Redcoat by David Crookes

Author:David Crookes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: adventure, historical
Publisher: David Crookes

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Salem stopped swinging his twin-bladed axe when Little Bird began shrieking excitedly and pointing up into the sky. To the south, above the tree-lined banks of the Missouri, a column of smoke was rising up into the clear blue midday sky. This is what he had been waiting for. At last the northbound paddle wheeler was coming.

For three weeks Salem had worked alongside Chester Flute and Little Bird in the wood camp. He had felled trees and split them into cordwood, leaving Chester and his squaw to stack it in piles on the riverbank. In return for Salem’s labor, Chester had agreed to give him enough cordwood to make a trade with the steamboat captain for a passage to Fort Benton.

‘I’d say she’s only a couple of miles away, Salem.’ Chester said, eyeing the pall of rising smoke. ‘She’ll only stop long enough to take on fuel, so you’d best be getting your things together.’

Salem slammed the axe deep into a thick pine log. ‘I reckon this is one thing I won’t be needing any longer, Chester.’

‘More the pity, son,’ the old man said. ‘Sure you won’t change your mind and stay on awhile?’

‘You know I can’t do that. You know what I have to do in Benton.’

Chester nodded sadly. ‘Just in case Blackie shows up here again sometime, you won’t mention you was ever here with me and Little Bird, will you?’

‘You can count on that, Chester. But if things go my way in Benton, I don’t reckon Blackie will ever bother anybody again, anywhere.’

With several empty cabins on the passenger deck, the captain of the stern paddle-wheel steamer, Belle of St Louis, was only too happy to trade a passage to Fort Benton in exchange for cordwood. After sleeping for so long in his bedroll outdoors under the stars and on the dirt floor of Chester’s shack, Salem was well pleased with the exchange that gave him a cabin with a real bed and three squares a day, just like a regular fare paying passenger.

As soon as the transfer of wood-fuel was complete and Chester had taken some supplies off the steamer, she headed upstream again. A crewman showed Salem to his cabin where he transferred his few possessions from a buffalo skin bundle to a locker at the foot of the bunk. Then he looked in a mirror on the cabin wall and stared critically at the ragged, wild looking man staring back at him from the glass.

There was a knock on the door. Salem opened it to find a Chinese youth standing outside. He had clean linen and towels draped over his arm and a wide smile on his face.

‘Welcome aboard, Mr Slade,’ the youth said in perfect English. ‘I’m Joe Sing, your cabin steward. I’m here to make up your bunk.’

Salem stood back from the cabin door. ‘Sure, go ahead, Joe.’

‘I can bring you a tub and hot water if you wish to bathe, Mr Slade,’ the young Chinese said as he busied himself with the bunk, ‘and I can do any washing and ironing you might require.

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