The Shirt On His Back

Chapter 10



Five dollars says Beauty Clarke done it,' offered Jed Blankenship. 'This pilgrim cut his trail last night—'

'Don't be a dolt, Blankenship,' sighed Jim Bridger. 'Does this old buzzard look savvy enough to cut Beauty Clarke's trail?'

The knot of trappers holding a shooting contest near the mouth of Horse Creek had been the first to sight the little party of Sioux as they'd crossed the stream with their burden. By the time they'd reached the Ivy and Wallach camp, the knot had grown to a procession, with Robbie Prideaux running ahead to alert Hannibal, so that a fly could be rigged under the trees near the store tent and trestles set up to receive the robe-draped litter. The Reverend Grey had been sent for - he was found, as usual, preaching a temperance sermon outside Seaholly's - and gazed in horror at the face of the man o'n the bier. January had laid a folded bandanna from his pocket over the worst of the damage done by foxes and birds. Grey lifted it momentarily and laid it hastily down again.

'No,' he whispered, his usual sanctimoniousness completely shattered by pity and shock. 'No, this isn't Asa Goodpastor. I've never seen this poor man before in my life.' He looked as if he wanted to do something like close the corpse's eyes, but of course that wasn't possible.

By this time most of the camp was arriving at a run. Booze, whores, five-card monte and shooting matches were one thing, but a wanderer in the woods who hadn't been killed by Indians was a nine days' wonder and trumped any amount of Mick Seaholly's liquor.

'Fitz, get some of your boys to get these people out of here,' snapped Edwin Titus in disgust. He and the Company's senior trapper, Tom Fitzpatrick, had been two of the quickest arrivals.

'Rather'n do that,' suggested Shaw, 'whyn't we get 'em in a line and file 'em past the body for a viewin'? That way we'll hear right away, if'fn anybody knows him.'

'Good God, man, why would anyone in the camp know him?'

'He sure didn't come up to the mountains for his health.'

'If he did,' remarked Hannibal, 'he should sue his doctor.'

'It is asqueroso,' cried Charro Morales. 'Disgusting. Can you not let the poor old man rest in peace?'

'Anybody new come into the camp today?' asked Shaw as Tom Fitzpatrick and Jim Bridger moved off into the gathering crowd to get the men into a rough line. Looks were exchanged, heads shaken.

Mick Seaholly pushed his way into the growing crowd around the bier, caught Shaw's elbow: 'We've got a spare markee down at the AFC camp and more room than this. I'll give you two hundred dollars to move him down there.' January opened his mouth to protest and saw Shaw glance sidelong at Titus - who, to his credit, looked totally revolted at the suggestion.

But then, he'd managed to convey a near approximation of total revulsion yesterday when accused of attempting to drug and rape a thirteen-year-old girl.

'Or let me set up a bar in your store and I'll split the proceeds fifty percent.' Seaholly gestured behind him to a couple of the AFC camp-setters just coming up with kegs and tin cups, clearly prepared for anything.

Shaw bowed to the inevitable. 'Fine with me, but you gotta ask Gil Wallach. Looks like the only way we're gonna make money this summer.'

'Asqueroso,' muttered Morales, but went off to get a barrel of his own liquor in case Seaholly ran out.

For the remainder of the day, January and Hannibal took turns standing by the unknown man's bier, watching the faces of those who passed. Whichever of them wasn't on duty at the bier side, sat on a packsaddle by the line and told the story three hundred and fifty times: they'd found the body in a clearing on the other side of Horse Creek, by the signs he'd been killed sometime in the night, always making sure to exclaim that it sure hadn't been done by Indians.

'Looks a bit old for the game, doesn't he?' remarked Sir William Stewart as he emerged from the fly. 'Wonder where he's left his razors?' By the way he spoke in passing to Edwin Titus, it was clear to January that he believed his host's version of what Pia had been doing in Titus's tent.

And why not? Even as a child, January had been aware that white gentlemen believed white gentlemen; and that the face a white gentleman showed his white gentlemen friends frequently concealed horrors done in the privacy of what he considered his exclusive domain.

He replied, 'I wondered that myself, sir.'

'Not to speak of his valet.' Stewart blew a line of cigar smoke and glanced down the row of waiting men with speculation in his dark eyes. 'Since there are at least two other trade caravans due to arrive in the camp - and since it's clear our Senex Incognito isn't going to keep - I wondered if you'd like me to get Mr Miller to take a likeness of him?'

'I think that's a brilliant idea, sir, if Mr Miller would be willing,' said January. 'Thank you.'

So Mr Miller was summoned - actually, he was only a few yards down the line, waiting his turn - and made sketches of the old man as he lay, and of what he had probably looked like in life, while men walked past exclaiming: 'What the Sam Hill—?' and 'Where in blazes did he drop from?' and 'He ain't been scalped . . .' (Good, thought January, you go repeat that around the camp if you please . . .)

And everybody went to the store tent next door and bought liquor at three dollars a pint. Even allowing for a fifty-percent split with Seaholly, it was definitely the best profits Ivy and Wallach had made all summer.

January was taking his shift beside the body when he heard the buzz of voices outside suddenly rise. Past the line of men, he saw three Indians approaching on foot. Beaded belts, naked to the waist . . .

Iron Heart and his Omahas.

Hannibal got up immediately and went to them, realizing - January guessed - the obvious fact that it was better to risk a few grumbles from the whites in the line about Indians getting in for a look ahead of them, than to risk combat in the line itself if they waited among whites for any length of time. The trappers by and large got along well with the Indians of whatever tribe they dealt with, though many of the AFC men sided with the Crow in saying that you couldn't trust a Flathead as far as you could throw a piano . . . But enough men were visiting Seaholly's end of the store tent before they got in line that it was best to nip trouble in the bud.

But Iron Heart only looked down at the ruined face and said, in his Mission Indian English, 'It was a white man who did this.'

'Your people heard nothing?' asked January. 'Saw nothing? The man did not fall from the sky. He must have left a camp in the woods, horses, probably at least one other man. Your hunters have seen no sign of this? Camped as you are above Horse Creek, you might see what others might not.'

'We have seen nothing.' The pockmarked face was expressionless. 'The only sign we have found has been of the Blackfoot, and of hunters - we think perhaps Crow or Flathead on the other side of the river to the north. If this grandfather were killed by a white man, it does not mean that he who stole his horses and killed his companions was the same white man who killed him. There may be more dead men in the gullies than one, Winter Moon. And more than that,' he added quietly, 'before the camp here breaks.'

'Will you tell me if you find anything?'

'And why should I do that?' Iron Heart looked coldly up into his face. 'Why should it concern me if every white man in this camp dies and lies rotting on the ground, as my people lay among our tents and rotted along the banks of the Platte when the white man's fever came through our homeland? You destroy what you touch, white man, including one another. One day you will destroy the land itself.'

He turned and walked from the square shade of the stretched cover, back upriver toward their distant camp.

'Hard point to dispute,' murmured Shaw, who had materialized as quietly as a shadow at the rear of the fly. 'Though, mind you, I didn't care for that business about how maybe there's a couple more deaders up the gullies. You think some of your in-laws might be prevailed on, Sefton, to go have a look 'fore night comes on? I think between keepin' things orderly here, an' makin' sure Seaholly ain't left for ten seconds by hisself in the store tent - Clopard's in there with him now

I think we're here 'til mornin' at least.'

'Do we bury our friend come morning?' January had been using a pine bough to switch away the flies that swarmed around the old man's face, but knew that by morning, in the July heat of the high mountain valley, the maggots that had been laid before the corpse had been discovered would start to hatch. There were other unpleasant symptoms of mortality as well, and the ants no one could do anything about.

Night would bring complications of its own.

'I'd say we gotta. Though I would like to keep him around as long as we can today, as there's folk we ain't heard from yet. None of you's seen Manitou Wildman, have you?'

Hannibal shook his head. 'Nor the Beauty and Groot, though they'll be halfway to their secret . . . Ah.' He stopped, as if recalling Jed Blankenship's initial accusation, and why it would have been the first thing anyone in the camp thought of. 'Hem. Yes.'

'You boys see what you can put together, of who went out playin' Leatherstocking in the woods last night, an' of them, who's back in camp now. Get Prideaux an' Veinte-y-Cinco to help. They knows everybody in the camp.'

Shaw slouched his hands in his pockets, spit into the thickets of huckleberry that the camp-setters had hacked back in order to set up the fly. Liquor wasn't the only white man's vice too dangerous to indulge away from the protection of the camp; January smiled a little to himself, at the quickness with which Shaw had sought out 'Missouri manufactured' - as it was called - on his return. 'I don't think it was our friend Boden that did for the old boy - since he didn't try to blame it on the Indians. But hanged if I can see how one feller headin' for the rendezvous alive an' disappearing, an' another feller appearin' at the rendezvous dead out of nowhere, can't have somethin' to do with each other somehow. I better go ask that pusillanimous skunk Titus if'fn one of his AFC boys don't know how to put together a coffin. If Grey shows up again . . .'

'Madre de Dios,' cried a young man's voice from the front of the fly, hoarse with shock.

January, Shaw, and Hannibal all swung around, just as Blankenship pushed his way through the crowd to seize the arm of the youth who had gasped the words - one of his camp-setters, January saw . . . What was his name? Poco. A half-breed boy from Santa Fe, small and wiry—

'He has come after me,' whispered Poco, and crossed himself. 'I never thought that it was true, that if you rob the dead they would come to you, demanding their own back.'

—small and wiry and wearing a handsome pair of black wool trousers that would have fit the dead man perfectly.