River of Blood

by William W. Johnstone

  Otto had grown up hearing stories about those Americans and their homeland. Even though his father had fought for the British, he had admired the enemy, the way a fighting man will do. In America, he had said, a man could make of himself whatever he was capable of.

  That idea appealed to Otto, so as a young man with a new bride he had answered the summons and dared to make the long voyage across the Atlantic. They had landed almost penniless, unable to speak more than a few words of English . . .

  And ten years later, Otto Ducharme had owned a successful freighting company and been the proud father of a new son.

  Unfortunately, Rory’s birth had been hard on his mother, and eventually her weakened state had caused her to sicken and die. Bitter and grieving, Otto Ducharme had thrown himself into his business, and as a result he had become more and more successful. Eventually his wagons rolled from one end of the new country to the other, and he and his young son had settled in St. Louis, at the western terminus of the freight lines, on the edge of the vast wilderness that to Ducharme’s way of thinking provided fertile ground for even more expansion.

  With all of that to occupy his mind, it was understandable that Rory had grown up without much of a firm hand to guide him. Otto knew that his boy was a bit of a wastrel . . . but that was the nature of boys, was it not? Sooner or later he would grow out of it, and until he did, Otto had plenty of money to buy him out of whatever predicament he found himself in.

  Unfortunately, no amount of money in the world could buy a rifle ball out of his son’s chest.

  When enough time had passed and the sharp edge of his grief was dulled, Otto Ducharme knew what he had to do. He began hiring men, hard, dangerous men with few scruples. There were plenty of those in St. Louis. He bought supplies the same way he bought men, paying whatever was necessary to get what he wanted.

  He had bought the shotgun that now rested across his knees, the shotgun he planned to use personally once he found what he was looking for. As his hands tightened on the weapon, he brought his angry reaction under control and said to the white-haired man, “I am coming along, Powell, just as we planned. There will be no more discussion.”

  “Whatever you say, Mr. Ducharme,” Powell agreed with a shrug.

  Ducharme went on as if he hadn’t even heard the man, saying, “Your job is only to find Breckinridge Wallace and bring him to me.” He lifted the shotgun and ran his right hand along the smooth wood of the stock. “And then I will blow his Gott-damned head off.”

  Chapter Seven

  Two weeks had passed since the fight with the Blackfeet. During that time, Breckinridge and his companions hadn’t seen any more hostiles. Breck could usually sense when somebody was watching him, and he didn’t experience that, either. As far as he could tell, he and the other three trappers were the only human beings in this valley.

  That was the way they wanted it, at least for now.

  They had taken three dozen more pelts and now had a pretty good stack of them. Breckinridge wasn’t sure how many they needed in order to make the trip profitable. He was willing to keep working as long as the other men were. There was a limit to how many pelts they could carry in their canoes, though.

  One morning, he and Morgan were out checking the traps on one of the creeks when something caused him to pause and lift his head as a frown creased his forehead.

  Morgan saw the reaction and asked, “What’s wrong, Breck?”

  Breckinridge sniffed the air a couple of times and then said, “You smell that?”

  Morgan took a deep breath, as well, causing his chest to expand. His eyes widened in surprise as he looked at Breckinridge and said, “Maybe I’m crazy, but that smells like . . . coffee!”

  “Yep,” Breckinridge agreed. “It surely does.”

  “Maybe one of the other fellas went back to camp and started a fresh pot brewing.”

  Breckinridge shook his head.

  “We’re too far from camp to be smellin’ it like that, and anyway, the wind’s comin’ from the wrong direction.”

  “Yeah, that’s true,” Morgan agreed, slowly nodding. “But who else could it be?”

  “More trappers, I reckon. Injuns don’t drink coffee, do they?”

  “I never heard tell of it if they do.”

  “I don’t know about you,” Breckinridge said, “but I’m a mite too curious not to find out who’s doin’ that. Chances are, they don’t mean us any harm . . .”

  “But there’s no guarantee of that,” Morgan finished. “We know there are murderers and thieves out here. We ran into enough of them on the way upriver!”

  Both young men wore grim expressions now. They remembered what had happened to the rest of their original party, including Morgan’s father. If there was danger lurking in the area, they needed to know about it.

  “Come on,” Breckinridge said. “Let’s follow our noses.”

  Since they hadn’t come across any beaver carcasses in their traps so far this morning, they were able to move pretty quickly as they trotted alongside the creek. Breckinridge knew that up ahead the stream twisted around several sharp bends that formed a big S-curve.

  At the first of those bends, the creek pooled up to form a swimming hole. Breckinridge and his friends had splashed around in that pool a few times since coming to the valley. The snowmelt that helped feed the stream meant that the water was pretty chilly, but Breck found it invigorating.

  There was also a big, slanted slab of rock at the edge of the pool where a fella could stand and dive off. Breckinridge enjoyed that, too.

  As they drew closer, the aroma of coffee got stronger. Somebody definitely had a camp somewhere up here, Breckinridge thought. The creek’s curving course left a good-sized piece of ground sticking out with water on three sides, complete with trees for firewood and plenty of grass for horses or mules to graze on, if somebody had draft animals like that with them. He and the others had actually considered making their camp there, before deciding on the spot on the bluff about a mile north of here.

  Breckinridge slowed down and held out a hand to signal for Morgan to do likewise. As they came to a stop, Morgan asked quietly, “Do we just waltz in?”

  “Seems like a good way to get ourselves shot,” Breckinridge replied.

  “That’s what I was thinking. Maybe we’d better scout out the lay of the land first.”

  Breckinridge nodded in agreement. It was difficult for somebody as big as him to make himself smaller, but he tried to crouch as he warily moved forward through the cottonwoods, aspens, and willows along the creek bank.

  As they came in sight of the first bend where the swimming hole was located, Breckinridge suddenly froze. Beside him, Morgan did likewise.

  Both young men had spotted movement on that big rock looming over the pool. As they watched from about fifty yards away, a figure climbed to the top of the slanting stone slab and stood at its edge, poised there to dive into the water.

  The sight that greeted their eyes was just about the last thing Breckinridge and Morgan would have expected to see out here in the middle of the wilderness.

  The person standing at the edge of the rock was a young woman.

  And she wore not a stitch of clothing on this fine morning.

  Morgan muttered something under his breath. Breckinridge didn’t know what it was, nor did he care. He was too entranced by the unexpected beauty of this discovery to think about anything else.

  The girl had fair hair so pale it was almost white. It was loose and hung around her bare shoulders and far down her back. Her skin had a golden tinge to it, and there was plenty of it on view. She was finely shaped, fine enough to take a young man’s breath away like a punch in the gut.

  She raised her arms, bent her knees slightly, and sprang off the rock, cleaving the air in a dive that demonstrated she had an abundance of grace to go along with her beauty. She struck the surface of the pool cleanly and vanished underneath it. There was barely a splash, and hardly any ripples.

  After a
few heartbeats, Breckinridge realized he was holding his breath, waiting for her to come back up again.

  When she did, it was with an explosion of water droplets that seemed to hang suspended in the air around her. Her skin shimmered with moisture. The water had turned her hair slightly darker, but it was still pale as she slicked it back on her head, away from her face.

  She treaded water for a moment, then stroked easily over to where the pool wasn’t as deep. She was able to stand up there as she began washing.

  “We . . . we shouldn’t be watching this,” Morgan said, his voice husky.

  “No, I reckon not,” Breckinridge agreed. He had trouble tearing his eyes away from the young woman, though, and he noticed that Morgan wasn’t looking down at the ground or turning away, either.

  They were both so captivated by what they were seeing that neither would have noticed if an entire herd of buffalo had stampeded up behind them.

  But there was no ignoring the harsh voice that suddenly rasped, “Turn around and stop starin’ at my gal, you scurvy varmints, or I’ll blow your damned heads off!”

  Chapter Eight

  Breckinridge knew a threat like that almost had to be backed up by a gun. His first impulse was to whirl around, bring up his rifle, and fire.

  With an effort, he controlled that urge. From the sound of it, the girl in the pool was the stranger’s daughter, so Breckinridge figured the man had a right to be upset when he found a couple of two-legged varmints staring at her unadorned charms.

  “Take it easy,” he told Morgan, who had jumped a little at the threat. As a rule, Breckinridge had never been the voice of reason in any group—he was more the impulsive type—but in this case he thought deliberation might be a good idea. “Let’s do what the fella says.”

  “And put them guns down,” the man added. “I see ’em comin’ my way, I’m gonna shoot.”

  Breckinridge bent over and placed his rifle on the ground. Morgan sighed and did likewise, with obvious reluctance. Breck held his hands at elbow height and a little away from his body so they were in plain sight, then slowly turned around so that his back was to the pool.

  He felt a pang of loss and disappointment when he couldn’t see the young woman anymore. She’d been running her fingers through her hair, completely unself-conscious and obviously unaware that she was being watched, and the sight was a spectacular one.

  The man facing them about ten feet away wasn’t an impressive specimen. He was a bandy-legged little runt, in fact, wearing an old set of buckskins that appeared to be stiff with accumulated grease and filth. A coonskin cap perched on a tangled bird’s nest of gray hair. A tuft of beard hanging down from his weak chin made him look like a billy goat. His nose was crooked and his mouth had only stubs of teeth left in it.

  If a gorgeous young woman like the one bathing in the pool had indeed sprung from this disreputable geezer’s loins, it was a plumb miracle, thought Breckinridge.

  “Who are you,” the old-timer whined, “and what’re you doin’ here ’sides spyin’ on a innocent gal?”

  “We could ask you the same thing, mister,” Morgan snapped.

  “Don’t you mouth off at me, boy,” the old man growled as he lifted the gun in his gnarled hands. “My patience is wearin’ mighty thin.”

  He might not be impressive, but the weapon he held was. It was an old-fashioned blunderbuss with such a wide barrel that looking down it was like staring into the mouth of a cannon. A gun like that could blow a huge hole through a man, especially at short range like this.

  “Hold your horses, mister,” Breckinridge said. “We’re not lookin’ for trouble. My name is Breckinridge Wallace, and this here is my friend Morgan Baxter. We’re fur trappers.”

  “Didn’t figure you was whalers,” the old man said with a sneer. “We’s a long ways from the ocean.”

  “What the hell does that even mean?” Morgan asked.

  Breckinridge went on hastily, “We didn’t intend to spy on your daughter, mister. Truly we didn’t. It’s just that when we walked up, she was standin’ up there on that rock, and then she dived into the pool, and . . . well, it was sort of hard to look away, if you know what I mean.”

  The old man’s tongue came out and licked over his dry lips, reminding Breckinridge a little of a lizard.

  “She is a right toothsome morsel o’ gal flesh, ain’t she?” he asked with a leer.

  Breckinridge frowned. The comment struck him as an improper thing for a father to be saying about his own daughter, but he supposed there were all types in the world and not everybody shared his notions of what was fitting.

  The old man suddenly leaned to the side, while still keeping the blunderbuss pointed at Breckinridge and Morgan, and shouted, “Annie! Annie Belle! Get on outta there and get back to the wagons! You done wasted enough time with that bathin’ nonsense.”

  Breckinridge tried not to, but he turned his head to look toward the pool again. It was like a giant hand had hold of his chin and was twisting his neck around. The girl waded to shore, water rolling off her skin in sparkling trails, and called, “All right, Nicodemus!” She paused on the bank to wring some of the water from her long, pale hair and added, “What’re you doing over there in the woods?”

  “Never you mind about that,” he told her. “Get that saucy behind o’ yours movin’.”

  Definitely not the way a father would talk, thought Breckinridge. And the girl had called the old-timer Nicodemus, not Pa.

  She shrugged and disappeared around the big rock slab.

  “You’re lookin’ at her again,” the old man accused. “I seen you. I got a good mind to charge you.”

  “Charge us?” Morgan said. “You charge men to look at your daughter while she’s naked?”

  Nicodemus frowned and asked, “What’re you talkin’ about? I said she was my gal, not my daughter.”

  “Good Lord!” Breckinridge exclaimed as the dawn broke inside his brain. “She’s a whore!”

  “I reckon I’d rather call her a good-time gal,” the old-timer said. He sucked on a tooth stub for a second, then went on, “That don’t sound bad. Nicodemus Finch’s Good-Time Gals. Maybe I’ll have one of ’em paint that on the wagons, if any of ’em can write.”

  Breckinridge was starting to grasp what was going on here. He asked, “How many, uh, good-time gals do you have with you, Mr. Finch?”

  “Half a dozen, and they’re all too good for the likes o’ you, if that’s what you’re thinkin’.”

  “It wasn’t,” Breckinridge said, although to tell the truth the thought had sort of snuck into the back of his mind.

  Finch motioned with the blunderbuss and said, “You never did tell me how come you’re sneakin’ around here.”

  “We smelled your coffee,” Morgan said. “We knew somebody had to be camped nearby, and we just wanted to find out who you were.”

  Breckinridge added, “We’ve been trappin’ in this valley for a while.”

  “Ain’t tryin’ to claim it belongs to you, are you?” Finch asked sharply.

  “No. I don’t reckon it belongs to anybody, except maybe the government, since all this territory was part of the Louisiana Purchase, wasn’t it?”

  “I don’t know nothin’ about that,” Finch snapped. “All I know is my bunch is settin’ up for the rendezvous, and ain’t nobody hornin’ in on it, especially not that damned Mahone.” His already beady eyes narrowed even more. “Say, you two varmints ain’t Mahone men, are you?”

  “Never heard of the fella,” Breckinridge said honestly.

  “If I find out you’re lyin’ to me, you’ll be sorry. I can’t abide that damn Mahone or anybody who’d be low-down enough to work for him.”

  “Well, that’s not us,” Morgan said. “Like Breck told you, we don’t know anything about anybody named Mahone.”

  “We did hear that there was gonna be a rendezvous somewhere around here, though,” Breckinridge added.

  The old-timer snorted and said, “Damn right. Biggest and b
est rendezvous since Green River. And it’s gonna be right up there ’round the bend on Finch’s Point.” He looked pleased with himself. “That’s what I’m gonna call it. Finch’s Point.”

  “Sounds like a fine idea.” Breckinridge started edging back toward his rifle. “Now, if you’ll let us get our guns, we’ll be movin’ on. Need to get back to our traplines—”

  Finch took a quick step forward and jabbed the blunderbuss’s huge barrel at them.

  “You just hold on, the both o’ you!” he said. “I ain’t sure I trust you yet. You could still be lyin’ to me about workin’ for Black Tom Mahone. You reckon I want you runnin’ back to him and tellin’ him all about my plans? No, sir, you’re comin’ with me into camp until I’m satisfied you’re tellin’ me the truth.”

  “But we got traps to check—” Breckinridge began.

  “Now, hold on, Breck, like the man says,” Morgan spoke up, taking him by surprise. “Mr. Finch has got a point. We need to go with him and talk to him some more so we can convince him we’re not working for his enemies.”

  Breckinridge’s eyes narrowed. He said, “You mean go with him to the camp where the rest of those, uh, good-time gals are?”

  “I suppose that’s right,” Morgan said, as if he hadn’t thought about that very thing.

  For a second, Breckinridge considered arguing with both of them. Then he thought about the blunderbuss Nicodemus Finch kept waving at them. As old at the thing was, it might not fire at all—or it might have a hair-trigger.

  He thought about the young woman they had seen dive off the rock into the pool, too. Annie Belle, Finch had called her. If they went with the old man, they might get an even better look at her, Breckinridge realized.

  Well, a closer look, anyway. Breckinridge doubted if it could get any better.

  Finally he nodded and said, “All right, Mr. Finch, we’ll come with you. I don’t want to lose these rifles, though.”

  “I’ll send somebody to fetch ’em in,” Finch promised. “Now, rattle your hocks and head on up the creek!”