Rocky Mountain Company (15 page)

“Absaroka! Assiniboin! Cree! Hidatsa! Gros Ventre! Blackfoot! I will warn my people about the ones who will come here.”

“I reckon you’re right. Good traffic. Lotsa everybody. That’s what it takes to make a post. I reckon your folks’ll be first to put robes through our trading window, eh?”

“I will tell them it’s bad medicine. That under-earth spirits live here. That Sweet Medicine doesn’t see this place; that — “

“You’re needin’ a husband,” he said. He always said that as a rebuke. She stared back, disdainfully.

Behind him, the oxen sagged in their yokes. They’d come far this day, to Fort Cass and then another few miles, dragging massive wagons over a trace that was full of humps, hollows, rivulets, and juniper thickets that choked progress.

“Trudeau. We’ll camp here. Good grass. I’m thinking we’ll stay here — it’s a likely enough place.”

Samson Trudeau surveyed the site, which lay glowing in an apricot light from a bedding sun, and nodded. “Monsieur Fitzhugh, it is suitable. Not as magnificent as Cass, there on the Yellowstone where ever’one comes. This is — a bit apart, yes.”

“You got any better notions?”

“Maybe go back down the Yellowstone a way. To the Tongue. That is closer to our goods.”

“I wanted to fetch us a spot as far from Fort Union as I could,” Brokenleg said. “So we get a good trade.”

“Ah, monsieur, Fort Union, she has come to us here.” He laughed easily, but Fitzhugh didn’t.

“We’ll build a fort here, I think.”

Trudeau sighed. “With ten men? We need fifty to make a fort. And these ten, we need most of them taking the wagons out and trading.”

Why was it, Dust Devil thought irritably, that Brokenleg would listen to another whiteman but not her? She glared at him while he and Trudeau exchanged ideas politely. Why could she never get him to listen like that? He though he knew more than the People, that’s why. He really listened to the color of their skin.

“I been chewing on it since we come on up hyar. I figger we’ll just build us a little cabin, enough to fetch the tradegoods out of the weather and keep ourselves warm. Then we’ll go out with the wagons and trade.”

“Six wagonloads — or seven — of goods, plus ten men, plus you and Mrs. Fitzhugh, and all the robes we bring back, in this petite cabin,
n’est-ce pas?”

“Wall, I was thinkin’ mostly we’d be out tradin’.”

“Monsieur, let me ask you this: we unload the wagon here and go back for more,
oui?
We leave — on the grass here — a great heap of things that go bad when it makes rain. Bolts of tradecloth — calico, gingham. Ribbons. Iron and steel that rust. Kegs of gun powder that maybe don’ keep rain out. All this we leave here, on the grass, and most of us go away for a month and bring a load, and then we go away for one more month and bring a load. And all this time, she never makes rain or hail, and it stays warm. And nobody comes by that steals anything,
oui?
Or makes war,
oui?”

She watched her man turn old, and saw the fleeting shadow of despair flick across his face. He hurt; she knew that. His bad leg tortured him. He’d been on that horse for hours.

“I think maybe we can put the stuff that needs cover in one wagon and leave it here, and you go on back for the rest.”

“Monsieur, we need a fort or a trading house. It has come August now, and in a few weeks it makes frost. And with only two wagons, we make three more trips back there. By then, ever’one knows where we come and go. And they see all the tradegoods sitting in the field, like a baby buffalo without its
papa
and
maman.
Wolves, they see the infant and lick chops. Maybe a few of us against a hundred Blackfeet,
oui?
Not so safe any more.”

“I’m fresh outa furs, Trudeau.”

The engagé shrugged. “Then maybe sell to Culbertson for what you can. Better something than nothing.”

“I’m too tired to make decisions,” Fitzhugh said shortly. “Maybe we ought to scout around. There’s been four, five trading houses put up hyar. Old Lisa’s post back in ought seven; old Benton. I forget the others.”

“Hervey, he burn them.”

“He says he burned them. I think we should see.”

She said, “He burned them. I saw when we came. I was watching for them.”

He turned to her, pain weighing his face now. “I reckon we should look anyway, Dust Devil.”

“You don’t take my word or trust me.”

“I’d like to see myself, I guess. Maybe you missed something.”

“Do what you want!” she cried. “I can help if you want. But you don’t want! I could go find my people and bring them. I could find my village. We can store all the tradegoods in the lodges and they will be safe. No Absarokas will come and steal them because the Tsistsistas are strong. We can live in the lodges too, and be comfortable. They’ll trade — they’ll bring good robes, better than the Crow-dogs’ robes, and take away these things. I’ll tell them to meet you where the Bighorn and the Little Bighorn come together.”

Her man assessed her wearily. “How long you figger it’d take to track them down and git yur people there? Or hyar?”

“A moon maybe.”

He sighed. “We got only two men and most of our stuff at Wolf Rapids. Can’t wait so long. I reckon we’d better see how things look in the morning, because they don’t shine now.”

He’d rejected her offer, she thought.

Fitzhugh woke up with a mind as stiff as his leg. He knew what he would do, and no one would like it, including himself. A little before dawn, a dew had settled, wetting his good buffalo robe and silvering the bunchgrass in the meadow. August, he thought. The Moon When the Berries Ripen. And the sun was a little slower to make heat and comfort cold flesh. In the mountains, weather controlled everything, including the choices he faced this late summer day.

He peered about in the gray light. The oxen grazed nearby, hobbled. The mules and horses roamed from clump to clump of good grass, some on picketlines, others hobbled. Dust Devil pretended to sleep in her robe, but was furtively watching him, the way a cat watches the one it permits to feed it. Maxim lay in his blankets, curled into a ball against the coolness. And near the three ghostly wagons, eight engagés fought the dawn.

Just standing up was an ordeal, one he faced at least once a day. He’d learned to pull himself up from his right side, using his Hawken as a staff. He hobbled around, driving the badness out of his leg, something that had become a morning ritual. Dust Devil’s gaze followed him, like a panther sizing up its prey. He’d skip breakfast, he thought, limping out toward the bay on the picketline. He studied the animal carefully, not from any love of horseflesh but because a horse was a useful machine, a conveyance for a lame man, and needed proper handling. The stallion yawned, baring yellow grass-stained teeth. A lame-man’s horse: low, stocky, quiet-natured, rather slow. Not a horse with which to escape a war party. Saddlemarks left a sheen on its slick hair.

He threw a buffalo-skin apishemore over the back of the animal and then his Santa Fe saddle, and drew up the latigo.

“Where are you going?” said Dust Devil, who materialized beside him. “It is too early. We have not greeted Sun.”

“Cass,” he said. “Stay here. Keep them here.”

“I know,” she said.

He expected a question, several questions, but she didn’t ask them. “I’ll wake Hervey up. He likes to sleep late.”

“Dogs,” she said. She gathered a shawl over her shoulders and headed toward the line of cottonwoods along the river. She had the primness of Cheyenne women. He watched her slim form grow distant and then disappear in brush, and felt an ancient pleasure at her lithe grace.

He had to mount from the off side and swing his stiff left leg over the animal. This horse was used to it, but it could be a problem with a horse unfamiliar with his ways. He settled himself in the cold leather, feeling it through his britches, and then walked the horse slowly north, aware that most of the men in camp were awake and staring.

He wanted coffee. It helped him think. But there was nothing to think about, and coffee would take a half hour. He would do what he had to do. The choices had narrowed down. He’d been dumb, supposing they had a fort at their disposal. American Fur usually burned a post it was abandoning, precisely because the old structures were a temptation to opposing companies. All the forts along here, Lisa’s old post, Joshua Pilcher’s Fort Benton, and old Fort Van Buren, now lay in ashes. So he would do what he had to. It could be the ruin of him; the ruin of Dance, Fitzhugh and Straus, but he pushed those thoughts aside, savagely. When the choices narrowed down, you took the best of a bad lot.

An hour later he raised Fort Cass, which lay somnolent in the horizontal light. Most of the Crow lodges had vanished, but a dozen or so remained, the last stragglers. The Crows must have welcomed the trading: it’d been years since they had traders close by, and no doubt they had plenty of those magnificent soft-tanned robes to exchange. No tribe tanned better than the Crow.

He rode straight to the fort, scarcely arousing a dog. Most Indians slept late; most traders did, too. Its gate lay on the shadowed north side, facing the glinting river. He steered the bay close to the massive gray planks of the door, and then hammered on the door with the back of a trade hatchet he kept on his saddle, and which he could throw as well as his knife. Nothing happened, and he hammered again, sensing the noise was swallowed up in the quiet of the dawn. Then at last the door screeched open a crack on its iron hinges, and Hervey himself peered out.

“You.”

“Me.”

A faint rising amusement spread across Hervey’s face, and the gate swung majestically on its old hinges. Harvey wore britches and an undershirt, and his free hand held a fifty-two caliber trade rifle, cocked.

“There’s no witnesses,” Hervey said.

“Reckon that’s true.”

Brokenleg heeled his bay and steered the horse through the widening aperture, down a narrow corridor and into the yard. He’d been in this place before, back in the beaver days. It had never been much of a fort compared to Union or MacKenzie or William up on the Missouri, or Laramie on the Platte. A rough palisade of thick, adzed cottonwood logs surrounded a miniscule yard. All the fort’s buildings lined the palisade. A warehouse on one side, and around the rest a stone magazine, a trading room beside the gate, barracks for a handful of engagés, and the trader’s house, also of log and crudely made. A hand-dug well in the yard drew water from the high water table there, seventy yards from the Yellowstone.

Brokenleg dismounted stiffly, a business as tricky as mounting with his game leg. Hervey’s rifle followed him around as he stomped to put some blood in his bum limb. Then he limped over to the warehouse and found a heap of robes within, some of them pressed and baled up into the standard packs of ten, others in the process of being graded, and lying in mounds. Good winter robes. A few summer robes. A smaller heap of special robes, mostly amber or tan colored, which might bring a premium. The smell of leather, and smoke, and the more pungent smells of the tanning media, brains and liver and urine, clung to them.

Hervey stood behind him, the trade rifle aimed squarely at his back.

“Lots,” said Brokenleg. “I reckon the trading room’s mostly empty.”

Hervey grunted.

Fitzhugh lumbered toward the trading room to confirm it, while Hervey, still amused, followed behind carrying murder in his arm. Brokenleg pushed open the squeaky door and peered into a brown gloom, lit only by a tiny foot-square pane of glass that didn’t admit much of the morning’s glow. But he pushed the door wider and walked in, letting in more light with him. He saw at once that the room had been largely stripped of goods. A well-supplied trading room could be a wondrous place, with bright blankets, scarlet and green and sky blue on the shelves; trays of beads; racks of shining rifles; beaver traps in lots of a dozen; gleaming brass or copper kettles; bolts of coarse tradecloth, or finer calico or gingham, joyous as rainbows.

These rooms were where it all happened, where a tribesman pushed his robe through a small window onto a counter, where it was assessed for quality and credited. And then the tribesman or woman would select the whiteman goods: a good robe would fetch sixty loads of powder and shot. A trade rifle was worth six to ten robes. A robe would fetch two gallons of shelled corn, or three pounds of sugar, or two pounds of coffee. It would be worth a hank of beads of a yard of tradecloth or flannel. And blankets went for a robe a point, just about the way the beavers traded in the old days, a plew a point.

But most of the shelves were bare.

“That’s what I thought,” said Fitzhugh. “They pretty near cleaned you. And you aren’t getting any resupply.”

“I could steal yours,” Hervey said. He poked the trade rifle higher, until the bore leveled at Fitzhugh’s heart.

“Want to sell the fort? I don’t figure you’ll do much business rest of the year, but it’ll cost plenty to keep you’n your men hyar. It’s a loser.”

Julius Hervey laughed.

“Pay a hundred robes for her.”

“Go home,” said Hervey.

“It’s a fool waste, you manning this empty logpile whiles we go on tradin’. You could build you a mackinaw and float your returns on down to Culbertson.”

“We’re good with flint and strikers, Stiffleg. Should have burned it long ago.”

“I’m building me a post about four miles around the bend.”

“Your heirs will, maybe.”

“You got some coffee?”

Hervey nodded. “For you, a robe a pound, and the beans ain’t roasted.”

Brokenleg stared. “Got some whiskey?”

“Never heard of spirits where its illegal. American Fur got into some devilish trouble about that, and’s real careful now.”

Fitzhugh laughed.

Outside, the sun caught the inner west well of the stockade, and whirled white light through the yard and into the trading room.

“If you aren’t going to sell the place, maybe you’ll rent it.”

“Not to Dance, Fitzhugh and Straus. That’s what I’m here for. To keep you from doing business. Easiest way’s to pull the trigger.”