by V. J. Banis
Morton looked relieved by the information. “Oh, sure, squaws. But that ain’t the same as a real woman. Couldn’t take a real woman out there.”
“Mister Morton, I can ride, and walk,” she added with a quick glance toward Summers. “And shoot a gun, better than my husband could, I assure you. And I have the same limbs and accoutrements as an Indian woman.”
“I don’t know about your coot, coot—”
“And I will pay a thousand dollars,” she finished.
That silenced him in mid-word. He stared openmouthed at her for a long moment. Summers, watching the trapper’s face, followed his changing thoughts like a map: the quick flare of greed, the speculative interest in Claire Denon’s bosom, weighing all the possible rewards.
“That’s five hundred for you, and five for me,” Summers said aloud. He ignored her startled glance, concentrating on Morton.
“How’d you get into this?” Morton asked, eyes narrowing.
“She’ll need someone to take over once you’ve shown her the spot.”
“I got me a partner,” Morton said. “Four each for us, the rest for you.”
“Three for me, you split the rest.”
Morton was silent for a moment, his lips moving as he did the necessary mathematics. He seemed satisfied finally. “When do we start?” he asked.
“The sooner the better,” Summers said.
“Ten days?” Morton nodded. Summers looked at Claire Denon for the first time since he’d volunteered the information that he was going.
It was her turn to be silently thoughtful. She was not fond of Mister Summers, and his change of heart had caught her a bit off balance, but his quick explanation that she would need someone as a guide once she’d been shown the spot where Peter had been left was certainly true. True, too, was the fact that, however despicable Summers might be as a man, he came highly recommended as a guide to the west.
Moreover, she was no fool. She too had seen Mister Morton’s quick glance down the front of her dress. How long alone with him and his partner before she was forced to defend herself? At least Summers had made clear his lack of interest in her as a woman, and though hardly flattering, it was a comfort.
“The sooner the better,” she agreed aloud.
* * * * * * *
Summers was silent on the walk back to her hotel. He seemed almost to be angry with her, which made her uncomfortable. She took refuge in a stream of small talk: an inventory of items she would pick up for their journey, a dry comment on Mister Morton’s intelligence, a reference to the fireflies blinking on and off in the darkness as they passed. She was completely unprepared when Summers stopped and, taking her shoulders in his hands as he had earlier, but much more gently this time, he turned her about to face him.
“Look, you don’t know what you’re getting into,” he said, his expression suddenly intense. “I know the part of the country we’re heading for, there’s nothing there but mud flats and hills. And that prairie, stretching west farther than the eye can see. The Indians say it goes on forever, without end. You don’t want to die out there.”
“I’m following my husband, Mister Summers. If need be, I too will go on forever.”
“Why? Because you love him? Or because you feel guilty about something that happened in the past?”
“My motives are no concern of yours.”
“Oh, but they are. We’ll be together for months, maybe even longer than you lived with your husband.”
“The solution is very simple. If you are uncomfortable with my actions or their motives, you needn’t accompany me.” Her eyes narrowed suspiciously. “Why did you change your mind, anyway?”
He stared down at her. He had been questioning his own motives since they’d left Letitia’s, and cursing himself for a fool. Of course, he knew Morton well enough—or the type anyway—to know what Morton had been thinking when he looked her over. He’d been thinking that once they were away from the city he’d take whatever he wanted. Not just the thousand, but whatever else she had on her, and her as well. And if he came back two, three months later without her, who was to question his story of an Indian attack or an overturned canoe? Such things happened to men who set out with trappers and guides into the west, where the only law was survival. Most likely it had been her husband’s fate, and her prospects of a better one were slim indeed. Though why he should care was entirely beyond him.
“I lost a lot of money at cards this week,” he said aloud. “Running short. Yours is the best offer that’s come along. You’re overpaying, you know.”
“I’d have paid twice that much.”
And so much for trying to warn you, he thought. All Morton needed was to know the thousand was only half of what she’d got on her. She wouldn’t have lasted a hundred miles out of the town.
“You’d best leave most of that money stashed here in town,” he said. “You won’t need it where you’re going.”
“What I don’t need is your telling me what to do,” she told him. “I will remind you, Mister Summers, that I have hired you for a job. I am your employer, and you are my hired help. In the future, you will do what I say, not the other way round.”
To her surprise he only grinned at that. “You try pulling strings to make me dance, lady, and I’ll leave you to your Mister Morton. And the only kind of dance he’s got in mind is one you do laying down.”
“How dare you?” She lifted a hand to slap him, but he was quicker, snatching her wrist in a cruelly tight grip.
They were standing before a darkened house with a neat picket fence and a curving walk that led to front steps. Somewhere nearby at an open window a girl began to croon a lullaby, perhaps, or some wordless ballad.
He was suddenly aware of her perfume. Or was it only the flowers along the fence, hollyhock and sweet pea, and distant roses?
“Maybe that’s what you want,” he said in a lower voice, deliberately cruel because he was angry with her high-falutin’ ways, angry with himself for having gotten involved when he hadn’t intended to at all. “Maybe your husband’s been gone too long. Or maybe that’s why he left in the first place?”
He pulled her closer, lowering his face until it was only inches from hers, his eyes searching the depths of hers.
“Let me go,” she said in little more than a whisper.
A buggy rounded the corner behind them and came briskly along the street. It seemed to break the trance into which he’d fallen. His fingers unclenched her wrist. She rubbed it gingerly with her other hand, her eyes flashing angrily back at his for a moment before she stepped past him and hurried on down the street, walking so fast she was nearly running.
Summers watched her go, thinking he ought not leave her alone. St. Louis was only slightly more civilized than the land to the west.
As if summoned by his thoughts, a stranger stepped out of the alley she had just gone by, falling into step behind her, but so stealthily that there was little doubt in Summers’ mind what the man intended.
The Englishwoman rounded a corner. Before the stranger could reach it and round it after her, Summers had caught up with him, his long legs covering the distance with easy speed as silently as a wraith. One moment the stranger had thought himself alone on the dark street with the blonde girl, and the next someone had seized his collar roughly and, spinning him around, shoved him hard against a brick wall.
“What the hell...?”
“Leave her alone.”
“Who are you—what business is it of yours anyway?”
A cloud that had enwebbed the moon tired of its quarry and moved on. In the silver light that cascaded from above the stranger saw the knife in the other man’s hand held level with his belly, its point barely touching his shirtfront.
“I was just walking,” he said quickly. “Just getting some air.”
“You’ll breathe it better down that way,” Summers said, pointing.
He let go his hold and watched the stranger run until he had disappeared in the direction pointed. Then, staying well
behind and in the shadows, he followed Claire Denon until he had seen her enter her hotel and the light come on in the window of her room.
Without knowing quite why, he stood on the porch of a dry goods store across the street, watching and waiting until, some minutes later, the light went out again, and he knew she’d gone to bed. Finally he set out for his own home, wishing, after all, that he’d stayed around Letitia’s, and yet not sufficiently of a mind to go back.
CHAPTER FIVE
They set out ten days later in a pair of birch-bark canoes. Morton and his partner, a wiry little French Canadian named Leblanc, led the way, with Claire and Summers in the rear.
Though she disliked the look and smell of the well-worn hide outfits Summers and Morton both wore, she had been persuaded that this was the most practical apparel for the sort of journey they were to make. Accordingly she had purchased the necessary hides and after considerable searching found an Indian woman, mistress to an absent trapper, who had made her a rather unorthodox costume: a fringe-trimmed shirt not unlike Summers’ own, and a wide, flaring deerskin skirt breaking at mid-calf. A pair of high leather boots took care of concealing her legs, though the skirt’s short length earned her some critical stares from the ladies and a few guffaws from the local men. For protection from the sun she found a flat-brimmed hat, and at Summers’ suggestion she’d tied a long scarf about her neck. “You’ll need it to keep the sweat out of your eyes,” he’d told her a bit inelegantly. “And to swat away the flies.”
* * * * * * *
Summers sat to the rear of the canoe to paddle, placing her in the bow to watch for sandbars.
“I could paddle too, you know,” she argued. “I didn’t intend to remain useless.”
“Nothing useless about watching for sandbars,” he told her. “The bottom of these rivers changes daily, hourly even. The last thing we want is a hole in the bottom.”
By the time they’d traveled an hour or so, she was having misgivings about her costume; she found it quite uncomfortable, the material stiff and scratchy and unpleasantly warm in the later summer sunshine.
“It’s got to be lived in,” Summers explained when she complained. “The sweat and the heat will soften it up, and it stretches to mold itself to your body like it was your own skin. You’ll see. Six weeks from now you wouldn’t want to trade it for anything else.”
“Except perhaps a bath and a clean dress,” was her reply. She looked back over her shoulder at him, watching the ease and grace with which he handled the long paddle.
“Better watch where we’re going,” he warned.
“It’s all clear ahead,” she said.
A moment later the canoe buried its nose in one of the river’s shifting sandbars. Summers let fly with a string of curses and attempted to use his paddle to push them free, to no avail.
“What’ll we do now?” she asked.
“We’ll have to get out and free it,” he said. Suiting action to words, he removed the powder horn tied to his waist, and laying that and his gun in the bottom of the canoe, he scrambled over the side into the swiftly moving muddy water.
She sat where she was until he turned ice blue eyes on her. “Well?” he said.
“But I can’t swim,” she stammered, genuinely frightened of the treacherous-looking water sweeping about the boat. “Suppose I lose my balance?”
“Then you can remind yourself while you’re floating downstream to watch out for sandbars. Now get out and give me a hand with this before it starts breaking up and we both end up floating downstream.”
His look and his tone made it clear that he was deadly serious. She took another anxious look at the water and then, following his example, clambered a bit ungracefully into the water.
It was not particularly cold, but it was waist deep and the current was every bit as swift and dangerous as it had looked. She clung to the side of the canoe, trying to get her balance on the muddy bottom.
“Pull!” Summers shouted, tugging the canoe back from the sandbar. She attempted to pull with him, lost her footing, and sank beneath the water’s brown surface.
He pulled her up gasping and retching, holding to the canoe with his free hand.
“Damnation,” he swore. “Can’t you do anything right?”
The leather outfit, thoroughly soaked now with water, felt as if it weighed a ton; she could barely manage to stand up in it, and the slightest shift in the current would have toppled her again, had he not been supporting her.
“I’m—not—used to—pushing canoes—about in rivers,” she managed to reply between gasps for breath.
“If you’d been watching where we were going,” he sneered.
“I didn’t see it,” she said, and to her dismay as well as his she began to cry. She was soaked and chilled, and her limbs had begun to ache with the struggle to keep herself upright in the water. To make matters worse, she was quite aware that their present predicament was her fault.
“Damnation,” he said again, and a moment later, “Stop that infernal bawling. Here, just hang on to the canoe here, and brace yourself against the current, so’s when I get it free it won’t go flying downriver without us.”
He left her by the stern and went to the bow to attempt to pry it free from the sand. Claire was so wet and miserable that she concentrated her energy on clinging to the canoe for safety, forgetting the rest of his instructions.
The results were inevitable. Moving directly in front of the canoe, Summers braced his feet against the river bottom, put both hands at the canoe’s nose, and shoved with all his considerable strength. The canoe bobbed down and then up, swung its tail about in a graceful arc, and broke free of the clinging sand—and, with Claire still clinging to its tail, swung into the current and shot downstream.
She let out a squeal of fright and kicked out frantically with her feet, trying to get a toehold, but the muddy bottom eluded her.
“Hey!” Summers shouted. Then, seeing she was in danger of being swept away, he cupped his hands about his mouth and cried, “Let go!”
She looked back in time to see him churning the water, swimming frantically after her. For a moment more she held to the canoe, then, fearful of being carried beyond his reach, she did as ordered and let go, sinking once more beneath the brown-green surface of the water, swallowing it in desperate mouthfuls.
She struggled to reach the light and air, but the leather skirt was a great, ponderous weight pulling her downward, where her feet slipped and churned the shifting mud.
Fool, she thought, fool, to die ignominiously in this filthy river, in this God-forgotten land. She closed her eyes, only to see poor, pathetic Peter, and Richard, carrying scars that ran clear through the fiber and being of him.
She coughed and gasped and swallowed air this time. There was Summers, and framing his face like a cerulean halo, the sky, the wonderful sky.
“Mis—Mister....”
“Don’t talk, I’ve got you,” he said, not even short of breath from his swim, his arm fast about her. “It’s all right. I can stand down on the bottom here, see? Just hold tight to me.”
The river bottom that had eluded her was an easy reach for his long, muscular legs. He held her without effort while the river swept relentlessly by them.
“The canoe—?”
“It’ll run ashore, ’bout a half-mile past that bend. I know this water,” he said.
“Wh—what’ll we do?” she asked.
“Stand right here, and hope those trappers look behind them before they reach the north woods. When they see we’re not following them, they’ll turn back to look for us,” he said, adding on a slightly less confident note, “I hope.”
He was proven right on both counts.
They had waited only a few minutes when they heard “Hallo!” and saw Morton and Leblanc paddling swiftly downriver toward them.
“What happened?” Morton asked when he had brought the canoe alongside them.
“Miz Denon decided to go for a swim,” Summers said
, boosting her into the canoe with his hands on her rump. He gave her such a shove that she toppled head first into the bottom of the canoe. Morton helped her up, the back of his hand just brushing the tips of her breasts, seemingly by chance.
Summers swung himself into the canoe with the ease of long practice, and they continued back in the direction of St. Louis until they’d rounded the next bend and found the canoe swept into a tiny inlet by the current exactly as Summers had predicted.
Wet and bedraggled, and more than a bit despondent, Claire again took up her place in the front of the canoe to watch for sandbars—this time with considerably more diligence. Though the men had been remarkably restrained in their comments on the incident, she was as well aware as they that it had not been an auspicious beginning to what would be a long and arduous journey.
* * * * * * *
They traveled for five weeks before they reached the spot where the Platte River joined with the Missouri and started up the former.
The Platte was an ugly, uninspiring river, shallow and pockmarked with islands and sandbars. Now, with the summer season running riot, the water was so low they found themselves more often than not pushing and pulling their canoes upstream. Here began the real work of the trip, and for days Claire’s body thrummed with pain and fatigue, though the men were sparing her as much as possible.
She began to wonder about the wisdom of this journey. Since they had left St. Louis she had seen no one but the three men with whom she traveled, nor the faintest trace of civilization. To her untrained eye it appeared certain that no one had traveled this way before them. She found it necessary to remind herself that Morton and Leblanc were retracing a previous journey.
“How much farther?” she asked at the end of the sixth week. They had made camp for the night on the marshy bank of the Platte. The fire that Summers had built was little more than a heap of embers. “Pawnee country,” he’d explained. “No need to announce our presence if they aren’t already aware of it.”
“To the South Platte?” he asked in reply to her question. “A couple of weeks, I’d guess.”