Rocky Mountain Company Read Free Page B

trip, though they’d been looking ever since the stop at Bellevue, where the army performed its final inspection to ascertain whether the packet contained nefarious spirits. It found none except normal ship’s stores for passenger use. Not until they’d reached a certain woodyard below Sergeant Bluff one moonless evening had spirits in wooden casks appeared in the low hold. None of the passengers knew it save for himself, young Maxim Straus, and Dust Devil, who frowned at it all. Those plus Captain La-Barge and his mate and two crewmen. Without those illegal spirits, the whole enterprise would collapse. With them, they had a fighting chance against the giant American Fur, with all its ruthless power and subterfuge — and vast stores of the illegal commodity.
    At first some of the passengers and his own engagés shot at the buffalo, killing a few, which were snared by the crew and hauled aboard, rivering water and blood. But the shooting palled, especially when dead bloody buffaloes spun and bobbed silently downstream in the opaque aquamarine water, useless meat. The boat lay on the soft-lit river as silent as the ghostly herd that shook loose of the clawing stream on the north and trotted up into the night.
    He didn’t speak. No one spoke. He hadn’t heard a word for an hour. He liked being there. For the first time in moons, he felt right. He’d started to feel right back near Bellevue, where the Platte, a mile wide and six inches deep and mostly rolling sand, debouched into the Missouri. And where the bankside forests thinned, finally surrendering to grass. And where the moist oppressive air gave way to something drier and cleaner in his hungry lungs, and the scent of prairie replaced the fetid odor of hardwood forest. Above the Platte, the color of the river changed from chocolate to murky green. Below Bellevue, the trees had hemmed him like prison bars.
    He’d borne St. Louis only by large infusions of corn spirits, quietly, nightly, staving off the demons that choked and throttled him until he bolted up in the night, sweating and cursing. Somehow he’d survived, eyeing the denizens of that rich city as narrowly as they must have eyed him, in his velvety fringed elkskin britches and calico shirt, his unkempt beard, and a red mane flowing from a half bald crown of skull down to his shoulders. He’d had to do it, and he did it.
    Straus had booked a cabin for him on the Platte , but even though it was the most spacious available it closed in on him until, scarcely out of St. Louis, he’d fled out onto the boiler deck, and vaulted up the companionway and rolled into a buffalo robe on the hurricane deck, just aft of the texas. Dust Devil hadn’t joined him. She had taken to her cabin as if it was a fine eighteen-hide lodge, with slaves who’d bring her tea or coffee at the slightest wave of her hard hand. She liked slaves, and had never ceased pestering him for some, especially a few Crow women she could persecute.
    The sun slid behind a bank of clouds along the northwest horizon, gilding their tops until Brokenleg thought for an aching moment they might be the western mountains, snowcapped, blue and royal. But they weren’t, and it was much too soon to entertain such thoughts. It left him disappointed in the graying light. He felt almost right, but not quite. These prairies were tallgrass and thick, dampening him almost as much as the dank forests. Not yet free, not yet. But better than St. Louis.
    Odd how Guy Straus had sensed it in him and sympathized, although not a word had passed between them. On several occasions Straus had offered his carriage and trotters for a jaunt out of town, and Brokenleg had taken him up on it, driving hard out Market or Chestnut or Washington into the wooded hills to the west. But it never helped. Sometimes Straus took him to the comfortable, decaying Planters House to dine with Robert Campbell, legendary fur man who’d come out to the rendezvous with the Sublettes, Fitzpatrick,