The Shirt On His Back

Chapter 6



Whether any of this had anything to do with the trouble being brewed between Frank Boden and the mysterious Mr Hepplewhite, January wasn't certain, but the evening had at least been instructive.

It was unfortunately to become more so.

'Could an Indian Agent actually close down the Company?' inquired Hannibal, on the way back up the trail to camp.

'By hisself?' Shaw spoke without taking his attention from the formless darkness of the land to their left. Though the smell of that many humans was generally enough to keep bears from getting too close, it was by no means an uncommon thing to find them prowling at this time of night, drawn by the smell of camp garbage. Last night January had nearly walked into one when he'd gone down to the river to piss. 'Not hardly. But he can sure shut down their operations for a year, while they sort things out with that gang of licensed thieves in Washington. If so be the British raise a stink . . .'

'Which you know they're gonna,' put in Wallach gloomily. 'Or businessmen in their pay. Money bein' as bad as it is right now, a year can make a difference. Things ain't like they was, even a year ago.'

No, thought January, his mind catching the echo of words he'd been hearing, not only at the rendezvous, but all the way up the trail from Fort Ivy.

It'll all be gone, Sir William had said, looking around him at the candlelit gloom of the banquet tent: the mountaineers with their Indian braids and porcupine-quill moccasins, the dark eyes of the Indians gleaming with Company whiskey, the spit of venison dripping over the fire. It was the true reason His Lordship had brought his own private artist out from the East: to capture not what he was leaving, but what was leaving the world, evaporating like smoke on the wind of time.

Yet, looking out over the vast stillness of the valley, the pale blurs of the tipis under starlight, the gleam of coyote eyes flashing suddenly in the grass, January thought: it's gone already, if rich sportsmen have begun to come up here to hunt with the savages and pretend they're savage themselves.

A member of His Majesty's Sixth Dragoon Guards, Sir William had fought at Waterloo. The regret January had heard in his voice, when he spoke of going back to the duties of his family, was genuine. But there were two other gentleman hunters in the camp: Germans who had come in quest of excitement and the right to say: I've chased buffalo on the Plains ... I've seen the wild Indians . . .

And behind the gentleman hunters - and the missionaries like Grey - emigrants were already on the road, following the mountaineers' trails to the western country in search of unexhausted land that hadn't been divided up between uncles and cousins of prior generations. In search of a new start after the bankruptcies sweeping the East. He remembered New Orleans when it had been a walled city. The cane fields had come right up to within a block of Canal Street. On cricket-haunted summer nights he'd hunted rabbits and fished in Bayou St. John, where wooden American houses now stood.

An owl hooted in the darkness - it was only an hour short of dawn. After Grey's departure the feast had gone on for hours, Hannibal fiddling like an elf drunk on starlight, and the men had danced out of sheer high spirits as well as Company booze. Jim Bridger had put on the armor Stewart had given him - cuirass, greaves, and helmet of old Spanish plate, suitable, Stewart said, for a Knight of the Plains - and this had led into mock battles and demonstrations of how the stuff could or couldn't protect a man in combat. Stewart had sat back and beamed, almost - but not quite, January told himself, because he liked His Lordship - like a father contemplating his children playing with a particularly successful Christmas gift. To judge by the noise behind them now, there were trappers who were at it yet.

The scents of last night's storm still whispered in the air: wet forests, quenched grass, damp earth far out among the streams on the meadow. New Orleans, thought January, will be a sewer now: reeking, crawling and hot as the hinges of Hell.

Fever season.

Blessed Mary ever-Virgin, uphold Rose in your hand . . .

His wife in Paris, his beautiful Ayasha, had died in the fever summer of 1832 . . . Five years ago, only five . . .

He had come home from working in the plague hospital and found her dead.

It was not only law that did not reach to this achingly beautiful place. It was word of those you had left behind.

It would be September before he knew if Rose was still alive. Before he knew if the child she carried would ever be born. Not even that, he realized. The letter that will be waiting for me in Independence will have been written weeks before. I won't know - I won't KNOW - until I walk each step along the brick banquette of Rue Esplanade up from the levee, until I run up each step of the gallery . . .

'Maestro ?'

He turned, aware that Shaw had spoken to him, and said, 'I'm sorry . . .'

'She'll be all right,' said Shaw, with surprising gentleness in his voice.

Behind them, in French, Morning Star asked Hannibal, 'What will you bet me, Sun Mouse, against this sour God-man who threatened Cold Face at the feast getting himself down the mountain alive?'

'Would Cold Face kill him?' asked Hannibal, turning to Wallach. 'Or have him killed?' Cold Face being, of course, Edwin Titus. Morning Star's sisters - who seemed to have found boyfriends at the feast, because they'd been nowhere to be found when it was decided to return to camp - had a far less flattering name for him.

'If that child thought he could foist the blame on the Hudson's Bay Company somehow,' said Wallach, 'you bet your second- best fiddle-strings he would, pilgrim. Grey's been McLeod's guest up at the Hudson's Bay camp for weeks. The man's got nuthin' but holiness to sell, an' he'd have starved on that in this camp. He'll do what McLeod tells him to. And sure as the Brits are trying to make trouble for the AFC, the AFC's got its men in Congress just climbin' the backs of their chairs, lookin' for a reason to push Van Buren into startin' a war with Britain so as to give us a good excuse to send troops into Oregon.'

He pointed upriver into the darkness, toward the faint gleam of snow that even at this season whitened the highest tips of the Gros Ventres. 'Five miles upstream of here, you'll find what's left of Fort Bonneville. Everybody said Bill Bonneville was a blame fool, to try to build a tradin' post in a valley that's snowed in six months of the year . . . especially since Bonneville was only on leave from the US Army for a year. Myself, I couldn't help thinkin' how it's a blame stupid place for a tradin' post, but a damn smart one if you wanted to put a garrison up here. If the Brits send troops down, they'll have to come this way.'

A dog barked - in Iron Heart's camp, January calculated, the farthest from the river and from any other Indian camp. He'd seen neither the pockmarked Omaha chief nor any of his men at the feast. Other than the most necessary trading, none of them had come into the camp since the day January had fought Blankenship for the Omaha girl.

'So it ain't the liquor that's the issue,' said Shaw after a time, returning to Hannibal's question. 'It ain't even the Indians, but the land. It always comes back to the land.'

'Well, if we don't take it,' pointed out Wallach, 'either the Brits - or God help us, the Russkis down from Alaska - will. Same as all that hoo-raw about sellin' whiskey to the tribes. You don't hear the redskins objectin' to it, do you? We're not here to found a church; we're here to do business. If the tribes see what happens when they get theirselves liquored up, an' they don't like it, then why do they keep askin' for liquor? Why don't they all just sign the pledge and put us all out of business?'

Hannibal sighed. 'Why indeed? That we should, with joy, pleasure, revel and applause, transform ourselves into beasts . . .'

'Titus was right,' said the little trader. 'If the government—'

Shaw yelled, 'Down!' and dropped. In the same instant that January heard a sort of soft vrrrtt in the air near his face, and Wallach - who was standing nearest him - shoved him down into a shallow depression in the ground off the track. Lying flat on the dark earth January could see men silhouetted against the sky, and Wallach brought his rifle up and fired. At the same time another shot cracked - Shaw's, January guessed - and he brought up his own rifle as a man sprang down into the hollowed ground, too close to aim at . . .

January swung the rifle butt, smelled the other man's sweat; the blow hit and glanced off as other shapes rose out of the grass all around them. Someone seized him from behind, a bare arm like iron around his neck; a hand gripped his hair. He pulled his knife and cut at the arm, even as the corner of his vision caught the glint of a knife and he felt the blade cut his forehead - his own knife ripped muscle and the choking hold loosened. January surged to his knees, twisting like a harpooned whale, and dragged his attacker over his shoulder with his own greater strength and smote the ground with him as with a blanket.

Then he grabbed for the rifle he'd dropped at some point - he didn't even remember when or how - scooped it up, swung around . . .

And the Indians were gone, as if they'd never been.

Movement. He crouched, swung the rifle in that direction . . .

'Maestro?'

'Here.'

Footfalls pounded along the track from the camp, louder than any Indian would make. Prideaux's voice yelled, 'You all right there?'

'Sefton?' called Shaw, and Hannibal's voice replied:

'I'm perfectly safe hiding behind my wife here.'

'Gnaye,' said Morning Star - fool!'

'You still got your hair on?' Shaw's tall form stood lanky against the stars.

January straightened up. Beside him, Wallach said shakily, 'Let me check.'

January felt the knife-slash on his forehead, the ribbon of blood dribbling down his cheek. 'More or less,' he said. 'Pretty close to less.'

With Prideaux were two of his trapper friends and the engages Clopard and LeBel. Now that the fighting was over, January felt slightly weak in the knees.

Any idea who it was?' Prideaux asked, and Wallach retorted:

'You know, I think it was the Chinese, but I ain't all that sure.'

'If'fn it was the Chinese,' remarked Shaw, 'they's hittin' us awfully close to the camp.'

Maybe, thought January as the group walked back toward the Ivy and Wallach shelters. But the ambush had been laid precisely between the AFC camp and that of Ivy and Wallach at the greatest distance from either, and where the cotton- woods came up closest to the path.

A guard was set, for what remained of the night.