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the bank; it splashed into water two or three feet out but it didn’t matter. Captain Sire barked an order from above and the crew sprang to work, hoisting cargo from the hold and swinging it on a spar over land and reeling it to earth.
    Brokenleg hastened up the companionways, ignoring the vicious pain in his bad leg, until he reached the texas. “Cap’n,” he muttered, out of breath. “Can you hold her a while? We got nobody hyar. Jist hold her up a day or two.”
    Sire shook his head. “Alas, Monsieur Fitzhugh. The river, she drops by the hour. We can’t wait. Even now the risk is impossible — impossible. We may be forced to abandon her as it is. No — we’ll unload and start back the instant — the very second we have fulfilled our contract.”
    “That’s what I was afraid you’d say. I got me three men and a boy to defend fifteen thousand dollars of trade goods. And that village o’ Hidatsa only a dozen miles away. And that isn’t all, neither. I haven’t got a bit o’ sheeting to protect it. We were gonna put ’er into the wagons — under the wagon sheets. Keep rain off them blankets and cloth and all.”
    “Monsieur Fitzhugh, I wish I could help you.”
    “Maybe you can. You got any sheeting in ship’s stores to spare?”
    Sire didn’t respond. Instead he bellowed something in French to the mate, who trotted off toward the storage bins aft of the boiler. Meanwhile, on the grassy bank the cargo grew into a small mountain. The crew worked feverishly, not wasting a second.
    Then the mate appeared below and yelled up to the captain.
    “We’ve none to spare, Monsieur. And the whole of it wouldn’t begin to cover your cargo.”
    The news couldn’t have been worse. Fitzhugh sighed and plunged down the companionways, leapfrogging steps to spare his tortured leg. The morning sky looked blue enough but it meant nothing. Thousands of dollars worth of cargo would be in peril, exposed to the elements there on the island.
    He found his three new engages, Lebrun, Grevy, and Poinsett, on the deck, pulling their kits together. “Look hyar,” he said. “We got us a pile o’ trouble. No one hyar from the post. We got to protect them things. You git on down to the bank fast, and git busy. We’ve got to dig us a dray cache somewhere, which ain’t gonna be easy hyar. Maybe back in them bluffs. We got to make her big and dry and then haul every blanket and bolt of cloth and what else gets hurt by rain into it, and do her before it rains.”
    They nodded. Caching was something every man of the mountains knew about. It was the time-honored way of storing beaver plews, weapons, and even food, safe from weather and Injun eyes. It was an art in its own right. A poorly built or misplaced cache would leak water and ruin whatever lay within. A poorly concealed cache would swiftly be discovered and robbed by any passing tribesmen — or wolf or bear.
    Lebrun understood English best and spoke it. “We’ll dig like badgers and haul like mules,” he said.
    They hauled their kits down the gangway, splashing the last few feet to land. Each carried a heavy pack of personal things and a good mountain rifle. On the bank they stood helplessly, waiting for spades and axes to show up from the hold.
    Fitzhugh plunged into the hold, dodging swinging nets of cargo, and hunted down the spades, a dozen of them simply corded together. He grabbed the whole lot, struggled up the ladder to the main deck, and hauled them ashore, sweating fiercely. The engages swiftly grabbed them and headed toward the southern bluffs half a mile off. It’d be a staggering business to build a cache and carry the most vulnerable things on their backs to it, but Fitzhugh didn’t let himself think about it. He’d been in tighter corners.
    No matter how fast the crew worked, it wasn’t fast enough for Sire, who paced the hurricane deck and scowled. Hours passed, and the lightened vessel pulled free of the mud and rocked at the end of its mooring