Five miles from the Mississippi they came to the boundary stone with an M carved on it that marked Victoire's easternmost extent. From there Raoul could see, a good ten miles or more away, the sign of the Indians, a long finger of gray smoke leaning northeastward among the fluffy white clouds. The mine entrance was at the bottom of a ravine carved in the prairie by the Peach River, and the smoke doubtless meant the Indians were smelting lead.
After a long ride they reached the little river. The five men reined up and tethered their horses downwind from the smoke; an Indian, it was said, had a sense of smell as keen as a dog's. Raoul led his men to the edge of the ravine.
They walked quietly along the ravine until they sighted Indians down at the bottom. Sauk or Fox, Raoul saw, recognizing their shaven heads with tufts of hair in the center. One of the bucks was standing at the mine entrance holding a skin sack that appeared to be full of chunks of galena, lead ore. The other two were adding logs to the smelter's fire. Their six horses—three for riding and three for carrying lead—were standing at the edge of the river about ten feet from the smelter.
The Indians' smelter was simply a square pit dug in the hillside, lined with rocks at the bottom and filled with logs and brushwood. They were melting down the galena, letting it flow through the rocks into a slanting trench that led to a square mold dug in the earth. Raoul counted five pigs of lead already formed, cooled and stacked beside the mold. They'd probably been at this ever since the end of winter, thinking the mine was so far from town that no white man would notice.
Lead was selling at seventeen dollars per thousand pounds at the pit head up north in Galena, the new boom town named for the ore, and if these Indians had been working since the snow melted, they might have robbed Raoul of as much as two hundred dollars.
Raoul thought he recognized the two bucks at the smelter. Last fall they had come to him as he was bossing the crew he'd put to work expanding the mine before he shut it down for the winter. The Indians had claimed it was their mine. He had told them to be off, and when they hadn't moved quickly enough, he and his men had cocked their flintlocks. Should have killed them then.
Raoul gripped the gilded butt of the cap-and-ball pistol that hung at his waist and slid it out of its holster.
"Get them!" he called, standing up suddenly. He stretched out his arm, sighted along the barrel of his pistol and fired at the nearer Indian standing by the smelter.
Four rifles went off at once. Raoul was enveloped in the bitter smell of gunpowder and a cloud of smoke. The Indian Raoul had aimed at jerked, fell to his knees, then collapsed face forward beside the smelter. The other one at the smelter ran for his horse and leaped on its back. They must have all aimed at the same one, Raoul thought, cursing himself for not thinking of pointing out targets for each man.
The third Indian had disappeared. The skin sack of galena lay beside the mine entrance.