The Shirt On His Back

Chapter 12



Even before the procession left camp, Edwin Titus dispatched Tom Fitzpatrick with ten men, to ride post-haste down the river and meet and escort the missing Indian Agent to the rendezvous if he was delayed, or to find him if he was lost. Bets were taken at Seaholly's - according to Pia they ran five to two in favor of the deceased actually being Goodpastor - and Hannibal played a Mozart requiem, after which every man in the camp, with the exception of January and Shaw, repaired to Seaholly's for the wake.

'Bridger tell you last night 'bout the winter of . . . musta been '31 or '32?' said Shaw, in response to January's question as to his opinion on the matter. They crossed Horse Creek at the same spot they had the previous morning - deadfall pine athwart the stream bed marked the best ford - and climbed the ridge beyond; the stream was much lower than it had been yesterday, but just as cold.

'Was that the winter Bridger was working for Rocky Mountain Fur?'

'It was - 'fore the AFC strangled 'em out of business.' Shaw leaned forward in the saddle as the horses scrambled up the trail. He kept one rifle in hand and the other scabbarded on the saddle, and had added a US Army pistol to his armory and a second bowie-knife stuck in his moccasin top - an uncomfortable reminder of the fact that whoever had murdered either Johnny Shaw, or poor old Senex Incognito or both, they weren't the only killers abroad in these high, empty-seeming lands.

'RMF brigades would go into a territory, and AFC had orders to follow 'em in an' trap the streams bare 'fore Bridger an' his men - Tom Fitzpatrick was one of 'em, then, too - could get enough plews to make back what their company was payin' 'em,' went on Shaw. 'They did this for a month or two, then Bridger got fed up with it - an' fedder up of the

AFC tellin' the local tribes that if they did business with the RMF, they could forget AFC goods forever. Finally, Bridger turns around an' heads straight into Blackfoot country, knowin' the AFC boys would have to follow an' knowin' what'd happen to 'em when they did. Bridger an' his boys was in danger too, but they was in smaller groups, they was the first ones in, an' Bridger figured they had a better chance. An' he was right. Bridger an' his men got through pretty clear. AFC lost some men, some of who died pretty badly. Bridger knowed that would happen. That's the kind of fightin' we're lookin' at. The men we're dealin' with.'

January was silent. He now had a pretty good idea of what the pelts stacked in the AFC storage tents would bring when Titus got them to St Louis, and what the Company paid the trappers for them, even before the trappers were docked Company prices for liquor and powder and salt. Britain and the US were fighting over profits well equivalent to a silver lode.

'So, would Titus egg on a pack of Crows to kill an Indian Agent that was like to get questions asked in Congress about sellin' liquor?' Shaw shrugged and swung down from his horse as they neared the clearing where the old man had lain. 'Beats hell outta me. Would Congress believe it's the kind of thing the AFC would do an' start an investigation? I would. Well, consarn,' he added, scanning the ground around the clearing and its shelter. 'I knew this would happen whilst we was keepin' an eye on the viewin' of the corpse.'

'Every man in the camp hiked up here to have a look at the shelter?'

The Kentuckian straightened up and surveyed the clearing around him. Even so inexpert a tracker as January could tell that the place had been well and truly visited. 'If I'd been the Blackfeet,' sighed Shaw, I'd'a just put up an ambush here by the trail. Coulda picked off every man in the camp that way.'

'Except you and me and our deceased friend, now in his honored grave.' January took the reins of Shaw's horse as Shaw began slowly circling the clearing afoot, more often crouched than straight, examining the ground, the trees, the scrubby thickets of huckleberry around the bases of the pines. January glanced at him every few seconds, but his attention remained on the woods around them: on the chittering of squirrels and the hidden rustle of foxes in the juniper thickets; on the voices of larks, the squabbling of jaybirds. Sounds that would cease, he knew, if someone were coming behind them.

In just such a fashion, he reflected, were Hannibal, and Veinte-y-Cinco, and Pia, pursuing their own investigations at Seaholly's, listening for gossip, words, chance remarks . . . Anything out of place.

Out of place like an old man's naked body - like a pair of expensive black kid gloves.

Shaw said, with a note of satisfaction in his voice, An' here we are.'

January followed his gaze and saw the bright orangey-yellow scar of a fresh bullet-mark high on a scraggy-barked fir.

Branches didn't even start on the trunk until some twenty- five feet from the ground. January set his own rifle and one of Shaw's where he could grasp them in seconds, leaned on the tree and gave his hand for his companion's moccasined foot.

'Looks to have been a wild shot.' Shaw prized the bullet loose with his knife, dropped lightly off January's shoulders with the deformed wad of lead in his hand. 'Pistol,' he added, and held it up for January to see. 'Fifty caliber. Johnny's was a fifty, an' it wasn't on his body.'

He pocketed the bullet, resumed his search of the trees while January went back to watching for danger. After a time he asked, 'Was there a reason Johnny didn't stay with you in New Orleans, and came west with Tom? Other than wanting to be kidnapped by the Indians like Uncle Naboth?'

'He hated bugs,' replied Shaw simply - as good a reason as January had ever heard for staying out of New Orleans. 'An' he missed the mountains. He was only twelve,' the Kentuckian went on quietly, 'when the three of us come to New Orleans. I'd been down the river twice before. But it was Tom's first trip, an' Johnny's, an' him wild to come an' see the elephant an' hear the lion roar. Probably saved his life, an' Tom's too, when the fever come through at home. I don't think Tom ever got over it.' His hand brushed the bark of another tree, and he added, 'No second ball, far as I can see. Since Mr Incognito didn't have it in his hide, there's a chance Wildman took it, which might account for him not bein' at his camp.'

'Wouldn't account for his horses being gone.' January nudged his own mount along after Shaw as Shaw made his way from the clearing upslope to the top of the ridge. 'And I didn't see any birds circling when we were coming up toward the hills.'

Our mama an 'OUR wives, Shaw had said, when he'd spoken of his brother: it was the first time January had ever heard his friend mention that he might have once been married. When the fever came through at home . . .

Tom wasn 't the only one, who never got over it.

'Don't smell any smoke,' remarked Shaw. 'You?'

January shook his head. 'Did Tom meet Gil Wallach in New Orleans?'

'Gil Wallach was still trappin' back in '29. But the Chouteau Brothers, that just about runs the fur business outta St Louis, come down to New Orleans pretty regular, an' Tom hooked up with them on the business side - Tom was always the businessman, of the three of us.' He knelt, probing at a tangle of hemlock. 'He clerked a spell at Laramie, but it wasn't long 'fore he was the bourgeois of a post. Johnny went with him.'

And you didn't, thought January. You stayed alone, in New Orleans . . .

'An' about,' Shaw added, straightening up, 'goddam time.'

In one hand he held a straight stick some two and a half feet long, cut on both ends with a fresh knife-gash and trimmed of branches. Under its rough bark was snagged a single long, white thread.

'The splint?' January reined in close to see. 'That Poco found on the dead man's leg?'

'One of 'em. I ain't seen anythin' resemblin' a rag hereabouts. That shelter's tied together with rawhide strips—'

'Now we just need to find someone in the camp who carries those in his pockets.' Every trapper, camp-setter and Indian from the Rio Grande to the Columbia generally had strips of rawhide about his person, for the thousand uses of the camp and the hunt: tying carcasses to saddles, or float-sticks to mark traps, repairing moccasins or rigging makeshift hobbles . . .

'Well, who we wouldn't find with 'em might be our friend with the banknotes an' that German silver pocket-watch. I don't reckon there's much Mrs Sefton would miss when it comes to viewin' the scene of a disappearin', but let's go have a look at what there is to see.'



Manitou's solitary camp, as Shaw had guessed, was still deserted when they reached it. The big man's traps, wrapped in oilskin, hung from the branches of an alder tree; other limbs sported parfleches of pemmican and the remains of a couple of rabbits, now torn at by birds and buzzing with insect life. A bear had certainly come through at some point. A shelter of boughs very similar to the one in the clearing had been rigged over a couple of trade blankets, but January guessed that Manitou slept under the sky when it wasn't actually raining. Besides the blankets, the shelter held a tin cup and a camp kettle, a half-constructed pair of moccasins, a bullet mold, a bar of lead, a small sack of spare powder and, of course, six or eight thin strips of rawhide tucked in a corner. Horse droppings on the edge of the camp had been rained on, but (said Shaw) had been fresh when that had occurred.

'One of the Indian villages?' suggested January, and turned in the saddle to look down toward the valley to the north. 'If he had one of those bullets in him—'

'We'd'a heard. Mrs Sefton picks up all every-kind of gossip from those sisters of hers - 'ceptin from Iron Heart's Omahas, an' so far as I know, they'd scalp any white man that came among 'em.' Shaw straightened up from examining the cold ashes in the fire pit and shoved his sorry hat back on his head to scratch. 'If the old man shot Wildman bad enough to put him down, why ain't he here? An' if he shot him not bad enough to put him down, why didn't he take an' dump the body out in the hills where he wouldn't be found? An' if it wasn't Wildman at all that made that shelter an' was on the receivin' end of those bullets, where is he?'

'Maybe he didn't dump the body because he didn't want to risk meeting the Blackfeet?' surmised January. 'Or any of the seventy-five parties of trappers who were out running around hereabouts looking for Clarke and the Dutchman? And if he took the shot in his head - a glancing blow that didn't kill him - the concussion might not have manifested until later. He could have come back to his camp, saddled up his horses—'

'I seen that happen,' agreed Shaw. 'Feller down to Tchapitoulas Street held me an' two of my men off for fifteen minutes with a shotgun after bein' cracked over the head by Fat Mary with a slung shot, an' didn't remember a thing about— Watch it!'

He flung himself sideways and down even as he shouted the warning, rolled behind Manitou's shelter as his rifle came up ready. January dived in the other direction behind the nearest juniper bush, his own weapon swinging to point at Morning Star as the young woman emerged from the woods, her small hands held in the air.

'Behold a mighty warrior,' she said, without so much as a smile.

January stepped from cover, gun lowered but ready to come up again in an instant. After a moment Shaw emerged from a hemlock thicket a considerable distance from where he'd gone to ground.

'Well,' said January, going to pick up the reins of the startled horses, 'think how foolish we'd have felt if you'd been a mighty warrior, and we'd only shrugged and said: That noise is only Hannibal's clever and beautiful wife . . .'

'The wife of Sun Mouse is clever and beautiful,' agreed Morning Star, helping herself to two parfleches of Manitou's pemmican, which she slung over her shoulders. 'And her eyesight is good enough for her to find the tracks of white men who passed along the other side of these hills going west the night before last in the rain . . . and who this morning passed the same way, going east. When they traveled west on the night of the rain, all of them - trappers and camp-setters and one Cree woman - wore moccasins. Now this morning, traveling east, one of them wears boots.'