tent, mostly won at chess. 'I'll buy you a new one, amor mia,' he said. 'Better suited to your charms.'
It took her a few minutes to unpin all the ribbons and ornaments. Then she tossed it over.
Hannibal gave her another handful of plews - presumably in addition to what he was paying her for her time, since by the sound of it, Seaholly's tent was open for business again. 'Tell Benjamin where you acquired your hat - with the understanding that he is a gentleman and will guard your secret with his life.'
'Please, you got to.' Mary regarded January doubtfully. 'Mick'll skin me, if he knows I was meetin' anybody outside and not tellin' him.'
Who she had been meeting - four nights ago, the night after his fight with Manitou, with rain coming down and the moon two days old - had been Jed Blankenship.
'He come up to me behind the liquor tent all sore-assed after Mick threw him out.' She perched on a flat rock on her own side of the quarantine line, took tobacco and corn husk from the pouch around her neck, and pulled up her skirt to roll a cigarette on her knee. It was enough, reflected January admiringly, to make a man take up smoking.
'He could get liquor from Hudson's Bay or Morales or anyone, but he wanted conejo, and he'd pay real silver for it, he said.'
The assignation had been set for the woods on the south side of Horse Creek, where the pine tree had fallen across the water to form a fragile bridge. January remembered passing the spot.
'I told Mick I was sick an' couldn't work, and anyway with everybody out chasin' the Dutchman, it was a slow night. But I was late gettin' out of the camp, an' then the creek was high like you never seen. Then Jed didn't show up. So here I am, sittin' under some bushes in the rain, an' every now an' then I'll hear somebody rustlin' around in the woods, or sometimes horses goin' past. Now, I knowed it was probably just those pendejos out tryin' to catch the Dutchman . . . but, you know, I was cold an' scared.'
And back in April, if somebody had offered me hard silver to go wait someplace in the rain with Blackfeet running around in the woods behind me, reflected January, I'd have taken it ... To this girl, every piece of silver that she didn't have to divide with Mick was one step closer to getting out of Taos and liquor tents and ten or twelve trappers a day, provided that was what she wanted to do with it. Maybe it was just liquor money.
'So the rain quits, an' I think, Jed'll be along soon,' the girl went on. 'I had one of Mick's bottles of trade liquor with me, sippin' to stay warm, so I'm not real sure how long it was after the rain quit that I heard shots. Not real long. There was one shot, an' then sounds of fightin'. Somebody was bellerin' like a grizzly that sat on a porcupine, and then there was a second shot in the middle of that. Myself, I thought it was Manitou - you know how he gets when somethin' sets him off.'
She shrugged and took another drag of her cigarette. 'Not my business, anyway. They'd quieted down, and along comes Jed, and it started raining again. And after all that,' she added, those beautiful brown eyes turning ugly, 'the carajo didn't even pay me. Just said he'd tell Mick if I didn't keep quiet. Said he'd knock my front teeth out, too, and let me explain that to Mick . . .'
January's first thought was: and you were surprised? but he kept it to himself. From his experience in New Orleans, he guessed there was every chance that when the proposition had been put to Irish Mary to earn a little extra silver, she hadn't been completely sober.
'I swear to Christ, I wish somebody'd break that cono's leg an' leave him where the Blackfeet'll find him. So after Jed takes off to see what he can see of Beauty and the Dutchman it started raining again, and I stayed smoking a little - he took my whiskey, too, the cheap meado - and I got to thinking. You've seen Manitou when he gets like he does, so I knew whoever he'd had an argument with probably wouldn't object to it if I sort of went