Free Sign-Talker by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

they went to the bootleggers and got too much of it. He kept them busy whipsawing lumber to improve the camp and their big boat. He constantly measured the skies and the weather with his strange instruments, and wrote the measurements on paper along with lists and sketches and maps and numbers and words, words, words. All his life Drouillard had seen writing people, Lorimier’s clerks and scriveners, but he had never seen anyone write and figure on paper so diligently as that Captain Clark. His fingers were always black with ink.
    It was their way of remembering. Clark told Drouillard they would write each day of what was happening, all the way to the western sea. This was all for the man Jefferson, to tell him all they did, all they saw. All the sergeants and soldiers who could write would keep journals too, so that if any records gotlost or damaged, there would still be accounts for the President. Clark asked Drouillard to keep a journal, but he said he could not write well enough. York made as much ink as coffee for Captain Clark. They looked alike, but the coffee was hot and the ink was not.
    Drouillard, carrying letters to Captain Lewis from Captain Clark, disembarked from a rowboat near Manuel Lisa’s store. Lisa was a Spanish merchant who had made considerable wealth in New Orleans. Believing in the business tenet that the closer one is to the source, the more profit one can skim off, he had then moved up the Mississippi to try to break into the old Chouteau family’s fur trade monopoly in St. Louis. By virtue of being Spanish, Lisa had obtained a trading license from Spanish officials, and now had a thriving establishment on the riverfront. He had become one of the suppliers for the Americans’ planned journey to the West.
    Lisa’s establishment fronted on a cobbled riverfront quay that ran with sewage from upslope streets; just as the great rivers of the land converged in the Mississippi Valley, the streets of St. Louis trickled mud, washwater, and chamber-pot waste down onto this broad quay, where it stewed until a rainstorm flushed everything into the river. Drouillard stepped from plank to cobblestone, stone to curb, to keep his soft-soled, delicately quilled moccasins out of the sludge as he approached the door of Lisa’s store and warehouse. He breathed through his mouth to keep from smelling the stench of whitemen’s civilization. A few flatboats, pirogues, and dugouts were moored at quayside, silhouetted against the vast, yellow-gray surface of the Mississippi.
    The interior of Lisa’s establishment was dense with the musky, rotten-flesh smell of ill-prepared hides and pelts and loud with the arguments of buyers, sellers, and clerks. As Drouillard made his way through the gloom among kegs, coils of rope, bolts of calico, hempen sacks, and shelved boxes, he heard Manuel Lisa’s voice squawking rapidly in Spanish and then a deep bellow of a man in pain. From the dim depths at theback of the store two figures came hurrying up the aisle. Drouillard darted out of their way among a stack of piggin buckets.
    Manuel Lisa in a black frock was in front, leading a huge, reddish-haired mulatto man in filthy deerskins toward the front exit. The giant was running on tiptoe, because Señor Lisa had a dagger point up his nostril, and by this bloody point of contact pulled him along to the front door, where he released the man, pivoted around him and with a kick sent him sprawling in the foul puddles of the quay. When the little Spaniard returned, he seemed hardly agitated. He beckoned Drouillard into his office in the rear, where they sat to face each other.
    “I am surprised to see
you
here, Señor Drouillard.”
    “Why surprised? I come to talk further about the voyageurs.”
    Lisa made a sharp cutting motion with one hand. “Your haughty captain has terminated us. He will get the boatmen through Chouteau. Has he not even told you?”
    “In fact, no.”
    “Perhaps then he was just venting his temper with me, or