The Shirt On His Back - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,39

Star . . .

'None that could be read, says Chased By Bears. Only that his throat was cut.'

Goodpastor. The Indian Agent.

Or Blankenship . . .

Trouble at the rendezvous. Bad trouble, killing trouble . . .

Morning Star's voice went on: 'He was no one from the camp. An old man, his hair was white and his face shaven like the traders. Chased By Bears and Little Fish -' that was Morning Star's cousin - 'say they found no trace of horses near the place. But the old man had built a shelter and a fire before he was killed—'

'He dressed like a trader?'

January rolled silently to his feet, found his pants and his boots, and ducked through the door of the lodge, blinking in the morning sunlight. The whole world glittered with last night's rain.

'No, Tall Chief,' said the Sioux girl to Shaw, worriedly. 'He is not dressed at all. He lies in his shelter naked, his throat cut, wearing nothing but. . .' She held up her hands, searching for the word. 'Wearing nothing but white man's perfume on his hair and black gloves on his hands. And my brother is afraid - all the tribes are afraid - that this is the man the government has sent to cause trouble with Cold Face about the traders' liquor, and that the next ones to come here will be the Army, saying that we are to blame.'

Chapter 9

They woke Hannibal, poured coffee down him - he was no easier to rouse now than he'd been when he was drinking himself unconscious six nights a week - and left him in charge of the store. Then they rode north along the river, swung west where Horse Creek purled along the feet of timbered hills. North of the creek the drier valley stretched away in miles of bunch grass, to where William Bonneville had tried to establish a fort a few years ago - a silly place to try to set up a trading station, as Wallach had pointed out. But if the British ever did make a serious attempt to take and hold these disputed, fur-rich lands, this would indeed be a very good place to stop them.

They crossed the creek, the water high and freezing cold. On the south side the hills rose under a thin cover of lodgepole pine, last year's yellow needles wet underfoot. Shaw dismounted and led his horse, stopping to examine the droppings of horses and mules (January couldn't tell the difference, but his companion evidently could). 'Looks like Groot an' Clarke,' the Kentuckian surmised. 'Rain washed out most of the sign.'

Ahead, January could hear the hoarse calls of ravens. Wind passed through the pines; like the deep rushing of the trees in the bayou swamps of his earliest childhood, before he'd known New Orleans or Paris. A world of silence, and of beasts: cruel Bouki the Fox, wise old Mbumba the serpent rainbow, silly M'am Perdix and her chicks and wily, nimble Compair Lapin the rabbit. . . who, even now, paused on his errands in a patch of sunlight between the pines and sat up, watching the two men pass with the young woman in her deerskin dress.

Then the ravens called again, harshly, squabbling over the tastiest bits of a dead man's flesh.

The black birds flew up cursing when the three companions came into the little clearing, just below the crown of the ridge. The brush all around rustled with an explosion of fleeing foxes.

The ants and the flies ignored the interlopers, as ants and flies will.

In a rough shelter of branches against the huge roots of a deadfall pine, the dead man lay on a bed of more boughs, raised a little off the ground on stones. In front of it a fire pit had been dug, protected from the rain. January knelt and held his hand over the ashes. They were still mildly warm.

As Morning Star had reported, the dead man wore nothing but a pair of black kid gloves, and his throat had been cut almost to the neck bone, severing carotids, jugulars and windpipe. A few feet in front of the shelter - and the pine needles were scuffed up everywhere in the small clearing - even the rain had not completely washed the blood out of the ground. Flies roared above it in clouds.

January said, 'Jesus.' It was obvious - even through the predation of the ravens and foxes - that, prior to having his throat cut, the old man