Had Macklem and his crowd caught up with me? Where were LeBrun and Yvette?
Keeping my left hand on the rudder, I managed to keep the boat away from the banks. From my crouching position, or even standing and merging my body with the rudderpost, I could not see the river ahead.
I prayed that the river was free from obstructions.
There had to be a reason for setting the boat adrift. Had LeBrun and Yvette gone ashore for some reason?
The more questions I asked myself the less I knew the answers.
I crawled into the pulpit, where I could at least see the river ahead and get a better grip on the rudder. For a moment I gripped it, expecting a bullet at any instant. None came.
I guided the boat closer to the bank, watching for a place where I might run it in close and tie up. At all costs, I must get back to St. Louis.
The river took a slight bend. I headed in close to the bank, grounded the bow, then leaped ashore with the line. I took a quick turn around a sturdy tree, then another turn and a half-hitch, then still another.
The boat secured, I went off into the woods.
I reached a path. For a moment I stopped and listened, then I stepped into the path and walked away from the river, moving carefully in the moonlight. When I had walked no more than two hundred yards, I heard a faint sound.
I dropped to one knee near a bush.
At the same moment I knew that I was not alone. Not more than six feet away, I could faintly see the outline of a head and the whiteness of a face. A man was crouched and waiting.
Whoever he was, he had not heard me come, nor had he any idea of my presence. Suddenly a voice said, “Newt? You hear something a moment ago?”
“Ssh!”
“Newt, I—”
“Ssh, damn it! They’re coming.”
The second man, whoever he was, must be not more than six feet away.
Then, I saw the second man. He was right in front of me, facing away.
Rising up only slightly, I took a careful step forward. The night was cool, still. I could see him more clearly now. I put my hand on the cold barrel of my pistol, chilling it.
Then I heard the murmur of other voices, talking very low. Yvette and LeBrun! My fingers cold from the gun barrel, I reached out suddenly and touched the bare neck of the man before me.
He leaped like a startled rabbit. “A-a-agh!” he gave out with a choking scream and smashed backward with his gun butt. It missed, but the man ran into the brush.
Newt came out of hiding and onto the path. I had dropped down again, and Newt could see nothing.
He swore viciously under his breath and turned square around to start back. “Looking for something, Newt?” I asked very softly.
He had nerve, I’ll give him credit. I was up again. He leaped right at me. I’d no desire to shoot, not knowing where LeBrun and Yvette might be hiding, so I stiff-armed him in the face with the butt of my palm, then clubbed my pistol barrel over his skull. He dropped in his tracks.
Squatting beside him, I took his gun and knife. The gun I slid behind my belt, the knife I tossed into the brush, and then I felt around for his rifle, sure there would be one. The moment I put my hand on it, I knew from the shape and weight that it was a trade musket of the kind sold to the Indians.
I stood up. “It is all right,” I said quietly. “One’s down and the other one’s still running.”
Yvette and LeBrun came along the trail then, and I stepped out where they could see me. “They cut the boat loose,” I said, “but I tied her up downstream a ways. Shall we get along down there?”
“What about him? Is he dead?”
“Doubt it. He’s too hardheaded. But let’s take him along. Maybe he can tell us something.”
LeBrun caught the unconscious man by the scruff of the neck and jerked him erect. The fellow moved, seemed to come conscious.
“Walk!” LeBrun commanded. “Or I’ll hit you!”
The man stumbled along, gradually gaining more command of his feet. When we were aboard the keelboat, we took in the line and drifted downstream almost a mile, then tied up again.
With heavy canvas curtains over the portholes, LeBrun lighted a lamp.
The man was a stranger, a surly-looking fellow with a streak of blood from a broken scalp to add to the dirt and whiskers on his face.
“Your friend’s still running,” I said, grinning at him. “I just touched him on the back of the neck with a cold hand. Jumped right out of his skin.”
“Yeller!” The bewhiskered man sneered. “Yeller clean through. I told Baker he was no good.”
Baker. That was one name.
“What do you want them for?” I asked, gesturing toward LeBrun and Yvette.
“None of your damn business!” he snapped, and I slapped him across the mouth.
Like I’ve said, I’ve a heavy hand. It smashed his head around on his neck and jolted him to his heels, although to my notion, it had not been a hard slap.
“I don’t like that sort of talk,” I said mildly.
Yvette had started forward, and she was staring at me wide eyed.
“I like the kind of talk with information,” I said calmly. “I want to know who everybody is, where everybody is, and what they’re planning to do.”
He started to make an angry reply, and I half lifted my hand. He shrank away, and I could see he had no particular taste for it. “Do you no good,” he said. “He’ll kill you anyway. Them too. That’s what he told me. ‘Kill ’em,’ says he, ‘I don’t want to be bothered.’
“‘What about the girl?’ I says, and him, he just shrugs. ‘Just so she doesn’t talk,’ he says.”
“Who is he?” I asked.
“None of your—” I lifted my hand, and he shrugged. “Do you no good anyway. You’re dead. You’re dead as a doornail. He’ll see to that. The Baron, I mean.”
“Torville?”
“Who else? He’s got over ten thousand men, and he’s going to take them soldiers first, and then the rest of you as he moves. We’re going to own this country. Right up to St. Louis and Santy Fe. You’ll see.”
“Where is he now?” I demanded.
Suddenly a rush of water rocked the boat, and we heard the low chug-chug of an engine.
“That’s him now,” the man said, “an’ he’s got you, dead to rights!”
Chapter 19
*
WITH A GUN barrel against the man’s back, I blew out the light. There was moonlight outside, and we lay close under the bank, with branches hanging around us. Unless we had already been seen, there was a chance we might be passed by.
Peering out, I saw it. Huge, black, and glistening, the great eyes of the serpent staring ahead, the smoke puffing from the flared nostrils, the huge fins obscuring any sight of the stern wheel that churned the water behind it.
It was, I had to admit, a fearsome object. It gave off a sense of enormous power, of evil, of mystery.
“I seen her before,” LeBrun said. “She mounts twelve guns.”
Our prisoner snorted. “Twelve? She’s got twenty now!”
“What are they doing?” Yvette asked.
“Passing by,” I said.
An idea was already working itself around in my head, and we had no time to watch over a prisoner. I wanted him away from us, not knowing what we were doing but frightened enough to be too cautious to signal the serpent ship.
“Remember those Sioux?” I asked LeBrun, who just looked at me.
“Gives me an idea,” I said. “Let’s just turn this man loose.”
The prisoner looked at me sharply. “Let’s leave him ashore,” I said. “He’ll get back to his friends if he’s lucky, but if the Sioux need a scalp, they can get his.”
“Now see here!” the man protested.
“Get him ashore,” I told LeBrun.
Despite the man’s protests, we put him ashore. “If I were you,” I said low voiced, “I’d be almighty quiet. They’re all around us. You be quiet and you might get ups
tream to where your outfit is. We’ve got no time to watch over you, and the girl doesn’t want you killed. Lucky for you she’s soft-hearted, or we’d just let you drown.”
He was gone into the brush. We got back aboard. “Cut loose,” I said, “and let’s get out of here.”
“There’s a breeze coming up,” LeBrun said. “We might make some time upstream before daylight.”
“Try it then,” I said.
To loosen the half-hitches and scramble aboard, hauling in the lines, took a matter of a minute. With poles we pushed off. The keelboat got into the current, and we slipped away to follow the steamboat.
There was a little wind, and we finally got out of the full sweep of the current losing scarcely a halfmile in the process. We got our sail up, and the keelboat began edging upstream with painful slowness. The steamboat could do a good ten miles an hour against the stream; we would be lucky to do one.
When I took the rudder and LeBrun went below for coffee, I was alone with Yvette. “You said you were going to find Charles. Do you know where he is?”
“We think we do.”
“You believe he is in trouble?”
“Yes. When they can use him no longer, they will kill him. I think he knows this.”
“He cannot escape?”
“How? There are many men with Torville. They would track him down and have him at once, and then they would kill. We must find him.”
“Macklem’s steamboat may find him first. It can travel much faster than us.”
“Maybe. Papa does not think their pilot is good, and the pilot must be good. There are snags, sandbars, and sawyers—”
“What’s a sawyer?”
“A tree whose roots or branches are buried in the mud at the bottom. It bobs up and down, swings back and forth with the current. They can take the bottom right out of a boat, especially a steamboat, because they hit so much harder. Papa knows this river. He has been on it many times in keelboats and canoes. He says there is no river like it, and he has worked on the Ohio, the St. Lawrence, and the Mississippi.”
The wind held strong, and we moved along, gaining a little speed.
The banks were low, thick with trees and brush. In the moonlight through the clouds, the channel was clear, but the current was strong.
Suddenly, I caught sight of something on the water, just ahead. “Yvette?” I whispered, for sound carries far over water. “What is it?”
She looked out. “It’s a canoe. There are three men in it.”
With our sail, we were gaining, but not very much. LeBrun came out and stood by the rail, rifle in hand. My gun was behind my belt, the butt easily reached.
“They’re waiting for us,” Yvette said suddenly. “They’re paddling just enough to keep going.”
It was true, and suddenly a low voice called out, “Ahoy, there! Stand by!”
The voice was one not easy to forget. It was Jambe-de-Bois.
“It’s all right, LeBrun,” I said. “I know one of them.”
His face turned toward me. “I do not,” he said bluntly. “Yvette, take the rudder. Come over here, Talon.”
His rifle covered them. “Stand by,” he said quietly. “You know one of them. We do not know the others.” He glanced at me again. “How well do you know the one?”
It was a good question, for how well did I know him?
“Talon?” I knew that voice, too. “This is McQuarrie. Can we board you?”
I passed them a line, to which they made fast the canoe, and drew them in close. McQuarrie scrambled aboard, then Jambe-de-Bois. For all his peg-leg, he came up nimbly enough. No doubt he had boarded many a craft in his day.
The third man then came up, and he was a stranger. A stocky, well-set-up man in buckskins. A mountain man by the look of him.
“Have you seen the black ship?” McQuarrie asked.
“Aye,” I said. “She went up the river back there. Skimmed right past us, and lucky for us she did.”
“Who are these men?” LeBrun demanded.
Explanations required only a few minutes, but LeBrun kept studying Jambe-de-Bois. “It’s you I’ve seen before,” he said suddenly.
“I’ve never been on the Missouri,” Jambe-de-Bois said. “You’re mistaken.”
LeBrun glanced at the sail. It was bellied out, and the keelboat was moving well despite the current. “Hold to the channel,” he said to Yvette. “We’ll be up in a minute.”
He led the way below, then turned to look at first one, then the other. “Where is it you’re bound?”
“I was hunting him,” Jambe-de-Bois said, indicating me.
“Hunting him? How could you know he was alive?”
“I knew nothing, only there was talk of a big fight, and I found his hat on the wharf, so I asked around and some said there was a boat passing at the time. Thinks I, with his luck, he got aboard her. So here I be.”
“And you?”
McQuarrie shrugged. “I am a British officer. I have no authority here, but I want Torville. He is a murderer and a traitor.”
The buckskin-clad man shrugged. “I am Otis Pinkney. I think you know of me.”
LeBrun nodded. “I do. And you’re welcome aboard. Make yourselves at home here. It will be dawn soon, and we’ve a hole to hunt.”
“So has Macklem,” Pinkney replied. “He’ll not want to be seen by daylight on the river, I’m thinking.”
There was coffee in the pot, and we shared it. There was beef jerky, and we tried that—almost the last of the beef picked up below St. Louis by LeBrun. From now on, it would be buffalo meat or antelope, and maybe a deer.
“I’ve something for you,” Jambe-de-Bois said when we were alone. “Choteau sent it.”
“How’d he know I was alive?”
Jambe-de-Bois grinned. “I lied. I told him you sent me for them…the guns, I mean.” He opened a sack and took out the Pauly rifle and a brace of Collier pistols.
I took the rifle in my hands. It was what I had wanted. A good, fast-shooting gun. And the pistols. There was ammunition for each of them.
Yvette came to the door. “We will tie up now. Papa needs help.”
It was already dawn. In the middle of the river was a large sandbar on which grew clumps of brush among the piled-up driftwood. We moved in behind an island beyond the sandbar, an island covered with willows and a thick growth of underbrush and many trees including wild plum. There, in a position that hid all sight of the keelboat, we tied up to a huge old tree that had beached itself on the island and become half-buried in the sand.
We all were tired. Leaving the cabin to Yvette and LeBrun, the rest of us stretched out on the deck.
When I awakened some hours later, the sun was high and all was still. Everyone else was sleeping. Belting on my pistols, I took the rifle and went ashore, wandering along the edge of the island, close to the brush. There were wild grapes in profusion, and many wild raspberries. Pausing here and there to eat, I also listened for any sound, any movement.
Somehow we must locate Charles Majoribanks and free him, if, as we assumed, he was a prisoner. Next we must locate the dragon ship and keep it under observation. If Tabitha was no longer in command, we must somehow capture the steamboat and take her back down to St. Louis. And, in the process, somehow disrupt whatever plans Torville had—and Macklem, for I was sure they worked together.
The late morning was very still and overcast with clouds. Again I paused. The willows were very thick where I stood. Looking through the leaves I could see several deer at the edge of the water, drinking.
For a moment I stood watching them, for the wind, slight as it was, was from them toward me. I was well hidden, but wild animals will rarely see you if you remain still, and I was watching.
Suddenly, the head of one doe came up sharply, then the others. Instantly, I was alert. Waiting, listening, I heard the faint sound of a paddle in the water, and then a canoe. In it were four Indians—a man, two women, and a young boy.
They came in close, and the ma
n held the bow into the sandy shore while the boy sprang ashore and hauled the canoe higher.
Obviously, they were a family on the move. I walked out from the willows toward them, and they saw me at once, standing very still, all eyes on me. I held my hand up in a sign of peace and spoke to them. “You have come far?”
The man hesitated, then spoke slowly. “Far.”
They wore moccasins of elkskin blackened with smoke, with an ornamental seam across the back and flaps turned outward. It was little enough I knew about western Indians, but this I had learned from Butlin, that such moccasins were worn by the Omaha.
I gestured toward the brush. “Many berries. Good.” I rubbed my stomach and grinned at them, showing the few I had in my hand.
The women had gone about making a fire. They had chosen a spot up a creek, sheltered from the mainstream of the river by a clump of chokecherry brush.
The boy was a handsome lad, very quick. He kept watching me as I talked to his father. I did not smoke, but I carried tobacco. I offered the man some. He accepted it, and we sat down together.
“You hunt?” I asked.
He gestured upstream. “Much hunt. Buffalo. You see?”
“Not yet.” I gestured toward the brush behind me. “My boat is there. Many men. We look for a man.” I described Charles, as he had been described to me. “Maybe with bad man…bad white man,” I added.
He puffed on his pipe.
“Big serpent boat. You know?”
“Black,” he said, “I know.”
“You be careful,” I suggested, “some good men, some bad men with it.”
“Bad men,” he looked at me gravely, but his eyes twinkled, “make big snake work hard. Carry steamboat on back.”
His own name, he told me, was Red Tail. They were going to visit an Indian village that lay on a river I took to be the Kansas.
“Long time ago,” he said, puffing on his pipe, “Omaha big people…big nation. Much sickness…many attacks by the Sioux. We are few now. Maybe ninety warriors.
“It is no longer as it was,” he said, the words coming to him as he spoke, “the old ways are gone. Young men no longer make arrows. Now guns.”
“It is easier now, with the white man’s pots? Easier to boil food? Easier to hunt with his gun?” I asked.
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