Downriver
Page 29
“Well?” Skye asked. “What’s your reply?”
Marsh didn’t blink and the moment stretched long, but then there was a subtle change; nothing palpable, but a change even so, and Skye knew he had won. The master needed his armed thugs and they all knew it. The insults and taunts were dust.
“We’re leaving as soon as steam’s up,” Marsh said.
Skye wheeled away, down the companionway, and back to the rear staterooms. He found the women all together.
“We’re getting off the boat.”
“Sonofabitch!”
Lame Deer was staring at him. “It is good. I love to walk upon the breast of the earth and feel the grass beneath my moccasins. I love the earth. It is honest and clean. My legs do not grow weary, and I can walk from sun to sun.”
Skye nodded.
A preliminary whistle squalled from the standpipe. The chimneys belched black smoke. Steam was up. The fireboxes roared.
A cabin boy appeared, and Skye directed him toward the mound of gear. Skye and the women each collected all they could carry, and hauled it out upon the main deck, next to the gangway.
“All ashore that’s going ashore,” a second mate bawled at the crowd on the deck.
“Help us get this off,” Skye said to the cabin boy. The la looked doubtful. “There’s time, and Marsh will wait if he must.’
The lad nodded, and helped them move their truck to the levee, where a crowd watched silently, curious about Skye and his Indian women.
Up in the pilothouse, Marsh was smiling. The moment the boy was done, Marsh pulled a cord. Deckmen pulled up the gangway. Rivermen loosened the hawsers. The Otter slid away from the levee, and began to buck the current of the Mississippi. The wheels thrashed, and the boat shuddered forward, and the captain laughed. He had gotten rid of Skye’s party after all.
But Skye, staring up at the man, didn’t mind.
fifty
In a grove outside of Independence, the last caravan of the season creaked to life one early August morning, and headed out the well-worn trail toward Santa Fe. This one, thirty-two wagons strong, consisted of independent entrepreneurs, except that Ceran St. Vrain was among them with a dozen wagons destined for Bent’s Fort and Taos. The Bent brothers and St. Vrain were partners in the other great fur empire, this one stretching across the southern plains, and reaping a harvest of buffalo robes that rivaled Chouteau’s.
Skye and Victoria knew several of those travelers, including Uncle Dick Wooton, Kit Carson, and Lucien Maxwell, all of them veterans of the mountains. Some of them had been in St. Louis for one reason or another that spring and summer. It would be grand to see Kit.
Skye had traded his spare outfit for passage on a steamer, Arapaho, as far as Independence, and there was enough left over for horses as well, which they took with them on the steamer because there was an acute shortage of mules and horses in Independence, where the Santa Fe trade devoured livestock.
With Skye was Lame Deer and her daughter, sharing a small mare Skye had acquired for her. She was smiling, knowing that at Bent’s Fort she would find her Cheyenne people, and maybe even her own kin. The Cheyenne, who had lived for years around the Black Hills and along the Cheyenne River, where MacLees had traded with them, had drifted south in recent years. And now she was going home.
Red Gill was taking a wagon west, loaded with hardware and satins and velvets for Santa Fe, and had put together his outfit just in time to join up with the others before the cold weather roared down on the plains. Even so, the last part of his trip would be tough, with snow on the peaks of the Sangre de Cristos in Nuevo Mexico.
But it was to St. Vrain that Skye was attached now.
“My friend, come work for us,” William Bent’s partner had said expansively in Independence.
“Maybe for the winter,” Skye had replied.
And so Skye had hired on, and now, this fine hot day, the motley assemblage of foul-mouthed teamsters, adventurers, merchants, buckskin-clad mountaineers, trappers’ children, and a few Indians, like Lame Deer, rode out. Skye and Victoria preferred their saddle horses, but Lame Deer was content to sit in the van of one of St. Vrain’s lumbering, rocking freight wagons, and tie her mustang mare to the tailgate.
Skye drew up beside her wagon.
“You happy?” he asked.
“I go to my people,” she said. “They are strong and good. They listen to Sweet Medicine, and obey his wisdom. My clan will care for me, and for Singing Rain. They will honor me, and soon I will find a new man with a true heart and I will be given to him, and I will make his lodge a good place. And we will follow the four-foots and the buffalo, and make our lodge warm in the winter, with many robes and much meat.”
“You glad you went to St. Louis?”
Her face clouded a moment. “I have been where no Cheyenne woman has ever gone, and I see many things. But my heart is big now that I see the grass and the sky, as far as my eye can see. And I will bring this knowledge of what I saw in St. Louis to my people, and help them know about white men. I am big in my heart, but in St. Louis I was small in my heart. Now you make me happy, and you are my friend, and I will sing about you to my people.”
“Thank Victoria, not me.”
“Ah, the Absaroka woman, she is a true friend too. She loves Singing Rain, and my girl-child loves her too.”
Skye nodded, and spurred his lean, rough-gaited, nondescript nag forward to walk beside St. Vrain.
“You want to winter with me, up at my post?” St. Vrain said. “I could always use a man. You’d be closer to Victoria’s people.”
“Might. But only if you offer the jug. I have the biggest thirst I’ve ever had.”
St. Vrain laughed. “It is possible,” he said.
“I didn’t get a sip all summer. First I got yanked out of rendezvous when they were just unpacking, and in St. Louis I didn’t have even two bits to buy a refreshment. So I’ll let you and William make offers. How many jugs do you bid?”
“I think William Bent could outbid me,” St. Vrain confessed. “We don’t have to smuggle spirits, you know. We’ve got Taos Lightning, brewed in old Mexico. Aguardiente, it’s called. A fiery brandy, fermented from the agave leaf. Oh, Skye, it bites. It kicks. It makes a man howl.”
Skye rumbled, the anticipation of paradise welling up in him.
And so the procession creaked west, the big wooden wheels hammering along rutted trails, winding through mixed groves and prairies, splashing through muddy creeks, and eventually out upon vast grasslands that spread to the mysterious horizons where the future lay, like the seas upon which Skye had sailed for so many years. It would be a good trip if the grass held up. Many Santa Fe caravans had already lumbered down the trail, and the grass had been well chewed down.
Maybe this was the future, he thought. The beaver were gone, and beaver felt wasn’t in demand anyway. If there were any more rendezvous, they’d be melancholy affairs at best, a mournful echo of those grand frolics of yore. But a man could still survive out here, far from the cities, far from all the civilizing influences that he would just as soon avoid. There was a living to be had from buffalo, and he reckoned he could make some money someday just taking people where they wanted to go and looking after their safety.
That year of 1838, the Bents and the Chouteaus had divided up the West; the Bents controlling everything south of the South Platte, while the Chouteaus dominated the robe trade to the north. Only a handful of independent traders were surviving against the two giants. Skye had tried the Chouteaus; now he would see about these others.
He found Victoria, who was back toward the rear with Red Gill, enjoying the mild day.
“You happy?” he asked.
“This damned horse! It don’t do nothing right. But I got him figured out. He was not gonna walk one more step, so I leaned forward and took an ear, and I whispered into his ear, ‘You sonofabitch, you get moving or I’ll eat you.’”
“And what did the horse do?”
“Well look at him
! He’s a prancing fool!”
Skye was content. Victoria wished she could be heading toward her people, but had settled into cheerful acceptance of the turn in their fortunes. She had brightened from the moment they left St. Louis. Skye planned to winter at the great adobe fort built by the Bents, enjoying the mild climate and the good company.
He was glad he had gone to St. Louis, even though the whole thing had come to nothing. The cost to his body had been terrible, but the trip had opened vistas to him. At last, he had seen the Yanks in their homeland. He no longer wished to work for Pierre Chouteau. Skye knew himself to be a man of honor, and if he paid a heavy price because of his beliefs, so be it. He could always live with himself; other men with more flexible ethics might not like what they saw in the looking glass.
He was no longer tempted to become an American citizen. Not now. Maybe not ever. How could a people with such noble ideals harbor so many cutthroats and ruffians? Skye grasped anew that he was a man without a country, and probably would live out his life that way, apart from the cabals and crowds and schemes of empire.
That was all right. Even if he belonged to no people, he belonged to a land, and that land stretched across the great prairies to the mountains, from British Canada on the north to Mexico on the south. Alone, yet not alone, for no man with stalwart friends is ever alone, and no man with a woman like Victoria is ever alone, and no man who harbors a bright vision of the way things should be is ever without comfort.
St. Vrain had promised him any position he wanted, and he thought he might take some trips out to the Apache and Comanche Indian villages on the Mexican side of the Arkansas River, where he need not worry about having a trading license from General Clark. There could be some danger in it, but Skye was born to danger, and thought he would be all right. Bent regularly sent small trading outfits to the surrounding villages to bid for buffalo robes, and Skye thought he might do that. He wouldn’t earn much, but there were some things in life that were better than money. And if he hung around Bent’s Fort, he and Victoria would be employed, fed and sheltered for as long as he wanted to stay on the Arkansas River.
That was good enough for Skye. He and Victoria would settle in, and maybe some twilit evening, up in that famous second-floor billiard room Bent had built for his men, he and Victoria would pull the cork on a jug of Taos Lightning, settle down on a thick buffalo robe against the adobe wall, gather his friends for some quiet good times, and rejoice that they had escaped secretive, scheming St. Louis. They were out beyond the rim of civilization, where life was sweet as mead and a man was always free.
BY RICHARD S. WHEELER FROM TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES
SAM FLINT
Flint’s Gifts
Flint’s Truth
Flint’s Honor
SKYE’S WEST
Sun River
Bannack
The Far Tribes
Yellowstone
Bitterroot
Sundance
Wind River
Santa Fe
Rendezvous
Dark Passage
Going Home
Aftershocks
Badlands
The Buffalo Commons
Cashbox
Downriver
The Fields of Eden
Fool’s Coach
Goldfield
Masterson
Montana Hitch
Second Lives
Sierra
Sun Mountain
Where the River Runs
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
DOWNRIVER: A BARNABY SKYE NOVEL
Copyright © 2001 by Richard S. Wheeler
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.
eISBN 9781466822986
First eBook Edition : July 2012
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