The Shirt On His Back Read Online Free PDF Page B

content if that's what pleases him.'
    'Everybody
in the mountains knows Jed's all cackle an' no egg to speak of. 'Sides,' added
Prideaux as he knelt to turn over the red-haired trapper in the shallows, 'I
don't think there's a man in the camp who'd ask why anyone in his right mind
would run away from Manitou.' Ribbons of blood, bright around the body,
dispersed themselves to nothingness in the water.
    'An'
Blezy Picard - that's Jed's l'il friend - he won't even remember what happened,
when he sobers up. Well, don't that just suck eggs,' Prideaux added in a tone
of mild regret as January and Hannibal approached to help him carry the dead
man up from the riverbank. 'What a way to go, eh? Ty here got himself through
clawin' by a grizzly bear, gettin' shot an' chased by the Blackfeet, an' being
clapped by that whore last year at Fort Ivy, an' how does he die? In a damn
fight over a damn Injun girl 'cause he's too damn drunk to get out of the way
of Blezy Picard's damn knife.'
    'Ty?'
said January, straightening up. 'Ty Farrell?'
    'Oh,
yeah,' said Prideaux. 'That's him. You know him?'
    January
sighed. 'Not exactly.'

Chapter 3
     
    Abishag
Shaw said, 'Well, consarn,' and stood for a time with his long arms folded,
chewing on both his tobacco and the news of his informant's death.
    'Wallach
wouldn't know Boden by sight?'
    Shaw
cast a glance up through the cottonwoods toward the store tent. The little
trader had taken over at the counter while January led Shaw down to the river's
edge, allegedly to have a look at the scene of the fight. 'Wallach works mainly
out of St Louis. I doubt he seen Boden more'n two-three times, an' those most
likely in the post store where the light ain't good. Even Clopard an' LeBel
knew him bearded, an' I'm guessin' his beard was the first thing to go. Boden
kept apart from most of the men in the fort, Tom says.'
    'That's
a strange disposition to have,' remarked January, 'for a man who takes a job at
a trading post.' He recalled the muddy palisaded yard - eighty feet by sixty -
and the cramped quarters that were snowbound five months of the year.
    Shaw
spit at a squirrel on the trunk of a Cottonwood half a dozen paces away: the
animal jeered at him but didn't bother to dodge. For a man who could kill
anything with one rifleshot, Abishag Shaw couldn't hit a barn door with spit.
'An' I'd say your disposition for helpin' your fellow man an' goin' to
confession regular is a strange one to have for what we're doin' here, Maestro.
But yeah, I'd say it's strange. Johnny did, too. Else he wouldn't have been
pokin' his fool nose around Boden's desk.'
    'He
write to you about it?'
    Shaw
shook his head. 'Johnny couldn't hardly write his name. But Tom said, Johnny
asked about him, months before he found that letter. He's too smart for what he's doin ', Johnny said. An' he's stayed out here too long. Tom told him it wasn't none of
his affair.'
    January
leaned his shoulder against the tree, looking out over the river - low in the
thin gold light of afternoon, exposing a long strand of rock and driftwood -
and seeing instead the cramped blockhouse of Fort Ivy. Each night the stock was
herded into the gray wooden palisade, and the ground, the walls, the air
smelled of their dung. Through the six months of winter the snow would lie deep
around the walls. No travelers, no news: nothing to do but play cards and drink
and talk about women and beat off. Even sharing a two-room slave-cabin with
twenty other people in his childhood, with a drunken and unpredictable master thrown
in, January and the other slave children had at least been able to seek the
cypress woods, the bayou, the batture along the river with its fascinating
mazes of dead wood and flotsam . . . and to do so at any season of the year.
    On
the plains beyond the frontier, even in the summer, you stood the chance of
being murdered and scalped if you went too far from the walls.
    As
Johnny Shaw had been.
    Though
he had never met the young man, he knew exactly why