Rivers West by Louis L’Amour Page A

watched him go and then said to me, “I shall go along the street. There will be men from the mountains here.”
    We had not talked of what lay west, nor of Torville, so I said to him, “Say nothing, but if you hear a word of a man named Charles Majoribanks, I’d like to know.”
    He gave me a thoughtful look and then said, “I will come with you a bit. There are things that need be said.”
    In my room he sat in a window seat, cross-legged, as he preferred to sit. “He is related to the young lady?”
    â€œHer brother,” I said. “She is going west to find him. She believes he is in some kind of trouble.”
    â€œHe is that,” Butlin said wryly. “He’s crossed the trail of some rather dangerous men.”
    â€œWhat do you know of all this?”
    He looked at me directly. “There are no secrets in the West, although there are some who believe otherwise. No man moves but what someone sees, and no man speaks but what someone listens. Indians are curious folk, and often puzzled by the curious things done by white men. They discuss them over their pipes.
    â€œThere are men among the Indians who talk of war. There is talk of guns, of many rifles that will come from the sea. Men move from tribe to tribe along with some disgruntled Indians, and it is said that many of the Indians listen with both ears.”
    â€œAnd Charles Majoribanks?” I said.
    â€œI hear of him from time to time.”

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    I T WAS DARK when I went out again to the street. There was a gleam of reflected light on the waters of the Monongahela, and I stood on the street for a few minutes, just looking at the river and listening.
    From up the street came the tinny sound of a piano, and somebody whooped. Two men passed me, smelling of wine and tar, both a little unsteady. From somewhere close by I could smell the good smell of fresh lumber, and then I saw it, great tiers of planks stacked to season in the sun, and a cribbing of heavy timbers and poles for masts.
    Yet my thought returned to Miss Majoribanks and her voyage to the West. Uneasily, I recalled my promise to Simon Tate…yet the promise had only been to see her safely here. Now she was going to St. Louis, and if she didn’t find word of her brother there, she would go up the Missouri or the Platte.
    No need to worry. Macaire was a good man, a solid man.
    Yet worry I did. She was too young, too seemingly sure of herself.
    I walked on along the waterfront, seeing several keelboats in the building process and at least one hull that appeared from its shallowness to be that of a steamboat being built for service on the Missouri.
    There was a light in a shack near the farthest stacks of lumber. Beyond it, the bank sloped away, and I could see flatboats moored along the river. From some of them came voices, and the cabins showed lights in their windows. Men lived on these boats, floated downriver to New Orleans, sold the boats, and then paid their passage back upstream.
    Suddenly I saw it. I stopped, caught in midstride, straining my eyes through the gathering darkness. The head of a giant sea monster or dragon, rearing up from the river and carrying a steamboat on its back.
    I went down to the dock. The
Western Engineer!
This, then, was the boat that had gone west with the Major Stephen H. Long expedition. Even in Canada, which was far from here, news of the expedition had been heard. Thirty-five days from Pittsburgh to St. Louis, with several stops along the way. I looked at the name on the hull and the long, scaly-looking, serpentlike boat, her head reared up as high as the deck, her tail fins covering the view of the stern paddle wheel from the sides.
    It was something to see, even in the dusk as I reached her. It had been built, t’was said, to frighten the Indians. I’d known a few Indians, and I doubted whether any of them would be frightened for long. Yet it must have been impressive, steaming along upstream