With such a schooner, if a man steered clear of the Russian capital at Sitka and its immediately neighboring islands he might trade along the Alaskan coast and be gone before the Russians were aware of his presence in the area. With luck he might slip in and out of that network of channels like a dark ghost ship, for the Indians were not apt to talk to their Russian masters, preferring to deal with the “Boston men” as all Yankees were called by them. The Russians were all too willing to let the Indians have a touch of the knout. Yet trading among the islands was not a simple thing, and within the past few years a dozen ships had vanished there, ships mastered by men who knew the waters, the bitter offshore winds and fogs. Furs were not coming out as they had been, and prices had risen. Now if ever was the time for a private venture. There are men who give their hearts to a horse, a boat, or a gun, men who are possessed by all these things, absorbed by them to the exclusion of all else. Jean LaBarge was such a man, but he was absorbed by a land. To the north lay a country vast and unpeopled, without cities, a land of glacier and mountain, of icy inlet and rocky fjord, of long grassy valleys and canyons choked with snow, of endless tundra and mile upon mile of mighty timber. It was a land with broken shores where the icy tongues of an Arctic sea licked at gaping mouths of rock, while above it the sky was weirdly lit by the vast play of color that was the northern lights. Long before he had seen the land he had loved it, for he had felt its strength and beauty in the richness of its fur, in its timber and gold. He knew of the gold. There had been a trapper who had come to him with furs, a man who had wintered with the Tlingit Indians north of Fifty-four. Jean had bought furs from him, wondering at their richness, and he asked the man when he was going back.
The trapper turned sharply around, his face flushed and angry. “Back? Are you crazy? Who’d go back to a country that freezes the eyeballs in your skull, the marrow in your bones, where the bears grow tall as horses and heavy as bulls? The Russkies can have it, and welcome. I wouldn’t even go back for the gold.”
“Gold?”
The trapper dug into his pocket and drew out a bit of tanned hide, unrolling it to reveal a nugget of walnut size. It gleamed there on his calloused palm, heavy as sin in the heart of a man. “If that isn’t gold, what is it?” Jean remembered the feel of it in his own palm, the weight of it and the brightness. This was gold, all right, raw gold, of which he had seen plenty here in California. Yet this was from Alaska.
“Found it in the shallows of a mountain stream when my canoe tipped over. I was picking my gear off the bottom when I saw it lying there, and could have picked up a dozen more. Only the country was freezing up and my grub was gone. “Rough gold, see? Means it wasn’t carried far from the lode or it would have been worn smooth by rocks and gravel. The Tlingits have gold but they value it less than iron.” He made a brushing gesture before his face. “I’d set no value on it either, if I had to go to Alaska for it.” Yet a year later Jean LaBarge heard the trapper had been killed in Alaska in a fight over a Kolush squaw. They were all the same, these men who went to the north country, they claimed to hate it, but they went back. And Jean knew it was not the furs or gold nor was it the wild, free life. It was the land. Thoughfully, he considered the problem presented by the schooner, her probable cost and the additional expense of outfitting her. Beyond the trim, black-hulled schooner was a big square-rigger flying the Russian flag—it was almost a challenge. He grinned thoughtfully, thinking of the places that schooner could go where the square-rigger could not hope to follow. Few Russian ships came to San Francisco since the closing of Fort Ross, yet occasionally they made their way down from Sitka to buy grain or other food even as they had done in the days of the Dons when they had bought much from the missions. The square-rigger had come into port only a short time ago. Giancing around at an approaching footstep he saw a short, thickset man with a captain’s peaked cap shoved back on the hard knot of his head. Despite the damp chill the man had his coat over his arm and his shirt open at the neck. In his mouth was a short-stemmed pipe. “That schooner, now. She’s a pretty thing, isn’t she?” He slanted a shrewd, measuring glance at Jean. “And the beauty of it is, she can be had. In a week I’d make no bets on it, but right now, for hard cash, she’d be a real bargain.”
He made a thrusting gesture, his pointing finger held waist-high, like a pistol.
“Right now her owner’s got a touch of the yellow … he’s discouraged.”
“Discouraged?”
There was a hard competence about the man, and a scar on his cheekbone, scarcely healed. His eyes, however, held a quizzical humor that belied the toughness. “Bad luck in the Pribilofs. The Russkies got him.”
“They didn’t take the schooner?”
“He hadn’t the schooner with him. That time he was sailing a barkentine. They didn’t take her, either, just the cargo. Six thousand prime sealskins. Six thousand mind you.” The man spat. “And lucky, at that. Had it been Baron Zinnovy he’d have been lucky to be alive, to say nothing of ship and crew.” “Zinnovy?”
“If you’re in the trade it’s a name you’ll know soon enough. He’s out from Siberia to command the Russian patrol ship, the Kronstadt. And none of your vodka-swilling scenery bums such as they’ve been sending out, but a tough man, one chosen to do a bloody job and put the fear of the Lord in such of us as sail north.”
“He’s already on the north coast?”
“He’s right here … in Frisco.” He indicated the square-rigger. “He came aboard of her, but as a passenger, mind you.
“If I’m to fight a man, give me a brute every time, but this one is cold and he’s smart, and fresh from the Russian navy with a lot of ideas. I’ve heard them say his idea is to end the free trading with a rope, a knout for the Indians and a noose for the Boston men, and the deep six for their ships.” “That’s a large order.”
“Ay, but this one’s man enough, don’t you be doubting that. I say it as hate to, he’s man enough.”
The square-rigger had lowered a boat that was coming shoreward. Jean strained his eyes against the distance, making out but one passenger aside from the boat crew.
“You’ve been sizing up the schooner, and she’s a likely craft, but you’ll be needing a skipper, a man who knows the islands. You’ll find none who know them better than myself, from Vancouver Island to the Circle.” He gestured at himself. “You see me now, name of Barney Kohl, standing in the middle of my property. But wealth, man? ‘Tis not property that makes a man rich, but what’s in his skull, and I’ve a pretty lot upstairs. You’ll be needing a man with more in his head. Jean LaBarge, than mincy ways and nancy talk. You’ll be seeking a man who knows the way of a ship and the sea, and the tricks of the Kolush prominent among them. You’ll be needing me, LaBarge, if it’s yonder schooner you’ll be buying.”
Kohl was a name well known to shipping: a tough rascal by all accounts, not above cutting a corner or two, but a good man with a ship, and a fighter. He had bargained with the Kolush and dealt with the Eskimo, and had a couple of running battles with Russian patrol ships.
“You know the kind of man Zinnovy is and you’d still go north?” Kohl took the pipe from his teeth. “That’s why I want to go. There was a ship lost up there, and I know what happened.
“You’ve heard of the mosquitoes on that coast? They’ll cover every naked bit of a man and eat him alive. I’ve seen a man after being left naked by the Kolush, black with them, driven crazy by them.
“Well, there were six men left alive when their ship was taken, and Zinnovy had the six whipped with a cat until the muscles were laid bare and then tied them, bloody as they were, to trees. Then he left them for the mosquitoes, and I was the one found those men—or what was left of them.” “You’re hired,” Jean said, “if I can buy the schooner.”