I walked away . . .
With a sigh, the Kentuckian flung the knife down, so that its blade stuck in the dirt between Bodenschatz’s knees. To Asa Goodpastor he said, ‘You stayin’ in the mountains when the rendezvous breaks? Or headin’ back to the settlements? Can you notarize affidavits, so’s Boden here can be tried for what he done, an’ hanged in form of law for murder by poison an’ by knife? I’d say we got evidence enough.’
‘That you do,’ agreed Goodpastor, and he stroked his white mustache. ‘An’ yes, I’m ridin’ back to Missouri. An’ I’ll make your case for you, if you manage to get this weasel back there. But you’ll have your work cut out for you, keepin’ guard over him—’
‘He’ll come,’ rumbled Manitou. ‘For I’ll ride with you and stand my trial as well. That’s what you want, isn’t it, Franz? You won’t pass up the chance to take the witness stand against me a second time, will you?’
‘For that pleasure, monster,’ whispered Boden, ‘I will happily face the gallows myself.’
TWENTY-EIGHT
In the Ivy and Wallach camp on the banks of the Green late that night – after a ride of some twelve miles over the hills back to the rendezvous – Shaw, Hannibal and January unpacked the rest of Franz Bodenschatz’s camp chest.
The rendezvous was breaking up. Some of the men would continue to camp along the Green for another week or two, but the high summer was passing. The weather would be bitter by the time McLeod and his traders got back to the headwaters of the Columbia, and snow would fly before some of the independents found the high valleys where there were sufficient beaver to justify a winter camp.
The Indians were leaving, too. ‘It is time for the Fall buffalo-hunt,’ Morning Star said, when she’d embraced Hannibal, Shaw and January in turn as they’d dismounted before her lodge in the twilight. ‘I’m so glad you returned before our departure.’ She kissed Hannibal again, with the warm affection of a wife of years’ standing, and added, ‘And that you were not killed, of course. Will you hold one more feast for my brothers, Sun Mouse, before we leave?’
‘With all the pleasure in the world, beautiful lady.’
Even Gil Wallach, who came from his own tent with exclamations of joy and relief at the travelers’ return, didn’t object.
When they went into the lodge, January could see that Morning Star was already packed to go. Her small cooking gear was bundled up, her drying racks disassembled and tied together. She had, to January’s great astonishment, thought to steal one of the packets stored in Klaus Bodenschatz’s lodge in the Omaha camp before she’d burned it, which made things a great deal easier when the camp’s chief citizens came calling. Even as Morning Star and Pia were making supper – the girl had run all the way from Seaholly’s, but had not, January was later informed, neglected to set a guard on her faro table – Titus, McLeod, Stewart, Bridger and Tom Fitzpatrick came up the trail.
They listened unmoved to Franz Bodenschatz’s furious counter-accusations against Manitou and Shaw, then viewed the dead man’s assembled garments with the watchful intelligence of men – like the Crow warriors – whose lives depended on inference from small details. Bridger and Fitzpatrick were in favor of rough justice then and there, and it took all of Shaw’s arguments to convince them to let the man be taken back to Missouri for trial. In this, Stewart, McLeod and Titus seconded him: the former two out of an innate sense of law, the latter because Shaw took him quietly behind the tipi and threatened to reveal who had hired Walks Before Sunrise and his band of Crow to ambush stragglers on their way back to the mountains.
‘Can you prove it?’ Titus asked narrowly. ‘About Morales – Bodenschatz, I mean.’ He glowered at Shaw in the distant light of the supper fire. ‘That nonsense about the Company paying the Crow to cause trouble is pure fantasy.’
‘Well, I thought as much,’ assented Shaw mildly. ‘So’d Mr Goodpastor – who’s ridin’ the first day or two back to the Yellowstone country with ’em.’
January – who’d followed the Lieutenant and Titus back behind the lodge for this conversation – wondered if the words that Edwin Titus so violently bit back at that point had anything to do with the barrels of AFC gunpowder and the thirty AFC rifles for which he would now receive nothing. But Titus hadn’t risen to his present position with the Company by saying what was in his mind.
‘I think we have more than enough evidence to hang Bodenschatz when we get to Missouri,’ January interpolated comfortably. ‘Was anything taken from his tent, sir, while he was away?’
The end of Titus’s cigar glowed momentarily, a gold eye in the darkness. ‘When he headed out of here two nights ago – that’d be, I guess, when he got word you and Sefton had been took by the Omahas – he paid a couple of my boys to keep an eye on his stores. Doesn’t look like that stopped Moccasin Woman from walking into his tent, though. You can have a look through the place tomorrow. I’ll square Bridger and Fitz, to keep this quiet.’
When supper was done, and Robbie Prideaux set to guard Bodenschatz, the three companions retreated to the lodge to go through the camp chest for whatever else of interest it might contain.
‘This should probably do it.’ Hannibal thumbed through the thin packet of letters he’d taken from the back of one of Bodenschatz’s ledgers. ‘I’ll need to go over them more carefully—Manitou,’ he added, as the big trapper ducked in through the doorway of the lodge, ‘—can you still read enough Bavarian to translate? But it looks like old Klaus wasn’t any too happy with Franz’s scheme even before he saw little Pia playing in the meadow with flowers in her hair. Is there no other bargain which can be struck? he asks here – dated December of last year, just before he leaves Ingolstadt. And here: my heart goes out to these unfortunate savages, yet their vengeance is no affair of ours. But in the next sentence he says he can bring about thirty pounds of powdered castor-bean – I suppose that’s why Franz kept this particular letter – and that it should be enough to poison everyone in the camp ten times over. It is the price that must be paid.’
‘It is the price that must be paid,’ echoed January wonderingly. ‘Just like that. Hand over poison to kill six or seven hundred men . . .’
Manitou settled cross-legged by the fire, turned the papers over in his huge hands. ‘He was a good man,’ he said softly. ‘He hired me, that Mina might become a doctor . . . There wasn’t a malicious bone in the whole of his body. Don’t know how many times I played cards with him . . .’ He shook his head, rubbed his forehead as if trying to clear away some shadow from his eyes. ‘I thought he’d be my father-in-law.’ And his hand went, almost without the appearance of conscious thought, to knead his left arm, where the old man’s bullet had plowed through the flesh. ‘Thing is . . . I don’t feel this evil in me. I don’t think that I ever would do such a thing . . . except that I know I did.’
Hannibal said, ‘But yet I could accuse me of such things that it were better that my mother had not borne me . . . I don’t suppose he thought he’d turn poisoner, either, if you’d asked him fifteen years ago.’
‘If I could do that,’ the trapper went on. ‘Could turn him from the man he was into someone who’d make a bargain like that – maybe it’s just as well that I do hang.’
‘You already had one trial.’ Shaw folded his long arms around his knees. ‘Or, at least, one set of judges declared it weren’t your fault.’
‘An’ sent me to a madhouse,’ replied Manitou. ‘I think I’d rather hang than go to another.’
‘What was Franz like in those days?’ January lifted from the bottom of the chest an octavo volume of Shakespeare in translation – Hamlet, Lear, Othello and Macbeth – and another of The Sorrows of Young Werther. ‘His sister must have spoken of him.’
‘She didn’t, much.’ Manitou’s single bar of brow furrowed at old memories. ‘She’d laugh at the letters he’d write her every day – joked that his wife Katerina would get jealous. Their pa said he once beat up a local boy that courted her—’
He broke off as
January lifted from the very bottom of the box, where they’d been beneath the books, a pair of women’s gloves – faded pink – and, creased and folded, a batiste chemise embroidered with lilies, white upon white. ‘Them was Mina’s,’ he whispered.
‘Were they, indeed?’ With them was a locket, such as old Klaus had worn in his waistcoat pocket. The picture inside wasn’t as accurate, but idealized and ethereal. January guessed it had been done after her death. It also contained a lock of her hair.
‘She said he was jealous,’ murmured Manitou after a time, and he turned the glove over in clumsy fingers hardened by pack ropes and trap springs. ‘Jealous of me. Jealous of her love.’ He looked aside. ‘’Bout time I went back, I guess. Let him have his say in a court of law. ’Cause I sure can’t say the right an’ the wrong of it.’
‘No.’ Shaw shook his head and sat considering the face of the girl in the locket and the chemise that her brother had saved. Had brought to the New World with him, when he had carried pictures of neither his children nor his wife. The Kentuckian’s thin, ugly face looked tired, with a haggardness it hadn’t shown during pursuit through the wilderness, or wading icy torrents, or as a prisoner in the camp of vengeful savages, and there was a sadness in his eyes. As if, January thought, this whole thing were just one of the cases he solved in New Orleans, the fox tracks of grief and sin and rage that he’d only stumbled across in pursuit of his calling. ‘No, I ain’t sure as how anyone can.’
In the afternoon, as January was helping Morning Star butcher out an elk for that night’s feast, Veinte-y-Cinco came to the camp to bid the Indian woman goodby. ‘You go back Taos?’ Morning Star asked, in the rather shaky English that Hannibal had been teaching her, and Veinte-y-Cinco nodded.
‘Hell, Mick and I know one another,’ she sighed. ‘I don’t give him trouble when he drinks, and he don’t give me trouble when I don’t.’ She held out to the younger woman a necklace strung with silver coins and a silver cross. ‘I want you to have this, corazón.’
‘You can come to New Orleans with us,’ offered Hannibal as his bride joyfully put on the new ornament and kissed everyone in sight. January suspected, by the wistful note in his voice, that the fiddler would miss his Sioux wife very much, despite the fact that both knew that neither could survive in the other’s world. ‘I don’t think Shaw would mind an extra rider.’
Veinte-y-Cinco smiled and laid her thin palm to his cheek. ‘That’s sweet of you, Sun Mouse. But I know Taos. And what would an old whore like me do in New Orleans, up against so many that’re pretty and young? But if it’s true Mr Shaw wouldn’t mind another rider—’ She glanced, a little shyly, toward the store tent, where Shaw was helping Gil Wallach pack and count the unsold goods, and then back at January. ‘Would you take Pia? She’s got nothing waiting for her in Taos but what I’ve got. Last year I almost sent her off with those missionaries that came through here, but she was so young then . . . I thought I could keep her another few years. But after what happened with that bastard skunk Titus . . . Would you take her? Take her and see to it she gets work with a good family, who’ll look after her? The world is hard,’ she finished softly.
‘My wife’ll look after her,’ promised January. ‘After you fetched Moccasin Woman to the Crow camp – when you very well might have run off and left us – we owe you that and as much more as you care to ask.’
That night the whole of the Ogallala village came to the feast – joined by large numbers of Delaware, Crow, Shoshone, and also by Asa Goodpastor, who’d ridden into camp that afternoon. ‘First time I’ve had a banquet to celebrate a divorce,’ Hannibal remarked, incongruous in his much-battered frock-coat with feathers braided into his long hair. ‘Something I should do more often.’ But January guessed, as the liquor went around, that the fiddler would have liked to get drunk, to forget that he was leaving her. He played instead, as stories said Compair Lapin had played, calling the stars down out of the sky and the Devil up from Hell: Irish airs and Mozart dances, sweet wild tunes that seemed to flow upward into the Milky Way, all that he could give this girl in farewell.
In the morning, before the mist was off the river, the tribes were gone.
Hannibal spoke little through the day as the Ivy and Wallach men broke their camp. He seemed anxious and nervous, as he had when first he’d ceased taking opium, but the mundane work of packing seemed to steady him. Robbie Prideaux and his partners brought Franz Bodenschatz with them and left him tied to a tree while they assisted. ‘You’re taking a chance with that one,’ warned Goodpastor quietly as he took January aside.
The German sat on the ground by his tree reading Goethe – silent and as contemptuous of the men around him, as Tom Shaw said he had been at Fort Ivy . . . but every time January looked at him, he felt the hair lift on his nape.
Although Shaw was helping Gil Wallach pack furs, January noticed that the Kentuckian never got where he couldn’t see his prisoner, and never let his rifle out of instant reach of his hand. He had stayed awake guarding Bodenschatz for two nights now. January guessed he was expecting something, too.
‘Any suggestions?’
‘Hell.’ Goodpastor grinned crookedly. ‘If I knew what he was planning to try I wouldn’t be twitchy.’ His bright-blue eyes went from Shaw back to Bodenschatz, who after his bitter imprecations and curses thrown at Titus and McLeod that first night, had said little to anyone. ‘It’s six weeks back to the settlements. Tall Chief’s gotta sleep sometime.’
‘I’ll do what I can.’ Though January guessed that writing was something of a labor to Shaw, he knew that the man had patiently prepared a stack of affidavits – from Poco, Moccasin Woman (under her English name, with no mention of her race), Morning Star, Hannibal and everyone else he could find – as to the circumstances of the deaths of Klaus Bodenschatz, Clemantius Groot, Goshen Clarke and the Dutchman’s three camp-setters, and had gotten Goodpastor to sign and notarize them.
He hoped this would be enough for Tom Shaw.
‘And you watch out, especially for that little girl.’ Pia and her mother waved to them as they came up the path from the AFC camp, where tents were being struck also: furs weighed, plew-sticks tallied. Pia, too, had been quiet all day, and it crossed January’s mind to wonder if Johnny Shaw was the only child to dream about running away with the Indians. Today she looked very grown-up, in her red vest and a new skirt, with one of Morning Star’s beaded necklaces around her throat.
‘Don’t you let her get anywheres near him,’ said Goodpastor quietly.
‘I won’t.’ January’s instincts told him that whoever else Shaw might sacrifice, to bring his brother’s killer to justice, a threat to the child would render him helpless.
Bodenschatz would know that, too.
But on the following morning, when the Ivy and Wallach train was preparing to leave, Pia couldn’t be found. Shaw had sat awake a third night guarding Bodenschatz, and he attested that the girl had had no contact with the prisoner. She’d come back to the camp past midnight with Hannibal, after doing a land-office business on her final evening dealing faro in front of Seaholly’s.
‘Scarcely surprising, considering the number of eleventh-hour customers waiting in line,’ added the fiddler, who had spent the evening alternately playing chess with Sir William Stewart and making music for men who would hear nothing for the next eleven months but wolves howling and the chants of Indians. ‘I understand she and Jed Blankenship, working in concert, took three hundred dollars off John McLeod at vingt-et-un.’
The child had slept close to the fire, near Hannibal and Manitou. Her blankets, folded neatly, had been there when Manitou had woken at the first whisper of light.
‘What do you expect?’ said Bodenschatz, when he heard of the matter. ‘The girl is a whore.’
Hannibal and Prideaux went out to search the camp, while the rest of the party loaded the mules. ‘We can’t wait long, if she ain’t found,’ warned Goodpastor. ‘I’d search that skunk Titus’s tent, myself—’
‘Gi
ven that McLeod’s watchin’ like a hawk for somethin’ to cause the Company grief,’ Shaw said, returning from a careful inspection of the ground all around the campsite, ‘I think he’d be too smart to try anythin’, though there’s no sayin’. Anyways,’ he added grimly, ‘by the sign it looks like she walked away from the camp alone.’
It was Hannibal who brought the news, hastening back down the path from the Hudson’s Bay compound. ‘A couple of McLeod’s engagés saw her leaving camp at first light,’ he said, pressing his hand to his side. ‘With Jed Blankenship.’
Into the stunned silence which followed, January said, ‘Blankenship?’
And tied to his tree, the prisoner sat down and laughed uproariously at the consternation in his jailer’s voice.
‘She kept company with him, Prideaux says, while her mother was away.’ Hannibal sat on one of the rocks that surrounded what was left of the fire pit. ‘And with Edwin Titus, evidently. The men who saw her leave say she was laughing with Blankenship; riding one of his horses, and making jokes with his engagés. It doesn’t sound as if she was forced.’
‘She’s thirteen—’
Hannibal only looked up at him with weary eyes. They both knew whores in New Orleans younger than that.
‘Hell, I was thirteen when I left the settlements,’ said Prideaux, with a trace of sadness in his voice. ‘I joined Fitzpatrick’s brigade to go trap on the Popo Agie. An’ for the same reason. There wasn’t nobody much lookin’ after me. An’ it looked like a whale of a lot of fun.’
Nevertheless, Gil Wallach and – to his enormous and unexpected credit – Mick Seaholly delayed their departures from the much-trampled valley of the Green River for another forty-eight hours, while Prideaux, Manitou, Shaw and Asa Goodpastor scoured the hills, trying to pick Blankenship’s trail out of the mazes of departing hoof-prints of independents, the early-leaving Hudson’s Bay trappers and the numerous Indian villages heading north and east and south on the autumn hunts. January and Hannibal spent most of the two days either guarding Franz Bodenschatz – who seemed glumly disinterested in anything other than how badly the world had treated him – or comforting Veinte-y-Cinco.
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