The Shirt On His Back (11 page)

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.

Prideaux, Shaw,
Morning Star and January went out to the place at first light - January with
four more of Hannibal's inexpert stitches in his head and a three-inch strip
shaved out of his hair with Shaw's skinning knife. They found evidence of an
ambush carefully planned. Four men had lain in wait among the cottonwoods, just
at the point where the bottomlands came closest to the path. Three more had
lain flat in the deep grass of one of the meadow's several small streams, a few
yards west of the trail. 'Laid here for over an hour, looks like,' said
Prideaux, kneeling beside a few scuff marks and flattened blades that were
perfectly incomprehensible to January. 'Which means me and Dalrain - you
remember Gordy Dalrain from yesterday, hoss? - musta walked right betwixt 'em,
'cause we hadn't hardly sat down an' stirred up our fire, 'fore we heard your
hoo-rah.'

'This is
Flathead work.' Morning Star stood up from where she'd knelt some ten yards
west of the trail, came back with beaded knife-sheathe in her hand.

'What'd we do to
get on the Flatheads' wrong side?' protested January, and Prideaux replied
promptly:

'Had some decent
piece of plunder on you, maybe. Hell, they mighta been after Sefton's fiddle.
That thing's
hellacious
medicine.'

'That is fool
talk,' replied the Indian woman. 'Seven Flatheads, killing and scalping white
traders at a rendezvous? English Chief would have
their
scalps. And
Kills At Night too, for driving the white traders away so there will be no
gunpowder or liquor for anyone.'

'Coulda been
drunk.'

'What, all seven
of 'em?' Shaw turned the sheath over in his bony fingers. 'Layin' there so
quiet in the dark? That sound like drunks to you, Maestro?'

'That's a
handsome piece of work.' January took the beaded leather from him, studied the
band of stylized birds on it, green on white. 'How often does it happen that an
Indian would just drop a piece of gear? Particularly a sheathe like this that
goes on a belt.'

'How often does
it happen that an Indian'11 take pains to stick the blame for his killin' on
another tribe?' countered Shaw thoughtfully. 'The point of killin' is to count
coup for your own glory, not somebody else.' He knelt and made his way back
toward the river in a sort of duck walk - crouching, stooping, long body bent
almost double - with Prideaux and Morning Star scouting the ground on either
side. 'Delaware moccasins,' he added, and Morning Star mimed a woman smitten by
Buddhist Enlightenment.

'And the woman
who makes moccasins for the whole of the camp is One of the Delawares! Perhaps
there is some connection?'

Shaw grinned up
at her, then returned his attention to the damp ground.

Inquiry up and
down the river - and along Horse Creek where the camp had thrown out a sort of
suburb for a few hundred yards - unearthed no evidence of other ambuscades in
the night, and January got a great deal of good-natured backslapping from the
mountaineers, who regarded the near scalping as a sort of initiation rite. 'By
God, pilgrim,' said little Kit Carson, grinning, 'now you can for sure tell
your grandchildren you seen the elephant an' heard the lion roar.'

'I'd just as
soon have missed it.' January grinned back and drank down the liquor that Mick
Seaholly poured out for him on the house - a ritual he knew well enough
required the purchase of a round for everyone present. The stitched and
scabbing cut on his forehead still ached like the devil, and he hoped he'd live
to see his child, let alone his grandchildren . . .

'Never say that,
hoss,' protested AFC agent Beckwith, a wiry little man, resplendent in beaded
Crow finery, and one of the very few men of African descent January had seen
among the mountaineers. 'Bastards didn't hurt you, did they? To perdition with
'em then, I say! Waugh! You wear your scars with
pride . .
.' Which led
directly - as conversations with Beckwith frequently did - into accounts of
Beckwith's glorious adventures in the mountains: single-handed fights with
Blackfeet, weaponless triumphs over grizzly bears, long treks naked and wounded
in the snow with two broken legs and a whole tribe of Blackfeet in pursuit . .
.

And yet,
reflected January, for all his boasting, Jim Beckwith had been a trapper for
many years and was a warrior respected among the Crows. His chieftainship among
them had been hard earned, considering how easily the man could have spent his
life chopping some white man's cotton in Missouri.

January left
Seaholly's and made his way back to the tipi shared by Clem Groot, Beauty
Clarke and Fingers Woman, who were still chuckling over leading half the camp
on a wild goose chase in the rain. He brought a bottle of trade whiskey, and
Fingers Woman immediately put a grouse on to roast - Indians spent so much of
their time hungry that any visitor was instantly fed - and the tale of
January's adventures led naturally into the time Clem nearly got his hair
lifted by the Assiniboin, and from there to the fight they'd had with the Crows
in the Absaroka Country in the Fall of '34. At last January judged the time
right to ask, 'They ever find out who it was, scalped Johnny Shaw at Fort Ivy
last winter?'

The partners
shook their heads. With very little nudging from January, the two independents
gave an account of events which closely paralleled that related by Tom Shaw
back at the fort: in midwinter Tom had gone down to Fort Laramie, a journey of
about a week at that season, for supplies, and a few days after his departure
Johnny Shaw's body had been found about a quarter-mile from the fort, mutilated
and scalped.

'I said I'd head
down to Laramie, tell Tom,' said Groot, handing January a chunk of grouse from
the stewpot. 'Boden - the fort clerk - said he'd go. It'd snowed the week
before, so they packed Johnny's body in it real good, to keep him 'til Tom got
back. Beauty an' me left Ivy a few days after that, so we never did hear no
more about it, but I guess Tom musta wrote Abe to come take the supply-train.
It true Abe's in the City Guards at New Orleans?'

January let the
conversation run on a little - about Johnny's relations with the various tribes
that came to trade at the fort, and the time Fingers Woman had taken four
horses and his boots off him playing the Hand Game - and then mentioned that
Tom Shaw had had no warning when he'd returned to the fort: Frank Boden had not
made it to Fort Laramie. This elicited some exclamations, and some cursing at
the Blackfeet, but no remarks concerning:
gosh, I saw a feller here at the camp I woulda SWORE was
Boden
. . .

'Manitou Wildman
was at the fort at the same time, wasn't he?'

'He was,' agreed
Clarke, and with a careful finger fluffed the long, golden ends of his
mustache. 'But I doubt you'll get Manitou to say a word about any Indian, no
matter what tribe.'

'Has he gone
that much into the tribes?' There were, January knew, trappers who became
virtually Indians themselves, though he'd noticed they were just as ready to
trap streams bare and kill members of other tribes as were any of the Company
hunters.

The Dutchman
shook his head. 'Nah, the redskins think he's as strange as we do. Well, you've
seen him - or you ain't seen him, more like. He's one of those fellows who's
best left alone. Hell -' he grinned whitely in a tangle of sandy beard - 'ain't
we all?'

January was
still considering what excuse would be most plausible for him to ride up to
Manitou's solitary camp in the hills above Horse Creek and start a
conversation, when the chance to get better acquainted with the man was more or
less dropped into his lap.

When he returned
to the camp and made his way to Seaholly's, he found - in addition to an
improvised jousting match in progress involving Jim Bridger's new armor - that
Hannibal had set up a table outside the liquor tent and announced himself ready
to take on all comers at chess, at a dollar a game. He had immediately - the
trappers gleefully informed January - gutted and skinned Sir William Stewart
and stretched his plew to dry, to the Scotsman's utter delight. There were four
trappers lined up to be initiated into the mysteries of this new pastime
('That's better'n I've had all week,' commented Veinte-y-Cinco) and Pia had
undertaken to keep the challengers supplied from the bar and Hannibal provided
with spruce water and fizz pop, in-between running a faro bank at the next
table. 'I hope he's giving her a cut,' murmured January to the girl's mother.

Veinte-y-Cinco
winked at him and went back to stand behind Hannibal's bench. Having a wife
back at the camp, reflected January, bemused, didn't seem to have reduced his
friend's attraction for women in the slightest. Even the gray-haired, motherly
Moccasin Woman of the Delawares - whose baptized name was Ann Bryan, though
Hannibal was the only one who ever remembered it - would flirt with him when
she came past. Young Mr Miller was perched nearby on a pack saddle, sketchbook
on his knee, capturing the group around the chess game, though January noticed
he had tactfully transformed Veinte-y-Cinco into an Indian squaw.

There's the
man!' From the direction of the scuffed and trampled pitch of last night's
banqueting tent, a voice called out, and half a dozen mountaineers and
camp-setters came over to surround January at the bar.

'Just the child
we been lookin' for, waugh!'

'Let us all buy
you a drink, Ben.'

'Whoa!' January
held up his hands. 'I may be a pilgrim here, but I'm learning to smell war
smoke in the wind! Let
me
buy
you
a drink—'

'See, Ben,' said
Kit Carson, when they were all gathered around one of Seaholly's makeshift
trestles, 'you're not only the biggest damn nigger in this camp, you're the
biggest damn nigger anybody here's ever
seen.'

Which was
probably true - January stood six feet three inches and was built on what
English novelists liked to call 'Herculean lines' - but he replied promptly,
'That's 'cause you haven't spent enough time in New Orleans,' which got a
general laugh.

'Fact is,'
coaxed Bridger, removing his helmet to wipe his brow, 'a couple of us was
wonderin' how you'd shape against Manitou Wildman.'

He stepped back
and motioned up the big, silent trapper. January looked the man up and down,
and said, "Bout the same as Pia over there'd shape against a grizzly bear.
I'm a pilgrim,' he added, against the general chorus of protest. 'I may stand a
little taller, but I'm no wrestler. What fighting I've done was boxing, and I
can't afford to get my eye gouged out or my thumb broken. I'm gonna need that
thumb if I'm to get work this winter playin' the piano.'