Rivers West

by Louis L'Amour

  Macaire thought a moment. “Is it closer that way?”

  “Closer by miles.”

  “All right.”

  The tracks went on along at a good pace, but Butlin suddenly turned and dipped into the trees at a point where I’d not have guessed there’d be a trail. Then he pointed it out to us, a dim narrow track leading off through the forest.

  Macaire took the lead, and Butlin dropped back and rearranged the disturbed branches at our entry point. Then he brushed out our tracks and sifted leaves over them.

  “They’ll find it if they look,” Butlin said, “but not unless they go back down the trail and track us to where we stepped off. We’ll have us a good lead before they realize, I’m thinkin’.”

  It was a dim, shadowed place, and very still. We rode at a trot, then a walk, then a trot again. Twice we forded small streams.

  By the time the sun was high, we were still within the forest, and we stopped briefly to spell the horses, gathering on the banks of a small pond. Nobody talked.

  The stillness was marvelous. Only a few birds in the branches nearby.

  At midafternoon we crossed a wide meadow and came down into a country lane. Briskly then, we rode.

  We skirted a small village, and went back into the forest again. By sundown we had forty miles behind us, and we stopped at a large, comfortable-looking farm. The women slept in the house, the rest of us outside in the barn. I awakened to the smell of fresh hay and the cackling of a hen who had just laid an egg and was informing the world.

  A quick check of the trail showed no signs of travel, and by an hour after sun-up we were dusting our tracks down the trail.

  Albany was a small town that had once been Dutch. We came up to it along a very dusty road over a plain dotted with pines. The houses on the way to the town were few and poor. Albany had first been called Beverwyck, then changed to Fort Orange, and after that to Williamstadt and finally Albany. A few of the houses were still of the Dutch fashion, with high, sharp roofs, small windows, and low ceilings. Most of the streets were at right angles to the river, and there were some new, fine-looking houses. One that I noticed, at the head of Market Street, was said to be the home of a family named Van Rensselaer.

  We ate one meal in the town, bought supplies, and rode out at once toward the west.

  Now we followed no set route, but took bypaths and lanes or Indian trails, many long abandoned, across the country and generally down the course of the Allegheny River. Nor had we any nighttime visitors or travelers upon the trail before or behind, beyond occasional country folks, until we rode into the town of Pittsburgh at the meeting of the rivers.

  Chapter 9

  *

  MACAIRE DREW UP at a corner of Grant Street. He turned in his saddle. “You are stopping now?”

  “I am. I’ll be searching out a job of boat building here.”

  “Luck be with you. ’Tis a far piece we’ve come together, and I’d wish it were all the way. You be good men and true,” he said, “and I’ve slept easy these nights with the thought of you by.”

  Even Miss Majoribanks turned in her saddle, and I thought her features softened a little as she looked toward me. “I do not like saying goodbye,” she said, “so I shall not.”

  “Nor I,” I said quietly, “nor do I envy you the trail you go. Please be careful, for I think there are those who know why and where you go and who want no one so near to them as can see what they do.”

  “I shall manage,” she replied.

  They turned aside then, riding toward Penn Street where Miss Majoribanks had friends with whom to stay. As for Jambe-de-Bois, Butlin, and myself, we had no friends and no place to stay except what our money would buy.

  Pittsburgh lay neatly between the Allegheny and the Monongahela rivers, which joined at this point to form the Ohio. Fort Pitt, originally founded here many years before, had been a point of much warfare between Indians and whites, between French and English, and the site was important.

  We found a hotel close by the riverfront, and we stabled our horses nearby. It was the room for me, and a hot bath, but Jambe-de-Bois went along to the common room for a noggin of rum.

  Calgary Butlin watched him go and then said to me, “I shall go along the street. There will be men from the mountains here.”

  We had not talked of what lay west, nor of Torville, so I said to him, “Say nothing, but if you hear a word of a man named Charles Majoribanks, I’d like to know.”

  He gave me a thoughtful look and then said, “I will come with you a bit. There are things that need be said.”

  In my room he sat in a window seat, cross-legged, as he preferred to sit. “He is related to the young lady?”

  “Her brother,” I said. “She is going west to find him. She believes he is in some kind of trouble.”

  “He is that,” Butlin said wryly. “He’s crossed the trail of some rather dangerous men.”

  “What do you know of all this?”

  He looked at me directly. “There are no secrets in the West, although there are some who believe otherwise. No man moves but what someone sees, and no man speaks but what someone listens. Indians are curious folk, and often puzzled by the curious things done by white men. They discuss them over their pipes.

  “There are men among the Indians who talk of war. There is talk of guns, of many rifles that will come from the sea. Men move from tribe to tribe along with some disgruntled Indians, and it is said that many of the Indians listen with both ears.”

  “And Charles Majoribanks?” I said.

  “I hear of him from time to time.”

  *

  IT WAS DARK when I went out again to the street. There was a gleam of reflected light on the waters of the Monongahela, and I stood on the street for a few minutes, just looking at the river and listening.

  From up the street came the tinny sound of a piano, and somebody whooped. Two men passed me, smelling of wine and tar, both a little unsteady. From somewhere close by I could smell the good smell of fresh lumber, and then I saw it, great tiers of planks stacked to season in the sun, and a cribbing of heavy timbers and poles for masts.

  Yet my thought returned to Miss Majoribanks and her voyage to the West. Uneasily, I recalled my promise to Simon Tate…yet the promise had only been to see her safely here. Now she was going to St. Louis, and if she didn’t find word of her brother there, she would go up the Missouri or the Platte.

  No need to worry. Macaire was a good man, a solid man.

  Yet worry I did. She was too young, too seemingly sure of herself.

  I walked on along the waterfront, seeing several keelboats in the building process and at least one hull that appeared from its shallowness to be that of a steamboat being built for service on the Missouri.

  There was a light in a shack near the farthest stacks of lumber. Beyond it, the bank sloped away, and I could see flatboats moored along the river. From some of them came voices, and the cabins showed lights in their windows. Men lived on these boats, floated downriver to New Orleans, sold the boats, and then paid their passage back upstream.

  Suddenly I saw it. I stopped, caught in midstride, straining my eyes through the gathering darkness. The head of a giant sea monster or dragon, rearing up from the river and carrying a steamboat on its back.

  I went down to the dock. The Western Engineer! This, then, was the boat that had gone west with the Major Stephen H. Long expedition. Even in Canada, which was far from here, news of the expedition had been heard. Thirty-five days from Pittsburgh to St. Louis, with several stops along the way. I looked at the name on the hull and the long, scaly-looking, serpentlike boat, her head reared up as high as the deck, her tail fins covering the view of the stern paddle wheel from the sides.

  It was something to see, even in the dusk as I reached her. It had been built, t’was said, to frighten the Indians. I’d known a few Indians, and I doubted whether any of them would be frightened for long. Yet it must have been impressive, steaming along upstream against the curr
ent, smoke issuing from its nostrils, foaming water behind it.

  “Like her?”

  A man was leaning on the rail alongside her scaly back.

  “She must have been a joy to build.”

  “Build? Aye…I’d no hand in that, but she takes the river nicely. I’d say it’s a shame.”

  “Shame?”

  “She’s government built, and the government has had their fill of her. They’re takin’ her up the Ohio a ways, and she’ll be junked.”

  I glanced at her hull. She’d be about seventy-five feet long. “How much does she draw?”

  “Nineteen inches, fully loaded. She’s right for the western rivers, where often enough you have to chase the water to find it.”

  “How about her boilers?”

  “No trouble. She’s a good craft…good. It’s just that she was sent to do a job, and it was only half done. But that was the fault of the men aboard and the difficulties that arose.”

  We talked a bit longer, and I’m afraid my questions were as much about conditions upriver as the possibilities of building a ship. The trouble was, I was beginning to feel the fever.

  When a man came into Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, or Lexington then, he found himself meeting folks from all over who talked of only one thing: the West. Everybody had either been west or was going there. They talked of Indians, buffaloes, game, but more than anything else they just talked about the land, the prairies, and the mountains.

  Sometimes it made no sense. Men with good jobs, professions, or businesses talking of going west. Many of them had only to stay where they were to get rich, but there was a drive in them that went beyond money, beyond success. It was the drive to explore, to develop new country, to populate those vast empty lands to the west.

  It was in the air I breathed in that frontier town, and must be even more so out there in St. Louis, where everybody in Pittsburgh seemed determined to go. There was talk of opening trade with Santa Fe, talk of California, wherever that was.

  This man had it, too. His name was John Massman, he had been to St. Louis twice before, and up the Missouri with a keelboat before that.

  “Injuns? I’ve known aplenty. Good folks, but notional. They can change their minds in a minute, and they think lightly of the white man. Most of them have seen few of us and we all want to trade.

  “The Injun is convinced the white man can’t get along without him. Buffalo robes are all important to an Injun, and he believes the white man has no buffalo to hunt so he has to come west to get robes from the Injun.

  “A few Injuns have been east and seen the cities, but the other Injuns don’t believe what they say. They call them liars, say the white man’s medicine has confused them.

  “You got to walk soft with Injuns until you know how the wind blows.…There’s much fightin’ amongst them, an’ they raid each other’s villages, catch huntin’ parties, even squaws out gatherin’ wood.…They kill them an’ take their scalps.

  “If’n you do business with one tribe, another’s liable to make you for an enemy. You got to walk easy until you know where they stand.”

  It sounded like good advice, and I needed it.

  Now the fever was on me.

  I left Massman and walked a long time. It was very late when I went back to the hotel. Jambe-de-Bois was sitting in the common room combing his beard and muttering. He combed his beard when he worried, and he was worried now.

  He had a glass of rum before him, and from his flushed cheeks, I knew it was not the first, although he was a man who drank little and could hold his liquor.

  “They’re here, lad,” he said to me, “they’ve come up to us.”

  “Who?”

  “Macklem and that lot. Only there’s more of them now. And a rum lot they are, too! They’ve tied in with eight or ten rascals from God knows where, and they’re fixing to go west.”

  “It’s none of our affair,” I said, shrugging. “The sooner they go, the better.”

  He shot me a hard glance, eyes bulging a bit as they were likely to do when he was overwrought. “None of our affair, you say? That may be one way of thinking, but I think we’re lashed to them, sink or swim, until some one drowns!”

  He took a short swallow of rum. “That one with the sneaky eyes…he was in here, askin’ after you. He didn’t see me,” he indicated the rear. “I was back yonder by the door, and he asked partic’lar for you.”

  “All right, he knows where I am.”

  “And that wasn’t all,” Jambe-de-Bois wiped his beard with the back of his hand. “He asked after the young miss.”

  There was a sudden stillness in me. Jambe had all my attention, and he knew it.

  “He asked for her?”

  “He did. But nobody knew aught of her here, and he went away after a quick look around him. Oh, he’s a suspicious lot, that one!”

  Abruptly, I dropped into a chair across from him. Asking after Miss Majoribanks, were they? Now, why?

  How much they inquired after me did not matter. I could take care of myself—or try. With her it was a different thing. She was a fine, proud young lady with no idea what she was getting into, nor could Macaire tell her. As for her other young friend…

  She was going west to look for her brother, who had discovered, or thought he had, some kind of plot. Nor did I doubt there might be some such plan, for there had been many before. Some men were ravenous for land. The very existence of such a vast, unexplored area was a temptation to every adventurer or soldier-of-fortune, and each one dreamed of becoming king overnight. A king of his own vast land, vaguely reported to be as large as Europe.

  The success of the Lewis and Clark expedition had only added fuel to their dreams, for if sixteen men or so could travel across a continent, couldn’t a few hundred men seize it for themselves?

  Swiftly, I reviewed the situation in my thoughts. A problem must be clearly defined before it can be solved.

  She was going west. They were going west. Her brother, Charles Majoribanks, had somehow become involved in, or aware of, a plot whose seriousness I was not qualified to judge.

  Only weeks ago I had come upon the body of a dying man who was somehow involved in that very plot, or one very similar to it.

  The murderer could have been only a few minutes away at the time of my discovery.

  The so-called Colonel Macklem had been stopping at the next inn and with him a bunch of men who, if not rascals, at least looked the part.

  Macklem had proved himself an exceptionally dangerous man by killing Sam Purdy.

  Now that same Macklem was here in Pittsburgh, inquiring about, or having one of his henchmen inquire about, Miss Majoribanks.

  It was true that I had warned her, but she had taken my warning very casually.

  “It’s none of my affair,” I said at last. “She has been warned.”

  “Hah!” Jambe-de-Bois said explosively. “Warned! Did you ever know such a high-headed young filly to take to a warning?”

  “Well, that’s up to her.”

  “Is it? It was in my mind that you were having ideas about her. Not that I’d blame you, lad. She’s right pretty, that one, right pretty!”

  I growled something and tossed off my bit of rum. “I am for sleep,” I said irritably, “let her go her way.”

  Getting to my feet, I added, “Anyway, she has Macaire.”

  “Macaire! Do you think he’s a match for that lot? Macklem’s a devil. A devil, I tell you. Macaire’s a solid man, a good man, but he’s not up to Macklem’s boot tops. Macklem would swallow him whole and spit him out.”

  “I work with timber,” I said stubbornly. “I came to build boats.”

  “Aye…so the girl can go to the devil.”

  “Who are you to talk so to me? You damned pirate!”

  He laughed, baring his ugly teeth in the process. “Pirate, is it? You say that to me? Your own pirate blood runs thick in your veins. Do you think I bought that John Daniel story? You take me for a bloody fool! I’d know your like wherev
er seen, for you’ve the mark of the Talon upon you, and if you had a claw for a hand, you’d be the spittin’ image of the old devil himself!”

  Well! I stared at him. Who was this man who had come out of the night and the swamp and who knew me by name?

  We were almost alone in the room, and our voices had been low but intense. Several had turned their eyes upon us, seeking the beginning of a quarrel, or so they thought.

  “If my name be Talon,” I said, “so be it. Jean Daniel Talon, if you wish to know, and it is said the old man of my tribe was a pirate…or a privateer. What is that to you?”

  He had half risen from his chair; now he sat down. “Sit, damn you, and we’ll talk. You called me a pirate, and I have been that—and more. No better gunner ever sailed the seas than I, and sometimes I sailed under the black flag, but that be neither here nor there.

  “Do you think those who sailed the Indian seas have forgotten the old Claw? They remember him. Believe me, they do, and how he took the fortress of Gingee, singlehanded.”

  “He did not take it. He merely entered it.”

  “‘Entered it,’ he says. Yes, he entered it, entered it when no army could have done it, scaled walls and towers right into the inner rooms and bearded the old lion in his den, took him by the beard and trimmed his ears, then killed him and carried off a bag of loot that would ransom half the kings of Europe! Who in those waters does not know the story?

  “Aye, and I’ve looked upon the walls of Gingee these many years after, and shudder to think of a man who would dare them alone.”

  A figure loomed over the table. Glancing up, startled, I saw it was the man from the steamboat, John Massman. “Maybe I shall join you in building, for I am out of a job. They’ve sold the boat.”

  “The Western Engineer?”

  “Aye. Sold it to a bit of a lass named Majoribanks, or some such name.”

  Something sank within me. “To Miss Majoribanks?”

  “That’s her.” He was sour with the taste of it. “I wanted another trip aboard her…she’s a good boat…but her captain said no. He had his own crew.”

  “Her captain?”