The Shirt On His Back

Chapter 15



Frye gasped, 'F*ck me . . .'

The second scream was worse, like the bellowing of an animal trapped in burning barn.

The Blackfeet.

Shaw.

For a few moments January felt as if he couldn't breathe.

'Downstream.' Morning Star's voice was barely more than the siffle of the wind. Her small hand touched January's elbow in the darkness, guiding him up the coulee and away.

January pulled his arm free. 'We have to get him.'

'You think he will be in any state to run, should you do so?'

You'll hear me hollerin' . . .

'I won't leave him.'

Her face was no more than a blur in the shadow as she tilted her head. 'Will you die then, and tell his ghost all about your friendship?'

She was absolutely right, and January felt sick with shock. Dear God, silence him! Dear God, let him die.

He knew damn well that Abishag Shaw was too tough to die anytime soon. And the Blackfeet too skilled.

'The least I can do is shoot him from cover.'

'Hell, pilgrim,' said Frye, when January told the young trapper in English what he planned to do, 'I seen you shoot.' He puffed his chest a little in an attempt to sound like Jim Bridger. It would have been laughable if January hadn't heard in his voice how terrified he was. 'No man's gonna say Bo Frye left a feller to be gutted an' minced by the Blackfeet. Waugh! Damn it,' he added, looking around sharply, and when January followed his gaze he saw that Morning Star was gone. 'Where'd that squaw get to? You don't think she guided us here a-purpose—?'

'She's a Sioux.' January didn't feel at all certain, now that she was gone, of his own words. 'And she's my partner's wife. Her uncle was killed by the Blackfeet.'

Frye made a little noise in his throat - 'Huh . . .' - but it was impossible now to see his face. Only a pallid dapple of moonlight leaked through the boughs overhead; the gulch below was like a lake of indigo and cool. They tied the horses (what if a wolf comes along!) and Frye led the way straight down toward the stream, where there was also a little silvery light. 'Got to watch for the camp dogs,' Frye murmured. 'Billy LeBleaux down on the Purgatoire snuck into a 'Rapahoe camp to get back his rifle an' knife when they got stolen, an' ran into the dogs. Raised such a ruckus he had to spend the next three days hidin' up in a rock crevice, while the savages looked for him. It's gonna be a long shot.'

Moonlight cold on water. Night wind in trees. Smells of pine and wet rock. Something dark on the far side of the stream rose on its hind legs to half again January's six-foot- three-inch height, snuffing the air. Dear GOD—! He guessed the bears he'd seen near the camp had been black bears, scarcely taller than a man.

He followed Frye's shadow back a few feet into the deeper concealment of the trees. 'I would have sworn Shaw would keep clear of them,' he breathed. 'Or at least that he'd get off a shot—'

'Don't you think it, pilgrim. Five years ago Tom Fitzpatrick walked smack into a Gros Ventre village that he was tryin' to avoid one night, came within a huckleberry of gettin' a prairie haircut.' Further down the coulee came another scream, and behind it, bodiless in the darkness, a single, guttural voice lifted in a chant. Frye's voice shook with the effort to sound nonchalant. 'Happens to the best.'

Firelight glimmered through the trees. The smell of horses, the reek of camp. With the next scream came the howling of the camp dogs. Frye touched January's arm, and they hopped from boulder to boulder across the creek. From there they worked their way up the side of the draw, never losing sight of the orange glimmer of the flames.

'All right, hoss,' whispered Frye. 'Here's how it is.' His hands worked swiftly as he spoke, drawing the ball from his rifle, adding powder to throw the ball an extra distance. 'I only get one shot. That's all I can do, and all I'd expect of any man in the like position—'

'I understand.'

'You ever kicked a hornet's nest? You'll wish you was safe home rollin' on one in a minute. The second 1 shoot, you go straight up-slope and back up the coulee. There's rocks about a half-mile behind us, with crevices big enough that a man can get in under 'em. You pull in whatever brush you can find in front of you and you lay still, and if a rattlesnake's in there and bites you, you're still ahead of the game.' The fear was gone from the young man's voice and, curiously, January realized he felt none either, only a kind of chilly calm.

He recalled being scared, marching with the Faubourg Treme Free Colored Militia down to Chalmette Plantation behind Andrew Jackson, twenty years old and thinking about what he'd seen bullets do to human flesh. But once crouched behind those cotton-bale redoubts, straining his eyes through the fog and hearing the British drums, there had been only this sense of cold, and of time standing still.

'If one of 'em tackles you in the woods, use your knife instead of your gun if you can. I'll head down to the stream and try to get to the horses 'fore they do. I'll circle back for you. If I don't come, don't you move from where you're layin' until night comes again. They'll stop everything 'til they gets us or we gets back to the camp. Understand?'

'All right.' His mouth was so dry he could barely speak.

'And don't you shoot. You won't be able to hit him, you can't reload in time and you may need that shot later.'

'All right.' But January knew he'd try, if he could get close enough.

Men's voices raised in feral howling as Frye and January edged downslope.

Across the creek he could see horses grazing, bulky shadow and the round glint of eyes. Through the trees, the dim white triangles of the lodges, strung out along the creek bed just above where the waterside bushes got thick. Forty lodges, Morning Star had said. Well over two hundred warriors. Small tires laid gauzy drifts of smoke over the water. They followed the creek for another three-quarters of a mile before coming to where the big fire was. The men were gathered around it, naked shoulders jostling pale skin hunting-shirts, all gilded with the firelight: beating drums, or with the butts of their rifles on the ground. Where the warriors clustered thickest, between the tipis and over their heads January could just see the ends of the lodgepole frame to which they'd lashed their victim, and a single bleeding hand.

He brought up his rifle. Shaw, he thought, I did my best. . .

The men moved, and January saw what they were doing - driving splinters of wood under the bound man's skin, among a bleeding horror of gashes and burns. An impossible shot at the distance, with the men moving back and forth, the firelight wavering—

And the bound man wasn't Abishag Shaw.

It was Manitou Wildman.

There had been no mistaking the heavy power of the frame, the cropped-off black hair hanging down where his head lolled back, the harsh strong bones of the face under that bestial beard. The first rush of relief made January feel almost faint, and then, in the next moment, the horrible choice: I would shoot, and take the consequences, for Shaw who saved my life . . .

Will I take those same consequences for a man I barely know?

No man's gonna say Bo Frye left a feller to be gutted an' minced by Blackfeet . . .

Even a relative stranger, as Shaw was to Frye. Boaz Frye, January thought, would know that some day he might easily be the one bound by firelight in a Blackfoot camp, in hell already and looking at worse . . .

Are you really going to get yourself killed - and possibly, killed THAT WAY - to shorten Manitou Wildman's agony?

January didn't hear the camp guard's approach, but Frye touched his shoulder, and the two men drew back further into the trees. Willing himself to be willing, January followed him, moccasins sliding in the pine straw, seeking another vantage point for a shot. Like his companion, he'd double-shotted his gun - crammed in as much powder as it could take without, he hoped, having the lock blow up in his face - to speed the bullet over an impossible distance. But at that distance it was anybody's guess if he could aim. Moonlight touched the sleek dark hair of a warrior passing between the trees on the hill slope below, made a ghostly ravel of the down on an eagle feather. Frye led him up on to an outcrop of rocks, but still could get no clear view of the camp, and all the while the screaming went on like a soul in hell. 'Them splinters is fatwood,' Frye whispered. 'Resin pine. Burns like lucifer matches. They lights 'em . . .'

Dear God—

January remembered the smack of the man's fist on his jaw, the animal glint of those brown eyes and the trained, clean, careful way Wildman had moved.

Remembered how the big man had pulled that Omaha girl from the men who'd held her, not knowing then that he wouldn't have to fight January for her immediately thereafter and maybe others as well, but half-throwing her to her own people, with a let the girl go . . .

A second scout came into the moonlight below, much too near the rocks. Frye and January drew further upslope. The firelight leaped up among the tipis; Wildman's screams passed beyond human, beyond animal even.

The moon's angle changed above the draw. January saw the pale pattern of elk teeth on smoky buckskin, moving on this side of the creek now. When Frye touched January's arm again to signal a further retreat, January could feel the young man's hand shaking, as were his own. Hating himself, he followed, keeping to the border zone of darkness among the trees, as high up the side of the little canyon as they could until they were well clear of the vicinity of the Blackfoot camp. Only then did the mountaineer whisper, 'I'm sorry, hoss. We couldn't—'

'It's all right.'

But it wasn't.

They hid among the boulders Frye had told him about, far up the draw. Shared pemmican, which January was almost too sick with shock to want until he'd tasted some and realized he was famished and his head was pounding. When the wind backed a little they could still hear the screaming. It didn't stop until past moonset.

Not long after first light January heard the harsh scuffle of movement in the trees below them. He put his head over the rocks and saw the Blackfeet moving out. Warriors rode ahead, long dark hair hanging down their backs; women walked with bundles among the horses that drew the lodgepole travois. Dogs and children, silent alike, ghosts between the trees. Medicine bundles - feathers and bones twirling - on the end of travois poles and spears. Rifles held upright and ready.

When the last of the village was well out of sight, January and his companion slipped from cover, almost ran downstream-

—and swung around, rifles at ready, at movement in the green dawn shadows on the other side of the creek. 'You tolerable, Maestro?' January let out his breath in a sigh. 'Just.' Shaw came to the creek's edge as Frye and January waded across. 'Glad to see that warn't you they was settin' fire to.' Together the three climbed the few yards up to where Goshen 'Beauty' Clarke waited with his horse and his laden mules, nearly hidden among the trees. 'An' twice as glad to see you had the good sense not to try an' put that poor bastard out'n his pain.' Clarke had on his wolfskin hood, beneath which his long golden braids flowed down almost to his waist. On his feet he wore a pair of well-cut, and much-scuffed, black boots.

'You were bug-struck loco to even think about tryin', Shaw,' snapped the Beauty. 'Waugh! You near as dammit got us killed.'

'But I didn't,' pointed out Shaw mildly.

'I told you it couldn't have been Clem or any of the boys,' Clarke added grouchily. 'They's all camped in the next draw over. You didn't see them riskin' their tripes checkin' to see if that was me.'

'Well, don't mean they didn't,' replied Shaw. 'I 'spects they'll meet us at the campsite, if'fn the Dutchman wants see if they left your new boots behind.'

'Naw.' The Beauty shrugged. 'They didn't fit him. The coat doesn't fit him, neither, but he wanted somethin' out of it, an' he wouldn't listen to reason.'

'You tell my partner how you come by those boots, Clarke,' said Shaw. 'I found it right interestin'.'

As did January, when the trapper related in an undervoice - because Shaw and Frye were still listening for the slightest signs of trouble back down the trail that the Blackfeet had taken - the events of three nights ago. 'We thought at first that little speck of a fire mighta been somebody who'd been hurt,' explained Clarke. 'Or somebody who'd camped up, not realizin' how close he was to the rendezvous, like Robbie Prideaux, that time he made his confession to one of his camp- setters an' they both laid down in a blizzard, thinkin' they was dyin' fifteen feet from the gate of Fort Laramie one night. But there's this old man, layin' in a shelter under a deadfall, with his hands folded on his breast an' his throat cut from ear to ear. Stabbed in the back, too, though that didn't keep Clem from takin' his coat. We figured he was that Indian agent Titus was workin' himself up to a stroke over - no lookout of ours even if we hadn't been tryin' to ease on out of the camp, quiet like. There's one thing I got no patience with, it's Indian agents, pokin' around causin' trouble . . .'

'What time was this?'

'First light.'

'Any sign of a horse nearby?'

'We didn't see any, but we didn't look. The rain had slowed us down, an' we knew we still had a couple of those sneaky bastards on our tails, that's too dumb to find their own beaver.' He glared pointedly at Boaz Frye.

'His clothes wet or dry?'

'Damp,' said Clarke. 'Like he'd got under shelter pretty quick after gettin' wet.'

'You have trouble getting his boots off? Was that why you hauled him out of the shelter?'

'The left boot, yeah. His leg was splinted up, and his foot was swole - Clem had to hold on to his shoulders while I pulled at it. The old guy was dead,' he added defensively. 'It's not like it hurt him or nuthin'.'

January reflected that Jed Blankenship would have just cut off the swollen leg and removed the foot the easy way.

'Swelled a little or swelled a lot?'

The mountaineer thought about it for a moment, his hand stroking the stock of his rifle, which had been decorated with an elaborate design of brass nail-heads. 'A little, I'd say. I mean, we got his boot off him—'

Shaw raised a hand. All stopped, and on the morning air, above the animal smells of the empty campsite before them, January smelled fresh smoke. Instinctively, the four men spread out, moving in silence from tree to tree among the cut-down brush, the dung and detritus that littered the edges of the creek where the tipis had been set last night. Further ahead among the cottonwoods, January saw a flash of movement and raised his gun. Beside a small fire two gourd bowls lay, and a tin cup of water. Shaw stepped out of the trees, flanking the clearing. After a moment, from the rocks nearer the creek, a man's hat was raised up on a rifle - a reasonable precaution against trigger-happy intruders.

And the next minute, Manitou Wildman - dressed, unruffled and quite clearly in perfectly good health - stood up from among the rocks.