The Shirt On His Back (30 page)

It was a war
camp, in a draw about two miles from the New
Fork River and
above the Green. There were no lodges.

January, at
least, had managed to keep on his feet getting there behind the horses; he
still wasn't sure how. After Hannibal had fallen and been dragged for a few
hundred feet, the warrior in charge of the party - January thought he was Dark
Antlers, one of the two who had come into the camp with Iron Heart when they'd
viewed old Klaus Bodenschatz's body - had had him slung over one of the ponies
like a dead deer and carried into the camp that way.

Iron Heart's
orders, January guessed.

There were about
fifteen warriors in the party that took them, not counting the four Shaw
killed. They were tied, wrists and ankles, with rawhide thongs and left on the
ground close enough to the fire that they could be seen. Only by the motion of
Hannibal's sides could January tell that he was alive at all. The single woman
at the war camp brought pemmican to all the warriors and led the ponies down to
water further along the coulee, before - rather circumspectly - she approached
the prisoners. The warriors watched her, but didn't interfere. It was
Veinte-y-Cinco.

'They've sent
for Boden,' she murmured, dropping to her knees beside January and filling her
tin drinking-cup from the waterskin she carried. 'Iron Heart and the others are
still out looking for you - there's about forty in the band. Dark Antlers -'
she nodded at the warrior who had led the raid - 'speaks English; many of them
do. There was a mission school near their village's hunting grounds on the
Platte. A lot of them were baptized Christians - Protestants,' she added with a
dismissive grimace, like the good Catholic she was, 'and have English names.'

'Is Iron Heart's
name Hepplewhite?'

She looked
startled, then nodded and brushed back the straggling tendrils of her hair.
'Matthew Hepplewhite. It was the name of one of his sponsors when he was
baptized. He was called Eagle Heart by his parents. When they died, he said,
his heart turned to iron in his breast. Some of them speak Spanish, too.' She
rubbed - gingerly - a cut on her chin.

'Let me see
that. . .' Even in the flicker of the small Indian fire, it was clear to him
she'd been beaten. Probably, January guessed, raped as well.

Her mouth
twisted in a sidelong expression as she read his thought in his voice and
replied, 'Nothing I didn't get from my daddy and his drunk friends, a long time
before I met Mick Seaholly. I'm not a little flower, Ben. Like a fool, I tried
to get off a shot, and the powder didn't flash. I should have headed straight
for the river like you did. By the time I ran for it they were coming in from
both sides of the island. Pia got away.' Her voice wavered, ever so slightly,
as she said it: hope that dared not speak its own name, lest it break what
strength was left her. Briskly, she went on, 'They put me on a horse and came
straight after you.'

January turned
his head to look at where the others lay. He could see Shaw's eyes were open -
the man must have a skull like granite - but Hannibal hadn't stirred. 'See the
others are all right,' he said softly. 'Thank you for the water.' No sense
asking her the intentions of their captors: those were clear enough, in Dark
Antlers's eyes when he glanced their way. There was a chance they'd take
Veinte-y-Cinco with them when they rode on, if the band was short of women.
He'd heard how captive women were sometimes treated, and it seemed to depend on
the personalities of the Indians involved, and how ready the woman was to
settle in to become a drudge like the Indian women mostly were.

He watched her
now, kneeling beside Hannibal with her dark hair hanging down over her face
like a curtain, sponging his bloodied face with a corner of her torn skirt.
Hannibal, who'd done nothing, sought neither profit nor vengeance, but had
joined the party on the off-chance that he could be of some use to his friends.

Hooves in the
darkness. Veinte-y-Cinco's long nose caught the firelight as she swiveled on
her heels. A dozen riders came into camp, bareback on their painted horses. The
woman rose at once and went to bring food to the warriors, to lead the horses
away to where a fair-sized herd, by the sound of it, was tethered among the
trees upslope. She had clearly learned her duties in the camp and probably
guessed that making herself useful was her only chance to avoid being killed
with the men. Iron Heart turned in their direction, said something to Dark
Antlers. Dark Antlers clearly reported that five men had been killed in taking
the prisoners, and the war chief's pock-marked face twisted with anger. He
strode toward them; when Veinte-y-Cinco came out of the darkness and asked him something
he simply struck her aside, with such force that she fell.

He kicked Shaw
twice, full force in the ribs, dropped to his knees beside him, dragged him up
into a seated position by his long hair and shook him, his knife in his hand.
'Who have you told about Boden?' he demanded. 'Who else knows?'

'I don't know,'
replied Shaw quietly. 'Didn't take much work for us to guess. Likely, others
did, too.'

'What others?'

'You gonna go
after an' kill them, too?'

'Yes.' The
chief's face was like a wooden mask, half eaten- away with acid. 'If I must.'

'But your plan
was to kill everyone,' said January. 'Wasn't it?'

Iron Heart
looked toward him, his knife blade still laid on Shaw's throat. 'Yes,' he said.
Then he shoved Shaw away from him to the ground.

'Although most
of the people in the camp weren't anywhere near the South Platte when your
family died.'

'It is not
vengeance only for my family, white man.' Iron Heart crossed to where January
lay, stood over him in the firelight, his bare chest, bare arms, silver knife-blade
clothed in the low red light. 'Or only for my people, lying among their lodges
with their bodies eaten up by birds and animals, dying so swiftly there was
none to sing their death songs nor to remember their names as they died. Since
I was a boy not old enough to gather firewood by myself, I have seen those whom
the white man has pushed out of their homes: the Delaware who lived by the
Eastern Sea, the Cherokee, the Houmas. They passed through our land, and they
all said the same: the white man is too lazy to build fences, so his pigs and
his cattle wander to eat the crops in our villages;
the white man
has ruined his land with growing cotton, so now he needs fresh land to ruin.
And we must move, because we are not Christians. And even when we are Christians,
we are not civilized. And even when we live in houses and print newspapers and
go to school and read books . . . Because we are enemies. And even when we have
sworn friendship and had it sworn us in return by the men that the white men
elect to represent them . . . What does the white man want us to be?'

Passion twisted
his voice for a moment, but his ruined face remained impassive, as if the scars
went through the skin and flesh to the nerve and the bone. 'He wants us to be
dead,' he finished, 'so that he can take our land, which is what he meant all
along to do. Do you deny this, black white man?'

'No,' said
January. 'I do not deny it.'

'If another man
killed your wife and ate her body for his dinner, would you seek revenge on
him?'

'I don't know.'

'Then you are no
man. If he came to you with her blood on his hands and stood before you and
laughed in your face, would you strike him down?'

January sighed.
'Yes. Yes, I would.'

'And when he lay
before you, would you kill him?'

'I would,' said
January, knowing it to be true. 'But I would not kill his brother, who had been
home sleeping in his own bed when his murder took place. Was it Boden who asked
you to help him seek his revenge, or you who asked Boden?'

'It was Boden
who came to me.' The warrior's dark eyes narrowed behind scar-thick lids.
'After the white man's sickness had burned itself out, I and what remained of
my people came north. We meant to go on into the mountains. But the first snows
found us still on the plains, taking buffalo. We wintered near Fort Ivy, and
talk of the sickness was still on every man's lips. Counts Things - the chief
of the fort—'

Had he not been
in fear for his own life and those of his friends, January would have smiled at
the name the Indians had given Tom Shaw.

'—asked me:
would my people become trappers for Ivy and Wallach? I grew angry, and in my
anger I spoke my heart: that I would sooner die than work for the white men.
The deaths of my wife and my parents were new to me then. I said that I would
have vengeance on the white men, whatever the cost, for the ruin they had
brought to my people and my world.'

He was silent a
moment, as if the remembering of it took him back to that smoke-stained
blockhouse chamber, that isolated quadrangle of logs on the windswept hillside
above Rawhide Creek. To bitter night and marble-hard snow and the comfortless
moon that had watched his grief uncaring.

The last of the
search parties had ridden into the camp while Iron Heart spoke, and the men
were bedding down in their buffalo robes. A few, January noticed, knelt and
folded their hands in Christian prayer.

'Boden came to
our village that night. He said that the trapper called Manitou had murdered
his sister, away in the country of the white men beyond the ocean. The white
man's law had not hanged him for this crime, and so he, Boden, had been seeking
him across half the world. You have seen Manitou and know that he is like a
spirit bear, swift and hard to catch. The mountains are great and go on for
many months' journeying to the desert, and to the sea beyond that. Boden knew
that to trap one man in all this land, he must have Indians who knew the land
and how to hunt.'

Softly, January
said, 'And Boden knew Manitou would be coming to the rendezvous. It's the one
time he knew where he would be.'

'To kill the
deer, one does not lie out on a dry hillside,' returned Iron Heart. 'One goes
to water and waits for the deer to come down.'

'And from saying
you would sooner die than become a hunter for the white men,' said January,
'you became a hunter for a white man.' And when Iron Heart's face twisted with
anger, January went on: 'What did he promise you for this? The deaths of other
white men?'

'The deaths of
them all. The trappers who strip our streams of the beaver people who have
lived there in peace since the moon was young . . . The traders who sell liquor
to my people - not Omaha, not Sioux, not Shoshone, but
all
my people, all
the people of this land! - and make them silly and drunk so that they give away
not only the furs they have trapped, but also their wives and their horses and
the clothes from off their backs . . . The whites who bring in disease, whose
touch rots the land. If I cannot kill all of them, I would see as many of them
die as I can. This is what he promised.'

By the fire,
Dark Antlers and the other men glanced at their chief and his prisoners; there
was only one of them not visibly scarred by the smallpox. They were grouped
around the bodies of the five warriors January and Shaw had knifed in the fight
by the river: brothers and friends.

'His father was
a medicine man, he said,' Iron Heart went on. 'He would bring a sickness
medicine from across the ocean and would mix it with the white man's liquor on
a night when Manitou was in the camp. For this reason he let it be known that
he had the best liquor in the camp, so that when he gave it away free, all
would drink it. This he planned to do after you fought Manitou, save that the
man Blankenship angered Manitou and sent him from the camp in great rage. The
old father had been staying among us with his poison. He had said to me that
day that he wished to poison only Manitou, and not the others. I told him that
this was not our bargain, that all must die. Before Dark Antlers and I went to
watch the fight, the old man and I had angry words. When I came back to the
village later, I found he was gone.'

'And he met
Manitou,' said January softly, with a sudden sense of having seen someone turn
right, whom he had expected to turn left. Ridiculous, he thought, considering
that he and his friends sat in the open mouth of the wolf . . . 'Did his son go
with him, then? He was at the fight—'

In his mind
January saw Charro Morales in his crimson jacket, making his horse caracole and
shouting: '
Free liquor tonight, if Wildman
wins!''

And every man in
the camp had cheered. 'Boden remained in the camp. He never came to our tents
while daylight was in the sky, or any man moved about awake.'