by Shirl Henke
They walked back to the campfire in melancholy silence.
Lisa’s crew was up with the dawn, raucously breaking camp in preparation for the long journey upriver. The French Canadian trappers who made up the majority of the company laughed and exchanged bawdy jibes while their Anglo counterparts worked grudgingly, for the most part in dour silence. Everyone was hungover, but it seemed to burden the Gallic spirit less. Several Indian women married to trappers, stoically hefted huge packs with camp gear, more inured to such labors than most Eastern men.
Shelby sat clutching a cup of steaming coffee in a crude pewter cup, watching all the flurry around him. He would travel aboard Lisa’s big boat along with another man, hired as a hunter. Seth Walton also planned to keep a diary, recording the marvels of their journey along the banks of the Missouri. Walton and Shelby would not be required to participate in the backbreaking labor of propelling the massive keelboat upriver. They had only to make forays along the banks to bring down deer, bison and other game for the stew pots of the squaws.
In the event the party was attacked, Shelby would assume command of the men. But for now, having little to do while the final loading took place, he strolled about the camp, assessing the men and their weapons. The majority carried ancient muskets but a few were better armed with long rifles, mostly the Americans. All were seasoned veterans of the wilderness, sun and wind blasted, unshaven men with tough stringy muscles and an incredible ability to endure hardship. The pungent stench of unwashed bodies and greasy buckskins wafted on the chill morning air, not so bad in the open but cloying at close quarters aboard the boat. Fortunately the engages would spend much of their time on shore or in the water pulling the boat upstream with brute strength.
It took hardy men to earn their livelihood that way. Samuel’s eyes assessed the crew, then lighted on one slight figure, a slip of a boy, beardless and thin. He looked far too young and green to handle his share of the chores. Then Lisa yelled for him to secure the foodstuff for the cabin box and bring them aboard. The youth was a cabin boy of sorts. Samuel shrugged and started to turn away, then paused to watch the boy struggle with the awkward bundles of clattering cook pots and bulky bedding. There was something naggingly familiar about the way the grim urchin moved. He started to walk closer but a couple of voyageurs carrying a long canoe blocked his path. By the time they passed, the boy was clambering aboard the keelboat. Samuel shrugged and forgot about him, returning instead to gather up his small cache of belongings.
The youth kept rather mysteriously to himself over the next several days, fetching and carrying for Lisa and keeping the dark, musty quarters of the cabin box in order. It seemed to Shelby that the boy avoided him, for whenever he entered the big cabin the youth would find some way to engage himself at the opposite end of the long boat. He spoke only in French, which was hardly unusual for a St. Louis inhabitant. Shelby would have assumed he merely felt uncomfortable around an American military officer and preferred the company of his compatriots, but the boy also stayed clear of the boisterous French-Canadian rivermen as well.
The journey was uneventful for the first several days. The crew rose with the dawn each morning and poled the boat until it became too dark to move it in the treacherous waters at nightfall. Everyone was so bone weary by the time camp was made, they consumed their supper of mush and tallow, then quickly fell into the dreamless slumber of exhaustion. Shelby posted guards in two-hour shifts, taking responsibility for security as long as he remained with the party.
On the fourth night he debated ordering the boy to take a turn at watch with the others. Lisa said he had found the youth asleep, scrunched into a corner between two wooden crates that afternoon. He was only fourteen or fifteen years old. Instead, Samuel assigned a hatchet-faced American the first watch, then went in search of the boy, Ollie Moreau. By the time this journey was over, he would be a lot tougher, or he’d be dead.
Shelby walked around the half-dozen campfires scattered on the sandy bar at the river’s edge where they had moored up for the night. The beach was perhaps thirty feet wide with the Missouri glistening blackly to the north as it ran its relentless course down into the Mississippi. On the land side a steep limestone bluff stretched high overhead, choked with scrub pines that cast jagged shadows which moved with the night wind.
Moreau was nowhere around. Shelby stopped to ask several groups of men but no one had seen him. “He isn’t aboard the boat. Where the hell has the fool boy wandered off to?” he muttered to himself just as Seth Walton came striding into the circle of firelight. “You seen the Moreau boy?” Samuel asked.
Walton scratched his stubbly chin. “No, can’t say as I have but I passed some of the men walking toward that next island. There’s a narrow channel between it and the bank. I figger they’ll cross it and do a little private celebrating with a jug they don’t plan on sharing.”
“Thanks, Seth. Maybe he’s with them,” Shelby said, striding into the darkness with his Bartlett flintlock clutched angrily in his hand. If he is, he’ll soon wish he weren’t. Sneaking off in the wilderness to get drunk was a foolhardy danger, not to mention against the rules agreed upon by all the men of the company.
Samuel headed upriver, following the gradual rise of the bank into a dense brushy stand of hickory and sycamore. A thick blanket of meadow grass had sprung up, covering the earth knee-high in places where it had not been trampled by deer to make their beds. He followed an old, well-worn Indian trail that twisted along the river, all the while keeping alert for any signs of movement.
The night was cool and the wind had stilled to a slight breeze. The fecund musty smell of river and earth filled his nostrils as he paused to gaze at the sky overhead. Ever since his first journey west in 1803, Samuel Shelby always experienced a physical thrill when he saw that big sky, an endless vault of blinding blue by day and star studded brilliance by night. The heady sense of freedom he felt was tempered by a feeling of insignificance in the face of all the untamed vastness spread before him. A three-quarter moon hung low on the horizon, casting silvery light around a long bare stretch of sandbar in the middle of a narrow sluggish neck of the river.
Such islands were always temporary, an old river rat had once told him when he first traversed the Mississippi. The great river changed course, often overnight, erasing all traces of land as if the hand of God had simply smoothed them back from whence they came. Then the power of the water would again disgorge another island up into its channel at another place, in another time. The deeper channel was on the opposite side and the narrow water between this bank and the island was easily fordable. Through the dense brushy cover Shelby could see the orange flicker of a low campfire and several shadowy figures gathered around it. He began to descend the embankment.
Once he neared the water’s edge he could hear the unmistakable sounds of a scuffle. Two men were holding a third down on the ground while another knelt over him, tearing at his clothes. Although Shelby could not see his face, he was certain the thin small figure kicking and writhing in the sand was Ollie Moreau. The boy fought fiercely yet made no attempt to cry out. Shelby had seen that before, a youth too ashamed to ask for help from his fellows, enduring a painful violation in frantic, desperate silence. That grown men could ease their lust with a boy had always appalled and sickened him. He checked the pistols in his belt, then raised his rifle and began wading across the shallow water toward the island.
The men were too intent on lust to hear the sounds of splashing but when he pulled back the hammer of the rifle, the distinct metallic click caused one of them to look up at the shadow looming fifteen feet away. Before the riverman could do more than loose his hold on the boy, Shelby’s voice cut through the sounds of hoarse panting.
“There are squaws happy enough to accommodate you back at camp—unless you have an unnatural taste for buggering your own sex,” Shelby said with withering contempt.
One of the men, a short, fat Frenchman, released his hold and tumbled backward onto the sand, sc
ooting frantically away. The second fellow lost his grip on his captive’s arm when Moreau jackknifed up, twisting free as the third culprit glared unrepentantly at the tall American. “Ain’t never been thet hard up fer my pleasurin’. This here’s no boy.”
One big hairy hand jerked aside the voluminous folds of the torn shirt shrouding his prisoner. A pair of pearly white breasts with impudently pointed pale pink tips peeped out through a tangled veil of long dark hair that had come unfastened in the struggle.
Samuel felt poleaxed when Olivia St. Etienne’s blazing emerald eyes met his. He expected terror or gratitude, but instead her expression was one of searing hatred. She shook off her tormentor’s hands and wrapped the shirt over her nakedness, all the while glaring defiantly at Shelby.
“You! How the hell did you end up here?”
“You ain’t sayin’ she’s yore woman, air ye, Colonel?” the other American asked while the little Frenchman cursed fluently as he scrambled away in the darkness.
“In a manner of speaking, yes,” Samuel said with a sardonic laugh.
“I am most certainly not!” Olivia seethed, gritting out each word.
“Oh, then you’d prefer these gentlemen?” Shelby countered with an almost courtly flourish.
Before she could respond, the ringleader, a big burly fellow with shaggy gray hair and rotted teeth bellowed, “I found her out ‘n took her. By Gawd, she’s mine!”
“I think we’ll let Manuel Lisa decide the matter,” Shelby replied, leveling the rifle directly at the contender’s midsection. “Of course, I’ll tell him you dragged her off a mile from camp along with a jug of his whiskey...that is whiskey from Señor Lisa’s private cabin, is it not?”
Some of the belligerence evaporated as the burly American stood up. “Now let’s not go ‘n do somethin’ plumb foolish, Colonel. We kin share ‘n share alike. The whiskey ‘n the woman. We caught her fair ‘n square. No respectable woman’d be out here alone. She’s nothin’ but a camp whore.”
Olivia spit a startlingly explicit French expletive she’d learned from the voyageurs and lunged, placing a well-aimed kick between the man’s legs. He toppled back onto the sand with a string of curses.
“Pick up your slightly castrated friend and take him back to camp before I give her a skinning knife and let her finish the operation. Leave the whiskey,” Shelby commanded.
The younger man helped his companion to stand up, then slung one arm across his shoulders and half dragged him into the river shallows without uttering another word.
Samuel lowered the rifle as the silence thickened between him and Olivia. Finally he asked, “Why the hell did you do such a wild, irresponsible thing? Did you think this would be another adventure like racing Wescott’s horses?”
She stood facing him, her booted feet spread defiantly, small fists clenched at her sides with the nails cutting into her palms. “At least it was of my own choosing. Anything is better than being sold like one of Wescott’s horses! How could you do it? I trusted you and you betrayed me. You told me you weren’t married when all the time—”
“I never told you a thing about my marital status,” Samuel shot back. Guilt reddened his face but in the dim firelight she could not see it.
“You deceived me!” she cried. “I thought you were…” She stopped, horrified. I thought you were the man of my dreams, the man who loved me. Instead she accused, “I thought you were a gentleman. All you are is a vile immoral piece of offal! Scum! Bastard! Son of a—”
“Cease fire! I think you’ve made your point, Mademoiselle St. Etienne. I take it you somehow learned of your guardian’s provisions for you and they didn’t exactly meet with your approval,” he said dryly.
“No, they did not,” she snapped. “You would have taken my virtue without a single qualm.”
He looked at her with disgust. “Your virtue,” he emphasized the word disdainfully, “it seems to me, was already quite thoroughly compromised long before you ever met me.”
“That’s a monstrous lie!” she yelled, ready to lambaste him with her fist.
“Is it? You couldn’t bear the idea of being my mistress, so instead you decided to take up with a whole crew of randy rivermen. Am I to assume these charming fellows were more to your liking than I? How could you be so stupid as to travel up the Missouri into the wilderness with them and not expect to have them rip you to pieces?” He could feel his simmering temper rising out of control, realizing what could have happened to her had he not been there.
“I did not intend to go upriver. I planned to go to my uncle Charles in New Orleans,” she replied stiffly.
“Well, for someone who’s lived several years on the Mississippi, you sure have a lousy sense of direction.”
“I was desperate and it was dark the morning we left. Monsieur Lisa let me sleep in the cabin box the night before. I did not realize we were headed northwest until we camped that night. By then I could scarcely lodge a protest,” she replied with withering sarcasm. “It was too late to do anything about it. You left me no choice.”
“Me?” he asked incredulously. “I didn’t sell you—your guardian did and apparently with good reason.” He felt guilty. Damn, why should he feel guilty because of this harebrained hoyden!
“So, that made it all right for you to buy me—for a damned horse!” That sounded pitiful to her own ears. At once she added, “It so happens I’m worth a hell of a lot more than that horse and I’m going to find a man who appreciates that fact.”
He snorted in derision. “Well, it damn well won’t be me now, will it? On reconsideration, I’d prefer to ‘ride’ the horse. Not only does she have a sweeter disposition, she does not bellow or curse.”
He had almost told her that he would not have forced her to become his mistress, that he didn’t believe all Wescott had told him, but just looking at her, feeling the raw sexual energy she exuded, having her throw down the gauntlet so blatantly made him realize he’d been a fool. She was spoiled and wild, just like the reckless French aristocracy from which she had sprung, living only for their own self-gratification, for the pleasures of the moment. Oh, yes, and she had experienced pleasure and given it. He could see that in the lushly sensuous pout of her full lips, the wicked slant of those exotic gypsy eyes, the bold way she stood with her feet planted apart, hands on the sweet curves of her hips, near-naked breasts thrust outward just begging for a man’s caress.
“How the hell did I not recognize you for the past four days? How did any man in the party ever for an instant think you were a boy?” The question asked itself before he could stop himself from blurting it out. Then another thought hit him with a crash. “Or did someone know? Do you have a lover here—someone who appreciates your worth?” he asked, lacing the last words with scorn, although he immediately dismissed the idea as foolish.
“I will not dignify such an insult with an answer.” Let him believe that she had a lover. At least he would keep his distance then, she assured herself. But the pain of the accusation cut far more deeply than she would ever have imagined that it could. Why had she become smitten with so unworthy a man? Fool.
Samuel slapped at a mosquito that was drawing a banquet from his neck. “It’s past time we got back to camp before Lisa has to send Walton out with a search party looking for us.”
“I’m not going anywhere with you.” Her eyes narrowed and she backed away a step as he approached her.
“You’re going to do precisely what I say, when I say. From here on, you will consider yourself my woman whether you want to be or not.”
“I’ll never belong to you!”
“You already do. I just took you from those three men. Once the rest of the crew learns there’s a white woman in camp they’ll cut each other’s throats to claim you. The best we can do to prevent chaos is to pretend that you’re mine.”
“What if I did have another lover in camp?” Stung, she could not resist taunting him.
He raised one eyebrow and looked down at her. “To date he�
�s done a miserable job as your protector. I just fired him, my pet. Come along, but first I’d cover those breasts again if I were you.”
He turned his back to kick out the fire, arrogantly assured that she would follow him to camp like some mindless lackey. Olivia’s eyes scanned the bare sandy islet searching for a weapon with which to bash out his brains. Other than the small brittle pieces of driftwood littering the sand, there was nothing—but the whiskey jug left by her attackers! Half-full and made of heavy crockery, it would do handily. She seized it and raised it up to deliver the coup de grace.
Samuel sensed more than saw her faint shadow move up behind him and whirled in the nick of time, blocking her blow with his forearm. With an oath he wrested the jug from her and tossed it into the river while holding one of her slender wrists.
Olivia kicked and clawed at him but he was more agile than the luckless trapper had been. Neatly avoiding her flying feet, he pulled her against him with bone jarring force and held her with arms pinned at her sides as she screamed curses at him, recalling every insult to his ancestry and description of his sexual practices that she had overheard among the rough rivermen.
“Be still, you damned hellcat. Do you want to bring the whole camp down on us? If they come to watch, I guarantee that I can give them quite a show.”
His voice was a threatening growl. He would actually do it, the miserable cur! She gritted her teeth, unable to control her rage, especially while he was holding her pressed against him. She could feel every inch of his hard chest, flat belly and long lean legs, even that most mysterious and threatening male part that seemed to have grown alarmingly since their struggle began. “No! I won’t let you—”
“See if you can stop me,” he snarled. Tossing her up over his shoulder, he began slogging through the water back to the riverbank.
His boots were soaked, his feet half-frozen by river water, he was chewed alive by mosquitoes and now the damned hellion was clawing at his back. He gave her sumptuously rounded derriere a hard swat to silence her, then cursed at that part of his own anatomy that ached most of all. Keeping her with him was going to be worse than Apache torture, but what other choice did he have? And how could he complete his mission with the responsibility for this impossible female on his back, now quite literally? Grimly he decided he would worry about that when he picked up the Englishman’s trail.