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their minds whether to kill him or not. By the time they decided he had chosen
his horse and rifle, and the night before his captors came for him, an Indian
who had befriended him loosed the rawhide bonds they had finally tied him
with, and he slipped out of camp in the darkness and rode south until he
struck the trail from Santa Fe to California. Two months later, broke, ragged
and hungry, he had showed up at Captain Hutchins office on the wharf at San
Francisco. The following year he bought furs for Captain Hutchins, read twelve
more books and tried prospecting in the gold fields without luck. Twice he
made strikes but both petered out.
Returning one night from the wharf he heard a woman cry for help from an
alley in Sydney Town. He rushed into the alley and something struck him a
terrible blow across the back of his head. He came to, to find himself lying
in a stinking bunk in the fo c sle of a windjammer bound for Amoy and Canton,
China. The mate, a burly ruffian with tattooed arms and a heavy chest, came
down the ladder with a marline-spike and jerked men from the bunks.
Tentatively, Jean LaBarge swung his feet to the deck.
Hurry it up, you!
He looked up and started to speak and the mate hit him. His head still
throbbed from the night before and this second blow did him no good. He
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painfully got to his feet, as tall as the mate when standing, lean and hard as
a wolf, but he only choked back his anger and went on deck.
By the time they reached Canton he knew his way about a ship. He learned
fast, paid attention to his job, and bided his time. Captain Swagert eyed him
doubtfully, but the mate, Bully Gallow, shrugged it off. Yellow. He s big,
but he s yellow.
At trappers rendezvous Jean LaBarge had won a dozen rough-and-tumble fights,
and had lost one. He found that he liked to fight, there was something savage
and wild in him that reveled in it. One of the trappers who worked for Captain
Hutchins had once been a bare-knuckle bruiser in England, and he added his
teaching to what Jean had learned the hard way. And now Jean s time came in
Amoy.
It was a waterfront dive where sailors went, and it was filled with sailors
the night Jean LaBarge went hunting. He knew all about the back room at the
dive, the place reserved for officers, and it was there he found Captain
Swagert, and beside him Gallow.
A big man, Gallow was, with two drinks under his belt and his meanness riding
him like a devil on his shoulders. He saw LaBarge and LaBarge grinned at him.
Gallow waved a hand. Get out! This room is for your betters! Get up, Jean
LaBarge told him. Get up. Stack your duds and grease your skids because I m
going to tear down your meat-house! Gallow left the chair with a lunge and
learned for the first time the value of a straight left. It stabbed him in the
mouth as though he had run into the butt end of a post, and it stopped him in
his tracks. What followed was deliberate, artistic and enthusiastic. Jean
LaBarge proceeded to whip Bully Gallow to a fare-thee-well, dragging him from
the back room for the entertainment of the common sailors and when the job was
finished he went into the back room again where Captain Swagert sat over a
bottle and a glass. Captain Swagert, sir, he said, you ll be needing a new
mate. I m applying for the job.
The older man s eyes glinted. You ll not get it, he said abruptly. You ll
not get it at all. One more trip and you d be after my job. You re through,
lad, and you re on the beach in Amoy, and I envy you not one whit. So that
was the way of it. And Jean wrote to Rob from Amoy but he did not tell him he
was on the beach there, only what the port was like, and that he was staying
on awhile.
There was no love in Amoy for the white man since the Opium Wars, and for a
month Jean LaBarge lived a hand-to-mouth existence, then signed on with a
four-master sailing north to the Amur. It was a Russian ship, clumsy on deck
and dirty below, but it was a ship, and when they had discharged cargo in the
Amur they sailed for Fort Ross on the California coast. There, evading a guard
who walked the decks by night, he slipped over the side into the dark water
and floated ashore with an arm over a cask.
Once back in California, Jean had a long letter from Rob. His friend had gone
far since the Great Swamp days. He had borrowed money and gone to college. He
had graduated from the University of Pennsylvania at the age of eighteen and
paid the money back by his own efforts. Then he had married the granddaughter
of Benjamin Franklin and moved to Mississippi. A successful lawyer, he was now
rapidly gaining eminence as a senator ... Rob had always had a gift for words
and a way with people.
Jean LaBarge settled down in the growing city of San Francisco, buying furs
and selling supplies to the Alaska traders and other seagoers. On the
foundations of their first efforts Captain Hutchins had begun a thriving
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business, ignoring the gold rush and building for the future when the boom
would be a thing of the past. Not only did Jean know furs, but his sea
experience had given him the knowledge to talk equipment and supplies with the
best of them. And always in the back of his mind was the thought of Alaska. It
was waiting there, a great subcontinent, almost untouched, overflowing with
riches, and all in the hands of a greedy, self-serving company under a charter
from the Russian government, a company that kept out all interlopers despite
regulations and international treaties. Yet soon Jean LaBarge discovered that
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