Dorothy Garlock - [Annie Lash 03] by Almost Eden

bend.”
     
    *  *  *
     
    Since sundown the day before, Eli Nielson had been aware that there was a man upriver and that he was traveling light. Only a man alone would have butchered a deer in such a way, taking only what he could use before the meat spoiled and leaving the rest of the carcass to float downriver. After spotting the dead deer, Nielson, Deschanel and a German named Kruger had moved the flatboat upriver until it became too dark to spot a dangerous sawyer or an unruly current.
    At dawn Nielson had taken his turn at the steering oar while Otto Kruger, possibly the best carpenter in the territory and also the most ill-tempered, and Paul Deschanel, Nielson’s friend and companion for most of his life, took the poles.
    “You think it’s him?” Paul asked as he pulled his pole from the muddy river bottom.
    “Could be. Merrick said he was a week out of St. Charles.”
    “If it is,
mon ami,
you’ll get a look at him before nightfall, that’s if the Delaware don’t take a notion to set on us . . . or him.”
    “I was sure that he wouldn’t have turned inland. Merrick didn’t say, but it’s logical that he would follow the river if he was goin’ to the Bluffs.”
    “
Mon Dieu.
Merrick didn’t say he was going to the Bluffs.”
    “Cautious man.”
    Paul snorted a reply.
    “Trappers comin’ down riffer two days back see no vhite man.” The German spoke with a heavy accent.
    “They might’ve thought he was an Indian.”
    “
Eh, bien!
” Paul took one hand off the pole to remove his fur cap. “Is he not?”
    “He iss a saffage?” Kruger’s bald head swiveled on his thick neck.
    Eli was looking through his spyglass and didn’t answer.
    “If he has any sense, he’s cut a wide path round them Delaware.” Paul grunted and heaved on the pole. “If he went through them, he could’a come out without hair.
Mon ami,
them Delawares is mean sonsabitches.”
    “If he planned to get to the Bluffs before winter, he took to the river.” Eli lifted the spyglass to his eye again.
    “Who knows,
mon ami,
why a Frenchman does anything.” Paul grinned over his shoulder at Eli. “A Frenchman with Osage blood is”—he waved his hands—“crazy like fox. Knowing about Baptiste Lightbody’s been eating on you for going on five year now.”
    The tall sharp-eyed man agreed but showed no outward sign of it.
    Had it been only five years since Sloan Carroll, of Carrolltown up on the Ohio, had sent word that he had a spot of business to discuss with him? What Carroll had told him had changed his life. From that day on he had even viewed himself in a different way.
    A few months after his visit to the Carrolls, he had received another blow to his pride. Sloan’s daughter, Orah Delle, had told him that she was going back to her father’s ancestral home in Virginia to study music. To give the lady credit, he was sure that she had no idea that he had lain in his bed night after night dreaming of her and had come to the Carroll home as often as possible in hopes of seeing her.
    Five years ago he had been so young and inexperienced, unable to recognize that the beautiful and gracious Orah Delle had offered him only the same courtesy that she would have shown any of her father’s acquaintances.
    Eli Nielson had heard about the profits to be made by freighting up the Mississippi. It was one of the reasons, a minor one he admitted to himself, that he had left the Ohio Valley, come down the Ohio to the Mississippi and up to St. Louis, where he had bought guns, gunpowder, tools, blankets and tobacco with the intention of taking them upriver perhaps as far as the French settlement of Prairie du Chien.
    From a word here and a word there he had learned that Baptiste Lightbody was a well-known scout that Zeb Pike had tried to hire. It seemed that he had no close ties to anyone other than the men Sloan named, Jefferson Merrick and Will Murdock. That information had led Neilson to Jefferson Merrick, and now here to this