The Shirt On His Back

Chapter 11



That's horseshit,' said Blankenship. 'I robbed more dead men than I got friends livin'—'

'We few, we happy few,' quoted Hannibal irreverently.

'—an' not a one of 'em ever come around askin' for his plunder back.'

But Poco was already unbuttoning the trousers. He stepped out of them and held them out to Shaw: 'I am truly sorry. It is not that I wished to rob the dead, but they were so much better than my own.'

'Hannibal,' said Shaw, 'you go mind the store.'

Poco's story was a simple one. He had waited until his master left the camp the previous night - shortly before the onset of the rain - and made his way across Horse Creek alone, aided by a dark-lantern for which he'd traded what remained of his tobacco ration, for the moon, on those rare occasions when the clouds parted, was but two days past new. 'My cousin works for Señor Groot,' he explained. 'He told me that day, that if I wanted work with his party I should meet them at Rotten Draw, that runs into Horse Creek from the hills, when it was fully dark—'

'An' you didn't think to tell me this?' Blankenship, who had refused to be turned out of the fly, smote the boy with his wolfskin hat. 'I ought to—'

'I feared it might be a trick, Señor,' explained the young man ingenuously. 'Ramon is clever, and it would be like him, to tell me this, hoping that I would then tell you and draw you from the true trail.'

Blankenship's eyes narrowed with suspicion at this tale, but he let the matter pass.

The brush along Rotten Draw - 'If it was Rotten Draw where I found myself, Señor, for it was dark and raining like the Great Flood' - was thick, and Poco became thoroughly lost. 'When the rain stopped I heard shots - not in the camp, but closer, in the woods above the creek it sounded like.'

'How many shots?'

'Two, Señor Shaw. Also, for a time I thought that I was being followed. But it began again to rain, and with the darkness of the clouds, I could not be sure. It might only have been some other, to whom Ramon let "slip out" this story about Rotten Draw, but it might also have been the Blackfoot. I dared not call out. I slipped and rolled down the draw, and tore my trousers. So I went to ground, like a fox, under some bushes, and waited until there was enough light to see.'

At daybreak - for the young man had drifted off to sleep once the rain had ceased for good - Poco had climbed back out of the draw and made his way to the top of the ridge and back toward the camp. 'I was cold and very hungry, and frightened too, because of the Blackfeet. When I smelled smoke I thought that it was the camp of Oso Loco - Señor Manitou - which I knew to be somewhere along the creek. But I found instead a shelter made of boughs, with a dead fire before it, and a dead man lying on the ground.'

'On the ground?' repeated January.

'Sí, Señor. The shelter was at one side of a clearing, and the man lay on his face. His feet were pointing toward the shelter - perhaps three feet distant - and his arms lay at his sides like this.' Poco demonstrated, holding his arms curved away from his sides so that his hands were about a foot from each hip. 'He had been stabbed in the back. His shirt was all soaked with blood, and when I turned him over I saw that his throat had been cut, and the breast of his shirt was also red with blood—'

The youth looked aside, suddenly white around the mouth.

'So he's wearin' a shirt?'

'Sí, Señor Shaw. A new shirt. . .' Poco's eyes narrowed as he tried to call back the scene. 'Just an ordinary checkered shirt, like Señor Enero's he nodded toward January - 'or Señor Prideaux's . . .'

The men gathered before the fly, standing or hunkered, or sitting on chunks of firewood on the still-wet ground, looked at each other. Checkered shirts from Lowell, Massachusetts were among the most common in the camp. Prideaux's, which he'd loyally bought from Ivy and Wallach a few days previously, was - like January's - yellow-and-black, brand new and stiff with starch. Others represented had been worn hard and faded colorless with weather and wind.

'Big shirt or small shirt?' asked January, and Poco frowned again.

'To tell the truth, Señor, I cannot remember. Only the blood.' He shivered, drawing his long, thin, bare brown legs together under his own dangling shirt tails.

'Boots?'

'No, Señor. Nothing. His leg had been broken, and someone had tied two straight sticks on it. I— May the Mother of God forgive me, I untied them and threw them away. I could see that the poor old man had no need of his trousers anymore, and . . . and they are very fine trousers, Señor. And my own had never been very good, even when they were whole. And I thought, perhaps the old man had a son, to whom he would willingly have given his trousers, if he had found him cold and naked in the wilderness. By the Mother of God -' Poco crossed himself once more - 'truly I meant no harm.'

'You leave him where he laid?' asked Shaw, and Poco nodded miserably.

'I had no means to bury him, Señor. And, in truth, I could not rid my mind of the Blackfeet, and what they do to those they capture. I told myself, the dead are the dead; he has no more use even of his poor body, much less of the garments which clothed it.' Guilt and wretchedness filled the young man's brown eyes. 'Had he been still living, I would have—'

"Course you would.' Rising, Shaw laid a hand on Poco's shoulder. 'Any man here would.'

Looking across at Blankenship, January did not feel prepared to lay money on that assertion.

And Pia, who had slipped into the fly between the men, piped up, 'Was there anything in his pockets?'

'What there was, I have left there.' Poco gestured toward the black trousers, which Shaw still held in one hand. 'All of it. For in truth, no good can come of taking from the dead.'

Shaw dug in the trouser pockets and brought out a sizeable chunk of vermillion - the flame-colored dyestuff from China, which all the traders dealt in, still wrapped in its paper - a thick packet of banknotes and a very handsome silver watch.

Gil Wallach said kindly, 'Here, Poco—' and tossed him a pair of new wool pants. 'I'll put these on our dead friend's tab.'



It was near dark when the liquor ran out. By that time, everyone in the camp had been through the fly at least twice, the exceptions being Manitou Wildman, everyone connected with Goshen Clarke and Clemantius Groot's party, and the young New England trapper Boaz Frye. Bridger and Fitzpatrick of the AFC volunteered to comb through the rough country south of Horse Creek for any others who, like Poco and Blankenship, had thought to follow the two independents to their secret beaver valley, while Kit Carson returned to Wildman's camp. Through the tail end of the long afternoon, a fair-sized troop of would-be Beauty-trackers made their way back to the rendezvous, cursing their elusive quarry and agog to hear what had happened in their vicinity, unbeknownst.

Most of these claimed to have heard two shots, shortly after the rain had ceased for the first time, at which point the moon, what there was of it, was coming to zenith. Some had assumed these shots to be Blackfoot. Others thought they were Clarke and Groot trying to discourage followers. Most agreed that the shots had been slightly less than a minute apart.

During these testimonies, conducted alternately by Shaw and January at the rear of the fly, Hannibal assisted Mick Seaholly and Charro Morales in pouring drinks. Thus, by the time even the Mexican trader's more expensive barrel was exhausted, and the AFC publican took his empty kegs and his customers back down to their regular venue, Hannibal had a list of about a hundred theories as to who might have committed the murder, propounded to him across the bar.

'I like the one that claims it was Generalissimo Santa Anna,' he mused, studying his notes by the light of the campfire that had been built in front of the fly. 'Is he in Washington these days?'

'They let him go home.' January shook his head, bemused. 'Considering the Americans he massacred at the Alamo, I'm still astonished that Sam Houston's soldiers didn't kill him on the spot when they caught him . . .'

'I'd have held their coats for them.' During Hannibal's visit to Mexico two winters ago, the dictator's negligence had very nearly gotten him hanged.

January adjusted a trade blanket over the side of the fly, knotted it into place with strips of rawhide - the ubiquitous fasteners of everything beyond the frontier - and held the corner of another blanket for Morning Star and Veinte-y-Cinco to do the same. 'How many were with Blankenship, that it was Groot or Clarke or both?'

'About a dozen.' Hannibal edged aside on the flat rock on which he sat, to let Pia arrange supper over the fire: green sticks laden with skewered meat. 'There's the usual accusations that it was either the Blackfeet, that band of Crows - only, Tom Fitzpatrick said he'd heard it was Flatheads that are lurking - in the hills to the north, or Iron Heart's Omahas—'

'In spite of the fact that our friend there still got his hair on.' Shaw came into the circle of the firelight, from closing up the store.

Hannibal tapped the side of his nose and looked crafty. 'They're sly. One vote apiece for the Sioux, Red Arm's Crows here in the camp, the Hudson's Bay Flatheads - this isn't counting those who believe that the group lurking in the north are Flatheads, working for Hudson's Bay. Votes also for the Company's Delaware scouts, the Snakes, the Crees, the Assiniboin, and the Nez Perces, with no more argument for motive other than that they are Indians.'

'Cabrons.' Veinte-y-Cinco knelt to set a Dutch oven of cornbread on the coals. 'Like any Indian's gonna kill a man and leave that much vermillion in his pocket.' She settled on the rock next to Hannibal, took a comb from her skirt pocket and proceeded to comb out her long hair.

'Homini praeposuit veritatem.' Hannibal turned the pages over, thin hands a little shaky in the firelight. Other than occasional bouts with the symptoms of withdrawal from long- term opiate consumption, the fiddler had held up surprisingly well. But the journey, January was well aware, had been hard on him: his friend was not one of those specimens of American hardihood so beloved of temperance-tract writers, who had only to be thrown on his own into the company of red-blooded mountaineers in the embrace of Nature, to abandon all thought of evil habits and be restored to complete health. Though his consumption had gone into abeyance, January could still hear it whisper in the rasping of Hannibal's breath; could see it sometimes, when the fiddler put his hand to his side in pain when he didn't think anyone was looking.

'We also have accusations against Sir William Stewart - you can't trust these aristocrats, you know; ten for Edwin Titus, assuming that the victim actually is the missing Asa Goodpastor - although I think Warren Wynne would accuse Titus of anything at this point, since the AFC has pretty much bankrupted him this summer. Three for the Reverend Grey, also assuming that the victim is Goodpastor, who knew some terrible secret about the Reverend; one for John McLeod; one for the secret long-lost husband of Irish Mary -' he named the youngest and prettiest of the Taos girls, who was in fact no more Irish than the rest of them - 'and, of course, twenty- five votes for Manitou Wildman. Gordy Dalrain swears the dead man is actually Aaron Burr—'

'Aaron Burr?' January - who had settled on the opposite side of the blaze to count out the stranger's banknotes - almost dropped them into the fire.

'—who faked his death last year in New York with the express purpose of returning to the West for another try at setting up his Empire. According to Gordy, Burr was pursued by government agents who ran him to earth here and killed him—'

'And then erected a comfortable shelter out of the rain and left a fire to warm his corpse?'

The fiddler shrugged.’ ... I don't suppose we could prove it isn't Burr.' He poured himself tea from the tin camp-kettle that Morning Star had hung on a green-stick tripod above the fire, grimaced at the taste. Among his young wife's many accomplishments, tea-making was signally lacking. 'The fire, of course, was to destroy all record of Burr's nefarious plots, plus any proof of his identity. And how much money did our third Vice President have there in his pocket when he was killed?'

'Five thousand dollars, always supposing the Bank of New York, the Bank of Pennsylvania, the Germantown and Lancaster Citizens' Bank, Wesley's Private Bank of Manhattan, the Ohio and Albany Commercial Bank, and about ten other such establishments are still in business. We can discount the two thousand here from the Bank of Louisiana—'

'Proving conclusively that it was Burr.' Hannibal shook his head. 'So many secret papers in his pockets, they didn't need the banknotes to start the fire. It explains why they stripped him, too, of course. There's coffee here, too, amicus meus—'

Veinte-y-Cinco rose, and Shaw set aside the saddle-worn black trousers, the plain German silver watch that he'd been studying, and walked her down the path to Seaholly's, with the matter-of-fact obligingness of a man walking any woman to her work after dark. When he returned he was accompanied by Kit Carson and Jim Bridger, who accepted the invitation to stay and dine.

'I think I got 'em all,' said Bridger, tearing - with perfect politeness - the elk meat from the rib he held. 'All but that child Frye - he come in? No? An' not even a footprint at Wildman's camp.'

'No sign of any other camp?'

'Plenty sign.' Carson tugged a corner of his light-brown mustache, vexed. 'Hell, we had half the rendezvous stampedin' across those hills lookin' for Beauty and the Dutchman. The rain washed out pretty much everythin' but droppings. Didn't see nothing clustered together, like you'd have if anyone had put down for any length of time.'

'How far'd you go?'

'Maybe four miles back along the creek, 'bout two miles over the ridge.'

'Cross the river?'

Carson shook his head. 'I was huntin' for Wildman, not our friend's camp.' He nodded toward the gaily-striped blanket walls of the makeshift morgue. 'Damnedest thing I ever saw,' he added - which, January reflected, coming from Carson, was saying a great deal. 'Old buffer's got to have a camp someplace, and folks looking for him - 'less they're all of 'em croaked. They would be, if they were across the river and ran into the Blackfeet. You folks need help keepin' our friend from havin' dinner guests tonight?'

'It'd be a help, yes, thank you,' said Shaw. 'I 'predate it.'

Curious, January reflected, that Senex Incognito, as Stewart had dubbed him, was almost universally referred to as 'our friend,' though in life he might easily have been plotting trouble - killin' bad - serious enough, perhaps, to endanger every man in the camp. Death - and the savage manner of his death - had brought out the ready friendliness of the trappers, the willingness to speak of him as a friend and to sit up all night to keep vermin from eating his corpse.

Already, January could hear furtive rustlings in the brush of the bottomlands below the camp. He hoped the only things drawn to the smell of the corpse would be foxes and coyote.

If it's a bear, he thought, he can have him . . .

'That boy Poco was right, though,' went on Shaw after a time. 'The old man got no more need of his body now than he has of those britches Poco borrowed. Still, it's a lonesome business, watchin' alone.'

So they split the watches, two and two, through the night in the time-honored way: Shaw and Prideaux, January and Jim Bridger, Hannibal and Kit Carson, LeBel and Clopard. At one point on January's vigil something quite large snuffled at the other side of the blanket wall, but evidently the scents of men and fire were enough to convince it - or them - to stay away. Certainly, the conversation with Jim Bridger - about beaver and bears and navigation in the wilderness, about white and Indian medicine, about slavery and Andrew Jackson and the kind of men who chose to leave the United States and live in the mountains in solitude and constant danger - was worth every foot of the long journey up the Platte, an attempted scalping and longing for Rose . . .

The old man - dressed in his own black trousers and a new calico shirt that Gil Wallach had donated from the company's store, and moccasins that Morning Star had spent the night embroidering - was laid to rest in the morning, in a coffin gouged from a hollowed log and with a makeshift cross set up above his grave at the foot of the hills west of the main camp. Aside from a near murder occasioned by the Reverend Grey's sudden assertion that the deceased was, in fact, the Indian Agent Asa Goodpastor after all - and his sworn oath that he was going to write immediately to Congress accusing Edwin Titus of the crime - the obsequies went well. Over a hundred men escorted the old man to his grave, and January saw in more than one bearded face genuine sympathy and pity for this aged man - whoever he was - who'd met his death alone and by violence, as any of them might meet theirs tomorrow ... or even later on today . . .

As Veinte-y-Cinco had put it, as she'd made coffee in front of the lodge early that morning, 'Poor old abuelo. What would bring him all the way out here to die?'