As the spring freshened, the bloated corpses of dead buffalo floated past. Great treesundercut and toppled when the current undercut the bank that had once nourished themtwisted and turned in the Missouri’s current; they rolled their hooklike branches as they bounced off the river’s bottom. Other trees—called sawyers—bobbed in the swift, muddy current. Anchored to the bottom by a snagged root or branch, they rose and sank, giving them the motion from whence they derived their name. The worst of the Missouri’s dangers was the embarrass: a tangle of floating driftwood that broke loose on the spring flood and floated down in a huge, interlocked mass of wicked limbs and debris.
Shifting sandbars made navigation difficult. The fluctuating water level would leave boats floating at night, only to find them listing on shore the following morning.
The banks along which the cordellers struggled were unstable, and more than once collapsed, tumbling the men into the water while the polers battled to maintain the boat’s position. The engages swam, or struggled through the mud, to the shore, cursing, laughing, and joking, as they scrambled to recover the heavy line before it drifted back down past the Polly.
Once a log rammed the rudder, smashing it to bits. Upon the impact, the tiller batted Mayette ass-over-appetite into the river. The rudder took two days to repair.
Then Polly’s mast had to be reset at Little Osage Island.
During repairs, the engages enjoyed hunting, fishing, and even playful wrestling and racing on the muddy sand.
Jean Baptiste LaChappelle found a huge catfish stranded in a muddy pool. It took him, Tylor, and Latoulipe fifteen minutes of splashing, yelling, and laughter to club the huge fish into submission. Then came the struggle to carry the slick-sided, flopping monster back to camp where they presented it to the cook.
“This is the way to travel, my friend.” Latoulipe laughed through the spattered mud on his face as he dropped his full length on the sand next to Tylor. The odor of roasting catfish carried on the afternoon breeze.
“It does beat hell out of the cordelle, don’t it?” Tylor stared out at the river, wondering at its ceasless energy. All that water—and it never hesitated, just kept rolling, surging, sucking, and swirling on its way to the distant Gulf of Mexico.
Latoulipe’s eyes turned thoughtful. “The bourgeois, he tells me that you knew I followed you in Saint Louis? I don’t know what to . . . I just . . .”
“Spying isn’t your strongest foot put forward.”
“Do you think poorly of me?”
Tylor straightened himself and cupped some sand in his hands. He sifted it through his fingers as he studied Latoulipe. “Hell, no. You were doing a job for Lisa.”
They shared a long pause as the sun beat down on them.
The boatman gestured with both hands. “It is the times. There are many plots. The British are making trouble through this man Dickson. The Spanish are always a threat. Many, even those who invest with him, would see the bourgeois destroyed. What is even a man’s life when the stakes are so high and the future so uncertain?”
“It is the times.” A knot tightened at the base of Tylor’s throat. What are you after, Latoulipe? Picking up on what Lisa was prodding at last night?
Latoulipe smiled. “I think the bourgeois is still curious about you—but he does not think you a threat anymore. Since we must work together, I am hoping that what happened in Saint Louis will not cause you to forever think poorly of me.”
Tylor marveled at the subtle changes of expression in Latoulipe’s face. The man could be read like a book. Call him anything but steeped in intrigue.
Tylor nodded to himself: Loyalty was the driving force in Latoulipe’s life. The knot began to recede.
“Baptiste, so far as I am concerned, Saint Louis is indeed behind us. In more ways than one.”
But the last thing he could do was relax. Even here, beyond the frontier.