Chapter Twelve
Breckinridge had thought the stream at Cooter’s Landing was big, but three weeks later he discovered what a big river really looked like.
He stood on a slight hill and gazed at what had to be the Mississippi. It was more than half a mile wide, he estimated, a giant, powerfully flowing monster of a river. On the surface it appeared placid, but with hundreds of miles of travel behind it that water must have built up a considerable current.
The river was empty at the moment as it flowed between grassy, gently rolling banks dotted with clumps of brush. Here and there trees grew. Breckinridge had heard stories about how much boat traffic was to be found on the Mississippi, but not today, not on this stretch of the river, anyway. He saw no sign of a settlement, no sign of civilization at all. The great river looked like it must have hundreds of years ago, he thought, before white men ever came to this part of the country.
The next thing to occur to him was to wonder how in the world he was going to get across.
Breckinridge sat down on the hillside to think. His shaggy hair, grown out some since he had hacked it off at Cooter’s Landing, brushed the tops of his shoulders. He was a little leaner than he had been before Sadie Humboldt and Jack MacKenzie stole everything he had, but he hadn’t gotten gaunt from hunger. He knew how to find roots and berries that were safe to eat, and he had been able to rig a snare and catch a rabbit. He’d found a rock sharp enough to make a cut in the animal’s hide and had skinned it by the simple expedient of tearing the pelt off. Then he’d built a fire Indian-fashion, by rubbing sticks together, and roasted the hunks of rabbit meat. The meal wasn’t very good, but it gave him strength.
Working with that sharp rock, he had fashioned a sling out of the creature’s hide. With stones as ammunition, he had brought down several birds and another couple of rabbits as he continued his westward trek. Roots, berries, and some occasional half-raw meat weren’t much to sustain a young man of his size, but they were the best he could do. He hadn’t starved, anyway, and he was rather proud of that fact.
He had hoped he might run into some pilgrims headed west who would be willing to let him accompany them in return for helping out with the teams and doing chores around the camp at night. No such luck, however. Where was that great tide of immigrants he had heard folks talking about in the taverns back home? Not in southern Tennessee or northern Alabama and Mississippi, wherever the hell he was. That was for sure.
Now Breckinridge sat there and looked at the river and tried to decide whether he should go north or south as he followed the mighty stream. It had to be one or the other. Like it or not, he was going to have to find a town with a ferry or some other sort of boat to carry him to the western shore.
While he was sitting there, he heard a faint popping sound in the distance.
A frown creased Breckinridge’s forehead. He knew gunshots when he heard them, and these came fast and frequent. Somebody in these parts was in trouble. That many shots meant men were firing at each other.
Breckinridge stood up and shaded his eyes with his hand as he looked out at the river. The Mississippi curved around a great bend to the south, Breck’s left, and as he watched, several boats appeared, one larger vessel and a number of canoes.
The smaller boats were harrying the big one like a pack of wolves surrounding a potential meal. Men seated in the canoes wielded paddles and tried to drive them alongside the larger craft, which was propelled by a dozen oarsmen, six to a side, digging long oars into the water to force the boat against the current.
Several men knelt on top of a cabin in the center of the bigger boat and fired rifles and pistols at the men in the canoes. Those shots were returned and caused the men on the cabin to duck. There was no telling how long this running fight had been going on, Breckinridge thought.
His sympathies instinctively were with the men on the larger boat, even though he had no logical reason for feeling that way. Maybe he just didn’t like to see anybody ganged up on because that had happened to him so many times while he was growing up. The other boys knew they couldn’t defeat him alone because of his size, so they had swarmed him and tried to take him down that way.
Another man was fooling with something mounted at the front of the cabin. He turned it toward the nearest canoe, and suddenly a loud boom! rolled over the water and grayish-white smoke spurted. Breckinridge realized the weapon was a small cannon. The cannonball tore through the canoe and sent splinters flying into the air as well as dumping the craft’s occupants into the river.
That didn’t make the other attackers back off. They continued trying to close in as they skirmished with the defenders on top of the cabin.
One of the attackers lobbed a small dark object through the air. It landed on the bigger boat’s deck and exploded. The man who had fired the cannon ran to the back of the cabin and grabbed the long sweep mounted there. Breckinridge wasn’t very familiar with boats, but his mind was keen enough for him to figure out that the sweep was used for steering. The man threw his weight against it and swung it around, and the boat began to angle toward the shore on the side of the river where Breckinridge stood.
He started down the hill. Unarmed as he was, he didn’t know what he could do to help the men on the larger boat, but that impulse drove him anyway.
He plunged into some brush, and as he thrashed his way through it he heard the cannon boom again. It would be a pretty formidable weapon against lightweight canoes, but it took time to load and the attackers’ crafts were much more maneuverable.
Breckinridge burst out of the brush and saw that he was within a hundred yards of the river. The larger boat was still bound for shore with the smaller vessels swarming around it. The shooting on both sides continued. Nobody involved in this fracas was much of a marksman, Breck thought, or else they’d all be dead by now, as much powder as they’d burned.
His long legs carried him swiftly toward the river. As he ran, he realized that he wasn’t completely unarmed after all. He had his sling and a good supply of rocks he’d picked up along the way and put in a pouch made from the hide of another rabbit he’d killed. Every time he came across a stone that looked like it would make good ammunition, he collected it.
He ran out onto a little point of ground that jutted a short distance into the water near the spot where the larger boat appeared to be bound. Fitting a rock into the sling, he began to whirl it by the cords he’d fashioned from rabbit guts. A man in one of the canoes pointed a rifle at the men on top of the boat’s cabin, so Breckinridge took aim at him.
He let fly with the stone, which was roughly round and a little smaller than the palm of his hand. It whipped through the air and struck the rifleman square on the temple. The man reared up and then toppled over the side, either dead or unconscious.
Just like David and Goliath, Breckinridge thought, once again remembering his ma reading from the Good Book . . . although he was built more along the lines of Goliath, to be honest.
With all the commotion going on, no one seemed to have noticed Breckinridge yet, despite the fact that he was sort of hard to miss. The other attackers probably thought the man who’d been knocked into the river had been clipped by a bullet fired from the bigger boat. Breck fitted another stone into his sling and again started whirling.
This time he hit one of the paddlers. The man dropped his paddle, gagged, clutched at his throat where the rock had struck him, and started thrashing around. Breckinridge figured the man’s windpipe was crushed.
That finally got the attackers’ attention. One of them yelled and pointed at the big youngster in buckskins standing on the shore. Breckinridge threw himself down as several rifles and pistols swung toward him and erupted in smoke and flame.
The cannon roared once more, followed by a splintering sound and howls of alarm and pain. Breckinridge figured another of the canoes had been blown out of the water. He raised his head to look and saw that was the case. Several men thrashed around in the river, obviously having abandoned the destroyed craft.
A couple more paddlers floated facedown.
The rest of the canoes began veering away from the larger boat. The attackers had had enough from the looks of it. However, as Breckinridge started to stand up, one of the men turned and fired a pistol at him. Breck felt a jolt of pain as the ball burned along his upper left arm. The impact twisted him around and dropped him on his rear end. He stared angrily after the man who had shot him as the remaining canoes sped away across the river.
He wasn’t likely to forget the man’s lumpy, ugly face. The brutal features looked like they had been carved out of a rotting potato.
The cannon sent another shot whistling after the fleeing canoes, but the ball splashed into the river between two of the lightweight craft, rocking them but not doing any damage. Then the boat grounded against the shore and two men leaped to the bank holding thick ropes that they tied around nearby trees to keep the vessel from drifting away.
The fellow who’d been manning the cannon on top of the cabin jumped down to the walkway along the sides of the boat and then bounded ashore. He came over to Breckinridge and bent to grasp Breck’s good arm and help him to his feet.
“Merci, mon ami!” the man said in a booming voice reminiscent of the sound the cannon made when it went off.
“You don’t have to ask me for mercy,” Breckinridge told him. “I’m on the same side as you fellas.”
The man laughed and shook his head. He was tall and broad shouldered, although not as large and brawny as Breckinridge.
“Non, non,” he said. “That is not what I meant. Merci means thank you, and when I call you mon ami it means you are my friend.”
Breckinridge realized what was going on now and recalled hearing the other language before on occasion. He said “You’re talkin’ French, ain’t you?”
“Oui. Yes. My native tongue. I am Christophe Marchant.”
He was striking looking, with his size, a shock of black hair, and a thin mustache that curled around at the ends.
“I’m Breckinridge Wallace,” Breck introduced himself, giving his real name before he remembered that he’d been trying not to do that. The pain of his wounded arm must have distracted him, he thought.
He wasn’t going to worry about it too much, though. Knoxville was hundreds of miles behind him now, and besides, he’d never liked lying, especially about who he was. Bill Walters was dead and could rest in peace as far as Breckinridge was concerned.
Christophe Marchant gripped Breck’s hand and pumped it enthusiastically. Christophe said, “I am very pleased to meet you, M’sieu Wallace. You came to our aid, and for that I owe you a debt of gratitude.”
“I just didn’t cotton to the way those varmints were swarmin’ around you like that,” Breckinridge explained. “It always gets my dander up when I see somebody bein’ ganged up on.”
“Oui, I feel the same way. You risked your life by interceding on our behalf, though. You shed your own blood.” Christophe gestured toward the crimson stain on Breckinridge’s sleeve. “Come aboard the boat. One of my men is very clever when it comes to patching up such injuries.”
“You’re the cap’n of this boat?”
“Oui. She is the Sophie, the finest keelboat on all the mighty Mississipp’.”
Christophe helped Breckinridge onto the boat and called, “Harry! We have a wounded man here.”
A little man with a rat-like face under a knit cap hurried toward them. He said, “Can you take that shirt off, mister? Otherwise I got to cut the sleeve off to get at the wound, and you might not want that.”
Breckinridge grimaced at the pain as he lifted his injured arm to peel the homespun shirt over his head. Harry, whose head didn’t quite come up to the level of the wound on Breck’s arm, looked at it and nodded.
“Not too bad,” he declared. “Probably hurts like blazes, but it’s just a graze. I’ll fetch a jug of whiskey.”
“I ain’t much of a drinker,” Breckinridge told him.
Harry snorted and said, “It ain’t for drinkin’. Pour whiskey on a wound and it stings like hell, but it’s a lot less likely to fester. Don’t ask me why. I just know it works.”
While Harry had ducked into the cabin to fetch the liquor, Christophe asked one of the other men, “How much damage did that infernal bomb do, Andre?”
A man with a thin, dark, rather sinister face said, “We have a hole in the deck we’ll have to repair and we lost one crate of cargo, but that’s all, mon capitaine.”
“I was worried that it might have holed our hull,” Christophe said. “We will stay here while we make the necessary repairs, eh?”
Andre nodded his agreement with that plan.
Harry came back with an earthen jug. He splashed whiskey directly on the wound on Breckinridge’s arm. Breck’s breath hissed between clenched teeth at the fiery pain, but it subsided quickly. Harry bound a strip of cloth around the wound and nodded in satisfaction.
“That’ll do it,” he said. “That arm will be stiff and sore for a few days, but it ought to heal all right.”
“I’m much obliged to you,” Breckinridge said. “I don’t have any way to pay you for your help—”
“Pay us?” Christophe interrupted. “Non, that is the ridiculous notion. You came to our assistance. It is we who owe the debt to you.”
“All I did was fling a couple of stones at those varmints.”
“And you severely injured two of them. Don’t think I did not notice. You are quite the excellent marksman with that sling.”
Breckinridge grinned and said, “Here lately I’ve had to get good with it, or else I wouldn’t have had anything to eat.”
“You have no food, no other weapons?” Christophe asked. “No horse?”
“Nope,” Breckinridge said as he pulled his shirt back on. “All I own in the world is what I’m wearin’.”
“But you look like an American . . . what is the word . . . frontiersman.”
“I reckon that’s what I started out to be. I had a horse and plenty of gear. But I, ah, ran into some bad luck.”
“The cards, eh? Or the dice?” Christophe raised his rather bushy eyebrows. “You are the gambler, no?”
“Not really. Somebody played a dirty trick on me, and I got robbed. They took everything I had.”
“Was there a woman involved?”
Breckinridge frowned in surprise and asked, “How’d you know that?”
“Where there is trouble, my friend, cherchez la femme . . . look for the woman.”
“Yeah, well, that’s what happened, all right. There was this gal called Sadie . . .” Breckinridge’s voice trailed off as he shook his head. “Aw, shoot, there ain’t no point in talkin’ about it. What’s done is done. I just got to learn from it and go on.”
“A very wise attitude. Most of the valuable lessons learned in life are accompanied by heartbreak and loss, or else we would not remember them.”
Breckinridge didn’t want to dwell on what had happened with Sadie and MacKenzie, so he looked around and asked, “What kind of boat is this, anyway?”
“The Sophie is a keelboat. We carry cargo of all sorts up and down the river between New Orleans and Saint Louis. At the moment we are on our way north with a load of cotton and tobacco.”
“Who were those fellas who jumped you?”
Christophe clenched both hands into fists, shook them in front of him, and said, “Pirates! Damned river pirates after our cargo. Instead of doing honest work, they prefer to murder and steal. We have fought them off before. They are led by a man named Bolton, Asa Bolton.” Christophe paused. “He was the one who shot you, friend Breckinridge.”
“Big ugly fella?”
“Oui, that is him.”
“I won’t forget him any time soon,” Breckinridge said. “If I ever run into him again, there’s liable to be trouble. I don’t cotton to bein’ shot.”
“A very understandable attitude. Be careful around Bolton, however. He is a very dangerous man.”
“So am I,” Breckinridge said, “when I get my dander up.”
That brought a laugh from Christophe. He said, “You can worry about that another time, mon ami. For now, you will be our guest as we camp here tonight. We have plenty of food and wine and will be honored to have you join us.”
Breckinridge wasn’t that interested in the wine, but the prospect of an actual hot meal, something besides squirrel and rabbit and berries, made his mouth water. He nodded and said, “That sounds mighty good to me, Mr. Marchant.”
“Please, call me Christophe. Here we are all comrades of the river, voyageurs of the mighty Mississipp’!”