The Shirt On His Back Read online

  January swung the rifle butt, smelled the other man’s sweat; the blow hit and glanced off as other shapes rose out of the grass all around them. Someone seized him from behind, a bare arm like iron around his neck; a hand gripped his hair. He pulled his knife and cut at the arm, even as the corner of his vision caught the glint of a knife and he felt the blade cut his forehead – his own knife ripped muscle and the choking hold loosened. January surged to his knees, twisting like a harpooned whale, and dragged his attacker over his shoulder with his own greater strength and smote the ground with him as with a blanket.

  Then he grabbed for the rifle he’d dropped at some point – he didn’t even remember when or how – scooped it up, swung around . . .

  And the Indians were gone, as if they’d never been.

  Movement. He crouched, swung the rifle in that direction . . .

  ‘Maestro?’

  ‘Here.’

  Footfalls pounded along the track from the camp, louder than any Indian would make. Prideaux’s voice yelled, ‘You all right there?’

  ‘Sefton?’ called Shaw, and Hannibal’s voice replied:

  ‘I’m perfectly safe hiding behind my wife here.’

  ‘Gnaye,’ said Morning Star – fool!

  ‘You still got your hair on?’ Shaw’s tall form stood lanky against the stars.

  January straightened up. Beside him, Wallach said shakily, ‘Let me check.’

  January felt the knife-slash on his forehead, the ribbon of blood dribbling down his cheek. ‘More or less,’ he said. ‘Pretty close to less.’

  With Prideaux were two of his trapper friends and the engagés Clopard and LeBel. Now that the fighting was over, January felt slightly weak in the knees.

  ‘Any idea who it was?’ Prideaux asked, and Wallach retorted:

  ‘You know, I think it was the Chinese, but I ain’t all that sure.’

  ‘If’fn it was the Chinese,’ remarked Shaw, ‘they’s hittin’ us awfully close to the camp.’

  Maybe, thought January as the group walked back toward the Ivy and Wallach shelters. But the ambush had been laid precisely between the AFC camp and that of Ivy and Wallach – at the greatest distance from either, and where the cottonwoods came up closest to the path.

  A guard was set, for what remained of the night.

  SEVEN

  Prideaux, Shaw, Morning Star and January went out to the place at first light – January with four more of Hannibal’s inexpert stitches in his head and a three-inch strip shaved out of his hair with Shaw’s skinning knife. They found evidence of an ambush carefully planned. Four men had lain in wait among the cottonwoods, just at the point where the bottomlands came closest to the path. Three more had lain flat in the deep grass of one of the meadow’s several small streams, a few yards west of the trail. ‘Laid here for over an hour, looks like,’ said Prideaux, kneeling beside a few scuff marks and flattened blades that were perfectly incomprehensible to January. ‘Which means me and Dalrain – you remember Gordy Dalrain from yesterday, hoss? – musta walked right betwixt ’em, ’cause we hadn’t hardly sat down an’ stirred up our fire, ’fore we heard your hoo-rah.’

  ‘This is Flathead work.’ Morning Star stood up from where she’d knelt some ten yards west of the trail, came back with beaded knife-sheathe in her hand.

  ‘What’d we do to get on the Flatheads’ wrong side?’ protested January, and Prideaux replied promptly:

  ‘Had some decent piece of plunder on you, maybe. Hell, they mighta been after Sefton’s fiddle. That thing’s hellacious medicine.’

  ‘That is fool talk,’ replied the Indian woman. ‘Seven Flatheads, killing and scalping white traders at a rendezvous? English Chief would have their scalps. And Kills At Night too, for driving the white traders away so there will be no gunpowder or liquor for anyone.’

  ‘Coulda been drunk.’

  ‘What, all seven of ’em?’ Shaw turned the sheath over in his bony fingers. ‘Layin’ there so quiet in the dark? That sound like drunks to you, Maestro?’

  ‘That’s a handsome piece of work.’ January took the beaded leather from him, studied the band of stylized birds on it, green on white. ‘How often does it happen that an Indian would just drop a piece of gear? Particularly a sheathe like this that goes on a belt.’

  ‘How often does it happen that an Indian’ll take pains to stick the blame for his killin’ on another tribe?’ countered Shaw thoughtfully. ‘The point of killin’ is to count coup for your own glory, not somebody else.’ He knelt and made his way back toward the river in a sort of duck walk – crouching, stooping, long body bent almost double – with Prideaux and Morning Star scouting the ground on either side. ‘Delaware moccasins,’ he added, and Morning Star mimed a woman smitten by Buddhist Enlightenment.

  ‘And the woman who makes moccasins for the whole of the camp is one of the Delawares! Perhaps there is some connection?’

  Shaw grinned up at her, then returned his attention to the damp ground.

  Inquiry up and down the river – and along Horse Creek where the camp had thrown out a sort of suburb for a few hundred yards – unearthed no evidence of other ambuscades in the night, and January got a great deal of good-natured backslapping from the mountaineers, who regarded the near scalping as a sort of initiation rite. ‘By God, pilgrim,’ said little Kit Carson, grinning, ‘now you can for sure tell your grandchildren you seen the elephant an’ heard the lion roar.’

  ‘I’d just as soon have missed it.’ January grinned back and drank down the liquor that Mick Seaholly poured out for him on the house – a ritual he knew well enough required the purchase of a round for everyone present. The stitched and scabbing cut on his forehead still ached like the devil, and he hoped he’d live to see his child, let alone his grandchildren . . .

  ‘Never say that, hoss,’ protested AFC agent Beckwith, a wiry little man, resplendent in beaded Crow finery, and one of the very few men of African descent January had seen among the mountaineers. ‘Bastards didn’t hurt you, did they? To perdition with ’em then, I say! Waugh! You wear your scars with pride . . .’ Which led directly – as conversations with Beckwith frequently did – into accounts of Beckwith’s glorious adventures in the mountains: single-handed fights with Blackfeet, weaponless triumphs over grizzly bears, long treks naked and wounded in the snow with two broken legs and a whole tribe of Blackfeet in pursuit . . .

  And yet, reflected January, for all his boasting, Jim Beckwith had been a trapper for many years and was a warrior respected among the Crows. His chieftainship among them had been hard earned, considering how easily the man could have spent his life chopping some white man’s cotton in Missouri.

  January left Seaholly’s and made his way back to the tipi shared by Clem Groot, Beauty Clarke and Fingers Woman, who were still chuckling over leading half the camp on a wild goose chase in the rain. He brought a bottle of trade whiskey, and Fingers Woman immediately put a grouse on to roast – Indians spent so much of their time hungry that any visitor was instantly fed – and the tale of January’s adventures led naturally into the time Clem nearly got his hair lifted by the Assiniboin, and from there to the fight they’d had with the Crows in the Absaroka Country in the Fall of ’34. At last January judged the time right to ask, ‘They ever find out who it was, scalped Johnny Shaw at Fort Ivy last winter?’

  The partners shook their heads. With very little nudging from January, the two independents gave an account of events which closely paralleled that related by Tom Shaw back at the fort: in midwinter Tom had gone down to Fort Laramie, a journey of about a week at that season, for supplies, and a few days after his departure Johnny Shaw’s body had been found about a quarter-mile from the fort, mutilated and scalped.

  ‘I said I’d head down to Laramie, tell Tom,’ said Groot, handing January a chunk of grouse from the stewpot. ‘Boden – the fort clerk – said he’d go. It’d snowed the week before, so they packed Johnny’s body in it real good, to keep him ’til Tom got back. Beauty an’ me left Ivy a
few days after that, so we never did hear no more about it, but I guess Tom musta wrote Abe to come take the supply-train. It true Abe’s in the City Guards at New Orleans?’

  January let the conversation run on a little – about Johnny’s relations with the various tribes that came to trade at the fort, and the time Fingers Woman had taken four horses and his boots off him playing the Hand Game – and then mentioned that Tom Shaw had had no warning when he’d returned to the fort: Frank Boden had not made it to Fort Laramie. This elicited some exclamations, and some cursing at the Blackfeet, but no remarks concerning: gosh, I saw a feller here at the camp I woulda SWORE was Boden . . .

  ‘Manitou Wildman was at the fort at the same time, wasn’t he?’

  ‘He was,’ agreed Clarke, and with a careful finger fluffed the long, golden ends of his mustache. ‘But I doubt you’ll get Manitou to say a word about any Indian, no matter what tribe.’

  ‘Has he gone that much into the tribes?’ There were, January knew, trappers who became virtually Indians themselves, though he’d noticed they were just as ready to trap streams bare and kill members of other tribes as were any of the Company hunters.

  The Dutchman shook his head. ‘Nah, the redskins think he’s as strange as we do. Well, you’ve seen him – or you ain’t seen him, more like. He’s one of those fellows who’s best left alone. Hell –’ he grinned whitely in a tangle of sandy beard – ‘ain’t we all?’

  January was still considering what excuse would be most plausible for him to ride up to Manitou’s solitary camp in the hills above Horse Creek and start a conversation, when the chance to get better acquainted with the man was more or less dropped into his lap.

  When he returned to the camp and made his way to Seaholly’s, he found – in addition to an improvised jousting match in progress involving Jim Bridger’s new armor – that Hannibal had set up a table outside the liquor tent and announced himself ready to take on all comers at chess, at a dollar a game. He had immediately – the trappers gleefully informed January – gutted and skinned Sir William Stewart and stretched his plew to dry, to the Scotsman’s utter delight. There were four trappers lined up to be initiated into the mysteries of this new pastime (‘That’s better’n I’ve had all week,’ commented Veinte-y-Cinco) and Pia had undertaken to keep the challengers supplied from the bar and Hannibal provided with spruce water and fizz pop, in-between running a faro bank at the next table. ‘I hope he’s giving her a cut,’ murmured January to the girl’s mother.

  Veinte-y-Cinco winked at him and went back to stand behind Hannibal’s bench. Having a wife back at the camp, reflected January, bemused, didn’t seem to have reduced his friend’s attraction for women in the slightest. Even the gray-haired, motherly Moccasin Woman of the Delawares – whose baptized name was Ann Bryan, though Hannibal was the only one who ever remembered it – would flirt with him when she came past. Young Mr Miller was perched nearby on a pack saddle, sketchbook on his knee, capturing the group around the chess game, though January noticed he had tactfully transformed Veinte-y-Cinco into an Indian squaw.

  ‘There’s the man!’ From the direction of the scuffed and trampled pitch of last night’s banqueting tent, a voice called out, and half a dozen mountaineers and camp-setters came over to surround January at the bar.

  ‘Just the child we been lookin’ for, waugh!’

  ‘Let us all buy you a drink, Ben.’

  ‘Whoa!’ January held up his hands. ‘I may be a pilgrim here, but I’m learning to smell war smoke in the wind! Let me buy you a drink—’

  ‘See, Ben,’ said Kit Carson, when they were all gathered around one of Seaholly’s makeshift trestles, ‘you’re not only the biggest damn nigger in this camp, you’re the biggest damn nigger anybody here’s ever seen.’

  Which was probably true – January stood six feet three inches and was built on what English novelists liked to call ‘Herculean lines’ – but he replied promptly, ‘That’s ’cause you haven’t spent enough time in New Orleans,’ which got a general laugh.

  ‘Fact is,’ coaxed Bridger, removing his helmet to wipe his brow, ‘a couple of us was wonderin’ how you’d shape against Manitou Wildman.’

  He stepped back and motioned up the big, silent trapper. January looked the man up and down, and said, ‘’Bout the same as Pia over there’d shape against a grizzly bear. I’m a pilgrim,’ he added, against the general chorus of protest. ‘I may stand a little taller, but I’m no wrestler. What fighting I’ve done was boxing, and I can’t afford to get my eye gouged out or my thumb broken. I’m gonna need that thumb if I’m to get work this winter playin’ the piano.’

  ‘You play the pi’anna, Ben?’ Stares of disbelief from those who hadn’t been party to last night’s interchange with Stewart. Like most white men, they assumed that anyone his size would have spent his life picking cotton.

  ‘For the best whorehouse in New Orleans.’ This happened to be true, though January’s brief stint at the Countess Mazzini’s quim emporium the previous Fall hadn’t been his usual venue. But it got a better reaction, he reflected, than if he’d said he played regularly for the New Orleans Opera House. Young Mr Miller, he reflected, wasn’t the only one to alter details to make a better tale.

  In a slow bass rumble, like a man struggling to remember what human speech sounded like, Wildman said, ‘I can box.’

  It was like hearing that Kit Carson could dance the minuet.

  ‘’Sides,’ added a young New England trapper named Boaz Frye, ‘Manitou’s a fair fighter, long as you don’t get him mad.’

  ‘Yes, and I’ve heard that same thing about grizzly bears.’

  ‘If that’s all that’s bothering you, amicus meus –’ Hannibal appeared at his elbow and accepted another tin cup from Veinte-y-Cinco – ‘why, there isn’t a man in this camp who hasn’t killed a grizzly with his bare hands. Just ask them. Waugh,’ he added politely and slugged back the contents of the cup.

  January’s eyes met Manitou’s, but found no expression in them that was readily decipherable. Manitou only stood, his head a little down, like a bull buffalo startled by something he’d heard and making up his mind whether to charge or not. And yet, January knew, from his own days of studying ‘the sweet science’ – as boxing was called – with an English professional in Paris, that there was no quicker means to open a door to conversation with a man than a clean, hard fight with no ill feelings involved. You can’t lie on the stage, they’d said at Colonel Rory’s boxing salon.

  Dancers he’d known said the same thing of their own ‘sweet science’.

  ‘Come on, Ben,’ urged Jed Blankenship, and he slapped January’s arm familiarly. ‘We already got money on you.’ He’d spilled his last two or three drinks down his buckskin shirtfront, and his breath would have killed trees at thirty paces. ‘You ain’t scared of him, are you?’

  ‘Are you?’ January countered.

  Jed grinned slyly. ‘You just gotta know how to handle him, is all.’

  ‘Good,’ said January. ‘I’ll fight him if you’ll do it first.’

  Blankenship blenched visibly under his tan, and everyone cheered.

  ‘Suits me,’ Manitou rumbled.

  Blankenship’s dark-blue eyes darted from side to side like a man contemplating physical flight, and Prideaux whooped, ‘Jed today,’ over the yelling, ‘and Ben tomorrow. Wouldn’t want to take Manitou’s edge off,’ he added with a wink.

  There was very little danger of that. Men were already shoving Blankenship across the path toward the dusty contest-ground, and Pia was collecting plews and recording bets with the businesslike briskness of long practice. January – detained by the crowd at the bar – didn’t even make it to the front of the mob that surrounded the fighters before the combat was over. One moment he was struggling to get through the wall of backs, and the next, it seemed, everyone was jostling their way back to the bar and Manitou was putting his new checkered shirt back on, with Jed sprawled before him unconscious – and suspiciously unbruised – in t
he dust.

  January knelt beside him and saw his eyelids move.

  He was faking a knockout.

  ‘Did you think he wouldn’t?’ inquired Veinte-y-Cinco as plews and plew-sticks changed hands before the bar. There wasn’t a lot of exchange, since nobody had bet on Jed to win. All the wagers had concerned how long it would take Wildman to knock Jed out, and one or two optimists on Wildman killing his opponent – and, January heard later, eating him as well. ‘Hell, Jed bet himself to lose.’

  ‘He found a taker?’ asked Hannibal incredulously.

  ‘Goshen Clarke. The man’ll bet on anything.’ Veinte-y-Cinco shook her head, counted out red-and-yellow markers from the AFC, blue-and-reds from the Brits, reds from Morales and Company (not that the Mexican trader had a Company) just down the path, Pete Sharpless’s red-white-and-blues, and blue-and-yellows from Gil Wallach . . . ‘He gets the Dutchman – well, the Dutchman’s squaw, really – to keep his money for him, so he’ll have enough to buy powder and ball. It’s the only reason their whole outfit hasn’t gone into debt to the AFC years ago.’

  It was true, January reflected, that every time he’d passed a horse race or a shooting match, if the Beauty wasn’t a participant, he was deep in conversation with whoever was keeping track of the wagers. If Clarke wasn’t playing poker on some crony’s blanket, or at little Pia’s faro table, he could be found in one of the Indian camps playing the Hand Game – which consisted of chanting and switching a carved fox-bone from fist to fist in rhythm until the gambler tried to guess which fist it was in. It reminded January of a game he played with his little nephew Chou-Chou, only these men played it drunk for ‘Made Beaver’ at six dollars a plew.

  ‘Jed was saying it’s ’cause he wanted tomorrow’s fight to be fair.’ Pia cocked a bright dark eye, like a squirrel’s, up at the adults. She was a little thing, skinny like her mother, and ordinarily clothed in a mix of men’s cast-offs and women’s, her long black braids making her look like an Indian child. ‘But I don’t think that’s what Mr January meant, was it, when he said Jed had to fight first?’