The Shirt On His Back

Chapter 28



In the Ivy and Wallach camp on the banks of the Green late that night - after a ride of some twelve miles over the hills back to the rendezvous - Shaw, Hannibal and January unpacked the rest of Franz Bodenschatz's camp chest.

The rendezvous was breaking up. Some of the men would continue to camp along the Green for another week or two, but the high summer was passing. The weather would be bitter by the time McLeod and his traders got back to the headwaters of the Columbia, and snow would fly before some of the independents found the high valleys where there were sufficient beaver to justify a winter camp.

The Indians were leaving, too. 'It is time for the Fall buffalo- hunt,' Morning Star said, when she'd embraced Hannibal, Shaw and January in turn as they'd dismounted before her lodge in the twilight. 'I'm so glad you returned before our departure.' She kissed Hannibal again, with the warm affection of a wife of years' standing, and added, 'And that you were not killed, of course. Will you hold one more feast for my brothers, Sun Mouse, before we leave?'

'With all the pleasure in the world, beautiful lady.' Even Gil Wallach, who came from his own tent with exclamations of joy and relief at the travelers' return, didn't object.

When they went into the lodge, January could see that Morning Star was already packed to go. Her small cooking gear was bundled up, her drying racks disassembled and tied together. She had, to January's great astonishment, thought to steal one of the packets stored in Klaus Bodenschatz's lodge in the Omaha camp before she'd burned it, which made things a great deal easier when the camp's chief citizens came calling. Even as Morning Star and Pia were making supper - the girl had run all the way from Seaholly's, but had not, January was later informed, neglected to set a guard on her faro table - Titus, McLeod, Stewart, Bridger and Tom Fitzpatrick came up the trail.

They listened unmoved to Franz Bodenschatz's furious counter-accusations against Manitou and Shaw, then viewed the dead man's assembled garments with the watchful intelligence of men - like the Crow warriors - whose lives depended on inference from small details. Bridger and Fitzpatrick were in favor of rough justice then and there, and it took all of Shaw's arguments to convince them to let the man be taken back to Missouri for trial. In this, Stewart, McLeod and Titus seconded him: the former two out of an innate sense of law, the latter because Shaw took him quietly behind the tipi and threatened to reveal who had hired Walks Before Sunrise and his band of Crow to ambush stragglers on their way back to the mountains.

'Can you prove it?' Titus asked narrowly. 'About Morales - Bodenschatz, I mean.' He glowered at Shaw in the distant light of the supper fire. 'That nonsense about the Company paying the Crow to cause trouble is pure fantasy.'

'Well, I thought as much,' assented Shaw mildly. 'So'd Mr Goodpastor - who's ridin' the first day or two back to the Yellowstone country with 'em.'

January - who'd followed the Lieutenant and Titus back behind the lodge for this conversation - wondered if the words that Edwin Titus so violently bit back at that point had anything to do with the barrels of AFC gunpowder and the thirty AFC rifles for which he would now receive nothing. But Titus hadn't risen to his present position with the Company by saying what was in his mind.

'I think we have more than enough evidence to hang Bodenschatz when we get to Missouri,' January interpolated comfortably. 'Was anything taken from his tent, sir, while he was away?'

The end of Titus's cigar glowed momentarily, a gold eye in the darkness. 'When he headed out of here two nights ago - that'd be, I guess, when he got word you and Sefton had been took by the Omahas - he paid a couple of my boys to keep an eye on his stores. Doesn't look like that stopped Moccasin Woman from walking into his tent, though. You can have a look through the place tomorrow. I'll square Bridger and Fitz, to keep this quiet.'

When supper was done, and Robbie Prideaux set to guard Bodenschatz, the three companions retreated to the lodge to go through the camp chest for whatever else of interest it might contain.



'This should probably do it.' Hannibal thumbed through the thin packet of letters he'd taken from the back of one of Bodenschatz's ledgers. 'I'll need to go over them more carefully—Manitou,' he added, as the big trapper ducked in through the doorway of the lodge,'—can you still read enough Bavarian to translate? But it looks like old Klaus wasn't any too happy with Franz's scheme even before he saw little Pia playing in the meadow with flowers in her hair. Is there no other bargain which can be struck? he asks here - dated December of last year, just before he leaves Ingolstadt. And here: my heart goes out to these unfortunate savages, yet their vengeance is no affair of ours. But in the next sentence he says he can bring about thirty pounds of powdered castor-bean -1 suppose that's why Franz kept this particular letter - and that it should be enough to poison everyone in the camp ten times over. It is the price that must be paid:

'It is the price that must be paid: echoed January wonderingly. 'Just like that. Hand over poison to kill six or seven hundred men . . .'

Manitou settled cross-legged by the fire, turned the papers over in his huge hands. 'He was a good man,' he said softly. 'He hired me, that Mina might become a doctor . . . There wasn't a malicious bone in the whole of his body. Don't know how many times I played cards with him . . .' He shook his head, rubbed his forehead as if trying to clear away some shadow from his eyes. 'I thought he'd be my father-in-law.' And his hand went, almost without the appearance of conscious thought, to knead his left arm, where the old man's bullet had plowed through the flesh. 'Thing is ... I don't feel this evil in me. I don't think that I ever would do such a thing . . . except that I know I did:

Hannibal said, 'But yet I could accuse me of such things that it were better that my mother had not borne me ... I don't suppose he thought he'd turn poisoner, either, if you'd asked him fifteen years ago.'

'If I could do that,' the trapper went on. 'Could turn him from the man he was into someone who'd make a bargain like that - maybe it's just as well that I do hang.'

'You already had one trial.' Shaw folded his long arms around his knees. 'Or, at least, one set of judges declared it weren't your fault.'

'An' sent me to a madhouse,' replied Manitou. 'I think I'd rather hang than go to another.'

'What was Franz like in those days?' January lifted from the bottom of the chest an octavo volume of Shakespeare in translation - Hamlet, Lear, Othello and Macbeth - and another of The Sorrows of Young Werther. 'His sister must have spoken of him.'

'She didn't, much.' Manitou's single bar of brow furrowed at old memories. 'She'd laugh at the letters he'd write her every day - joked that his wife Katerina would get jealous. Their pa said he once beat up a local boy that courted her—'

He broke off as January lifted from the very bottom of the box, where they'd been beneath the books, a pair of women's gloves - faded pink - and, creased and folded, a batiste chemise embroidered with lilies, white upon white. 'Them was Mina's,' he whispered.

'Were they, indeed?' With them was a locket, such as old Klaus had worn in his waistcoat pocket. The picture inside wasn't as accurate, but idealized and ethereal. January guessed it had been done after her death. It also contained a lock of her hair.

'She said he was jealous,' murmured Manitou after a time, and he turned the glove over in clumsy fingers hardened by pack ropes and trap springs. 'Jealous of me. Jealous of her love.' He looked aside. "Bout time I went back, I guess. Let him have his say in a court of law. 'Cause I sure can't say the right an' the wrong of it.'

'No.' Shaw shook his head and sat considering the face of the girl in the locket and the chemise that her brother had saved. Had brought to the New World with him, when he had carried pictures of neither his children nor his wife. The Kentuckian's thin, ugly face looked tired, with a haggardness it hadn't shown during pursuit through the wilderness, or wading icy torrents, or as a prisoner in the camp of vengeful savages, and there was a sadness in his eyes. As if, January thought, this whole thing were just one of the cases he solved in New Orleans, the fox tracks of grief and sin and rage that he'd only stumbled across in pursuit of his calling. 'No, I ain't sure as how anyone can.'



In the afternoon, as January was helping Morning Star butcher out an elk for that night's feast, Veinte-y-Cinco came to the camp to bid the Indian woman goodby. 'You go back Taos?' Morning Star asked, in the rather shaky English that Hannibal had been teaching her, and Veinte-y-Cinco nodded.

'Hell, Mick and I know one another,' she sighed. 'I don't give him trouble when he drinks, and he don't give me trouble when I don't.' She held out to the younger woman a necklace strung with silver coins and a silver cross. 'I want you to have this, corazón.'

'You can come to New Orleans with us,' offered Hannibal as his bride joyfully put on the new ornament and kissed everyone in sight. January suspected, by the wistful note in his voice, that the fiddler would miss his Sioux wife very much, despite the fact that both knew that neither could survive in the other's world. 'I don't think Shaw would mind an extra rider.'

Veinte-y-Cinco smiled and laid her thin palm to his cheek. 'That's sweet of you, Sun Mouse. But I know Taos. And what would an old whore like me do in New Orleans, up against so many that're pretty and young? But if it's true Mr Shaw wouldn't mind another rider—' She glanced, a little shyly, toward the store tent, where Shaw was helping Gil Wallach pack and count the unsold goods, and then back at January. 'Would you take Pia? She's got nothing waiting for her in Taos but what I've got. Last year I almost sent her off with those missionaries that came through here, but she was so young then ... I thought I could keep her another few years. But after what happened with that bastard skunk Titus . . . Would you take her? Take her and see to it she gets work with a good family, who'll look after her? The world is hard,' she finished softly.

'My wife'11 look after her,' promised January. 'After you fetched Moccasin Woman to the Crow camp - when you very well might have run off and left us - we owe you that and as much more as you care to ask.'

That night the whole of the Ogallala village came to the feast - joined by large numbers of Delaware, Crow, Shoshone, and also by Asa Goodpastor, who'd ridden into camp that afternoon. 'First time I've had a banquet to celebrate a divorce,' Hannibal remarked, incongruous in his much-battered frock- coat with feathers braided into his long hair. 'Something I should do more often.' But January guessed, as the liquor went around, that the fiddler would have liked to get drunk, to forget that he was leaving her. He played instead, as stories said Compair Lapin had played, calling the stars down out of the sky and the Devil up from Hell: Irish airs and Mozart dances, sweet wild tunes that seemed to flow upward into the Milky Way, all that he could give this girl in farewell.

In the morning, before the mist was off the river, the tribes were gone.

Hannibal spoke little through the day as the Ivy and Wallach men broke their camp. He seemed anxious and nervous, as he had when first he'd ceased taking opium, but the mundane work of packing seemed to steady him. Robbie Prideaux and his partners brought Franz Bodenschatz with them and left him tied to a tree while they assisted. 'You're taking a chance with that one,' warned Goodpastor quietly as he took January aside.

The German sat on the ground by his tree reading Goethe - silent and as contemptuous of the men around him, as Tom Shaw said he had been at Fort Ivy . . . but every time January looked at him, he felt the hair lift on his nape.

Although Shaw was helping Gil Wallach pack furs, January noticed that the Kentuckian never got where he couldn't see his prisoner, and never let his rifle out of instant reach of his hand. He had stayed awake guarding Bodenschatz for two nights now. January guessed he was expecting something, too.

'Any suggestions?'

'Hell.' Goodpastor grinned crookedly. 'If I knew what he was planning to try I wouldn't be twitchy.' His bright-blue eyes went from Shaw back to Bodenschatz, who after his bitter imprecations and curses thrown at Titus and McLeod that first night, had said little to anyone. 'It's six weeks back to the settlements. Tall Chief's gotta sleep sometime.'

'I'll do what I can.' Though January guessed that writing was something of a labor to Shaw, he knew that the man had patiently prepared a stack of affidavits - from Poco, Moccasin

Woman (under her English name, with no mention of her race), Morning Star, Hannibal and everyone else he could find - as to the circumstances of the deaths of Klaus Bodenschatz, Clemantius Groot, Goshen Clarke and the Dutchman's three camp-setters, and had gotten Goodpastor to sign and notarize them.

He hoped this would be enough for Tom Shaw.

'And you watch out, especially for that little girl.' Pia and her mother waved to them as they came up the path from the AFC camp, where tents were being struck also: furs weighed, plew-sticks tallied. Pia, too, had been quiet all day, and it crossed January's mind to wonder if Johnny Shaw was the only child to dream about running away with the Indians. Today she looked very grown-up, in her red vest and a new skirt, with one of Morning Star's beaded necklaces around her throat.

'Don't you let her get anywheres near him,' said Goodpastor quietly.

'I won't.' January's instincts told him that whoever else Shaw might sacrifice, to bring his brother's killer to justice, a threat to the child would render him helpless.

Bodenschatz would know that, too.

But on the following morning, when the Ivy and Wallach train was preparing to leave, Pia couldn't be found. Shaw had sat awake a third night guarding Bodenschatz, and he attested that the girl had had no contact with the prisoner. She'd come back to the camp past midnight with Hannibal, after doing a land-office business on her final evening dealing faro in front of Seaholly's.

'Scarcely surprising, considering the number of eleventh- hour customers waiting in line,' added the fiddler, who had spent the evening alternately playing chess with Sir William Stewart and making music for men who would hear nothing for the next eleven months but wolves howling and the chants of Indians. 'I understand she and Jed Blankenship, working in concert, took three hundred dollars off John McLeod at vingt-et-un.'

The child had slept close to the fire, near Hannibal and Manitou. Her blankets, folded neatly, had been there when Manitou had woken at the first whisper of light.

'What do you expect?' said Bodenschatz, when he heard of the matter. 'The girl is a whore.'

Hannibal and Prideaux went out to search the camp, while the rest of the party loaded the mules. 'We can't wait long, if she ain't found,' warned Goodpastor. 'I'd search that skunk Titus's tent, myself—'

'Given that McLeod's watchin' like a hawk for somethin' to cause the Company grief,' Shaw said, returning from a careful inspection of the ground all around the campsite, 'I think he'd be too smart to try anythin', though there's no sayin'. Anyways,' he added grimly, 'by the sign it looks like she walked away from the camp alone.'

It was Hannibal who brought the news, hastening back down the path from the Hudson's Bay compound. 'A couple of McLeod's engages saw her leaving camp at first light,' he said, pressing his hand to his side. 'With Jed Blankenship.'

Into the stunned silence which followed, January said, 'Blankenship?’

And tied to his tree, the prisoner sat down and laughed uproariously at the consternation in his jailer's voice.

'She kept company with him, Prideaux says, while her mother was away.' Hannibal sat on one of the rocks that surrounded what was left of the fire pit. 'And with Edwin Titus, evidently. The men who saw her leave say she was laughing with Blankenship; riding one of his horses, and making jokes with his engages. It doesn't sound as if she was forced.'

'She's thirteen—'

Hannibal only looked up at him with weary eyes. They both knew whores in New Orleans younger than that.

'Hell, I was thirteen when I left the settlements,' said Prideaux, with a trace of sadness in his voice. 'I joined Fitzpatrick's brigade to go trap on the Popo Agie. An' for the same reason. There wasn't nobody much lookin' after me. An' it looked like a whale of a lot of fun.'



Nevertheless, Gil Wallach and - to his enormous and unexpected credit - Mick Seaholly delayed their departures from the much-trampled valley of the Green River for another forty- eight hours, while Prideaux, Manitou, Shaw and Asa Goodpastor scoured the hills, trying to pick Blankenship's trail out of the mazes of departing hoof-prints of independents, the early- leaving Hudson's Bay trappers and the numerous Indian villages heading north and east and south on the autumn hunts.

January and Hannibal spent most of the two days either guarding Franz Bodenschatz - who seemed glumly disinterested in anything other than how badly the world had treated him - or comforting Veinte-y-Cinco.

'The girl was a whore,' was all Bodenschatz would say. 'You could see it in her eyes. Why all the world weeps over a brat like that and lets the murderer of my beautiful sister go free . . .'

All he had asked for was his books - which he read and reread - and Mina's gloves, portrait and chemise. These he kept inside his clothing, next to his skin, and turned in smouldering disgust from January's attempts to draw him into speech.

Through most of the first day, Veinte-y-Cinco cried, on and off, and talked incessantly of her daughter. Again, to January's surprise, Mick Seaholly proved to be a patient listener - in-between working the bar - and doled out to her the hard comfort that: 'It ain't like she's turnin' her back on finishing school and engagement to some nice boy from Philadelphia, acushla.'

'I wanted something better for her,' the woman whispered, huddled against January's side in one of the makeshift crib- tents that had been temporarily reset, this one apart from the others. Even the most loutish of the trappers kept their distance.

January met the barkeep's wide, heaven-blue glance over her head.

'We all want somethin' better for other people,' said Seaholly dispassionately. 'But they go right on ahead and make their own mistakes, just like we do.'

By the second night, when the searchers returned with word that they hadn't been able to pick out Blankenship's tracks from the hundreds in all directions that they were mixed with, Luz Veinte-y-Cinco was able to thank them, and to let her daughter go.



It was four weeks down from the mountains, through the gap in the ranges called the South Pass, and across mile upon mile, day upon day, of arid scrubland to Fort Ivy. All the way, January was oppressed by a vague sense of failure and defeat. 'What would have given you a sense of success?' inquired Hannibal, when he spoke of it one night when they both had guard duty. 'Shooting Bodenschatz from behind a tree? Your success is that you'll come home.'

'With another two hundred dollars,' added January, trying to speak lightly. Trying not to think of what he'd seen daily in his heart: the house on Rue Esplanade closed up when he reached it, the frantic canvassing of neighbors. Seeing in his fears how their eyes would avoid meeting his: shall you tell him or shall I?

Rose . . .

Even on better days, he knew that Hannibal was absolutely right. The two hundred dollars barely mattered.

His success was that he'd come home.

And Rose would be ripe with their unborn child.

Virgin Mary Mother of God, he prayed to the desert stars, let it he so. It had been five months since he'd seen either her or a single line of her handwriting . . . Let it be so.

The desert stars made no reply.

Sitting on guard at the edge of the camp, his rifle in his hand, looking out across the silvery darkness of sagebrush and bunch grass for some break in the patterns of what he knew to be safe - jackrabbits, foxes, prairie dogs, kangaroo rats - he realized he would miss this open silence, this thin, free air. Far off he could still see the white peaks of the Wind River Mountains, glittering in the starlight: the Green River in which he'd almost drowned, the dry coulees where he'd almost starved, where he'd fought for his life against the Omaha and the Crow . . .

He'd miss those, too. No wonder the mountain trappers stayed in the mountains.

It wasn't only beaver that they sought in those valleys that whispered with the voices of the pines.

Beside the fire, Manitou slept - and dreamed of what? The medieval streets of a German University town? Or the empty world where he was safe from the danger that the thunder spirit in him would awake?

By daylight the big trapper kept close to the train, as if to reassure - or remind - Bodenschatz that he, too, was going back to the United States to face justice for what he had done. But as they moved east and the endless pale-yellow miles stretched on, he became more and more uneasy. 'We should be seein' Indians by this time,' he said one evening, as the engages were setting camp. 'This's the time of their Fall hunt. Plain should be crawlin' with 'em. I ain't even seen sign, have you?'

Both Shaw and Goodpastor shook their heads.

Shaw was quieter also as they put the miles behind them. He took his turn at scouting, but January could tell it bothered him to let Bodenschatz out of his sight, and most nights he would stay awake, watching him. Having risked his brother's anger for the sake of doing justice, January guessed, he lived with the dread that something would go wrong and leave him bereft of both justice and revenge. And if that happened - as he had once said to Manitou - he stood to lose not one brother, but two: all the family that remained to him in the world.

For his part, the prisoner had little to say for himself, and what little he did was mostly sarcasm: 'If to destroy me, I have made that beast take himself back to justice,' he remarked on one occasion, 'then I have accomplished my aim.' When he wasn't reading - and he scorned Hannibal's small volume of Shakespeare's comedies - he watched Manitou with glittering eyes. 'I will confess whatever you ask me to,' he said on another evening to Goodpastor. 'Just so that you bring him also to the scaffold and let me tell in open court the things that man has done.'

But January thought that as they went east, Shaw was bracing himself.

Tom Shaw met them at the gate of Fort Ivy, his narrow face dark with shock, anger and disbelief as he saw who rode in their train. 'What the hell you think you're doin', bringin' that piece of pig snot back with you?' he demanded, when Shaw dismounted and helped Bodenschatz from the saddle. He turned and struck Shaw open-handed across the face. 'Where the hell you think you are, brother? New Orleans? Goddam Philadelphia? You think any jury back in the States is gonna convict a man for shootin' another way the hell and gone out past the frontier?'

'I do, yes,' replied Shaw in his mild voice. 'I said I'd bring him to justice—'

'There ain't gonna be no justice for what he done to Johnny!' retorted Tom. 'You think twelve "good citizens" is gonna care about somethin' that happened out here? Like God Himself could even find twelve good men in Independence—'

'Been awhile since you been to Independence, sir,' Goodpastor broke in. 'It's settled some, and there's enough men there who'll convict a man, if not of killin' your brother, then of killin' his own father - which is what we got plenty of evidence for, an' affidavits, too. Not to speak of plottin' with the savages to murder every man in the rendezvous. Believe me, he'll hang.'

'You stay outta this.' Tom Shaw barely glanced at the older man. 'I don't give spit in a whirlwind about what-all else he done. This's blood. An' we was brought up - / was brought up - that blood wins out, over what twelve "good citizens" or the whole damn Constitution of the United States might say ... or might not. I was brought up not to take chances with your blood.'

He took the pistol from his belt, and Shaw stepped between its barrel and Bodenschatz. Tom reached to thrust him out of the way, and Shaw, his face a careful blank, thrust back. 'We had enough murder here,' he said. 'Seven white men an' a woman, killed 'cause of another man's revenge, not to speak of a score of Indians who got dragged into it just through bein' there. It needs to stop.'

'No, brother,' said Tom quietly and lowered the pistol to his side. 'We's one death short.'



They camped outside Fort Ivy for two nights. Shaw and January divided their time in guarding Bodenschatz while Goodpastor and Hannibal negotiated for supplies. The engages who'd traveled to the rendezvous with them were clearly troubled by the whole affair: 'En effet,' said Clopard to Shaw, when he helped Manitou carry out sacks of flour and cornmeal to be loaded on to the mules, 'what does it matter, eh? It isn't like anybody will know, or come after you.'

'Nope,' agreed Shaw, and he shifted his rifle across his knees. 'It ain't.'

Tom Shaw never crossed the twenty yards of open ground that lay between the fort's gates and the camp, or as far as January could tell, even came as far as the gate. Gil Wallach spoke to each of the brothers once, about settling their affairs with one another: 'You think how long it is, from New Orleans out to here, Abe. You think of all that happens out here. You really want to risk never seein' your brother again, for the sake of justice to a stranger who so far as I can tell is pretty much a murderin' weasel?'

Shaw leaned his head back against the thin trunk of the lodgepole pine by which he sat - one of the small clump of trees near the fort, where in other years the local Indians would have been camped by this time - and repeated: 'For the sake of justice. I have lived where there's no justice, Gil.' For a time he sat in silence, then added, 'An' I have lived where I had no brother. I'll think on what you say.'

But January guessed he wouldn't.

It was from Wallach, too, that January learned why they'd seen no hunting parties as they'd crossed the high plains back to the Fort: 'There's smallpox in the tribes, all up and down the river. It started among the Mandans at Fort Clark - there was a couple cases in the deck passengers on a steamboat that come through. Now there's ten, twenty a day dyin'. Blackfeet, Minnetarees, Arikara, Assiniboin . . . they've all got it now. Whole villages wiped out, wolves an' rats eatin' the dead among the lodges.'

'Looks like our friend Iron Heart was a little ahead on his revenge,' said Manitou quietly.

Wallach bristled like a miffed porcupine. 'Well, it wasn't us that did it. Not the folks at the rendezvous, I mean, nor the trappers—'

'No,' sighed Manitou. 'It never is. Didn't mean to say it was.' He turned and walked away from the camp then, out on to the prairie: silent, open grassland that would never thereafter be the same. The tribes were dying. There weren't even buffalo to be seen. Only dry wind, and heat.

Bodenschatz called out angrily to January, 'You gonna let him just run off like that? You gonna let him get away, just 'cause he's a friend?'

'Oh, shut up,' said January, weary to his back teeth of vengeance and anger, hate and death. 'He isn't going anywhere.' He wondered if Morning Star and her family were still alive, or Silent Wolf and his Blackfeet, or Walks Before Sunrise . . .

And knew that there was not the slightest likelihood that he would ever find out.



Manitou was silent when the train moved out the next morning, on the worn trail down toward the distant Platte. The beaten trace snaked like a blonde ribbon, visible for miles in the brown distance and rutted now with the wheels of the big immigrant wagons. January was conscious that among the debris of the trading caravans along the ruts, there were objects that could only have been thrown out by those seeking Oregon land. A broken spinning-wheel, like the echoes of a woman's voice. A small trunk of books. Anything to lighten the load as the dry air shrank the wood of axles never designed for these high plains and the ox teams broke their sinews at labor . . .

'More of 'em this year,' remarked Goodpastor. 'Fleein' the bank crash, probably. Headin' for free land in Oregon.'

'And they took their journey from Elim,' quoted Hannibal, 'and all the congregation of the children of Israel came unto the wilderness . . . where God obligingly slaughtered everyone they met for them.' It was the closest he came, in all that journey, to speaking of Morning Star.

'That's gonna sit well with the British.' Shaw edged his horse over beside the Indian Agent's, his pale eyes in their worn dark circles never leaving the sharply rolling land, the dry watercourses and the empty skylines. 'Get enough settlers in that territory, we ain't gonna need the American Fur Company startin' schemes with the Crow to get us into another war with England. Settlers'11 do it every time.'

'An' now their king's dead -' this news had also been waiting for them at Fort Ivy - 'I doubt that little niece of his - what's her name?'

'Victoria.'

'I doubt that little gal's gonna go startin' any wars over fur.' Goodpastor shook his head. 'Independence'11 be crawlin' with 'em.'

'Good.' On his led horse, his hands still tied to the saddle tree, Bodenschatz turned cold eyes on Manitou. 'That way it will need no testimony of mine to prove that the judgement against him in Germany was unjust, a fraud by the rich. You had best watch him, when he gets among civilized men. You who keep me bound, who keep watch on me with a rifle, as if I were some kind of dangerous criminal - you will see your mistake. He is the one who—'

The crack of the rifle seemed very small in the dry hugeness of the scrubland; like a firecracker, January thought, even as the prisoner's body arched backward with the impact, mouth popping open, eyes staring in shock at the sky. Shaw wheeled his horse at once, scanning the horizon for dust while January flung himself from his saddle, caught Bodenschatz as he sagged sideways. The prisoner's wrists were still tied to the saddle, and by the time January had got them cut free Bodenschatz was dead. He heard Shaw say: 'That draw we passed—'

Hooves thundered away. An engage brought a blanket. January laid Bodenschatz on it and opened his shirt. The bullet had struck him just behind the right armpit and gone through both lungs and the heart. The worn batiste chemise, the pink kid gloves, folded small into a packet beneath his shirt, against his skin, were soaked through with blood.



They came back to the camp at fall of night, having found no tracks. January could have told them they wouldn't. He guessed, from the angle of entry of the bullet, that in fact the killer had been elsewhere than the cover they'd suspected. 'Don't matter,' said Shaw quietly, when he helped January dig the trail-side grave. 'I know who done it.'

'You want to go back for him?' asked Manitou. Stripped for the work, his chest and arms showed in the firelight the horrific mazes of scars left by repeated torture, tracks of a pain that was his only salvation.

'An' do what?' Shaw's face was covered with dust, the straggly beard he'd grown on the trail thick with it, his eyes strange and light in the dark grime, like a bobcat's, except for the pain in them. 'Arrest him by an authority I ain't got, for a murder I can't prove, that no jury in the State of Missouri's gonna convict him of? They's only so much I can do,' he said, driving his shovel to break the hard knots of interlaced grass roots, 'an' I done it. Now let's put this sorry bastard to bed an' go home.'



Manitou Wildman rode with them for three more days, then disappeared one night, leaving not even tracks behind. January guessed he'd go back to seek out his brothers the Blackfeet, if any of them had survived the epidemic.

'Did it ever occur to you,' January asked Shaw on the following night, 'that it might have been Franz who killed Mina, and not Manitou at all?' He'd left the chemise and gloves inside Bodenschatz's shirt when they'd laid him in his shallow grave. The locket as well, which they'd offered to Manitou and which he had refused to touch. 'He loved his sister - passionately, it sounds like. Jealous men have done worse. And guilty men have gone to greater lengths, to absolve themselves of what they feel is another's fault.'

'That crossed my mind from the first.' Shaw stirred at the fire with a stick. January had shot a buffalo that afternoon: probably the last time he would do so, he guessed, before they reached Independence. They'd begun to find the droppings of corn-fed horses, and to see the signs of white hunters, with their large fires and boot prints in the earth.

His journal to Rose - which he'd kept every evening of the return journey - was overflowing with these observations, and with the remembrances of the men who'd taught him. Please, Mother of God, let me put it into her living hand . . .

'They's no way of provin' it,' Shaw went on. 'An' no point doin' so. We can only know so much, Maestro. Then we got to let it go. Like that old play Manitou spoke of: it's why we got to get twelve strangers to sit down an' say, "This is how we settle it: it's done." It's got to be taken out of our hands. If it ain't, it eats us alive.'