The Shirt On His Back - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,119

journey from Elim,' quoted Hannibal, 'and all the congregation of the children of Israel came unto the wilderness . . . where God obligingly slaughtered everyone they met for them.' It was the closest he came, in all that journey, to speaking of Morning Star.

'That's gonna sit well with the British.' Shaw edged his horse over beside the Indian Agent's, his pale eyes in their worn dark circles never leaving the sharply rolling land, the dry watercourses and the empty skylines. 'Get enough settlers in that territory, we ain't gonna need the American Fur Company startin' schemes with the Crow to get us into another war with England. Settlers'11 do it every time.'

'An' now their king's dead -' this news had also been waiting for them at Fort Ivy - 'I doubt that little niece of his - what's her name?'

'Victoria.'

'I doubt that little gal's gonna go startin' any wars over fur.' Goodpastor shook his head. 'Independence'11 be crawlin' with 'em.'

'Good.' On his led horse, his hands still tied to the saddle tree, Bodenschatz turned cold eyes on Manitou. 'That way it will need no testimony of mine to prove that the judgement against him in Germany was unjust, a fraud by the rich. You had best watch him, when he gets among civilized men. You who keep me bound, who keep watch on me with a rifle, as if I were some kind of dangerous criminal - you will see your mistake. He is the one who—'

The crack of the rifle seemed very small in the dry hugeness of the scrubland; like a firecracker, January thought, even as the prisoner's body arched backward with the impact, mouth popping open, eyes staring in shock at the sky. Shaw wheeled his horse at once, scanning the horizon for dust while January flung himself from his saddle, caught Bodenschatz as he sagged sideways. The prisoner's wrists were still tied to the saddle, and by the time January had got them cut free Bodenschatz was dead. He heard Shaw say: 'That draw we passed—'

Hooves thundered away. An engage brought a blanket. January laid Bodenschatz on it and opened his shirt. The bullet had struck him just behind the right armpit and gone through both lungs and the heart. The worn batiste chemise, the pink kid gloves, folded small into a packet beneath his shirt, against his skin, were soaked through with blood.

They came back to the camp at fall of night, having found no tracks. January could have told them they wouldn't. He guessed, from the angle of entry of the bullet, that in fact the killer had been elsewhere than the cover they'd suspected. 'Don't matter,' said Shaw quietly, when he helped January dig the trail-side grave. 'I know who done it.'

'You want to go back for him?' asked Manitou. Stripped for the work, his chest and arms showed in the firelight the horrific mazes of scars left by repeated torture, tracks of a pain that was his only salvation.

'An' do what?' Shaw's face was covered with dust, the straggly beard he'd grown on the trail thick with it, his eyes strange and light in the dark grime, like a bobcat's, except for the pain in them. 'Arrest him by an authority I ain't got, for a murder I can't prove, that no jury in the State of Missouri's gonna convict him of? They's only so much I can do,' he said, driving his shovel to break the hard knots of interlaced grass roots, 'an' I done it. Now let's put this sorry bastard to bed an' go home.'

Manitou Wildman rode with them for three more days, then disappeared one night, leaving not even tracks behind. January guessed he'd go back to seek out his brothers the Blackfeet, if any of them had survived the epidemic.

'Did it ever occur to you,' January asked Shaw on the following night, 'that it might have been Franz who killed Mina, and not Manitou at all?' He'd left the chemise and gloves inside Bodenschatz's shirt when they'd laid him in his shallow grave. The locket as well, which they'd offered to Manitou and which he had refused to touch. 'He loved his sister - passionately, it sounds like. Jealous men have done worse. And guilty men have gone to greater lengths, to absolve themselves of what they feel is another's fault.'

'That crossed my mind from the first.' Shaw stirred at the fire with a stick. January had shot a buffalo that afternoon: probably the last time