stair tellin' me . . .' His voice faltered. 'Tellin' me I'd . . .'
January put a hand on the big man's arm, and Manitou sat silent, eyes closed to the morning light that streamed up the valley, flashed gold now on the tips of the pine needles.
'They put me in a madhouse.' The trapper turned his face from the distant river, met January's eyes. 'They said I wasn't sane enough to be judged. I heard later, Franz an' his father both swore before the judges that I was as sane as the next man an' had never had no problem about gettin' angry before . . . It was only my parents, an' two of the other students at the University, an' some of my grandpa's shepherds, tellin' of what I'd been like from childhood, that kept me off the gallows. Had I been better, to have hanged?'
He folded his hands again, pressed the heavy knuckles to his lips. 'I swear to you, I have no answer to that. I hope I killed no one when I escaped the place, but to be honest, I have no memory of that either, and every time I dream it, it's different. It's as if one day I was bein' walked to that 'laboratory' of theirs to get more needles stuck through my neck, and then I was waking up in a goods yard in Regensburg, wearing clothes I didn't recognize.
'I thought about going back,' he went on quietly. 'But I'd been there two, maybe three months . . . and I couldn't make myself do it. I thought about killing myself. I couldn't do that either. I was only twenty-two. I made my way to Marseilles, found a boat to New Orleans. I'm not happy,' he added simply. 'I don't think a man like me is ever happy. But to live in a world where it's only animals, and the rocks and the sky—'
He drew a deep breath, his face peaceful, like a man who comes from bitterest cold to a fire. 'I swear to you, it's the closest I can get. I should have known they'd follow me.'
'Do you remember killing Klaus Bodenschatz?'
Manitou had shut his eyes again; now they flared open, earnest and troubled and without a trace of anger in their gold-flecked brown depths. 'I didn't kill him.'
Chapter 25
January opened his mouth to make the obvious reply, then closed it again, recalling that sense of seeing some piece of a puzzle fall into place . . . 'Did you break his leg?' he asked.
Flecks of color came up under the mountaineer's heavy tan, and he looked away. 'He had pistols,' he said. 'I saw that fool lantern of his a mile away and thought it might have been you, or one of those numbskulls that were out all over the hills that night followin' Beauty and the Dutchman. Bodenschatz put a ball in my arm 'fore I ever saw him. He had a second pistol, and I knew I had to get it from him fast . . .' Some memory flickered for a moment like the reflection of that speck of lantern fire in his eyes.
'I was angry,' he added, more softly. 'At that pissant Blankenship. At you, as I thought, comin' after me. At all them damn cretins tramplin' all over the hills tryin' to find their way to the one best beaver stream in the mountains . . . Doesn't matter.' He shook his head, like a bull in fly season, goaded beyond enduring by a thousand biting demons that he could not see. 'Anger comes over me ... I hurt him . . . pretty bad, I think. His bones was like dry sticks.' For an instant his face convulsed: shame and pain and grief at what he had done. 'But I never took a knife to him. I splinted up his leg and tore up his shirt to bind his ribs with, for I'd broke a number of 'em. Then I made a shelter for him, under that big deadfall, and made a fire, and give him my own shirt, for I could smell it was comin' to rain again.'
From the blanket beside him Manitou picked up his second parfleche, half-emptied, and handed it to January, who had to force himself to stop eating the pemmican lest he devour everything and leave nothing for the others. Their companions still lay like the dead on the apishamores spread on the ground: Shaw's bare arms