“There has been very little rain; maybe we will be lucky still, eh?” Orliac said, and smiled apologetically, and hunched his shoulders, and held out his hands, the palms showing. “She is heating the water. It will be in the kitchen that you will bathe. I shall ask the cook to go somewhere,” Orliac said, and took a watch from his pocket and looked at it. “Yes, there is time before he starts the meal.”
“Thank you,” Hadley said again.
“I have put you there near the offices and storerooms, where there is not much traffic at night. It is away from the corral, too.” He glanced across the courtyard to where Bobbo was taking the harness off the mules. Five or six Indians had gathered around the wagon and were studying the horses. “Ah, Bobby!” he called. “You found where to put them, good!” He turned again to Hadley. “How many were there? The Indians.”
“Four,” Hadley said.
“Pawnee?”
“I don’t know.”
“But you took three horses from them, eh? Good.”
“They killed my daughter,” Hadley said. Orliac looked into his face.
“I am so sorry,” he said, and took his hand at once.
A party of white men arrived the next day.
They were dusty and bearded, wearing blue army uniforms. They arrived in a convoy of two mule-drawn wagons and eight horses. Minerva watched them as they crossed the courtyard toward the stairs at the far end. They were carrying leather cases that seemed heavy from the way the men were bent under them. Probably valuable, too, otherwise they’d have left them in the wagons outside the main gate. They were on the gallery now. One of them knocked on Orliac’s door. Behind her Minerva heard the shuffle of feet. She turned.
The Indian was wearing a white buffalo robe.
He was tall and straight and his face was painted black. There were shells in his ears and strung around his neck.
“Un-p ’tee-plez,” he said to her.
“What do you want?” she said.
“Un-p’tee-plez,” he said, and thrust out his hand.
“Get away from me,” she said, and whirled toward the wall, and picked up the rifle leaning against it. “Get away!” she said sharply, and thrust the muzzle at him. Her finger was inside the trigger guard and wrapped around the trigger. The Indian scowled at her. Then he took his nose between thumb and forefinger, and blew snot into the dirt at her feet. Turning, he stalked regally across the courtyard again.
Minerva was trembling.
The men were government surveyors returning from South Pass, where they’d spent the summer. The leader of the expedition was a major named Abner Duggan, burly man with a browned, wrinkled face, white mustache under his bulbous nose. Must’ve been about Hadley’s age, Minerva figured, but looked a lot older. Drank too much wine. Was pouring for Hadley now, and leaning over, and talking straight into his face. Wasn’t drunk, but his tongue was loose enough to make him sound a trifle disrespectful. They were in the Orliac apartment, six of them sitting around a big wooden table. Orliac and his wife, Gracieuse, Hadley and Minerva, Duggan and his aide. The invitation had not included Bonnie Sue and Bobbo. This had seemed strange to Minerva, who was used to everybody in a family eating at the same time. The two of them were in the fort’s kitchen now, but she’d have preferred them here beside her. She’d almost turned down the invitation, in fact, but Hadley’d convinced her they could learn things from the two surveyors about the trail ahead.
“When did you plan to leave?” Duggan asked.
“As soon as my sons catch up,” Hadley said.
“Where are they now?”
“I don’t know. We left them outside St Louis near the end of May.”
“The twentieth of May,” Minerva said.
“It’s my hope they’ve done what they had to do, and are already on their way here,” Hadley said.
“Just the two of them alone?” Duggan asked.
“Yes.”
“Well,” Duggan said, “the Pawnee’ve got troubles of their own right now; maybe your sons won’t be bothered.”
Orliac glanced swiftly at Minerva and immediately said, “Major Duggan, the Chisholm family has recently—”
“Let me tell you what you’ll find west of here,” Duggan said, and lifted his glass and drank, and smacked his lips. In what sounded like surprise, he said, “Very nice, Orliac,” and then wiped the back of his hand across the wine-stained white mustache and turned to Hadley. “What you’ll find — beside Indians, that is—”
“Cheyenne, Sioux, and Gros Ventres,” Duggan’s aide said. He was a man named Howard Kelsey, a captain. Very thin, with pale white skin, delicate as a woman’s. Had a mustache, too, but his was narrow and black. He offered the information about the Indians as if Duggan had called for it. Duggan acknowledged it with a tap of his forefinger on the air.
“Right,” he said, and tap went the forefinger. “Roaming out there in parties a thousand strong, some of them.”
“Major Duggan,” Orliac said, “I feel I should tell you—”
“Four thousand, one party,” Kelsey said.
“Right,” Duggan said, and tapped the air. “You ever see four thousand Sioux or Dakota or whatever they choose to call themselves—”
“Dakota,” Kelsey said.
“—riding across the prairie in war paint?”
“Scary,” Kelsey said.
“But that’s not all you’ve got to worry about, Chisholm. There hasn’t been rain out there for the past two months—”
“Serious drought,” Kelsey said.
“Indians cutting down cottonwood boughs to feed their horses.”
“No grass at all.”
“Or burned yellow where you find a patch of it.”
“Plague of grasshoppers, too,” Kelsey said.
“What the drought didn’t finish off, the grasshoppers did,” Duggan said, and laughed and poured himself another glass of wine. “Orliac,” he said, “this is really very nice wine.”
“Comment?” Gracieuse asked.
“Le vin. Il trouve bon, le vin. She speaks no English,” he said. He seemed to be explaining this more to himself than to anyone sitting at the table.
“No water, no grass,” Kelsey said.
“And no game,” Duggan said. “The Indians are eating their own horses out there. That’s what’s out there, Chisholm,” he said, and nodded for emphasis.
“Were you thinking of heading for Fort Hall?” Kelsey asked.
“Fort Hall’s five hundred miles from here,” Duggan said.
“You couldn’t get much beyond there,” Kelsey said. “There’d be snow in the Rockies.”
“You’d be stuck at Fort Hall for the winter,” Duggan said.
“Some picnic, that,” Kelsey said, and rolled his eyes. “It’s a smaller trading post than this, you know.”
“You want wilderness,” Duggan said, “that’s wilderness.”
“Snow-filled Rockies ahead of you.”
“Behind you hostile Indians.”
“That’s wilderness,” Kelsey said.
Duggan tapped the air.
“What do you say, Bobby?” Orliac asked. “You want to be in the fur business? We expect to trade this year alone more than fifty thousand robes. I have room for another clerk here, eh?”
“I don’t think so,” Bobbo said.
The robes were piled high in the center of the courtyard, the fur on them thick and black. They all looked alike to Bobbo, but Orliac was sorting them for quality. Everywhere around them, there was teeming activity. Women bickering and children scampering, babies shrieking. Company men bawling orders in French. Trappers striding through the fort in leggings and leathers. Through the main gate, Bobbo could see tipis being taken down, travois being packed with goods acquired in trade. In the distance, more Indians moved slowly toward the fort, laden with robes to barter. Like the robes, the Indians all looked the same to him.