The Shirt On His Back

by Barbara Hambly

  January shifted the rifle to his left hand and held out his right.

  ‘And here I thought I was the only one to hang on to the Beauty’s trail,’ lamented the young man. ‘Tell you what, though, January. I’ll go in with you and your friends – that’s Shaw with you, ain’t it? And the fiddler’s squaw? Once the Beauty gets up into the mountains, he’ll quit hiding his tracks, and then we can double back to camp, gear up good and follow ’em straight— What is it?’ he added, seeing the direction of January’s gaze. ‘What you lookin’ at?’

  ‘Your fancy waistcoat.’

  Frye’s face colored above the dark beard, and he looked aside.

  ‘Where’d you get something like that out here?’ January went on. ‘And whose throat did you cut to take it off him?’ He extended a finger, to the remains of the crusted blood still visible on the puckered and water-ruined black silk.

  The young man’s flush deepened. ‘Like that preacher said,’ he repeated, opening his coat further so that January could see the garment, ‘it’s not how it looks.’

  ‘I know it’s not,’ said January. ‘We came on the same man, dead on the ridge by Horse Creek.’

  FOURTEEN

  ‘You know who it was?’ asked Frye, after he’d fired a shot – the signal for Shaw’s return – and with a professional’s swiftness reloaded his piece before removing the waistcoat for closer inspection.

  ‘Not the tiniest hint.’

  ‘I figured he had to been a friend of that Englishman Stewart’s. That’s good silk, a dollar an ell. My ma was a dressmaker,’ he added, as if this unmanly piece of knowledge needed explanation.

  ‘So was my first wife.’ January turned the creased and water-faded fabric in his fingers, examined the edges of the knife hole that had been ripped in the back. ‘Anything in his pockets?’

  ‘Just this.’ Frye held out a silver locket and, when January pressed open the delicate catch, added a trifle wistfully, ‘She’s right pretty.’

  She was indeed. The miniature within had been painted on ivory, by an artist not quite skilled enough to convey the girl’s youth. Sixteen? Seventeen? Her mouth was a childlike rosebud, but her light-brown hair was dressed high: January recalled the style as being all the rage in Paris about ten years ago. So she was, at least, old enough to be ‘out’. Under a watch glass in the locket’s lid, a curl of hair that same light-brown color had been carefully preserved.

  Frye brought up his rifle at the sound of horses coming down to the bottomlands, then lowered it as Shaw called out, ‘Yo, Maestro?’

  ‘All clear, Lieutenant.’ The use of Shaw’s title was a signal. Had somebody been holding a gun to his head, January would have called out, All clear, Captain, and Shaw would have taken whatever steps he deemed necessary from there. He held out the vest and the locket as Shaw dropped from the saddle.

  ‘Well, Lordy Lordy . . .’

  ‘It’s funny,’ mused Frye. ‘My granny always said, if you went around stealing things from the dead, they’d find a way to make sure you got caught for it. Hell, I’ve took heaps of plunder from Injuns, and if God’s keeping count of the horses and saddle tack I took off dead Comanche and Mexicans, well, I can only hope Granny’ll be praying for me when my account gets tallied. But you know, I sure did feel queer, pullin’ the weskit off that old man.’

  But you did it anyway. January reflected that if you’d happened to have been soaked by the rain, a silk under-layer between your new red calico shirt and your new blue wool coat would have been extraordinarily welcome. Even if you did have to rinse blood out of it before you put it on.

  ‘When did you find him?’

  ‘Just before sunup. You could see colors.’

  ‘How was he layin’?’ asked Shaw.

  ‘On his back.’

  ‘On the ground?’

  ‘Well, yeah. His feet was pointing toward that deadfall tree, maybe two–three feet between his toes and the fire pit.’

  ‘Barefoot?’

  Frye nodded. ‘He had splints on his left leg, like as if he’d broke it. Somebody’d tore the hem of his shirt to tie ’em on with. Black gloves – a real gentleman, I thought, which is why I thought he mighta been one of Stewart’s friends. The fire’d burned out, but somebody’d put wood by it for him. I thought he’d broke his leg fallin’ off a horse, and they’d put up a little shelter for him and gone back to the camp for a litter. I sure wouldn’t want to try to pack a wounded man down out of these mountains and back to the settlements.’

  January thought about the steep trails beyond Fort Laramie, the gullies – climb down, climb up – and the crossing of the Platte, the Sandy, the Popo Agie and a thousand swollen creeks in-between.

  ‘It wasn’t Indians, though, was it?’

  January shook his head. ‘I don’t think so, no.’

  ‘Poor old buzzard. I’m sorry I robbed him, now.’

  ‘If’fn you hadn’t,’ remarked Shaw, ‘Indians might’ve, an’ this locket’d be halfway to the Columbia.’ He turned it over in his long fingers. ‘’Sides, we know the Beauty got to him ’fore you did – we been trackin’ him by his boots – which means the odds is good that he got his coat an’ his hat as well.’

  ‘Do you know?’ said January suddenly. ‘I think our friend was in mourning.’

  ‘If you’re goin’ by the color,’ returned Shaw, ‘it’d mean Edwin Titus an’ half the traders in the camp just lost their whole families.’

  ‘Titus’s coat-buttons are steel.’ January held up the weskit again. ‘Look at these. They’re covered in the same silk, so they’ll be black like the rest of the garment. It’s bombazine silk, too, that doesn’t catch light. Mourning is mostly what it’s worn for. And expensive as it is, it’s an old vest. Nobody does this kind of lacing on the back anymore, or has lapels cut in a triple notch this way—’

  ‘Oh dearie dear,’ squeaked Frye, with upflung hands, ‘don’t tell me I must get rid of all my old weskits before I go back to the States! Don’t grieve a body so!’

  January grinned and made a move as if to push the young trapper out of the shelter of the cottonwoods and into the river. ‘Don’t you tell me your ma never cut out a gentleman’s vest. And look at how the silk’s worn along the edge of the collar. He’s got to have bought this ten years ago. Now look at the way his young lady is dressed. Those sleeves are just about ten years out of date – so’s her hair. My sister would throw herself in the river before she’d wear a wired topknot like that. Doesn’t it look to you,’ he went on, ‘like our young lady died about ten years ago, which is when her – father, shall we say? – outfitted himself all in black – rather expensively – and has remained so ever since?’

  ‘Hair’s what folks mostly take, goin’ into mournin’.’ Shaw rubbed his thumb at the silky glitter of stubble on his jaw. ‘An’ that locket’s plain enough to go with a funeral rig . . . not that some of them ladies in New Orleans don’t put on as much of a dog biddin’ their Dear Departed adios as they would goin’ to the Opera. I am most curious,’ he added, ‘as to what we’ll find in the coat.’

  January glanced at the angle of the sun. It stood only a few hand-breadths above the western mountains: every sagebrush, every boulder, that lay beyond the cottonwoods seemed edged in shadow, and coolness rose from the river. ‘You’re for going after Clarke and Groot, then?’

  ‘I am goin’ after ’em,’ said Shaw gently, ‘yes. I need to find out who our friend really is, an’ I need to find out what he might be carryin’ in his pockets, if anythin’ – an’ most of all what he was doin’ out here. If’fn you go back to the camp, Maestro – an’ I reckon if you follow the river you can make it there not more’n an hour after dark – get Prideaux an’ Stewart, an’ see if you can find our friend’s camp, or any sign of where Manitou Wildman mighta got to . . . I don’t know when I’ll be back.’

  ‘Well, hell.’ January reflected that it was probably too much to hope for that Shaw had simply forgotten about the Blackfeet. ‘Since Rose has probably
already spent that three hundred dollars you left with her, I guess I’m with you. Frye?’

  ‘Thunderation, no man’s gonna say Bo Frye ever backed off a clear trail. I’m your huckleberry, Shaw. Besides, I want in on that secret valley. They’ll have to take me with ’em, or have me trumpetin’ to the congregation which way they went.’

  Morning Star listened in silence as January reiterated in French all that had been said.

  All she replied was, ‘They’ll camp in Small Bear coulee.’ Her moving hands translated the words to Frye as she spoke. ‘It is the closest place between here and the mountains where they can water their animals, and there is no other they can reach by dark.’

  ‘You figure they know someone’s still after ’em?’ Frye’s question was answered within a quarter-hour, when the hoof prints divided after another section where the trail had been obliterated with blankets. Half went east, the other half continued north.

  ‘That’ll be the Beauty goin’ east,’ surmised Shaw, when both sets of continuing tracks had been located – some hundred feet apart – and the pursuers reunited briefly to reconnoiter. ‘It’s one horse an’ a passel of mules, so my guess is, that’s the Dutchman with the camp-setters an’ Fingers Woman turnin’ north. There a stream in Small Bear coulee, m’am?’ And, when she nodded: ‘Then they can follow the stream to each other, an’ head into the hills along its bed. You folks want to take the main party, in case our boys split what they found on the old man? I’ll come on down the stream to meet you, if’fn I catch Clarke.’

  ‘And what if someone catches you?’ asked January.

  Shaw grinned and swung into the yellow gelding’s saddle. ‘Then you’ll hear me hollerin’.’

  The sun went behind the mountains, and suddenly the whole of the valley lay in lavender shadow. Frye and Morning Star made patient casts forward and backward through the bunch grass across the hill slope toward the coulee, whenever the trail disappeared. Wind rustled drily in the silent world, broken now and then by the strange tweet-pop of grouse. Like a gray-brown mirage, a line of antelope flowed higher up the slope, heading, like themselves, for the water in the coulee. A peaceful scene, marred only by the inescapable recollection that if Small Bear coulee was the closest place between the ford and the deeper mountains where horses could be watered, there was a certain likelihood that this was where the Blackfeet would camp also. The result of that would not be good.

  To hell with wondering if I’ll come home to find Rose dead, reflected January grimly. Let’s just worry about ME coming home in the first place. In New Orleans you might have to keep looking over your shoulder to make sure you weren’t about to be kidnapped by slavers and sent to the cotton-growing territories, but at least you didn’t have to worry about being tortured to death.

  Unless, of course, you encountered one of those truly crazy blankittes who thought it was perfectly all right to torture blacks if doing so eased their own inner demons. January had met those, too.

  And if Rose was here, where she and he both longed for her to be, he knew he’d be insane with worry for her safety.

  He knew this world of tribes and beaver and silence and birds would enthrall her. She wouldn’t rest, he thought, until she’d talked Jim Bridger into taking her north to the valley of the Yellowstone – Blackfeet or no Blackfeet – to see the hidden mysteries at the heart of the continent of which the trapper had spoken to him last night. Strange geothermal vents, smoking mud-pits, geysers spouting steaming water thirty feet into the air. Waterfalls like walls of lace, hot springs and a mountain of glass and yellow rock, seen only by the Blackfeet, the grizzlies, the wolves.

  The coulee dropped away before them, filled with shadow. He smelled water below, but no scent of smoke. The Dutchman would be making a cold camp. Frye and Morning Star moved off in opposite directions along the crest, leaving January just far enough down the slope himself that he wouldn’t be skylined, to hold the horses and watch for Blackfeet. He saw no dust in the air, but that didn’t mean they weren’t ahead of them, somewhere in the creek bed among the thin trees and shadows. No sound.

  As the last light faded the young mountaineer climbed back up to him: ‘Don’t see a damn thing.’ And, when Morning Star melted out of the darkness a few moments later, he asked – combining English with the signs universal to the tribes of the Plains: ‘What you think about us cuttin’ straight down to the creek, so we’ll at least have it ourselves if they ain’t there?’

  Morning Star answered, small brown hands seeming to pluck ideas from the thin moonlight. ‘They’ll be upstream or down, not opposite where they entered the coulee. They must go up it tomorrow, to meet the Beauty, but there will be more water further down.’

  It would be pitch dark in the woods, and having left camp when they had, January hadn’t thought to bring a lantern. Not that he’d be fool enough to use one on this side of the river. They descended, cautiously, keeping as close to the edge of the trees – and the flicker of moonlight – as they could.

  The wind eased. In its wake, the stillness gritted with the sudden, faint taste of smoke.

  And with knife-gash suddenness, a man’s scream of agony ripped the night.

  FIFTEEN

  Frye gasped, ‘Fuck me . . .’

  The second scream was worse, like the bellowing of an animal trapped in burning barn.

  The Blackfeet.

  Shaw.

  For a few moments January felt as if he couldn’t breathe.

  ‘Downstream.’ Morning Star’s voice was barely more than the siffle of the wind. Her small hand touched January’s elbow in the darkness, guiding him up the coulee and away.

  January pulled his arm free. ‘We have to get him.’

  ‘You think he will be in any state to run, should you do so?’

  You’ll hear me hollerin’ . . .

  ‘I won’t leave him.’

  Her face was no more than a blur in the shadow as she tilted her head. ‘Will you die then, and tell his ghost all about your friendship?’

  She was absolutely right, and January felt sick with shock. Dear God, silence him! Dear God, let him die.

  He knew damn well that Abishag Shaw was too tough to die anytime soon. And the Blackfeet too skilled.

  ‘The least I can do is shoot him from cover.’

  ‘Hell, pilgrim,’ said Frye, when January told the young trapper in English what he planned to do, ‘I seen you shoot.’ He puffed his chest a little in an attempt to sound like Jim Bridger. It would have been laughable if January hadn’t heard in his voice how terrified he was. ‘No man’s gonna say Bo Frye left a feller to be gutted an’ minced by the Blackfeet. Waugh! Damn it,’ he added, looking around sharply, and when January followed his gaze he saw that Morning Star was gone. ‘Where’d that squaw get to? You don’t think she guided us here a-purpose—?’

  ‘She’s a Sioux.’ January didn’t feel at all certain, now that she was gone, of his own words. ‘And she’s my partner’s wife. Her uncle was killed by the Blackfeet.’

  Frye made a little noise in his throat – ‘Huh . . .’ – but it was impossible now to see his face. Only a pallid dapple of moonlight leaked through the boughs overhead; the gulch below was like a lake of indigo and cool. They tied the horses (what if a wolf comes along?) and Frye led the way straight down toward the stream, where there was also a little silvery light. ‘Got to watch for the camp dogs,’ Frye murmured. ‘Billy LeBleaux down on the Purgatoire snuck into a ’Rapahoe camp to get back his rifle an’ knife when they got stolen, an’ ran into the dogs. Raised such a ruckus he had to spend the next three days hidin’ up in a rock crevice, while the savages looked for him. It’s gonna be a long shot.’

  Moonlight cold on water. Night wind in trees. Smells of pine and wet rock. Something dark on the far side of the stream rose on its hind legs to half again January’s six-foot-three-inch height, snuffing the air. Dear GOD—! He guessed the bears he’d seen near the camp had been black bears, scarcely taller than a man.

  He
followed Frye’s shadow back a few feet into the deeper concealment of the trees. ‘I would have sworn Shaw would keep clear of them,’ he breathed. ‘Or at least that he’d get off a shot—’

  ‘Don’t you think it, pilgrim. Five years ago Tom Fitzpatrick walked smack into a Gros Ventre village that he was tryin’ to avoid one night, came within a huckleberry of gettin’ a prairie haircut.’ Further down the coulee came another scream, and behind it, bodiless in the darkness, a single, guttural voice lifted in a chant. Frye’s voice shook with the effort to sound nonchalant. ‘Happens to the best.’

  Firelight glimmered through the trees. The smell of horses, the reek of camp. With the next scream came the howling of the camp dogs. Frye touched January’s arm, and they hopped from boulder to boulder across the creek. From there they worked their way up the side of the draw, never losing sight of the orange glimmer of the flames.

  ‘All right, hoss,’ whispered Frye. ‘Here’s how it is.’ His hands worked swiftly as he spoke, drawing the ball from his rifle, adding powder to throw the ball an extra distance. ‘I only get one shot. That’s all I can do, and all I’d expect of any man in the like position—’

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘You ever kicked a hornet’s nest? You’ll wish you was safe home rollin’ on one in a minute. The second I shoot, you go straight up-slope and back up the coulee. There’s rocks about a half-mile behind us, with crevices big enough that a man can get in under ’em. You pull in whatever brush you can find in front of you and you lay still, and if a rattlesnake’s in there and bites you, you’re still ahead of the game.’ The fear was gone from the young man’s voice and, curiously, January realized he felt none either, only a kind of chilly calm.

  He recalled being scared, marching with the Faubourg Tremé Free Colored Militia down to Chalmette Plantation behind Andrew Jackson, twenty years old and thinking about what he’d seen bullets do to human flesh. But once crouched behind those cotton-bale redoubts, straining his eyes through the fog and hearing the British drums, there had been only this sense of cold, and of time standing still.