Rocky Mountain Company (12 page)

“You are happy,” Dust Devil said to him in the lavender twilight.

It startled him. “I cain’t rightly say I noticed it. My haid’s been full of stuff. You know. Getting the goods shelved, fixing up the old place, getting word out to the — the tribes. Sending the wagons back for the next. Who should go, who should stay. Trading. Gettin’ that first robe through the window and giving out something for it. We’ll be manned pretty thin — but, yeah, I’m feeling perky at that.”

“It is because you’re here. You don’t like it back there with all the whitemen and the cities. Not even the riverboat.”

“I reckon that’s it.”

“I hardly know you back there. You were different. Now you’re Cheyenne like me.”

“Reckon so.”

She’d put it into some sort of words for him, and after that he knew what was happening inside of himself each day and they toiled west and south, day by day. They hit a hailstorm one day and soggy ground the next, which mired the iron tires and exhausted the oxen and mules. They had a bad time fording the Powder, quicksand sucking at hooves and wheels, and had to double-team once to drag a mired wagon out. They saw a barechested horseman atop a bluff on the north side of the river one day, and knew they’d been observed. One day they couldn’t make meat, and gobbled down oat gruel boiled from precious stores. Four of the oxen were rebellious and troublemakers, and the engagés fought among themselves to avoid having to use them. Brokenleg established a system of rotation, so that the troublesome beasts were inflicted evenly on each pair of engagés. And through it all, Brokenleg felt restraints falling away like dead leaves, and he was discovering that even the annoyances didn’t bother him.

One day while he was resting on a wagon, Dust Devil rode back to him with a wild joy illumining her face. “A village of the People ahead. They’re gone now but they were there.”

He rode ahead of the wagons with her to the bank of the Tongue River, and she showed him the site. It’d been some village all right. The grass was clipped down; white bones lay about; teepee rings remained in large concentric circles across the open flat.

“How do you know it’s the People?” he asked.

“I know.”

“Could be Sioux. They’re some like your Cheyenne.”

“It was the People.”

“You figger out how you know, cause I want to learn it. Maybe it smells right.”

“Smell! Smell! The People don’t smell. Whitemen stink. Crows smell like dog-vomit.”

He laughed. “You smell some, at least on Sundays and Tuesdays,” he said, but she whirled her spotted mare and rode off, indignant. Before they’d gone down to St. Louis, they’d spent many of their waking hours insulting each other and laughing. He hadn’t even been aware it had stopped, or that it had started up again.

They’d planned to camp at the Tongue that night but pushed on two extra miles to get to fresh grass. That made another night without meat because whoever’d camped there had driven it miles away.

Through the fat long days of July they toiled westward, fording the Rosebud and then Sarpy, closing in on the place where they would start a trading post. The oxen were thinning down but the mules showed little sign of their long toil. Fitzhugh eyed the stock warily, hoping it’d last out the return trips. He worried about the mountain of goods left behind, and the two left to guard it; but he could do nothing, and it didn’t pay to let a thing like that nag at him.

They made their last camp about eight or ten miles from the Bighorn, he reckoned. One more day, at any rate. That evening they stopped right beside the Yellowstone, surrounded by thick brown grass, with scarcely a tree in sight. Some places along the wide river were like that. He’d shot a buffalo cow there; a good, careful shot that struck right behind the shoulder, where his fifty-two-caliber ball would have the greatest effect, and had it half butchered when the wagons pulled up. That seemed fitting enough — a buffalo feast on the last night out, to celebrate the start of the Buffalo Company’s new post. The engagés rejoiced but Dust Devil turned solemn, and he couldn’t fathom it.

“I don’t want any,” she said, and refused to touch even the succulent humpmeat, or tongue.

He shrugged, wondering if it had to do with that mirage way back down the river, when they stood on the hurricane deck and watched all the buffalo march into a hole in the sky.

“It’s sacred!” she cried, angrily.

The next day, a rare overcast one in which July seemed to vanish and the Moon when the Chokecherries Ripen replaced it somehow, she remained sullen and stayed by herself, as if the company of whitemen was as loathsome as the Spirits she feared so much, which lived under the earth. The chill day delighted the engagés, and made life sweeter for the livestock, and they made good time. Trudeau, who knew the country well, thought they’d reach Fort Cass by mid-afternoon.

Brokenleg didn’t sense that anything was amiss until he began to smell woodsmoke, faint and pungent and elusive, on the air rolling out of the west, upriver. A village, he supposed, right there on the confluence of the Bighorn and the Yellowstone, always a choice place to dwell, with its ample fuel and grass. He hoped the good buffalo grass around the fort and the nearby hills wouldn’t be eaten off by the herds of whatever village it might be.

By noon the woodsmoke smell had grown stronger, and Dust Devil had grown more sullen.

“Absaroka,” she muttered, and he couldn’t imagine why she said it. Certainly a little smoke in the air didn’t provide the clue. The engagés smelled the smoke, too, and looked a little fearful.

“Trudeau, tell them to relax. We’re traders, not soldiers. They can be armed if they want, but I want those weapons sheathed.”

Trudeau walked among the wagons and the gaunted teams, giving the solemn engagés the word.

They’d been discovered now. Horsemen up on the hills above the broad valley watched and waited, in twos and threes.

“Absaroka!” Dust Devil spat, a loathing underlying the name.

Nonetheless, Fitzhugh led the wagons upriver, even while knots of almost naked warriors rode out to escort them, smiling, pointing, guessing at the contents of the giant wagons, exclaiming at the strange sight of yoked oxen and harnessed gray mules dragging the giant boxes toward the village.

“I reckon they’re camped around Fort Cass outa habit,” he said to Trudeau. “We’ll just drive on up to the fort and claim it, and you and the rest can start unloading while I palaver with their headman. Stroke a luck, actually. We got us a whole blooming Crow village to trade robes with, fast as we can get the stuff on the shelves.”

They rounded a last headland looming up on the south, and beheld a vast village, with lodges everywhere, dimpling the broad flats under a low gray sky. A skim of gray smoke layered over the encampment. He glanced at Dust Devil, who stared at the sight angrily, withdrawn into herself, like a nun in a bawdyhouse, he thought, amused. From everywhere, Crow people tumbled out to see the amazing sight, these white-sheeted monsters pulled by slavering whitemen’s buffalo. A happy crowd, he thought, enjoying the bright children, the little lads naked but the girls in skirts, and the broad-cheeked young women, laughing and pointing and obviously guessing at the mysteries within the wagons.

They rode down a sort of street, exciting yellow curs, which barked at strange sights; past smoke-blackened lodges of cowhide, with medicine tripods before them, the doors of the lodges all facing east to greet Sun and bless the lodge.

Ahead lay Fort Cass, on barren land stripped of the cottonwoods that once surrounded it, the palisades silvery in the gray light. It excited him. The post! They’d restore it, renew it, clean the cobwebs and rattlers out of it, sweep the dirt floors of its warehouse, chase away the small wild things that had taken it over  . . . 

It flew two flags.

It took him a long, dark moment to register it. One was the familiar Stars and Stripes. He closed his eyes, half-wild. The other pennant was the familiar ensign of the Chouteaus.

He paused on his slat-ribbed horse, his leg aching suddenly, staring at this apparition. Fort Cass had been put back into service. Its giant doors had been rehung. The hardused grassy meadow around the fort had been ground down to tawny dust. His heart sank at the sight. This was no Crow village; it was Fort Cass doing a booming trade with the Crow nation.

As he sat his horse, gaping, a brown-bearded man emerged, a man with bright black eyes and a sharp cruel twist of lip. Julius Hervey.

Oh, the waiting was hard. In spite of all his careful planning, he hadn’t counted on this, the daily toll upon his health and mind simply from waiting for news, and keeping his imaginings under control. Guy Straus had a vivid imagination, especially when it came to calamity — shipwreck, Indian trouble, pox or cholera  . . . 

He’d kept busy, of course. Most days brought some business, in the form of currency exchange. His ability to change reals and pesos into dollars was valued in frontier St. Louis, as was his ability to convert buffalo robes into gold, or wolf pelts into iron kettles. The thrust of business kept him from worrying too much about his sons, especially Maxim, out there in a land no one but a few trappers knew. But he had bad moments, especially when Yvonne’s worrying undermined his own optimism, most often at night as they snuffed the last candle and the torrent of doubt flowed from her like ink into the dark.

Oh, there’d been things to do. He’d contacted a French-Osage métis and offered him fifty dollars to cut five hundred selected sticks of osage orange, all prime bow wood, and deliver them bundled into hundreds to his agent at Westport. The thought of trading a prime buffalo robe, worth four dollars in the east for a stick of supple yellowish wood worth a few cents, pleased him. In fact, it tickled him because it gave them an edge, at least for a while, against Pierre Chouteau
le Cadet
and all his numerous family and Creole relatives and allies by marriage, and loyal retainers.

And he would soon need to be writing Charles Early, at Witney mills in England, ordering next year’s trade blankets for delivery in St. Louis by April 1, 1842. He debated whether to raise the order, and decided against it. He had no information suggesting he should. But he did write Cabot Mills, in Lawrence, Massachusetts, wondering whether that firm might weave a blanket suitable for the Indian trade. American blankets were dyed in drab colors, lacked the stripes and brightness the tribesmen loved, and also lacked the bars, or points, that instantly told them whether the blanket weighed two, three, or four pounds. Worth a try, he thought. A lot cheaper to ship Yankee blankets than English ones.

Often he dined with Robert Campbell at the rambling Planters House just to talk about the fur trade, and worry together. The affable Scot had been a part of it for years, an important person with Rocky Mountain Fur. What’s more, he’d been out there, out to the wild rendezvous back in the beaver days, out the long Platte River trail to the roof of the continent. He’d been there; he knew the ropes — and he’d been a partner in several fur ventures that opposed the giant octopus, Chouteau.

“It all boils down to the men you send out there,” he said over thick aromatic coffee. Guy had heard him say it before, and believed it fervently. “Put the right men out there and you’ll do well, barring calamities and acts of God. But nothing’ll squander a man’s fortune away out there faster than bad judgment, stupidity, or some weakness or blindness. It’s a crucible, that wilderness and all its hardships. It burns away the dross and only the pure mountaineer survives.”

“I think I’ve got the men,” Guy responded.

“Do you?”

The way Campbell said it sent a chill through Guy. “Are you suggesting I don’t?”

“No, mon, I’m suggesting I’m not sure. It’s a gamble, They both could turn out fine, as solid as Milt Sublette or Jed Smith.”

But his caution, and his eyes, suggested something else.

“Tell me what you see, Robert. In confidence, of course.”

But Campbell had smiled easily. “I would not have invested a farthing if I felt they weren’t top men, both Fitzhugh and Dance.”

But something hung there, in the smoke-laden air of the Planters, that disturbed Guy.

News came at last in late July. The first scrap of it arrived with the
Trapper
, the AFC steamer, back from Fort Union carrying the year’s returns for the Chouteau interests. Its master, Jacques Raval, had sent a second mate to Chestnut Street, hand delivering Maxim’s letter. Guy read it with vast joy, delighting in Maxim’s enthusiasm, glad of the youth’s critical assessment of Brokenleg and relieved that the frightening episode with the Yanktonai at the woodyard had turned out well. Or mostly well.

Within the same week he got a brief note from David, delivered by eastbound Mexican traders they’d encountered on the Santa Fe Trail. All was well; no disease; several breakdowns of the wagons which had forced them to stop for repairs; no reports of Comanche or Kiowa trouble ahead; and Jamie a good man, a natural leader out on the trail, a big grin forever cheering his teamsters.

These Guy showed to Yvonne, who found cause in them to worry all the more, until Guy gently teased her about it. And then the waiting once again.

And so things revolved until early August. One hot day when scarcely a breeze stirred a leaf, a fine black-lacquered chaise drawn by a gray trotter drew to a halt before Straus et Fils. Its driver, a trim, bearded man in a doublebreasted blue suit, clipped a carriage weight to the trotter’s bridle, and let himself into the foyer.

“Joe LaBarge!” exclaimed Guy, upon discovering his guest. “You’re back! It’s good to see you, my
cher ami.
Come, come, come — “ He steered the master back toward his own walnut wainscoted office. “Tell me everything. Everything! How goes the
Platte
? And tell me — everything!”

Captain LaBarge settled into the settee covered with watershot yellow silk, and accepted the aperitif Guy splashed generously from a decanter.

“Back in one piece, Guy. Fast trip down, and profitable, though not exactly lucrative.”