Rocky Mountain Company (7 page)

Fitzhugh let it hang for a moment, but he had known this would come and how he’d reply. It was the standard offer, but only half of the proposition.

“I reckon we’ll take a stab at the robes. There’s a profit in them, oh, hundred to five hundred percent, if we get the robes downriver next spring.”

“Ah. If. Big if.
Le grand
if. But you Opposition fellows, you hardly ever do, eh?”

LaBarge would not tarry an instant longer than necessary, not with a third of the river left to conquer. As soon as the few passengers bound for Fort Pierre had debarked, along with their meager belongings, the packet’s whistle shrilled, catapulting flocks of magpies into raucous flight. The stop had consumed only twenty minutes.

Brokenleg hurried through the post, prodding the gawking boy before him, and down the soft slope to the river. It had been much as he’d expected, and he’d have to think over some of the things Chardonne said. That was the way of American Fur: amiable hospitality on the surface, but something else flowing beneath.

They hastened aboard, the last passengers, and the deckmen lifted the stage and coiled the hawsers that had tied the packet to posts at the levee. The
Platte
shuddered and belched black smoke, its wheels churning placid water, gathering the strength in its loins to tackle the brutal current of the channel.

“M. Chardonne treated us kindly, don’t you think? I like him.” Maxim said.

Fitzhugh grunted.

“He invited me to stay, and was concerned about my safety. I shall tell
papa
that some of the company, at least, are very civil people.”

“Maxim — you’ll find that sort of hospitality at any post, American Fur or Opposition, including ours. It means little.”

“Mister Fitzhugh, surely you take a dark view of an amiable man.”

Fitzhugh sensed that no matter what he said, the youth would take it wrong. It would be best not to say anything. Some things couldn’t be told, but had to be experienced. And the youth would remember only Chardonne’s easy smile and affable talk, and not realize the swift talk over a slug of brandy had been business and worse — a series of threats. Oh, indeed, how AFC would love to have young Maxim, the son of the Opposition’s key financier, as its guest — as its hostage. And Maxim didn’t know that once Fitzhugh had refused the company’s usual buyout — its standard offer to any opposition outfit coming upriver — the catastrophes that Chardonne had delicately warned of would begin to happen, and they wouldn’t always be accidents.

“Stay alert, Maxim, and watch.” Fitzhugh didn’t have the fancy words or the grace to describe what really had transpired, and he feared he’d only harden the lad’s favorable view of Chouteau’s men and methods.

He left the boy on the main deck, where engagés huddled in the shade escaping the furnace heat of the sun. Then he limped and sweated up the companionway’s two flights, and emerged into the blinding glare of the hurricane deck. He saw her there, standing alertly, leaning forward as if to hasten the packet in its progress. She wore a hip-length white blouse cinched at the waist with a blue quillworked belt, and full skirts of bottle green. She smiled, and he discovered ease in her chiseled features he’d not seen there for months. Her sharp, eager gaze took in the vast panorama before them, the distant yellow bluffs and the treeless plains humping and rolling toward a vast emptiness beneath an enameled blue sky. Not far to the west rose the Black Hills, and Bear Butte, where Sweet Medicine had received the Four Arrows sacred to the Cheyenne people. This was the eastern edge of her people’s land, and the sight of it had transformed her.

Instinctively he slid an arm about her waist, in spite of the fierce heat, and she responded softly, sidling closer to her man as they watched the shore creep by. Then, just as impulsively, she pulled free and fixed him with a disdainful gaze that told him that he and this packet and all aboard it were invaders and trespassers. A part of him accepted that, and a part resented it. He’d married into the Cheyenne tribe, and had bonded himself to them, and become a part of them. The land of Sweet Medicine had become his own; he felt much more possessive of this vast lonely country than anything back east where he’d come from. Dimly he recollected upstate New York, his innkeeping parents Nathaniel and Bethany, his brothers and sister, the intimate green vales of that settled country. It would never be his again. Neither would the civilities that went with it. His family would find him harsh, violent, uncouth now, acid of tongue and direct of eye. This land of Dust Devil’s, of her people, of Sweet Medicine, held upon it all he had.

“ ’bout home,” he said.

She eyed him scornfully and pulled free. His eyes were watering from the glare, so he left her there and limped around to the small stair that led to the pilothouse, and gimped up it.

“Sorry to weigh anchor so fast, but the river’s already crested, and I’ll be fighting sandbars all the way back,” LaBarge said.

“I know.”

“Chardonne try the usual?”

“Cost plus ten percent and an agreement not to go into opposition.”

LaBarge nodded. “When they found we’d had the
Platte
built, they wanted to charter it exclusively. They were provoked when my brother and I declined, and warned us of all the usual hazards on the river. One never knows, does one?”

“You’ve made serious opposition possible, Joe.”

The master nodded. Up until now, opposition companies could ship tradegoods upriver on American Fur packets only at exorbitant rates which gave the monopoly all the advantage in trade.

“I don’t doubt that some of my crew have been bought. But I’ve not spotted anything — yet.” He peered earnestly into Fitzhugh’s eyes. “You’d be wise to run a daily inventory of your tradegoods down in the hold — and take a close look at your wagons and stock every day.”

“I’ll teach Maxim. That’s a clerk duty that he can learn.”

“I wouldn’t do it that way,” LaBarge said, sharply, and didn’t elaborate. But Fitzhugh caught the warning.

“Sandbar,” muttered Roux, pointing at a long swell of water angling out from a bight.

LaBarge’s attention shifted totally to the coiling river, which was working its way around a broad oxbow studded with prickly pear and a little yucca. The channel ran between visible snags tilling the water on the right and the glassy swell of the bar arrowing toward them on the left.

“La-haut,”
he said to Roux, pointing at a patch of darker water scarcely thirty yards wide. The pilot, who was manning the helm himself at this hour, turned the duckbilled prow a bit to the right. LaBarge pulled the bellcord, and a moment later the packet slowed to a lazy crawl into the upwelling torrent.

A giant hand seemed to rise from the river and clamp the vessel in its grasp. Fitzhugh stumbled forward on his game leg into the wainscoting. Below, cargo shifted, and men yelled. The boat stood stock still while the river sucked by, gurgling at the intrusion. LaBarge pulled the bellrope, a series of tugs, and from below came a clanging of metal, and a thrashing of paddles in reverse, churning aquamarine water into white froth. But the bar didn’t yield its prey. After a moment, LaBarge tugged the bellrope again and the paddles quieted. He leaned out of the pilothouse and nodded to the mate, far below.

“We’ll grasshopper,” he said to Fitzhugh. “There was no bar here last year. This is a bad one, and we’re thirty or forty feet onto it.”

Down below, deckhands lowered the front spars, normally used for lifting heavy items out of the hold, into the water until they settled into the sandbar. They rigged manila lines that ran from cleats on the foredeck to pulleys at the top of the spars, and back down to a capstan on the foredeck, and then, with a long rod through the capstan, began the slow twisting that wound the line around the capstan, lifting the whole front end of the packet upward on its spars, like a grasshopper rising on its legs. The spars themselves had been set at an angle, leaning forward to give the vessel a push when the moment came. The packet creaked and the rope hummed and spit spray as the prow inched upward.

Roux nodded, and LaBarge yanked the bellrope hard, and a sudden roar of the steam pistons echoed. The eighteen-foot wheels churned, driving the packet ahead on its spars until the angle was too great and the packet settled back onto the sandbar, but twenty feet forward of its previous position. Fitzhugh had seen it before, and marveled at its ingenuity as much now as when he’d first witnessed a riverboat being eased over shallow water. It took two more grasshopperings before the packet slid free on the far side of the bar, and danced on the sparkling waters like a manumitted slave while men cheered down below.

LaBarge smiled. “It can be worse than this,” he said. “Sometimes we must shift cargo to the rear, or forward, and the crew hates it.”

“I reckon the river gets shallower and tougher every time we pass the mouth of a creek,” Fitzhugh said.

LaBarge snorted. “It’s the June rise that counts. I’ve always thought there’s water deep enough to go to the great falls of the Missouri on the June rise. But no one’s ever been there. Too many rocks and rapids.”

“I’d take it kindly if you’d push on up the Yellowstone far as you can. The Bighorn’s a long ways up, and I hate the thought of three or four wagon trips from wherever you drop us, and that mountain of stuff sitting unguarded out there.”

“We’ll find an island. A place where you can store your goods while you’re hauling. Lots of them on that river, M. Fitzhugh. Some of them separated from the riverbank by a gravelly bottom with only a few inches running over it — easy to ford. I wish we could just anchor and wait, but we’d never make it back down.”

“We’ll manage,” he said, “But I don’t have enough men to do it right.”

LaBarge smiled tightly. “M. Chardonne warned about calamities,” he said softly. “It’ll depend on whether the tribes on the Yellowstone know about us.”

Maxim took his new duties seriously. He had grown up solemn by nature, not given to laughter and lightness, and inclined to see life as a series of crushing responsibilities.

M. Fitzhugh showed him how to check inventory. Each morning, as the packet toiled up the endless miles of the great river, the
bourgeois
swung down the ladder into the low hold carrying a coal-oil lantern and his cargo manifest. Maxim could stand, but just barely, in the five-foot-high hold, but M. Fitzhugh had to crouch, which wasn’t easy with his stiff leg.

“Now this’ll take time. It’s slow and tedious, but we’ve got to do it each day, boy.”

Maxim nodded as Fitzhugh limped to the closest freight, oblong crates. Maxim could hear the water gurgle and suck at the hull, and slide beneath the bottom. Above, the thunder of pistons rumbled softly.

“Hyar, hold the lamp now. This crate’s got axes in it, fifty according to the waybill. Now first you look at our manifest, and find out how many axes we’re taking for trade. Hyar, now. A hundred. Have we two crates? Hyar we are, two crates. Now look and see, here, whether they’ve been pried open. If someone’s filching axes, he’s got to open the case. Try it with your hand, eh?”

Maxim did, discovering that the lid remained tightly attached.

“Petty thief ’ll fool you; he’ll make it look like there’s been no tampering, so look sharp and use your hands.”

And so it went. Maxim learned to look and feel, and check off the boxes and bales and sacks, and to use his hands as well as his eyes because thieves would deceive. He learned how to spot-check, too. There were too many boxes of blue-and-white glass trade beads to examine, but M. Fitzhugh showed him how to make a random check, and look at something new each day.

It took much of the morning, and once they ran out of coal-oil and had to grope back to the forward hatch where a little light lit the shadowed hold.

“Always be careful with this lamp,” Fitzhugh warned. “If you drop it and that coal oil spreads and burns, you’ll cost us our goods, Mr. LaBarge his riverboat, and maybe kill us all. Now one more thing. Don’t bring that lamp close to these casks of grain spirits. But do check the spirits first of all. There’s the temptation, both to crewmen and our engagés. They’ll draw what they need from a bung, and then put water in to compensate, so you can’t tell by weight. Not even a seal works. A thief wanting spirits will auger through the back of a cask if he must. No, the secret’s camouflage. This one’s marked vinegar, eh? That one’s turpentine. Another’s marked lamp oil. And check twice a day. Do that, and maybe we’ll have enough left when we get up to the Yellerstone to start a robe business.”

All this had happened the very day they’d pulled away from Fort Pierre and Ulysses Chardonne, and Maxim knew that it was because Brokenleg had turned down the American Fur buyout, and now feared sabotage. It ate up his mornings, and he hated the dark, pungent hold, and the fearsome creaking of the boat as it slapped through rapids and around bends. His dreads gripped him there, especially when rats scurried along the bilge ahead of his lantern, blurred sinister movement. He ached to be out upon the deck, watching this strange barren country roll slowly by, with its occasional copse of cottonwoods along the bottoms, amber bluffs, antelope, buffalo, and even an occasional Indian watching silently from shore. It tugged at him, but so did the weight of his responsibilities.

He’d promised his father he’d watch and learn, and contain his own impulses. And his father had gravely charged him, that last night in St. Louis, with the task of being Guy Straus’s eyes and ears, and more. “You will be my representative; the member of Straus et Fils present on the post,” he said. “You’ll want to hunt and fish and have fun — and that’s fine. But business first, Maxim. Business first. For your mother, and me, and Clothilde and David.”

Each day’s venture into the cavernous hold turned out to be the same. He swiftly learned where the beads and hatchets and brass kettles were; where the crates of fusils lay, and the casks of powder and bars of galena were stored. He eyed the DuPont unhappily, keeping his lamp far from it. He knew how many bales of Witney point blankets there were, woven in England especially for the trade. And he knew exactly where the hoop-iron lay — iron the tribes used to make metal arrowpoints and spear points too. He knew there were three cartons of tin mirrors, and six of colored ribbons, and whole bales of tradecloth and calicoes, kept well above the bilge, along with the bales of blankets. He learned where the awls and files were, and the rolls of canvas duck, and the packets of needles.