kill him. You was the best of us. Best killer on the mountain, Daddy said—-'
'I never was.'
'You was 'til you lost your nerve.'
Shaw said nothing, his narrow gargoyle face like something cut from rock.
'He'll know me if I come to the rendezvous. He'll know there wasn't but one reason I'd leave this post. But he'll think, seein' you, only as how I called you to take Johnny's place on account of him bein' killed by the Blackfoot. You kill him, an' you bring me his scalp, for me to nail to that wall.'
Something in those words made Shaw glance across at his brother, straight thin lashes catching a glint of gold. Someone in the family, thought January, had nailed scalps to the wall of whatever cabin it was in the mountains of Kentucky where they'd grown up. 'An' this Hepplewhite feller?' Shaw spoke cautiously, as if he feared a trap. 'This killin' trouble Johnny read of—'
'What the hell is that to me?' Tom Shaw took Johnny's scalp out of his brother's hand, sat back in his chair, the only chair in a room that was furnished primarily with benches of hewn logs, stroking the long fair hair. 'You been on the flat- lands too long, brother. You know better'n that. They's a million square miles of mountain out there, Abe, an' only this one chance to find him in that one place. You can kill anythin' with one shot. I seen you do it. So don't you breathe one single word that'll scare him off. That ain't our business.'
The elder brother's eyes burned like those of a man in slow fever. It was as if January, and Hannibal sleeping curled up in the corner by the dying fire, had ceased to exist. 'You owe me, Abe,' he said. 'Hadn't been for you runnin' the way you did—'
'I walked away. I never ran.'
'A man that turns his back on his family is runnin',' retorted Tom. 'Hadn't been for that, Johnny an' me, we'd never have had to go down to New Orleans the way we did, sellin' hogs so's there'd be money at home. You owe our blood, an' you owe Johnny, an' you owe me. You tellin' me you'll run away again?'
Shaw sighed. 'No,' he said softly. 'No, I won't run away.'
The pack-train passed the camp of the American Fur Company, a big store-markee with its sides up, and another - sides down - with a makeshift bar on trestles across the front and a gray- coated man with the blue eyes of a defrocked angel pouring drinks. Trappers and engages clustered along the bar and around the half-dozen Mexican girls who lounged on rough- built benches along the front of the tent.
'Hey, Veinte-y-Cinco!' yelled Clopard, who had ridden with the train from Fort Ivy, 'you wait right there 'til we get set! 1 got a little somethin' for you!'
The skinny whore gave him a dazzling, gap-toothed grin, 'Hey, minino, I remember how little it is—'
At the female voice Hannibal looked up, roused from his nightmare of barely-suppressed panic, and murmured, "Malo me Galatea petit, lascivia puella . . .' a classical allusion that January hoped wasn't going to spell trouble.
The American Fur Company was making a good showing: in addition to a separate liquor tent, they had what amounted to a full-scale dry-goods store set up and half a dozen canvas shelters - watched over by engages - to store the furs that their trappers under contract had brought in already. These were not traded for by weight, but simply handed over by the mountaineers in exchange for their pay, as if the land they trapped through was the AFC's private farm, and they, laborers in the vineyard. January couldn't help wondering if the Mexican girls were also on the Company payroll.
A quarter mile further upriver, Shaw drew rein before a small store-tent and a couple of deer-hide shelters, which marked the camp of Gil Wallach, a former-mountaineer turned trader. The little black-haired bantam came from around the store's counter and held out his hand to Shaw as he dismounted: 'Tom wrote me you'd be heading up the train, Abe. I surely am sorry about Johnny.'
Shaw made a motion with his hand, as if to brush the name away like a cobweb. 'Ty Farrell in the camp? Tom had a message for him.'
Wallach tilted his head a little, as if he smelled trouble even in this simple request. Ty had been a clerk at Fort Ivy. He'll know Boden,