Cheyenne Winter (8 page)

Wearily, Trudeau eased the long keelboat toward the bank until it touched bottom. His men threw lines to shore. Two or three Creoles Trudeau had never seen before caught the lines and tied them to willows. Fitzhugh stared, first at Trudeau, then at his own men on the deck, and then at a strange face in the porthole of the cabin. “You,” he muttered, a crazy joy illumining his face. “All the ol’ coons.”

In a few minutes Fitzhugh had the whole story. His oxen dead; his mules stolen! A keelboat for a dozen oxen and six mules seemed a fair-enough exchange although Maxim scowled about it. But Maxim was scowling about everything anyway.

“You sure it wasn’t just another Blackfeet horse-raidin’ bunch?”

“Yes,” Trudeau said. “Horse raiders, they come on foot and ride their prizes away. But these came on horseback. Horse raiders, they don’ bother with oxen. But these, they hang around and put an arrow into every ox, and steal the mules.”

That was all Fitzhugh needed. “I reckon they got a keg o’ whiskey for it. What about the wagons?”

“We cached the sheets in the woods near the river. It was all we could do.”

He pointed at the boat. “What about them in the cabin?”

“They understand. We tell them the whole story. We’re Creoles, they’re Creoles. They aren’t mad.”

“I guess you’d better let ’em out.”

Moments later, the American Fur engages stood on the riverbank, blinking at the sun.

“What’d you have in mind, Trudeau?” Fitzhugh asked.

“Trudeau’s gallic shrug said more than words. He pointed at Primeau. “He knows
Anglais.”

“Unload your bales and then help us load up. We’re borrowing this keelboat.”

“Stealing it,” snapped Maxim.

“I reckon it’s repayment, Maxim.”

“Two wrongs don’t make a right.”

Fitzhugh ignored him. “Git your bales out and you can do what you want afterward. We’ll leave your powderhorns and duffel, and drop your rifles a mile upstream.”

“Monsieur Fitzhugh, I would not wish to leave the robes exposed to the weather.”

It angered Brokenleg. “Your outfit didn’t care about us leavin’ our trade goods out hyar. Luckily there’s been no rain — yet.”

“I’ll give him the sail,” Maxim said.

Fitzhugh didn’t like it but said nothing. Unless they had a freak easterly wind they wouldn’t use the sail. When he didn’t object, Maxim stalked sullenly aboard and pulled the sail out of a bin on deck.

Silent Chouteau men hefted the heavy bales up from the hold and handed them down to others on shore. Gradually a carefully built mound of baled robes, fit together like bricks to keep it water tight, rose near the Rocky Mountain Company trade goods. And then under the watchful eye of Fitzhugh’s own armed engages the opposition men loaded the boat with Fitzhugh’s supplies.

They were sweating freely when it was done although the day’s heat had scarcely built up. The Chouteau men spread the sail over the compact load of robes, making it reasonably weathertight while his own men collected their kits and boarded.

Fitzhugh pulled Primeau aside. “You got supplies? Fire steel, and all?”

“I don’t know,” the man replied.

Brokenleg turned to Samson Trudeau. “Make sure they have what they need. All we want’s their boat.”

In short order a small heap of provisions lay on the grass, including coffee beans and tobacco, sugar and other staples, camp axes and hatchets, a few knives, and their blankets and robes.

“Primeau. About a mile up, we’ll leave your rifles right on the bank close to water. You wait a while. You come too soon and you’ll run into that swivel gun.”

Primeau grinned. “We’re in no hurry. We’ll smoke the
tabac. Merci beaucoup,”
he added, half mocking. It wasn’t war; it wasn’t peace. Fitzhugh grinned back. Fur Company stuff. Maxim scowled again, obviously hating it.

His men swung the keelboat loose. Just to be on the safe side Fitzhugh himself swung the swivel gun around and kept the blunderbuss aimed toward shore. His engages each grabbed a long pole with a knob at one end, and lined themselves along each side.
“A bas les perches,”
cried Trudeau and the voyageurs thrust their poles in unison, the ball in the hollow of their shoulders, walking toward the stern. Sluggishly the boat lumbered forward.
“Levez les perches,”
Trudeau cried, and the Creoles lifted their poles, ready to repeat the operation. Muscling a keelboat upriver was brutal work. Fitzhugh would have poled too but his bum leg prevented it and someone had to steer anyway. He didn’t trust Maxim with the job — not with that boy’s frame of mind. Dust Devil had scurried into the cool hold.

Less than a mile upstream they found a grassy flat next to the main channel and he steered the boat to it. They left the opposition’s rifles there. For good measure, Fitzhugh tied a red ribbon to some nearby brush. In about ten minutes those rifles would be back in the hands of their owners.

His nine engages, six from the post and the new three, poled their way upriver until they hit a place with no bottom, a place where the current shoved the boat hard against the far bank and they’d lost control. As the boat whirled backward and began to turn broadside of the eddy, Fitzhugh steered it brutally into the bank, and at once his engages caught the boat fast with gaff hooks, and dug out the cordelle. This long heavy line they tied to the mast, ran it through a bridle at the bow, and then plunged into the water next to the bank and played out the line until they were several hundred feet ahead of the keelboat. And then they began cordelling the boat forward, a task even more brutal than poling it.

For the next hour they hauled the boat forward, tromping through water, mucking through sloughs, battling brush, detouring around fallen logs, clambering up cutbanks and down rocky grades, the long line biting into their shoulders, the boat a dead whale behind them, resisting every inch, tugging, yanking them backward when currents caught it. In the end the torn muscles of nine men tromping a ragged shore overpowered a sixty-foot wooden boat with eighteen tons in its hold.

They rested through the midday inferno, coiled the endless cordelle and drooped it into its bin, and took up their poles again where the river ran broad over a gravelly bottom. Brokenleg squinted behind, watching sharply for a glimpse of the opposition engages — and saw none.

More and more, though, he fumed at Max, who sat sulking, doing nothing, daring Fitzhugh to make him pole. They were coming to trouble, he and that boy. He was ready to box the boy’s ears so soundly that the boy would be governed by fear if nothing else. But something in Brokenleg told him it wouldn’t help. Max would not yield. Boxing and tormenting that boy would only produce an angry rebel who’d slip away at the first opportunity. He had to reach Max’s mind and soul. And he didn’t even know where to start. Max was in trouble with the engages, too, who studied him sullenly, aware that the boy wasn’t sharing the toil in spite of a strapping, healthy, seventeen-year-old’s body. The time of reckoning had to come soon.

The fourth day they reached the place where the wagons and wagon sheets had been cached. Samson Trudeau steered the keelboat toward the south bank and the engages tied it tightly to stout willow brush. Nearby the carcasses of oxen rotted, filling the meadow with a sweet sickening odor. They’d been half-devoured by coyotes, wolves, hawks, skunks, and raptors. Fitzhugh gagged. Maxim vanished into the hold. Brokenleg had Bercier stay aboard and man the swivel gun against surprise while he limped off with the rest toward the dark cottonwoods that hid the wagons. He hoped they could take the wagons. He’d never see the wagons again if he left them there.

They found the three Pittsburghs untouched and still well-concealed behind walls of brush. Trudeau sent a man to pull the sheets out of the cache while the rest freed the first wagon and dragged it slowly to the riverbank. The keelboat could hold the wagon crosswise, that was plain. Maybe hold all three wagons crosswise — if they could build some sort of stage and muscle them up the steep incline to the deck. He searched restlessly along the bank, looking for higher ground, a low cutbank, and found one two hundred yards back. They unloosed the keelboat and let it slide downstream, and retied it at a place where the bank lay level with the deck. And then they shoved the cumbersome wagon there, hacked through dense brush, eased it over wobbling planks while waves careened the keelboat, and finally aboard. It looked odd and out of place there, a humpbacked camel.

Through the hot afternoon they wrestled the other wagons to the bank. It turned out there was room for two, one aft of the cabin, one ahead of it. Disheartened, Brokenleg helped them drag the third one back to its hiding place and cover it. His leg tortured him all the way, although he’d done nothing compared to the brutal toil of the engages. He stared at the fine freight wagon doubting he’d ever see it whole again. At least he had the three wagon sheets and two freighters, he thought.

They shuffled back to the keelboat and once again the engages began their promenade, this time dodging the wagons, jamming their poles into the river bottom until they bent under the fierce thrust. For boatmen heading upriver toil never ceased.

“Steer,” he said to Dust Devil. She took hold of the long sweep hesitantly, and then with an arrogant gleam in her eye guided the keelboat. He grabbed a pole and joined the parade, feeling the toil brutalize his leg. Maxim scowled.

Two days later they approached Fort Cass. Various Indians had spotted them. Crows, he thought. Crows out hunting or root-gathering while they traded. He knew he might have trouble at Cass. Old Isodor Sandoval was the trader but Julius Hervey lingered on as the factor, more vicious than ever, sulking about his damaged hands — hands half-severed by Brokenleg in a brawl a half a year earlier — and looking for revenge. Chouteau men up on the bastions would recognize the boat; recognize the wagons on it, and know exactly what had happened — or at least part of it. The keelboat would pass close to the post and right under the post’s six-pounder — which could blow it to bits, kill his men, and destroy the resupply down in the hold. He could run for it — if toiling upriver upon the bent poles of engages could be called running. Or he could stop and tell them the whats and the whys. He knew that if Hervey or Sandoval chose to, they could pick off Fitzhugh’s engages easily with rifle shots and just as easily sink the boat or compel Fitzhugh to come to shore. It was something to think about, and Fitzhugh was thinking plenty when they rounded a gentle bend and spotted the gray palisades and bastions of Fort Cass.

Brokenleg steered the keelboat to the Fort Cass levee and his men tied it there amid a growing crowd of Crow Indians.

“Watch ’er,” he told his men. “Cut ’er loose if there’s trouble.”

He limped across an open flat crowded with lodges, heading toward the gate in the log stockade of the American Fur Company post. His flesh crawled, remembering the troubles he’d had there last winter — when Julius Hervey had almost strangled him to death.

Brokenleg knew he’d have to deal with Hervey. The man’s sheer force of will dominated the post in spite of the ruin of his hands. He found Sandoval and Hervey awaiting him at the gate, which was good. He didn’t want to enter Fort Cass.

“You have my keelboat,” said Hervey. The man looked as menacing as ever, pure muscle driven by an untrammeled will.

“You have my mules and you killed my oxen,” Brokenleg retorted. “Worth a thousand.”

Hervey laughed, that maniacal roar that always sent shivers of dread through Brokenleg — and other listeners. Hervey didn’t bother to deny it. There was not point in denying it. Blaming such things on Indians was a great joke among robe traders. “Worth a small keg,” he said, grinning. “Mess a’ Piegans.”

“I’m taking our stuff up to my post,” Fitzhugh said.

“What did you do with ours?” Sandoval asked quietly.

“Left it on the bank, along with your men.”

“Fifty-five bales,” Sandoval said angrily.

“Twelve oxen and six mules,” Brokenleg snapped.

“Stiffleg, it your men outa that boat,” Hervey said. “If you want them to live.”

“I don’t think so, Hervey.”

“The six-pounder is charged, Stiffleg.”

“You’d only blow up your own keelboat. And start a stink that would ruin American Fur.”

Sandoval looked worried. “Fitzhugh, go unload that keelboat at your post and float it back here.”

Hervey flared. “You gone soft, Sandoval? Some day, some day when I get my hands back — I’ll deal with you. Same for you, Stiffleg.”

Sandoval met Hervey’s mockery with a steady gaze of his own from unblinking brown eyes.

“I ain’t returning the keelboat,” said Fitzhugh. “You lost it — fair and square.”

“Bring it back or we’ll come get it,” Sandoval said.

“Bring twelve oxen and six mules when you do,” Brokenleg said.

“Look, Fitzhugh,” said Sandoval overly politely. “You’ve stolen our boat; put fifty-five bales ashore; put our men ashore — you bring back — ”

“Fire the six-pounder,” Fitzhugh said. He whirled away and limped back toward the keelboat, Julius Hervey’s wild laughter echoing in his ears. He felt his pulse climb as he walked, wondering if he’d take a ball in his back. He shoved through Crow spectators and walked up the plank to the boat even as his men began loosening the lines.

“Are we safe?” asked Trudeau, eyeing the six-pounder and the men around it up in the bastion.

“No,” Fitzhugh replied shortly.

“Sacrebleu,”
the man muttered.

“If Sandoval’s in charge we are,” Brokenleg added. “But he ain’t.”

“So you’re going to get us killed,” Maxim shot at him.

“You got a better way, boy?”

Maxim retreated into sullen silence again. Bercier and Brasseau had finished loosening the lines on shore, and the boat was almost free. A great crowd of Crows stood at the bank watching them. Fitzhugh spotted a chief, Big Robber, and a subchief he didn’t know, watching thoughtfully. Salvation, he thought, and maybe trade.