In the Season of the Sun (30 page)

“Plenty of it,” Tom replied. “I think there's a village back in a valley about a five-day haul from here. Pike and I spotted a hunting party. We trailed it as long as we dared.”

Tom glanced across the room at Abigail, then returned his attention to the map on the desk. “Pike has our maps. You'll be able to fill in some of those blank spaces,” he said.

“Just so long as he brings them to
me,”
Harveson pointedly replied.

“Oh, he will. He will,” Kilhenny said. “I'll personally see to it. Come along, lad.” Kilhenny's bushy eyebrows furrowed and his hard-edged stare bore into Tom. “I'll have a word with you, Tom, my boy.” Kilhenny straightened and rapped a scarred fist on the desk top. “We'll have the stockade finished out within the week. Right in time for us to invite our Blackfeet brothers to powwow.”

“I still have my doubts about your plan. It does seem a trifle harsh,” Harveson said.

“Spoken like a true gentleman,” Coyote Kilhenny said. “Let the other fellow make the first move. That works east of the Mississippi. Out here, it only gets you scalped.”

“But the final decision will rest with us.” Abigail's voice carried as much authority as her brother's. She was not cowed in the least by Coyote Kilhenny and was determined to prove that fact to one and all. “Our money. Our decision.”

“My life, my decision.” Kilhenny ran a hand across his grizzled features, nodded in Abigail's direction, and headed for the door. “Tom?” he called over his shoulder as he left.

“Tom?” Abigail repeated the call in her own soft and inviting way.

Young Milam hesitated, torn between the woman by the piano and Kilhenny's shadow stretching in through the open front door where the half-breed waited outside. At last he started to leave. Time and tragedy had cut a pattern he couldn't break.

“Young man,” Nate Harveson said. Tom paused, partway to the door. “I should like to talk to you later. My sister has convinced me I've misjudged you.”

Tom looked aside as Abigail came to him and placed a hand on his arm.

“Kilhenny is a braggart and an uncouth lout,” she said. “What future can you realize by standing in his shadow?” She lowered her voice and looked furtively toward the door.

“I'd like you to be my friend,” Harveson added, swirling the contents of his brandy snifter and inhaling the aroma. “A special friend to us both. I'd like to know I can count on you in case of trouble.”

“I am trouble,” Tom replied, a reckless grin splitting his features. He headed through the doorway.

Hiram seemed to materialize out of thin air and closed the door.

“A disturbing young man,” Harveson wryly noted. “Tell me, did he agree or no?”

Abigail had to chuckle. “We'll find out, dear brother, one way or the other. We'll find out.'

She walked to the piano, ran a finger across some middle notes, then turned and peered through the window at Kilhenny and Tom Milam walking side by side. Their shadows stretched forth side by side on the trampled earth and in their wake a dust devil danced and died.

Con Vogel stared down at his grimy blistered hands, tossed the shovel aside in disgust, and kicked a black clump of dried manure out of his path.

“Enough, damn it!”

Spence Mitchell had to laugh. He poked his wizened profile over the wooden rail to the stall he was cleaning.

“Yup. I been saying the same thing for nigh unto fifty-eight years,” he cackled. Mitchell spewed a greasy brown stream of tobacco juice into the straw at his feet. “And here I be.” He doubled over, slapped his thighs, and passed gas. “Learn a lesson from old Spence Mitchell, mister fiddle player.” Spence wiped his mouth, sighed, and leaned on the stall railing. “Lord, but that's a good one.”

Vogel found no humor in the situation. He scowled and stalked off toward the corral, out of the low-roofed long shed that served as a barn. He paused by a water trough and stared at his reflection on the surface of the water.

Was this the son of Hermann Vogel … this barn sweep dressed in dirty shirt and worn at knee britches? Were these the hands of a master violinist now callused and cut and blistered? He stared at Harveson's house and replayed, in his mind, a scene weeks earlier when Nate Harveson had agreed to allow Con Vogel to accompany him west.

Harveson has insisted Vogel earn his keep and that meant laboring as something other than a musician. A change had come over Harveson since departing Independence. He had little time in his life for music, being driven by his dream of this northwest outpost.

Con Vogel had only come along in hopes that Abby would come to her senses. But no such luck. Her infatuation with Tom Milam had yet to run its course. Vogel's patience was wearing thin, not to mention the palms of his hands. From the corral, he watched as the front door opened and Kilhenny emerged, followed eventually by Tom Milam himself. The two continued across the compound. Abby appeared in the doorway, her gaze centered on Tom. She never once looked toward the corral.

“Fiddle player, I ain't gonna tend this shed on my lonesome,” Spence called out. He stepped from beneath the low overhang of bridles and bits and leather harnesses dangling from the pinewood ceiling. “She's as pretty as a picture and puts a fire under my rocks as much as yours, but that won't get the stalls cleaned out or put grain in the feed boxes neither.”

Another stream of tobacco juice arced from shadow into morning sunlight. Vogel lifted his eyes to heaven but what he intended for Abby and Tom was rooted in hell.

Night, and the bonfire illuminated the sky, and rum and whiskey flowed free. Fort Promise wasn't entirely completed, but the work was close enough to finished that the men clamored for a celebration. Kilhenny heard their pleas. He blasted the lock off the storage shed and handed out a dozen casks of liquor to the men gathered round. Skintop Pritchard and his men had brought in a buffalo carcass. The bull was skinned and slaughtered and the dark meat spitted and hung over the cookfires.

Kilhenny's men hooted and hollered and fired their rifles into the air. Con Vogel had been dragged from his cot and coerced at gunpoint to fiddle a tune. Vogel's talents began and ended with the classics, but a minuet played at a furious pace carried enough rhythm and melody to set the men to dancing a drunken jig or singing out of tune and improvising enough off-color lyrics to make a Hun blush.

Beneath the cook-shed roof, by the friendly glow of her own hearth, Thalia clasped her Bible to her ample bosom and looked from Hiram to Virginia and shook her head.

“Only God-fearing souls I know is in this here summer kitchen.” She noticed how Virginia kept glancing off toward the front gates and the hell-raisers gathered outside the walls of Fort Promise. The Harveson house actually blocked the young girl's view, but Thalia knew what the girl was thinking. “Child, you ain't got no place among such kind.”

Virginia turned on the cook and her eyes flashed with an intensity that belied her young years. “And just where's my place? Breaking my back for the likes of high-and-mighty Miss Abigail or lyin' on it for Mister Nate's pleasure?”

Thalia gasped and glanced in alarm toward the house. “Hush your voice,” she muttered.

“I ain't afeard of Mister Nate,” Virginia said. “Not anymore.”

“You aren't so old he won't take a switch to your behind.” Hiram spoke up from the end of the table.

“Let him try,” Virginia said, a proud expression on her coffee-colored features. “Coyote Kilhenny will carve my name on his hide.” Virginia ran a hand through her thick black curls and she straightened and stood with her shoulders back and her pointed breasts straining against her cotton blouse. “And if he's not of a mind to, then Con Vogel. Yes. That's right. I've had them both.”

“Stay put,” Hiram cautioned, a note of sternness in his voice. “And say no more.”

“You don't order me,” Virginia snapped. She had not meant to sound so peevish; it came natural with trying to defend her conduct. She liked Hiram. He had always treated her kindly. But she was sixteen years old now and had a mind of her own.

“Child, you don't know what you are saying?” Hiram placed a bony black hand on the young woman's smooth, silken forearm. “Mister Nate's treated us good.”

“Good enough for you maybe. But there's another high cock of the pen. I heard things.…” Suddenly her eyes widened and she clamped a hand over her mouth and retreated toward the yard. Thalia made a grab for the girl, but she easily eluded the cook's grasp and sprang away across the yard, disappearing around the corner of the house. She never broke stride on her way to the bonfire.

And from the window in his room, Nate Harveson watched her run. He spun about and hurled his wineglass at the blanket-draped wall of his room. The glass crashed to the floor. Moments later, Abigail worked the latch on his door and stood in the doorway.

“Are you all right?”

“Yes!” Harveson growled. “No!” he sputtered, trying to put his suspicions into words. Then again, just how much could he confide? He had never spoken of his intimate relationship with the mulatto servant.

“You've found Virginia?” Abigail asked. Her brother nodded. He worked his small fist into the palm of his hand. “And lost her?” Harveson stared at her, caught off guard by her revelation. “Yes,” Abigail continued, “I am aware of your obsession with the girl.”

“How?”

“Dear brother,” Abigail gently chided. “Being younger than you doesn't make me blind and deaf.”

“You never said anything.” Harveson crossed to a heavily japanned end table by his bed. He filled another glass with wine. The din of the trappers' jubilant celebration carried through the walls of the house. The wine bottle close at hand was Harveson's own private party.

Abigail crossed the room, knelt by the far wall, and began to pick up the pieces of the wineglass.

“You seem to always be picking up the pieces after I break something,” Harveson muttered dejectedly.

“Feeling sorry for yourself, dear brother?” Abigail said. “Come now. Your only failures have been in matters of the heart. For as long as you've worn long pants, you've been in love with the wrong woman.”

Harveson chuckled. “That I have.” He sloshed another mouthful of wine down his throat and almost choked on the vintage, for his mind was full of painful recollections that somehow struck him as amusing here in this room on the edge of a wild and dangerous country. Ambition was his true paramour, the one love that had never failed him. “You're right, of course. I'm well rid of her. Let her take to the rogues. By summer's end I'll be done with all of them and we'll have a proper town. You'll see.”

“Of course we will,” Abigail said, standing by the window that looked out upon the entrance to the fort and the glare of the bonfire beyond. The fire beckoned her. The silhouettes of men formed shifting shadows, mysterious by firelight. Their voices were coarse accompaniment to the music of violin and concertina. Abigail heard her brother rise from the bed and start from the room. She followed him into the narrow hall and downstairs to the front room as Mose Smead entered from the back of the house. He held a bowl of peach preserves and a chunk of Thalia's day-old bread.

Smead was a congenial sort in his river captain's coat and blue woolen trousers. He was of average height and his friendly features were framed by thick, bushy sideburns. He'd plied the Mississippi with Nate and Abigail's father and been a partner in more ventures than he could remember. Nate and Abigail were family to the captain, like his own children.

He looked up and grinned. “Hope ya'll don't mind. I kinda helped myself. Didn't see anybody about.”

Mose sampled the bread after dipping the end into the preserves. As soon as he began to chew, an expression of utter bliss transformed his features. “I swear that old colored woman can cook.” He continued on through the front room and took a seat by the piano. Captain Smead's other “vice” was music—listening, not playing.

Nate Harveson and Abigail joined him in the front room. Abigail bent over and kissed the riverboat pilot on the cheek.

“Uncle Mose, you're always welcome here,” she said.

“Good. Then c'mon, Nate. Let me hear something. Perhaps a hymn, eh, to counter the devil's din outside the gates.” He patted the worn leather Bible tucked in his belt, then resumed eating. Even Nate Harveson had to smile, the captain's good humor was infectious. And he was grateful for Smead's loyalty.

“Uncle Mose, you are the one constant in all this troublesome frontier,” Harveson said, taking a seat at the piano. “I'll play for you, old friend.”

“And what of you, Abigail?” Smead noticed that the young woman had taken a woolen shawl from a wall peg and wrapped herself against the night's brisk breath. “Surely you'll not be venturing forth with such a hellish commotion but a few yards without the stockade walls.”

“Abby always knows what she's doing, Captain,” Harveson said. Back in Independence he would have been horrified at the merest suggestion that Abigail go among such men like Coyote Kilhenny and Tom Milam. Here on the edge of Ever Shadow, things looked a lot different. Kilhenny was growing more insolent with every passing day. But Tom had a following as well. He was headstrong and a bit reckless but obviously a man of courage. Harveson sensed that many of the trappers liked young Milam and those that didn't seemed to respect him. Yes, Harveson would rest a lot easier if Tom were brought into the fold.

So Nate Harveson offered no protest as Abigail kissed her “Uncle” Mose farewell and stepped outside. Instead, he secretly wished her well and began to play. And the hymn he chose was entitled
Lord of All Hopefulness
.

35

I
ron Mike hunched forward alongside the wooden barrel laid on its side on the blackboard and held a blue enamel tin cup under the spout for Spence Mitchell to fill. The dancing glare of the bonfire behind him caused the shadows of the trappers to lengthen and shrink. Timber split, cracked in two, spilled embers that spiraled skyward to mingle with the stars before winking out. Their temporal tragic beauty was lost on the likes of Iron Mike, who wanted nothing more than to get knockdown, spread-eagle drunk.