Shaman by Robert Shea (nice books to read TXT) 📖

King of Prussia, was six foot three with broad shoulders. He wore his brown mustache thick and let it grow back over his cheeks to join his sideburns. Hodge Hode, like Eli, was a Puke, a Missourian. Huge as a grizzly bear, he dressed in fringed buckskins. Under his coonskin cap red hair, wild and knotted,[54] hung down to his shoulders, and his red beard hid three quarters of his face. Besides their long rifles, Eli, Levi, Hodge and Otto had pistols stuck through their belts, powder horns slung over their shoulders, hunting knives sheathed in pockets in the front of their buckskin shirts.

Raoul let them each have a glass of whiskey, his good whiskey, Old Kaintuck from a canvas-wrapped stone jug, not the terrible-tasting corn liquor he dispensed from the barrel in the taproom. Then the five of them went out to mount their horses in the courtyard of the trading post. Raoul rode his chestnut stallion, Banner.

My domain, Raoul thought proudly, as he looked around. Surrounding the trading post was a palisade twenty feet high made of logs set vertically, with a catwalk running all around it and a guard tower in each corner. From a pole atop the southwest tower flew the flag of the United States, thirteen stripes and twenty-four stars, and below it the flag of the de Marions' Illinois Fur Company, an arrow and a musket crossing behind a beaver pelt.

Dominating the buildings inside the palisade was a blockhouse, limestone at ground level, with an overhanging second story of logs and rifle slits all around. Raoul had built it to fortify the trading post against his memories of Checagou. Pierre and Papa might have thought it foolish expense and effort, but where had they been when he needed them?

Near the east side of the blockhouse was the inn they'd just left, a log house, food and drink on the ground floor and lodgings above. On the west side, the fur store. Over in the northwest corner was the magazine, a windowless cube of limestone blocks, surrounded by its own little palisade the height of a man. Here were stored the bags and barrels of gunpowder that passed through the trading post.

They rode out through the gateway, arched over by the name DE MARION, formed out of small bits of log by Raoul's brother-in-law, Frank Hopkins, carpenter and printer. Raoul glanced down at the town of Victor, built on the steep slope below the trading post. From here he could see mostly half-log roofs and clay-lined log chimneys following the road that zigzagged across the face of the bluff. The houses all faced west, with their backs to the limestone slope. North and south from the base of the bluff stretched miles of bottomland along the Mississippi River. The spring floods that left the bottom some of the richest farmland in the world also made it[55] necessary to build almost everything on the bluff above the high-water line.

Raoul pulled Banner's head around and led his little troop at a trot along the ridge that ran east. Now Victoire came into view, the château his father and brother had built on the edge of the prairie, its first floor, like that of the blockhouse, of stone, its upper two stories of square-hewn timber. Some day, he thought, as he rode past the hill crowned by the great house, he would enter Victoire as master.

They rode on, passing big log barns and animal sheds Raoul had helped build. They followed a narrow trail through fields planted in corn and wheat, through orchards, the trees as yet only a little higher than a man but already yielding apples and peaches. Farther out still, cattle and horses grazed on grassland that rolled eastward like the waves of the ocean.

Five miles from the Mississippi they came to the boundary stone with an M carved on it that marked Victoire's easternmost extent. From there Raoul could see, a good ten miles or more away, the sign of the Indians, a long finger of gray smoke leaning northeastward among the fluffy white clouds. The mine entrance was at the bottom of a ravine carved in the prairie by the Peach River, and the smoke doubtless meant the Indians were smelting lead.

After a long ride they reached the little river. The five men reined up and tethered their horses downwind from the smoke; an Indian, it was said, had a sense of smell as keen as a dog's. Raoul led his men to the edge of the ravine.

They walked quietly along the ravine until they sighted Indians down at the bottom. Sauk or Fox, Raoul saw, recognizing their shaven heads with tufts of hair in the center. One of the bucks was standing at the mine entrance holding a skin sack that appeared to be full of chunks of galena, lead ore. The other two were adding logs to the smelter's fire. Their six horses—three for riding and three for carrying lead—were standing at the edge of the river about ten feet from the smelter.

The Indians' smelter was simply a square pit dug in the hillside, lined with rocks at the bottom and filled with logs and brushwood. They were melting down the galena, letting it flow through the rocks into a slanting trench that led to a square mold dug in the earth. Raoul counted five pigs of lead already formed, cooled and stacked[56] beside the mold. They'd probably been at this ever since the end of winter, thinking the mine was so far from town that no white man would notice.

Lead was selling at seventeen dollars per thousand pounds at the pit head up north in Galena, the new boom town named for the ore, and if these Indians had been working since the snow melted, they might have robbed Raoul of as much as two hundred dollars.

Raoul thought he recognized the two bucks at the smelter. Last fall they had come to him as he was bossing the crew he'd put to work expanding the mine before he shut it down for the winter. The Indians had claimed it was their mine. He had told them to be off, and when they hadn't moved quickly enough, he and his men had cocked their flintlocks. Should have killed them then.

Raoul gripped the gilded butt of the cap-and-ball pistol that hung at his waist and slid it out of its holster.

"Get them!" he called, standing up suddenly. He stretched out his arm, sighted along the barrel of his pistol and fired at the nearer Indian standing by the smelter.

Four rifles went off at once. Raoul was enveloped in the bitter smell of gunpowder and a cloud of smoke. The Indian Raoul had aimed at jerked, fell to his knees, then collapsed face forward beside the smelter. The other one at the smelter ran for his horse and leaped on its back. They must have all aimed at the same one, Raoul thought, cursing himself for not thinking of pointing out targets for each man.

The third Indian had disappeared. The skin sack of galena lay beside the mine entrance.

"Dammit," said Raoul. "If that redskin on the horse gets away there'll be raiding parties coming here. Whoever digs here'll have to have eyes in the back of his head."

"I'll put an eye in the back of his head," said Eli as he poured powder from his measure down the muzzle of his rifle. He grinned at Raoul—two upper front teeth missing and one lower. Did he know about Clarissa? Raoul still couldn't tell.

The other men were also reloading. Raoul pushed powder and shot down the muzzle of his pistol, then took a percussion cap out of a pouch at his belt and pressed it onto the nipple in the breach. By the time he was ready to fire, the Indian was galloping down the riverbed and had disappeared around a bend.[57]

Hodge Hode, Levi Pope and Otto Wegner ran for their horses. Eli stayed where he was, smiling down at the rifle in his hands as if he were holding a baby.

"If we all chase after the one on horseback," Eli said, "the one that's hiding will run off in the other direction."

"True enough," said Raoul. By this time Hodge, Levi and Otto had ridden off.

"Another thing," Eli said. "Our boys is on the wrong side of the ravine. When the Injun comes out, he'll come out on the south side. By the time they ride down and in, and up and out again, he'll be a mile away."

"So what do we do?" asked Raoul.

"It's all flat land hereabouts."

Before Raoul could demand an explanation of that, he saw the fleeing Indian on his mount scramble out of the ravine and ride southward, just as Eli had predicted. Raoul glanced at his men as they came to a halt, puzzlement showing in their gestures. Hodge fired at the Indian, who rode on unharmed. Though Raoul would not have known what else to do, he despised his two men for their uselessness.

Soon the Indian, riding hell-bent south, was a tiny dark silhouette against the yellow prairie. Eli raised the barrel of his Kentucky long rifle. It was an impossible shot, Raoul thought, but he said nothing. Eli seemed to be aiming slightly high, not straight at the redskin. Raoul heard the Puke suck in a deep breath through his missing front teeth.

The rifle boomed. The muzzle flash made Raoul blink, and a cloud of blue-white smoke drifted across the canyon.

A long time seemed to pass with nothing happening. But maybe it was only a heartbeat or two. Then the dark, distant figure threw up his arms and toppled sideways from his horse. The horse kept running and was gone over the horizon a moment later.

"Right through his noodle," Eli said. "I couldn't of made that shot if he hadn't been riding due south. Too hard to get a lead on him and arch the bullet just right."

Eli made it seem just a simple matter of skill, but Raoul felt as if he had just seen a miracle.

The faces of the other men, as they climbed down from their horses, showed as much awe as Raoul felt.[58]

"Pretty good shooting, for a Puke," said Levi Pope.

"Better'n any Sucker could do," Eli returned genially.

Raoul said, "Otto, go get that Indian's body and bring it back here."

Otto Wegner turned at once to remount his horse. Raoul liked the way the Prussian obeyed every order instantly.

But Hodge Hode glowered at Raoul. "Waste of time. Coyotes and buzzards have a taste for Injun meat."

Annoyed at being questioned, Raoul said, "I don't want anybody to know what happened to these redskins."

As Otto rode off, Eli, pointing to the mine entrance, said, "We got one still alive. At least one."

"I'll take care of him," said Raoul.

Eli, Hodge and Levi looked at him, surprised.

Eli's fine shot had not only awed him; he felt it, uneasily, as a challenge. The law was absent in Smith County, which was the way Raoul liked it. Gave an edge to a man who could handle a rifle as well as Eli. But now, to make sure his own word remained the closest thing to law in these parts, Raoul felt he had to equal Eli's accomplishment.

He checked the load in his pistol. He gripped the hilt of the thirteen-inch knife at his belt and loosened it in its sheath. A blacksmith in St. Louis had made it for him, assuring him it was an exact replica of the knife designed a couple of years ago by the famed Arkansas frontiersman Jim Bowie.

Raoul's mouth was dry. His heart was beating so hard he thought his men must be able to see his woollen coat quivering. His hands were cold and sweaty.

"Ain't but one way out of that mine, is there?" said Eli. "If we go in four abreast he can't get past us, and it's a hell of a sight safer."

"I'll take care of him," Raoul repeated. Every word Eli said against his going into the mine alone made him even more determined to do it. He needed to keep Eli in line, especially if it should turn out that Eli knew about him and Clarissa.

"He might have a rifle," said Eli. "Might shoot you when you walk in there."

"If we all go in, one of you might get shot," said Raoul. "This is my property."[59]

And fighting for it will make it more truly my property than any government grant could.

But that Indian in there—what was he armed with? Rifle, knife, bow, tomahawk? How strong was he, how fast, how skilled in fighting hand to hand?

I'm a fool to put myself through this.

"Could be more'n one in there," said Eli.

Raoul felt the blood run hot through his veins as he thought of Pierre's bastard son, of