He read his books at night beside the campfire, and read them lying in his bunk at Astoria, and later in San Francisco. Several times after they arrived there he took trips with Captain Hutchins back into the Sierras or the Rockies, and each time he took a book with him.
At sixteen he had read just seven books, but had read them over and over, and at sixteen he was a veteran of nine battles with Indians, and victor in a man-to-man fight with a drunken trapper.
When his seventeenth birthday came around, he had read only one more book, but had read it, Plutarch's Lives, four times. He had a fight with Comanches under his belt by that time, carried the scar of his first wound, and had recuperated in Santa Fe.
By the time he was twenty he had covered the length of the Rockies and the Sierras, had nearly died of thirst, carried the scar of another wound and was over six feet tall, lean as any savage warrior, and stronger than any man he had so far met. That was the year he lost all his furs on the Green River when his canoe upset, and lived two months with Ute Indians while they made up their minds whether to kill him or not. By the time they decided he had chosen his horse and rifle, and the night before his captors came for him, an Indian who had befriended him loosed the rawhide bonds they had finally tied him with, and he slipped out of camp in the darkness and rode south until he struck the trail from Santa Fe to California. Two months later, broke, ragged and hungry, he had showed up at Captain Hutchins' office on the wharf at San Francisco. The following year he bought furs for Captain Hutchins, read twelve more books and tried prospecting in the gold fields without luck. Twice he made strikes but both petered out.
Returning one night from the wharf he heard a woman cry for help from an alley in Sydney Town. He rushed into the alley and something struck him a terrible blow across the back of his head. He came to, to find himself lying in a stinking bunk in the fo'c'sle of a windjammer bound for Amoy and Canton, China. The mate, a burly ruffian with tattooed arms and a heavy chest, came down the ladder with a marline-spike and jerked men from the bunks. Tentatively, Jean LaBarge swung his feet to the deck.
"Hurry it up, you!"
He looked up and started to speak and the mate hit him. His head still throbbed from the night before and this second blow did him no good. He painfully got to his feet, as tall as the mate when standing, lean and hard as a wolf, but he only choked back his anger and went on deck.
By the time they reached Canton he knew his way about a ship. He learned fast, paid attention to his job, and bided his time. Captain Swagert eyed him doubtfully, but the mate, Bully Gallow, shrugged it off. "Yellow. He's big, but he's yellow."
At trappers' rendezvous Jean LaBarge had won a dozen rough-and-tumble fights, and had lost one. He found that he liked to fight, there was something savage and wild in him that reveled in it. One of the trappers who worked for Captain Hutchins had once been a bare-knuckle bruiser in England, and he added his teaching to what Jean had learned the hard way. And now Jean's time came in Amoy.
It was a waterfront dive where sailors went, and it was filled with sailors the night Jean LaBarge went hunting. He knew all about the back room at the dive, the place reserved for officers, and it was there he found Captain Swagert, and beside him Gallow.
A big man, Gallow was, with two drinks under his belt and his meanness riding him like a devil on his shoulders. He saw LaBarge and LaBarge grinned at him. Gallow waved a hand. "Get out! This room is for your betters!" "Get up," Jean LaBarge told him. "Get up. Stack your duds and grease your skids because I'm going to tear down your meat-house!" Gallow left the chair with a lunge and learned for the first time the value of a straight left. It stabbed him in the mouth as though he had run into the butt end of a post, and it stopped him in his tracks. What followed was deliberate, artistic and enthusiastic. Jean LaBarge proceeded to whip Bully Gallow to a fare-thee-well, dragging him from the back room for the entertainment of the common sailors and when the job was finished he went into the back room again where Captain Swagert sat over a bottle and a glass. "Captain Swagert, sir," he said, "you'll be needing a new mate. I'm applying for the job."
The older man's eyes glinted. "You'll not get it," he said abruptly. "You'll not get it at all. One more trip and you'd be after my job. You're through, lad, and you're on the beach in Amoy, and I envy you not one whit." So that was the way of it. And Jean wrote to Rob from Amoy but he did not tell him he was on the beach there, only what the port was like, and that he was staying on awhile.
There was no love in Amoy for the white man since the Opium Wars, and for a month Jean LaBarge lived a hand-to-mouth existence, then signed on with a four-master sailing north to the Amur. It was a Russian ship, clumsy on deck and dirty below, but it was a ship, and when they had discharged cargo in the Amur they sailed for Fort Ross on the California coast. There, evading a guard who walked the decks by night, he slipped over the side into the dark water and floated ashore with an arm over a cask.
Once back in California, Jean had a long letter from Rob. His friend had gone far since the Great Swamp days. He had borrowed money and gone to college. He had graduated from the University of Pennsylvania at the age of eighteen and paid the money back by his own efforts. Then he had married the granddaughter of Benjamin Franklin and moved to Mississippi. A successful lawyer, he was now rapidly gaining eminence as a senator ... Rob had always had a gift for words and a way with people.
Jean LaBarge settled down in the growing city of San Francisco, buying furs and selling supplies to the Alaska traders and other seagoers. On the foundations of their first efforts Captain Hutchins had begun a thriving business, ignoring the gold rush and building for the future when the boom would be a thing of the past. Not only did Jean know furs, but his sea experience had given him the knowledge to talk equipment and supplies with the best of them. And always in the back of his mind was the thought of Alaska. It was waiting there, a great subcontinent, almost untouched, overflowing with riches, and all in the hands of a greedy, self-serving company under a charter from the Russian government, a company that kept out all interlopers despite regulations and international treaties. Yet soon Jean LaBarge discovered that nobody had any exact information about Alaska or the islands off the coast to the south. For the greater part they had never been explored and no proper charts existed. The smattering of Russian he had picked up was quickly improved by conversations with the few Russian shipmasters who came to Captain Hutchins' chandler's shop or to trade privately a few furs they had purchased on their own. From these casual conversations and further talks with seamen from the ships, he gleaned what information he could.
Later, on a ship of which Captain Hutchins and he were part owners, he sailed down the coast of Chile and to the Hawaiian Islands. There they picked up an old man, a survivor of Baranov's ill-fated attempt to capture those islands many years before. Relatives of the old man still lived near the abandoned Fort Ross, and on Jean's authority the old man was transported back to California. For hours each day and night Jean's interest kept the old man yarning about his own trading days in the vicinity of Sitka.