Skittles watched her, amused, perhaps contemptuous. He urged the party forward. Victoria squeezed Skye’s hand and then retreated. There would be time for a reunion later—maybe. Skye had a bad feeling eating at him, and didn’t like any of this.
When they reached The Robber’s great lodge, the blanket-wrapped headmen had gathered, and were cheerfully awaiting their guest.
“All right, Skittles, I’ll translate. They don’t know much English.”
Skittles nodded.
“Chief Robber, I am honored to be among you, and pleased to tell you we will be trading for robes and hides and pelts and all manner of furs,” he said. “My name is Mister Skittles, and my company of traders has settled a little way up the river. Tell them that.”
Skye did, translating into Crow as best he could.
“We will be trading many things and offering good prices,” Skittles said. “We are pleased to be in this camp of the mighty Absarokas.”
Skye translated. The Robber asked him a question.
“The chief asks whether you brought gifts for him,” Skye said.
“I have gifts! A mighty knife for the chief! Green River knives for these gentlemen!”
The Robber nodded. “Ask the trader if he will trade with our enemies next.”
“The chief wants to know whether you’ll be trading with the Crows’ enemies next.”
“Tell him we only trade with our friends the Crows,” Skittles said.
Skye paused. It was always a temptation to add or subtract or comment on what had been said. But a translator has a sacred duty to be exact. Mendacious translators cause more grief than the harshest truth. Skye knew he must honor what was said. In any case, there were some in the village who knew English.
“The trader says he only trades with his friends, the Absaroka,” he said.
The Robber nodded, pleased with this pledge.
thirty-four
Chief Robber was a discerning man. He was given to the Indian way of weighing words carefully, often with a silence that white men found disconcerting. He stood there in quiet contemplation, aging but with unlined features, as keen a man as Skye had ever known.
The villagers waited quietly. The Robber gazed at Skye, who stood two or three paces from Skittles, rigid and stern.
“It is said among us that you have in your wagons the spirits that make men mad. Is it so?”
“Oh, yes, Chief,” Skittles replied. Skye translated.
“I do not think these things are good for the young men. It makes them bad,” The Robber said.
Skittles listened to Skye, and nodded.
“I think these traders are welcome if they agree not to trade the spirits that make men mad for robes. Tell the trader this. Ask him if he agrees.”
“Chief Robber says you are welcome to trade if you agree not to trade for spirits. He wants your agreement.”
“Why, tell the esteemed chief that we will trade only for those things his people wish to have.”
Skye translated and The Robber was not satisfied. “Tell the trader he must agree to serve no spirits. That is my word.”
Skittles bowed slightly, smiled, and nodded. “No spirits,” he said. “But I can’t always control my young men.”
Chief Robber’s eyes turned merry. “Tell him I can’t control my young men either. That is why there will be no spirits.”
Skittles smiled easily, enjoying the joke. “Tell the chief we will be ready to trade as soon as I return to the wagons.”
“We will see,” said The Robber, a sudden smile on his face. Skye sensed the agreement would not be taken seriously by either party.
He followed Skittles back to the wagon. Victoria rushed up to him, alarm in her eyes, but a gesture from Skye quieted her. She sensed trouble.
Skittles’s men had set up shop. There was a paltry array of small steel items: awls, knives, fire steels, and arrow points. In addition there was sugar and coffee, hard candy, some one-pound casks of powder, small pigs of lead, caps, vermillion, beads, needles and thread. That was it. But nearby was a great black kettle brimming with firewater, hastily manufactured while Skittles was parleying with the chief. A dozen tin cups and a stack of hollowed gourds were at the ready.
Skittles looked over the array, nodded, and gave his men a thumbs-up.
“Mister Skye, you’ll translate. The price list’s on that tailgate. One good robe for a drink. If it’s mangy or worn, half a drink. No exceptions. The rest, awls, knives, and all that, it’s there. Tell’em, and don’t back off.”
“No,” said Skye.
“What do you mean, no?”
“Didn’t you just make a contract with Chief Robber?”
Skittles smiled, dangerously. “No, a little palaver isn’t a contract. Now, if you want to stay out of trouble, do as I say.”
“No,” said Skye.
A flame leaped up in Skittles’s eyes. “No? No? You’re saying no?” Then he saw the villagers drifting close. Everything was set. “You′ll learn the hard way,” he said. “If I deal with you now it’d disrupt my business.”
“Do that.”
Skye had the measure of the man now. For Skittles, a contract was a means to take advantage of others. It wasn’t an agreement for mutual gain. If a contract was inconvenient, as far as Skittles believed, it didn’t exist. In Skittles’s new world, powerful combines would force the weak or the wounded into contracts and use contracts, enforced by courts, to bleed the world’s laboring classes white. It all came clear to Skye. He saw enough of that in England. He was seeing even more of it in the Yank republic. A contract was nothing but a serfdom agreement when it was negotiated between a humble man and a rich combination. Slavery, papered over by the notion that both parties going into a contract were on equal footing.
But there was not time to ponder that now.
“What, what?” cried Victoria.
He saw her reaching for him, mystified by all this. He caught her hand and held it. “No time. It’s a long story. There’s something you must do. These are bad men. I’m their prisoner. I’ll explain that later. Tell every woman in the village to hide robes. Take them out of the lodges. Hide them away from the men. Hide them!”
“But, Skye …”
“Do it!”
“Who would listen?”
“Try!”
Something steeled within her. “I will.”
“Good! Then help me escape. I’ll tell you later.”
“Escape, Skye?”
He saw wild fear in her now. It matched his own fear. “Save your people from death and grief,” he said.
She glanced bleakly, then walked away, her pace urgent.
Behind Skye, the trading had started. Young men were the first. They heaped luxurious buffalo robes, thick with curly hair, onto the back of a wagon, where one of Skittles’s smooth-shaven men lifted it, examined it, and then gave the young man a chit. Already there were twenty splendid robes laid flat in the bed of the wagon, and more pouring in.
Skye glanced at the rest. A few of the women were trading pelts for sugar and beads and needles and thread. An old man, wrapped in a blanket, was trading an otter skin for a knife and ten arrow points.
Skittles smiled blandly, glanced maliciously at Skye, and urged people to step right up. The firewater flowed. Tin cups, handed down to grinning youths. One sipped, coughed, whooped, spit, and downed the entire cupful with a gasp. That had cost him a good buffalo robe.
“Oheeee!” he howled.
A toothless old granny dropped a worn and hairless robe on the wagon gate, and waited patiently. “Half a cup, grandma,” said Mister Balsamwood, who appeared to be doing most of the evaluating. She nodded. He gave her a chit. She traded it for a tin cup and sipped, sputtered, and then smiled. She sat down and sipped slowly, nodding and smiling at the passing parade.
There went her winter night’s warmth, Skye thought.
He saw a headman he admired, Talking Drum, glaring thunderously at all this.
“I
wish to talk to you,” Skye said.
“My ears are stopped. I will not listen.”
“I tried to prevent this.”
“You lied to us.”
“I translated truly.”
“You will never be welcome again among The Robber’s people.”
“I was brought here as a prisoner.”
Talking Drum’s scorn laced his face. Then he smiled cruelly, the sort of smile that mocks and destroys. “I will tell The Robber. The Robber will be entertained,” he said.
The powerful headman abandoned Skye, walked slowly and massively through the throng, eliciting swift sharp glances. He headed toward a young warrior, Eagle’s Claw, and slapped the spirits from the youth’s hand.
The boy’s temper rose until he saw the massive headman looming over him, ready to deliver ten times more than he got. The youth slipped away.
Talking Drum cut a swath through the crowd, slowing things down, until Skittles approached, with a smile and a gift.
“Here’s to the chieftain,” he said, handing the headman a good hatchet
Talking Drum took it, threw it into the soft earth, where its blade sank up to the hilt. In an instant, half a dozen of Skittles’s smooth-shaven men surrounded the headman, and handed him a cup of spirits.
Talking Drum poured them into the ground and walked away.
Skye took his chance during the confrontation and hastened out of the trading camp, trotting toward The Robber’s village, eliciting stares as he passed scores of people lugging heavy robes and lush fox and weasel and mink and wolf furs, or elk hides, or deerskins.
They greeted him cheerfully. He hurried into the circle of lodges, found it half deserted, headed straight toward the small lodge of the Tobacco Planter, Walks to the Top, collected his breath, and scratched.
No one responded.
He scratched the lodge door again.
“I see no token of your esteem,” the old man said.
Skye had nothing. Then he thought of his green flannel shirt, and swiftly stripped it off and laid it before the door. The winter air chilled him at once. After a long wait, the door parted, the seer beckoned him in, and took the shirt.
“Your vision came true,” Skye said, preempting the talk and cutting straight to the heart of things. “You said that if the mare and my medicine colt remained here, disaster would strike The Robber’s village. That is happening.”
The old man stared, swift and sharp and also startled.
“I was brought here as a prisoner by bad men who plan to take away every robe and pelt in the village, and debauch the young men. Now I am trying to prevent it.”
“A prisoner, Mister Skye?”
“They gave me the option of leaving them one bitter cold day. Naked.”
“What are they doing?”
“They do not have a license, a permission, from the Fathers, and they are ruthless. There will be much weeping.”
“What do you want of me?”
“The headmen think I’m one of the traders. They are deaf to me. I cannot tell them of the trouble, or what has happened to me, or what will fall upon this village. You can. You are an elder. Chief Robber and the headmen can stop this.”
Walks to the Top stared into the ashes of his fire, and then into the warm winter day.
“That which I saw in the sweetgrass smoke and the clouds will come to pass,” he said. “I will do nothing. Who can resist an ill wind?”
thirty-five
He felt the cold air on his back. He needed a shirt. It was a bright winter’s day. If Skittles’s men hadn’t made off with his buckskin shirt, it would be among his things. But first, find Victoria. She needed to know the whole story.
He hunted through the village. A few women were indeed carrying the heavy robes away. Somehow Victoria had talked them into it. He found her collecting robes in her brother’s lodge.
“Oh, Skye!” she cried, and flew to him. They hugged with all the pent-up love that months of separation had built in them.
“Oh, Skye,” she cried, touching his face, running her hand through his shorn hair. “What? What?”
He pulled her down to the robes and sat beside her. “Too long to tell now. No time. I’m a captive, or they think I am. These traders are evil. They are not offering a little whiskey and a lot of other goods. They mean to make The Robber’s whole village crazy and walk off with every robe and pelt here. The Fathers in Washington don’t know about them. The traders think they own me. They said they’d keep my possessions, Jawbone and the mare, even my clothing, if I didn’t obey. I’ll need your help. My rifle and gear and the horses need to be taken away and hidden. The Hawken’s one I got at a trading post.
“We need to let Chief Robber know. And the headmen. Maybe they can stop this. Let them know that evil is here among them. And beware. These man are armed and capable of anything.”
“Skye, what first?”
“Talk, Victoria. Tell them. Tell everyone. Warn them away. Hide robes. Stop the young men from drinking the spirits.”
“How did you lose your green shirt?”
“Gift to Walks to the Top.”
“Did he believe you?”
“Yes, but he says it will all happen just as he dreamed it.”
“Sonofabitch”
Skye laughed suddenly. Victoria was an army.
“Come,” she said.
He followed her to their own lodge, which he had never seen. Its new hides shone golden in the bright light, and smoke had not yet blackened the top of the cone. There were half a dozen robes within, but little else. All this had been a gift of her brother and his wives.
She plucked up a buckskin shirt.
“Try this.”
“Victoria—”
“I was making it for my brother. Maybe it fits.”
The shirt had been sewn of the softest doeskin he had ever felt in his fingers, fringed and partly quilled. There was a red geometric design over the heart.
He slid it on, feeling its soft silkiness cover him against the winter air.
“Damn! I make good shirts!”
This one had an irregular hem that followed the contour of the hide, dipping low on the left side. It had long sleeves, fringed all the way to draw off water.
“I feel like a chief,” he said.
“You’re my chief. Ho ho, Skye, let’s get those bastards. Now you got medicine. This here shirt, it’s big medicine.”
He didn’t need an invitation. He stepped into the light somehow transformed. Now he was a man of the mountains again, not some interloper in a green shirt, like all the others over there in their green flannels.
“I go talk. Then we see what we can do,” she said.
He watched her race toward a knot of angry headmen, who plainly didn’t like what was being purveyed over at the trading camp.
He had his own business to attend, and headed along the riverbank to the trading camp. He had to acknowledge there were a lot of happy people on the trail and around the camp. He had never seen so many smiles in a village. Young men swaggered expansively, parading themselves before the maidens. But so were cheerful wives and sisters, old warriors, and scores of older wives, who had bargained for sugar and needles and thread and awls, but also tried a cup of the brew.
In a glance Skye saw that one wagon was nearly filled with robes, carefully laid flat. And that Skittles’s men were busy brewing another batch of firewater, this one no doubt thinner and meaner than the first. Less of the spirits but more of the cayenne pepper and maybe now a pinch of the bug powder used by fur outfits to control insect damage to hides and furs.
The camp was perfectly orderly. Young men stood around in circles, sipping out of gourd cups, horn spoons, and sometimes a tin cup. They were at ease, laughing, enjoying the crisp bright afternoon. In small knots old men wrapped blankets tight, folded their arms, and glowered at those who were abandoning the traditional Crow ways.
Skye’s plan was simple. Spirit his horses out of there, along with e
verything in his packs, especially his rifle. Victoria would hide them. Then he was free. Nothing Skittles might throw at him would compel him to stay. After that, somehow, wreck the trade as much as possible, get these people back to their lodges.
And after that … he eyed the well-guarded wagon with the casks in it, knowing he would have his hands full. But if he could destroy that pure grain alcohol, trading would come to an abrupt halt.
He headed into the traders’ camp only to run into Skittles.
“Where’ve you been?”
“In the village.”
“Why aren’t you in your green shirt?”
“I gave it to a powerful man.”
“Gave company property away, did you? That’s going to cost you. You’re out of uniform. That’s going to cost you. All my men wear green shirts. That’s so the redskins know we’re a company. Now what’m I going to do with you?” He eyed the beautifully made shirt. “Put that in the wagon, Skye. You just traded it for the green shirt.”
Skye started to walk away, but heard the snick of a revolver being cocked.
“No you don’t, Skye. I’m not done with you.”
Skye doubted the man would shoot. It would start a riot. But there was no telling about Skittles. He stood quietly, not liking that black bore pointed at his midsection.
“You don’t seem to understand, Mister Skye. You’re my employee.”
“Slave.”
“Go to that wagon and start spreading those robes flat. I want every robe just as flat as it gets. We can put a lot more robes into a wagon if they’re loaded right.”
“Slave,” Skye said.
Skittles laughed. “I can read your mind, Mister Skye. You’re wondering where your nags are, and your outfit and your rifle. I don’t know what you see in that ugly colt and spavined mare, but they make handy hostages, don’t they? They’re well guarded, Mister Skye, along with your other truck. If you even approach the pen we’ve put them in, the first bullet goes into them, not you.”
“Thank you for warning me, mate.”
“And don’t suppose you can send your little trollop after them. The guards are well aware of the slut.”
“Victoria is my wife.”
The Fire Arrow Page 18