Chapter Thirteen
After spending three weeks on the trail by himself, half-starved for both food and company, passing the evening with these rough keelboatmen was a very welcome change for Breckinridge. Of the ten-man crew, half were French, including Christophe Marchant, descendants of trappers and boatmen who had ventured into the American wilderness from Canada. Four of the others had been born and raised here, and the final member of the crew was a taciturn Englishman.
The salt pork, biscuits, and beans dished up at supper tasted mighty good to Breckinridge, as did the coffee with which he washed down the food. The coffee was different from any he had ever had, and Christophe explained that it had something called chicory in it.
“That is the way the Cajuns drink it in New Orleans and along the bayous down yonder in Louisiana,” he said.
“What are Cajuns?” Breckinridge asked.
“French people who were driven down there by their enemies from a place in Canada called Acadia. Cousins, I suppose you could say, of voyageurs such as myself.” Christophe thumped his chest with a clenched fist as they sat on logs next to the campfire. “They live now mostly in the swamps, although some have settled in New Orleans.”
Breckinridge shook his head and said, “There’s a whole lot about this world I don’t know, I reckon.”
“You are a woodsman. You cannot be expected to know anything other than your homeland until you venture out away from it . . . as you are doing now,” Christophe replied with a smile. “You will find that the world is bigger and more wondrous than you could ever imagine, mon ami. People are very different in the places you will go. Although in some respects they are always the same.”
“Like there are some you can trust and some you can’t,” Breckinridge observed.
Christophe laughed and nodded.
“Exactly, my young friend. You have the beginnings of wisdom beyond your years.”
After supper the Frenchmen all filled their cups with wine from a jug Christophe passed around, while the Americans and the Englishmen stuck to whiskey. Breckinridge was satisfied with the coffee. After a while he said to Christophe, “You’re plannin’ to post guards tonight in case those pirates come back, aren’t you?”
“Oui. Although the likelihood of them attacking us on land is small. They prefer to carry out their thievery on the water.”
“I’d be glad to take a turn, if you’d like,” Breckinridge volunteered. He lowered his voice. “Some of these fellas might not be too alert later on, if you know what I mean.”
“Not to worry. They all have a surprising capacity for intoxicants. However, I will take you up on your offer, mon ami. We have rifles and pistols with which you can arm yourself.”
Breckinridge nodded and said with a sigh, “It’ll be good to hold a gun again.”
“I would make a gift of the weapons to you, but we may need them. This river, she is a dangerous place at times, and not just because of the currents and snags.”
“I wouldn’t take your guns,” Breckinridge said. “There is one favor you fellas might could do for me, though.”
“Name it, and if it is within our power to accomplish, it is yours.”
“Once you get your boat patched up, if you could take me across to the other side of the river I’d be mighty obliged.”
“But of course! You wish to continue traveling west, I take it?”
“Yep. Got places to go.” Breckinridge didn’t mention the Rocky Mountains, but they were always in the back of his mind these days.
He was going to have to figure out some way to outfit himself, though, if he was ever going to make it to the Rockies. He couldn’t survive out there the way he had been doing these past few weeks.
Christophe hadn’t asked him where he had come from or where he was going, but Breckinridge had a hunch the Frenchman was smart enough to have figured out that he was fleeing from something. Breck appreciated the fact that Christophe hadn’t pried in his affairs.
Now Christophe echoed what Breckinridge had just been thinking. He said, “You will need weapons, supplies, perhaps a sturdy mount. I will be glad to deliver you to the other side of the river, but why not go where you can earn the things you will need to continue your journey?”
“Where would that be?”
“Saint Louis,” Christophe said. “Come with us the rest of the way. If you are willing to work, I can pay you a small wage. That will be a start on what you need. And we will have the pleasure of your company for the remainder of this voyage.”
Ever since leaving home, Breckinridge had been moving west as much as possible, putting more and more distance between himself and that unjust murder charge. The idea of traveling north, maybe even backtracking a little, worried him.
But there was no denying that Christophe was right. He’d have a better chance of making it to the mountains if he had the right gear.
“What do you say?” the captain prodded after Breckinridge had sat there frowning into the fire in thought for a few moments.
“Well, I sort of feel like you’re just takin’ pity on me—”
“Not at all! Using the oars to drive Sophie against the river’s current requires great strength. It is obvious you have that in abundance.”
Breckinridge nodded and said, “All right, you’ve got a deal. I’ll come with you to Saint Louis.”
“Bon! It will be to your advantage. Besides, you will have a chance to see the biggest city here on your American frontier.”
That was sort of intriguing, all right, Breckinridge had to admit. But the idea made him nervous, too. There was no telling what might be waiting for him in St. Louis. He would do his best to blend in with the crowds while he was there, but with his size and his flaming red hair, that might not be easy to do.
Christophe lifted his cup of wine and said with a grin, “To our new friend Breckinridge and his adventures!”
The others echoed the toast in two different languages, and as Breckinridge returned their salutes with his coffee cup, he felt the warmth of their companionship. It was something he hadn’t experienced in too long a time.
* * *
Breckinridge took a turn standing guard duty, but Christophe was right about Asa Bolton’s gang of river pirates not bothering them. The night passed peacefully, and the next morning the crew finished the job of repairing the deck where the bomb had blown a hole.
Christophe explained to Breck that such explosives were fashioned by forming a hollow ball out of dried clay, then filling it with black powder and inserting a fuse into it. A devilish instrument, Christophe called it.
By midmorning the Sophie was headed upriver again. Despite his injured arm, Breckinridge insisted on taking his place at one of the oars.
At first he was clumsy at handling the long, heavy object, but with his natural athletic ability he soon got the hang of it. After that it was more a question of reining in his great strength a little so that his efforts wouldn’t overpower those of the man opposite him. That might cause the keelboat to veer to the side.
Blisters soon developed on his hands, but stubbornly he didn’t say anything about them. Nor did he complain about the stiffness in his arm from the slight wound. He figured the best way to handle such problems was to keep working. He would bull through the pain the same way he had with most obstacles he had ever encountered.
After a while, though, his hands started slipping on the oar because of the blood that coated them. Christophe noticed that from the top of the cabin and exclaimed, “Sacre bleu! What have you done to yourself, Breckinridge?”
“Just a few little blisters,” Breckinridge said.
“A few little—Harry! Bind up Breckinridge’s hands.”
“I want to carry my share of the load,” Breckinridge insisted.
“You will. Once Harry has bandaged your poor hands, you can come up here and I will show you how to handle the sweep.”
That was the start of Breckinridge’s education in how to be a keelboatman. The place where he had encountered the Sophie was about halfway between New Orleans and St. Louis, so it would take several more days for the boat to reach its destination. Christophe liked to talk, and Breck listened closely and learned as much as he could about life on the mighty river.
They passed a big settlement on some bluffs overlooking the Mississippi, but Christophe didn’t stop. He nodded toward the buildings and said, “That is Memphis. A rough place, my young friend. Not as bad as Natchez, mind you. That’s downriver from where we picked you up, and it can be worth your life to go ashore at what they call Natchez-Under-the-Hill. But Memphis is bad enough, and a place where an unwary man can get in serious trouble in a hurry. I prefer to avoid it.”
“I’m sure not lookin’ for trouble,” Breckinridge said.
“But sometimes it comes looking for you, eh?” Christophe asked with a twinkle in his eyes.
“Well, yeah,” Breckinridge admitted. “I do seem to wind up in scrapes pretty regular-like.”
“That tells me you are a man who will not sit back and allow the world to dictate to him. Instead you try to impose your will on the world. Unfortunately, such efforts are often doomed to failure, but if no one ever made them, how would things ever change? A man must take some risks to accomplish anything worthwhile.”
Breckinridge wasn’t sure his father would agree with that, or his brothers. Robert Wallace and his other offspring tended to chart the safest course possible through life, and they seemed satisfied with doing that.
His path might bring him nothing but misery, but Breckinridge knew he could never be that way.
When they were several miles above Memphis, Christophe turned the sweep tiller over to Breckinridge again and sat nearby on a crate, smoking a pipe as he pointed out landmarks on both banks.
“A man needs to know where he is all the time,” the Frenchman said. “The river, she is a changeable creature. Snags and sandbars come and go. But if you know that on the last voyage there was a snag just past the spot where those three trees grow so close together”—he pointed to the trees he meant—“then you know to look and see if the snag is still there. See the little riffles in the water?”
“I see ’em,” Breckinridge said.
“They mark the location of the snag. Send us past them well to port.”
“That’s left.”
“Correct.”
Breckinridge leaned on the sweep the way Christophe had taught him. As the Sophie began to veer to the left—or port, as Christophe called it—Breck spotted something in some other trees along the bank. He saw a flash as the sunlight reflected off of something . . .
Instinct made him lunge harder against the sweep. He saw a puff of smoke from the trees. The keelboat began to swing around even more. Christophe had time to exclaim, “Mon dieu, what are you—”
Then a rifle ball struck the sweep and chewed splinters from it.
“Bushwhackers!” Breckinridge yelled. He was out in the open, a perfect target on top of the cabin, and he didn’t like it.
“Get down!” Christophe ordered as he leaped up off the crate and started toward Breckinridge. He had taken only a step when there was an ugly thud and he fell in an ungainly sprawl.
“Pull hard!” Breckinridge bellowed at the oarsmen, not even thinking about the fact that he had no right to give orders here. It just came natural to him. “Keep us movin’ as fast as you can!”
He dropped to a knee next to Christophe, who was struggling to sit up.
“Get behind the cabin,” the captain told Breckinridge. “We are too far from the other shore for them to have riflemen there.”
Another rifle ball struck the cabin and threw up wood chips. Breckinridge got hold of Christophe and surged to his feet.
“I ain’t leavin’ you out here to be a sittin’ duck,” he said as he hurried toward the edge of the cabin roof.
A shot hummed past his head. He ignored it and dropped to the walkway on the far side of the boat. He and Christophe were both big men, and their combined weight landing like that rocked the vessel for a second.
He lowered the wounded man to the planks and told him, “You ought to be safe here.”
“To hell with safety!” Christophe protested. “I can still fire a rifle. Lean me against the cabin wall and give me a gun! Andre, bring me a rifle!”
The lean, dark Frenchman, who was Christophe’s second-in-command, ducked into the cabin and came back with a rifle. He handed it to Christophe, who now balanced on his good leg as he leaned against the cabin where Breckinridge had helped him get in place.
“It’s Bolton and his men, I will wager a new chapeau,” Christophe said. “Look, even now they come out of hiding in their canoes!”
It was true, Breckinridge saw. Four of the lightweight craft arrowed across the river toward the keelboat as the fusillade from the shore continued. Breck saw the pirates’ strategy: keep the keelboatmen from fighting back by peppering the cabin with rifle fire and give the men in the canoes time to get close enough to leap on board and continue the fight hand to hand. It was very much like the previous attack, but having the riflemen on shore this time was a new wrinkle. Their shots would be more accurate than if they were firing from moving canoes.
Breckinridge spotted Asa Bolton himself in the first canoe. The pirate chief sat in the back shouting encouragement to the two men in front of him who were paddling hard toward the keelboat. Bolton gripped a pistol in each hand and clearly was ready to board the Sophie and carry the fight to its crew.
Breckinridge wasn’t going to let that happen if he could stop it. He said to Christophe, “Is that cannon ready to fire?”
“Yes, and a man might be able to touch it off once without getting killed, if he was quick enough,” the Frenchman replied. “But reloading would be worth his life. The men on shore would pick him off, certainment.”
“Maybe, maybe not. How do I fire the blasted thing?”
“You really wish to risk it?”
Breckinridge nodded and said, “I do.”
With a grim look on his face, Christophe said, “Very well. Andre, fetch a punk.”
Andre went into the cabin again and came back with a smoldering bit of wood from the fire that was kept burning in the stove below. He handed it to Breckinridge and said something in French that Breck didn’t understand. He figured that Andre had just wished him luck, so he nodded and said, “Much obliged.”
Then he put his free hand on the cabin top and vaulted onto it. Rifle balls hummed around him as he rolled over and lunged up next to the cannon.
He turned the weapon so that it pointed toward the oncoming canoes and touched the punk to the hole where the powder charge was waiting to be detonated. The cannon roared as Breckinridge felt a shot pluck at his shirt.
He’d hoped to blow Bolton to hell, but as the smoke cleared he saw that the cannonball had gone over the first canoe and struck one of the craft behind it, which was now a mass of floating splinters and chunks of jagged wood. Pirates were in the water, but Breckinridge couldn’t tell how badly they were hurt.
He had looked at the cannon enough in the past to know how it was attached to its swivel mount. He pulled the pins that fastened it in place and lifted it out of its cradle, a task that normally took two men to perform. The barrel was pretty warm from just being fired, but Breckinridge ignored that and cradled the weapon in his arms. He turned as another rifle ball whipped past his ear and jumped off the cabin onto the deck.
“Mon dieu!” Christophe exclaimed when he saw what Breckinridge had done. “Andre, we need powder and shot! Quickly!”
Andre and another man rushed to reload the cannon while Breckinridge stood there holding it. When it was ready to fire again, he said, “Somebody else’ll have to touch it off. I can’t do that and hang on to it, too.”
“Such a thing is madness!” Christophe cried. “The cannon, she is not meant to be fired that way!”
“It’s the best chance we got,” Breckinridge said. “Come on, Andre.”
The lean, dark-faced Frenchman nodded. He had the punk Breckinridge had dropped, and he held it ready as Breck stepped out into the open at the end of the cabin and turned so that the cannon he held with both hands braced against his hip was pointed toward the attackers. The pirates wouldn’t be expecting that.
“Let ’er rip!” he shouted.
Andre touched off the powder charge. As the cannon roared, its recoil picked up Breckinridge and flung him backward. He felt himself flying through the air, and then he hit the river and the water closed over him.
He cursed himself bitterly as he sank deeper into the Mississippi. The cannon had been torn from his hands, and he knew it would sink to the bottom. Maybe they could recover it later . . . if they were still alive.
He oriented himself, then kicked and stroked for the surface. He broke out into the open air and gulped down a welcome breath. From here he couldn’t see the pirates anymore, but then one of the canoes hove into view around the keelboat’s bow. It was the one carrying Asa Bolton.
That man had the luck of the devil, Breckinridge thought. Breck started swimming toward the Sophie as Bolton leaped from the canoe, landed on the keelboat’s deck, and charged toward Christophe with both pistols thrust in front of him, ready to blow the captain’s lights out.