The Shirt On His Back

Chapter 8



The boxing match with Manitou Wildman - set for noon of the following day - almost didn't take place after all. Sufficient sums were involved that the gamblers were insisting on an hour when no chance ray of sunlight would take either fighter in the eyes. But an hour before the sun reached zenith, Veinte-y-Cinco came breathless and shaking into the Ivy and Wallach store tent with the news that Edwin Titus had been seen a few minutes before taking Pia into his quarters. 'Take a walk, Mick tells me.' The woman turned her head, as if she could see back to the AFC camp. 'Take a walk, just like that. Come back in an hour, he says—'

Shaw said, very quietly, 'Jesus,' slung one rifle on his back and picked up the other. 'You watch the place,' he ordered Jorge on his way to the horse line. Silently, January fetched his own weapon and followed. John McLeod, who'd been at the back of the tent talking to Gil Wallach about mules, whistled to a couple of the Canadian trappers; Prideaux and his camp mates joined the group as they were saddling up. January hoisted Veinte-y-Cinco on to the rump of his horse behind him, and close to thirty men rode downriver to the AFC camp.

'Titus, he never comes around for none of us girls,' Veinte- y-Cinco whispered, clinging to January's waist. 'He says we got the pox—'

January guessed this to be true, something which made faithfulness to Rose less difficult, notwithstanding the protective sheaths on sale at the store. The corollary to that fact - that, as a child, Pia was probably the only female in the AFC camp who wouldn't be poxed - had already crossed his mind.

And while Titus was not exactly Mick Seaholly's boss, without the Controller's financing - and his protection on the road - the saloon keeper would never have been able to get his liquor and his girls up to the Green River from Taos. Certainly, he would not be able to do so in future years.

And, anyway, it was known throughout the camp that Mick Seaholly would sell his own sister for the price of a Long-Nine cigar.

Unlike the Indian women, the Taos girls had nothing to offer the mountaineers in the way of camp-keeping, moccasin- making and the endless ancillary work of preparing beaver skins for the market. Their chief value lay in that they were cheaper than buying an Indian bride, and you didn't have to be constantly giving presents to their families.

They had no families.

Only Seaholly.

And, in Veinte-y-Cinco's case, Pia.

Through his back, January was aware of the woman's trembling. Without Seaholly's protection, it wouldn't be long before a woman on her own would find herself selling her body for pemmican - to those who simply didn't drag her down to the cottonwoods for free. January knew women in New Orleans who'd have greeted the situation with a shrug ... or a demand for a cut of the proceeds.

The posse found Edwin Titus outside his tent, faced off against Hannibal Sefton . . . and Manitou Wildman. Seaholly, slouched nearby, would clearly have dealt with the fiddler had Wildman not been looming silently at his elbow. 'You heard the girl, Sefton,' Titus was saying impatiently. 'She's perfectly willing—'

'She's perfectly dosed to the hairline with opium—'

'Are you suggesting that I held her nose and poured it down her throat? I could have you up for libel.'

'In what court?' retorted Hannibal. 'If there's no law against raping a drugged child, there's certainly not any statute against my saying so.'

'You have to go back to New Orleans sometime, Sefton. And when you do, you'll find—' He turned his head as Shaw, January and McLeod dismounted and strode toward the tent; January saw his thin mouth twist with anger. Then at once it smoothed as Veinte-y-Cinco ran forward—

'Pia! Corazon!’

Seaholly grabbed the woman by her arm. She wrenched at his grip, and Titus laid a hand on her shoulder: 'Senora Vasquez, thank Heaven you have come!'

While Veinte-y-Cinco stared at him, startled speechless at this turnabout - didn't she think that's what he'd say if she showed up with armed force? - McLeod almost spat the words, 'Damn it, Titus, I knew you Yanks were scoundrels—'

'Scoundrels?' Titus's head jerked back in melodramatic shock. Then, his face changing, 'Good God, man!' he thundered. '1 find the poor child staggering about the camp - ill, I assumed, for surely no man here is so debased as to deliberately give liquor to a girl of her years - and you dare to suggest—?'

Hannibal, looking as if he'd just heard the Serpent of Eden claim that Eve had pinned him down and spooned applesauce down his throat, slipped past Titus and thrust the tent flap aside. In the shadows January could see Pia lying among the buffalo robes on the Comptroller's cot, her long black hair unbraided over her shoulders in a silky cloak, her shift loose and drawn up to her thighs. She was giggling, but when Veinte- y-Cinco ran into the tent she held out her arms, sighed: 'Mama!'

'They say no good deed goes unpunished,' proclaimed Titus, in tones of bitterest reproach. 'Had I not brought the child here, God knows who would have found her. Yet, instead of thanks, I am accused of . . . Good God, McLeod, will you listen to yourself? Get the little tramp out of here, Madame,' he added as Veinte-y-Cinco supported her stumbling daughter past him and into the open. 'For that matter, I should like to know where you were, when someone was feeding that poor child liquor.'

He glanced significantly from the woman to Seaholly, put on an aggrieved expression - just as if he were not splitting Veinte-y-Cinco's income with the publican in exchange for food - and shook his sleek sandy head.

Drawn by the commotion like a cow to the pasture fence, the Reverend Grey chipped in: 'What kind of a mother do you call yourself, woman? The fruit falleth not far from the tree! Bring up a child in the way she will go—'

'I suddenly have considerably greater insight,' stated Titus, glaring at the men around him in disgust, 'as to why the priest and the Levite rode by the stricken traveler on the other side of the road. Gentlemen, good day to you all.'

He retreated into the tent.

The men looked uneasily at one another, and then at

Veinte-y-Cinco and the sleepy, giggling Pia, like men who fear they may have made fools of themselves. Edwin Titus was, after all, a respected trader - and it was Edwin Titus who held their rather considerable debts for the liquor they'd consumed so far. Moreover, for many of them, it was Edwin Titus who could set the prices they still had to pay for the trap springs and gunpowder that they'd need for the year's trapping. Compared to Titus's frock-coated respectability, Veinte-y-Cinco, with her dark hair tumbled loose on her skinny shoulders and her grimy satin vest cut low over sagging breasts, looked like exactly what she was: a Mexican whore.

'Lo, how the Lord looketh on the hearts of the unrighteous—' Grey went on, his alliance with McLeod evidently taking second place to new material for a sermon. 'Her house is the way to Hell, going down to the chambers of death . . .'

'I don't know what kind of a mother you call yourself,' remarked Hannibal quietly as they turned away, 'but that's not liquor she was given. That was opium - and I'm not sure where else you'd get that in the camp, except in Edwin Titus's tent.' He walked back to his chess table, packed it up and walked off up the trail to the Ivy and Wallach pitch.



For all his expressed grief at the foul mistrust he'd seen demonstrated that forenoon, Mick Seaholly made no move to shift the venue of the boxing match. When January returned to the liquor tent an hour later, he estimated that three-quarters of the men in the camp - and three-quarters of the Indians in the valley - were on hand to watch.

Deadfall trees had been hauled from the river bank to make a rough border around the square that Sir William paced off, the precise size of a London boxing-stage. While the Scots nobleman was cutting the scratch lines for the combatants with his knife in the dirt, January was offered so many drinks that if he'd accepted them all he'd have had trouble identifying Wildman at ten paces.

'Keep a few.' Hannibal stepped aside to let Mr Miller edge to the fore with his ever-present sketchbook. 'If you get cut again we can use it to cleanse the wound.'

'My teachers recommended spirits of wine to cleanse wounds,' returned January, stripping off his shirt, 'not snake venom mixed with river water. Which way did you bet?'

'Benjamin!' The fiddler clasped a hand to his breast. 'You wound me. You cut me to the heart. Detrahit amicitiae maies- tatem suam, qui illam parat ad bonos casus. This is a boxing match, not an eye-gouging contest.' He fished into the dripping gourd that Prideaux was holding for him and wound strips of wet rawhide around January's hands, tucking the ends in tight.

'And if you think anyone is going to lodge a protest with the Rules Committee and proclaim me the winner if Manitou fouls me, I suggest you check the contents of that fizz pop you've been drinking.'

Men came streaming across from Seaholly's, where final bets were being laid. Charro Morales brought in his horse to the edge of the crowd for a better view and whooped, 'Free liquor tonight, if Wildman wins!' which set up a roaring cheer; the two German noblemen who, like Stewart, had come to the rendezvous for adventure and hunting, attempted to better their viewpoint by purchasing Jim Bridger's front-row spot and were unceremoniously shoved to the farthest rear.

On the other side of the boxing-stage men were shouting Wildman's name. The spectators parted, to let January through, and January's eyes widened with shock. Yesterday's bout had been so quick that he had not only missed seeing Wildman's style of combat, but also by the time he'd reached the front of the crowd, Manitou had already been putting on his shirt.

Now, for the first time, January got a look at that scarred torso. He'd helped the Army surgeons with the wounded after the Battle of Chalmette, and since he'd been in the rendezvous camp he'd seen a surgeon's textbook of scars: tomahawk, skinning knife, bear claw, broken branches ... the wicked Xs that told of snake-bite poison far from other help. As a child, he'd seen what a five-tongued whip with iron tied into its ends would leave of an 'uppity' slave's back.

He'd never seen scars like Wildman's. Ever. Anywhere.

He couldn't even imagine what had made them or how the man had survived whatever it was.

And that ripped and mended hide covered muscle like hammered iron.

Manitou had hacked off most of his long black hair for the fight - something he hadn't bothered to do when facing off against Blankenship - as well as much of his beard, both operations obviously performed with a bowie knife and no mirror. He was clearly not a man who craved the glance of the Taos ladies. Beneath the unbroken line of brow, those clear brown eyes had a curious focus to them, distant, like a man striving to remember something long forgotten. January hoped it was the rules of the ring.

'Gentlemen,' declaimed Stewart, in a voice that could have been heard in St Louis, 'to your scratch. The fight will proceed by London rules: holding and throwing are allowable, but no gouging, no biting, no strangling, no foul blows. A man upon his knees is considered down; the round is concluded with a man down; thirty seconds to rest before returning to the scratch. Is this clear?'

January said, 'Yes, sir,' and Wildman grunted.

'No crowding the contestants. No man to enter the stage except the fighters and their seconds. Understood?'

Incoherent yelling from all sides to get on with it. Men pressed up to the edges of the stage, with more standing on the tree trunks to get a head over those in front of them. A third ring of men on horses crowded behind them. Dust fogged the air. Rose will never forgive me if I get my nose broken in the cause of getting friendly with a witness . . .

Mountaineers and camp-setters passed the word to their Sioux and Flathead friends that this was fighting as it was done in the country of the English King across the sea - there wasn't an Indian alive who didn't relish a good fight. On the mountains at the north end of the valley, thunder grumbled distantly, and wind blew chilly across January's naked back, bearing the smell of coming storm.

Shaking hands with his opponent was like grasping the paw of an animal.

'Gentlemen,' called Stewart, 'begin!'

Wildman had a stance that wouldn't have been out of place in Gentleman Jackson's boxing salon in London and a punch that a grizzly would have envied. And he was - somewhat to January's surprise - a clean fighter: trained, calculating, scientific, with a precise sense of distance. January hadn't had a formal match since he'd left Paris and had almost forgotten how much he'd enjoyed the sport.

They circled, watching each other for an opening - the trapper was huge, and January guessed he'd be fast. He knew already that he was going to lose, simply because his opponent would outlast him. Aside from being ten years younger, Wildman was someone who really could drag himself for eight days through the wilderness with two broken legs and Indians on his trail, and when all was said and done, for all his size, January was a forty-three-year-old piano-player.

And yet - as he had never been able to explain, either to Rose or to the wife of his Paris days, the beautiful Ayasha - there was great pleasure in fighting a man who fought so well.

He knocked Manitou down twice, and was himself downed, his opponent standing back, like a polite bear, to let Shaw and Hannibal get him on his feet and back to the scratch. They waded in again, hard straight punishing blows and the salt taste of blood on his mouth. He felt his stamina flagging, and sparred for wind and distance, but Manitou crowded him, forced him back toward the ring of spectators, who fell away before them. They grappled, clinched, broke apart — if I can get him down again . . .

They circled, and January squinted against the westering sun—

And saw clearly the bright bar of light that speared into Manitou's eyes.

Squaw wearing a mirror ... He reacted even as he thought this, saw his opponent flinch. His fist connected with jawbone, a blow that came all the way through his back heel from the earth—

Manitou's face changed. He'd been fighting a well-trained beast. Now he suddenly faced the wild one.

The trapper bellowed something - January didn't hear what - and threw himself in, disregarding January's blows and attempts to block, caught him by the throat and hurled him aside as if he'd been a child, then kept on going into the audience. Someone screamed, 'Get him off me! Get him—!' and January struck the ground, tucking his head and curling his body to avoid being trampled. Spectators surged over him, to stop the enraged man. January was kicked, stepped on - at least four men tripped over him and a horse's hoof nicked his shoulder - and when he sat up he couldn't see anything but a surging struggle enveloped in dust, nor hear beyond a thunderous howl of rage.

Shaw and Hannibal thrashed free of the crowd, dashed to his side. 'What the hell happened?' January gasped. 'It looked like sunlight caught some squaw's mirror and threw it in his eyes—'

'That's what happened, all right,' returned Shaw grimly, and helped him to sit. 'Only it was Jed Blankenship holdin' the mirror.'

Of course it would be. So much for the possibility of getting Manitou to talk to him - or even, now, of going out to that isolated campsite with a friendly bottle some evening. Wearily, January said, 'God damn Jed Blankenship.' A dozen yards away, men were hanging on to Wildman as if to a roped bull, and Blankenship, wisely, was nowhere to be seen. 'That goddamned seventy-five dollars - and now Manitou's going to think I was in on it.'

'I'd say there's that possibility.' Shaw got him to his feet. January tried to turn his head, winced at the pang in his muscles. 'Such bein' the case, it may be best you make yourself scarce 'til he cools down . . . Which, Tom tells me, can take years.'

'God damn Jed Blankenship.'

Manitou's voice rose above the din, a bull roar of insane rage, as they walked away up the path for the camp.



Shaw stationed himself outside Morning Star's lodge and spent the remainder of the afternoon explaining over and over to what sounded to January like two-thirds of the camp: 'No, we didn't have nuthin' to do with it . . . Hell, no, we didn't bet on him! Friend or no friend, we ain't crazy! Ask anybody in the camp . . .' Morning Star anointed January's bruises with a poultice of sagebrush and mullein and brought him cold water from the river to soak his knuckles. A little later, Gil Wallach brought the news that such had been the confusion over who'd won and who'd lost that Mick Seaholly had disbarred Jed Blankenship from the AFC liquor tent and all its various amenities. 'And God help slow mares,' the trader added with a grin.

Veinte-y-Cinco was already at the camp, watching over a flushed and fretful Pia. The girl had a massive opium-headache and no very clear idea of what had happened to her: 'I remember talking to Titus, but he wasn't there before. I was just talkin' to a couple of his boys, outside Seaholly's—'

'Anyone buy you a drink, honey?'

The girl moved one thin shoulder, with an adolescent's impatience: what a stupid question. 'No. You know you told Mr Seaholly you'd kill him if he sold me liquor. We were drinking coffee, is all.'

January had tasted camp coffee. It could have been doctored with gunpowder, let alone laudanum, without altering the taste. 'It could have been anyone,' he said softly, when the girl had fallen asleep among the buffalo robes. 'Anyone Titus paid off.'

Veinte-y-Cinco cursed, quietly and without any real hope in her voice, then sat for a time with her chin on her drawn-up knees, gazing into the swept stones of the lodge fire-pit. 'But he's right,' she said after a time. 'That filth-eating— Titus is right. What kind of mother am I, that I can't even keep my child from harm? I brought her up here—'

'And she'd have been safer back in Taos by herself?' Hannibal and Morning Star ducked through the entry hole into the tent, carrying wood for that night's fire.

'I don't know—' The woman looked aside, in grief that had long ago exhausted its lifetime allotment of tears. 'I don't know what to do.' She made a move to rise. 'I got to get back. Can she sleep here tonight?'

'You both can,' said Morning Star. It was her lodge, after all.

'It's coming on to rain,' added Hannibal. 'Numquam imprudentibus imber obfuit . . .'

'Hoss!' yelled Prideaux's voice from outside. 'Hoss, you got to come! You got to - where'd he go? Hoss!' The red- haired trapper thrust his head through the entry hole. 'Hoss, this is it! It's startin' to rain, an' I just heard from that kid Poco - that camp-setter of Blankenship's - that Beauty an' the Dutchman sneaked around whilst everyone was at the fight an' bought up everythin' they'll need for a year's trappin'! Salt, whetstones, lead . . . They're headin' out tonight, with the rain to cover their tracks—'

January rolled his eyes. 'Weren't they supposed to be heading out three nights ago? When everyone went out and skulked around in the rain—'

'But tonight is really it!' Prideaux was so excited he could barely get the words out. 'I went out an' had a look at their camp an' that squaw of the Dutchman's is takin' down her dry in' racks!’

'When my mama started takin' in her dryin' racks from the yard,' remarked Shaw, ducking into the tent at Prideaux's heels, 'it generally meant there was rain comin' in, not that she was gettin' ready to light outta there in secret.'

'But this's their secret beaver valley!' insisted Prideaux, as if the Kentuckian had somehow missed the critical importance of that fact. 'You just wait 'til this child follows those boys to their secret valley, an' comes back next rendezvous with beaver skins big as buffalo hides! Wee-augh! How's your neck, hoss?' he asked in a more normal tone.

'After today I won't fear hangin'.'

'Well,' remarked Hannibal to Veinte-y-Cinco, when Prideaux finally left - on the run - to gather up what plunder he'd need to pursue Clarke and Groot into the hills, and the first spatters of rain rattled on the lodge skins, 'you might as well make yourself comfortable, m'am; it's not like there's going to be anything happening at Seaholly's with half the camp out in the woods. Come, amicus meus,' he added, turning to January as Morning Star knelt to kindle the fire, 'let's have some stories. Tell us about the strangest person you ever met . . .'



January woke to voices. The river's roar, to which he'd fallen asleep last night, thundered unabated, but the light that came through the semi-translucent lodge-skins told him that the sun was up and shining. He felt as if he'd fallen down a flight of stairs and broken his neck. On the other side of the fire, Veinte- y-Cinco and her daughter slept close together, a tangle of soft limbs and dark hair under a five-point trade-blanket. A short distance away, Hannibal was a knot of draped bones. Outside the tent he heard Shaw ask someone in French: 'An' no sign around the body?'

If he's speaking French, he'll be talking to Morning Star . . .

'None that could be read, says Chased By Bears. Only that his throat was cut.'

Goodpastor. The Indian Agent.

Or Blankenship . . .

Trouble at the rendezvous. Bad trouble, killing trouble . . .

Morning Star's voice went on: 'He was no one from the camp. An old man, his hair was white and his face shaven like the traders. Chased By Bears and Little Fish -' that was Morning Star's cousin - 'say they found no trace of horses near the place. But the old man had built a shelter and a fire before he was killed—'

'He dressed like a trader?'

January rolled silently to his feet, found his pants and his boots, and ducked through the door of the lodge, blinking in the morning sunlight. The whole world glittered with last night's rain.

'No, Tall Chief,' said the Sioux girl to Shaw, worriedly. 'He is not dressed at all. He lies in his shelter naked, his throat cut, wearing nothing but. . .' She held up her hands, searching for the word. 'Wearing nothing but white man's perfume on his hair and black gloves on his hands. And my brother is afraid - all the tribes are afraid - that this is the man the government has sent to cause trouble with Cold Face about the traders' liquor, and that the next ones to come here will be the Army, saying that we are to blame.'