The Shirt On His Back

by Barbara Hambly

  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 dryin’ 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.’

  NINE

  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.’

  Or madness.

  Shaw returned to the fire pit and stirred carefully through the ashes
with the tip of his knife. ‘Panic, too, not to scalp an’ mutilate him, with all the Indians in the world a couple miles away to put the blame on. Might as well leave a sign tacked to his chest sayin’: A White Man Done This. You think any of our friends down the camp would panic if they killed a man?’

  ‘Only if they found out too late that he actually knew the way to Clarke and Groot’s secret beaver valley.’

  Keeping together, Shaw and January worked their way around the outer perimeter of the clearing, Shaw checking the ground for sign and January checking the woods in all directions for Blackfeet – not, he reflected, that he’d be able to see them coming until he got an arrow in the back. The needles seemed to be scratched about by animals larger than foxes, but because of last night’s rain it was impossible to tell who had passed that way, or when. ‘Is reading sign something they teach white boys in Kentucky?’ asked January softly, when Shaw straightened up.

  ‘It is if the family’s gettin’ half their food out of the woods.’ He moved from tree to tree craning his skinny neck to look at the trunks, as if seeking some further mark. ‘Then, too, my uncle Naboth was kidnapped by the Shawnee as a child, raised among ’em for a year an’ a half – family never could teach him to sit in a chair after that, my daddy said. He taught us . . . Johnny was wild to be kidnapped by Indians, too,’ he added with a half grin. ‘Even if he had to travel clear to the Nebraska Territory to arrange it. Tom—’

  He turned, bringing his rifle up before January was even aware that there’d been movement in the trees.

  It was Morning Star.

  ‘Crazy Bear is gone from his camp,’ she said. ‘His blankets are there, and his food also. Last night’s fire was burned out; even the ashes are cold.’

  ‘He could be down at the camp.’

  ‘We’d’a passed him.’ Shaw glanced back through the trees, to where ravens were regathering around the corpse. ‘Damn birds,’ he added, and the three companions returned to the body’s side. ‘But I would be most curious as to who-all else has turned up at the camp today, an’ what they have to say about what our friend here was doin’ out in the woods all by hisself. What you got to say about his glove, Maestro? An’ them stains on his hands?’