The Shirt On His Back Read Online Free PDF Page A

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 and threw at the knife wielder,
before turning to Yellow-Beard - he only heard them splash as they hit the
river. Yellow-Beard ducked his first punch - 'Waugh, Sambo, wait your turn!' -
but when January came at him he pushed the girl aside and whipped out his
knife. January scooped up the limb of a deadfall tree as Yellow-Beard lunged at
him, rammed its broken end at that broken-nosed, blond-bearded face.
    The
trapper cursed and staggered back, then came on again, murder in his red face.
January had his own knife out already, though he had never used it as a weapon
- in New Orleans, or anywhere he'd been in the United States, he wasn't even
permitted to carry it - and in any case he saw the original dark-haired
knife-wielder pelting up dripping from the river at him, to stab him from
behind. January ducked, sidestepped and was aware of a fourth man emerging from
the trees behind him, to throw himself into the fray. January had a glimpse of
long black hair, a black beard that seemed to start just below the eyes and
shoulders the size of a cotton bale: the man who'd joked with the trapper
Carson