Skye stood at the rail watching the hubbub. On shore, a crowd jostled and pushed. The arrival of a riverboat was a great event at Fort Pierre Chouteau. The Sioux added to the press of bodies, studying this amazing machine of the white men, their thoughts private and unfathomable. Skye thought them handsomely formed, and taller than most tribes. Most of the males wore only breechclouts that hot day, but many wore white men’s shirts and britches, and stovepipe hats. The calico-clad women stood back, knotted into clusters,
holding their children close. Dogs circled crazily; No Name watched them from the deck, his neck hair bristling.
When the deck crew finally slid the gangway to the levee and the boat was snubbed to massive posts set in the earth, a great traffic commenced on the gangway; passengers heading for land, and a few company clerks fighting the tide to reach Marsh, their hands clutching manifests and bills of lading. Skye thought he would wait. There would be time enough to roam the post, meet Laidlaw, its factor, and patrol the Sioux lodges to study the ways of these powerful people.
Fort engagés were hurrying bales of buffalo robes, beaver pelts, and other furs to the bank. The Otter would carry a fortune in furs and hides back to St. Louis. On its upstream trip, it had dropped off a year’s supply of trade items and household goods for the post; now, en route to St. Louis, it would carry the annual returns, as the fur trade called the accumulated peltries.
Deckmen opened the cargo hatch and several dropped below to begin the mighty business of storing tons of furs in the cramped hold and moving all the furs brought from Fort Union aft to make room for the new load. The boat drew four feet of water loaded; the hold was only five feet high, and a man had to stoop. Other deckmen swung a cargo boom toward shore, where a fort crew waited to load the bales of fur.
Two deckmen were in the horse pen, sliding hackamores over the Cheyenne woman’s wild-eyed ponies, and that seemed odd to Skye. Maybe they would exercise all the horses, including those belonging to the Skyes. But they didn’t halter any other horses. He spotted Trenholm leading Lame Deer, the Cheyenne woman, and her children down the companionway. He was carrying her things; two parfleches, some blankets, and a canvas sack. Behind, a cabin boy was carrying her packsaddle.
Was she getting off?
He spotted Victoria, looking agitated, and he headed toward the companionway, curious about this turn of events.
Lame Deer passed him, her face granitic and proud, but her eyes betrayed sorrow.
“Say, mate, what is this?” Skye asked.
The mate grinned. “Cap’ain’s putting her off. Don’t want some lice-bait squaw on board.”
Victoria appeared at the foot of the stair. “He’s making her go!”
“Why?”
“He says he don’t want her.”
The mate continued toward the gangway, passing the lounging firemen and stacks of cordwood.
“You sure she isn’t just getting off because she wants to?”
“I saw it. The big chief, he just tells the little chief to unload her.”
“Is he giving her back her fare? The robes?”
She shook her head angrily.
He pushed into the crowd. Lame Deer was waiting near the gangway.
“You getting off?” he asked.
“He make me go.”
“You want to go to St. Louis?”
She nodded. She stood resolutely, tall and straight, her face blank and empty as an August sky.
“Want me to talk to Marsh?”
She stared silently, and now he saw an edge in her. The boy clung to her skirt; she held the girl on her hip.
Skye did not understand any of this. “Don’t get off until I see about this,” he said.
She looked fearfully at the mate, Trenholm, who was getting her horses readied to lead down the wobbly gangway.
Skye vaulted up the companionway to the pilothouse, which was now jammed with company clerks in black suits.
Marsh looked up, his face showing displeasure at the unauthorized presence of a passenger.
“Why are you putting that woman off?” Skye asked.
“Because I choose to,” Marsh snapped and returned to his examination of a paper the clerks had handed him.
“You returning her fare?”
Marsh, already choleric, exploded. “Get out!”
“I said, you returning her St. Louis fare?”
Marsh wheeled about and faced Skye. The captain was about the same height and build, and probably was just as hard as Skye.
“This is my ship, Skye. I will do what I choose, when I choose, and for whatever reason I choose. Now get out.”
Skye didn’t budge. “Not until this is settled. And it’s Mister Skye.”
He wondered what it mattered to him. Why did he care about the Cheyenne woman? Was it because Trenholm had called her a louse-ridden squaw? Or was it simply his ancient hatred of injustice, a tidal wave of feeling that went straight back to the Royal Navy and the endless cruelties he had seen there. He remembered those naval officers, their arrogance and contempt, and with the memory came a hardening of his own. Damn the consequences. The heat rose in him, even as it filled the face of Marsh, who glared at him furiously.
“You owe her a fare. Get those robes back to her, or let her stay,” Skye said quietly, an unmistakable menace in his voice. The pilot and helmsman stared. The fort’s clerks gaped.
Marsh pointed. “Off,” he said. “You and your filthy squaw. Off my boat!”
“Give the Cheyenne woman her fare back.”
Marsh was totally unafraid, and Skye knew the man would fight, and fight brutally if it came to that. The master closed in, his fists balled, his hard gaze steady.
The pilot and helmsman circled to either side, ready to help. A dead silence pervaded the pilothouse, a silence so profound
that it seemed to blot the hubbub on the boiler deck and riverbank.
Then all three leapt at Skye simultaneously. Skye didn’t fight back; there was no point in it. They escorted Skye to the companionway and pushed. Skye stumbled downward, caught a rail, and tripped down to the boiler deck.
“Aiee!” Victoria cried. She had obviously seen at least some of it.
“We’re getting off. Get the horses saddled. I’ll get our truck.”
The second mate followed, ready to throw them off if they didn’t leave on their own. Above, Marsh watched from the pilothouse.
Skye headed for the cabin, filled with regret. What had he done? Had he ruined his future with American Fur? Were his old feelings about injustice, feelings dating back to his slavery in the Royal Navy, still governing his conduct? Had he not grown since those youthful days?
It was too late to have regrets. Marsh had ejected him from the Otter, and that was a captain’s absolute right. Marsh hated the Indian women. His boat was for whites, not redskins. But that puzzled Skye. There was something else at work here; something he didn’t know about; something connected to Lame Deer, or her husband, Simon MacLees. Marsh was a choleric man, but that explained nothing. A minor incident had exploded into something darker. Skye wondered whether he would ever know the answer.
He stuffed their few possessions into Victoria’s handsomely dyed parfleches, checked to see if he had left anything in the gloomy little cubicle, and emerged on the boiler deck—right into Bonfils, who was lounging aft, watching the furious business of loading the packet.
“Why, Skye, you leaving us?” the young man asked, delight in his eye.
Skye ignored him.
“Handsome ladies out there. I suppose I’ll go see what a few trinkets will purchase,” Bonfils said, following Skye past the firemen to the midships area where the gangway stretched to land. “You are abandoning us. Is it that you have given up your little, ah, quest to impress your magnificent virtues and skills upon my uncle Pierre?”
Skye stared at the handsome brigade leader, and then returned to his business.
It took a few minutes for Victoria to prepare the horses, and then they led the nervous, whinnying animals down the wobbling gangway and onto the levee, where scores of Sioux eyed them solemnly. Here they were safe; beyond the fort, Skye and Victoria would be fair game. No Name slunk along with them, his neck hair bristling.
Skye stood at the levee, rein in hand, while Victoria finished loading the horses. He was looking for Lame Deer, who had vanished in the hurlyburly of the crowd.
“You see the Cheyenne?” he asked Victoria.
She squinted. “What for?”
“Take to Saint Louis.”
“You still going there?”
He nodded, lifted his battered topper, and settled it on his long locks. “Got unfinished business there. And the least the company can do is get the Cheyenne woman there safely, long as she paid her fare.”
“You still with the company?” Victoria’s gaze bore into him; she was confused.
“Haven’t resigned,” he said. “Maybe I will in St. Louis.”
“How we going?”
“I’ve got a little credit. We didn’t have time at rendezvous to drink up the last of the salary.” He grinned. She grinned back.
“Maybe they got some goddam whiskey here,” she said, cheer leaking into her hard glare like sun bursting into an overcast sky. “We got to find that Cheyenne. They treat her bad.”
“Marsh doesn’t like Indians.”
“Well, sonofabitch, I don’t like Marsh!”
They found Lame Deer at the fort, her horse tied to a hitch rail, her children clutching her. She might be a trader’s wife, put a post of this size was plainly intimidating.
Victoria approached. “Hey, you want to go to St. Louis? Place of many lodges?”
Lame Deer looked uncertain. “My heart is two hearts now. My mind flies away from my spirit. My children weep.”
“We’ll take you,” Victoria said.
“Long walk. Marsh, the big chief, put us off too,” Skye said. “But we’re going to St. Louis.”
Lame Deer studied Skye with knowing eyes, and a determined look in her soft young face. “I will put wings on my feet. I will walk and leave no footprints upon the meadows. I will walk beside the river, and the fish will play beside me. My feet will carry me to the end of the world, for there will I see Simon. He gives me a big heart. I will go with you.”