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get drunk, but there are
trappers that must have known Boden. They'd be more observant, even if he's
done something to change how he looks.'
    'More
observant,' agreed Shaw. 'Less like to go shootin' off their mouths, if'fn word
gets out as to how Johnny Shaw's brother is askin' questions about Frank
Boden?' He spit again at a pocket mouse at the foot of the boulder behind the
store tent, missing it by feet. 'Like Tom said, I get one shot at the man. I
purely don't want to have to go trackin' him through the mountains.'
    It
was on the tip of January's tongue to ask, ' Would you ?’ but
he held back from the question, as he would have held back from grabbing a
man's broken arm. In the four years he had known Abishag Shaw in New Orleans,
he had never heard the Lieutenant speak of any family, save once, when he had
mentioned a sister who had died. Hadn't been for
you runnin' the way you did, Tom had said. What had happened because Shaw had walked away?
    It
was clear to him now that Tom and Johnny had been the only family Shaw had.
    Will
you give up your beliefs about law and vengeance, so as not to lose the single
person of your own blood that you have left?
    Follow
a man into endless and deadly wilderness, rather than go back to your only kin
and say, I couldn't? I wouldn 't ?'
    January
recalled swearing once that nothing would ever induce him to return to New
Orleans. He had learned since then what it was to need your own blood, your own
kin, as a drowning man needs air. To need to know that you weren't utterly
alone.
    'That
feller who helped you out in your fight, Manitou Wildman—' They ducked beneath
the line of dangling traps as they came into the store tent. 'He was at the
fort last winter.'
    'I
thought he might have been. He had credit-sticks - plews? Or are plews the
skins?'
    'Plews.
An' yes - they call the sticks same as they call the skins, just so's
everythin's clear an' understandable.'
    'He
had plews from the fort.'
    'He's
one I need to talk to. Clem Groot - the Dutchman - an' his partner Goshen
Clarke was camped near there, too. Trouble is,' Shaw added more quietly as
Wallach gave them a salute and headed off up the path for the Hudson's Bay
Camp, 'we got no way of knowin' that they wasn't part of whatever Boden is
mixed up in. That goes for the engages, too.'
    'What could he be mixed up in?' January waved out across the counter at the rolling
meadows, the distant clusters of white tipis, the long string of shelters and
campfires upstream and down. 'What trouble, what evil, could a man be here to do?'
    'Other'n
murder, without proof, a feller he thinks might be the one who killed his
brother, you mean?' Shaw perched on a bale of shirts. 'That I don't know.
They's money in furs, Maestro, more'n you or I'll ever see. The American Fur
Company's already crushed out two big outfits that they felt was takin' their
Indian trade away from 'em, an' God knows how many little ones like Ivy an'
Wallach, an' not just by gettin' their trappers to desert 'em with all their
season's furs, neither. You talk to Tom Fitzpatrick sometime, 'bout how the AFC
works. They got agents livin' regular with the Crow villages - hell, Jim
Beckwith's a chief of the Crows these days - an' the Crows or any other tribe is just as happy to
scalp a white man they catches on their huntin' lands . . . an' the Flatheads
is just as tickled to return the compliment on anyone who ain't a friend of their friends, the Hudson's Bay Company.'
    A
trapper named Bridger - older than most and recognized through the length and
breadth of the mountains as being as wise as the Angel Gabriel, for which
reason he was generally called Gabe in spite of the fact that his name was
actually Jim - came to the counter to ask the prices of salt and tobacco.
    When
Bridger had gone, Shaw went on, 'The Hudson's Bay men been tryin' for years to
spread east into the Rockies. At Seaholly's this afternoon they was sayin' as
how that Controller the AFC sent out - that snake-eye Titus