“Ah, Benton, so good, so good, mon ami. You are back safely, and we see the vessel is heavy-laden and rides low. How do you fare? How is your health? Did we lose anyone?”
“No one I didn’t intend to lose. And your health?”
“We are well, though madame struggles with gout, and there has been dysentery again. The whole city smells of excrement.”
“Well, Pierre, we’re in St. Louis with good news aplenty. You are rich, once again. Very, very rich.”
“Ah! We shall see. In New York they speak dolorously of dropping prices. They have us by the throat.” Chouteau plucked up the cognac and poured a generous dollop into the captain’s cut-glass snifter.
“Tell us everything! But first, what do you carry?”
For an answer, Marsh pulled out his papers and ledgers and lay the cargo manifest before Chouteau. The entrepreneur donned his wire-rimmed spectacles, and began reading the watery black script, lifting the ledger pages up close to the soft light.
“Manifique, c’est marveloux. So much. Is there insect damage or soaking?”
“No, no trouble this time.”
Chouteau read and reread the manifest. “There is more here than we were led by the expresses to believe we possess.”
“Ah! Some nineteen bales of buffalo hide, and odds and ends I picked up along the way from savages.”
“We are sure there is a story in it.”
There was indeed.
Trenholm knocked politely. “We’re secure. Crew wants to go,” he said.
“No, not until every bale is safe in the warehouse.”
“They’re grumbling.”
“Let them. Every bale accounted for, and a receipt for it. They’ll be freed in a few hours. Except for you, of course, and a half dozen men you select. They stay.”
“Aye, sir.”
Trenholm left, and they heard him clatter down the companionway.
Oddly, Chouteau’s smile had vanished.
“Monsieur Marsh, is there anything urgent we should know?”
“Oh, a few small matters, an incident or two, and some action on my part that will save the company from embarrassment.”
“Really, we shall relish the story.”
“Yes, it’ll take a bit, but we have time.”
“Ah, my captain, was that not your wife and the lovely Miss Lansing we saw on the levee, awaiting your presence?”
“Yes, it was. They can wait a little. That’s the fate of the wives of sailing men, I’m afraid. The lamp in the window.”
Chouteau smiled gently. “We see things differently. A man who returns to his wife after a long absence should fall into her arms—assuming, of course, she is of a certain age and not infirm.”
They laughed.
Chouteau stood. “You have mail from the posts, we presume?”
“Yes, as always. Quite a packet of it.”
He handed Chouteau all the letters he had collected en route, reports and complaints that would give the fur magnate a fine idea of the situation at each fur post, and the preoccupations of each trader.
“We will read these, my friend. Come to our house at ten, and we will have a cigar in our study, and you can tell your anecdotes, eh?”
“Very well, sir.”
“Bien! And tell your passengers, Bonfils and Skye, to come to our offices midmorning.”
“They are not aboard, sir.
”Chouteau stood stock still. “You have much to tell us, then. We will read this correspondence while you put this bateau in order and embrace your enchanting wife and family. Then, mon ami, we will see.”
thirty-two
Sarpy’s Post, on the right bank of the Missouri at the confluence of the Platte, looked different from any other post that Skye had seen. This one was simply a hilltop farm, with a farmhouse and a few buildings scattered about. It was not fortified.
Were they that close to civilization? Or were the tribes in the vicinity, such as the Omahas, that pacific? Gill had steered the flatboat past several posts, mostly Opposition outfits, in the Council Bluffs area, but now he pulled the tiller and steered the boat toward the bank, where a few people stood watching.
“There’s more to it than it looks,” Gill said, reading Skye’s mind. “This place—Bellevue—been in the middle of the fur trade from the get-go.”
“Will we see white women?” Victoria asked.
Gill grinned. “Not as I ever heard. Some comely Omaha ladies, maybe.”
“Where the hell are your women?”
“There ain’t any. We get borned a different way. We cut off a toenail, put her in whiskey, and it grows.”
Victoria laughed.
Skye saw that the people on shore were Indians after all, but dressed entirely in white men’s duds, duck cloth pantaloons and chambray shirts, mostly. And the sole woman was in printed calico. Tame Indians, the mountaineers called them Not the furred and feathered variety in the far West.
Gill steered the flatboat toward the crude landing, and tossed a hawser to one of the men, who wrapped it around i post poking up from the mud. Bonfils threw the plank gang way to the bank, stepped ashore ahead of the rest, grinning broadly. For once he didn’t seem to be in a rush.
Lame Deer followed, her walk wary and cautious. She carried her girl in her arms, and then set Singing Rain on the damp earth. She was dressed in a fringed buckskin skirt and moccasins, and a blue cambray shirt, all quilled in the Cheyenne tradition, and sharply different from clothing of the tame Indians.
Skye followed, still weak on his pins and wobbly, but Victoria helped him alight. He wondered how he could manage the hundred yards upslope to the store, but taking a few steps at a time he worked his way forward, glad to be walking. Gil secured the boat, wrapping another hawser forward, and then joined them in the trek to the store.
“There’s a mess of Sarpys in the fur business,” he said “Pete here, he’s the son of old John, and coming along smartly, in the company. His pa’s a partner in the company, got a thirty-second of it, I think. Tom, an uncle, got himself blown up a few years ago, messing around a powder barrel.”
By the time Skye reached the store, he was exhausted, and settled on a plank bench to catch his breath. He wasn’t healing as fast as he had hoped, and was still just about useless. At firs it had been the rib wound that tormented him; now it was the thigh wound, which ached mercilessly and drew the strength right out of him. Still, the wounds had scabbed over and weren’t infected, and with some time he might recover hi health. Victoria had taken good care of him, but he was stil just about worthless.
The view was handsome from up there, and he studied the sparkling blue river while his heart thudded and slowed, and a dry breeze toyed with him. Victoria headed into the store, along with Bonfils and Lame Deer.
“I got some private business with Sarpy,” Gill said, heading for the farmhouse.
Skye guessed it had to do with smuggled alcohol. Red Gill struck him as a bold, likeable, daring frontiersman who would make his coin any way he could, no matter what the rules were. He might well have supplied Sarpy’s Post with ardent spirits, if indeed that was Gill’s real business.
After Skye recovered his breath, he wobbled to his feet and entered the post, which looked more like an ordinary store for white people than most trading posts. But he spotted the usual blankets, awls, trade muskets, shot and powder, knives, pots, skeins of beads, along with sacks of cornmeal, sugar, coffee, and all the rest. He loved these stores, with all their small sweet luxuries, and meant to buy Victoria something. A black-suited clerk hovered behind a plank counter, keeping a wary eye on customers, but his eye betrayed a lively curiosity as he Looked over these latest specimens from the far West.
“Out of the mountains?” the clerk asked.
“From the Stony Mountains,” Skye said.
“You’ve come a piece.” The man was itching to find out Skye’s business, but Skye wasn’t in a talking mood.
“We got good prices, better than mountain prices,�
�� the clerk said as Skye studied the stock.
What struck Skye at once was Bonfils, who was holding up a gaudy red and blue blanket for Lame Deer. Her eyes shone with pleasure.
“Madame, it is for you!” he said with a gallic flourish.
‘And now I shall buy one for the petite fille!”
He dug through the two-point blankets and plucked up a green one for the child.
“Ah! I see smiles! Now, how about a little paint, eh?”
He led the Cheyenne woman toward a shelf filled with small, papered cubes of vermillion, and handed one to her.
“There’s this, but perhaps you’d like some ocher too! And on course some lamp black, and some cobalt!”
“Ah!” she cried.
“And let us not forget some big beads, and thread an needle, and a string of jingle bells! Now, how about some tobacco? Ah, a few plugs, and a clay pipe! You shall have a goo puff or two, all the way to St. Louis!”
Lame Deer was laughing and shaking her head. Skye ha not seen her laugh for weeks.
“Now, madame, what about a hatchet, and some ve veteen for a skirt? You’ll have time to work it up, and whe you find Simon MacLees, you’ll look like a Cheyenne queen!
“What is queen?”
“Very beautiful and important lady. MacLees will go ma with happiness!”
“Ah! Ah!” she cried, fondling the purple velveteen.
Bonfils raised two fingers to the clerk, who cut two yard of it and folded it neatly.
“You got a little lard?” Bonfils asked.
The clerk nodded, and pulled a tin off a shelf.
“Good. We’ll mix us some paints!”
Swiftly, Bonfils heaped the goods on the counter, and the added cornmeal, coffee beans, parched corn, sugar, molasse and chocolates.
Even as the clerk was totting up the cost of all that, Bonfils was mixing vermillion with the lard until he had a shiny re-paste, and then he began painting Lame Deer, a thick re-streak down her forehead, chevrons of red on her brown arm while she laughed and squealed. When Bonfils was done, he stepped back to study his handiwork.
“Yes, yes,” he said, “you’ll be the belle of St. Louis. Ah, the perfect savage!”
“Goddam,” said Victoria, approving. “Skye, why don’t you get me that stuff?”
“With what?”
“You gonna take me to the city with all the lodges dressed like this?”
Skye grinned. “When I get that job, I’ll dress you in satins and silks, like all those Assiniboine ladies up at Fort Union.”
Victoria grunted, not certain she liked that.
Skye found a barrel to sit on. He could scarcely stand up for five minutes.
Bonfils pulled real gold out of some inner pocket, and paid the clerk with yellow coins so bright that they stole sunlight from the room.
“Where’s Sarpy?” Bonfils asked.
“At the house, talking with your friend.”
“Well, say hello to him, mon ami, and help me load this stuff.”
The clerk lugged sacks of food and the heap of Lame Deer’s goods down the steep slope, and left them in the flatboat cabin, while Bonfils added a few yards of gaudy ribbon to his purchases, and then handed the ribbon to Lame Deer.
“You come along, ma cheri, and we’ll tie some ribbons to your hair, oui? Then we’ll have a big smoke!”
Lame Deer’s eyes lit up again. She had turned into a wild beauty, with the vermillion striping her face and arms, and the gaudy blanket drawn around her, and the clay pipe in her hands.
Soon, Lame Deer, her little girl, and Bonfils retreated to the flatboat, and the clerk finished his hauling and returned, winded, to the store.
“Haven’t seen gold out here ever,” he said, fingering Bonfils’s ducats. “I had to do some calculatin’ as to the value.”
Victoria was sulking. “How come he bought all that stuff for her, eh? Maybe he could buy some for me! You gonna fix me up for when we get to this place of the lodges? You gonna make me happy, or am I gonna look like some damn Injun around all those white women in all their silk stuff, eh?”
Something about all this puzzled Skye, but he had no answers, and figured he would find out soon enough. Was Bonfils courting the Cheyenne woman? Did he plan to steal her from MacLees?
Skye had some residual credit with the company, but he wasn’t inclined to spend it on foofaraw. When he returned to the mountains, it would be with a new percussion rifle, made by the Hawken Brothers of St. Louis, some good DuPont powder and shot and caps, some real cow-leather boots, and a load of necessaries. And a jug or two if he could manage it. Not just trade whiskey, either, but some real, potent, smooth Kentucky.
He was out of sorts, had been ever since he was wounded, and his spirits were darkened by uncertainty. He wanted that trading job badly. It would provide him with a living, and put him in daily contact with Victoria’s people. But as much as he wanted that, he felt doubts gnawing at him, things just beyond the pale, things unfathomed, a thundercloud just over the horizon.
There was the question of his health. Would he ever recover? And if he were offered this job, and took it, he would become a company man, and that meant obeying instructions and doing things he would not otherwise do … . Would he be required to cheat? Put a thumb in the sugar cup, the way he had seen traders do? Water the whiskey, adulterate the flour with clay, all for a profit? Would he be at the beck and call of Chouteau? He had been a free man of the mountains for many years, but would he still be free? Would he still be honorable?
While he was fretting over that, and Victoria was poking her way through the tradegoods and muttering happily, he heard Red Gill yelling. The boatman stepped into the trading room, peered wildly at the people within, spotted Skye, and beckoned.
“He’s gone!” Gill roared at the puzzled Skye. “Bonfils!”
Skye hastened to the door and peered down the steep path to the riverbank. The flatboat had vanished. It was so far gone that Skye could not even spot it down the long sweep of the river.
thirty-three
Benton Marsh was feeling testy as he stepped from his cabriolet and faced the front door of the brick Chouteau residence, which he privately regarded as a grotesque melange of porticos, gargoyles, dormers, cornices, motley architectural styles, and gallic gaud.
For some reason, Pierre Chouteau put him on the defensive and he didn’t like it. For that matter, he didn’t like that frog, Chouteau. After months on the steamboat, where he was absolute master of his universe and his word was law, he suddenly found himself back on the ground, and in a world where there were masters of men, chief among them the man he was about to visit.
A handsomely liveried house slave appeared out of the darkness and led the cabriolet off. The trotter’s hooves clopped hollowly on the glistening cobbles as Marsh headed for the enameled door of the famous house where all the spiderwebs of ambition in St. Louis were spun. It was an ostentatious house, though actually a large, homey and comfortable one.
The door swung open even before he reached it, and a graying slave in black brocaded silk with white ruffles at the collar and sleeves let him in and took his top hat and umbrella.
“He’s off there in the pariah, suh,” she said.
Marsh trod over an Aubusson carpet with bold golds and blues in it through the parlor to the lamplit study, Chouteau’s private and secluded den, where much of what happened west of the Missouri River was decided over snifters of brandy or glasses of amontillado. The captain saw no signs of other life in the house, and supposed that Madame had retired to her chambers.
Chouteau was standing, a certain smile on his face. That smile, which always resembled a smirk, had always annoyed Marsh. No one but a dark-fleshed Creole frog would smile like that, as if in amusement or disdain. But Marsh had endless experience smoothing over his own choleric temper, and smiled warmly as he and the master of an American empire shook hands and proceeded through the wine-pouring and cigar rituals.
Marsh was no good at smal
l talk, and wished that this St. Louis Midas, this bilingual Western Caesar, would get on with it.
“Anything in the mail?” Marsh asked, impatiently.
“Ah, mon ami, why is it that our traders complain that they have too much of this and not enough of that one year, and the opposite the next year? We have a time supplying them with whatever feathers and beads and trinkets their tribes demand at the moment. Fashion, it is ephemeral, n’est pas?”
Chouteau swirled a stiff drought of ruby port in his glass and swallowed it in a gulp.
“Ah! We have discovered the cure for aches of the body,” he said. “But my dear capitaine, we believe you have some stories you wish to divulge, in strictest privacy?”
At last, the cue, Marsh thought impatiently. He scarcely knew where to begin. But the Cheyenne squaw was a good enough place. Later, when Chouteau had imbibed more wine, Marsh would talk about such disasters as firing a cannon into the Sans Arcs, killing a boatman and wounding Skye, jettisoning Chouteau’s own relative Bonfils, booting Skye off the boat, and a few small items like that.
“Well, yes, in chronological order. We were proceeding homeward when we were flagged by a squaw on the riverbank. I was reluctant to stop, but did so because Skye pressed me to. A squaw, after all. The squaw, a Cheyenne woman, spoke a little English. She wanted a ride to St. Louis for herself and her little brats, and had some robes and a few fox and otter pelts to trade … . So I offered deck passage; nothing to lose, of course … .”
Marsh described what he learned from Skye. “The squaw was the mountain wife of Simon MacLees! Imagine it! Going to St. Louis to find out what happened to her man!” Marsh laughed darkly. “When I found that out, I put her off at Fort Pierre, along with her brats, fumigated the cabin, too. Camphor works well. And so …” he spoke softly, “I saved you and also my family embarrassment. Poor Sarah! How agitated we all would have been! Imagine that squaw and her little breed brats showing up at his doorstep on the eve of the wedding! And of course,” there was a question in his voice, “I saved embarrassment to the company too. You were considering MacLees for the Fort Cass position. Am I not correct?”
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