The Shirt On His Back - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,73

quarantine a white man. I don't know what they'd do to one of your people.'

Obediently, Morning Star got to her feet and retreated to the line of stakes. January followed so that they stood about ten feet apart.

'What should I do, Winter Moon?'

'First, don't let anyone know you were one of the burying party. I'll make sure Frye keeps his mouth shut. Would your brothers, or others of your family, be willing to cross the river to hunt for Tall Chief?'

'I have already spoken to my brothers, and they have gone.' Morning Star gestured toward the hills across the river - shadowy still, though the sky was filled with new light. 'Chased By Bears said - and it is true - that this sickness seems worse even than the smallpox. Why should we care, he asked, if the whites all perish of it together? I said that Tall Chief is his brother now, and at least we must learn what became of him. But more, I think, he will not do.'

'Nor should he,' said January. 'Yet thank him for whatever he is willing to do to find the source of the evil that I think is walking somewhere in this valley. I don't know whether the evil that surrounded the old man by Horse Creek is a brother to the sickness spirit or not. Yet each time I look, I see that the tracks of the one lie close to the tracks of the other. And now I can't look for the tracks of either.'

He stood for a moment in thought, arms folded against the sharp chill, and passed all that had happened the previous day, and the day before, through his mind: the long, patient tracking of Groot and Clarke over the hills south of the camp; the bizarre and horrifying rituals glimpsed through the trees in the Blackfoot village - and the still-more-bizarre conversation with Wildman by the ashes of the Blackfoot fire the following morning; Fingers Woman curled up beside her husband on the reeking blankets, her head pillowed on the shoulder of the black velvet coat.

In his pocket - shut safely in his watch case - were four long splinters of burned fatwood that he'd taken from the Blackfoot fire. Their pointed ends were tipped with dried blood. What he'd seen hadn't been a hallucination or a trick.

Silent Wolf is my brother . . .

'Would you do this for me?' he asked at length. 'Would you take the big buckskin mare that's tethered at our camp and return her to Manitou Wildman? Tell him - and anyone else you meet - that Tall Chief sent you back to camp the moment we saw the bodies of the Dutchman and his party, without ever letting you get close. And ask Wildman, would he come here to speak to me?'

The young woman nodded and started to turn away. Then she looked back and asked him softly, 'Is it true? Will I become sick, as Fingers Woman and the others became sick? Will I die as they died?'

'I haven't yet,' pointed out January. 'Nor has Frye. The sickness spirit has given us time, and time is always a gift that must not be wasted.'

When Morning Star had gone, January made his way down to the water's edge to gather up driftwood and deadfalls, then returned to the camp to brew coffee. By the time Frye woke, Pia had paddled over with a camp kettle full of bighorn sheep- ribs and the information - called across the quarantine barrier, after she'd set down the kettle for January to pick up - that Bridger and Carson had just returned to the camp with the news of Clarke's death and Shaw's disappearance . . .

And that Hannibal had located Klaus Bodenschatz's hat.

Chapter 19

We camped near there the night,' reported Bridger, with the sun halfway to noon, when he, Carson and an assortment of traders and trappers gathered along the staked quarantine-line on what was rapidly coming to be known (to January's annoyance) as Plague Island. 'You'll understand we didn't want to get too near, 'specially after we found the Beauty.'

'Did you leave him unburied?' demanded the Reverend Grey, with the righteous horror of someone who wasn't confined behind a quarantine line . . . and who hadn't seen the bodies in Groot's camp.

Carson looked like he was about to make a sharp reply, but Bridger answered, 'First light we dug a grave, and we rolled him into it with saplings. That's what's