say anythin',' put in Shaw softly, 'about smaller groups - either them or the Blackfeet - comin' into the camp, when they think nobody's lookin', an' pickin' off a few here an' there.'
'And on the subject of the fruits of decadent Civilization . . .' Hannibal nodded toward the footpath that led toward the main trail as Edwin Titus, Controller of the AFC camp, appeared around the screen of scrubby rabbitbrush that bordered the Ivy and Wallach pitch.
Titus was a big man, bland-faced, frock-coated, and despite a tidy Quaker beard and the pomade he wore on his hair there was nothing in him of the weakness that trappers usually saw in citified Easterners. The trappers loved to boast of how their farts and sneezes could send lesser mortals like Mexicans and niggers ('Present company excepted, Ben . . .') fleeing in terror, but they walked quietly around Titus. There was a deadly quality even to his geniality - he'd lost no time in offering January a job with the Company the previous afternoon, the moment Gil Wallach was out of hearing: a hundred and twenty dollars a year, to clerk at their St Louis offices - and at the AFC store tent, effective immediately. 'You know Ivy and Wallach aren't going to last the year,' he'd said with his wide, impersonal smile. January guessed this to be true - the AFC was mercilessly undercutting the prices of every independent trader in the camp. 'They're losing money in that little fort of theirs—'
'I didn't know that, sir.' And YOU wouldn't know it either, unless you had someone IN that fort sending you reports . . .
Unless, of course, you 're simply making that up.
Titus had shrugged. 'It's not something they'd tell a man they'd just hired. But if you think your loyalty now is going to mean there'll be work for you when you get back to the settlements, you may find yourself left standing.'
Later January had learned that Shaw, too, had been approached - 'Only, he offered me a fifty-dollar bonus if I'd bring some skins with me when I come. An' he sort of implied that he took my refusin' in bad part.'
Bad part or not, Titus was all smiles today. Possibly - January learned later - because he'd just hired the small trader Pete Sharpless's clerk away from him, leaving the Missourian to do all his camp-work himself. Titus complimented Hannibal on his marriage, said he much looked forward to hearing the two musicians play at the banquet in Bridger's honor that evening (just as if Jim 'Gabe' Bridger, now a Company employee, had not come very close to being scalped by Indian allies of the AFC while he was still leading brigades for the now-defunct Rocky Mountain outfit), and invited Gil Wallach and Abishag Shaw to the festivities as well.
'He planning to poison you?' asked Hannibal interestedly, when the Controller had taken his leave, and Wallach laughed.
'He'd do it if he could figure out a way not to kill half his allies in the process,' the little ex-trapper said. 'No, I rode with Old Gabe in '32, up in the Beaverhead Mountains. I'm guessing he's asked all his old compadres to this fandango tonight. And I'm guessing, too, Titus invited every trader in the camp, up to and includin' John McLeod of Hudson's Bay - though it'll choke him on Captain Stewart's foie gras, to look down on us all sittin' there drinkin' his liquor.' And he grinned to himself at the thought as he got to his feet and headed up the path to open the store.
'Be that all as it may,' remarked Shaw quietly, uncoiling his tall height to follow, 'it'll give us a chance to look over the camp an' see who it couldn't be.'
'It would help,' said January that evening as they set out on foot down the trampled pathway toward the AFC camp, 'if your brother were just a little more observant - or if Boden had something convenient like a deformed ear or a broken nose or a mole on his chin. Or one blue eye and one brown eye, like the villains in novels. Because medium height, medium build, brown hair and beard, brown eyes, straight nose could be a description of Hannibal ten years ago. Or Jim Bridger. Or the pilot of the steamboat we took up the Missouri - how old is Boden?'
"Bout thirty-five. Tom's age. Old for the mountains.'
Killin' bad, Johnny had told his brother. But having