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  "I am a Westerner," said Sterling.

  "A Westerner, opposed to expansion."

  "I favor the expansion of republicanism, sir, but not the peculiar institution with it. And I will not allow you to hang this man. I may not agree with his ideas, or especially his tactics, but I will not stand by and let the fate which befell Elijah Lovejoy repeat itself here."

  Delgado knew the story of Lovejoy, the abolitionist editor. Ten years ago, the man had been hounded out of Missouri. Moving to Illinois, he continued his crusade against slavery. After his printing presses were destroyed on three separate occasions, his house invaded by an unruly mob, and his wife pushed to the verge of hysterical collapse, Lovejoy had armed himself, vowing to protect his family and property. When a mob came to wreck his fourth printing press, Lovejoy confronted them with pistol in hand, and was gunned down in the process. He had become a martyr to the abolitionist cause.

  A boy broke through the press of passengers. By the condition of his dirty linsey shirt and ragged dungarees, Delgado took him for one of those less fortunate souls who were berthed on the main deck with the cargo. In his white-knuckled grasp was a length of braided hemp, and on his face was stamped the same mad lust for blood Delgado had seen on Brent Horan's patrician features.

  "Here's your rope!" exclaimed the youth. "Stretch the damn Yankee's neck!"

  Horan gave Sterling a look of defiance as he snatched the rope from the boy. Making a slip knot loop at one end, he put it over Rankin's head and pulled the loop closed around the abolitionist's neck. Rankin renewed his struggle to free himself, but to no avail. The pressure of the rope seemed to make his eyes bulge in their sockets. Cold sweat beaded his forehead, and he began to mumble the Lord's Prayer. He could no longer deny his fate.

  Seeing that Horan was prepared to go through with the lynching, some of the men in the crowd turned their backs, leading the women away from the scene. But no one stepped forward to intervene—except Sterling, who clutched Horan's arm.

  "Don't be a fool," rasped the newspaperman. "By his own admission, this man has broken the laws of several states. Turn him over to the authorities, Horan, for the love of God."

  Horan grinned like a wolf. "Let go of me, Sterling, or I'll hang you right alongside him."

  Sterling removed his hand. The slump of his shoulders told Delgado that he would go no further to try to save Rankin.

  As he stepped forward, Delgado reached into the pocket of his frock coat and extracted the derringer. He acted almost by reflex, without giving any thought to the consequences of his actions. Angus McKinn had always claimed his son was too impetuous for his own good.

  "Pardon me," he said.

  Horan looked at him, saw the pocket pistol, and froze.

  "I was under the impression," said Delgado coldly, "that this nation was built upon certain unalienable rights. Are you acquainted, Horan, with the first ten amendments to the Constitution?"

  Horan just stared at him, rendered speechless by astonishment more so than fear.

  "I refer specifically," continued Delgado, "to the right of free speech, not to mention the right to a public trial with an impartial jury and the assistance of counsel."

  Horan was quickly recovering. "Stay out of this, sir," he warned, his words like cold steel. "This is none of your affair."

  "I disagree. Is this a republic, or a monarchy? The former is antithetical to the latter. Yet, in recent weeks, during my sojourn in the South, I have begun to wonder if the United States of America is a republic at all. I have seen tyranny, aristocracy, hereditary privilege, restrictive land tenure, and servile obedience enforced by repressions. And you, sir, you must be a prince of this aristocracy, since by your whim a man can lose his life."

  Horan darkened. "I find your words insulting, McKinn."

  "These are the facts which insult you." Delgado took a step closer and planted the derringer's double barrel in Horan's rib cage. "If this man hangs, Horan," he said, pitching his voice so low that only Horan could hear him, "you won't be alive to see it."

  For a moment Horan made no move. He searched Delgado's face for any clue that this might be a bluff. There was no such clue. Delgado knew he might very well have to kill Horan. The man's towering pride might not permit him to back down, especially in the presence of so many witnesses. But Delgado realized that he could not back down either, if for no other reason than that Jeremiah Rankin's life depended on him. So he kept his nerve and did not flinch from the malevolence in Horan's gaze.

  "Let the man go," Sterling told the two men who were restraining the abolitionist. "Let him go, or Horan's blood will be on your hands."

  It was a clever stratagem. If Horan died, they would be responsible, because Sterling suspected, as did they, that Horan would not submit, preferring death to dishonor. This was a code they understood and strove to live by. The honorable course for them would be to release Rankin and save the life of their friend.

  They let Rankin go. One of them removed the rope from around the abolitionist's neck. "I will turn him over to the authorities in St. Louis," he told Sterling curtly as he flung the rope over the railing.

  The second man turned to Horan. "Come on, Brent," he said softly with a wary glance at Delgado and his pistol.

  "This is not the end," Horan told Delgado and turned briskly away.

  Delgado pocketed the derringer and went to the railing, feeling suddenly nauseated, hoping only that he did not show it. Below him in the brown water between the hull of the Sultana and the old wharf, the rope slowly squirmed in the river's current like a long snake. Delgado stared at the rope, unaware of all else about him. When Sterling put a hand on his shoulder he flinched.

  "That was a brave act, McKinn," said the newspaperman. "And it just may yet get you killed."

  "Something had to be done. We have to live with ourselves. I think that would have been a difficult proposition had we stood by and watched a man hanged for no good reason."

  "Slavery." Sterling shook his head. "It is an issue tearing at the very fabric of our nation. But Horan will not forget, or forgive, what you did. I thought for a moment he might issue a challenge."

  "A duel?"

  Sterling nodded. "It is still quite possible he will have his representative pay a call on you."

  Delgado laughed sharply. "I am no duelist and refuse to become one."

  "Well, perhaps nothing will come of it. Cooler heads may yet prevail. You are an unknown quantity, and that works in your favor. I hope we will meet again in St. Louis, before you leave for Taos. Perhaps you will be in the mood for another game of whist. Here is my card."

  Sterling handed him the newspaper he had been carrying and walked away.

  Delgado opened the newspaper. It was the St. Louis Enquirer, yesterday's edition. A few copies had come up the gangplank at this landing. The banner headline jumped out at him. Men from Commodore Sloat's naval squadron had seized the California ports of Monterey and San Francisco. Mexican troops were reported to be massing in the Los Angeles area, preparing to march against the American interlopers. A great and decisive battle was expected.

  Delgado grimly folded the newspaper, put it under his arm, and returned to his stateroom, wondering what the future held for Taos, his home, and his family.

  Chapter Two

  "If there is no cure, one must endure . . ."

  1

  St. Louis was a thriving city of more than seventy thousand souls on that summer day in 1846 when Delgado McKinn arrived on the magnificent Sultana. The town was both cosmopolitan and frontier, American as well as French in character. At least fifty steamboats were moored to its mile-long docks, taking on or discharging cargoes and passengers, the serried ranks of their ornamented smokestacks looming against the azure sky. The levee was covered as far as the eye could see with merchandise just landed or ready to be shipped—hundreds of barrels of flour, hogsheads of tobacco, piles of lead harvested from nearby mines, hundreds of head of livestock of every description. Boatman, draymen
, factors, and laborers went about their business with that hustle and bustle that seemed, to Delgado, so American. Beyond the levee, the vigorous and ever-expanding city sprawled across a long limestone bluff and spilled onto the plateau beyond.

  In thirty short years St. Louis had grown a thousandfold. It had been founded in 1764 by a French soldier and adventurer named Pierre Laclede Ligueste, leader of a commercial enterprise that enjoyed the royal monopoly of trade with the Indians along the Missouri and upper Mississippi. Where these two mighty rivers met, Laclede established an outpost, named St. Louis in honor of the enterprise's patron, Louis XV, King of France. Early on, St. Louis became the jumping-off point of most expeditions into the uncharted western country, as well as the center of the fur trade.

  Even after France ceded all of the Louisiana Territory to Spain, St. Louis remained predominantly French. But when Louisiana was purchased by the United States in 1803, numerous New England speculators materialized. With the advent of the steamboat, St. Louis boomed, her wealth and population and importance soaring, and she was soon the undisputed river capital of the West. The fact that she stood at one end of the Santa Fe Trail only added to her phenomenal growth.

  Delgado had never visited St. Louis before, although the city had played a pivotal role in his life. His father had embarked from here on his first bold venture down the Santa Fe Trail. In 1822 Angus McKinn had outfitted in the Vide Poche district, the old, French section of town, putting every penny he had to his name into all the merchandise that two dozen Missouri mules could carry, and which he subsequently sold at a tremendous profit in Santa Fe. Though rich in silver and wool, Santa Fe was starved for the simplest manufactured goods, since vast deserts separated it from the metropolitan centers of Mexico proper. On his third trip Angus met Delgado's mother, married her, and made his home in Taos. Yet he still maintained his St. Louis connections and prospered as a result of them. The Santa Fe trade was still going strong. Angus had written his son that in the year 1843, by his calculations, a half million dollars worth of goods had been transported from St. Louis to Santa Fe.

  Delgado still vividly remembered his father's description of St. Louis in the old days. A raw frontier village of less than ten thousand back then, just beginning to flex her muscles and contemplate her prospects. Already the warehouses of gray and yellow stone, erected on a flat bench between the levee and the limestone bluff, were filled with the pelts for which the fur trappers had risked life and limb in the great unknown of the Shining Mountains—pelts bound for New York, London, Paris, Canton, Athens, and Constantinople. Today, the fur trade was in decline. The silk hat had replaced the one made of beaver, and the China trade had surpassed the fur trade. But the sturdy old warehouses still stood, along with others of more recent construction, all chock full of merchandise hauled by riverboat, or about to be.

  Back in the days when Angus McKinn had stepped off an Ohio River flatboat and swept this very scene with his flinty gaze, French had been spoken on every hand, and the narrow unpaved streets were lined with the shabby dwellings built in the way of the voyageur—logs or planks driven vertically into the ground with the interstices daubed with mud—interspersed by a few more stately abodes of brick and stone. One of these, still standing in '46, and which, for nostalgic reasons, Delgado wanted to see, was the home of Auguste Chouteau, one of the stalwart band who had come here with Laclede. The Chouteau home and outbuildings occupied a square near the center of town, between the Rue de la Tour and the Rue de la Place.

  Chouteau's son and grandson had made their fortunes in the fur trade, Pierre Chouteau, Sr. had partnered with Manuel Lisa, William Clark, and Andrew Henry to form the Missouri Fur Company in 1809. Pierre, Jr. had carried on the family tradition and allied himself with John Jacob Astor in the formation of the American Fur Company twenty years later. The Chouteau family had shown Angus McKinn every kindness.

  In the new West a fluid society provided a forum where any immigrant, regardless of his ancestry, could command respect, so long as he demonstrated ability and ambition. Personal drive and self-reliance were virtues to be admired in a man of talent and personality. Angus McKinn fit that bill in every particular, and the Chouteaus had warmed to him immediately.

  Today, the southern part of St. Louis, called the Vide Poche, was still the stronghold of the French Canadian trappers and traders. It was considered the rough side of town, and for good reason. By way of contrast, there was Washington Square, where the affluent—people like Jacob Bledsoe—lived in palatial homes. High society was comprised of old French families who had made their fortunes in the fur trade, and southern slaveholders, relative newcomers, who had found the rich black soil of the area conducive to the growing of money crops. Great plantation homes and lavish town manors were now commonplace. Two renowned hostelries, the Planters House and the Union Hotel, vied for the custom of the well-heeled visitor. Some of the major thoroughfares were paved now, and a few were even lighted. There were churches side by side with cathedrals, an opera house, business establishments of all persuasions, a typically American epidemic of lawyers, the famous Market House, a notorious slave auction, a good many mills on the outskirts, numerous taverns and gambling dens, and Bloody Island, the city's designated dueling ground.

  One thing, though, hadn't changed since Angus McKinn's days here. Regiments of pigs roamed the streets, growing fat on the refuse. Delgado had learned that even a metropolis as sophisticated as New York tolerated these porcine "street cleaners"—one had to take care not to trip over them while emerging from private club or theater house.

  In the melee of white and black, gentleman and common laborer, with the tumultuous babble of French, English, and German ringing in his ears, Delgado paused at the bottom of the gangplank, burdened with a bulging valise in either hand, momentarily at a loss. Jacob Bledsoe, his father's business partner, was expecting him. He had forwarded a letter to Bledsoe from New Orleans in advance of his six-day, twelve-hundred-mile journey upriver. But, having never before met Bledsoe, they would have no way of recognizing one another, slender and dark-haired, Delgado resembled his Castilian mother, not the stocky, ruddy-complected Angus McKinn.

  "Delgado!"

  A big man was coming toward him, cleaving the stream of humanity on the levee.

  Delgado grinned broadly. Here was a familiar face in a sea of strangers. He set the heavy valises down and stuck out a hand. The man clasped it with an iron grasp and an easy grin of his own.

  "Hugh Falconer!" said Delgado, delighted. "You are the last person I expected to see here."

  "Jacob asked me to meet you. You're looking well, my friend."

  "As are you. But I must confess, I almost didn't recognize you."

  "Times change," said Falconer, rueful. "A man must change with them."

  Delgado had met Hugh Falconer on two previous occasions. The first one he did not remember, as he had been but two years of age. Falconer had come down the Santa Fe Trail on his way to the Shining Mountains and the life of a trapper. Angus McKinn had outfitted him and introduced him to several other buckskinners, including Wolf Montooth, who was about to lead a brigade into prime beaver country.

  What had happened next became mountain legend. The trappers had run afoul of Blackfoot Indians, and one of the men was mortally wounded. Montooth had abandoned the man, but Falconer had refused to do the same. Only when the man had breathed his last did Falconer leave his side, miraculously escaping the Blackfeet. Later, he hunted Montooth down and killed him. Or so went the story. There had been no witnesses, and Falconer was tight-lipped about the whole business.

  The last time Delgado had met Falconer was three years ago, just weeks prior to Delgado's departure for England and the ivy-colored halls of Oxford University. Falconer had been hunting two men who had robbed Oregon-bound emigrants of their grubstakes. These two men were also fugitives from Santa Fe justice. One of them had killed a prominent local man. Falconer had ventured alone into Comanchero country and slain one of the men, bri
nging the other back to Santa Fe to collect the reward, which he in turn passed on to the luckless emigrants. This had made of Falconer something of a hero in Santa Fe, at a time when all Anglo outsiders were suspect; Mirabeau B. Lamar, the president of the Republic of Texas, had recently dispatched a military expedition with orders to seize Santa Fe for the new republic. Lamar's grandiose scheme to extend Texas to the Pacific had been stymied, and bred animosity among Santa Feans toward the land-grabbing Anglos. Falconer's subsequent exploits had somewhat improved that situation.

  Wounded in the fray, Falconer had spent a few days with the McKinns, until Angus could expedite the payment of the bounty. Against a doctor's advice, Falconer had promptly taken his leave once the gold was in hand. He had left the emigrants to winter in the high country, and he was anxious to get back to them. Delgado remembered being impressed by the buckskinner's toughness. To venture into the mountains in the dead of winter while suffering from a gunshot wound seemed foolhardy, perhaps even suicidal. But then Hugh Falconer was no ordinary man.

  He was in his mid-forties now, but looked ten years younger, in spite of a life of tragedy and travail. He was tall, broad in the shoulders, whipcord lean, with brown eyes and yellow hair. His beard, darker than his shoulder-length locks, was close cropped now. In place of buckskins he wore a kersey shirt and stroud trousers tucked into mule-eared boots. A Bowie knife with staghorn handle rode on his right hip in an Indian sheath. His left arm was nestled in a sling.

  "I never thought you would forsake the mountain life," Delgado told him.

  "I have responsibilities now, to others than myself." Sensing that this answer did not satisfy Delgado's curiosity, Falconer added, "A wife and son."