The Shirt On His Back

Chapter 23



It was a war camp, in a draw about two miles from the New Fork River and above the Green. There were no lodges.

January, at least, had managed to keep on his feet getting there behind the horses; he still wasn't sure how. After Hannibal had fallen and been dragged for a few hundred feet, the warrior in charge of the party - January thought he was Dark Antlers, one of the two who had come into the camp with Iron Heart when they'd viewed old Klaus Bodenschatz's body - had had him slung over one of the ponies like a dead deer and carried into the camp that way.

Iron Heart's orders, January guessed.

There were about fifteen warriors in the party that took them, not counting the four Shaw killed. They were tied, wrists and ankles, with rawhide thongs and left on the ground close enough to the fire that they could be seen. Only by the motion of Hannibal's sides could January tell that he was alive at all. The single woman at the war camp brought pemmican to all the warriors and led the ponies down to water further along the coulee, before - rather circumspectly - she approached the prisoners. The warriors watched her, but didn't interfere. It was Veinte-y-Cinco.

'They've sent for Boden,' she murmured, dropping to her knees beside January and filling her tin drinking-cup from the waterskin she carried. 'Iron Heart and the others are still out looking for you - there's about forty in the band. Dark Antlers -' she nodded at the warrior who had led the raid - 'speaks English; many of them do. There was a mission school near their village's hunting grounds on the Platte. A lot of them were baptized Christians - Protestants,' she added with a dismissive grimace, like the good Catholic she was, 'and have English names.'

'Is Iron Heart's name Hepplewhite?'

She looked startled, then nodded and brushed back the straggling tendrils of her hair. 'Matthew Hepplewhite. It was the name of one of his sponsors when he was baptized. He was called Eagle Heart by his parents. When they died, he said, his heart turned to iron in his breast. Some of them speak Spanish, too.' She rubbed - gingerly - a cut on her chin.

'Let me see that. . .' Even in the flicker of the small Indian fire, it was clear to him she'd been beaten. Probably, January guessed, raped as well.

Her mouth twisted in a sidelong expression as she read his thought in his voice and replied, 'Nothing I didn't get from my daddy and his drunk friends, a long time before I met Mick Seaholly. I'm not a little flower, Ben. Like a fool, I tried to get off a shot, and the powder didn't flash. I should have headed straight for the river like you did. By the time I ran for it they were coming in from both sides of the island. Pia got away.' Her voice wavered, ever so slightly, as she said it: hope that dared not speak its own name, lest it break what strength was left her. Briskly, she went on, 'They put me on a horse and came straight after you.'

January turned his head to look at where the others lay. He could see Shaw's eyes were open - the man must have a skull like granite - but Hannibal hadn't stirred. 'See the others are all right,' he said softly. 'Thank you for the water.' No sense asking her the intentions of their captors: those were clear enough, in Dark Antlers's eyes when he glanced their way. There was a chance they'd take Veinte-y-Cinco with them when they rode on, if the band was short of women. He'd heard how captive women were sometimes treated, and it seemed to depend on the personalities of the Indians involved, and how ready the woman was to settle in to become a drudge like the Indian women mostly were.

He watched her now, kneeling beside Hannibal with her dark hair hanging down over her face like a curtain, sponging his bloodied face with a corner of her torn skirt. Hannibal, who'd done nothing, sought neither profit nor vengeance, but had joined the party on the off-chance that he could be of some use to his friends.

Hooves in the darkness. Veinte-y-Cinco's long nose caught the firelight as she swiveled on her heels. A dozen riders came into camp, bareback on their painted horses. The woman rose at once and went to bring food to the warriors, to lead the horses away to where a fair-sized herd, by the sound of it, was tethered among the trees upslope. She had clearly learned her duties in the camp and probably guessed that making herself useful was her only chance to avoid being killed with the men. Iron Heart turned in their direction, said something to Dark Antlers. Dark Antlers clearly reported that five men had been killed in taking the prisoners, and the war chief's pock-marked face twisted with anger. He strode toward them; when Veinte-y-Cinco came out of the darkness and asked him something he simply struck her aside, with such force that she fell.

He kicked Shaw twice, full force in the ribs, dropped to his knees beside him, dragged him up into a seated position by his long hair and shook him, his knife in his hand. 'Who have you told about Boden?' he demanded. 'Who else knows?'

'I don't know,' replied Shaw quietly. 'Didn't take much work for us to guess. Likely, others did, too.'

'What others?'

'You gonna go after an' kill them, too?'

'Yes.' The chief's face was like a wooden mask, half eaten- away with acid. 'If I must.'

'But your plan was to kill everyone,' said January. 'Wasn't it?'

Iron Heart looked toward him, his knife blade still laid on Shaw's throat. 'Yes,' he said. Then he shoved Shaw away from him to the ground.

'Although most of the people in the camp weren't anywhere near the South Platte when your family died.'

'It is not vengeance only for my family, white man.' Iron Heart crossed to where January lay, stood over him in the firelight, his bare chest, bare arms, silver knife-blade clothed in the low red light. 'Or only for my people, lying among their lodges with their bodies eaten up by birds and animals, dying so swiftly there was none to sing their death songs nor to remember their names as they died. Since I was a boy not old enough to gather firewood by myself, I have seen those whom the white man has pushed out of their homes: the Delaware who lived by the Eastern Sea, the Cherokee, the Houmas. They passed through our land, and they all said the same: the white man is too lazy to build fences, so his pigs and his cattle wander to eat the crops in our villages; the white man has ruined his land with growing cotton, so now he needs fresh land to ruin. And we must move, because we are not Christians. And even when we are Christians, we are not civilized. And even when we live in houses and print newspapers and go to school and read books . . . Because we are enemies. And even when we have sworn friendship and had it sworn us in return by the men that the white men elect to represent them . . . What does the white man want us to be?'

Passion twisted his voice for a moment, but his ruined face remained impassive, as if the scars went through the skin and flesh to the nerve and the bone. 'He wants us to be dead,' he finished, 'so that he can take our land, which is what he meant all along to do. Do you deny this, black white man?'

'No,' said January. 'I do not deny it.'

'If another man killed your wife and ate her body for his dinner, would you seek revenge on him?'

'I don't know.'

'Then you are no man. If he came to you with her blood on his hands and stood before you and laughed in your face, would you strike him down?'

January sighed. 'Yes. Yes, I would.'

'And when he lay before you, would you kill him?'

'I would,' said January, knowing it to be true. 'But I would not kill his brother, who had been home sleeping in his own bed when his murder took place. Was it Boden who asked you to help him seek his revenge, or you who asked Boden?'

'It was Boden who came to me.' The warrior's dark eyes narrowed behind scar-thick lids. 'After the white man's sickness had burned itself out, I and what remained of my people came north. We meant to go on into the mountains. But the first snows found us still on the plains, taking buffalo. We wintered near Fort Ivy, and talk of the sickness was still on every man's lips. Counts Things - the chief of the fort—'

Had he not been in fear for his own life and those of his friends, January would have smiled at the name the Indians had given Tom Shaw.

'—asked me: would my people become trappers for Ivy and Wallach? I grew angry, and in my anger I spoke my heart: that I would sooner die than work for the white men. The deaths of my wife and my parents were new to me then. I said that I would have vengeance on the white men, whatever the cost, for the ruin they had brought to my people and my world.'

He was silent a moment, as if the remembering of it took him back to that smoke-stained blockhouse chamber, that isolated quadrangle of logs on the windswept hillside above Rawhide Creek. To bitter night and marble-hard snow and the comfortless moon that had watched his grief uncaring.

The last of the search parties had ridden into the camp while Iron Heart spoke, and the men were bedding down in their buffalo robes. A few, January noticed, knelt and folded their hands in Christian prayer.

'Boden came to our village that night. He said that the trapper called Manitou had murdered his sister, away in the country of the white men beyond the ocean. The white man's law had not hanged him for this crime, and so he, Boden, had been seeking him across half the world. You have seen Manitou and know that he is like a spirit bear, swift and hard to catch. The mountains are great and go on for many months' journeying to the desert, and to the sea beyond that. Boden knew that to trap one man in all this land, he must have Indians who knew the land and how to hunt.'

Softly, January said, 'And Boden knew Manitou would be coming to the rendezvous. It's the one time he knew where he would be.'

'To kill the deer, one does not lie out on a dry hillside,' returned Iron Heart. 'One goes to water and waits for the deer to come down.'

'And from saying you would sooner die than become a hunter for the white men,' said January, 'you became a hunter for a white man.' And when Iron Heart's face twisted with anger, January went on: 'What did he promise you for this? The deaths of other white men?'

'The deaths of them all. The trappers who strip our streams of the beaver people who have lived there in peace since the moon was young . . . The traders who sell liquor to my people - not Omaha, not Sioux, not Shoshone, but all my people, all the people of this land! - and make them silly and drunk so that they give away not only the furs they have trapped, but also their wives and their horses and the clothes from off their backs . . . The whites who bring in disease, whose touch rots the land. If I cannot kill all of them, I would see as many of them die as I can. This is what he promised.'

By the fire, Dark Antlers and the other men glanced at their chief and his prisoners; there was only one of them not visibly scarred by the smallpox. They were grouped around the bodies of the five warriors January and Shaw had knifed in the fight by the river: brothers and friends.

'His father was a medicine man, he said,' Iron Heart went on. 'He would bring a sickness medicine from across the ocean and would mix it with the white man's liquor on a night when Manitou was in the camp. For this reason he let it be known that he had the best liquor in the camp, so that when he gave it away free, all would drink it. This he planned to do after you fought Manitou, save that the man Blankenship angered Manitou and sent him from the camp in great rage. The old father had been staying among us with his poison. He had said to me that day that he wished to poison only Manitou, and not the others. I told him that this was not our bargain, that all must die. Before Dark Antlers and I went to watch the fight, the old man and I had angry words. When I came back to the village later, I found he was gone.'

'And he met Manitou,' said January softly, with a sudden sense of having seen someone turn right, whom he had expected to turn left. Ridiculous, he thought, considering that he and his friends sat in the open mouth of the wolf . . . 'Did his son go with him, then? He was at the fight—'

In his mind January saw Charro Morales in his crimson jacket, making his horse caracole and shouting: 'Free liquor tonight, if Wildman wins!''

And every man in the camp had cheered. 'Boden remained in the camp. He never came to our tents while daylight was in the sky, or any man moved about awake.'

'Then—' January frowned, trying to fit times together: the start of the rain, the time of the shots. The dry inside of the roof wrought of boughs. 'Do you know what time the old man left your camp? At sunset? Before?'

'You speak like a fool,' snapped the warrior impatiently. 'You will die, and then you can seek out the old medicine man and ask him yourself. And I, I care not when the old man came to die, but only that my vengeance on those who killed my people be accomplished. It will be soon,' he added quietly, 'and I will walk through their camp as they are dying and ask them: are you happy now, that you came into our lands?’ He glanced toward the bound men, lying still as the dead in the shadows just beyond the small gem of the fire, and a bitter smile moved his lips. 'It will please me, to make a beginning tonight.'

He walked away. An owl passed close over the camp, wings silent as the wings of Death; somewhere in the darkness some small thing squeaked in pain.

I am a fool. January lay down again on his side. Only a fool would be troubled over that sense of a pattern broken, a detail disturbed, when the next hour would bring death in agony. Patiently, agonizingly, he began to work his wrists back and forth against the rawhide: it's leather. It will stretch . . .

He wondered if Shaw were doing the same.

We have to warn the camp . . .

Boden would find some other occasion to broach his kegs of very expensive liquor, to keep Iron Heart's good will. He would need it, for the long hunt ahead through the wilderness. With those deaths, Iron Heart would be obligated to fulfill his part of the bargain.

He twisted at the rawhide, until his fingers lost their feeling. On the mountainside the wolves howled, cold voices in the cold and empty darkness. I have to succeed in this. I can't let Rose spend the next year wondering what became of me. 1 won't let her raise our child alone, as Bodenschatz made his poor Katerina raise hers . . .

What had old Klaus Bodenschatz made of it, traveling all those thousands of miles at his son's behest? Ship and packet boat and steamboat up the brown Missouri, the dirty clamor of Independence after the quiet cobblestones of Ingolstadt? He was a scientist. Had he missed his greenhouses and his laboratory, the quiet order of his days? Had he carried a notebook, full of observations and descriptions?

Had there been some friend waiting for him, whose voice he'd conjured for himself in those lonely miles? His son's deserted wife, his grandchildren? Or had he, like Franz, honed his life to a weapon of vengeance for that lovely daughter for whom he had never ceased to wear mourning?

He wished to poison only Manitou, Iron Heart had said. And when Iron Heart and Dark Antlers had gone to watch the fight, the old man had left the Omaha camp - for the first time since coming to the valley, January knew: probably for the first time since he had joined the village back on the high plains. Had crossed Horse Creek on that fallen tree and scrambled up the wooded ridge . . .

And now he lay in a shallow grave.

Beneath his cheek, January felt the distant tremor of hooves.

Boden.

And when I can't give them any specific information about who might or might not know about the scheme to poison every man at the rendezvous, they'll start by carving up Hannibal - who, like old Bodenschatz, had wanted only to do the office of friendship . . .

He turned to look toward his friend and saw, to his astonishment, that Hannibal was gone.