The Shirt On His Back

Chapter 16



The words, 'Are you all right?' came out of January's mouth even as he thought: that's the stupidest question I've ever heard.

Wildman blinked at him, like a man thrust suddenly into light from darkness. 'I'm well.'

Shaw lowered his rifle. 'You didn't look so peart last night.'

The trapper shook his head. His short-cropped hair, January noticed, was clean, new-washed, still wet, and under his tan he was ghastly pale. His slow, mumbling voice had a hoarse note to it, as if indeed his throat had been lacerated by screams. 'Nothing happened last night.'

'Here? This very spot? The Blackfeet?'

'The Blackfeet are my friends,' said Wildman. 'Silent Wolf is my brother.'

'Now, there's been times I wanted to stick splinters under my brother's hide an' light 'em,' said Shaw, 'but I don't recall as I ever actually done it—'

'Nothing happened last night,' repeated Wildman.

Shaw, January and young Mr Frye exchanged looks - are we crazy?

The big trapper seated himself cross-legged by the fire again, picked up one of the gourds and sipped at the broth within. 'What are you doing here?' he asked, in a voice that sounded more normal. 'It's miles from camp.'

'What are you doin' here?' returned Shaw.

'Came to see my brothers.' Manitou nodded in the direction of the stream, where two horses and a mule were hobbled - Manitou's horses, January saw at a glance. Like himself, the mountaineer was a big man and paid extra for the biggest horses in the strings brought up from Missouri and New Mexico. 'Silent Wolf knows it'd be madness to attack his enemies where the white men are in strength,' Manitou went on. 'But it's madness not to know what's going on. Sit.' He motioned to the ground by the fire. 'There's more stew here than I can eat.'

After a moment's hesitation - and another glance traded - the four trackers complied. In the mountains, you didn't turn down stew, and after tracking from sunrise to darkness yesterday January would have eaten raw buffalo with the hair on. Shaw said, 'There was a man killed outside the camp three nights ago, a stranger—'

'I didn't do it,' said Wildman quickly. 'I never saw the old man.' And then, 'Three nights?'

'How'd you know he was old?'

Hesitation. Then, 'One of the camp-setters told me.'

January opened his mouth to ask: when? You haven't been in camp since then— and Shaw elbowed him very gently in the back.

'He tell you the body was nekkid when we found him? We been trackin' down bits an' pieces of his plunder, tryin' to find out who he was an' what he was doin' out there. McLeod an' that preacher Grey been claiming he was this Indian Agent Goodpastor, that seems to have got hisself lost.'

Manitou's heavy brow sank even lower over his eyes. 'No,' he said in his slow voice. 'No, I didn't know ghouls had looted his body.' His glance swept over Frye's waistcoat, and Clarke's boots, and spots of angry color began to spread like wounds over the dark, taut skin of his cheekbones.

'Now, just a goddam minute—' Clarke began, and Shaw held up his hand.

'That's by the way,' he said. 'An' the old man was buried decent at the camp. Grey prayed over him, for what good that's like to do - an' for a fact, he sure don't care now who's wearin' his boots. This camp-setter you talked to wouldn'ta had some idea who the old boy mighta been, would he?'

Manitou looked aside. 'No.' He stood, his sudden movement reminding January of the grizzly he'd seen on the other side of the creek last night, huge and far too close in the moonlight, and went to pick up his saddle from the rocks where it lay. 'Maybe it was old Goodpastor.'

'If'fn it was, he parked his camp an' his horses under a rock someplace. Care to come with us, whilst we takes tea with the Dutchman an' sees if old Mr Incognito was carryin' callin' cards in his coat pocket?' Shaw collected bridle and apishamore, and followed.

'No,' Manitou said. 'I been from my camp too long. Three days, you said?' He shook his head, his heavy brow creasing, like a drunkard trying to reckon the days of a binge. 'Winter Moon,' he added, 'you need one of these girls -' he slapped the shoulder of the taller of his two horses, a heavy-boned buckskin - "til you get back to the camp? If Beauty'11 lend you a bridle off one of the mules . . .'

'I appreciate the offer,' said January. 'Thank you. We owe you some pemmican, by the way—'

'Surprised a bear hadn't got it. You're welcome to it.'

'You stayin' at the camp awhile?' asked Shaw more softly - perhaps to exclude, January thought, Beauty Clarke and Boaz Frye, who had gone to check loads and cinches on Clarke's mules. 'For a fact I been wantin' to speak with you 'bout what happened down at Fort Ivy this winter, when Johnny Shaw was killed.'

Manitou paused in the act of laying down the apishamore on his other horse, a cinder-gray mare, and regarded Shaw with those deep-shadowed brown eyes. 'That'd be your brother.'

'It would.'

'You look like him.'

'I been told.'

'I wasn't in the fort when it happened.' When Wildman swung the saddle into place January noticed the catch in his movements, and the way he favored his left arm. Where the worn elk-hide hunting-shirt fell away from Wildman's throat, he saw clotted wounds. In places blood leaked through to stain the pale-gold hide. 'I was camped about a mile off, in the woods.'

'Why?' asked Shaw. 'From all Tom an' Beauty both say, it was snowin' billy-bejeezus an' cold as brass underwear.'

'Too many people. People—' Manitou readjusted the apishamore under the saddle, cinched the whole arrangement tight. 'I ain't fit to be around people. Never have been. Guess you know that,' he added, with a sudden shy grin that made his face look suddenly human again. 'I get mad . . . Better I keep my distance. You think it was Frank that did it? Tom's clerk?'

'It's who I'm up here lookin' for.' Shaw folded his long arms. 'Though I'd appreciate you kept that one silent as the grave. Why'd you think it might be him?'

'Man don't leave a fort in the middle of winter like that, 'less he's flushed out. One mornin' - before first light, durin' a break between storms, but more bad weather comin' in, you could smell it - I saw him pass 'bout a half-mile from my camp. I only knew him by that townsman's coat he wore: old, black wool with a fur collar. Heard later he'd said he got spooked, the boy bein' killed by Blackfeet like that. But I never saw no sign of Blackfeet. So I figured it was probably him. Hard luck on Tom. I know he was crazy 'bout that boy. Yourself too, I guess.'

Shaw nodded, without speaking.

'Why'd you think he's comin' here?'

'Johnny found letters of his, that sounded like there was gonna be some kind of trouble here at the rendezvous. Bad trouble, he said. Killin' trouble. Then this old buffer shows up dead, that seems to just fallen outta the sky. The name Hepplewhite mean anythin' to you?'

'Just the feller who made the furniture.' Manitou took the empty stew-gourd Shaw held out to him, knotted it in one of the saddle latigos, then swung himself up as lightly as a schoolgirl. 'If Frank's come into this country,' he went on, looking down at Shaw, 'likely your vengeance'll look after itself. Frank's a clerk. Got a clerk's hands. Can't see him lastin'. You come here, you lay yourself in the hand of God. He don't have far to look if he's after you.'

He leaned from the saddle to rub the buckskin mare's face gently with his knuckles as January readjusted the borrowed bridle around her head. 'Look after that lady for me, Winter Moon. Anybody beat the crap outta Blankenship for that trick with the mirror?'

'I heard Robbie Prideaux beat the crap out of him for something,' replied January. 'It could have been anything, given the number of things people have against that man.'

Wildman made a growly sniff, as close as he ever got, January suspected, to laughter. 'Could have, at that. He's another one the country'll get sooner or later. It was a good fight,' he added. 'Been a long time since I followed ring rules. I enjoyed it. You think twice about vengeance, Shaw.' He glanced back at Shaw beneath the heavy shelf of his brow. 'It never ends well.'

'Nor does it,' returned Shaw quietly. 'Yet I can't turn from my brother, nor my brother's blood. An' there is no law here that'll touch the man who did it.'

'Nor bring your brother back.' Wildman sat for a time, looking down into Shaw's pale eyes. 'Guess you're right at that. We do what we gotta. I see this Frank feller around the camp, I'll let you know.' He touched his heels to the horse, started to move away.

'He may not be callin' himself Boden up here.'

Manitou reined in sharply: 'Boden?'

'That's his name,' said Shaw. 'Frank Boden.'

The trapper was silent for a moment; for the first time January saw the animal watchfulness disappear from his eyes, leaving them, for an instant, blank. Shocked, as if thought had been arrested midstream, leaving him uncertain which direction to go. But this was only for an instant. Then Wildman shook his head, said in a strange voice, 'I didn't know.'

He reined away into the woods without another word.

'I ain't no ghoul.' Clarke came back from his mules, looking after Wildman as the big trapper disappeared into the shadows of the trees.

"Course you ain't.'

'He should damn well talk about goddam ghouls! God Hisself couldn't keep track of how many hides an' horses that child's had off the Flatheads - and I didn't notice that deer- hide shirt he was wearin' was part of his plunder back at the camp. An' I know for a fact them leggins he's got on was took off some poor Crow up on the Bighorn—'

'It's a fact ever'body gets what they can, where they can,' replied Shaw soothingly. 'An' like I said, Mr Incognito don't care who's wearin' his boots now. You comin', Maestro?'

'Yes, just coming.' January went to kick out the campfire, then stooped to examine the ashes. From the charred earth, he picked a fragment of wood. With the back of his knife - the earth was scorching hot - he dug out two or three more, as if playing jackstraws. Clarke and Frye had already started off up the steep northern slope of the coulee. Shaw waited, still as a scarecrow on his yellow gelding, watching and listening all around him as January scooped up his rifle and followed. He said nothing as January stowed the half- burned splinters inside his watch case, the only hard metal container he had which didn't already hold either powder or lucifers, but the tilt of his eyebrows told January that the policeman had guessed what he'd found.

What it meant, of course, was an entirely different matter.

Given the fact that the Blackfeet - whatever their relationship with Wildman - would certainly carry to its conclusion the operations they'd begun on Wildman last night on a couple of lone whites who weren't their brothers, Shaw slipped on ahead on foot to scout the rim of the coulee before anyone else came out of its cover. About two miles lay between Small Bear and the next coulee - Dry Grass or Rotten Cow, depending on who you talked to, said Clarke - open ground in which it would have been almost impossible to evade Blackfoot warriors. The sun stood halfway between the eastern mountains and mid-heaven, and from one hill slope January could see across the glittering green sheet of the river the beginnings of the rendezvous camp, like a scattering of little villages beyond the rim of the cottonwoods.

'Clem's gonna scalp me,' muttered Clarke. 'Lettin' myself get caught like a damn pork-eater—'

'He won't,' promised Frye jauntily. He seemed to have put completely behind him the enigma of Manitou Wildman's visit with the Blackfeet. "Cause I'll be headin' out with you - it's just me, I don't have a partner or nuthin' - an' when we get to your valley I'll trap just where you say, an' keep outta your way—'

'Yeah, an' the other way he won't is if him and me scalp you - an' them,' he added, with a truculent glance over his shoulder at January and Shaw.

'You'd still have to catch Wildman,' pointed out January, 'and shut his mouth, too. You really think you're up to that?'

'What the hell you know, nigger?' muttered Clarke, but in a tone that told January he had him, there.

January glanced back to make some remark to Shaw and almost jumped in surprise: Morning Star rode at Shaw's side, leading January's big liver-bay from the camp and Bo Frye's mule and his rat-tailed paint. He reined back to join them. 'You know anything about Manitou Wildman and the Blackfeet, m'am?' he asked.

'I know he is their brother.'

'And is that a reason for them to torture him - and then turn him loose? Those were healing herbs he was drinking. My sister's a shaman -' well, a voodooienne, anyway - 'and I know the smell. But a bowl of poppy and willow bark isn't sufficient reason for pretending they didn't lay a hand on him. At least, it isn't for me.'

'Crazy Bear is a strange man.'

Clarke and Frye swung around in their saddles, 'What the hell—?'

'Where'd she come from?'

'Dropped down outta the sky,' returned Shaw mildly. 'Horses an' all. Beauty, you know Mornin' Star?'

'Yeah, Sefton's squaw.'

Frye asked a rapid question in sign, which January guessed concerned the Blackfeet, because Morning Star smiled and pointed up Small Bear Coulee. She added - doubling her quick- moving hands with French for his benefit - 'I have seen nothing of the other tribe, nor of the Indian Agent that Broken Hand was sent out to find. Nor have I seen any trace of the dead man's camp,' she added, 'which I think strangest of all . . .'

She lifted her head sharply, and at the same moment January heard it: the frenzied whinnying of horses in the draw ahead. January's eyes went instantly to the morning sky: buzzards and ravens circling. Clarke whispered, 'Jesus—'

And whipped up his horse.

Shaw and January followed at a canter, over the rim and down into Dry Grass Coulee. Dry Grass was shallower than Small Bear, and there was less timber. From the high ground, January saw the Dutchman's camp at once. A cold camp, and a dry one, since there was no stream here in summer. Through the trees he discerned packs and blankets on the ground, and crumpled things that could only be bodies. Something gray moved among them; he heard the quarrelsome snarls of wolves.

No wonder the tied horses were terrified.

The smell hit him then, foul in the clean mountain air, and prickled the hair on his head. He shouted, 'Stop!' and saw already that the Beauty had drawn rein, smelling it also and uncertain—

'Christ Jesus,' whispered Clarke, when Shaw and January came up to him. 'What the hell happened? It smells like a f*cken plague hospital down there.'

Even at a distance of two hundred yards, it was very clear that everyone in the camp had died purging and puking.

Morning Star rode past them, crossed the bottom of the coulee and put her spotted Nez Perce horse up the opposite slope to circle the camp. While they were waiting for her, Bo Frye came up with the mule string, pale with shock under his tan.

Curious, thought January, that this young man didn't find anything odd in playing tag with Blackfeet eleven months out of the year, with death by torture a daily possibility, yet his voice trembled at the thought of disease.

Maybe because once the First Horseman took you, your knife or your rifle or your wits would do nothing to slither you out of his cold white grip.

'You don't think it's the cholera, do you?' Frye whispered.

'I'll know better when we're close.' He brought up his rifle and shot at one of the wolves. The buzzards flapped skyward with a dark whoosh; the wolves backed away snarling, then flickered out of sight into the brush. Clarke kept whispering, 'Christ Jesus, Christ Jesus . . .' as if the words were a kind of lifeline, to keep him from being swept away by the fact that the people he'd been closest to for the past five years of his life all lay before him, dead.

And had died - January could see - very badly indeed.