The Shirt On His Back (25 page)

We camped near
there the night,' reported Bridger, with the sun halfway to noon, when he,
Carson and an assortment of traders and trappers gathered along the staked
quarantine-line on what was rapidly coming to be known (to January's annoyance)
as Plague Island. 'You'll understand we didn't want to get too near, 'specially
after we found the Beauty.'

'Did you leave
him unburied?' demanded the Reverend Grey, with the righteous horror of someone
who wasn't confined behind a quarantine line . . . and who hadn't seen the
bodies in Groot's camp.

Carson looked
like he was about to make a sharp reply, but Bridger answered, 'First light we
dug a grave, and we rolled him into it with saplings. That's what's taken us so
long gettin' back. It wasn't respectful,' he added grimly. 'But anyone here
wants to take issue with it, I'll gladly take him out and show him the spot,
so's they can rebury him more to their liking. We had a look around,' he went
on, into Grey's total silence. 'The Beauty'd been took sick: that was clear as
mule tracks. Whether Shaw was or not I don't know. I saw no sign of it. They
was hit by Injuns - Blackfoot, I made 'em - and by all I could tell he was well
enough to run for it, and to cover his trail when he reached timber. As for how
far he got—' He shook his head. 'I read the tracks of twenty or more in the war
party that killed Clarke, and more up the draw.'

'If you want to
go in after him -' Carson looked across at January - 'I'll go with you. But I'm
tellin' you, if that child has the brains I think he does, he'll have moved up
east into the foothills to lose 'em. If he ain't took sick up there, he'll make
his way back by an' by. An' if he is took sick, they'll find him 'fore you or I
would. That's my call. But I'll go.'

'And I.' Stewart
stepped forward, elegant in his white buckskins, Prideaux right behind him.

'Waugh! You can
count this child in. You don't look all that perishin' sick to me.'

'Moriamur et in
media arma ruamus
,' said Hannibal, and he moved up
to Prideaux's side.

'No, Carson's
right,' said January. 'Shaw'll be back or he won't. But if we go out there, one
of us, maybe more, will be killed before we're anywhere near enough to help
him.' He looked out across the swift-flowing green-brown silk of the main
river, thinking about the trackless miles of foothills that rose beyond and the
broken granite escarpments of the Wind River Range. Hearing again Manitou's
screams in the night and what Morning Star - and every mountaineer he'd spoken
to - had told him about the ways Indians of any tribe had of dealing with
prisoners.

When the
visitors had gone, trampling what was now a pale trace around the island's
center rise to where they could ford - or canoe - the thirty-some feet back to
the point of land behind Morales's tent, January felt sick at heart.

'You
owe me
,' Tom had said. '
You can kill anything with one shot. . .'Til you
lost your nerve. You tellin' me you'll run away again?'

And
Manitou: '
You think twice about vengeance... It never ends well
.'

For bloody deed,
let bloody deed atone . . .
Who had written
that? One of the Greeks, in some horrifying play about revenge and all that it
led to.

Would Shaw leave
his bones in the mountains, without ever having found his brother's killer? And
who would that profit in the end?

Like Hamlet,
he'd only leave a stage littered with corpses.

And then he saw
that Hannibal, who had lingered, seemed to have acquired yet another
girlfriend, and a new hat.

The girlfriend,
at least, was familiar. She was Irish Mary, a doll-faced Aphrodite of
seventeen. Her putative Celtic antecedents seemed most in evidence by the fact
that her hair was curly, rather than of the Indian straightness more usual
among Mexicans, and had in its natural blackness - trenchantly hinted at along
her hairline - a reddish cast of which she took fullest advantage with the
henna bottle. The youngest and the prettiest of the girls, she was consequently
the most in demand and
by rendezvous standards - was the best-dressed, in a crimson
skirt and a satin vest bedecked with ribbons and jingling with silver trinkets.
These ornaments also decorated Hannibal's new hat.

Which
presumably, deduced January, was actually hers, on loan.

It never ceased
to amaze him that in a camp consisting of five hundred mountaineers, three
times that many engages, and exactly six Mexican whores, two of those six kept
regular company with Hannibal. Who had an Indian wife as well.

'May I show
Benjamin your hat, my pearl of delight?' inquired Hannibal in Spanish.

Mary looked
uncertain. 'Well, I don't want to get nuthin'—'

Considering her
profession, January had to school his face carefully at the remark.

Hannibal reached
into his coat pocket - like the traders, he kept to his New Orleans attire of
old-fashioned cutaway coat and striped trousers - and produced a handful of
credit-plews from every store in the camp, including Seaholly's liquor tent,
mostly won at chess. 'I'll buy you a new one,
amor mia
,' he said.
'Better suited to your charms.'

It took her a
few minutes to unpin all the ribbons and ornaments. Then she tossed it over.

Hannibal gave
her another handful of plews - presumably in addition to what he was paying her
for her time, since by the sound of it, Seaholly's tent was open for business
again. 'Tell Benjamin where you acquired your hat - with the understanding
that he is a gentleman and will guard your secret with his life.'

'Please, you got
to.' Mary regarded January doubtfully. 'Mick'll skin me, if he knows I was
meetin' anybody outside and not tellin' him.'

Who she had been
meeting - four nights ago, the night after his fight with Manitou, with rain
coming down and the moon two days old - had been Jed Blankenship.

'He come up to
me behind the liquor tent all sore-assed after Mick threw him out.' She perched
on a flat rock on her own side of the quarantine line, took tobacco and corn
husk from the pouch around her neck, and pulled up her skirt to roll a
cigarette on her knee. It was enough, reflected January admiringly, to make a
man take up smoking.

'He could get
liquor from Hudson's Bay or Morales or anyone, but he wanted
conejo,
and he'd pay
real silver for it, he said.'

The assignation
had been set for the woods on the south side of Horse Creek, where the pine
tree had fallen across the water to form a fragile bridge. January remembered
passing the spot.

'I told Mick I
was sick an' couldn't work, and anyway with everybody out chasin' the Dutchman,
it was a slow night. But I was late gettin' out of the camp, an' then the creek
was high like you never seen. Then Jed didn't show up. So here I am, sittin'
under some bushes in the rain, an' every now an' then I'll hear somebody
rustlin' around in the woods, or sometimes horses goin' past. Now, I knowed it
was probably just those
pendejos
out tryin' to catch the Dutchman . . . but, you know, I was cold an' scared.'

And back in
April, if somebody had offered me hard silver to go wait someplace in the rain
with Blackfeet running around in the woods behind me,
reflected January,
I'd have taken
it
...
To this girl,
every piece of silver that she didn't have to divide with Mick was one step
closer to getting out of Taos and liquor tents and ten or twelve trappers a
day, provided that was what she wanted to do with it. Maybe it was just liquor
money.

'So the rain
quits, an' I think, Jed'll be along soon,' the girl went on. 'I had one of
Mick's bottles of trade liquor with me, sippin' to stay warm, so I'm not real
sure how long it was after the rain quit that I heard shots. Not real long.
There was one shot, an' then sounds of fightin'. Somebody was bellerin' like a
grizzly that sat on a porcupine, and then there was a second shot in the middle
of that. Myself, I thought it was Manitou - you know how he gets when somethin'
sets him off.'

She shrugged and
took another drag of her cigarette. 'Not my business, anyway. They'd quieted
down, and along comes Jed, and it started raining again. And after all that,'
she added, those beautiful brown eyes turning ugly, 'the
carajo
didn't even pay
me. Just said he'd tell Mick if I didn't keep quiet. Said he'd knock my front
teeth out, too, and let me explain
that
to Mick . . .'

January's first
thought was:
and you were
surprised
? but he kept it to himself. From his experience in New
Orleans, he guessed there was every chance that when the proposition had been
put to Irish Mary to earn a little extra silver, she hadn't been completely
sober.

'I swear to
Christ, I wish somebody'd break that
cono's
leg an' leave
him where the Blackfeet'll find him. So after Jed takes off to see what he can
see of Beauty and the Dutchman it started raining again, and I stayed smoking a
little - he took my whiskey, too, the cheap
meado
- and I got to
thinking. You've seen Manitou when he gets like he does, so I knew whoever he'd
had an argument with probably wouldn't object to it if I sort of went through
his pockets. And money's the last thing Manitou thinks about, when he goes off
like that: last year here he got howlin' mad - mad-dog mad - at Jacques
Chouinard and had to be dragged off him, and when he came back into camp three
days later, I swear he didn't remember a thing about it. So I waited 'til it
got good an' light - I wasn't gonna get myself lost again - and then headed up
in the direction of where I'd heard the shoutin'.'

'You see anyone
else in the woods?' January turned the hat over in his hands as he spoke,
surprised and bemused by what he saw.

Irish Mary shook
her head. 'While I was sittin' smokin' under the bush - which I tell you wasn't
any kind of good as a roof in that last rain-shower - I heard someone ride by
further up the slope. It musta been the
hideputa
who got to the
old boy 'fore I did, because when I got there, he'd been stripped of his coat,
his boots, an' his weskit, poor old man . . . I mean, yes, I was gonna go
through his pockets, but I wasn't gonna steal the shirt off his back, for the
love of Jesus!'

She piously
crossed herself. 'He was layin' there with his back all over with blood from
bein' stabbed, an' blood soakin' into the ground under him, an' it looked like
his leg broke - it was splinted up with a couple of saplings. An' I thought:
Daddy, if you was out here with a broke leg, pissin' off
Manitou Wildman was probably one of the stupider things you coulda done.'

'That's just
it,' mused January. 'Why piss off Wildman? Why shoot at him? Those were pistol
balls Shaw and I found in the trees near there - were there pistols by the
body?'

She shook her
head. 'Manitou musta taken them, or whoever got his coat an' boots, poor old
abuelo.'

'But they
didn't,' said January. At least, he thought, Frye, Groot and Clarke hadn't -
and pistols were heavy to lug.
If
Manitou had had them on him, his 'brother' Silent Wolf could
have taken them, before they tortured him . . . 'Where'd you find his hat?'

'Downslope a
little. There was enough light, I could see it, black against the bushes. It's
a mighty pretty hat.'

'So it is,'
agreed January, angling it so that the sunlight fell on the dark silk of the
lining. 'And I hope, when you get back to Taos, you'll find one prettier.
Hannibal,' he said, 'when you've walked Miss Mary back to Mr Seaholly's, I
could do with a word.'

As the fiddler
escorted Irish Mary - with tender courtesy that would have passed muster at a
garden party - back toward the canoe tied at the northern point of the island, January
returned to the shelter. 'That really the old boy's hat?' asked Frye, who had
retreated after the initial conference with Bridger and Carson to practice
knife-throwing at the slender trunk of a nearby sapling: competing right hand
against left.