The Shirt On His Back - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,13

Prideaux's friends had organized a shooting match, a common pastime to judge by the shots January had been hearing all afternoon. 'There's no way of knowing whether Clopard and LeBel can keep their mouths shut if they get drunk, but there are trappers that must have known Boden. They'd be more observant, even if he's done something to change how he looks.'

'More observant,' agreed Shaw. 'Less like to go shootin' off their mouths, if'fn word gets out as to how Johnny Shaw's brother is askin' questions about Frank Boden?' He spit again at a pocket mouse at the foot of the boulder behind the store tent, missing it by feet. 'Like Tom said, I get one shot at the man. I purely don't want to have to go trackin' him through the mountains.'

It was on the tip of January's tongue to ask, 'Would you?’ but he held back from the question, as he would have held back from grabbing a man's broken arm. In the four years he had known Abishag Shaw in New Orleans, he had never heard the Lieutenant speak of any family, save once, when he had mentioned a sister who had died. Hadn't been for you runnin' the way you did, Tom had said. What had happened because Shaw had walked away?

It was clear to him now that Tom and Johnny had been the only family Shaw had.

Will you give up your beliefs about law and vengeance, so as not to lose the single person of your own blood that you have left?

Follow a man into endless and deadly wilderness, rather than go back to your only kin and say, I couldn't? I wouldn 't?'

January recalled swearing once that nothing would ever induce him to return to New Orleans. He had learned since then what it was to need your own blood, your own kin, as a drowning man needs air. To need to know that you weren't utterly alone.

'That feller who helped you out in your fight, Manitou Wildman—' They ducked beneath the line of dangling traps as they came into the store tent. 'He was at the fort last winter.'

'I thought he might have been. He had credit-sticks - plews? Or are plews the skins?'

'Plews. An' yes - they call the sticks same as they call the skins, just so's everythin's clear an' understandable.'

'He had plews from the fort.'

'He's one I need to talk to. Clem Groot - the Dutchman - an' his partner Goshen Clarke was camped near there, too. Trouble is,' Shaw added more quietly as Wallach gave them a salute and headed off up the path for the Hudson's Bay Camp, 'we got no way of knowin' that they wasn't part of whatever Boden is mixed up in. That goes for the engages, too.'

'What could he be mixed up in?' January waved out across the counter at the rolling meadows, the distant clusters of white tipis, the long string of shelters and campfires upstream and down. 'What trouble, what evil, could a man be here to do?'

'Other'n murder, without proof, a feller he thinks might be the one who killed his brother, you mean?' Shaw perched on a bale of shirts. 'That I don't know. They's money in furs, Maestro, more'n you or I'll ever see. The American Fur Company's already crushed out two big outfits that they felt was takin' their Indian trade away from 'em, an' God knows how many little ones like Ivy an' Wallach, an' not just by gettin' their trappers to desert 'em with all their season's furs, neither. You talk to Tom Fitzpatrick sometime, 'bout how the AFC works. They got agents livin' regular with the Crow villages - hell, Jim Beckwith's a chief of the Crows these days - an' the Crows or any other tribe is just as happy to scalp a white man they catches on their huntin' lands . . . an' the Flatheads is just as tickled to return the compliment on anyone who ain't a friend of their friends, the Hudson's Bay Company.'

A trapper named Bridger - older than most and recognized through the length and breadth of the mountains as being as wise as the Angel Gabriel, for which reason he was generally called Gabe in spite of the fact that his name was actually Jim - came to the counter to ask the prices of salt and tobacco.

When Bridger had gone, Shaw went on, 'The Hudson's Bay men been tryin' for years to spread east into the