Rocky Mountain Company (40 page)

“Who paid you? Chouteau?”

Gallard shrugged, fearlessly. That was the thing about men like Gallard: they’d kill and despoil without a second thought, while knowing they were protected by other men’s scruples. Fitzhugh knew he wouldn’t stick that butcher knife into Gallard, and Gallard knew it too.

“You have help dumping the blankets?”

Gallard smiled.

“You lay with her.”

Gallard’s face went blank.

“Hervey tell you to go to her?”

Gallard grinned again.

“Monsieur Fitzhugh — we make our own justice,
oui?”
Brasseau addressed him from across the room. “The engagés are — one. We are dishonored,
oui?
The Creole have the shame.”

Brokenleg remembered. The Creoles would undertake their own justice upon one of their number who dishonored and betrayed them. “Take him. Do what you want,” he said.

Fear showed at last in Gallard’s pocked face, and he eyed his former colleagues carefully. The engagés stared back, and Fitzhugh saw unspoken agreement among them, though he didn’t have any notion what they’d agreed to, or what Gallard feared so much his face ticked and spasmed.

Guerette tied his hands together with manila trade rope, and Fitzhugh wondered whether Emile Gallard would jump and struggle. He didn’t, but the temptation rode his face. Spoon grinned and lifted the bore of his Hawken. The remaining engagés led him out into the bright cold, and Fitzhugh watched from the door, not wanting to interfere. The Cass engagés watched alertly from their barracks door. Guerette separated, walked toward the small stables and pen, and returned with a coiled bullwhip in his hand. Then Fitzhugh knew. They tied Gallard to the robe press in the middle of the yard, his chest to the post, and then Brasseau sliced Gallard’s blouse away with his Green River knife, being none too careful about it.

Brokenleg expected Guerette to begin, but they did a strange thing: Bercier and Brasseau returned to the trading room and gently lifted Lemaitre, and carried the body out into the snow and the glare. They laid it close to the robe press, where Gallard could see his dead colleague. Lemaitre’s head looked ghastly, with the skull caved in on one side. Fitzhugh remembered that Gallard had pulled Lemaitre off Hervey’s back, freeing Hervey.

The whip cracked across the man’s naked back, the sound like a shot. Gallard’s body spasmed and tugged at its bindings like a distempered thing. He screamed, a bloodcurdling howl that didn’t stop, but wailed like the whistle of a steamboat. The second lash smacked home, cutting flesh and drawing redness with it. The third followed, renewing the howling, and the fourth, snapping Gallard’s body like a rag doll. Fitzhugh watched from the trading room, subdued and sickened. On the tenth or fifteen or twentieth lash — he didn’t know which — he peeled his gaze from the mesmerizing sight and turned into the room. Julius Hervey stared, ashenfaced.

And Dust Devil wept silently, her tears welling large at the corners of her eyes.

He settled to the wooden floor beside her, each crack and howl outside a toll on his sanity. The bum leg had always made sitting an ordeal, but he ignored the hurt, and the ringing in his head, and the ache of loosened cartilage in his throat.

“You don’t have to say nothin’,” he said. “I got hotheaded with you, and said things I didn’t mean none, didn’t mean at all. And I feel so bad I can’t put it in words.”

She said nothing, but her unblinking eyes were bright with tears.

“You come so close. It scares me. Your ole medicine-helper, them crow-birds, they saved you. They come nesting in that cottonwood you lay down under, and when I walk by, not knowing you was there in the dark, they busted the top of the sky out, takin’ off.”

“My medicine?” she whispered.

“Yeah, the whole ball o’ wax.”

“What does that mean, ball o’ wax?”

“The whole package. Whatever you got arranged with the universe in your Suhtai heart, it was mighty big medicine.”

“My fingers hurt so much.”

“Frostbit. Toes too, probably. Ears and nose, I reckon. you’ll be hurtin’ plenty.”

Outside, the cracks of the lash stopped, but the howling didn’t. “Take me from here,” she whispered.

“Soon. You need to get your strength up. We got to get wagons loaded, get out outfit. See them blankets?” He waved at stacks of them shelved at the rear. “I’m layin’ half over you and half under you when we go. They owe me them blankets.”

“Hurry, Brokenleg,” she said, and he heard urgency in it.

Brokenleg stood before the robe press in the Fort Cass yard, noting the splatter of bright blood in the glazed snow. They’d taken Gallard somewhere; he didn’t care where. An eerie silence pervaded the American Fur Company post, even though it thronged with men. The bitter cold of new January had driven them to their fires, he thought. That and the morning’s terrible events. He peered into the frosty Pittsburgh wagon that hulked before the warehouse right where Hervey had confiscated it a week earlier, and in its bed he found the body of Lemaitre, carefully wrapped in a shroud of bed ticking from the trading room. The drive back to Fitzhugh’s Post would be a sad one.

He wondered whether to take Dust Devil with the first load, and decided not to. Death’s angel had hovered too close. She would go last. He crossed the yard, the snow squeaking under his boots, and entered the Fort Cass barracks, discovering most of the fur company engagés around a pot-bellied stove there, shipped clear up the river. They looked pensive, having witnessed the flogging of Gallard, but not hostile. Except for two or three who glowered at him.

“Who’s your top man? Your assistant trader?” he asked.

One arose, a small, wiry man, and Fitzhugh knew him at once from the beaver days. “Sandoval?”

Isodoro Sandoval smiled. “Brokenleg. A long time from the wild days,
si?”

Sandoval was one of several Mexicans in the upper Missouri fur trade, and a veteran employee of the Chouteau companies.

“Amigo,”
Fitzhugh said. “You mindin’ all this?”

Sandoval shrugged. “Most of these hombres, they are happy. They never like keeping your outfit from you. They never like Gallard spying and ruining your trade.”

“You mind helpin’ me? Need a couple of your men to carry your
bourgeois
to his house, and look after him.”

“Hervey.” The word burst sour from Sandoval’s mouth.

“Then I need help with my outfit. Hervey’s got the inventory somewhere. I want to do it proper, see what’s there, what got took out, and get the papers signed proper by you — long as Hervey’s got no signin’ fingers at the moment.”

Sandoval shrugged into a capote, asked several engagés to fetch Julius Hervey from the trading room, and then they braved the bright cold morning.

“You think I could borrow some ox or draft horses, Isodoro? Or get the mules Hervey stole from me?” Sandoval grunted.

In the bright yard, they watched the Cass engagés help Hervey toward his quarters. Incredibly, the pale
bourgeois
was walking, in spite of all the blood he’d lost. He held his hands, swathed in crimsoned bandaging, upward to slow the throbbing. Hervey paused before Fitzhugh. “I never forget,” he rasped.

“I don’t forget, either.”

“I’ll even things.”

“I think they’re even now.”

“I need one finger to pull with.”

Fitzhugh didn’t say anything more. He couldn’t think of anything to say. Hervey apparently couldn’t either, and wobbled off, supported by his men.

Sandoval said, “He’ll grow a finger, just to pull the trigger again. A dangerous man, Brokenleg.”

By noon of that long New Year’s Day, Fitzhugh had a good idea of the condition of his outfit. Working with Sandoval, the inventory, and several engagés, he’d dug through heaps of merchandise. Just as he feared, Hervey had helped himself here and there, wherever he’d run out of items in his own inventory. The American Fur trader had never let himself get too greedy — stealing another company’s outfit would be too blatant, even by fur trade standards. But he plainly intended to commandeer bits and pieces, and call it spoilage or maybe even theft by parties unknown, such as the winter loafers. The stores of vermilion, fire steels, two-pound lead bars, bullet molds, skillets, silk ribbons, mirrors, tortoise-shell combs, soap, brass and copper kettles, Havana brown sugar, calico and gingham, hawk bells, and coffee beans all had been pillaged.

Fitzhugh fumed when Sandoval and he tallied the result. Hervey had made off with another ten to fifteen percent of the outfit, beyond the rent that had been paid in kind.

“You reckon I could repay me outa your trading room?”

Sandoval bridled at that. “It is,” he began lamely, “a matter for the
jefes
in St. Louis,
si?”

“You figurin’ to stop me from takin’ it out off the trading room?”

Sandoval looked trapped, and if Fitzhugh hadn’t been so furious, he might have pitied the man.

“Amigo,”
Sandoval began. “I will bring this up with Alec Culbertson at once, with a full written report. Today, you take what is yours here,
si?
And I will see about repaying the rest from Fort Union — “

“I’m takin’ the Witney blankets, the ones that didn’t get ruined.” Fitzhugh’s tone dared Sandoval to do anything about it. “Gallard dumped every bale we brought with us,” he added.

Sandoval hesitated. “My eyes will not see this,” he muttered at last. “It might cost me my contract.”

“If it does, I’ll sign you.”

His engagés loaded the big Pittsburgh, reverently leaving a space at the front for the shrouded burden lying there. The Fort Cass engagés harnessed Fitzhugh’s three mules and one of their drays to the wagon. Fitzhugh selected Bercier to come with him and asked the rest to stay for the time being. He’d need a crew here and another at the post to load and unload. And he wanted a little additional protection for Dust Devil, who was being guarded and cared for by Abner Spoon and Zach Constable.

He halted the wagon beside the trading room door, and slid down, wincing.

Then he stood over her, peering into a taut face that contained no joy within it.

“I’m takin’ a load over. Leavin’ you with Abner and Zach. If I take you along this time, it’d kill you, I think. I truly don’t want that, Little Whirlwind. Truly don’t.”

She gazed up at him, expressionless.

Bad feelings clawed at him as he steered the drays out of the gates and down the trail. Maybe he’d lost her after all; maybe this whole thing would collapse still. He knew he’d keep this wagon rolling between the posts nonstop, into the night, until he had his six loads out of there and in his own post. And he’d set his men to stocking all night too, and then open trade the next day, with Dust Devil’s people doing the honors, and receiving the opening-day gifts from Dance, Fitzhugh and Straus. It was always a big thing, the opening of trade, with plenty of speeches and gifts and a few shots of a mountain howitzer for good measure.

They encountered Samson Trudeau on the trace. He stopped and gaped at the specter of the wagon loaded almost to the top of its naked bows.

“Sacre bleu!”
he exclaimed, his gaze on the familiar draft animals, the Pittsburgh wagon they’d lost, and Bercier, one of the ones who’d abandoned Fitzhugh. “I come because they are restless at the post. White Wolf, he asked where you are and I don’t know what to say. And Maxim, he’s cross as a sore-tooth bear.”

“Hop up here, and I’ll tell it as we ride,” Fitzhugh said.

Trudeau swung up and stopped suddenly, surveying the shrouded body at the front of the box.

“Mon Dieu!
Dust Devil — “

Fitzhugh sighed. “No, it’s Alain Lemaitre, who was clubbed by Hervey, while fighting for me — for us.”

“Jesu,”
muttered Trudeau, blessing himself with an instinctive sweep of his hand from forehead to belly, and then across his heart.

Quietly, as the wagon rumbled and squeaked its wintry way south, Fitzhugh described events: finding Dust Devil, the open gate, the brawl at dawn, the wounding of Hervey, and the lashing of Gallard.

“Chien!”
Trudeau cried.
“Merde!
We knew it was so. But we lacked the proof. He muttered once in his sleep,
oui?
But why does Dust Devil go naked into the night?”

Fitzhugh let his sadness guide him. “There are things, Samson, that should not be spoken of, ever again.”

“Je comprends fort bien,”
he muttered.

They raised the post a few minutes later, and beheld the tranquility of the place in the low solstice sun. Fitzhugh had never imagined his post to be beautiful, especially in the dead of winter, but now the golden glow lit its chimneys and slanted through naked black-limbed cottonwood forests beyond, and glinted off the ice of the river. The Cheyenne ponies stood against their tethers, their shaggy coats absorbing the faint heat, their breaths rising placidly. It choked him, this unexpected vision of peace and warmth and enduring strength, that seemed to rise from the solid rock walls. This post had been erected from rock of the ages; every other post he’d seen had been made of fragile wood.

Men boiled out of the door to see this spectacle, this burdened wagon laden with trading goods. The Cheyenne seemed as amazed as his own faithful engagés. And no one gaped more than young Maxim, who seemed unable to believe his own eyes. Chief White Wolf eyed the cargo, studied Bercier, examined the horses, just as Trudeau had done, and then waited serenely.

“Samson, I got to git back to Cass, before they git their back up and shut gates and all. I want my outfit outa there so bad I can’t think straight. I’m gonna pull up yonder, and then leave this here wagon, and hitch the team to one of those others we got there, and start back. You’n Bercier, you tell ’em. Then you, Maxim, and any Cheyenne that wants to unload and shelve the goods, you put ’em all to work. I’m goin’ to haul all night if I must and I got a moon, and the horses last.”

Trudeau nodded.

“I guess I better talk to White Wolf. I torture the Cheyenne language enough, but he’ll git the idea.”