The Shirt On His Back - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,35

Titus's head jerked back in melodramatic shock. Then, his face changing, 'Good God, man!' he thundered. '1 find the poor child staggering about the camp - ill, I assumed, for surely no man here is so debased as to deliberately give liquor to a girl of her years - and you dare to suggest—?'

Hannibal, looking as if he'd just heard the Serpent of Eden claim that Eve had pinned him down and spooned applesauce down his throat, slipped past Titus and thrust the tent flap aside. In the shadows January could see Pia lying among the buffalo robes on the Comptroller's cot, her long black hair unbraided over her shoulders in a silky cloak, her shift loose and drawn up to her thighs. She was giggling, but when Veinte- y-Cinco ran into the tent she held out her arms, sighed: 'Mama!'

'They say no good deed goes unpunished,' proclaimed Titus, in tones of bitterest reproach. 'Had I not brought the child here, God knows who would have found her. Yet, instead of thanks, I am accused of . . . Good God, McLeod, will you listen to yourself? Get the little tramp out of here, Madame,' he added as Veinte-y-Cinco supported her stumbling daughter past him and into the open. 'For that matter, I should like to know where you were, when someone was feeding that poor child liquor.'

He glanced significantly from the woman to Seaholly, put on an aggrieved expression - just as if he were not splitting Veinte-y-Cinco's income with the publican in exchange for food - and shook his sleek sandy head.

Drawn by the commotion like a cow to the pasture fence, the Reverend Grey chipped in: 'What kind of a mother do you call yourself, woman? The fruit falleth not far from the tree! Bring up a child in the way she will go—'

'I suddenly have considerably greater insight,' stated Titus, glaring at the men around him in disgust, 'as to why the priest and the Levite rode by the stricken traveler on the other side of the road. Gentlemen, good day to you all.'

He retreated into the tent.

The men looked uneasily at one another, and then at

Veinte-y-Cinco and the sleepy, giggling Pia, like men who fear they may have made fools of themselves. Edwin Titus was, after all, a respected trader - and it was Edwin Titus who held their rather considerable debts for the liquor they'd consumed so far. Moreover, for many of them, it was Edwin Titus who could set the prices they still had to pay for the trap springs and gunpowder that they'd need for the year's trapping. Compared to Titus's frock-coated respectability, Veinte-y-Cinco, with her dark hair tumbled loose on her skinny shoulders and her grimy satin vest cut low over sagging breasts, looked like exactly what she was: a Mexican whore.

'Lo, how the Lord looketh on the hearts of the unrighteous—' Grey went on, his alliance with McLeod evidently taking second place to new material for a sermon. 'Her house is the way to Hell, going down to the chambers of death . . .'

'I don't know what kind of a mother you call yourself,' remarked Hannibal quietly as they turned away, 'but that's not liquor she was given. That was opium - and I'm not sure where else you'd get that in the camp, except in Edwin Titus's tent.' He walked back to his chess table, packed it up and walked off up the trail to the Ivy and Wallach pitch.

For all his expressed grief at the foul mistrust he'd seen demonstrated that forenoon, Mick Seaholly made no move to shift the venue of the boxing match. When January returned to the liquor tent an hour later, he estimated that three-quarters of the men in the camp - and three-quarters of the Indians in the valley - were on hand to watch.

Deadfall trees had been hauled from the river bank to make a rough border around the square that Sir William paced off, the precise size of a London boxing-stage. While the Scots nobleman was cutting the scratch lines for the combatants with his knife in the dirt, January was offered so many drinks that if he'd accepted them all he'd have had trouble identifying Wildman at ten paces.

'Keep a few.' Hannibal stepped aside to let Mr Miller edge to the fore with his ever-present sketchbook. 'If you get cut again we can use it to cleanse the wound.'

'My teachers recommended spirits of wine to cleanse wounds,' returned January,