The Shirt On His Back - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,3

rise, spit tobacco into the long grass that edged the trail. 'Man what done it, he's someplace here.'

Shots rang out: men hunting in the hills on the other side of the river. Closer gunfire as they drew nearer the first of the shelters, men shooting at playing cards tacked to cottonwoods in the bottomland that lined the water. January knew the breed. He'd seen them, ferociously bearded with their long hair braided Indian-fashion, shirts faded colorless or glaring-new and rigid with starch, swaggering along Bourbon and Girod

Streets with their long Pennsylvania rifles on their backs, visitors to the world he knew.

Now he was the visitor. They clustered around to greet the pack-train, holding out tin cups of liquor in welcome. On the trail from Independence January had mostly gotten over his surprise that white men would extend such hospitality to a black one - the rules changed, the farther you got beyond the frontier. It was a dubious honor at best: it was hands down the worst liquor January had ever tasted.

The trappers roared at the expression on his face, and one of them shouted good-naturedly, 'Now you had a gen-u-ine Green River Cocktail, pilgrim! Waugh! Welcome to the rendezvous!'

Shaw leaned from the saddle, greeting the men, but January wasn't fooled by his affability. He saw the Lieutenant's pale eyes scan the bearded faces, seeking the man he'd come twenty- five hundred miles to kill.

The pack-train moved on along the river. Gil Wallach, of Ivy and Wallach Trading, had arrived before them, a small outfit - according to Shaw, on one of the three occasions between New Orleans and the South Pass that he'd spoken more than half a dozen words at a time - backed by men who'd once made up the Rocky Mountain Fur Company, before that organization had succumbed to the murderous business practices of the rival American Fur Company. A dozen of these smaller traders were camped along the river, between the military-looking establishments of the AFC and its rival, the British Hudson's Bay Company, peddling watered liquor to trappers in faded blanket coats and dickering fiercely over the price of beaver pelts. Just above the line where the ground sloped down to the bottomlands, a thin path had already been beaten into the grass, forming a sort of main street of the camp.

Mentally, January noted it all. Tents of canvas bleached by years of weather; cruder shelters, ranging from a few deer hides, to huts of pine and Cottonwood boughs skilfully lashed with rawhide. Here and there a tipi, where a trapper had an Indian wife. When he'd gotten on the steamboat for Independence, Rose had handed him an empty notebook and told him to bring it back full.

'The only way I can keep from hating you for being able to go, when I can't,' she'd said softly, 'is to know you'll bring this back.' She was a scientist. January knew it was agony to her, to be left behind, to be shut out of the wonders of a world unglimpsed because she was a woman, and with child.

Four months now he'd been making notes for her: animals, birds, plants, rocks. On the nights when he'd felt he would go insane with longing for her, it had been a little - a very little - like touching her hand. Like Shakespeare's comic lovers, whispering devotion to one another through a crack in a wall.

In the dappled shade of the cottonwoods on the river side of the trail, traders had hung scale beams to weigh the furs: the men of business in neat black broadcloth to mark their status, or gayer hues if they were Mexicans up from Taos. Most were clean-shaven, as befit representatives of all that was best in nineteenth-century civilization. Most wore boots.

At six dollars a pound, the furs they weighed represented the whole of a man's work for a year.

June was ending. Some men had been here for weeks - others would still be coming in. For the trappers, it was more than just the only chance they'd have to sell their furs, or resupply themselves with gunpowder and fish hooks, lead and salt and sharpening stones. For many, it was the only occasion they'd have to talk to anyone in the language of the land they'd left behind, or to see faces beyond the narrow circle of partners and camp-setters; the only chance to hear news of the world beyond the mountains, to talk to anyone of events beyond the doings