“And here.. .dear Lord, it’s White Smoke.”
That name from Morris settled any doubts about the identity of the stallion that might have been in the minds of the crowd. And, seeing Morris greet me like more than a brother, most of the sting of my last speech was rubbed out of their minds. They stood about with good-natured grins, watching Morris lead me up the street, stopping every now and then to wring my hand, or I to wring his, laughing, shouting, and - on my part at least - weeping like a child. He got me into his own cabin at last.
“The Pawnee villains told the truth, then,” he said. “I caught one of the red demons, and he swore that Bald Eagle had sent you hunting White Smoke as a ransom for yourself and Sitting Wolf. I thought that was another way of saying that he had sent you to heaven. I strangled the poor dog. But you’re here, Lew… you’re here past my hopes. Ah, man, when I thought you were gone, it wrung my heart. I hated every redskin. I hated the damned prairies. They were haunted for me. I couldn’t stand it.. .and so I came in here.”
So I, after all, was the first cause of the tragedy. If it had not been that loneliness for me had driven him away from the tribe, he would have stayed with Zintcallasappa until she and their child held him with a greater strength than steel. But my loss was the knife that cut the bond, just as she, poor, wise girl, had prophesied. Hearing him say it sent something like ice to my heart. I was dumb. I could only stare miserably at him. Then most of the brightness left his face.
He muttered: “You saw Zintcallasappa, of course?”
“The boy has your hair, Chuck,” I said, fumbling for the surest means of wounding him and rinding it well enough. “Yellow hair like yours, Chuck. When I saw it, the firelight was shining through it and turning it into gold.”
He blanched as the words struck him. But I was brutal for the sake of Zintcallasappa. I thought I might as well let him know that I knew everything.
I said: “I’ve seen the other woman, too.”
At this, he put up his great hand, and it was trembling. “Don’t, Lew. Not any more for a minute.”
He got up and went to the door where he stood a moment, and the noise of his breathing filled the room. Then he turned about and came slowly back to me.
I looked about the room. There was such a strain in the shack that I couldn’t go on tormenting him for a time - and this in the first moments of our meeting. It was a big place, heaped in every comer to the very ceiling with all manner of stuffs from flour to beads.
“Who owns all this?” I asked him.
He nodded at it vaguely. “I do.”
“Why, Chuck, have you gone into partnership with some rich man?”
“It’s all mine,” he answered, as though it were so much dirt. “I’m doing a new kind of trading.”
“What’s that?”
“Most of these fellows are risking their necks, trading straight with the Indians. That takes oceans of time. Of course, they make huge profits, but every third time they get wiped out by accidents or Indians. Well, they need partners, too, to share the danger and the profits with them, but I had a new idea. I cleaned up five thousand in less than a week when I first came to the fort. It’s a lucky place …a lucky place for me, Lew.”
How his face lighted as he said it and gave me a glimpse again of Rising Sun.
“I chartered an old river steamer for that.. .too crazy to run, people said, but I got an old Scotchman who can make a steam engine talk Sioux, if he wants to. He took it down the river and mortgaged the ship together with the rest of my cash. He sank it all in the sort of goods I’d named to him, and he brought it back to the highest point on the Missouri that his old tub would take it. Then I pulled it up here on canal boats …horses on the banks, you see? Well, I turned five thousand into fifteen thousand on the first trip, simply by selling the cargo directly to the traders. I’m a wholesaler, you might say. I went right back at the job myself. We patched up the ship, shot her down to New Orleans, and brought her back again with my entire capital turned into flour, rifles, beads, and….”
He paused quickly and glanced askance at me.
“Firewater?” I asked him.
He knew my opinion about that traffic, and he said: “Well, that’s what they want. If they didn’t get it from me, they’d get it from someone else. Why not from me? I really don’t like the business any more than you do.”
I looked down at the floor. I was afraid to face him.
“I finished that second trip with close to forty-five thousand dollars. Another man up here caught my idea and offered me a ridiculously high price for my charter on the steamer. Well, he offered more than the old tub was worth. I took my Scotchman, dropped down to New Orleans, and bought another ship outright, twice as big and twice as fast as the one I had chartered. I poured the rest of my money and all I could raise with a mortgage into a cargo that jammed her to the gunwales, as my Scotchman says.”
He lowered his voice a little and looked at me with shining eyes.
“Lew, I cleared a hundred thousand dollars on that voyage! I cleared a hundred thousand, and besides that I have the new steamer. I mean she’s new in this trade. This stuff in the house is all that is left of the cargo, and I could sell it all today… but I’m waiting for a little rise in prices. In a word, Lew, I’m a rich man.” He brought it out with a ring. “A rich man in eight months of work, Lew.”
It was like a miracle. I found myself changing my mind about him again. I had always been changing my mind about him, off and on. My last estimate of him had been as a careless lounger who would smile his way through life in easy fashion and do no good for himself or anyone else except to spread a sort of festival spirit around him. Yet, I found it as easy to understand why he had been able to take these huge business ventures and succeed in them. The mere thought of investing one’s total profits after each trip in a crazy old river boat that was overdue in Davy Jones’s locker made my blood run cold, but, whereas I was the poorest gambler in the world, Morris was one of the best. In eight months he had piled up a huge fortune. In these days of billions one may think a hundred thousand is a very small sum, but, before the war, a hundred thousand was a tidy fortune. Besides, it was only the beginning for Morris. Already he seemed to be drawing away from me. He was becoming a figure, I felt, of national importance. I digested all of this news in a moment of quiet.
“You are going to be a rich man, Chuck,” I said. “I thank God for it. Because you’re the sort of a fellow who will use money in the right way. No poor devil will ever be brokenhearted by your business ways. But what became of the man who bought the charter from you?”
“Of him? The ship sank on the way down… rammed a submerged wreck of a scow, I think. The poor devil who had invested in it blew his brains out… after he’d swum ashore. A fool, you see, with no nerve at all. Should have been in a foundling’s asylum. I gave his wife and his youngster money enough to take them home.”
Once more I had to look down to the floor. Yet, I could not accuse Morris of sharp practice. It was simply business, I suppose. The next moment his heart was running over again.
“And now, boy,” he said to me, “you’re coming in with me, and we’re going to be partners. I have it worked out. The whole scheme jumped out of my brain alive and running the minute I saw you. I’m going to New Orleans to handle that end. I have some ideas about shipping in stuff cheap, directly from England and France and Boston. I can cut our costs in two, now that I’m able to handle things on a larger scale. I’ll work down there. You’ll handle this end of it. I’ve only had one outlet, and that’s here. I want others. I need others. I have growing pains with this business, old man. I want twenty forts and posts to be fed directly from me at a rate that will break the hearts of the little fellows that cart their stuff three thousand miles overland and have to ask ridiculous prices. Waterway transportation… nothing but waterway transportation is my motto. It beats dry land ten ways. I have a scheme for getting a couple of big depots up these little side rivers to the forts. Very well.. .this will be the firing line, and on it I need a fighter. I need you, Lew! You know Indians better than anyone in the world. It was always play with me, but some of their stuff got into your blood. You are an Indian, you tiger, you. Very well, you know what the red devils want better than they do. I. ..I.. .why, I’d almost cut out the firewater trade, if you’d come in with me, Lew.”