The Shirt On His Back (36 page)

Boden moved like
a snake striking, snatched the knife from the warrior nearest him and slashed
the man, plunged for the momentary gap in the group around him. There was a
vicious struggle that ended with the trader being thrust back into the open
space before the lodges, two Omaha warriors now holding grimly on to his arms.
Boden gasped for breath, his face terrible to see as January unbuckled the
straps on the luggage, took out the trapper's spare shirts and trousers, socks
and drawers - and from beneath them, folded into a tight bundle, a short jacket
of cinnabar-colored rawhide, like a vaquero's, of the sort that many of the
Mexican traders wore for rough work on the trail. Then another shirt - like all
of them, white linen and much worn. Jacket and shirt, front and sleeves, were
stained and crusted with dried blood.

'You couldn't
throw them away,' went on January, 'because they'd be found. Nor could you wash
them without causing comment - not in the middle of the rendezvous camp. Nor
have them washed, because someone would talk. You killed him, and you left
him—'

'What's the
matter with you?' Boden's voice was almost a scream. 'Don't you understand what
that monster
did
?
Are you
actually going to let him
go
?
We vowed, my father and I, that neither of us would rest until that man was
dead. Before ever we started, he said that I must not permit
anything
to stop me—'

'Then why did
you need to stab him in the back,' asked January quietly, 'before you cut his
throat?'

Iron Heart stepped
from among his warriors, stood before Boden in the open ground before the
tipis. 'You disgust me,' he said in a level voice, and his pockmarked face was
as cold as his words. 'At Fort Ivy you said that you were one of us in your
heart, that you were our brother. In my own hunger for vengeance I listened.
Yet I see that you are a white man after all, who will let nothing stand in the
way of what he craves. To avenge yourself is the act of a man. To bring your
father far from his home to help you - and he came, willingly, because it was
his son who called, leaving all that he knew - and then to kill him rather than
burden yourself with his care . . . This is dishonor. Such a person is not my
brother.'

He turned to
Shaw, and taking his scalping knife from his belt, held it out to him. 'And for
this dishonor, twenty of my friends have died, killed by the Crow, or by you,
Tall Chief. They thought they were fighting for a brother, whose honor equaled
theirs. He has shamed them and dirtied even their deaths. He is yours.'

With an
incoherent shriek, Bodenschatz flung himself against the grip of his captors,
kicking and thrashing like a horse at the breaker's. Iron Heart stood aside as
the men dragged Bodenschatz to Shaw and pushed him to his knees.

'You have won.' The
Omaha chief stood facing Shaw, with the prisoner between them. 'Even our
vengeance is denied to us, that this man and his father promised us on the
banks of the Rawhide Creek. We will have our vengeance,' he went on, 'those of
us that are left. Yet we will have it without the help of those against whom we
would take it. My friends died, because I believed a white man would help me
against white enemies. You do not keep warm at night by sharing your blanket
with a wolf. Take your vengeance on him, Tall Chief. He is not my brother.'

Shaw stood for a
time, like an Indian himself, the scalping knife in his hand.
Seeing his brother
? January
wondered. Seeing the twelve-year-old boy, wild to go downriver on a flatboat
and see New Orleans . . . ? Seeing the child who had learned, with horror and
shock, that he had no home to go back to? That the only people he could rely on
in the world were his brothers?

Seeing Tom in
the firelight of Fort Ivy, long fingers stroking the pale silky scalp that he
held in his hand?

Or seeing the
hills that had been his home, where you had to bar the doors of your cabin at
night, because your cousins had killed the son of the clan in the next holler,
and if they couldn't catch your cousins they might just come after you or your
wife? The world he didn't want to bring up his children in?

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 stay in' 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.'

'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 -1 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.'