Cheyenne Winter (33 page)

He’d been wintering in the lodge of One Leg Eagle and Antelope along with their four daughters, and it’d driven him into a big dry. Too many wives and in-laws in there to suit him. It occurred to him that Hide Scraping Woman had a bulge to her belly he hadn’t seen before — she was pregnant, and had never said a blasted word to him. Probably the rest were, too. Visions of three of four squalling brats dizzied him. He squinted narrowly at Dust Devil and Sweet Smoke, and they smiled back, saying nothing. And he couldn’t speak to his mother-in-law, neither. Some old taboo. Not a bad one, he thought. His wives had slid into his robes night after night in the blackness but he’d pushed them away. He couldn’t even think of it in the lodge with a dozen ears listening in the space of ten feet. One Leg Eagle was plumb cheerful and told bawdy jokes he said he got from the Crows one time, while antelope smiled at him, understanding and enjoying his discomfort. It’d turned into some damned joke, and he was the butt of it. Maybe them Cheyenne weren’t so puritan after all.

Dust Devil turned sulky and went on long walks, even in the bitter air. She liked to traipse past Raffin’s little lodge, too. Brokenleg had spotted her doing it, and knew it was to annoy him and get even for ignoring her in the robes. And she’d succeeded. Which was why he was building up to a Big Dry. Raffin had spotted it, too, and made a point of stopping Dust Devil and visiting with her whenever he could — especially when Brokenleg was in sight.

Brokenleg endured, but he didn’t know how long he could before something snapped inside. It was worse than bein’ in St. Louis with all them dudes on the streets starin’ at him. His thoughts turned to murder. He took to wrapping himself in a scarlet blanket and stalking past Raffin’s lodge, listening for the sounds of talk inside, or the sounds of mating. Itching to climb in there and hunt around for something, anything, that would pin Raffin to the casks of spirits that probably had cost the company its trading license.

He’d shoot Raffin if he could. He’d stick his Green River right between Raffin’s ribs. He’d by god string Raffin up by his thumbs and make him squeal. But all that was empty dreaming. He knew that. Raffin stayed close to his lodge; never left the village; never — as far as Brokenleg could tell — even bothered to check on his own horses out in the cottonwoods. Instead, Raffin seemed to anticipate Brokenleg’s every act, showing up to watch every big trade, ogling Brokenleg’s wives whenever he was in sight of Brokenleg, a mean mock on his black-bearded face.

At the beginning of the Big Hoop and Stick Game Moon, Brokenleg couldn’t stand it any more. He slipped into the trading lodge and uncovered a parfleche buried near the rear, worried that his prize might have been discovered by Zach and Abner. But it was there. He slid his hand into the dark corner of the rawhide and felt its icy hardness and its weight. He lifted it gently, his eyes filled with love, and slid it under his blanket, away from their prying eyes. Then he walked into the vicious night. He peered down the village street toward the glowing lodge of his in-laws and rejected it. Instead, he stepped briskly over squeaking snow toward the small lodge on the outer edge of the village, where Raffin whiled away his life.

He paused at the flap, and then scratched it softly, the Indian way. It parted, emitting dim light from the tiny fire within.

Raffin stared into the blackness, seeing Brokenleg there, and noting the gray porcelain jug.

“This hyar’s pure spirits.”

“You have come to drink,
oui?”

“I reckon if I sip enough I’ll be ready to kill ye.”

Raffin laughed, and pulled the flap aside. “Come in and let us kill,” he said.

Raul Raffin studied the porcelain jug happily. “We will drink, and den we will kill,
oui?”

Fitzhugh lowered himself against some duffel piled to one side of the compact lodge. “Sounds about right, ’cept it ain’t we, it’s I.”

Raffin laughed softly. His eyes glowed. “She is pure spirits,
oui?
I’ll get the waters. Pure spirits, dey torture the throat and make me weep. How can I kill you when I’m crying?”

He plucked an iron pot from the hearth and vanished through the door flap. Brokenleg eyed the man’s possessions. Raffin did not live austerely. The flicker of the small fire revealed an array of curios hanging from the lodgepoles — a grotesque necklace of human ears he’d traded for; a human skull with an arrow piercing it through the temples. The arrowhead had broken off. A ceremonial lance with a pitted iron point and a dozen scalps dangling from its shaft. One of the scalps was brown; the rest blue-black.

Raffin pierced through the door, the iron pot in his hand brimming with water. He settled himself happily against a backrest at the rear of the small lodge. “I have only one,” he said, reaching for a tin cup. “We will share,
oui?”

He lifted the porcelain jug and twisted its cork free, anticipation shining from him. “You want it cut a lot or a little?” he asked. “You’re the guest. You choose. After you die, I’ll drink the rest my way — very petite the water.”

“Just a dash in ’er. Like at the rendezvous,” Brokenleg said. His leg hurt him. It always did when he was trying to sit up in lodges and the thing poked straight out.

“Ah, the rendezvous! Someone always die at the rendezvous! We’ll have one, Brokenleg. For the old times, for the beaver days. And den we’ll fight.”

“Didn’t come to fight, unless you want to git killed. I come to squeeze a confession out of ye after I git yer tongue loosened up.”

“Ah! A confession! Like the sacrament. Confession and absolution before the priest Fitzhugh. Ah!” He emptied the entire cup of spirits, and hiccoughed. “Ah! He wants a confession! Dat will be easy, Fitzhugh. I will confess before I kill you.”

He poured a slug of spirits into the empty cup and carefully corked the jug again. He would not risk spilling a drop. Then he splashed water into it and handed it to Brokenleg.

He watched, grinning, while Brokenleg sipped warily and then deeply. Brokenleg sighed, knowing that soon the ache in his leg would vanish.

“The bad leg, soon she doesn’t hurt! Ah, Brokenleg, how slowly you sip. I drink fast and kill fast. You drink slow because you are afraid of me.”

“You put them casks on
The Trapper,”
he said.

Raffin laughed easily, sipped, wheezed, and wept as the fiery stuff tortured his throat. “You are a bad priest, Brokenleg. You should wait for confession.”

“You put them ’Rapaho on me last summer. That took my stock and my robes.”

Raffin belched and gulped, draining the tin cup. He mixed another cupful. “It is atrocious, the taste, Ardent spirits and water from Crazy Woman Creek. But ah  . . . ” He belched happily and licked his lips. “Ah  . . . I’m getting ready for sacraments. Tonight we have two — confession and murder.”

“You’re workin’ private for Cadet Chouteau. The others, they don’t know nothin’. You put them casks on somewhere and come up the river, keepin’ outa my sight. You got off at Fort Pierre where you weren’t supposed to, and come out hyar to mess up my Cheyenne trade.”

“More than that, Brokenleg. I kill you and catch Little Whirlwind. She likes me some; she’s scared of me, too. Dat’s perfect,
oui?
I make her happy and scare her out of her wits.”

Brokenleg ignored that. The spirits had taken hold, pushing pain farther and farther away and heating up his belly. “When you git up to killin’ you go right ahead.” He grinned back, feeling pretty good. It seemed almost like a rendezvous on the Popo Agie. The fire-licked Creole across from him had waded the creeks and pulled the beaver out and made the plews. Brokenleg felt a vast affection for him, a living relic of the wild days. “Ah, Raffin, mind you the time, rendezvous o’ eighteen and maybe thirty-four, when that coon got hisself knifed, and they used his carcass for a card table, playin’ euchre?”

“Oh, I see dat, I see dat. You, Brokenleg, you’re too skinny to make a good table. But I’ll try it. Solitaire.”

“You haven’t got a deck.”

Raffin shrugged and sipped and coughed.
“Merde!
Dis water and spirits, it scrapes the skin off my throat!”

“You never were much of a drinker, Raffin. You Creoles.”

“Ah! I kill you sooner than later.”

“You ready to confess yet? You got yer tongue loosened up proper?”

“Ah, Brokenleg. For you,
mon ami,
I will confess everything. From the beginning. Like a river dat flows out of my heart into a puddle on the ground.”

“Well, git to it!” Fitzhugh’s body was afire. A fine hum rose within him, the throbbing of his own blood, and he felt it float him until he could soar anywhere, out the lodge door, over the village, up into the sky.

“I am rich,” said Raffin.

“You’re dead is what yo mean.”

“Ah, non,
mon ami.
Chouteau Cadet, he calls me in one night, after the clerks are gone. I go in dere, big old brick building down on the river, and he’s waiting with a lamp lit. ‘Ah, Raffin, I’ve been thinking about you,’ says he. Well, I won’t describe all dat. He just tells me this Rocky Mountain Company and my old
ami
Brokenleg, dey are the first competition in many years he’s worrying about. Because of the Straus money, and because you and Dance, you are  . . . it don’t matter what he say.

“No one knows of my visit. I go to Independence, and a man meets me with three casks. I go to Westport and wait for the
bateau.
It comes, and dey load in your outfit. It is simple. Dere on the levee at Westport under the bluffs, I carry the casks and put them with your things. Pretty soon the stevedores carry them in just like the rest of your outfit. I see the second mate at the gangway, and I say, add two casks of vinegar and one of lamp oil because I just deliver dem from Independence for Rocky Mountain Company. He says he’s got no pen and ink so I go on board and climb up to the empty pilot house and look, and there is a stoppered bottle of ink and a quill right beside the log book, and I bring it down. He hands me the cargo list and I write it in and hand it back to him.”

“You musta figgered the army’d catch it at Leavenworth.”

Raffin spat into the fire, making it pop. “Ah! Stupid army. Dey come into the hold and look around and don’t see the casks, and I am thinking, American Fur, it just gave Rocky Mountain Company three extra casts of spirits. Dey don’t look very hard, dem lieutenants.”

“Then what?”

Raffin chortled. “You want more, eh? The whole confession. Everywhere I sin,
oui?
No, I can’t say to you, Father, I fornicate seventeen times. You got to hear about all seventeen and describe the girls, each one.”

“What’d Cadet pay you?”

“A year’s extra to do it, another year’s wage if I succeed,
oui?”

Three hundred dollars, Fitzhugh thought. Three hundred dollars to tear apart a venture worth two hundred times that.

“He give me the first year in gold; I get my regular pay, too. He give me the second after your company is dead.”

“Guy Straus told me that Culbertson and the rest think you deserted — you’re off the rolls.”

“Cadet — he take care of dat.”

Brokenleg felt sleepy. He wrestled with himself to stay alert. He watched the Creole push fresh sticks into the dying fire and huff at it until it blazed up, driving back the sinister shadows.

Raffin watched the blaze and sipped steadily, refilling the battered tin cup again. He thrust it toward Fitzhugh. “You want?”

Fitzhugh took it — he’d never turned down a sip in his life. He felt the fire slide into his belly again, and sighed.

“How come you don’ ask me about the rest?”

“Because I know. Cadet sent you out hyar to the villages to make trouble for me. I got the Cheyenne trade sewed up so it’s no good him sendin’ an outfit. I’m kin and they’ll trade with me. You made it look like you deserted — got off the boat at Pierre — to keep the company out of it. You got out hyar and waited and made friends some, and figgered how to do it ’nother way, like puttin’ them ’Rapaho on me after I traded last summer. Them stealin’ my stock and gittin’ the robes. Did they bring them robes to you?”

Raffin shrugged.
“Non, non.
They trade robes at Laramie. All that matters, we take dem from you. Big loss for you. And stop your wagons.”

“You done that all right  . . . You been in touch with Cadet? You send some express down tellin’ him?”

“Naw. I work it out. He don’ want me sendin’ express or showin’ up in St. Louis.”

“You an’ Hervey, you almost licked me, Raffin.”

“Almost! Almost! You wait. Raffin, he’s not done yet.”

Brokenleg nodded. He felt fine. Now he knew everything. For the first time in months his bum leg stopped aching.

“You going to sleep, Stiffleg?”

“Naw. Let’s do the killin’.”

“Now?”

“Right now.”

Raffin laughed, a fine raucous howl that sounded like the bark of a wolf.

Maxim watched Fitzhugh’s Post die. His engages had lost both will and strength, and now worked listlessly at the well, stymied by a stratum of river cobbles that had to be pried loose. Their mule-meat diet had allayed hunger a little but the carcass had been stripped to the bone. The remaining horses bawled pitifully for food and water. A light snowfall rescued them for a day or two: the animals licked up every flake that fell in the yard. Engages salvaged a few quarts of water by scraping the three inches of white off roofs.

Arctic air crowded in after that forcing them to keep the barracks stove burning. Day by day the firewood from the demolished shed dwindled. Men eyed him accusingly, knowing that he could save them simply by surrendering. Their stomachs spoke through their eyes and with their angry silence.

Tomorrow they would have to butcher a horse. It’d be a futile gesture, especially if they didn’t strike water. He opened a shutter and peered out upon the solemn white flat. The great arc of brown lodges stood like a wall, all of them leaking gray smoke. Their captors enjoyed every comfort, he thought. They could outlast him.