The Shirt On His Back - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,92

fences, so his pigs and his cattle wander to eat the crops in our villages; the white man has ruined his land with growing cotton, so now he needs fresh land to ruin. And we must move, because we are not Christians. And even when we are Christians, we are not civilized. And even when we live in houses and print newspapers and go to school and read books . . . Because we are enemies. And even when we have sworn friendship and had it sworn us in return by the men that the white men elect to represent them . . . What does the white man want us to be?'

Passion twisted his voice for a moment, but his ruined face remained impassive, as if the scars went through the skin and flesh to the nerve and the bone. 'He wants us to be dead,' he finished, 'so that he can take our land, which is what he meant all along to do. Do you deny this, black white man?'

'No,' said January. 'I do not deny it.'

'If another man killed your wife and ate her body for his dinner, would you seek revenge on him?'

'I don't know.'

'Then you are no man. If he came to you with her blood on his hands and stood before you and laughed in your face, would you strike him down?'

January sighed. 'Yes. Yes, I would.'

'And when he lay before you, would you kill him?'

'I would,' said January, knowing it to be true. 'But I would not kill his brother, who had been home sleeping in his own bed when his murder took place. Was it Boden who asked you to help him seek his revenge, or you who asked Boden?'

'It was Boden who came to me.' The warrior's dark eyes narrowed behind scar-thick lids. 'After the white man's sickness had burned itself out, I and what remained of my people came north. We meant to go on into the mountains. But the first snows found us still on the plains, taking buffalo. We wintered near Fort Ivy, and talk of the sickness was still on every man's lips. Counts Things - the chief of the fort—'

Had he not been in fear for his own life and those of his friends, January would have smiled at the name the Indians had given Tom Shaw.

'—asked me: would my people become trappers for Ivy and Wallach? I grew angry, and in my anger I spoke my heart: that I would sooner die than work for the white men. The deaths of my wife and my parents were new to me then. I said that I would have vengeance on the white men, whatever the cost, for the ruin they had brought to my people and my world.'

He was silent a moment, as if the remembering of it took him back to that smoke-stained blockhouse chamber, that isolated quadrangle of logs on the windswept hillside above Rawhide Creek. To bitter night and marble-hard snow and the comfortless moon that had watched his grief uncaring.

The last of the search parties had ridden into the camp while Iron Heart spoke, and the men were bedding down in their buffalo robes. A few, January noticed, knelt and folded their hands in Christian prayer.

'Boden came to our village that night. He said that the trapper called Manitou had murdered his sister, away in the country of the white men beyond the ocean. The white man's law had not hanged him for this crime, and so he, Boden, had been seeking him across half the world. You have seen Manitou and know that he is like a spirit bear, swift and hard to catch. The mountains are great and go on for many months' journeying to the desert, and to the sea beyond that. Boden knew that to trap one man in all this land, he must have Indians who knew the land and how to hunt.'

Softly, January said, 'And Boden knew Manitou would be coming to the rendezvous. It's the one time he knew where he would be.'

'To kill the deer, one does not lie out on a dry hillside,' returned Iron Heart. 'One goes to water and waits for the deer to come down.'

'And from saying you would sooner die than become a hunter for the white men,' said January, 'you became a hunter for a white man.' And when Iron Heart's face twisted with anger, January went on: 'What did he promise you for this? The deaths of