Read Online Rocky Mountain Company by Richard S. Wheeler - Free Book Online

accepted that, and a part resented it. He’d married into the Cheyenne tribe, and had bonded himself to them, and become a part of them. The land of Sweet Medicine had become his own; he felt much more possessive of this vast lonely country than anything back east where he’d come from. Dimly he recollected upstate New York, his innkeeping parents Nathaniel and Bethany, his brothers and sister, the intimate green vales of that settled country. It would never be his again. Neither would the civilities that went with it. His family would find him harsh, violent, uncouth now, acid of tongue and direct of eye. This land of Dust Devil’s, of her people, of Sweet Medicine, held upon it all he had.
    “ ’bout home,” he said.
    She eyed him scornfully and pulled free. His eyes were watering from the glare, so he left her there and limped around to the small stair that led to the pilothouse, and gimped up it.
    “Sorry to weigh anchor so fast, but the river’s already crested, and I’ll be fighting sandbars all the way back,” LaBarge said.
    “I know.”
    “Chardonne try the usual?”
    “Cost plus ten percent and an agreement not to go into opposition.”
    LaBarge nodded. “When they found we’d had the Platte built, they wanted to charter it exclusively. They were provoked when my brother and I declined, and warned us of all the usual hazards on the river. One never knows, does one?”
    “You’ve made serious opposition possible, Joe.”
    The master nodded. Up until now, opposition companies could ship tradegoods upriver on American Fur packets only at exorbitant rates which gave the monopoly all the advantage in trade.
    “I don’t doubt that some of my crew have been bought. But I’ve not spotted anything — yet.” He peered earnestly into Fitzhugh’s eyes. “You’d be wise to run a daily inventory of your tradegoods down in the hold — and take a close look at your wagons and stock every day.”
    “I’ll teach Maxim. That’s a clerk duty that he can learn.”
    “I wouldn’t do it that way,” LaBarge said, sharply, and didn’t elaborate. But Fitzhugh caught the warning.
    “Sandbar,” muttered Roux, pointing at a long swell of water angling out from a bight.
    LaBarge’s attention shifted totally to the coiling river, which was working its way around a broad oxbow studded with prickly pear and a little yucca. The channel ran between visible snags tilling the water on the right and the glassy swell of the bar arrowing toward them on the left.
    “La-haut,” he said to Roux, pointing at a patch of darker water scarcely thirty yards wide. The pilot, who was manning the helm himself at this hour, turned the duckbilled prow a bit to the right. LaBarge pulled the bellcord, and a moment later the packet slowed to a lazy crawl into the upwelling torrent.
    A giant hand seemed to rise from the river and clamp the vessel in its grasp. Fitzhugh stumbled forward on his game leg into the wainscoting. Below, cargo shifted, and men yelled. The boat stood stock still while the river sucked by, gurgling at the intrusion. LaBarge pulled the bellrope, a series of tugs, and from below came a clanging of metal, and a thrashing of paddles in reverse, churning aquamarine water into white froth. But the bar didn’t yield its prey. After a moment, LaBarge tugged the bellrope again and the paddles quieted. He leaned out of the pilothouse and nodded to the mate, far below.
    “We’ll grasshopper,” he said to Fitzhugh. “There was no bar here last year. This is a bad one, and we’re thirty or forty feet onto it.”
    Down below, deckhands lowered the front spars, normally used for lifting heavy items out of the hold, into the water until they settled into the sandbar. They rigged manila lines that ran from cleats on the foredeck to pulleys at the top of the spars, and back down to a capstan on the foredeck, and then, with a long rod through the capstan, began the slow twisting that wound the line around the capstan, lifting