The Shirt On His Back

Chapter 20



Boden came in with one of the tribes?' Hannibal pulled on his shirt, still damp from his swim downriver to the island, then quickly huddled back to the fire inside the 'plague tent'. Outside, Frye stood guard - or rather sat casually by the fire, ready to call out a greeting loud enough to be heard within the tent, should anyone come along the path from the rendezvous side of the island.

The discovery of the dyed hair within the hat had the effect on January of a sound in the night: a prickly watchfulness, a profound sense of nearby threat. He was more aware than ever that he was going to need friends within the camp who had freedom of action - neither kept within the quarantine line by their sworn word, nor expelled from the camp for breaking it.

'He has to have come in with one of the tribes,' said January. 'The hair in that hat - the hair that wasn't Irish Mary's - was brown that had been dyed black. So that hat wasn't old Klaus's. The only reason I can think of for anyone to dye his hair black would be to pass as an Indian or a Mexican, and no blankitte in this part of the world would do that voluntarily. It looks to me as if Boden was with his father at the shelter at some point in the night, and their hats got switched.'

'Then he would have been the one who splinted his father's leg -' Hannibal frowned as he tied his moccasins, mentally aligning the probable course of the night's events - 'and made the fire and the shelter. Which would mean that Manitou came later, beat him and killed him . . . But why would Boden have left him alone there? If they were at the rendezvous at all, they'd have to have known Manitou was camped close by:

'And why would Manitou have beaten him that way, if his leg was already broken?' Anger flared like a hot coal in January's chest: anger at himself, for he had liked the big trapper. 'I can see hurting him in a fight to get a gun away from him, but if he was hurt already, lying in the shelter helpless—'

'He was enraged,' pointed out Hannibal. 'Mad-dog mad. Mary heard him shouting.'

'And where was Boden during all this? And afterward, why didn't he return to the old man, knowing he was unable to help himself?'

'Could Manitou have killed him?'

'And not remember it?' January frowned. 'It's possible . . . But no one in the camp is missing.'

'Except Shaw,' said Hannibal, rather grimly. 'And Asa Goodpastor. Unless letting himself be taken by the Blackfeet and tortured is some insane kind of penance.' The fiddler shook out his vest - a little damp, but the tight covering of waxed canvas in which he'd rolled his clothing for his downriver swim had worked well. 'One of my tutors when I was a lad was a little crazy that way. Not that he'd have beaten up an injured old man, but he'd sneak off into the village every couple of months, get well and truly hammered and roger himself speechless with the local commodity, a young lady named Peg Drowe . . . Perfectly understandable behavior. But old Venables would lock himself up in his room afterwards and cut his arms and legs with a sharpened letter-opener, a fact we only learned one night when he tripped on the stairway - perfectly sober, I might add - and knocked himself senseless. When he was carried up to his bed and undressed, he was found to be covered with scars, all precisely spaced, as if he'd used a ruler as well as the letter opener.' Hannibal shook his head, as if after decades he was still puzzling it over.

'He could recite the whole of Hesiod's Theogony off the top of his head - - Homer and the entire Bible as well. Astonishing. Poor Peg was mortified when she learned about it. Personally, I never found rogering her worth so much as a bitten hangnail.' He glanced sharply up at January, added, 'Well, we knew Boden had to be one of the traders, didn't we? It's not such an unusual style of hat - Edwin Titus wears one, and John McLeod, and others - but that narrows it to one of the new men.'

'Wynne, or Gonzales,' said January. 'Morales too - and what's the name of that fellow from Missouri?'

'Sharpless?'

January nodded. 'Do this for me, would you?' he began, and broke off as the rear wall of the shelter rippled, lifted about six inches, and Morning Star slithered through.

'Manitou is gone,' she said softly and wrung the river water out of her braids. Her deerskin dress, like Hannibal's coat and weskit, was damp from being carried across rolled tight in a piece of oiled deer-hide. 'I reached his camp, and there was nothing there. Even the fire pit was filled in and hidden, as if he were in enemy country.'

January cursed in Arabic. 'Can your brothers track him?' he asked. 'I think he's the man Boden and his father were seeking, for killing Boden's sister. This wouldn't be any of our business, except for what Boden seems to think his vengeance entitles him to do: kill those who get in his way, or - it seems - kill some or all of the men in this camp in order to kill his man among them. Hannibal,' he added, 'can you get a description from Wallach of the horses Boden took from the fort last winter? He'll have known someone at the rendezvous might recognize them, so he couldn't bring them into the main camp. But I'm guessing that whichever Indian tribe he came most of the way with, you'll find the horses there.'

'Crazy Bear killed the daughter of the old man?' asked Morning Star worriedly. 'The girl whose picture Sun Mouse showed me in the locket?'

'We think so, yes.'

'And the old man as well, when he was crippled and helpless?'

'It looks that way. I want to speak with him again,' January said, 'and ask him about Boden. Who he is, what he's capable of and what he might be up to. The laws of the United States can't touch Manitou here: he should have nothing to fear in talking to me. But the people he killed were innocent, as Tall Chief's brother was innocent when Boden killed him, only to hide what he's doing in his pursuit of Manitou.'

'If the laws of your country cannot punish him -' Morning Star's brow puckered - 'why would he lie and say he had not killed the old man? Crazy Bear has a thunder spirit that comes on him sometimes when he is angry, but he does not lie.' She shook her head. 'I will learn about the horses for you,' she went on. 'And I will ask Chased By Bears and Little Fish if they would seek him. But Manitou is not an easy man to find, if he does not wish it. And he can be dangerous to approach.'

'They don't have to approach him. Just let me know where he is.'

The young woman considered the matter for a time, sitting with her knees drawn up to her breast, her bare toes making small patterns in the dust of the shelter floor. 'I will ask,' she said again. 'But they may say, as I do, that these are other men's vengeances and have nothing to do with us. The more I hear of this, the less honorable it seems, for anyone who touches the matter. You should leave it.' She looked across at Hannibal. 'Both of you should leave it, husband. There will be no good in it for you.'

'A man doesn't leave his brother,' said January. 'And Tall Chief is my brother. And Boden killed his.'

Morning Star sighed and shook her head. 'I will ask,' she said. 'But this marrying of white men is more complicated than I thought.'



Because Charro Morales worked his store alone, without either a camp-setter or a clerk, once he'd waded across in the morning with a breakfast of corn mush and a couple of grouse - and asked if there was anything further he could get them - January and Frye saw nothing of the trader until early evening. Frye fretted about his traps and his horses - which Rob Prideaux had taken charge of - but in fact had sold up all his skins before setting forth on his ill-fated expedition to find the Secret Beaver Valley, and being of sober habits he had a considerable stock of credit to his name with the AFC.

To January's relief, Bo Frye proved to be a friendly and undemanding companion, although like many mountaineers he was unbelievably talkative when given a new listener. Another time January might have found the man's chatter irritating, but it served, in its way, to keep his mind off the gnawing worry about Shaw. Moreover, in-between tales of Frye's grandparents in Medfield, Massachusetts, his apprenticeship to a wheelwright uncle who had then moved to Ohio because of bad debts and a broken heart, and how he had answered the advertisement of the old Rocky Mountain Fur Company a few years back, to go into the mountains under Jim Bridger, the young trapper told stories of survival in the wilderness - Indians, sickness, and all; and of men January had met in the camp: Tom Fitzpatrick, Jim Bridger, Robbie Prideaux - that were comforting in their way. Men had been lost before, and had returned.

Mid-morning Pia paddled across to the island again, bringing with her part of a haunch of venison she'd won at poker and the news that neither Abishag Shaw nor Stewart's hunting party had returned to the camp. Neither had there been any word from Tom Fitzpatrick in his search for the missing Indian Agent, and the bets were running two-to-one at Seaholly's that Frye would be down sick by morning.

And which way are you betting?'

The girl looked offended, as if January had impugned her intelligence. 'Both ways,' she said. 'I got Mama to bet against, for noon, this evening, and tomorrow morning, and I'm betting for. Jed Blankenship said he'd fight any man who tried to put Poco in quarantine,' she added wisely, 'but I think that's because after this long, if Poco's quarantined, Jed'11 be next.' She'd gotten someone - probably the motherly Moccasin Woman - to make her a trim little vest out of a red shirt, and had sewed on it silver trinkets and a couple of pierced coins, in imitation of her mother and the other Mexican girls. Around her waist she wore a couple of silk sashes that looked as if they'd been cut from worn-out shawls, which gave her the look of a hummingbird masquerading in peacock's hand-me-downs.

'And Jed would rather go off in the woods and die,' suggested January, 'than share a forty-foot circle and a shelter with a black man?'

'Jed's a jackass.' Pia tossed her head, making her braids flop. 'Nobody else in the camp is sick. I asked everybody who came by the bar. Hannibal said to tell you that he found out from Mr Wallach what the three horses looked like that Mr Boden stole from the fort, and Morning Star went off to look for them . . . and he said it was a secret,' she added, when January put a finger to his lips. 'You don't need to worry about me, Ben. I'm true blue and will never stain.' She finger-marked an exaggerated cross on her flat chest. 'It's just that not having a clerk now except Hannibal, Mr Wallach is keeping him busy up there, so I'm minding the gambling tent. He'll be down tonight, he says, after it gets dark. Is there anything else I can get you, before I go back to the game?'

'Some whiskey for tonight would go good,' Frye put in. 'Morales come down on his prices any? Seaholly's, then,' he sighed, when the girl shook her head, and handed her a red- and-yellow AFC plew. 'There's a girl who's gonna make some man a fine wife,' he added, watching the thin little form dash away up the path, childlike for all her grown-up finery.

January grinned. 'Or break his heart.'

'Oh, they all do that,' said the young man, with an air of great wisdom. 'They all do that.'



Toward evening the northern skies began to cloud up, and Frye and January shifted tent and belongings up to the high ridge in the center of the island. Charro Morales came over to lend a hand, and though there was no evidence that the river had ever risen that far, offered sanctuary in his own quarters onshore. 'I won't tell if you won't. Sounds like a bad one coming in.' And he paused to listen to the grumble of far-off thunder.

'I appreciate that.' January tried to recall if he'd ever seen Morales in a black beaver hat with a chimney-pot crown to it. The man was one of the traders new to the rendezvous, and like the other newcomers - Gonzales who claimed to be from Santa Fe, and a taciturn man named Wynne who didn't seem to have a great deal of business sense - was being soundly drubbed in the marketplace by the AFC, despite the quality of his whiskey.

'You gonna take him up?' asked Frye, once they'd got the new fire pit dug. It was surprising how much difference the ten-foot rise at the center of the island made, in terms of exposure to the wind. 'If this turns out to be the time that the river does come up more'n fifteen feet, I for sure don't want to be sittin' up here when we find out about it.' And he looked down from the modest height at the two arms of the river - deep and shallow - rippling in the fading light. Across the shallower western channel, the lights of campfires twinkled beyond the trees of the bottomland; with the restless tossing of the cottonwoods, January was conscious of how far off those lights were.

He shifted the logs on the fire, throwing up a brighter glare and a cascade of sparks. 'I don't know.'

'You mind if I do?'

January hesitated, wondering what it was that was ringing alarm bells in his mind, then shook his head. 'Worst comes to worst, I can climb a tree,' he added, to lighten the air. 'Can't be worse than sitting out a hurricane in bayou country. And I'd rather not be turned out of the camp, if someone were to drop in unexpectedly.'

While Frye made coffee, January settled on an outcropping of the island's rocky bones and gazed across the wider eastern arm of the river, over the bottomlands and up at the shouldering foothills, the dark fringe of trees on the east side of the river where the coulees ran up into the mountains proper. I was raised in the mountains, Shaw had said . . .

He's fast, January reminded himself. He knows how to live off the land. And he was very, very tough.

Would that be enough?

How long do we wait, hoping for word? In another week, January knew, the rendezvous camps would start breaking up. Most of the trappers had finished their business already. The traders would head back toward Mexico or Missouri, mules laden with furs, hastening their steps to avoid snows that could fall as early as September in these high valleys. The trappers and their engages would begin the long trek toward new rivers to trap, new valleys to find where the beaver hadn't all been killed.

And if spring finds us in a war with England, thought January grimly, the logical place for the British to land their army will be New Orleans. Again.

'Well, you beat us there once,' remarked Hannibal, when he, Pia and Veinte-y-Cinco arrived - well after full dark - with a kettleful of supper and, as promised, a bottle of Seaholly's whiskey for Frye.

'Because General Pakenham was an idiot,' returned January. 'I can't imagine Parliament would appoint a general that stupid twice.'

'I have great faith in the rulers of my country.' The fiddler settled on a hunk of driftwood beside the fire while Pia and her mother got up a game of three-handed pinochle with Frye. 'I brought the letters.'

'Read them to me,' said January. 'Not just a summary - tell me what Bodenschatz actually tells his father, line by line.'

'Honored Father,' Hannibal read, and January bent his head and shut his eyes to listen. This is the man himself speaking, he thought. There has to be an answer there.

A description of Fort Ivy. Boden's contempt for the men among whom he found himself: trappers, muleteers, half-breed engages. Card-games and drinking, the same stories told a thousand times: I think I should burst into tears of joy, if a man came here who had read Shakespeare or Goethe, if I found one soul with whom I could speak even a broken fragment of what is in my heart . . .

His admiration for the 'wild' tribes who passed the fort to trade, whose honor is clean and who have not been corrupted by the Americans' obsessive greed and filthy ways. His disgust at the 'fort Indians': broken drunkards who will sell their wives and daughters for liquor . . .

Would that some great barrier, like the Wall of China, had been built the length of the frontier, to keep the Fur Companies, with their foul alcohol, their dirtiness and diseases, their corrupt and imbecilic 'Indian agents' and that great and filthy poison, Money, away from these savage, honest children of God, who know no Law but Rightness, as it is revealed to them in the magic of their dreams.

And from there, a long meditation upon his own dreams, and on the sacredness of Vengeance: Law is the whore of the rich, but here beyond the frontier, a Man does what he Must. . .

A doctrine that would appeal to a man in quest of vengeance. Don't you give me no law and Constitution, Tom Shaw had said. Evidently, Franz Boden agreed.

More prosaically, the second letter was filled with minute detail: put Gottsreich in charge of the greenhouses and the laboratory; sell your interest in the shop to Kleinsmark Apothekergeselleschaft; lay in a warm coat, some decent brandy (of which there is none in the whole of the United States), the green China tea and the African coffee. Take the diligence from Munich to Nuremberg, from Nuremberg to Weimar, complete with advice on which inns to put up at - clearly, January reflected, Franz Bodenschatz's own route - and then the steamer up the Elbe to Hamburg . . .

Purchase these things in New York - good boots, a pistol for your protection (Purdey is the most reliable maker) - then a steamer to New Orleans. January wondered how, upon reaching New York originally, the younger man had traced his sister's fleeing murderer. And he must have been young, January thought, if poor Katerina had just borne their second child when her husband had deserted her in pursuit of vengeance. Steamboat to Independence - lay in a good stock of liquor, fish hooks, trade-vermillion, mirrors. Join with one of the traders bound for Santa Fe - Merriwether has a reputation for honesty, as does Babbit, Becknell, McCoy . . .

I will be in the vicinity of Fort Laramie, watching for you. Hepplewhite and his men will meet us there . . .

'Could Hepplewhite be an Indian?'

Hannibal looked up from the letter. 'I can't imagine where such an Indian would have been born, if the first thing his parents saw to name him after was a chair.'

January laughed. 'A mission Indian,' he said. 'Who took a white man's name, like Moccasin Woman - whom nobody ever calls Mrs Bryan . . .'

Hannibal was still considering this when Morning Star appeared from the moonless dark, still shrugging herself back into her deerskin dress. 'Will you stay in the camp?' She looked downslope, gauging the river and the wind. 'It will come close to you. Whether or no, my husband, you and these ladies had best be crossing back soon. Can you hear the anger of the river?'

'Can we stay in your lodge?' January glanced across the fire at Frye, who was recounting with extravagant gesture and wild exaggeration a 'sea battle' between himself and two other canoe-gliding trappers against a war party of Arapaho on the Bighorn. 'We'll slip out by morning. Morales has offered us tent space, but until I see some kind of proof that he isn't actually Franz Bodenschatz, I'd rather sleep near someone I know. Did you find the horses?'

'I did,' said Morning Star grimly. 'They're in Iron Heart's camp.'

'The Omahas?' Hannibal's brows shot up. 'Of course, Iron Heart is a mission Indian, by the sound of his English, but they're the last people I'd have thought would be helping a white man. He hates all white men alike—'

'Because his people died of smallpox,' said January softly, 'down on the Platte . . .'

There was silence, broken only by the pounding of the river, the growl of the thunder in the north.

'One of the lodges in Iron Heart's camp isn't being used as a dwelling, either,' continued Morning Star after a time. 'I lay in the grass and watched the camp until it grew too dark to see. No one went into it or came out—'

'What is it that Bodenschatz tells his father to bring from Munich?' asked January, and Hannibal turned over the thin yellowish sheets of the notepaper.

'A warm coat, two kegs of decent brandy (Hennessy or Remy Martin), tea and coffee—'

'Exact words.'

'The green China tea,' read Hannibal, 'and the African coffee.'

'Who is he selling the shop to?' Above them, the cotton- woods bent with the sudden onslaught of wind; Frye got to his feet and walked a little ways toward the end of the island, listening too.

'We better be thinkin' about movin' if we're gonna. That river's comin' up fast.'

'Kleinsmark Apothekergeselleschaft . . .'

'Kleinsmark Apothecary Company,' translated January. 'And Klaus Bodenschatz needs to close up greenhouses and laboratories . . . Remember how his hands were stained? He was a chemist.'

Hannibal's eyes widened as he understood. 'Oh, Christ.'

'African coffee isn't coffee. Any more than Indian tobacco is really tobacco, or fool's parsley is really parsley. It's Ricinus communis - castor-oil bean - and poisonous as the gates of Hell.'

'You mean those folks didn't die of sickness?' Frye came back to the fire, silhouetted gold against the rushing dark, the wind whipping now at his long hair. 'I told you they mighta been poisoned. How'd this Boden fella manage to—'

He gasped suddenly, his eyes flaring wide, and even as January started to his feet, Morning Star shouted 'Run!’

Frye pitched forward on to the fire, an arrow in his back.