Shaman Part 41

"Are you all right?" he asked. He wanted to make her happy, and he felt terribly helpless.

"I will be," she said.

As he rode in the wagon back to the chateau with Marchette, the back of Auguste's neck tingled. He pictured silent hunters crouched out in the prairie, their Kentucky long rifles ready, their thoughts fixed on fifty pieces of silver. His eyes moved restlessly over the low hills around them. The nearly full moon was sinking before them in the west, a lantern at the end of their trail. In some places the prairie gra.s.s closed in around the horse and wagon, high as the horse's rump and the wagon's wheels, and it looked to Auguste as if they were pus.h.i.+ng their way through a moonlit lake.

The loudest sound he heard was the steady singing of choruses of crickets more numerous than all the tribes of man. Somehow it seemed they always sang louder this time of year, as if they knew that frost and snow were coming soon to silence their song.

The chateau's peaked roof rose black against the stars. Before they reached the orchards, Auguste put his arm around Marchette and gave her a kiss on the cheek. Jumping down from the wagon, he tied to his shoulders with rawhide thongs the pack that held his medicine bundle, his instruments and his book.

"Good-bye and thank you, Marchette," he whispered, and darted off into the tall gra.s.s.

"G.o.d keep His eye upon you," she called softly after him.

Watching for Raoul's lurking hunters, he was soon past the chateau and slipping along the edge of the road that led through the hills to town.

He froze. He saw a light ahead of him, a swinging lantern moving away from him. Loud voices carried to him on the still night air.

Those must be some of Raoul's men. He was frightened, but he needed to know what Raoul was doing. Staying well in the shadows of the trees that grew along the edge of the road, he moved quickly and silently until he was close enough to make out words.

They staggered along, praising Raoul's generosity with Old Kaintuck.

Auguste saw three of them in the lantern's yellow glow, each carrying a rifle.

He bit his lower lip, and fear formed a cold hollow in his chest. If these men saw him they would shoot him on the spot.

Or try to. He doubted they could hit anything, drunk as they looked.

With that thought, his tense muscles eased a little.

The men crossed a narrow ridge that connected a hill with the bluff on which the trading post stood. Auguste flinched, startled by a whoop and a wail, followed by the crash of a body falling through shrubbery and a heavy clattering--probably a rifle--against rocks.

From the ridge came a burst of drunken laughter. Two of the men mocked their comrade who had rolled to the bottom of the hill. They wouldn't help him climb back up. Sleep it off down there, they told him. Curses floated faintly from below, then there was silence.

"What if that Indian is lurking around here?" said the man carrying the lantern. "He might come upon Hodge in the dark and scalp him or something."

Auguste thought, _How I would love to_. He recognized the Prussian accent of the man speaking. It was Otto Wegner, one of the men who worked at Raoul's trading post.

The other man said, "h.e.l.l, if the Injun ain't dead from the way Eli conked him with that rifle b.u.t.t, he's halfway to Canada. He knows he'll get his red hide full of holes if he stays around Smith County."

"As for me, I do not shoot unarmed Indians," said Wegner. "Fifty Spanish dollars or not. I have my pride. I served under von Blucher at Waterloo."

"Waterloo, hah? Well, ain't you a h.e.l.l of a fella! Raoul'd skin you alive and wear you for a hat if he heard you talking like that."

"He would not. I am his best rifleman--after Eli Greenglove. He knows my value. And my honor as a soldier is worth more to me than fifty pieces of eight."

Crouching in the shrubbery, Auguste shook his head in wonder. There was some sense of right and wrong even among Raoul's rogues.

But that hadn't stopped Wegner from being one of the men who backed Raoul with his rifle this morning.

He waited for the men to cross the ridge. He heard no sound from the one who had fallen; he had probably taken his comrades' advice and gone to sleep.

When the lantern swung out of sight around a corner of the trading post palisade, Auguste darted forward. Keeping low, he made a wide circle through the wooded slope above Victor. He scrambled down to the road where the Hopkins house stood. A long-eared black dog barked and ran at him when he pa.s.sed one of the houses along the road. His heart stopped as he waited for doors to fly open and rifles to fire at him. But he kept walking, and the dog stopped barking when he was beyond the house it was guarding.

Hoping none of the neighbors would hear him, he knocked loudly at the Hopkins door to wake them up.

Frank Hopkins, holding a candle in his hand, stood in the doorway in a long nights.h.i.+rt. "What the devil is it? We've got a sick man in here--"

He peered closer. "My G.o.d, Auguste! Get inside, quick."

He reached out, dragged Auguste through the door and shut it quickly behind him.

"I thought you were out at the Hales'." They stood in Frank's ground-floor workshop. The iron printing press towered shadowy in the candle's glow.

"I came to see Grandpapa. And--Frank, I'm going back to my people. I need your help."

"Come upstairs." Frank helped Auguste untie his backpack.

The stairs led to a second-floor corridor, and Frank drew Auguste into a room where an oil lamp with a tall gla.s.s chimney burned next to a large bed. Nicole sat there. The lamplight revealed Elysee's sharp profile against the white of the pillow.

Nicole jumped to her feet. "Oh, Auguste! Are you all right?"

"I'm getting better. How is Grandpapa?"

"He's only been awake half the time. Gram Medill looked in on him. She said he wrenched his hip when he fell and had bad bruises, but he hadn't broken any bones. I've been sitting up with him. What about you--how is your head?"

Auguste felt as if chains had fallen away from his chest at the news that Grandpapa was not dying. Then his head started to hurt. In the excitement of slipping past his enemies, Auguste had forgotten his pain.

Now he rubbed the spot above his right ear where Greenglove's rifle had hit him. He felt a lump that was sore to the touch. But he was able to smile rea.s.suringly at Nicole.

He spoke in a low voice so as not to disturb Elysee. "I won't be able to put my fine beaver hat on over this b.u.mp. But I won't be taking my fine beaver hat where I'm going."

"I'll get some more chairs," Frank said. "We can talk in here. The old gentleman is sound asleep now. Could you use a drop of brandy, Auguste?"

Auguste nodded. "That might ease the pain." He thought not only of the pain from the rifle blow, but of the pain in his heart from having lost Victoire despite his promise to his father. And the pain of tearing himself away from Nancy.

He and Frank quietly removed chairs from the other upstairs rooms where the Hopkins children were sleeping. Frank went down to the kitchen and came back with a tray bearing three small bowl-shaped crystal gla.s.ses and a cut-gla.s.s decanter that twinkled in the lamplight.

"Handsome gla.s.sware," Auguste said, seating himself and carefully setting his backpack between his feet.

"From the time of Louis the Fifteenth," Nicole said. "One of the things Papa brought over from the old chateau in France. And he gave it to Frank and me as a wedding present. At least Raoul won't get his hands on this."

Auguste said, "But Raoul has everything else, because father left it all to me. I told him he should will it to you; I should have insisted." His face burned with shame.

Frank said, "I doubt we'd have held onto the estate any longer than you did. And, frankly, I don't want it any more than you do. I don't know how Nicole feels."

Now that the land was irrevocably lost to him, Auguste was no longer so sure that he did not want it. He twisted in his chair, angry at himself for his uncertainty.

Nicole shook her head. "I'm a wife and mother. I'm not prepared to be a chatelaine. Especially when I'd have to fight that--that beast."

As Frank poured an inch of the warm amber liquid into each of their gla.s.ses, Auguste noticed that his fingers were, as always, blackened. He must never get the stains of his trade off his hands.