no Opposition company last for long, let me tell you. Now Simon’s getting married, I hear. Benton Marsh’s stepdaughter, Sarah Lansing.”
“Getting married?” Skye was thunderstruck.
“So I heard at the warehouse. Next Saturday, too. Big wedding, pretty fancy goings on. The Lansings, they’re rich, and they ain’t sparing the horses, I heard. Sarah lives with her real father, not her mother. Nasty divorce a few years ago, rocked St. Louis. Benton Marsh has had his share of women, and then some.”
“And Simon MacLees abandoned Lame Deer without a word, never let her know.”
Gill shrugged, uneasily. “Mountain weddings, them don’t count for much.”
Some things about the trip were dawning on Skye. “You think that’s why Bonfils was so eager to bring Lame Deer here? Embarrass MacLees? A scandal that could cost MacLees a position?”
Red grinned. “That’s how it slices up,” he said. “Say, you don’t think maybe we should get the women to hustling, do you? They’re taking forever.”
“I reckon when a woman wants to pretty up, it doesn’t matter whether she’s a white or an Indian. They’re going to pretty up at their own speed.” Skye astonished himself with that bit of wisdom, since he had never waited upon a white woman in his life.
Getting fancied up for nothing, he thought. Nothing but a lot of hurt. He wished Lame Deer had never come here; he wished he could whisk her away before this cruel meeting afflicted her. She had already lost a son on this long trip; and now she would find a man who had abandoned her. He felt helpless to stop this terrible reunion, but he didn’t have the faintest idea what to do, except to let it play out.
They fidgeted another while, and finally the door to Gill’s room creaked open. Skye beheld a beautiful and solemn Cheyenne woman, dressed largely as a white woman might dress, with Victoria trailing behind.
Lame Deer had made herself lovely. Her jet hair looked odd, but it glowed, and there was a red ribbon tied in a bow on one side of it. She wore a green calico dress, with a bone necklace. On her feet were the traditional high moccasins of the Cheyenne, these exquisitely embellished with quillwork. Her soft eyes were alive with joy.
Suddenly Skye felt very bad. He must have shown it, because he caught Victoria staring at him.
“What?” she said sharply.
Skye shook his head.
“No sense in standing in the rain,” Gill said. “I’ll take you, but I ain’t hanging around, no how.”
The child had been cleaned and groomed too, and wore a green dress that matched her mother’s. Skye stared at the pair of them, and thought of their doomed journey and the mortification they would soon endure, and felt bad as they splashed through mucky lanes that soon soaked their moccasins.
The slow drizzle fit his mood.
Gill led them upslope to the neighborhood where the Chouteaus and so many of their relatives lived, where the air was better, the shade trees majestic, the views generous, and the city they owned lay supine before them.
They reached a two-story Georgian home of red brick, with a shining white veranda across the front.
“MacLees’s house,” Gill said. “And I am gonna vamoose.”
“Red—”
But Gill was hurrying away, just as fast as he could walk.
forty–seven
A black manservant opened, and stared at the motley people on the veranda. The man was a slave, but Skye got the distinct impression that the haughty servant was sitting in judgment, and the visitors were found wanting.
“Simon MacLees, please,” Skye said.
“Ah will fetch him directly. And who are you?”
“Mister Skye. He will know the name.”
“From?”
“From the West.”
The man vanished into the dark recesses of the house, nade even gloomier by the slate sky and slow drizzle. Victoria as usual was studying, gauging, marveling at what white men had wrought. But Lame Deer’s face was a mask, unfathomable :o any observer. If she was curious about all these comforts, she showed no sign of it.
Skye had the sense that more than the heavens would be weeping in a few minutes. After a considerable time, a lean, awkish, raptor-eyed man in a fine silver-embroidered waistcoat and black pantaloons appeared, jaunty until he discovered w
ho was standing at his doorstep. He stared, visbly startled, and then his good humor faded behind a hard nask.
“Mister MacLees, I’m Barnaby Skye, and this is my wi Victoria. And this woman you know.”
MacLees stood stock still, not even drawing breath, son wild alarm in his bright brown eyes. “I—don’t know you,” he said at last, his gaze darting madly from face to face.
“Simon,” said Lame Deer. “I come.”
“Who? Who?”
“Me. I come. See the child we made, Singing Rain.” She herded the girl forward. The little one looked upward at h father, her face solemn, and clutched her mother’s hand.
“Who … ah, who are you?”
Lame Deer was puzzled. “A long way we have come, S mon. A long way from the People, with many suns on the b river, always toward the East Wind, Simon, my own.” H composure crumbled. “I have bad news. The one who was o firstborn …“she was carefully avoiding the name, as was h tradition about those who were dead,” … he is gone up the pathway of the spirits.”
Lame Deer stood there, yearning, open, vulnerable, an brimming with tenderness.
“Ah, ah,” MacLees looked utterly disoriented. And r wonder, Skye mused. The young man had thought he was safe fifteen hundred miles and an entire civilization awa from his Indian wife.
“See, see how your girl has get big,” she said, urging the child forward again.
The girl clung to her mother.
“It was a hard trip,” Skye said, “but she bore it bravely, he thoughts always on you. She has been worried for mar months, because you did not return. She never heard a word
“I don’t have the faintest idea who this squaw is MacLees said, his voice wavering. “Or why you are here.”
Skye was disappointed in the young man, who was hiding behind a feeble and transparent lie.
“You might welcome her,” Skye said, relentlessly.
MacLees seemed to harden. “Nor have I met you, sir. I don’t quite know what you want or why you’re here, but if you have no business with me, then I shall excuse myself.”
Skye straightened himself and waited, unbudging. He would not help this spoiled young scion of a wealthy family out of his little dilemma.
A graying man emerged from the gloom of the house. “What’s this, Simon?” he asked.
“Some people who think I know them,” MacLees said.
“Mr. MacLees? I am Mister Skye; my wife, Victoria, and this is Simon’s Cheyenne wife, Lame Deer, and Simon’s daughter. They have come a long way.”
The world seemed to stop in its tracks. Beyond, in the bleak interior, he spotted a stout woman hovering about, and the manservant standing erect and disdainful to one side.
The senior MacLees turned red. His glare settled on one, then another, and finally on Lame Deer.
“Blackmail,” he said. “You are a blackmailer. You want money or you intend to embarrass us upon the eve of Simon’s wedding.”
“Wedding?” Victoria snapped.
“Wedding. And I won’t stand for it. Leave at once, and if I see you in St. Louis again, you’ll all be turned over to the authorities.”
“Simon, I come long way,” Lame Deer said, her hands lifting toward him. “How good to see you. I will be like a white woman to you, and learn all these strange things, and make you happy. It will be like it was, when we had our own lodge, and we were together. This I will gladly do—”
“Out!” The senior MacLees shook his fist.
The great oaken door swung hard, and snapped shut in their faces. But through the leaded glass windows at either side of the door, white faces peered at them.
“He gonna marry some white girl,” Victoria said to Lame Deer.
The Cheyenne woman stood erect, summoning her courage, and wheeled off the veranda. Then she began singing, a lamentation that rose and fell in minor chords as she sang the music of grief and loss and stayed the ache of her heart. She turned, stared at the half-timbered house and the velvet lawn about it, and the manicured grounds, and closed her eyes for a moment. When she opened them, she was somehow different.
Skye reached her, clasped his big, scarred hand into hers, and led her into the rain. One bad moment had wiped out her dreams and hopes, and fifteen hundred miles of travel toward her lover. But when at last she reached the lane, and could no longer see the house, or those ghostly faces peering through the windows, she slumped, and he could not tell whether the wetness on her cheeks was raindrops or tears. Victoria caught Lame Deer’s other hand, and held the child’s hand too, as they retreated not only from a cold home, but also from warm hopes, dreams, and visions of a joyous tomorrow.
They slogged silently down a narrow lane toward the riverfront, scarcely knowing where to go. Between them they hadn’t a cent for food, shelter, or transportation.
Skye didn’t like St. Louis anymore, and wasn’t sure he ever did. The place oozed with its grimy little secrets. The climate was foul, the soul of the city corrupt. When they reached the levee, he discovered that Gill’s flatboat was gone. The little sailboat had vanished too. He steered the women toward the Pratte, Chouteau warehouse again, needing to find Gill.
Like it or not, he had several people depending on him for food and shelter, and no doubt, a means to go back to the mountains, and Gill was the only person he could count on.
He turned to Lame Deer. “You want to stay here?”
She shook her head sternly.
“You want to go back to your people?”
She faltered then, unsure of herself. “I do not know,” she said. “My medicine … I have no medicine. No vision rises in me to light the way like a torch.”
“You have good medicine,” he said, but she looked desolate.
He steered them through open double doors into the pungent vaults where the company stored its peltries, and found Gill back at work, pulling each hide open and examining it.
“Told you so,” Gill said, surveying the gloomy party.
“We need—”
“Yeah, I know.”
“The flatboat’s gone.”
Gill stopped his grading. “Already? Bonfils didn’t waste no time. Old uncle must have told him to vamoose. Chouteau come around here a few minutes ago and told me the same. Long as I was doing his dirty work for him, getting spirits out to his posts, he knew I’d keep my mouth shut. But now that I quit, now he’s worrying maybe I’ll talk too much, spill his secrets, cost him his license, like the last time the company got into a jam.
“So he wanders through here and asks if I’m satisfied, and I says yes, except Bonfils took my flatboat, and he says he’ll pay for that, two hundred dollars, and he says he thinks maybe it’s time for me to get away from St. Louis, and the ears of old General Clark, who is sitting there, not a hundred yards from here, governing the whole Indian country, and handing out licenses. So I says I’ll think about it, and he says if I think fast, he’ll sweeten the offer.”
“Like what?”
Gill grinned. “Ain’t decided yet. The longer I hang around here, the more he itches for me to vamoose and raises the ante. I could maybe go into the Santy Fe trade. Lots of teamsters making plenty hauling stuff out there. Them Messicans pay silver or tallow or hide for just about anything gets hauled out there, half starved the way they are by all them tariffs and duties and rules their government puts on ’em. I could clear two thousand dollars a trip, maybe more. I’m more teamster than waterman anyway.” He nodded toward Lame Deer. “How’d she take it?”
“She is a courageous woman.”
“You get in to talk with MacLees?”
“Only as far as the door. He pretended not to recognize us. There he was, facing his wife, the woman who had borne his children, and he said he didn’t know her.”
Gill spat. “Guess that says all that needs saying about him. Then what?”
“MacLees senior called us blackmailers. Told us to get out of St. Louis or face the constables.”
Gill grinned. “More dirty linen no one want
s aired.”
Victoria said, “What are we gonna do?”
Skye was reminded that he was penniless in a strange city, and had two women and a child to care for.
“Red, would you look after these ladies for a while? I want to talk with Chouteau.”
Red grinned. “Have a seat. Or help me grade these robes,” he said. “All you got to do is open up the robes and let me have a look-see. When I sell, I want to get my money’s worth, and that means looking at every robe.”
The women nodded. Lame Deer settled upon a bale of robes and drew her girl to her.
Skye left them, and headed through the dreary warrens of that warehouse until he found his way into the company headquarters, and Chouteau’s chambers.
“Ah, Mister Skye, we weren’t prepared to see you, but it is just as well,” Chouteau said, rounding his desk.
Skye nodded. “I am hoping you have news.”
Chouteau’s compressed smile emerged on those pouty lips again. “We have rid the city of my nephew. He’s en route to visit relatives far away. We saw him only briefly, long enough to reject him for any position in the company—ever.” Chouteau was not smiling now. “We have received an express from Fort Pierre. The Teton Sioux are, shall we say, angry. They lost four young men, and others lie in torment. They want revenge on Bonfils, and reparations—blankets, guns, powder, lead, and much more. That grapeshot into their midst not only injured you, sir, but the company.
“We have chosen you, Mister Skye. You will be our trader at Fort Cass.”
forty–eight
How sweet it was. The unknown rival, MacLees, had declined the position, and sullied himself. The known rival, young, skilled, and connected in all the right places, had shown appalling judgment, damaged the company and many innocent people, and now was banished. And the position had settled upon Barnaby Skye.
He could, if he took it, greatly benefit Victoria’s people, making sure they were well armed against their clamorous enemies such as the Sioux and Blackfeet, supplying them with good blankets to warm themselves on an icy winter’s night, offering them all the tools and equipment they needed.
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