The Shirt On His Back - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,7

leaped out of a tree straight behind me, on a pitch-dark night, aimin' only by the sound of its cry—'

'Maestro—' Shaw appeared around the corner of the tent, quiet as the smallpox in his weathered scarecrow clothing, his long Kentucky rifle in his hand. There was another on his back - Mary and Martha, he had named them - and a knife at his belt; he looked as if he had been a part of this world for years. 'Looks like I need to go out an' hunt Ty Farrell, as he ain't like to come around here anytime soon.'

'Check for him at Seaholly's, hoss,' advised Prideaux cheerfully. 'I hear Edwin Titus - that sourpuss Controller the Company's put in charge this year - hired him on to the AFC for a hundred-fifty a year, plus seven-fifty a pound for his plews! Waugh! For that kinda wampum, he's gonna be plowin' through them girls like a bull buffalo through the prickly pears. I never did see a child go for the female of the species like Ty, 'ceptin' for a sergeant of the marines I knowed down on the Purgatoire . . .'

'I'll keep the store,' offered January.

'Obliged.' Shaw looked for a moment as if he might have said something else - asked Prideaux, perhaps, after Mr Hepplewhite, or queried for rumors about the unspecified trouble that Johnny had thought serious enough to risk his life pursuing. But January guessed how word of anything would fly from man to man in a camp where there was nothing really much to do but trade, get drunk, copulate and talk. Even the relatively short journey from Fort Ivy to the Green River had brought home to him how vast was this land beyond the frontier, how endless these mountains and how right Tom Shaw had been: only this one chance to find him in that one place.

He'd also learned that trappers, engages, and traders - whose survival depended on observing the tiniest details of their surroundings - would gossip about anything.

Only in silence lay any hope of success. Silence, and Ty Farrell's willingness to play Judas.

You can kill anythin' with one shot. I seen you do it...

January had, too.

Shaw nodded his thanks, then set off down the trail afoot, in quest of his prey.

Chapter 2

The goods in the tent hadn't even been completely arranged - traps hung from the frame Clopard knocked together from cottonwood poles, twisted brown plugs of 'Missouri manufactured' set out on a blanket-draped trestle- table, skeins of trade-beads dangling temptingly from the inner frame of the markee - when others besides Robespierre- Republique Prideaux came to shop. Ivy and Wallach employed about six trappers full-time and some fifty engages, who for a hundred dollars a year ranged the streams and rivers of the wilderness that stretched from the Missouri to the Pacific hunting beaver. This wage was paid in credit, and they spent this - and more besides - in the company tent. But the rendezvous camp also included independents, who had had enough money to outfit themselves and sold their skins to one company or another by the pound. These were the men who came to see what Gil Wallach was offering, and what he wanted for his wares.

And, they came to talk. Inside that first hour, January discovered that the thing the trappers wanted most to do at rendezvous - besides get blue-blind drunk and roger their brains out at Mick Seaholly's liquor tent in the AFC camp - was to talk. To tell tall stories. To trumpet their pristinely uninformed opinions about what President Van Buren ('It is Van Buren, ain't it, now?') should be doing to fix things back in the States. To brag of their exploits in the mountains, in the deserts, on roaring rivers in flood or of how they'd triumphed over a whole encampment of Crow Indians in the competitive swallowing of raw buffalo entrails, waugh!

(Waugh indeed, reflected January . . .)

To hear their own voices - and the voices of others like themselves - after eleven months of hunting prey that would flee at the sound of an indrawn breath and leave them hungry or at least beaver-less that day.

Fortunately, it was one of January's greatest pleasures to hear people who knew what they were talking about talk about their work. Inside that first hour at the store tent, he heard endless comparisons of the relative merits of French and British gunpowder, discussions of the proper ways of dealing with