Deep as the Rivers (Santa Fe Trilogy) (15 page)

   
Specially rigged with a heavy mast and square mainsail, the boat could take advantage of favorable winds when available. At the top of the mast a heavy cordelle rope was fastened to use when the crew was forced to pull the boat from shore. A heavy swivel gun perched ominously on the bow to repel boarders in the event of any encounter with either hostile Indians or river pirates.

   
Almost two dozen men were milling around Lisa’s boat, which was tied up fifteen miles above the small French village of St. Charles. The trading party had set out from St. Louis the preceding day but had been forced, as was often the case, to delay while drunken stragglers among the crew trickled into camp. Having paid their final farewell to the amenities of civilization by swilling rotgut whiskey, most of the men were penitent enough to allow Lisa’s second in command to round them up and bring them to fulfill their contracted obligations. Samuel Shelby had been assigned the unenviable task of collecting the unrepentant.

   
Lisa’s expedition provided him with the perfect cover to head up the Missouri into Osage country. In addition, the shrewd trader was well-known among the Big and Little Osage bands and would quickly learn of any rumors regarding the Englishman as they traded and gossiped with the Indians enroute. All Shelby had to do in return for his passage was to round up the drunken
engages
and hunt for game.

   
The former chore he completed after breaking one trapper’s nose and loosening several teeth of another. He nursed a bruised left fist from punching Jean Lebeck and a sore jaw from Billy Walgren’ s roundhouse swing. Of course the clumsy blow would never have landed had not the colonel been occupied at the time breaking a cane chair over Hiram Skeeter’s head. When the dust cleared after his brawl with the three drunken rivermen, he had become something of an instant folk hero around the St. Charles countryside. Eight sullen men, reeking of stale whiskey and all but bleeding through their eyeballs, stumbled listlessly into camp to the jovial catcalls of their fellows.

   
“All present and accounted for,” Shelby said as he swung down from his horse.

   
Lisa nodded. “I see Santiago Quinn did not exaggerate your skills,” he said in Spanish. His shrewd dark eyes assessed the tall Anglo from beneath beetled black brows. Manuel Lisa was slight of stature but deceptively strong. He was dressed in typical rivermen’s garb, greasy buckskin breeches and a laced buckskin tunic. His belt held a wicked looking skinning knife and a brace of pistols. From his piratical appearance, no one would mistake him for one of St. Louis’s leading businessmen. He grinned, revealing two missing teeth and one prominent gold one. “Come, have some coffee and we will talk.”

   
After pouring steaming inky coffee into tin cups, the two men walked between several campfires that crackled brightly in the spring twilight. They quickly left the raucous babble of laughing, cursing Frenchmen and Americans behind. “How many days until we reach the first Osage village?” Samuel asked in Spanish, a language he had been fluent in since childhood.

   
Lisa shrugged. “With good weather, ten days, two weeks, but I do not know if your Englishman will be at the first camp we encounter. Already the Indians have begun leaving the big winter settlement where the Osage River runs into the Missouri, heading onto the plains for the spring hunt.”

   
“They trap most of their beaver before the hunt. I’d think British traders would arrive before the Osage scatter,” Shelby speculated.

   
“British traders, yes, but this particular man who brings whiskey and weapons, promising the return of their ancestral hunting lands when the great king across the ocean defeats the Americans—of this one I do not know.”

   
“You told Santiago you thought it might be Robert Dickson from Prairie du Chien.”

   
“Last winter I believed so, but having heard the rumors my men brought back as they traveled downriver from Fort Raymond this spring, I no longer think it is him.”

   
“If only we had a name, or even a description of the bastard,” Shelby said in frustration.

   
Lisa grinned. “To an Osage, all white men fall into two categories, the Heavy Eyebrows or the Long Knives. As a Spaniard I am one of the former, you the latter, as are all Englishmen from Canada. Not much to go on, I fear.”

   
“Once I pick up his trail in an encampment, I’ll follow it until I find him.”

   
Observing the steely determination in Shelby’s hard blue eyes, Lisa said, “Tread lightly, my friend, with the Little Ones. The Osage have been allied with the Americans for a long time, but they demand proper respect, ceremony and dignity—things the British excel at. You cannot barge in waving an American flag and drag away this English agent, no matter if he is trespassing on soil your government has purchased from Napoleon. Before there was a United States or even a France, there was an Osage nation hunting and farming along the Mississippi.”

   
Samuel raised an eyebrow sardonically. “You sound like my brother-in-law.”

   
“We are both Spanish, yes, but we are men without a country now, belonging neither to the Old World nor your United States. Perhaps that is why we deal so well with the Indians. We understand dispossession.”

   
Shelby sighed thoughtfully. “Tom Jefferson believes that one day the United States will stretch across this continent. That means Spain and Britain will be forced to give way. So will all the hundreds of tribes of Indians, I’m afraid.”

   
They walked back to the campfire in melancholy silence.

   
Lisa’s crew was up with the dawn, raucously breaking camp in preparation for the long journey upriver. The French Canadian trappers who made up the majority of the company laughed and exchanged bawdy jibes while their Anglo counterparts worked grudgingly, for the most part in dour silence. Everyone was hungover, but it seemed to burden the Gallic spirit less. Several Indian women married to trappers, stoically hefted huge packs with camp gear, more inured to such labors than most Eastern men.

   
Shelby sat clutching a cup of steaming coffee in a crude pewter cup, watching all the flurry around him. He would travel aboard Lisa’s big boat along with another man, hired as a hunter. Seth Walton also planned to keep a diary, recording the marvels of their journey along the banks of the Missouri. Walton and Shelby would not be required to participate in the backbreaking labor of propelling the massive keelboat upriver. They had only to make forays along the banks to bring down deer, bison and other game for the stew pots of the squaws.

   
In the event the party was attacked, Shelby would assume command of the men. But for now, having little to do while the final loading took place, he strolled about the camp, assessing the men and their weapons. The majority carried ancient muskets but a few were better armed with long rifles, mostly the Americans. All were seasoned veterans of the wilderness, sun and wind blasted, unshaven men with tough stringy muscles and an incredible ability to endure hardship. The pungent stench of unwashed bodies and greasy buckskins wafted on the chill morning air, not so bad in the open but cloying at close quarters aboard the boat. Fortunately the
engages
would spend much of their time on shore or in the water pulling the boat upstream with brute strength.

   
It took hardy men to earn their livelihood that way. Samuel’s eyes assessed the crew, then lighted on one slight figure, a slip of a boy, beardless and thin. He looked far too young and green to handle his share of the chores. Then Lisa yelled for him to secure the foodstuff for the cabin box and bring them aboard. The youth was a cabin boy of sorts. Samuel shrugged and started to turn away, then paused to watch the boy struggle with the awkward bundles of clattering cook pots and bulky bedding. There was something naggingly familiar about the way the grim urchin moved. He started to walk closer but a couple of voyageurs carrying a long canoe blocked his path. By the time they passed, the boy was clambering aboard the keelboat. Samuel shrugged and forgot about him, returning instead to gather up his small cache of belongings.

   
The youth kept rather mysteriously to himself over the next several days, fetching and carrying for Lisa and keeping the dark, musty quarters of the cabin box in order. It seemed to Shelby that the boy avoided him, for whenever he entered the big cabin the youth would find some way to engage himself at the opposite end of the long boat. He spoke only in French, which was hardly unusual for a St. Louis inhabitant. Shelby would have assumed he merely felt uncomfortable around an American military officer and preferred the company of his compatriots, but the boy also stayed clear of the boisterous French-Canadian rivermen as well.

   
The journey was uneventful for the first several days. The crew rose with the dawn each morning and poled the boat until it became too dark to move it in the treacherous waters at nightfall. Everyone was so bone weary by the time camp was made, they consumed their supper of mush and tallow, then quickly fell into the dreamless slumber of exhaustion. Shelby posted guards in two-hour shifts, taking responsibility for security as long as he remained with the party.

   
On the fourth night he debated ordering the boy to take a turn at watch with the others. Lisa said he had found the youth asleep, scrunched into a corner between two wooden crates that afternoon. He was only fourteen or fifteen years old. Instead, Samuel assigned a hatchet-faced American the first watch, then went in search of the boy, Ollie Moreau. By the time this journey was over, he would be a lot tougher, or he’d be dead.

   
Shelby walked around the half-dozen campfires scattered on the sandy bar at the river’s edge where they had moored up for the night. The beach was perhaps thirty feet wide with the Missouri glistening blackly to the north as it ran its relentless course down into the Mississippi. On the land side a steep limestone bluff stretched high overhead, choked with scrub pines that cast jagged shadows which moved with the night wind.

   
Moreau was nowhere around. Shelby stopped to ask several groups of men but no one had seen him. “He isn’t aboard the boat. Where the hell has the fool boy wandered off to?” he muttered to himself just as Seth Walton came striding into the circle of firelight. “You seen the Moreau boy?” Samuel asked.

   
Walton scratched his stubbly chin. “No, can’t say as I have but I passed some of the men walking toward that next island. There’s a narrow channel between it and the bank. I figger they’ll cross it and do a little private celebrating with a jug they don’t plan on sharing.”

   
“Thanks, Seth. Maybe he’s with them,” Shelby said, striding into the darkness with his Bartlett flintlock clutched angrily in his hand. If he is, he’ll soon wish he weren’t. Sneaking off in the wilderness to get drunk was a foolhardy danger, not to mention against the rules agreed upon by all the men of the company.

   
Samuel headed upriver, following the gradual rise of the bank into a dense brushy stand of hickory and sycamore. A thick blanket of meadow grass had sprung up, covering the earth knee-high in places where it had not been trampled by deer to make their beds. He followed an old, well-worn Indian trail that twisted along the river, all the while keeping alert for any signs of movement.

   
The night was cool and the wind had stilled to a slight breeze. The fecund musty smell of river and earth filled his nostrils as he paused to gaze at the sky overhead. Ever since his first journey west in 1803, Samuel Shelby always experienced a physical thrill when he saw that big sky, an endless vault of blinding blue by day and star studded brilliance by night. The heady sense of freedom he felt was tempered by a feeling of insignificance in the face of all the untamed vastness spread before him. A three-quarter moon hung low on the horizon, casting silvery light around a long bare stretch of sandbar in the middle of a narrow sluggish neck of the river.

   
Such islands were always temporary, an old river rat had once told him when he first traversed the Mississippi. The great river changed course, often overnight, erasing all traces of land as if the hand of God had simply smoothed them back from whence they came. Then the power of the water would again disgorge another island up into its channel at another place, in another time. The deeper channel was on the opposite side and the narrow water between this bank and the island was easily fordable. Through the dense brushy cover Shelby could see the orange flicker of a low campfire and several shadowy figures gathered around it. He began to descend the embankment.

   
Once he neared the water’s edge he could hear the unmistakable sounds of a scuffle. Two men were holding a third down on the ground while another knelt over him, tearing at his clothes. Although Shelby could not see his face, he was certain the thin small figure kicking and writhing in the sand was Ollie Moreau. The boy fought fiercely yet made no attempt to cry out. Shelby had seen that before, a youth too ashamed to ask for help from his fellows, enduring a painful violation in frantic, desperate silence. That grown men could ease their lust with a boy had always appalled and sickened him. He checked the pistols in his belt, then raised his rifle and began wading across the shallow water toward the island.