Deep as the Rivers (Santa Fe Trilogy) (22 page)

   
As remembrance of the disastrous encounter returned in the merciless light of morning, she sat up and put her head on her knees, hugging them in abject misery. What must he think of her now? How could she face him after what they almost did? She huddled there for several minutes until she heard footsteps approaching. Then a man cleared his throat and called out to her.

   
“Mademoiselle St. Etienne. It is Manuel Lisa and I must speak with you.”

Chapter Eleven

   
What do you mean, he’s gone!” Olivia croaked, staring at Manuel Lisa’s swarthy countenance with an expression of horror and disbelief on her face.

   
“Señorita St. Etienne, I try to explain to you,” Lisa said in his halting, heavily accented English, spreading his hands in a placating gesture. “The colonel, he must travel to the Big Osage. Their village, it is a day’s journey up the Osage River, not far.”

   
“Then he’ll rejoin us in a couple of days?” she asked suspiciously, not liking the way the barrel-chested little Spaniard refused to meet her eyes.

   
Lisa shrugged. “If all goes as he hopes, it is possible...but if he must go farther into Osage country,
quien sabe
? That is why he gives me this.” He handed her a letter signed by Samuel.

   
Olivia perused it quickly. “It’s a letter of credit...to keep me at his house in St. Louis.” The amount was most generous—a thousand dollars, which she could draw upon from the Quinn Mercantile where the colonel had deposited his money. She blushed darkly, knowing the shrewd Spaniard had drawn his own conclusions about her relationship with Samuel. She was under his protection but not affianced. She was the Long Knife's woman. In effect, his whore. And last night she had almost become so in fact.

   
“I will return you to St. Louis as soon as I deposit my cargo at the forts. I must attend my business affairs. Then the journey downstream will take twelve to fourteen days, no more.”

   
“But how much longer to get upstream to the forts on the upper Missouri?” she asked, noting he had deliberately omitted that rather vital detail.

   
Lisa sighed. “With a good wind to fill the sails we will gain five to ten days,” he replied, using the fingers of his right hand to give visual punctuation to his remarks.

   
“How long for the entire trip, Señor Lisa?”

   
“Perhaps two months. But fear nothing. I have given my word to your colonel. I, Manuel Lisa, will keep you safe. I have promised,” he said with finality, nodding his head as if that settled the matter.

   
Olivia could see that arguments or cajolery would avail her nothing. Perhaps tears? Unlikely. This was a seasoned veteran of decades on the rivers who had his life savings tied up in this trading venture. He would not jeopardize it for one stowaway female, even if she managed to weep a bucket of tears! “When do we leave, Señor Lisa?” she asked with diplomatic meekness.

* * * *

   
After two more days of gathering information and smuggling food into her bedroll, Olivia was ready to strike out. If “her colonel” could walk up the Osage River, she, by damn, could walk down the Missouri. After all, they had only come a little over a week, or was it two, upriver from the last settlement at St. Charles. Here and there along the way they had passed isolated farms and a few small riverfront outposts. Thankfully she had squelched her first impulse to tear Samuel’s letter of credit into a dozen tiny bits and throw them in Lisa’s face. For once prudence—or was it a growing sense of self-preservation—led her to curb her temper and hold onto the letter. She hoped to trade it for a horse and enough food to see her back to St. Louis.

   
I will not endure another two or three months in this hellish wilderness just because of Samuel Shelby.
After all, it was his fault that she had been forced to flee St. Louis in the first place. Never mind that she had mistakenly headed in the wrong direction; she was going to correct that mishap this very night. As soon as everyone was asleep in their tents, she would slip from the boat where Lisa had insisted she spend the past several nights since Samuel’s treacherous desertion.

   
The bedroll was heavy, the scratchy strouding stuffed with hard biscuits and several pouches of greasy pemmican. Olivia supposed if she got hungry enough she could stomach the rancid stuff. There was a full moon and the sentry was posted at the stern of the boat. She could crawl over the bow and wade very carefully through the shallows undetected. Once on the bank, there was a brake of tall willow shoots to hide her. The only trick would be managing not to drop the unwieldy pack or the knife she had filched from a crate in the cabin box. It was a poor weapon, but even if she stole a rifle, she had not the slightest idea of how to load or fire it, so she had decided it was a heavy encumbrance not worth carrying.

   
Slipping off in the moonlight was not nearly so easy to accomplish as she had hoped. Bright light bathed the deck but the river shallows were shrouded in shadows cast by overhanging cottonwood limbs. The swift movement of the river did cover any noise she might make. When her feet touched the water a tiny hiss of misery escaped her lips. She knew it would be cold on her bare feet, but it was best to keep her boots with her gear, dry in her arms, not wet on her feet.

   
The water was only knee-high near the shore and the bow of the boat was moored firmly into the soft sandy bank. But treacherous small rocks, some lichen coated and slippery, others sharp as razors, were scattered along the riverbed. She bit her lip to keep from crying out as she made her way, one agonizing step at a time, to freedom. Balancing the bedroll was even more difficult than she had imagined. Several times she came within a gnat’s breath of dropping it in the water when she slipped or jerked back her foot from a sharp rock. By the time she reached the cover of the brake, her legs were going numb from the cold.

   
“At least I won ‘t feel how bad my feet hurt,” she muttered with grim humor as she carefully wended her way through the bracken to dry ground. The nearest campfire with tents scattered around it was only thirty feet away, but the flames had died to pale orange coals and the sound of loud snores vied with the croaking of bullfrogs on the still night air. She walked silently down the muddy beach until the fires were out of sight, then climbed to the top of the embankment about fifteen feet higher up.

   
Under the cover of scrub pines and cottonwoods, she could look down on the boat and the camp as she sat on the ground and pulled the dry boots over her cold and aching feet. Rough and miserable as her life with the rivermen had been, it was still one of relative safety. Once she left them, she would be completely alone in a strange and hostile wilderness. Could she attempt it—
should
she attempt it?

   
Ahead lay unknown dangers, but here lay another two to three months of unremitting drudgery and shame. Here was where Samuel Shelby had deserted her, turning her over to Manual Lisa as he would any other nonessential possession he might value only enough to make minimal arrangements for its “storage.” She turned her back on the comfort of the fires and began to walk inland, steering a course around the camp and then back to the riverbank downstream from where the boat was moored.

   
“In a week or so I’ll be back in civilization, on a boat bound for New Orleans,” she promised herself.

* * * *

   
It took two days for Olivia to admit she was lost. The first night she had made her way through the inky blackness of the woods with only small strips of moonlight to help her find her way back to the river. Now she was becoming increasingly certain that it had been the wrong river, not a narrow channel of the mighty Missouri, but only the last one of three small tributaries they had crossed the day before her escape. She must have followed it for a dozen miles headed vaguely northwest instead of southeast. The sun never seemed to be in the right position and the river seemed too narrow and clean-running to be the Missouri.

   
The situation was hopeless. She was miles from another human being. Not even a savage red Indian had shown his face. Her feet were blistered and her arms and legs scratched raw from thrashing her way through the dense underbrush that overgrew the bank of the river. After walking all night and most of yesterday with only brief stops to eat and drink, she had collapsed in exhaustion last night, rolling up in her blanket and lying on the dank, moist earth, listening to the eerie night sounds of the woodlands. Snorting, rattling and clucking noises emanated from the water while even more ominous screeches and howls echoed through the forest and across the open grassy meadows.

   
But Olivia had been too exhausted to remain awake for long. Clutching her knife in her fist, she quickly passed out, only to awaken with bright sunlight streaming in her face. Doggedly she had started out again that second morning after choking down one of the hard biscuits smeared with a bit of Walks Fast’s greasy pemmican. By midmorning she could definitely see that the river was narrowing far too much. At this rate it would soon be little more than a trickle. She finally admitted she was following the wrong river.

   
Reasoning that it ran at a right angle to the Missouri, she decided to ford it and then angle in a southwesterly direction back toward the big river. A dangerous course to follow but her only hope if she were ever to make her food last until she reached some sort of white settlement. After once more removing her boots, she very carefully stepped into the cold rushing water, feeling her way along the bottom, praying there would be no sudden drop-off. The water reached her waist at its highest point before she climbed out on the opposite bank.

   
Teeth chattering, she scrambled up and found a cluster of boulders set amid some scrub pines. The sun had warmed the rocks and they felt delightful to her wet clammy skin as she reclined against one. She remained motionless for several minutes until the sleep of exhaustion claimed her again.

   
Olivia awakened to the sounds of soft snorting and odd sounding squeals. She blinked her eyes at the dazzling azure canopy overhead. It must be noon. Her clothes had dried in the spring heat. She sat up to orient herself and to search for the source of the sounds she had heard. Her eyes swept the rocky stretch of clearing around the edge of the stream. There, only a dozen feet or so from her, amid the boulders, two very small black furry creatures rolled and jumped clumsily around each other in fierce play.

   
“How sweet!” Olivia was not exactly certain what they were, but they were cute and cuddly, almost like fat puppies. She slid from the rock quietly and knelt to coax them to come to her, eager for the comfort of something warm and furry and alive to hold.

   
“Come here, come, come,” she called in a soft musical voice. They stopped playing and observed her through liquid black eyes, wary and curious at the same time. She moved forward a step with her hand out but they retreated. Then remembering the pemmican in her pack, she pulled it down and opened it, taking out one of the rawhide parfleches. Scooping out a handful, she again extended her arm, offering the treat to them.

   
They sniffed the air and approached slowly. Just as she was almost close enough to feed them, an earsplitting growl rent the placid noontime air. A great black bear came running in a swift yet ponderous rhythm along the edge of the riverbank, headed directly toward Olivia.

   
Bear cubs. They were bear cubs! Holy Mother! Olivia remembered hearing stories about how fierce and dangerous she-bears could be. She turned to run, almost tripping over the pack in her desperate haste. Her boots lay uselessly on top of the boulder. She would have to run barefooted through the thick woods. With a sob, she clawed her way over the rocks, hearing the thudding of the bear’s paws on the ground, closer and closer. She screamed for help even though she knew it was useless. The hot fetid breath of the bear seemed to scorch her back but she was too terrified to turn around to see how close the creature was. Alone in the wilderness, she would be torn to shreds and die without a trace or any remembrance.

   
“
Maman!
Péré!
Samuel! Someone help me!” She crashed through a stand of dry grass and snagged her shirt on the prickers of a berry bush. Her lungs were exploding with fire, her eyes hazing over with sweat pouring into them. As she stumbled and started to go down, she yanked the knife from her belt and clutched it in one small white fist. She would not let herself be devoured without a fight. This is the end. She turned to face her death. The first words of an act of contrition formed on her lips as the bear reared up to deliver the killing blow. Still holding fast to the knife she braced herself for the cruel bloody fate awaiting her, determined to inflict some small injury on her killer.

   
Suddenly a deep masculine voice boomed in a thick Appalachian twang, “Missy, don’t hurt thet bar!”

   
Olivia looked up at the biggest man she had ever seen, a towering giant brandishing a blazing torch. He stepped across her small crouching body as if she were no more than a pebble on the riverbank.