The Shirt On His Back - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,9

so with Indian 'wives', purchased from their fathers for a couple of horses or a good-quality rifle, sometimes for the few weeks of the rendezvous and sometimes for years.

'If you don't fancy supportin' the girl's whole family with gifts, there's always Seaholly's girls,' added a wiry little trapper named Carson, on one of the extremely numerous occasions that afternoon when the subject of coition was brought up. 'They're mostly pretty clean, though myself, I'd wear protection if I was to venture there.'

'If you was to venture there,' rumbled a huge mountaineer whose black beard seemed to start just beneath his eyes, 'you'd need protection, Kit, 'cause Singing Grass'd scalp you.' And he laid on the counter two blue-and-yellow-striped plew-sticks for a checked shirt: Ivy and Wallach plews, universally pegged at a beaver skin apiece. It was the first time January had seen the man that day, and he thought: he must have been at the fort during the winter . . .

Carson grinned. 'Singin' Grass bein' my wife,' he explained to January. 'It true you got a feller here with a fiddle?'

January glanced across the tent at Hannibal, who made a small shake of his head: 'Twisted my hand in a pack rope on the way up here,' said the fiddler. - it may be weeks before I can play again.' He turned almost immediately and left the tent, lest well-meaning questions and sympathy - January guessed - uncover the fact that he had done no such thing.

It had been a long and difficult winter.

Following a murderous binge in November - which coincided with and immediately followed the wedding of the son who wasn't aware that Hannibal was alive - Hannibal had once more sworn off the liquor and laudanum on which he'd existed for decades, with the result that he'd lost an entire winter's income to illness and a depression of spirits so violent that he had found himself unable to make music at all. January had not been surprised - he'd known other men who had broken free of the opium habit - and had patiently sat by his friend, played endless games of all-night chess, made sure he ate - when he could eat - and walked with him through the streets of the French Town in the small hours of the morning . . . 'What the hell good does it do me to get my life back, if it costs me the only thing that matters to me?' the fiddler had cried, on the occasion that January had tracked him down on the wharves at four o'clock one morning after a Mardi Gras ball.

By Easter, Hannibal had begun to revive a little, and even practice again, in the shack behind Kate the Gouger's bathhouse where he was living by then. When Hannibal had announced that he was accompanying January and Shaw to the mountains, January had suggested that he bring his fiddle with him, guessing that at some point in the months they would be away, he would heal enough to want it. Still, he had the sense, when he looked at his friend, of seeing a tiny pile of desiccated moth-wings heaped in the midst of the endless prairie, waiting for the next wind to rise and scatter them all away.

Then his sadness for his friend - and his uneasy fears about what he would do if Hannibal didn't find his way back to the music that was his life - were swept aside by the sound of a woman's screams.

There had been, more or less, an intermittent punctuation of female shrieks all afternoon. Years of playing piano in New Orleans had given January the ability to identify in their sound the outrage, anger and drunken curses he knew from the levee and the Swamp: pissed-off whores cursing their customers or each other, or a girl squealing with excitement when two men came to blows over her charms.

This was different, and he knew it instantly.

This was rape.

'Stay here,' he ordered Clopard and ducked out through the back of the tent at a run.

It was a good bet that nobody else in the camp was going to take the slightest notice.

There were three of them, in the brush close by the waterside. A yellow-bearded man was holding the girl while another, smaller and dark, cut her deerskin dress off her with a knife. A third, burly as a red bull, stood back laughing; he was the one January caught by the back of the shirt