The Shirt On His Back

Chapter 19



We camped near there the night,' reported Bridger, with the sun halfway to noon, when he, Carson and an assortment of traders and trappers gathered along the staked quarantine-line on what was rapidly coming to be known (to January's annoyance) as Plague Island. 'You'll understand we didn't want to get too near, 'specially after we found the Beauty.'

'Did you leave him unburied?' demanded the Reverend Grey, with the righteous horror of someone who wasn't confined behind a quarantine line . . . and who hadn't seen the bodies in Groot's camp.

Carson looked like he was about to make a sharp reply, but Bridger answered, 'First light we dug a grave, and we rolled him into it with saplings. That's what's taken us so long gettin' back. It wasn't respectful,' he added grimly. 'But anyone here wants to take issue with it, I'll gladly take him out and show him the spot, so's they can rebury him more to their liking. We had a look around,' he went on, into Grey's total silence. 'The Beauty'd been took sick: that was clear as mule tracks. Whether Shaw was or not I don't know. I saw no sign of it. They was hit by Injuns - Blackfoot, I made 'em - and by all I could tell he was well enough to run for it, and to cover his trail when he reached timber. As for how far he got—' He shook his head. 'I read the tracks of twenty or more in the war party that killed Clarke, and more up the draw.'

'If you want to go in after him -' Carson looked across at January - 'I'll go with you. But I'm tellin' you, if that child has the brains I think he does, he'll have moved up east into the foothills to lose 'em. If he ain't took sick up there, he'll make his way back by an' by. An' if he is took sick, they'll find him 'fore you or I would. That's my call. But I'll go.'

'And I.' Stewart stepped forward, elegant in his white buckskins, Prideaux right behind him.

'Waugh! You can count this child in. You don't look all that perishin' sick to me.'

'Moriamur et in media arma ruamus,' said Hannibal, and he moved up to Prideaux's side.

'No, Carson's right,' said January. 'Shaw'll be back or he won't. But if we go out there, one of us, maybe more, will be killed before we're anywhere near enough to help him.' He looked out across the swift-flowing green-brown silk of the main river, thinking about the trackless miles of foothills that rose beyond and the broken granite escarpments of the Wind River Range. Hearing again Manitou's screams in the night and what Morning Star - and every mountaineer he'd spoken to - had told him about the ways Indians of any tribe had of dealing with prisoners.

When the visitors had gone, trampling what was now a pale trace around the island's center rise to where they could ford - or canoe - the thirty-some feet back to the point of land behind Morales's tent, January felt sick at heart.

'You owe me,' Tom had said. 'You can kill anything with one shot. . .'Til you lost your nerve. You tellin' me you'll run away again?'

And Manitou: ' You think twice about vengeance... It never ends well.'

For bloody deed, let bloody deed atone . . . Who had written that? One of the Greeks, in some horrifying play about revenge and all that it led to.

Would Shaw leave his bones in the mountains, without ever having found his brother's killer? And who would that profit in the end?

Like Hamlet, he'd only leave a stage littered with corpses.

And then he saw that Hannibal, who had lingered, seemed to have acquired yet another girlfriend, and a new hat.

The girlfriend, at least, was familiar. She was Irish Mary, a doll-faced Aphrodite of seventeen. Her putative Celtic antecedents seemed most in evidence by the fact that her hair was curly, rather than of the Indian straightness more usual among Mexicans, and had in its natural blackness - trenchantly hinted at along her hairline - a reddish cast of which she took fullest advantage with the henna bottle. The youngest and the prettiest of the girls, she was consequently the most in demand and by rendezvous standards - was the best-dressed, in a crimson skirt and a satin vest bedecked with ribbons and jingling with silver trinkets. These ornaments also decorated Hannibal's new hat.

Which presumably, deduced January, was actually hers, on loan.

It never ceased to amaze him that in a camp consisting of five hundred mountaineers, three times that many engages, and exactly six Mexican whores, two of those six kept regular company with Hannibal. Who had an Indian wife as well.

'May I show Benjamin your hat, my pearl of delight?' inquired Hannibal in Spanish.

Mary looked uncertain. 'Well, I don't want to get nuthin'—'

Considering her profession, January had to school his face carefully at the remark.

Hannibal reached into his coat pocket - like the traders, he kept to his New Orleans attire of old-fashioned cutaway coat and striped trousers - and produced a handful of credit-plews from every store in the camp, including Seaholly's liquor tent, mostly won at chess. 'I'll buy you a new one, amor mia,' he said. 'Better suited to your charms.'

It took her a few minutes to unpin all the ribbons and ornaments. Then she tossed it over.

Hannibal gave her another handful of plews - presumably in addition to what he was paying her for her time, since by the sound of it, Seaholly's tent was open for business again. 'Tell Benjamin where you acquired your hat - with the understanding that he is a gentleman and will guard your secret with his life.'

'Please, you got to.' Mary regarded January doubtfully. 'Mick'll skin me, if he knows I was meetin' anybody outside and not tellin' him.'

Who she had been meeting - four nights ago, the night after his fight with Manitou, with rain coming down and the moon two days old - had been Jed Blankenship.

'He come up to me behind the liquor tent all sore-assed after Mick threw him out.' She perched on a flat rock on her own side of the quarantine line, took tobacco and corn husk from the pouch around her neck, and pulled up her skirt to roll a cigarette on her knee. It was enough, reflected January admiringly, to make a man take up smoking.

'He could get liquor from Hudson's Bay or Morales or anyone, but he wanted conejo, and he'd pay real silver for it, he said.'

The assignation had been set for the woods on the south side of Horse Creek, where the pine tree had fallen across the water to form a fragile bridge. January remembered passing the spot.

'I told Mick I was sick an' couldn't work, and anyway with everybody out chasin' the Dutchman, it was a slow night. But I was late gettin' out of the camp, an' then the creek was high like you never seen. Then Jed didn't show up. So here I am, sittin' under some bushes in the rain, an' every now an' then I'll hear somebody rustlin' around in the woods, or sometimes horses goin' past. Now, I knowed it was probably just those pendejos out tryin' to catch the Dutchman . . . but, you know, I was cold an' scared.'

And back in April, if somebody had offered me hard silver to go wait someplace in the rain with Blackfeet running around in the woods behind me, reflected January, I'd have taken it ... To this girl, every piece of silver that she didn't have to divide with Mick was one step closer to getting out of Taos and liquor tents and ten or twelve trappers a day, provided that was what she wanted to do with it. Maybe it was just liquor money.

'So the rain quits, an' I think, Jed'll be along soon,' the girl went on. 'I had one of Mick's bottles of trade liquor with me, sippin' to stay warm, so I'm not real sure how long it was after the rain quit that I heard shots. Not real long. There was one shot, an' then sounds of fightin'. Somebody was bellerin' like a grizzly that sat on a porcupine, and then there was a second shot in the middle of that. Myself, I thought it was Manitou - you know how he gets when somethin' sets him off.'

She shrugged and took another drag of her cigarette. 'Not my business, anyway. They'd quieted down, and along comes Jed, and it started raining again. And after all that,' she added, those beautiful brown eyes turning ugly, 'the carajo didn't even pay me. Just said he'd tell Mick if I didn't keep quiet. Said he'd knock my front teeth out, too, and let me explain that to Mick . . .'

January's first thought was: and you were surprised? but he kept it to himself. From his experience in New Orleans, he guessed there was every chance that when the proposition had been put to Irish Mary to earn a little extra silver, she hadn't been completely sober.

'I swear to Christ, I wish somebody'd break that cono's leg an' leave him where the Blackfeet'll find him. So after Jed takes off to see what he can see of Beauty and the Dutchman it started raining again, and I stayed smoking a little - he took my whiskey, too, the cheap meado - and I got to thinking. You've seen Manitou when he gets like he does, so I knew whoever he'd had an argument with probably wouldn't object to it if I sort of went through his pockets. And money's the last thing Manitou thinks about, when he goes off like that: last year here he got howlin' mad - mad-dog mad - at Jacques Chouinard and had to be dragged off him, and when he came back into camp three days later, I swear he didn't remember a thing about it. So I waited 'til it got good an' light - I wasn't gonna get myself lost again - and then headed up in the direction of where I'd heard the shoutin'.'

'You see anyone else in the woods?' January turned the hat over in his hands as he spoke, surprised and bemused by what he saw.

Irish Mary shook her head. 'While I was sittin' smokin' under the bush - which I tell you wasn't any kind of good as a roof in that last rain-shower - I heard someone ride by further up the slope. It musta been the hideputa who got to the old boy 'fore I did, because when I got there, he'd been stripped of his coat, his boots, an' his weskit, poor old man . . . I mean, yes, I was gonna go through his pockets, but I wasn't gonna steal the shirt off his back, for the love of Jesus!'

She piously crossed herself. 'He was layin' there with his back all over with blood from bein' stabbed, an' blood soakin' into the ground under him, an' it looked like his leg broke - it was splinted up with a couple of saplings. An' I thought: Daddy, if you was out here with a broke leg, pissin' off Manitou Wildman was probably one of the stupider things you coulda done.'

'That's just it,' mused January. 'Why piss off Wildman? Why shoot at him? Those were pistol balls Shaw and I found in the trees near there - were there pistols by the body?'

She shook her head. 'Manitou musta taken them, or whoever got his coat an' boots, poor old abuelo.'

'But they didn't,' said January. At least, he thought, Frye, Groot and Clarke hadn't - and pistols were heavy to lug. If Manitou had had them on him, his 'brother' Silent Wolf could have taken them, before they tortured him . . . 'Where'd you find his hat?'

'Downslope a little. There was enough light, I could see it, black against the bushes. It's a mighty pretty hat.'

'So it is,' agreed January, angling it so that the sunlight fell on the dark silk of the lining. 'And I hope, when you get back to Taos, you'll find one prettier. Hannibal,' he said, 'when you've walked Miss Mary back to Mr Seaholly's, I could do with a word.'

As the fiddler escorted Irish Mary - with tender courtesy that would have passed muster at a garden party - back toward the canoe tied at the northern point of the island, January returned to the shelter. 'That really the old boy's hat?' asked Frye, who had retreated after the initial conference with Bridger and Carson to practice knife-throwing at the slender trunk of a nearby sapling: competing right hand against left.

'I'm not sure.' January knelt in a corner of the shelter, opened the little satchel of medicines he'd brought from New Orleans. Beneath the packets of powdered willow bark and ipecac that his sister Olympe had made up for him, the so-called 'Indian tobacco' - which wasn't tobacco at all - to treat laryngitis and asthma, the little phials of tincture of opium and camphor, the rolled-up kit of his surgical implements, he found the other thing Rose had sent with him besides the little notebook: a powerful round-lensed magnifier.

From outside the tent he heard Morales call out as he came near the ring of stakes, was there anything you boys need, and what'd Mary want? January didn't hear what his young companion replied. He carried the hat back to the entrance of the shelter where the eastern light was strong and - against the sun-bleached canvas - examined again with the magnifying lens the hairs that he'd taken from its lining.

Two of them were obviously Mary's, thickly curling and springy, bright with henna for most of their length and the girl's native, mahogany-tinted black for the last half-inch.

And one was fine-textured, black for most of its three-inch length, and for that last inch or so, light brown, like the hair of the girl Mina in her silver locket.