The Shirt On His Back

by Barbara Hambly

  He leaned from the saddle to rub the buckskin mare’s face gently with his knuckles as January readjusted the borrowed bridle around her head. ‘Look after that lady for me, Winter Moon. Anybody beat the crap outta Blankenship for that trick with the mirror?’

  ‘I heard Robbie Prideaux beat the crap out of him for something,’ replied January. ‘It could have been anything, given the number of things people have against that man.’

  Wildman made a growly sniff, as close as he ever got, January suspected, to laughter. ‘Could have, at that. He’s another one the country’ll get sooner or later. It was a good fight,’ he added. ‘Been a long time since I followed ring rules. I enjoyed it. You think twice about vengeance, Shaw.’ He glanced back at Shaw beneath the heavy shelf of his brow. ‘It never ends well.’

  ‘Nor does it,’ returned Shaw quietly. ‘Yet I can’t turn from my brother, nor my brother’s blood. An’ there is no law here that’ll touch the man who did it.’

  ‘Nor bring your brother back.’ Wildman sat for a time, looking down into Shaw’s pale eyes. ‘Guess you’re right at that. We do what we gotta. I see this Frank feller around the camp, I’ll let you know.’ He touched his heels to the horse, started to move away.

  ‘He may not be callin’ himself Boden up here.’

  Manitou reined in sharply: ‘Boden?’

  ‘That’s his name,’ said Shaw. ‘Frank Boden.’

  The trapper was silent for a moment; for the first time January saw the animal watchfulness disappear from his eyes, leaving them, for an instant, blank. Shocked, as if thought had been arrested midstream, leaving him uncertain which direction to go. But this was only for an instant. Then Wildman shook his head, said in a strange voice, ‘I didn’t know.’

  He reined away into the woods without another word.

  ‘I ain’t no ghoul.’ Clarke came back from his mules, looking after Wildman as the big trapper disappeared into the shadows of the trees.

  ‘’Course you ain’t.’

  ‘He should damn well talk about goddam ghouls! God Hisself couldn’t keep track of how many hides an’ horses that child’s had off the Flatheads – and I didn’t notice that deer-hide shirt he was wearin’ was part of his plunder back at the camp. An’ I know for a fact them leggins he’s got on was took off some poor Crow up on the Bighorn—’

  ‘It’s a fact ever’body gets what they can, where they can,’ replied Shaw soothingly. ‘An’ like I said, Mr Incognito don’t care who’s wearin’ his boots now. You comin’, Maestro?’

  ‘Yes, just coming.’ January went to kick out the campfire, then stooped to examine the ashes. From the charred earth, he picked a fragment of wood. With the back of his knife – the earth was scorching hot – he dug out two or three more, as if playing jackstraws. Clarke and Frye had already started off up the steep northern slope of the coulee. Shaw waited, still as a scarecrow on his yellow gelding, watching and listening all around him as January scooped up his rifle andfollowed. He said nothing as January stowed the half-burned splinters inside his watch case, the only hard metal container he had which didn’t already hold either powder or lucifers, but the tilt of his eyebrows told January that the policeman had guessed what he’d found.

  What it meant, of course, was an entirely different matter.

  Given the fact that the Blackfeet – whatever their relationship with Wildman – would certainly carry to its conclusion the operations they’d begun on Wildman last night on a couple of lone whites who weren’t their brothers, Shaw slipped on ahead on foot to scout the rim of the coulee before anyone else came out of its cover. About two miles lay between Small Bear and the next coulee – Dry Grass or Rotten Cow, depending on who you talked to, said Clarke – open ground in which it would have been almost impossible to evade Blackfoot warriors. The sun stood halfway between the eastern mountains and mid-heaven, and from one hill slope January could see across the glittering green sheet of the river the beginnings of the rendezvous camp, like a scattering of little villages beyond the rim of the cottonwoods.

  ‘Clem’s gonna scalp me,’ muttered Clarke. ‘Lettin’ myself get caught like a damn pork-eater—’

  ‘He won’t,’ promised Frye jauntily. He seemed to have put completely behind him the enigma of Manitou Wildman’s visit with the Blackfeet. ‘’Cause I’ll be headin’ out with you – it’s just me, I don’t have a partner or nuthin’ – an’ when we get to your valley I’ll trap just where you say, an’ keep outta your way—’

  ‘Yeah, an’ the other way he won’t is if him and me scalp you – an’ them,’ he added, with a truculent glance over his shoulder at January and Shaw.

  ‘You’d still have to catch Wildman,’ pointed out January, ‘and shut his mouth, too. You really think you’re up to that?’

  ‘What the hell you know, nigger?’ muttered Clarke, but in a tone that told January he had him, there.

  January glanced back to make some remark to Shaw and almost jumped in surprise: Morning Star rode at Shaw’s side, leading January’s big liver-bay from the camp and Bo Frye’s mule and his rat-tailed paint. He reined back to join them. ‘You know anything about Manitou Wildman and the Blackfeet, m’am?’ he asked.

  ‘I know he is their brother.’

  ‘And is that a reason for them to torture him – and then turn him loose? Those were healing herbs he was drinking. My sister’s a shaman –’ well, a voodooienne, anyway – ‘and I know the smell. But a bowl of poppy and willow bark isn’t sufficient reason for pretending they didn’t lay a hand on him. At least, it isn’t for me.’

  ‘Crazy Bear is a strange man.’

  Clarke and Frye swung around in their saddles, ‘What the hell—?’

  ‘Where’d she come from?’

  ‘Dropped down outta the sky,’ returned Shaw mildly. ‘Horses an’ all. Beauty, you know Mornin’ Star?’

  ‘Yeah, Sefton’s squaw.’

  Frye asked a rapid question in sign, which January guessed concerned the Blackfeet, because Morning Star smiled and pointed up Small Bear Coulee. She added – doubling her quick-moving hands with French for his benefit – ‘I have seen nothing of the other tribe, nor of the Indian Agent that Broken Hand was sent out to find. Nor have I seen any trace of the dead man’s camp,’ she added, ‘which I think strangest of all . . .’

  She lifted her head sharply, and at the same moment January heard it: the frenzied whinnying of horses in the draw ahead. January’s eyes went instantly to the morning sky: buzzards and ravens circling. Clarke whispered, ‘Jesus—’

  And whipped up his horse.

  Shaw and January followed at a canter, over the rim and down into Dry Grass Coulee. Dry Grass was shallower than Small Bear, and there was less timber. From the high ground, January saw the Dutchman’s camp at once. A cold camp, and a dry one, since there was no stream here in summer. Through the trees he discerned packs and blankets on the ground, and crumpled things that could only be bodies. Something gray moved among them; he heard the quarrelsome snarls of wolves.

  No wonder the tied horses were terrified.

  The smell hit him then, foul in the clean mountain air, and prickled the hair on his head. He shouted, ‘Stop!’ and saw already that the Beauty had drawn rein, smelling it also and uncertain—

  ‘Christ Jesus,’ whispered Clarke, when Shaw and January came up to him. ‘What the hell happened? It smells like a fucken plague hospital down there.’

  Even at a distance of two hundred yards, it was very clear that everyone in the camp had died purging and puking.

  Morning Star rode past them, crossed the bottom of the coulee and put her spotted Nez Perce horse up the opposite slope to circle the camp. While they were waiting for her, Bo Frye came up with the mule string, pale with shock under his tan.

  Curious, thought January, that this young man didn’t find anything odd in playing tag with Blackfeet eleven months out of the year, with death by torture a daily possibility, yet his voice trembled at the thought of disease.

 
Maybe because once the First Horseman took you, your knife or your rifle or your wits would do nothing to slither you out of his cold white grip.

  ‘You don’t think it’s the cholera, do you?’ Frye whispered.

  ‘I’ll know better when we’re close.’ He brought up his rifle and shot at one of the wolves. The buzzards flapped skyward with a dark whoosh; the wolves backed away snarling, then flickered out of sight into the brush. Clarke kept whispering, ‘Christ Jesus, Christ Jesus . . .’ as if the words were a kind of lifeline, to keep him from being swept away by the fact that the people he’d been closest to for the past five years of his life all lay before him, dead.

  And had died – January could see – very badly indeed.

  SEVENTEEN

  Clemantius Groot – clothed in a handsome black frock-coat – lay on his blankets, which were stiff with vomit. Beside him Fingers Woman was curled up, as if she’d died clutching her belly, her face pressed to his shoulder. Frye’s whisper was edged with panic: ‘My grandpa died like that. Yellow fever, in Boston in ’93 . . .’

  ‘The vomit’s the wrong color.’ January had worked plague wards, both in Paris and New Orleans. This was bad – four men and a woman, crumpled and twisted where they had fallen, two with faces and bellies torn open by the wolves. But nothing to what he had seen. ‘And yellow fever doesn’t kill in a night.’ He dismounted, his borrowed mare fidgeting her feet and thrashing her head at the smell of death.

  ‘But the cholera does, don’t it?’

  ‘Yes.’ He was a little surprised at how detached his voice sounded, though, oddly, it seemed to steady the frightened young man beside him. ‘Cholera can kill in a night.’

  Or a day. He had made love to his beautiful Ayasha, early one hot morning in the cholera summer in Paris, kissed her – not an instant of that day had left his memory, nor would it, he knew, until he died, his love for Rose notwithstanding . . . He had walked down the twisty stairs of that old tall house on the Rue de l’Aube and along those gray medieval streets where moss grew between the cobbles, to the plague hospital where he was working . . .

  He could even remember the song the two children at the corner had been singing as they bounced their ball against the wall.

  ‘Dans la forêt lointaine

  On entend le coucou

  Du haut de son grand chêne

  Il répond au hibou:

  “Coucou, coucou . . .”’

  And she’d been dead, when he’d come back to the room about half an hour before the setting of the sun.

  He shook himself. If he let it, the thought would devour him. It had paralyzed him for months after that day – which still felt exactly as if it were yesterday. Even if it was yesterday, today is today . . . And today we have five people dead in a coulee in the middle of the Oregon Territory and no way of knowing whether the contagion has already spread like wildfire over the rendezvous camp . . .

  He took a breath and said, ‘The stools are wrong.’

  ‘You can tell what they died of from lookin’ at their crap?’ Goshen Clarke grimaced, oddly revolted – particularly for a man who engaged in the competition-swallowing of raw buffalo-guts.

  ‘For some diseases, yes. Cholera’s one of them.’

  Among the bodies, cups and kettles lay, two of them that had been set down still upright containing a little water. Thirst could mean fever . . .

  Standing at the edge of the camp, holding the horses, Shaw’s face had a cold stillness to it. He’d been in and out of the plague wards, too – January had seen him there. And had gone into more than one small house in New Orleans, or those small rooms behind shops and groceries and livery stables – only to see the whole family, father, mother, children dead. As his own family had died, leaving only Johnny and Tom.

  ‘Could it be somethin’ they et?’ Frye tagged at January’s heels like a child as he went from body to body; as he knelt to feel faces and hands, though he knew if they’d made camp sometime before dark they’d be cool and only beginning to stiffen. ‘Woman that lived behind us on Water Street bought something in the market she thought was juneberries and made a pie of it for her family. All seven of ’em died, and for a couple days the whole neighborhood thought that it might be some sickness from down the wharves.’

  ‘It could be.’ January raised the eyelid of one of the engagés, but saw nothing unusual in the dilated pupils, the glazed whites. ‘Though I can’t see Fingers Woman baking a pie.’ He straightened up, then walked the whole of the camp again, observing everything, touching as little as he could.

  Morning Star, ever practical, had already taken the thirst-crazed horses further down the draw, to where someone had dug in the sand of the creek bed yesterday evening. The hole was now filled with water from the sunken stream. Clarke stood as close as he dared get to his partner and his partner’s Indian wife – perhaps ten feet – staring at them as if he still didn’t believe what he was seeing.

  It’s got to be a mistake . . .

  January knew exactly how he felt.

  It’s got to be a mistake. I was supposed to be with these friends a lot longer.

  And in his mind he heard Iron Heart, the pockmarked leader of what was left of the Omaha village . . . Rotting on the ground, as my people lay among our tents and rotted . . .

  And Shaw’s soft, creaky voice saying: Tom never got over it . . .

  One person, a family, a village. The shock was the same, almost physical, like an anchor-chain parting. The stunned mind asking: what happens now? What do I do for the rest of the day? The rest of my life . . . ?

  He didn’t like Beauty Clarke, but that didn’t matter.

  He said, ‘We need to warn the camp.’

  ‘Holy Mother of God.’ Frye’s eyes showed a rim of white all around the blue of the iris. ‘You mean this coulda broke out in the camp whilst we was up here?’

  ‘You want to do that?’ asked January. ‘You can go straight down the coulee and across the river. You can probably make it by dark. We’ll take care of these folks here and follow on—’

  He glanced questioningly at Shaw.

  ‘Why’n’t you go with him, Maestro? If there ain’t panic in the camp, don’t start it. Ask around quiet, an’ I mean quiet, if there’s sickness . . . But go first to Titus, an’ Stewart, an’ McLeod. Get ’em together an’ tell ’em what we found here, ’fore anythin’ else. All right?’

  ‘All right.’ January looked down at young Mr Frye at his side. ‘That sit with you, Frye? To avoid panic in the camp, people doing stupid things?’

  ‘All right.’ The young man sounded a little better, for having someone to tell him how to handle this.

  Shaw turned back to Clarke, gestured to Groot’s body on its blankets. ‘With your permission?’

  Clarke looked away. ‘Go ahead. I doubt he’ll care.’ January wondered if he was remembering Manitou’s words about ghouls.

  Shaw knelt, felt in all the coat’s pockets. Narrow-cut, January identified the garment automatically; it barely fit the Dutchman’s stocky shoulders. Dried blood still crusted around the knife hole in the back. Swallow-tailed, with the same old-fashioned lapels as the black waistcoat and the same covered black buttons: he has to have been in mourning. From the pocket, Shaw brought out three envelopes.

  One contained a ticket for the steam packet Charlotte out of Hamburg and fifty pounds in Bank of England notes. The other two contained letters in what January thought was German, until he tried to read it. He blinked, words seeming to make sense and then eluding him . . .

  ‘What’s it say, Maestro?’

  He shook his head. ‘It’s some kind of High German dialect. Hannibal will know.’ He turned the sheets over. Both were signed: Franz.

  The envelopes were addressed to Klaus Bodenschatz, on der Pfarrgasse, in Ingolstadt.

  And among the unfamiliar verbiage on the last page of one, January recognized the name Hepplewhite. He put the nail of his thumb beneath it, held the page for Shaw to see.

  Shaw�
��s glance lifted from the paper and for a moment met his, like frost on steel. ‘Hell to pay.’

  Cholera was the first thing Gil Wallach thought of, too. ‘You’re sure?’ he asked as he and January walked down to the tents of the AFC through the darkness. And, when January reassured him: ‘It’s not the smallpox, is it?’

  ‘Absolutely not.’

  The little trader wiped his face nervously. ‘I tell you, Ben, I was down in the Nebraska Territory when the smallpox went through the tribes there, and it’s nothing you want to see. Nothing. There wasn’t enough living to bury the dead. And the coyotes, and the birds . . . I never want to see nuthin’ like that again.’

  ‘It’s not the smallpox,’ repeated January. ‘Or yellow fever – and I’ve never heard of yellow fever up on high ground like this.’

  ‘What can we do?’ The man sounded scared – as well he might, January reflected. They were fifteen hundred miles from the United States, and surrounded by tribes who outnumbered them and who might easily convince themselves to take advantage of the white men in their time of weakness.

  ‘First thing we can do,’ said January, ‘is find out what we’re talking about.’

  As they approached the AFC camp Robbie Prideaux hailed them from the group gathered in front of Seaholly’s, engaged in the old trapper contest of seeing who could put out a candle with a rifle ball: ‘C’mon, pilgrim, you can’t say you seen the elephant ’til you tried this!’

  January waved good-naturedly, but shook his head. The minute they’d entered the camp, he’d dispatched Bo Frye to the Hudson’s Bay compound, with instructions to bring McLeod down to the AFC tents and to tell no one but McLeod the reason. The last thing they needed, January was well aware, was panic and finger pointing. That done, he’d lingered only long enough to fetch Gil Wallach and hand the two German letters over to Hannibal. He knew, to within a few degrees of certainty, that most of the other traders would be at Seaholly’s.

  This indeed proved to be the case. While Wallach quietly gathered up Sharpless, Morales, Wynne and a few of the other traders, January went to the crowd of trappers around the candle, signed to Bridger and Stewart and – when he’d actually fired off a shot that did put out the flame – Kit Carson: ‘We need to talk.’