The Shirt On His Back (14 page)

They woke
Hannibal, poured coffee down him - he was no easier to rouse now than he'd been
when he was drinking himself unconscious six nights a week - and left him in
charge of the store. Then they rode north along the river, swung west where
Horse Creek purled along the feet of timbered hills. North of the creek the
drier valley stretched away in miles of bunch grass, to where William
Bonneville had tried to establish a fort a few years ago - a silly place to try
to set up a trading station, as Wallach had pointed out. But if the British
ever did make a serious attempt to take and hold these disputed, fur-rich
lands, this would indeed be a very good place to stop them.

They crossed the
creek, the water high and freezing cold. On the south side the hills rose under
a thin cover of lodgepole pine, last year's yellow needles wet underfoot. Shaw
dismounted and led his horse, stopping to examine the droppings of horses and
mules (January couldn't tell the difference, but his companion evidently
could). 'Looks like Groot an' Clarke,' the Kentuckian surmised. 'Rain washed
out most of the sign.'

Ahead, January
could hear the hoarse calls of ravens. Wind passed through the pines; like the
deep rushing of the trees in the bayou swamps of his earliest childhood, before
he'd known New Orleans or Paris. A world of silence, and of beasts: cruel Bouki
the Fox, wise old Mbumba the serpent rainbow, silly M'am Perdix and her chicks
and wily, nimble Compair Lapin the rabbit. . . who, even now, paused on his
errands in a patch of sunlight between the pines and sat up, watching the two
men pass with the young woman in her deerskin dress.

Then the ravens
called again, harshly, squabbling over the tastiest bits of a dead man's flesh.

The black birds
flew up cursing when the three companions came into the little clearing, just
below the crown of the ridge. The brush all around rustled with an explosion of
fleeing foxes.

The ants and the
flies ignored the interlopers, as ants and flies will.

In a rough
shelter of branches against the huge roots of a deadfall pine, the dead man lay
on a bed of more boughs, raised a little off the ground on stones. In front of
it a fire pit had been dug, protected from the rain. January knelt and held his
hand over the ashes. They were still mildly warm.

As Morning Star
had reported, the dead man wore nothing but a pair of black kid gloves, and his
throat had been cut almost to the neck bone, severing carotids, jugulars and
windpipe. A few feet in front of the shelter - and the pine needles were
scuffed up everywhere in the small clearing - even the rain had not completely
washed the blood out of the ground. Flies roared above it in clouds.

January said,
'Jesus.' It was obvious - even through the predation of the ravens and foxes -
that, prior to having his throat cut, the old man had been viciously beaten.

'Well,' observed
Shaw drily, 'this for sure ain't Indian work.'

'No.' January
knelt beside the pine-bough bed as Shaw moved about the clearing, examining the
bindings on the shelter, the stones around the fire. 'And nobody tried to make
it look like Indian work.'

'Lets out Boden,
don't it?'

When January
repeated this observation to Morning Star in French, the young woman replied,
'Will your Great Chief in the East know this? Or the men in the camp, when they
hear that a white grandfather has been killed? Or will they say only,
"It cannot have been one of us who did this thing, so it
must have been the Blackfeet. . . but since there are no Blackfeet to lay hands
on, let us go kill some Sioux instead?"'

January said
nothing, but felt the dead man's wrists, which were just beginning to stiffen,
and - rather gingerly - the muscles of his neck. Just above the bed, bark had
been scraped away from the pine, and on the pale wood beneath someone had cut a
cross with a knife.

'When did your
cousin find him?'

'The sun was two
hands above the mountains.' She had walked a little distance away - as angry as
Shaw, in her own way - and now came back, steadied by the request for
specifics. 'Little Fish saw the ravens and thought it might have been a bear's
kill, from which he could take the horns. He said his first thought was to drag
the man deeper into the hills and bury him in a coulee. But, he said, bears
would dig him out again, and with men all over these hills looking for the
Beauty and the Dutchman, someone would find him. Then, of course, they would
say:
see how the Indians tried to hide the body?''

'They would at
that,' Shaw murmured, coming back to the shelter. 'Scalped or not scalped . . .
Your brothers followin' us?'

'Little Fish
is.'

'Send him to
your camp,' said Shaw. 'Get a couple horses with a litter - not a travois, but
a horse litter, like you'd carry someone real sick in - an' a couple braves.
It'd be best if all was to see you an' your family bringin' this man in with
honor. Then they'll pay attention to the fact that he weren't scalped nor
tortured, no matter what else was done to him. Bring a couple of robes, too, to
cover him decent.'

Morning Star
whistled, and for a moment January thought that another squaw had trailed them
as well; then realized that Morning Star's cousin was a
winkte,
a man who had
chosen the dress and duties of a woman . . . and who was permitted to do so,
something he wouldn't have been in any city in the United States except maybe
New Orleans. Little Fish listened to his cousin's instruction and was turning
to go when January said, 'Ask him, did he move anything? Touch anything?'

'Nothing,' she
reported, when the question was conveyed and answered. Little Fish - tall and
thin in contrast to his cousin's neat smallness - explained: 'My cousin
realized he needed his older brother's advice, so he left things as he found
them.'

'Your cousin is
a wise man,' said January.

'He says,' she
added, 'that the branches of the shelter were wet on their undersides when he
was first here, as well as above, though they have dried now. It rained three
times in the night, stopping between times.'

Shaw knelt and
moved the cut wood that had been laid close to the fire: 'Damp on the
underside. Cut with a tommyhawk,' he added, turning the end of one of the short
aspen-branches in his bony fingers.

'Well, that
narrows it down.' Every trapper in the camp carried an Indian belt-ax. January
turned back to Morning Star. 'How close are we to Manitou Wildman's camp?'

'About half as
far as it is back to the river.'

A
mile, give or take
. . .

'Would your
cousin be safe in fetching him?'

Morning Star
gave the matter some thought, then asked Little Fish something. The
winkte
made a sign with
his hand, replied.

'My cousin says,
he does not know. He has spoken to Crazy Bear at the camps, but he says - and
he is right - that sometimes this is safe to do, and sometimes not. I will
go,' she added. 'Even when his worst spirit is in him, Crazy Bear will not lift
his hand against a woman - unlike the husbands among my people,' she finished
pointedly. 'And his camp is close enough that he may well have heard what
passed here last night.'

The two cousins
departed in opposite directions, and Shaw stood for a time, still fingering the
cut end of the branch. 'Think he'll come?'

'It'll tell us
something if he doesn't. But that shelter doesn't look like the work of an
amateur.' January knelt again beside the dead man, carefully worked one of the
gloves from the stiffening hand. 'If this man ever did manual labor, it was
decades ago. No calluses . . .' He ran a gentle finger over the soft palm, the
unswollen knuckles. The fore and middle fingers were stained with ink - many
weeks old - and marked with older and deeper stains: yellow, brown, faded red.
The pale body was in keeping with the hands, slender but flabby, certainly not
the body of a mountaineer. 'You think he's our Indian Agent?'

'If he is, his
party'll be in the camp when we get back.' Shaw bent his long body around, to
examine more closely the inside of the shelter. 'An' if they ain't, we can at
least have a word with the Reverend Grey about his friend Goodpastor - what you
make of this, Maestro?' He touched the scratched cross, and January shook his
head.

'That after
beating an old man with his fists, breaking three ribs, breaking his knee -'
January lightly touched the swollen joint - 'cutting his throat and stripping
him naked, the killer decided his victim needed the blessing of God to send him
on his way? It's good to know such piety still exists in the world.'

'Well, the
Reverend Grey'll purely bear witness to that.'

Shaw's thumb
brushed the dead man's smooth chin, where traces of blood had been carefully
wiped away. 'The old man coulda cut that cross hisself, when he made the
shelter. If he made the shelter. Would a man bruise up like that if'fn he got
his throat cut right on top of a poundin'?'

'I've seen it,'
said January slowly. 'Not with a throat-cutting, nor with a man this old, nor
someone who's lain outdoors naked on a rainy night. But bruises will form for a
short time after death. His killer must have hated him,' he went on, contemplating
the old man's white hair and silvery side-whiskers, 'to hammer him like that
before he killed him. Or been drunk,' he added. 'Or insane with rage, to do
this to a stranger.'

'It does,
indeed, bear the marks of some of the family sentiment I seen.' Shaw had,
January reflected, been a City Guard in New Orleans for eight years. 'Any
bruises on the feller's back or shoulders? Long bruises, like from a stick or a
whip?'

January turned
the body over, revealing no bruises . . . but a deep and bloody puncture just
beneath the left shoulder- blade, where a knife had been driven into the old
man's heart.

January said,
'Jesus Christ,' and laid him back down again. It was like handling a scarecrow.
The old man couldn't have weighed a hundred and twenty pounds.

'Look at where
he's bruised,' said Shaw softly. 'He's bruised where you're bruised, Maestro -
'ceptin' Manitou was fightin' you by London Boxing Rules an' so didn't kick you
in the stones nor break your knee like this killer done. But the rest of it's
same as you: jaw, belly, ribs, all in the front. I'd paste Methuselah hisself
that way, if the old man were to come at me with a gun an' I had none. But with
a knee broke, an' ribs too, there was no need to stab him in the back nor cut
his throat. That says hate to
me ...
or panic.'