Rivers West by Louis L’Amour Page B

against the current, smoke issuing from its nostrils, foaming water behind it.
    â€œLike her?”
    A man was leaning on the rail alongside her scaly back.
    â€œShe must have been a joy to build.”
    â€œBuild? Aye…I’d no hand in that, but she takes the river nicely. I’d say it’s a shame.”
    â€œShame?”
    â€œShe’s government built, and the government has had their fill of her. They’re takin’ her up the Ohio a ways, and she’ll be junked.”
    I glanced at her hull. She’d be about seventy-five feet long. “How much does she draw?”
    â€œNineteen inches, fully loaded. She’s right for the western rivers, where often enough you have to chase the water to find it.”
    â€œHow about her boilers?”
    â€œNo trouble. She’s a good craft…
good
. It’s just that she was sent to do a job, and it was only half done. But that was the fault of the men aboard and the difficulties that arose.”
    We talked a bit longer, and I’m afraid my questions were as much about conditions upriver as the possibilities of building a ship. The trouble was, I was beginning to feel the fever.
    When a man came into Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, or Lexington then, he found himself meeting folks from all over who talked of only one thing: the West. Everybody had either been west or was going there. They talked of Indians, buffaloes, game, but more than anything else they just talked about the land, the prairies, and the mountains.
    Sometimes it made no sense. Men with good jobs, professions, or businesses talking of going west. Many of them had only to stay where they were to get rich, but there was a drive in them that went beyond money, beyond success. It was the drive to explore, to develop new country, to populate those vast empty lands to the west.
    It was in the air I breathed in that frontier town, and must be even more so out there in St. Louis, where everybody in Pittsburgh seemed determined to go. There was talk of opening trade with Santa Fe, talk of California, wherever that was.
    This man had it, too. His name was John Massman, he had been to St. Louis twice before, and up the Missouri with a keelboat before that.
    â€œInjuns? I’ve known a-plenty. Good folks, but notional. They can change their minds in a minute, and they think lightly of the white man. Most of them have seen few of us and we all want to trade.
    â€œThe Injun is convinced the white man can’t get along without him. Buffalo robes are all important to an Injun, and he believes the white man has no buffalo to hunt so he has to come west to get robes from the Injun.
    â€œA few Injuns have been east and seen the cities, but the other Injuns don’t believe what they say. They call them liars, say the white man’s medicine has confused them.
    â€œYou got to walk soft with Injuns until you know how the wind blows.…There’s much fightin’ amongst them, an’ they raid each other’s villages, catch huntin’ parties, even squaws out gatherin’ wood.…They kill them an’ take their scalps.
    â€œIf’n you do business with one tribe, another’s liable to make you for an enemy. You got to walk easy until you know where they stand.”
    It sounded like good advice, and I needed it.
    Now the fever was on me.
    I left Massman and walked a long time. It was very late when I went back to the hotel. Jambe-de-Bois was sitting in the common room combing his beard and muttering. He combed his beard when he worried, and he was worried now.
    He had a glass of rum before him, and from his flushed cheeks, I knew it was not the first, although he was a man who drank little and could hold his liquor.
    â€œThey’re here, lad,” he said to me, “they’ve come up to us.”
    â€œWho?”
    â€œMacklem and that lot. Only there’s more of them now. And a rum lot they are, too! They’ve tied in with eight or