Deep as the Rivers (Santa Fe Trilogy) (19 page)

   
Lisa ordered the men to pull to the bank. “Why don’t we just pole around the island?” she asked Samuel, who was studying the mass with a worried expression. At first she wondered if he would bother to answer her, but then he did.

   
“See how the island bobs and moves with the current? It isn’t solid land. It’s an embarras. The sudden pileup of all that wood and grass has made the current around it much too swift and treacherous to pole past.”

   
“Then how will we get by it?” she asked, daring to hope they might be forced to turn back to St. Louis.

   
“I imagine Lisa will use the cordelle ropes and let the men pull us through, but it will certainly slow us down. Stay right here unless I call you,” he instructed, then left to confer with the cluster of men at the opposite end of the boat.

   
The passage past the embarras was a nightmare. Lisa’s men were forced to wade into the rushing icy water, often shoulder-deep, with the cordelle ropes attached to their waists. They struggled to throw the ropes across low-lying tree limbs, sometimes resorting to climbing the trees. Then they attached pulleys so they could winch the boat upriver, agonizing foot by agonizing foot. Olivia watched Samuel’s dark head as he swam against the buffeting current with a rope in his hands. Once he gained solid footing a few feet ahead near the bank he stood up in waist-high water and searched for someplace to fasten the rope for leverage.

   
She watched horror-struck as her gaze traveled across the embarras where a mass of the roots jutted upward, securely embedded in the thicket. “No!” The word slipped out as she hunched at the bow of the boat, but no one heard her over the roaring of the river and the babel of curses. She closed her eyes in thankfulness when he decided not to swim to his target but instead attached a wicked looking grappling hook to the end of the rope and began whirling it in the air until he was able to wrap it around the roots and pull it tight. Several more men joined him to pull on the rope from the side of the boat.

   
On the bank to the left a large cottonwood towered high above and one limb jutted out over the rushing current. A young French-Canadian
engagé
took another cordelle rope and scrambled up the tree nimble as a squirrel. He crawled out onto the limb and secured the rope and pulley but suddenly an ominous cracking noise rose sharply over the din of the river and the limb snapped, tossing the youth into the boiling water below.

   
Samuel saw him fall and quickly kicked off after him. Dazed and semiconscious, Cousteau quickly floated downriver but Shelby’s swift powerful strokes cleanly cut through the water. He seized the lad by his sodden shirt. In minutes they were on the riverbank. Lisa yelled for Raoul Santandar, a Spaniard from New Orleans, to examine the injured fellow whose arm had been broken. Santandar was the nearest thing they had to a company physician. Setting the arm would have to wait while the dangerous operation of moving the boat past the embarras continued.

   
Several times the ropes slipped or gave way and the boat crashed against the sinking edges of the embarras, sustaining no major damage but sweeping two men who were poling into the water. The first quickly bobbed up, then swam ashore but the second was a poor swimmer and floundered, trying to climb back aboard the boat near the stern. He was helped back up by two of his fellows as Olivia watched from her vantage point.

   
From shore Samuel saw her move away from the secure position by the front of the cabin box where he had instructed her to remain. Damnation, a city bred female was a burdensome liability in the wilderness! “Get back inside the cabin where you’ll be safe,” he yelled at her.

   
Olivia either could not or would not hear as she watched the men pull their sodden comrade to safety. Never in her life, not even in the thick of a close horserace, had she seen so much excitement. For a brief time the adventure made her forget her own troubling and uncertain future.

   
Once the polers were back at their work, she scampered along the narrow end of the deck. The heavy mast high above her groaned beneath the bright afternoon sky as the ropes attached to it pulled it against the fierce current. She stepped over to where the rudder man held the sweep steady, guiding the boat that was now powered by human muscle and blood.

   
Suddenly the boat hit a sawyer, a submerged tree whose branches had been mired in the river bottom, leaving the massive trunk and roots to bob up without warning, smashing into any craft luckless enough to run afoul of it. The sawyer was big enough to capsize the boat. Only the men pulling the cordelle ropes with all their strength held it steady as the long craft eased by the clawing grasp of the tree’s roots.

   
But the bone-jarring impact caused one casualty. Olivia, made even more careless by her excitement, was catapulted overboard with a loud splash. And she could not swim a stroke!

Chapter Ten

   
Water closed in over her head like a coffin lid. Murky blackness, icy cold and fast moving, surrounded her as she thrashed frantically, trying to propel herself upward to breathe, to scream for help. What if no one saw her fall? What if they continued upriver without stopping, leaving her to a watery grave in the wilderness? No, she refused to accept such a horrible, lonely death.

   
Her hands and feet scraped the muddy bottom, restoring her sense of direction and allowing her a firm base from which to push off. She kicked upward with all her strength, clawing her way to the surface. The instant her face felt the cold fresh wind she sucked a great gulp of air into her lungs and screamed with all her might, “Samuel!” Then she was pulled beneath the swift rushing water once more.

   
Blackness closed in again. The relentless force of the current buffeted her as if she were no more than a hollow stick of driftwood. She thrashed and floundered, growing more hysterical each second her burning lungs were without oxygen. Suddenly a powerful band of steel-like strength and hardness encircled her waist, squeezing out what little breath she had left. Olivia kicked and flailed more desperately as she was lifted.

   
The bright light of day broke over her again and a hoarse voice muttered near her ear, “Stop struggling or by God I’ll drop you back for the fishes to eat!”

   
Now she could feel the warmth and solidity of his body as he held onto her, treading water while he tried to subdue her hysteria. “Samuel! You heard me,” she choked out, wrapping her arms around his neck as she coughed up wet sandy bile. It felt like she had swallowed half the Missouri River.

   
When Samuel had seen her tumble overboard and vanish into the roiling water, his heart had stopped beating for a moment before he collected himself and plunged from the embarras where he was working into the swiftly moving current. Thank God she had been able to come up once and cry out to him, else he might have dived repeatedly in vain, for the water was far too muddy and filled with bracken from the spring thaw to locate one slender woman without some clue as to what direction the undertow had taken her.

   
The fear that she was lost had squeezed his chest, almost paralyzing him. Her fiery head breaking the surface with his name on her lips had propelled him through the freezing water like a frantic otter. As soon as he made contact with her kicking, thrashing body he had seized hold of her with the strength born of desperation and some other even stronger emotion that he was loathe to name. All he felt now, he convinced himself, was fury. “Move around to my back and hold tight while I swim to shore,” he commanded. When she complied, he made for the bank with fast, sure strokes, feeling the soft allure of her supple body pressing against him as she held on for dear life.

   
Olivia could feel the tense anger that radiated from his body with each stroke. When they reached the shallows he hauled her up against him and half carried, half dragged her up the bank to a grassy spot where he pulled her down and knelt by her side.

   
Positioning her on all fours, he instructed, “Hang your head over and get out the rest of that water.” Samuel pounded on her back until her coughing yielded several violent regurgitations of brackish water and lumps of river bottom.

   
She raised her head after the last choking gasp, intending to thank him for saving her life but before she could utter a word his facial expression silenced her.

   
“Of all the stump stupid stunts you’ve ever pulled, this is the best yet! Don’t you have the brains of a possum? I told you to stay in the cabin box at the bow. What the hell were you doing hanging over the stern? You’re goddamn lucky you didn’t crack your skull on the sweep. But on second thought, that couldn’t have hurt one bit. You haven’t a brain inside the damn thing!”

   
“Are...you...quite finished?” she choked out, still struggling to get enough air into her aching lungs. Her throat was raw and her voice so hoarse that she was certain she must have swallowed enough twigs and leaves to build a vulture’s nest.

   
“Mademoiselle St. Etienne, I haven’t even begun. If you ever again disobey my orders, I will take down those raggedy britches and show you how the buffalo hunters tan a hide.”

   
“Over my dead body!” she shrieked back.

   
“It damn nearly
was
your dead body,” he snapped with a furious oath. “Given your propensity for plunging into ponds and rivers, why the hell did you learn to race horses bareback yet neglect to learn something as elementary as swimming?”

   
“A lady would have to bare her arms and legs to swim, but not to ride astride—unless she was Lady Godiva,” she said with all the disdain of a duchess.

   
“Well, you goddamned might as well be Lady Godiva, swaggering around without undergarments, showing off your breasts and hips in boys shirts and britches!” She had straightened up defiantly, with her back arched provocatively. Her high upthrust breasts with pointy nipples were outlined clearly through the soaked shirt that was plastered to her body. Her hair fell in a shining wet curtain around her shoulders, framing her face. Those exotic green eyes were darkened with mutinous rage. He wanted to kiss her...or kill her. Right now one would serve as well as the other.

   
Before he did something exceedingly stupid, he stood up and stomped off to rejoin the men. “The squaws have started a fire up ahead a half mile where we’ll camp tonight. Walk up and dry yourself out before you take a chill. I’ll see you get some dry clothes from the boat.”

   
Olivia sat back on her haunches, too stunned and furious to reply until he was gone. “I guess I don’t have any more brains than a possum, thinking I was ever in love with you, Samuel Shelby,” she muttered, struggling to haul herself to her feet. Then she began to walk in squishy misery toward the promised warmth of that fire.

   
Some secret part of her hoped that Samuel would bring her dry clothes from the boat but he did not. Instead a gnarled old
engagé
brought them, then stared at her with lascivious little black eyes, as if he could imagine her stripping herself naked to put on the dry clothes. Damn Shelby anyway! Sure as she went into the bushes to change, one or more of the men would spy on her and her “protector” was nowhere around to stop them. She decided it would be best to wait until the boat was brought up and use the privacy of the cabin box to don the dry clothes.

   
Huddling in front of the fire, Olivia was grateful that the sun was warm and her upper body was almost dry. Only her boots remained soggy and cold. She took them off and toasted her feet in front of the flames, while the heat of the fire dried the soaked leather.

   
Samuel was one of the last of the men to come into camp that evening. He approached her, his mouth a grim slash across his taut face. She decided he was still angry about the river incident and decided to coolly ignore him.

   
“You’re still in those damn damp clothes,” he accused, throwing the heavy bundle he had been carrying onto the ground in front of her.

   
“I could scarcely change with Jacques looking on so avidly, now could I?” she replied without looking up. “Or would you rather I did and he charge admission so half the men could watch and then ravish me as you so graphically described the other day?” She stared sullenly at the heavy canvas bundle lying at her feet but asked nothing about it.

   
“Were you not so self-absorbed, you might have noticed that the men are far too exhausted either for a peep show or a ravishment. And two of them were badly injured on that embarras today. Lisa doesn’t want them sleeping on the cold ground in tents. So we’re evicted from the cabin box.”

   
Her head flew up in consternation at his dispassionate announcement. “You—you mean we’re to sleep out in the open—together?”

   
“Unless there’s someone else here whose company you’d prefer to share.” He gestured around the camp with a mock flourish, taking in the motley assortment of crude, evil-smelling
engagés
slumped around the fires. “That lover you boasted of, perhaps?” he taunted.