Rivers West (12 page)

Suddenly I heard the hoofs of approaching horses.

“Wait!” someone said.

“There is nothing. I can see for several miles. They are further ahead than we thought.” It was the voice of another.

“We'll come up with them tonight…and it must be tonight, Jem. You know what the colonel said. And I'd cross the devil himself sooner'n him.”

Now I could see.

There were four men. One rode a fine dapple-gray gelding. He was a thin, raillike man who could have weighed nothing, but he had two knives in his belt and long, tapering fingers that kept dropping to the knives with a caressing touch.

I could not see his face, nor the face of one other. There was a burly, red-haired, and dirty man with greasy buckskins, and also a man in a black slouch hat and homespun pants who had a wide grin but few teeth. There was a bend in his nose and a scar on his eyebrows. He looked like a man hunting trouble.

Standing very still, I waited. Then I inched my hand to my gun and drew it. If they should happen to see me, I'd shoot without warning, instantly. The shot would also be a warning to Jambe-de-Bois.

But they didn't. They moved on. Fortunately, none of them noticed where we had turned off. On down the trail they went.

“Jambe?” I spoke softly as I approached him. “Get the horses. We're moving out.”

He groaned, sitting up. Briefly, I explained and he went at once for the reluctant horses.

“What now?”

“That way.” I pointed.

“But there's no trail!”

“That's right. There is no trail. We'll make our own.”

I checked the pistol I carried, then my rifle.

“Jambe?” I described the men. “If we see them, don't wait, don't talk. Shoot them on sight.”

Chapter 14

S
T. LOUIS WAS bathed in moonlight when we finally arrived, crossing the river on a flatboat we happened to see making ready on the east bank. We landed at a dock well away from the streets, which was just what we wanted, hoping to arrive without being seen.

We rode through the dark streets, taking nothing for granted.

On a side street we found a man leading a team into a barn. A lantern hung over the door, another inside.

“Is this a livery stable?” I asked.

He was a well-set-up man of perhaps fifty. “No,” he glanced at us, then at our horses. “However, I've got some empty stalls and a corral. Cost you two bits a day down at one of them stables in town. I'll board the lot of them for a dollar a week.”

“You've got yourself a deal.”

We dismounted, stripped our gear from the horses, and carried it inside. I handed the man a dollar.

“We want to put up at a quiet place,” I said. “Know a good one?”

“Sure do. Mary O'Brien's. Ma, we call her. She lives right down the street. Fourth house from here. Her husband was lost on the river, and her boys have gone down to New Orleans. She's a fine woman, and she can use the money.”

The house was sparsely furnished with homemade furniture, except for a big old chest of drawers. It was neat and everything was spotless.

When I commented, her blue eyes twinkled. “Mister,” she said, “I got nothing else to do but clean. I sew a mite, but there's little enough of that to do, and my sewing's not fancy.

“Board and room, two dollars a week for each. I know that seems expensive, but folks are crowding St. Louis right now, and grub's expensive. Why, sugar's gone to thirty-five cents a pound, and coffee's fifty cents!”

“That's mighty expensive, ma'am,” I agreed.

I handed her four dollars. “That's the first week,” I said, “and we're good eaters.”

“Like to see a man eat hearty. Does my heart good.”

“Now tell me, Mrs. O'Brien, if I wanted to go some place where I could hear the news, where would it be?” I asked.

“Choteau's.” She paused a moment, looking from Jambe to me. “On the other hand, if you was listening for the kind o' talk that leads to no good, I'd say Pierre's. It's only a few steps beyond the corner, and he's an honest man.”

“We'll go along then. And could we bring you a bit of something, Mrs. O'Brien?”

“Go along with you. I'll set up with my bit of coffee.”

Pierre's was a place of wooden tables and benches, and Pierre was a stocky man with a healthy stomach hanging over pants cut off below the knees, and a wide belt that struggled to retain the stomach.

The place was empty except for Pierre. For a few minutes we talked in French, then Pierre reverted to English. “It will be the only tongue soon. It's an American land we have now. Once there were French wherever a man looked, up the river and down. Now there's few of us left except for trappers and a few traders.”

He glanced from Jambe-de-Bois to me. “Jean Daniel Talon. It is a good name. There was a Talon once who was a pirate, I think.”

“Aye,” I said dryly, “he was the first of our line, and might be better able to face what we have before us than we. There's a steamer coming up the river. It used to be the
Western Engineer
.”

“The sea serpent?” He chuckled. “I fancied that one! I'd like to have owned her myself. What's she called now?”

I shrugged. “We came overland to get here first.” Then I outlined the story for him, and when I finished, he looked carefully about.

“I am an honest man, so they tell me nothing. But I can hear, and I hear a great deal. Men have come to St. Louis, and they have disappeared inland…a few at a time, maybe fifty or a hundred in all.

“There are rumors something is in the wind, but there are always such rumors. I believe none of them.”

“You're empty tonight?”

He scowled. “Yes, and I don't understand it. Most of the time there's twenty-five to thirty men in here. Of course, it's late.”

I got up. “Pierre, we're tired and we're going to turn in. We'll be at Mary O'Brien's if there's news, but tell nobody where we are.”

We left. At the corner we paused a moment. It was cool. A gentle wind was coming up the river carrying a faint suggestion of woodsmoke.

Jambe-de-Bois looked around impatiently. “It's no good place,” he said. “We'd best be getting on.”

Yet I hesitated a moment longer. Had that been a shadow in a doorway? I reached inside my coat for the pistol, rested my hand upon it. Slowly then, I turned to follow Jambe.

They came out of the darkness with a rush. Only a whisper of moccasins on the boardwalk. They were already hidden in the shadows waiting for us, and they closed in fast.

My pistol came out, and I fired. There was no chance to miss, the man was almost within arm's length to me when the gun went off. He stopped in full stride, and then he fell.

A sweeping blow with the barrel of the pistol dropped another one, and then I jammed the muzzle of the pistol into the throat of a third.

Jambe-de-Bois had turned like lightning. I never dreamed he could move with such speed. He was laying about him with a knife. There was a picket fence adjacent and we turned to face them there.

Somebody struck the knife from Jambe's hand, and it went flying. As I lost hold of my pistol and they closed in, I saw Jambe fall back on the fence. He struck out with his fist, then stooped suddenly, and, when I fought myself clear of those closing in on me, Jambe was laying about him with his wooden leg!

Catching a man by the throat with my left hand, I lifted him clear of the ground and shoved him into the face of another. Then I rushed them both off their feet, taking a savage blow to the kidney. Turning with a sweep of my hand, I struck a man along the temple.

Another charged in low, and I brought a knee up into his face, slamming down on the back of his head as my knee came up. He grunted and fell, his nose crushed.

I took a wicked blow to the face. A dozen men struck at me, it felt like, and then I was hitting, driving at them, punching low and hard. I butted one man in the face, kneed another in the crotch. And suddenly there was a breathing space, and we stood alone, gasping for breath.

Yet not quite alone. At least three men lay on the ground around us, one of them the man I'd shot.

Jambe-de-Bois held to the picket fence with one hand, his peg-leg in the other.

“There must have been a dozen,” I said.

“Seemed like it, but I figure only nine,” he said complacently, “and they weren't much. In the old days at sea, they'd have lasted no time at all.”

The dark street was empty. Pistol shots at night were no new things in St. Louis, where drunken trappers on their way home often fired their guns just out of sheer good spirits.

With my toe I rolled over the man I'd shot. He was dead, all right, and he was one of those I'd seen following us west. Near him lay my gun. I picked it up and thrust it into my belt.

One of the men, badly hurt, started to rise. Jambe-de-Bois hefted his peg-leg. “Lie still, damn you,” he said conversationally, “or I'll smash your skull.”

The man ceased to move. Jambe-de-Bois rolled him over on his back. “If you live,” he said quietly, “don't let me see you again, or I'll split you open like an overripe melon.”

He strapped on his leg. I watched him, wondering how many times before that leg had come off in brawls. It made a terrible weapon, and, whatever else he was, Jambe-de-Bois was a mighty fighter. With him around—and on my side—I need never worry about my back.

We limped home. Somehow I'd been kicked on the leg, although I didn't remember it, and when I looked into the mirror in my room I found a welt on my cheekbone and a lump over one eye.

Jambe-de-Bois dropped on his bed and stared at me. “You look to have been fighting, man,” he said and chuckled. “Best fight I've had in a year! But you did us a service, a real service when you shot the first one.”

“You think so?”

“Aye. 'Tis my thought that he was the leader and the paymaster as well. When you downed him, it took the heart from some of them, for they were not sure when they'd be paid…if ever.”

“I couldn't miss,” I said. “He came right at me.”

For two days we loitered about, each going his own way, each listening. We heard nothing. It was true that men had appeared, bought lead for bullets, powder, bought food and disappeared from sight, but nobody knew anything substantial. Or, if they did, they preferred not to speak.

At night we avoided troublesome places and retired early. I tried to see Choteau, who observed even more than Pierre, but he was out of town.

Late one morning there was a light knock on the door. It was Mary OBrien.

“It is Pierre,” she whispered. “Come!”

He was in the kitchen, with a cup of Mary's coffee.

“The steamboat,” he said low voiced, “has come. It is about four or five miles up the river, at a small island off the mouth of Coldwater Creek. A boat has come down from the steamboat to the town and has landed at the mouth of Mill Creek.”

“Who has landed?”

“Two gentlemen and a lady. They are on the street now.”

Tabitha was here. She was in St. Louis. Would she listen to me now?

Chapter 15

A
T MY SUGGESTION, Jambe-de-Bois kept himself hidden at Mary O'Brien's. At a nearby corner I paused, getting my bearings.

Choteau was the man I most wanted to see. It was around his fur-trading establishment that the town revolved. Whatever was happening, he would know. Perhaps he had returned by now.

Despite the hour the streets were crowded, and most of those on the street were men, trappers in buckskins, traders from back East or from New Orleans, a mixed lot, but all rough, capable, enduring. There was excitement in the air, for the very thought of what lay beyond the wilderness, the unknown lands of mountain and plain, generated such excitement.

I saw no familiar face and walked along toward Choteau's. In my belt was the pistol I still carried, Foulsham's pistol. At my belt, the knife—a knife from India that had been in my family for many years. It had been taken from the castle of Gingee by my famous ancestor. It was a knife of steel such as I had never seen elsewhere, a knife with an edge like a razor.

Tabitha was here…the steamboat upstream, at an island off a creek mouth…no doubt hidden there.

St. Louis was sure to be filled with Macklem's supporters, the men of Baron Torville. The town itself had a population, Pierre had told us, of between three and four thousand, yet during the season when the traders were gone upstream, when others had gone down to New Orleans with cargos, the population might be trimmed to no more than half…this was a guess, yet those gone would be the best of the fighting men.

What would Torville's plan be? He would need money. The logical way to that was to intercept the shipments downstream of the winter's take of furs.

He would need trade goods for presents to the Indians, for however many men he could recruit they would be insufficient unless he could also win the Indians, or some of them, to his side. There were malcontents among them as among our own people, and the chance of scalps and loot might be enough. The streets were dusty and crowded. Wagons drawn by mules or oxen, men riding horses, Indians of several tribes, men of all nationalities, and dozens of dogs. I stepped back against the face of a building and looked left and right, scanning the faces in the crowd, the buildings opposite. I had an uncomfortable sense of being watched.

The pistol in my belt was a reassurance, yet my greatest reliance was in my own physical powers. Somehow, when in trouble, I often forgot that I even carried a weapon.

After a moment I went on, checking out various stores and shops along the way. I entered several, looked around, watching the street as I did so.

Two men had come up the street opposite the store and stopped there, leaning on the hitching rail and talking. From time to time they stole quick looks at the last store I had entered.