The High Missouri Read Online Free Page B

horses. Naught else in here tonight, though there might have been, engagés and the like.” The voice made a grunt that might have been a chuckle.
    Engagés . The canoe men, the white men turned to beasts by the Indians, according to Dylan’s father. Was this creature one of that riffraff?
    “Eyes still closed?”
    “Yes.”
    “Open them, sit still, and let yourself see.”
    He did. The barn was changed. Where there had been impenetrable blackness, there were now shapes, indistinct, yet… He could make out two lines of posts, humps of hay, walls, even a handle that might go to a pitchfork leaning against a post.
    “See now?” The shape next to him was obscure, featureless, deep in shadow. It might be human or demon.
    “Yes, sort of.”
    “Still want light?”
    “I think so.”
    “All right. Use your eyes, get that broom, and sweep a big circle clean, right down to the dirt.”
    Dylan didn’t think he could do it—too dark.
    He managed without difficulty.
    “Now light your rag. I could see all you were doing from the loft. That’s how it is when you let your eyes adjust to nature.”
    Dylan set the can in the center of the circle and used his flint and tinder again. The creature blew hard on the sparks, and the handkerchief ignited. After a little more blowing, they had light. It made a queer pattern of flickering light and shadow on the old man’s face.
    The creature smiled. It sat on its haunches comfortably and looked up into Dylan’s face.
    Dylan squatted and studied the creature at eye level. All but the face was wrapped in a blanket—that’s why his arms looked webbed. A knobby face, the surface hard and bumpy, as though cobbled, and of indeterminate age. Gray hair pulled straight back like an Indian’s, braided and hanging nearly to his waist. The smile of a fellow who was amused, perhaps at his naivete. The crinkles of a man who liked to laugh. One eye normal, rather an attractive green. The other eye the strangest color Dylan had ever seen—aquamarine, he supposed, but luminous, brightly beaming, as from a lighthouse at sea. Dramatic, eerie eyes, one ordinary, mundane, the other a beacon.
    Dylan pushed back thoughts of the devil. Nursery-tale stuff.
    “Would you like some real food, boyo? You tore up that bread and apple like paper.”
    “Yes, sir,” said Dylan.
    “Away with that sir, laddo, I’m not a bloody officer, just a working Welshman like yourself.”
    “Welshman?”
    “Aye, laddo, like you.”
    “How do you know me?”
    “I knew your mother right well enough, God rest her soul, Dylan Elfed Davis.”
    “Campbell,” Dylan added automatically.
    “Aye, Campbell, ill enough, but you don’t have to admit it. Dylan Elfed Davis is a right good name by itself.” The creature was grinning. “Davies, perhaps even better, more traditional Welsh.”
    Don’t admit to the Campbell part—Dylan liked that idea, after today. Go stuff it, Father.
    “And who are you, to know so much?”
    The creature put out a paw to shake. Dylan took it. “Morgan Griffiths Morgan Bleddyn,” he said, “of the NorthWest Company, venturer to Rupert’s Land. You may call me Dru.”
    He leapt up and scrambled up a post into the loft. At least he didn’t fly. Dylan was relieved to see, when Morgan Bleddyn was gone into the dark recesses of the loft, that the post was studded with rods for climbing.
    Morgan leapt out, flew on blanket wings like a bat again and landed next to Dylan, grinning. He really seemed to land featherlike, as though he had no weight.
    He held something Dylan had never seen, wrapped in leather. He peeled back the leather to show… was it sausage?
    “Pemmican, laddo. A man with true understanding is never afraid, a man with a woman is never without a fire, and a man with pemmican is never hungry.” He cut a chunk off with his big belt knife and offered it to Dylan.
    Dylan tasted. Good. Kind of like cold sausage. Sewn tight into a deerskin casing.
    “Buffalo meat mixed with fat and