Sitka

by Louis L'Amour

  Chapter 18

  The Susquehanna fell off before the wind. Standing in the waist, Jean LaBarge watched the oncoming ship. It was the Lena. Although a patrol ship she was only a middling fast sailer, quite fast enough for the average ship in these waters but not in the same class with the schooner.

  He wanted to draw her deeply into Clarence Strait, for from her present position she could cover both the Strait and Revillagigedo Channel, a position fatal to his plans.

  On the east side of the Strait, only a short distance off, there was the mouth of a channel opening between Gravina and Annette Islands, which in turn opened on Revillagigedo Channel. From there several openings offered themselves, but of five possible openings three were dead ends. If he could win to the head of Nicholas Passage and disappear, the Lena would have small chance of finding him unless Zinnovy was shrewd and patient enough to return to the former position and wait. And once the quarry was sighted, Jean did not believe Paul Zinnovy would be patient.

  The sky was overcast, the sea gray. Lying close offshore he waited, hoping to draw the Russian ship deeper and deeper into the Strait. The shores were thick with forest except where cliffs of gray rock jutted out. White water broke over Hidden Reef. The wind was good and he allowed the schooner to loaf under reefed sails while the Russian ship came on. Jean waited, judging the distance. "All right," he said suddenly, "let's go!"

  In an instant Kohl was shouting orders and the crew exploded into action. Eagerly, as if welcoming the chase and knowing what was demanded of her, the schooner answered to the wind. There was a low cheer from the crew as her sails filled and she started to run for it. From the Russian ship there was the dull boom of a gun, a warning signal, an order to heave to. She was much too far away for a cannon shot.

  Jean took the wheel from Larsen and when the schooner was rolling along he put the wheel over and headed into the passage that led to Smugglers' Cove. From behind them the gun boomed again, impatiently. Standing at the wheel Jean watched the shore line, and suddenly glimpsed the lightning-blasted pine of which he had been told. Three minutes later by careful count he put the wheel over and slid between Hidden Reef and another rock patch, unnamed as yet. Then he was in full channel and reeling off a good eight knots. "If we can make the head of the Passage before he rounds the point," he told Kohl, "we'll be all right."

  "I hope you know what you're doin'." Kohl was worried. "This is dangerous ground."

  "I know."

  He hoped he did. There was a chance despite his endless checking that the information in the little black book was wrong. Beside the channel the somber walls of timber closed them in, virgin timber, untouched by man or fire. Ahead of them the outlet was filled with dangers, and there would be little margin of safety, yet if he could make the turn...

  He glanced back ... nothing in sight. Sweat broke out on his brow despite the wind. If they were trapped in a cul-de-sac they would have no chance, for Zinnovy could stand off and shell them to pieces, and with the greatest enjoyment.

  He stood with his legs spread to the roll of the ship, taking his time. Whitecaps dotted the sea, and a cold wind came down off the mountains. Nobody said anything until Larsen, glancing over his shoulder, said, "I think we make it."

  Momentarily, Jean resigned the wheel to him. He walked forward, scanning the sea and the marks on the cliffs. The distance was slight, but if the Lena had continued her pursuit she should be rounding into the Passage by now. "Head her toward the island." He pointed. "We'll get behind it and out of sight."

  Kohl was in the stern with a glass to his eye, anxiously watching the point on Annette Island beyond Hidden Reef, but there was no sign of the patrol ship. The dark green shores of the island were close aboard now, and he could make out details of the trees. There was a white streak of quartz in the rock at the island's end and a cluster of bedraggled pines. Kohl called out suddenly. "She's on our tail, Cap! She's comin'!"

  "Think they saw us?"

  "I doubt it. If they didn't they'll have to look in those other inlets before they come up the Passage."

  "Zinnovy knows I'm not the waiting type. He'll come on."

  Out of sight of the pursuing ship, Jean conned the schooner around the kelp. Ahead of him was a strip of dark water and he pointed into it, muttering a wordless prayer that it was deep as it looked. The schooner slid through with yards to spare on either side, and then swung into the Tongass Narrows that divided Pennock Island from Gravina. Before them lay thirteen miles of clear water and Pennock was more than three hundred feet high and good cover for him. Even if Zinnovy had guessed right there was still a chance they could reach Behm Cannal before they were seen.

  The black battalions of clouds lowered above storm-gored ridges, and the gray-furrowed sea licked at narrow beaches of sand and bare, black rocks. It was a strong land, a good land, unchanged through thousands of years. Off to the right the black, glistening arch of a rock showed momentarily above the water like the back of a porpoise and brown streamers of kelp trailed their mute warning into the gray of the sea.

  The Narrows opened and the great bulk of Pennock fell behind. Kohl paused at the companionway rubbing the back of his neck. He hated to leave the deck, yet he knew fresh men would be sorely needed later. He stumbled down the ladder and fell into his bunk and was asleep as soon as he hit the mattress. Duncan Pope, the sour-faced second mate, was on watch. He was a slovenly-appearing man with a cast to one eye, yet long since Jean had learned he was a capable officer whose lean, almost scrawny body possessed an amazing resistance to hunger, cold, and long weary hours on watch. Pope was a man who kept his own counsel. He did not like Russians. He did not like the thugs of Sydney Town. He disliked most ship's masters on general principles, and he cared for few things aside from standing watch, reading his Bible, and fighting. LaBarge was scarcely aware Pope had taken over. He was watching the Narrows open out before him, and soon he would make the turn around Revillagigedo where his information told him there was a passage. He was gambling everything on that, and hoping Zinnovy would continue the pursuit. If his luck held he would pass by within a short distance of where the patrol ship had originally waited and the Lena would be lost in the maze of islands, channels and inlets that lay behind. An hour and a half later, with no evidence of pursuit, he rounded the corner and started north. Ahead of him was a wooded island with a yellow cliff, which would be Tatoosh. He kept close in so the ship would be invisible against the island if anyone was within sight.

  He thought all at once of the Swamp, where as a child he had used the cover to hide from hostile eyes. And then he remembered Rob, and their dreams of adventure. "Rob," he said, half-aloud, "you should have been with me today. You would have liked this, I know you would."

  Chapter 19

  Helena stood on the terrace outside the Castle. It was late evening. For two days there had been no news from the Lena, and a message from her meant news of the Susquehanna. Each day until then there had been a bidarka to bring news or lack of it. The last canoe had brought word the Susquehanna had been sighted and, capture was imminent.

  Reception of the news in Sitka had been mixed. Despite the fact that the Americans were foreigners they had brought wheat to Sitka, and their plight found sympathy among the people of the town. Baron Zinnovy was already unpopular, and the fact that he had impounded the wheat had won him no friends. The wheat would have been lost to them but for an unexpected show of firmness by Count Rotcheff, who refused to permit the impounding and took the matter out of Zinnovy's hands. Rudakof, straddling the fence on most issues, met this one head on from necessity. Reluctantly, he backed up the Count, who was, after all, in authority.

  Rotcheff's words were repeated all over the settlement. "I am afraid, Baron Zinnovy," he had said sternly, "you have exceeded your authority. Your mission is to protect Russian trade and traders, not to enforce your arbitrary decisions in matters of no concern to you. I must remind you, sir, to restrict yourself to your duties and cease interfering with the ci
vilian authorities." Helena, who had been present, was suddenly bursting with pride for her husband. The Baron had stood at attention, ramrod stiff, his eyes straight forward, his body fairly trembling with repressed fury. He saluted, made an abrupt about-face, and strode from the room, heels clicking on the hard floor. Yet all knew it was but one battle in a campaign and the decision was not yet. Helena realized that there was more to the search for the American ship than the personal animosity Zinnovy bore for Jean LaBarge. If the Susquehanna could be captured with a cargo of furs--Zinnovy could claim she had been trading with the secret connivance of Rotcheff, and trading illegally. More than ever she appreciated the danger of their position, for had Rudakof failed to back up her husband, Zinnovy might have taken drastic action to free himself from interference, and orders were of no importance if they could not be enforced. Scarcely more than a child when she had married Count Rotcheff, she had not been unhappy. He was thirty years older than she, but an intelligent, attractive man, respected for his genuine ability and his sometimes biting wit. She had grown up listening to talk of politics and intrigue, a game at which her husband was a master.

  A door closed behind her and she turned to greet her husband. "I am glad you are out of that stuffy office."

  "It is nice here." He inhaled deeply, then glanced at her. "Do you believe they will catch him?"

  "No ... no, I don't."

  "Nor I." They walked a few steps together. "He is clever, this American of yours. Busch tells me he has friends all through the islands, and what Busch has learned of LaBarge's dealings convince him that LaBarge is extremely astute." Somewhere out among those dark, mysterious islands he might even now be fighting, dying. The air was growing colder but she felt no desire to go in ... this was the same air that he was breathing; even now he might be standing on his deck, watching the dark water slip past.

  "I like it here," she said suddenly.

  "Sitka?" He was surprised.

  "I mean all of this, as it is now, young and free."

  "And barbaric."

  "Of course ... and I like even that."

  "There is something primitive in all women, I suspect. Women think in terms of the basic. Love, marriage, children."

  "What better things to think of?"

  "Of course. It is as it should be and lucky for us males, God knows. You are coming in?"

  "Soon."

  He paused near the door, watching the dark serrated edge of the pine forest against the night sky. Somewhere down in the town someone dropped a piece of iron and it rang loudly on the pavement. He glanced at Helena, feeling his age now in the growing chill of the evening. This bout with Zinnovy might be his last. He must move shrewdly ... the man had influence, damn him! And he was vindictive, which Rotcheff was not. It was a pity, he reflected, that the men of good will are so poorly armed, for at times it was a handicap not to hate. It took a fanatic to win, a fanatic believer or one utterly ruthless. He, Rotcheff, thought too much of the other man's point of view, he could always see both sides of an argument. That would not do in a world where there were Zinnovys. Yet Zinnovy was a Russian and they talked loudest when they faced weakness. We are basically, he thought, a race of tyrants and poets, and his own fault was in being too much the poet, too little the tyrant. He looked again at Helena, standing by the stone parapet. In the world from which they had come it would be considered an absurd thing, but he loved his wife. He had not married for love. Helena was beautiful, she was wealthy, and her family was powerful in his world of intrigue and politics. Theirs had been a marriage of purpose. Yet he had been a lover once, and a successful one, with many conquests behind him. He knew all the little things that please a woman. He smiled thoughtfully. The best lovers were those who did not really love, for if one became too emotional there was in the place of eloquence a stumbling tongue, in the place of charm, awkwardness.

  The surprise had been his. He found Helena, even though he was sure she did not love him, a thoughtful, attentive, and considerate wife. Had he met her twenty-five years before she might have loved him ... but then he could not have afforded her!

  Their life had been singularly happy, and if she did not love him she did respect and admire him. These last years had been his happiest. He was not sure when he fell in love with his wife; nonetheless, it had happened, and now for the first time he sensed her unrest, and he knew the cause. Jean LaBarge was a handsome man, not in a pretty way as were some of the Czar's officers who had paid court to her, but in a tough, dangerous way. The Count, considered in his day a superb swordsman, and victor in four duels to the death, admitted to himself he would dislike to face LaBarge with a rapier in his hand. The man had it in him to kill ... not from malice, for there did not seem to be cruelty in him, but simply because he was, more than anyone in the Count's experience, a fighter.

  "Helena"--he turned back to her--"have you ever been sorry you married me?"

  Scarcely had he uttered the words than he was wishing they had not been said.

  Was he a boy to expect such a question to receive more than the obvious answer? She turned to face him. "No, Alexander, I have not been sorry, and I shall never be sorry."

  He welcomed the sincerity in her voice. "I'm afraid I have been a bad husband ... too preoccupied." He waved an irritated hand. "Marriage in our lot is so much a matter of state. We scarcely know each other until it is too late." "It has never been so with us," she protested. "You know it hasn't." She was right, of course. There had always been a warm, friendly understanding between them, and in the past few years it had become even better. They had, really, been two of the lucky ones.

  He remembered the first time he had seen her, when he was a young officer in the Imperial Army, and had come to her home to visit, accompanying her uncle. She had been, a little girl with large, serious eyes who was always in a corner, reading. She had come running from the door to greet her uncle, followed by a huge wolfhound she called Tovarich. Suddenly seeing the strange young man, she had stopped, torn between eagerness and embarrassment. He had seen her fear and had walked to her, bowing deeply. "Princess, I am your servant. And when was a mistress afraid of her servants?" She laughed then. "You! You couldn't be a servant! With that nose?"

  They had laughed together, and from that day on, they had been friends...

  The wind puffed through the pines and flurried her skirt. "It is cold," he said.

  "I shall go in."

  "I'll follow ... I want to be alone for a minute." When the door closed behind him he went to the sideboard and poured a glass of brandy. He tasted it and the warmth went through his veins. Zinnovy now: the man had friends in the high places but more than one road led to St. Petersburg. There was that boy, for instance, the boy Zinnovy had ordered flogged ... did he not have an uncle who was a power in the iron industry? The uncle would be a man to be listened to. Yes, that was it, and they had met once in Kiev, a hardheaded man named Zarasky who had fiercely resented his nephew's flogging. It had nearly killed the boy.

  That way it would not involve the Grand Duke or the Czar. There was no way of making someone tired of you faster than endless requests or complaints. It was the value of being a politician, that one knew other ways. It occurred to him abruptly that being the kind of man Zinnovy was, and wanting what he wanted, Zinnovy dared not let him, Rotcheff, return to St. Petersburg. Coolly, he considered the situation. There were ways of escape, of course, but he was no longer a young man, and all shipping out of the harbor could be controlled by Baron Zinnovy. Escape by the usual means would be barred to him, and any other means was closed by the danger to his health. That meant he must prepare a report now, with several copies, and see that at least two copies were smuggled out, for certainly Zinnovy would be checking all communications. Busch ... that was the man. Busch detested Zinnovy and was a patriot as well, shrewd enough to realize the danger Zinnovy meant to all legitimate business in Sitka. Moreover, and this was important, Busch had his own corps of tough and loyal promyshleniki. He was not a man to
attack with impunity. A long time later, while his pen still scratched, the clock chimed.

  Eleven o'clock. It was very late...

  Chapter 20

  Shortly after noon the wind fell away to nothing, and the Susquehanna, now barely making steerageway, held in toward the rocky shore. Jean was hoping to pick up vagrant breezes out of the numerous ravines that slashed the mountains. Twice during the afternoon there were brief squalls accompanied by heavy rain, and each time the schooner gained ground.

  All hands that could be spared were catching sleep against the long watches ahead, and when they turned to, every one of them was given a jolt of hot rum. It was almost dusk when the wind picked up. Moving at a bare four knots they rounded into Gedney Pass.

  Both shores sloped steeply back to three thousand feet, with the shore steep-to.

  Creeping along, the schooner made Shrimp Bay and dropped anchor until morning. During the night it rained hard. The man on watch was relieved every hour; Jean wanted to take no chance because of a sleepy watch. All hands slept in their clothing, ready to turn to at a moment's notice, and LaBarge bedded down under the bottom-up whaleboat.

  Tired as he was, he could not sleep. The cold wind made him grateful for his heavy blankets. Once while lying awake he heard something crash far up the mountainside and then a sliding of rocks and timber. There was a faint following rattle of stones, then silence. The schooner was ghostly in the night, but toward morning the air warmed a little and the fog lifted, shrouding her rigging in cobwebs of mist. His cargo was worth at least eighty thousand dollars and depending on how the market stood at the moment, might be worth at least half again that much.

  Sometime after that he must have fallen asleep for he was awakened to find the sky turning pale yellow and the watch standing beside him with a steaming cup of black coffee. By the time the sun was halfway up the sky they had rounded Curlew Point and entered the Narrows along Bell Island. Here, for approximately eight miles, the channel varied from three-tenths of a mile in width to more than a mile. By report the water was deep and the shores steep-to, but as the fog held they had no idea if they were pursued or not.