The Shirt On His Back (35 page)

Not long after
noon on the following day January heard the camp-dogs barking, and he emerged
from the lodge to see everyone hurrying toward the ford. He and his fellow
prisoners followed the Crow to the river's edge, in time to see the five horses
come down to the opposite bank, with the sharp sun dappling them through the
pine boughs as they crossed. With Dark Antlers and the two Crow rode
Veinte-y-Cinco, in her torn and ragged red-and-green finery, and beside her, in
matronly calico and a sunbonnet, Moccasin Woman, with a battered leather
camp-chest lashed to the back of her saddle.

January
whispered a prayer of thanks, and another one requesting that he'd be able to
convince Walks Before - and Iron Heart - that what he suspected was true.

Warriors, women,
children surrounded the five horses, so closely that none of the prisoners
could push their way close,
but over the dark heads of the crowd, January saw Veinte-y-
Cinco's eyes seek him, then Hannibal, then Shaw. He smiled at her and raised
his hand.

Walks Before
Sunrise and his son, the warrior Lost, were sitting on a blanket before the old
shaman's lodge when the little cavalcade approached. He got to his feet, and
the Indians made way for him to approach the horses. In the crowd January
picked out Iron Heart, and Bodenschatz, in the center of the Omaha warriors.
Bodenschatz saw him, and for a moment their eyes met, a look of such hatred and
spite in the other man's that January was taken aback.

I'm
only here as Shaw's henchman
. . .

To Bodenschatz,
he realized, it was all the same.
He who is not
for me is against
me...

He saw the
German's face when Bodenschatz saw the luggage tied on Moccasin Woman's saddle
and felt his own twinge of spite at Bodenschatz's horror. Spite and triumph.

It's
in there
. . .

He suddenly felt
much better.

Walks Before
held out his hands. 'You are Moccasin Woman?'

'I am.' She
kicked her feet free of the stirrups, slid to the ground and shook out her
faded skirts.

'And have you
brought the clothing of the old white man whom you found dead in the woods, two
nights after the new moon?'

'I have.' She
touched the quillwork bag that hung at her side. Her broad, brown face was sad
but peaceful. 'I asked his forgiveness of him, for taking it away, and did what
I could to honor him. Yet I am a poor woman, and even the smallest pieces of
cloth can be turned to good account, in repairing clothing.'

Walks Before
Sunrise turned to January, motioned for him to step forward and speak.

Bridger and
Prideaux, and every trapper to whom January had spoken, had said the same thing
of the peoples of the plains and the mountains: that they valued speech-making
as a form of honor and would follow explanations and tales with avid interest,
the length of them and the shape of them a compliment to the listeners. He took
a deep breath, and turned to Iron Heart.

'When your
warriors surprised Tall Chief and the Beauty, at the place where they were
burying the dead in Dry Grass Coulee, did one of them take the black coat that
lay in that place?' He knew the answer was yes because he'd already seen the
coat on one of the Omaha warriors, a bizarre sartorial effect in combination
with the young man's leggings and breech cloth. Iron Heart signed the warrior
forward, and January motioned for him to turn around before the Crow shaman, to
show the knife hole in the back of the coat.

'And when you
attacked us on the island near the camp,' January went on, 'and killed the
young trapper who was with us, did you also take his clothing?' This question
also was rhetorical. No Indian in creation would pass up a black silk
waistcoat, and in fact he'd seen Boaz Frye's yellow calico shirt on one of the
warriors, and thought he'd glimpsed the black satin vest on someone else . . .
Which indeed proved to be the case.

But the question
was asked in the proper form, and there was a murmur of approval from the
assembled tribe.

'Listen, now.'
He turned again to Walks Before Sunrise and raised his voice to carry, his
gestures taking in all the tribe gathered around, as if he were telling a story
to Olympe's children. 'And I will tell you all that took place beside Horse
Creek, on the night of the rain just after the moon was new.'

'He lies!'
shouted Bodenschatz. 'He is lying to save his own skin, and that of his
murdering friend!'

Iron Heart
glanced sidelong at him, expressionless. 'Let the black white man speak.'

'Is it true what
you told me, Iron Heart,' said January, 'that the old medicine-man, Boden's
father, left the lodges of the Omaha on the day that I fought with Manitou,
with a bottle of poisoned liquor in his pocket? That he sought to poison
Manitou the Spirit Bear in his own camp, because he had decided he did not wish
to kill all the men at the rendezvous?'

'It was because
he saw the child,' replied Iron Heart. 'The little Mexican girl who played
cards at the liquor tent. She was out in the meadows near our camp that day,
looking for feathers in the long grass. The old man said that he accepted that
the women would die, who were harlots and had come here of their own accord to
lie with men for money. But the child was innocent, he said.'

January
reflected that Klaus Bodenschatz had obviously never seen Pia dealing faro, but
let that pass. Across the open ground, he saw Veinte-y-Cinco silently take
Hannibal's hand.

'He and I
quarreled over this,' Iron Heart went on. 'It had been agreed that Boden would
poison the liquor and give it away after the fight, but there was no victory.
Men came back to the camp and told the old man of this, and also that Manitou
had returned in anger to his own camp. When I came back to the tents of my
people, the old man was already gone.'

'And you, Manitou.'
January turned to the trapper, standing huge and silent among the warriors of
the Crow. 'Did you meet the old man in the woods near your camp?'

'I saw the light
of his lantern.' Manitou, also, had learned what the nations of the plains
considered the honorable way of speaking. 'I had not known the man Boden in the
camp, but his father I knew. The old man was the father of a woman that I
loved, a woman I killed in a fit of madness, many years ago. He fired a pistol
at me from hiding. I had my rifle, but I did not want to kill him. He had a
second pistol, and in the struggle to get it from him I hurt him - broke his
ribs, and broke his leg. I was angry already from fighting Winter Moon -' he
nodded toward January - 'and I could see the fire of my madness beginning to
flicker at the sides of my eyes. Still I remained long enough to tie up the old
man's wounds. I tore up the shirt he wore, to brace his ribs and to bandage my
own arm where his first bullet had struck me. I used his neck cloth, and strips
torn from my own shirt, to put a splint on his broken leg. Then I made a
shelter for him, knowing it would rain again, and built a fire to keep him safe
from animals. I knew his son must be nearby and would search for him before
long. I put my own shirt on him to keep him warm, and over it his waistcoat and
coat again. Then I went to the camp of the Blackfeet. My brother Silent Wolf
knows the ways to take the thunder spirit out of my brain, before I harm those
around me. I was in their camp—' He frowned, trying to remember.

'Two nights.
Then Tall Chief and Winter Moon came - Bo Frye, too, and the Beauty. They told
me that old Bodenschatz had been found dead. I returned to my own camp and left
the rendezvous.'

'So when you
left the old man,' reiterated January, 'he was wearing your shirt - was this
the shirt you had bought from Ivy and Wallach the day before?'

'It was. Black
and yellow checks, cotton. Of good quality.'

'And his own
shirt was torn up for bandages around his ribs?'

Manitou nodded.

'What was that
shirt made of? What color was it?'

'White,' said
the trapper immediately. 'Linen—'

'Like the one
his son now wears?'

All eyes went to
Boden, who snapped, 'This is all lies!' He turned to Iron Heart, caught him by
the arm. 'This man talks nonsense, about what color our shirts are and who
wears what. What does it matter? He will say anything—'

'And I will
listen to anything,' replied the Omaha chief, his voice deadly quiet. 'The
truth leaves its tracks, like a fox in the snow, for a wise man to follow. Be
silent.'

Boden started to
reply, then looked around him, at the warriors who had moved in closer.

'Moccasin
Woman?'

Still with her
air of serene sadness, the matriarch opened her quillwork pouch and brought out
a bundle of cloth. The garments had been washed of their bloodstains, leaving
only pale brown ghosts, and the hole in the back of the checked shirt had been
neatly mended. Its torn-off hems had been sewn back as well - she must have
found those in the bushes around the camp, where Poco had thrown them and the
black silk cravat when he'd untied the splints. There wasn't a man among the
warriors - hunters and trackers from birth - who hadn't been brought up making
inferences from such details, putting together evidence in order to survive.

January summoned
back the two Omaha warriors who wore the old-fashioned black coat and the satin
vest with its outdated collar, and he held the black-and-yellow shirt up first
to one, and then the other. Walks Before rose from his blanket and studied the
holes, which matched one another exactly. Then January handed him the last
garment, the torn-up sections of the white linen shirt.

The seams had
been ripped apart, and one sleeve was missing—

'I got that
here.' Manitou slipped his left arm free of his deer-hide hunting-shirt, to
show the filthy, bloodied white linen that bound the bullet wound in his own
arm. 'You can see the cloth's the same.'

The back of old
Klaus Bodenschatz's white linen shirt was intact.

'He was stabbed,
then,
after
Manitou's
black-and-yellow shirt was put on him,' said Walks Before Sunrise, holding the
two garments in his hands. 'There was a great bleeding here, more than he would
have bled had his throat been cut earlier . . . And indeed, if his throat had
been cut first, what need to stab him in the back? What have you to say to
this, Boden?'

'That he's
lying,' argued Boden frantically. 'That that lying monster came back and
stabbed him later—'

'Why would he
have done that?' asked Walks Before reasonably. 'The old man's leg was broken.
He was no danger to Manitou then. Why not kill him the first time, rather than
build a shelter for him and bind his wounds?'

January folded
his arms, looked steadily at Bodenschatz where he stood among the Omahas. 'But
that broken leg meant that your father was now a liability to
you
,' he said
softly. 'You knew where your enemy was - and you knew that, having seen your
father, he would flee. Yet you couldn't pursue him as long as you had to care
for the old man. You'd have to take your father back to the settlements.
Certainly, your Omaha brothers weren't going to do it—'

'I—I knew
nothing of it,' Bodenschatz stammered. 'I didn't know he was dead until they
brought him into the camp—'

'But it was your
hat that one of the camp whores found beside the body later that morning,' said
January. 'With your hair in it, dyed black except for the brown at the roots—'

Sharply, the
young Omaha Kills With A Rock put in, 'He renewed the false color on his hair
the day he left our lodges, to ride into the white men's camp as a trader! It
was, as you say, brown as a raccoon's fur where it grew from his head, to the
length of a child's knuckle.'

'And the old
man's pistols were in your pockets yesterday. None were found on the body by
the men who took his coat. Yet he'd shot Manitou with one of them, and the
other had fired, putting a bullet into a tree, so he had them that night. And
as well as all that, Boden,' added January grimly, '
no
one else had any reason to kill him.
He was harmless, he was crippled, he was in a foreign land. He needed help,
that only his son could give him—'

'He would never
have asked me to give up my revenge!' shouted Boden. 'He was as vowed to it as
I!'

'Maybe he mighta
changed his mind,' put in Shaw softly, 'whilst lyin' there listenin' to the
rain? Let's see what's in that camp chest, Maestro—'