The Shirt On His Back - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,118
reached to thrust him out of the way, and Shaw, his face a careful blank, thrust back. 'We had enough murder here,' he said. 'Seven white men an' a woman, killed 'cause of another man's revenge, not to speak of a score of Indians who got dragged into it just through bein' there. It needs to stop.'
'No, brother,' said Tom quietly and lowered the pistol to his side. 'We's one death short.'
They camped outside Fort Ivy for two nights. Shaw and January divided their time in guarding Bodenschatz while Goodpastor and Hannibal negotiated for supplies. The engages who'd traveled to the rendezvous with them were clearly troubled by the whole affair: 'En effet,' said Clopard to Shaw, when he helped Manitou carry out sacks of flour and cornmeal to be loaded on to the mules, 'what does it matter, eh? It isn't like anybody will know, or come after you.'
'Nope,' agreed Shaw, and he shifted his rifle across his knees. 'It ain't.'
Tom Shaw never crossed the twenty yards of open ground that lay between the fort's gates and the camp, or as far as January could tell, even came as far as the gate. Gil Wallach spoke to each of the brothers once, about settling their affairs with one another: 'You think how long it is, from New Orleans out to here, Abe. You think of all that happens out here. You really want to risk never seein' your brother again, for the sake of justice to a stranger who so far as I can tell is pretty much a murderin' weasel?'
Shaw leaned his head back against the thin trunk of the lodgepole pine by which he sat - one of the small clump of trees near the fort, where in other years the local Indians would have been camped by this time - and repeated: 'For the sake of justice. I have lived where there's no justice, Gil.' For a time he sat in silence, then added, 'An' I have lived where I had no brother. I'll think on what you say.'
But January guessed he wouldn't.
It was from Wallach, too, that January learned why they'd seen no hunting parties as they'd crossed the high plains back to the Fort: 'There's smallpox in the tribes, all up and down the river. It started among the Mandans at Fort Clark - there was a couple cases in the deck passengers on a steamboat that come through. Now there's ten, twenty a day dyin'. Blackfeet, Minnetarees, Arikara, Assiniboin . . . they've all got it now. Whole villages wiped out, wolves an' rats eatin' the dead among the lodges.'
'Looks like our friend Iron Heart was a little ahead on his revenge,' said Manitou quietly.
Wallach bristled like a miffed porcupine. 'Well, it wasn't us that did it. Not the folks at the rendezvous, I mean, nor the trappers—'
'No,' sighed Manitou. 'It never is. Didn't mean to say it was.' He turned and walked away from the camp then, out on to the prairie: silent, open grassland that would never thereafter be the same. The tribes were dying. There weren't even buffalo to be seen. Only dry wind, and heat.
Bodenschatz called out angrily to January, 'You gonna let him just run off like that? You gonna let him get away, just 'cause he's a friend?'
'Oh, shut up,' said January, weary to his back teeth of vengeance and anger, hate and death. 'He isn't going anywhere.' He wondered if Morning Star and her family were still alive, or Silent Wolf and his Blackfeet, or Walks Before Sunrise . . .
And knew that there was not the slightest likelihood that he would ever find out.
Manitou was silent when the train moved out the next morning, on the worn trail down toward the distant Platte. The beaten trace snaked like a blonde ribbon, visible for miles in the brown distance and rutted now with the wheels of the big immigrant wagons. January was conscious that among the debris of the trading caravans along the ruts, there were objects that could only have been thrown out by those seeking Oregon land. A broken spinning-wheel, like the echoes of a woman's voice. A small trunk of books. Anything to lighten the load as the dry air shrank the wood of axles never designed for these high plains and the ox teams broke their sinews at labor . . .
'More of 'em this year,' remarked Goodpastor. 'Fleein' the bank crash, probably. Headin' for free land in Oregon.'