of animals, the chance of foul weather, the clues and guesswork about which tribes might be nearby - and were they friendly?
It was also the only occasion for the next eleven months that they'd be around enough white men to be able to get drunk in safety, and despite the quality of the liquor, most of them seemed to be taking fullest advantage of this facet of the situation.
He'll be at the rendezvous, Tom Shaw had said, of the man who had killed his brother.
'He'll be at the rendezvous.' And as he'd said it, Abishag Shaw's brother - five years the elder, Shaw had mentioned on the steamboat, breaking a silence of nearly forty-eight hours on that occasion and then returning to it at once - had laid on the table between them in the firelit blockhouse of Fort Ivy a human scalp, the long hair a few shades fairer than Shaw's own.
Shaw had looked aside. 'Why'n't you bury that thing with him?'
Tom Shaw had taken his surviving brother's hand in his own, picked up their brother's scalp and laid it in Shaw's palm. "Cause I know you, Abe,' he said. "Cause I heard you go on about a thousand goddam times about law an' justice an' the principles of the goddam Constitution. An' I tell you this: if'fn any single one of the men that wrote your Constitution had had his brother murdered the way Johnny was murdered - scalped so's we'd think it was the Blackfeet, an' worse - an' left up the gulch for the wolves, he'd go after the men that did it, an' screw all justice an' law. I wish you'd seen him when they brought him in.'
Shaw stroked the dried skin, the fair straight locks that he'd touched times without number in life. 'I wish I had.' His chill gray eyes seemed to see nothing, and there was no expression in his light-timbred voice.
On the steamboat - deck-passage, which in January's case meant the narrow stern-deck just inboard of the wheel - Shaw had informed his two companions only that his younger brother Johnny had been murdered at Fort Ivy, a fur-trade station some six weeks beyond the frontier. Their older brother Tom was 'bourgeois' - the head man - of the fort; he pronounced it 'bashaw'. 'If it was Indians,' he had said quietly, 'Tom wouldn't'a called it murder.'
After a long silence, with the firelight devils chasing one another across the log walls of the fort's little office, January asked the bourgeois, 'How is it you're sure where this man will be?'
The oldest brother's face had tightened in the flickering gloom. He was much shorter than Abishag Shaw's six-feet- two, and darker; his body reminded January of something that had been braided out of leather.
'Frank Boden was the fort clerk.' Tom Shaw's voice was an eerie duplicate of Abishag's, but thinner, like steel wire. 'Johnny told me he'd found a half-wrote letter in Boden's desk, to a man named Hepplewhite, that spoke of creatin' some kind of trouble at the rendezvous this summer. Bad trouble, Johnny said. Killin' bad. I didn't believe him.' A bead of fatwood popped in the coals, and the tiny red explosion of it glinted in the back of his dark eyes.
'When I got back from Laramie a week later, Johnny was dead. Blackfoot, the engages said.' Tom cast a glance back at the door in the partition that separated the lower floor of the Fort Ivy blockhouse in two: his office where they sat, with its sleeping loft, and the store, where Clopard and LeBel - the oldest and the youngest of the half-breed ruffians who hunted meat, prepared hides and looked after the stock - were bedded down in their blankets. 'They said Boden got so spooked at the way Johnny was cut up that he left the next day. Goin' back to the settlements, he said. Then a week later it thawed, an' one of 'em found Johnny's scalp, stuck into the hollow of a dead tree a couple yards from where his body had been. No Blackfoot would leave a scalp that way. I knew then Johnny'd been right.'
Shaw had said nothing through this. Had only sat looking into the fire, his brother's scalp in his hand.
'You kill him, Abe.' Tom's voice was cold and as matter- of-fact before witnesses as if there were no law against the killing of a man one merely suspected had done you a wrong. 'You find him, and you