The Shirt On His Back - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,93

other white men?'

'The deaths of them all. The trappers who strip our streams of the beaver people who have lived there in peace since the moon was young . . . The traders who sell liquor to my people - not Omaha, not Sioux, not Shoshone, but all my people, all the people of this land! - and make them silly and drunk so that they give away not only the furs they have trapped, but also their wives and their horses and the clothes from off their backs . . . The whites who bring in disease, whose touch rots the land. If I cannot kill all of them, I would see as many of them die as I can. This is what he promised.'

By the fire, Dark Antlers and the other men glanced at their chief and his prisoners; there was only one of them not visibly scarred by the smallpox. They were grouped around the bodies of the five warriors January and Shaw had knifed in the fight by the river: brothers and friends.

'His father was a medicine man, he said,' Iron Heart went on. 'He would bring a sickness medicine from across the ocean and would mix it with the white man's liquor on a night when Manitou was in the camp. For this reason he let it be known that he had the best liquor in the camp, so that when he gave it away free, all would drink it. This he planned to do after you fought Manitou, save that the man Blankenship angered Manitou and sent him from the camp in great rage. The old father had been staying among us with his poison. He had said to me that day that he wished to poison only Manitou, and not the others. I told him that this was not our bargain, that all must die. Before Dark Antlers and I went to watch the fight, the old man and I had angry words. When I came back to the village later, I found he was gone.'

'And he met Manitou,' said January softly, with a sudden sense of having seen someone turn right, whom he had expected to turn left. Ridiculous, he thought, considering that he and his friends sat in the open mouth of the wolf . . . 'Did his son go with him, then? He was at the fight—'

In his mind January saw Charro Morales in his crimson jacket, making his horse caracole and shouting: 'Free liquor tonight, if Wildman wins!''

And every man in the camp had cheered. 'Boden remained in the camp. He never came to our tents while daylight was in the sky, or any man moved about awake.'

'Then—' January frowned, trying to fit times together: the start of the rain, the time of the shots. The dry inside of the roof wrought of boughs. 'Do you know what time the old man left your camp? At sunset? Before?'

'You speak like a fool,' snapped the warrior impatiently. 'You will die, and then you can seek out the old medicine man and ask him yourself. And I, I care not when the old man came to die, but only that my vengeance on those who killed my people be accomplished. It will be soon,' he added quietly, 'and I will walk through their camp as they are dying and ask them: are you happy now, that you came into our lands?’ He glanced toward the bound men, lying still as the dead in the shadows just beyond the small gem of the fire, and a bitter smile moved his lips. 'It will please me, to make a beginning tonight.'

He walked away. An owl passed close over the camp, wings silent as the wings of Death; somewhere in the darkness some small thing squeaked in pain.

I am a fool. January lay down again on his side. Only a fool would be troubled over that sense of a pattern broken, a detail disturbed, when the next hour would bring death in agony. Patiently, agonizingly, he began to work his wrists back and forth against the rawhide: it's leather. It will stretch . . .

He wondered if Shaw were doing the same.

We have to warn the camp . . .

Boden would find some other occasion to broach his kegs of very expensive liquor, to keep Iron Heart's good will. He would need it, for the long hunt ahead through the wilderness. With those deaths, Iron Heart would be obligated to fulfill his part