The Shirt On His Back - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,27
as you have cast these souls into hell with the liquid devil, rum!'
'That ain't rum,' pointed out Jim Bridger, standing behind January's shoulder. 'Tastes like whiskey to me - the part of it that don't taste like bear piss.'
'How do you know what bear piss tastes like, Bridger?'
Titus snapped, 'Somebody get him out of here.'
'The Lord shall have his revenge!' Grey shouted as three of the Company engages closed in around him. 'Touch not the servant of the Lord! His servant cometh, even now, to break the chains of Satan - to break the chains that you have forged . . .' He managed to get a hand free and point at Titus again, who was probably - behind the impenetrable gloom of the tent - red with wrath. 'And to bring you and your hell-begotten Company to the justice of the Department of Indian Affairs!'
At this sudden descent from the Biblical to the governmental, Titus held up his hand. 'What?' The Controller's voice was deadly quiet.
Grey smiled in triumph - perhaps at having gotten Edwin Titus's attention - and shook his arms free of the grip of his captors. 'The Department of Indian Affairs,' he answered smugly, in a conversational tone. 'There's an Indian Agent on his way up the mountain, to verify the charges that I sent to Congress last year, that the American Fur Company was selling liquor to the tribes.'
There was nonplussed silence. The Missouri trader Sharpless said, in a voice of honest surprise, 'It's agin the law to sell liquor to an Injun?'
Titus spoke no word, and his thick-boned face revealed nothing, but the set of his shoulders, the tilt of his head, were like the clash of a drawn weapon.
'And don't think you can bribe your way out of this one.'
Grey displayed stained teeth in the flickering shadows. 'Or convince the agent that every Company man needs to carry forty gallons of raw spirits with him for personal medicinal purposes. Asa Goodpastor is a man of my own Church, a righteous man, unshakeable in holiness. A man who cares for the souls of the heathen, and who despises as much as I do the filth of liquor and all those who spread it. Woe unto you, children of Belial!' His tone, which had been creeping back into evangelical thunder, pealed forth again like a warning bell. 'Get thee behind me, Satan! For the footsteps of the Lord resound in the hills, and his righteous vengeance advances apace!'
In a quiet voice, Titus repeated, 'Get him out of here. Before I kill him myself.'
Chapter 6
Whether any of this had anything to do with the trouble being brewed between Frank Boden and the mysterious Mr Hepplewhite, January wasn't certain, but the evening had at least been instructive.
It was unfortunately to become more so.
'Could an Indian Agent actually close down the Company?' inquired Hannibal, on the way back up the trail to camp.
'By hisself?' Shaw spoke without taking his attention from the formless darkness of the land to their left. Though the smell of that many humans was generally enough to keep bears from getting too close, it was by no means an uncommon thing to find them prowling at this time of night, drawn by the smell of camp garbage. Last night January had nearly walked into one when he'd gone down to the river to piss. 'Not hardly. But he can sure shut down their operations for a year, while they sort things out with that gang of licensed thieves in Washington. If so be the British raise a stink . . .'
'Which you know they're gonna,' put in Wallach gloomily. 'Or businessmen in their pay. Money bein' as bad as it is right now, a year can make a difference. Things ain't like they was, even a year ago.'
No, thought January, his mind catching the echo of words he'd been hearing, not only at the rendezvous, but all the way up the trail from Fort Ivy.
It'll all be gone, Sir William had said, looking around him at the candlelit gloom of the banquet tent: the mountaineers with their Indian braids and porcupine-quill moccasins, the dark eyes of the Indians gleaming with Company whiskey, the spit of venison dripping over the fire. It was the true reason His Lordship had brought his own private artist out from the East: to capture not what he was leaving, but what was leaving the world, evaporating like smoke on the wind of time.