Cheyenne Winter Read Free

slid toward the levee a small crowd of Otos and Omahas collected there, running down the steep paths to the water’s edge. For years Bellevue had been run as a trading post for American Fur by Peter Sarpy. The comfortable post was still a trading center, but it had a new resident as well, the U.S. Indian Agent for the Omahas and other local tribes — the Reverend Mr. Foster Gillian, a portly divine of the Congregational Church. It had become Indian Bureau policy to appoint ministers as Indian Agents, supposing civilizing good would come of it. Brokenleg hawked up some spit and spat. He had his notions about all that.
    From up on the hurricane deck Brokenleg eyed the fat cleric in his black clawhammer frock coat and silk top hat. The man was teetotal. And worse, he’d been imposing his morals on tribesmen until they brimmed with resentments, turning a happy, fruitful trading post into a seething mass of hatreds. Still, this would take all of twenty minutes and they’d be on their way upriver. Below, on the main deck, a motley mob of deck passengers, ruffians and mountain men mostly, swarmed to the rail. Brokenleg hardly knew any of them — the old beaver men, his rendezvous pals, had mostly vanished into some void. Oh, where had all them coons gone? Men he drank with, trapped icy streams with, told tall tales with through a wintry night? The Stony Mountains had become as silent as a trapped-out creek.
    Deck hands lowered the stage and a welter of men boiled off the packet to stretch their legs and explore the loveliest of all the Missouri River fur posts. After that exodus the reverend proceeded forth, as stately as a whale, accompanied by a horde of factotums, mostly breeds. Brokenleg decided he’d better head down to the main deck even though descending the companionways was torture for a man with a leg welded straight at the knee by an old injury.
    But Captain Sire was down there to greet the agent, and young Maxim as well; the boat and the company were represented, so he didn’t hurry. At length, after some babble, the deckhands opened the hatch and the Reverend Foster Gillian lowered his portly self down the ladder, a glassed candle-lantern in hand. Maxim accompanied him; no one else bothered. By the time Brokenleg limped up, the hold had swallowed the reverend.
    Down there, Brokenleg knew, Maxim would steer the man along the two aisles through inky blackness, warning him not to bring the lantern close to casks of gunpowder, occasionally shifting crates and bales of trade goods to let the inspector examine what lay beneath. That had been young Maxim’s duty from the start; he kept the books, did the clerking, checked the cargo against theft each day.
    Nearby, Mrs. Gillian awaited under a white parasol, respectably isolated on the deck by cowed passengers. Brokenleg did not introduce himself. Something about Mrs. Gillian’s manner forbade it. He wondered how she treated the red men in her husband’s charge. He heard the scuff and scrape of shifting cargo below and knew Maxim was being put through a workout. And then he detected rising voices.
    Maxim’s head bobbed up at the hatch, looking worried. “We need two deck hands,” he said, shooting an unhappy look at Brokenleg.
    The mate sent down two deckhands, and in short order three rundlets were hoisted to the main deck looking like fat felons, followed by the lumbering bulk of the minister, who was helped out upon the planking, and stood puffing after his exertion up the ladder.
    He had a bung starter in hand and proceeded to twist it into wood until he was able to extract the plug, which taxed his muscles to their limit. Then he bent his portly frame until his nose probed the hole, and sniffed.
    “Vinegar indeed,” he wheezed. “I smell foul spirits.”

Two
     
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    Brokenleg was amazed. The company had no spirits aboard. He limped forward, plunged a finger into the bung, and sniffed. It wasn’t vinegar.
    “And who are you?” asked Foster Gillian,