Rebels & desperados by John R. Stuart

Author:John R. Stuart [Stuart, John R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: JOHN R. STUART
Published: 2013-10-09T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 15 – THE KING OF THE WEST

Before noon Kensington led Kingfisher, Pepper, Velázquez and I north towards the wild badlands of the District of Assiniboia and the Métis town of Rielville. Hoyle was still passed out in a whore’s bed, an empty whiskey bottle nestled in his arms, his head between her breasts, all attempts to stir him had proven unsuccessful and he never blinked an eye when Pato threw a bucket of cold water over both him and the wagtail beside him. She awoke with a scream and gave Pato and me proper Hell before kicking us out of her room. My suspicions that Hoyle was unreliable and a liability were proven true. We left him to his own devices; I won’t tolerate a man of that ilk, and even though I’d abandoned him I won’t jeopardize myself and the others to give him time to sober up.

As the dusk began to gather around us Kensington pulled us to a halt beside a clump of saplings beside the trail.

“Lee, can I borrow your Texas toothpick for a bit?”

I handed my Bowie knife to him and he dismounted and proceeded to cut a swamp maple sapling into a seven-foot staff. He cleaned off my blade and returned it to me.

“Kensington, what are you about?” I asked.

He smiled back, “You’ll see big man. You’ll see. I’m preparing our invitation to Rielville.”

He was looking through one of his saddlebags, and after a few seconds’ search. he extracted a large square of red cloth approximately three feet by two, which he affixed to the staff. As it unfurled, I could see a white horizontal figure eight painted on both sides.

He re-mounted and set the butt of the staff into his stirrup, allowing the red flag to drape down over his shoulder. “They’ve got cannons and a Gatling gun at the front gate. This Métis flag should get us to the gate without them firing on us.”

Kensington had described Rielville as the home base of the rebellion and it had grown over a twenty-year period from a squalid disgusting Indian-Métis encampment into a small town as the rebellion had expanded and spread. The town was set between a rough craggy series of steep cliffs and a wide half mile diameter ox-bow loop of the Assiniboine River. The river was wide and deep there and provided protection from attack from the north. Any assault from that direction required boats and Riel had built an earthworks embankment with a deep ditch to make any waterborne assault a treacherous affair.

The southern narrow access path, which was no more than fifty feet wide as it cut through the cliffs had been closed with a barrier wall twenty feet high and five feet wide consisting of a double wall of wooden tree trunks that were filled with rocks. The Métis had two cannons mounted on the wall and loaded with canister they were an effective deterrent to attack. A quarter mile south of the gates to Rielville we

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