Sin Killer Read online

  “I don’t quite like that Mr. Glass,” she said to Kit. “He has the look of a criminal, that man.”

  “Hugh’s a rough cob,” Kit agreed. “It’s all three of us can do to whip him, when he’s drunk.”

  “What about my Jimmy?” she asked. “Do you think my Jim could whip him?”

  “Not in a wrestle, no—Hugh’s a biter and a gouger,” Kit said. “Jim might kill him, though—with a knife maybe. Killing him might be the only way to stop him.”

  Tasmin thought of the wild old man, watching her. What if he came, caught her before she could even wake up?

  “I’ve made you walk all this distance for nothing, Kit,” she said one night. “I’m going back to the fort— after all, I need to be careful. I have a baby coming.”

  On their way back, their feet crunching in the snow, Kit imagined himself killing Hugh Glass in a savage fight over Tasmin. Once imagined, the vision wouldn’t leave him—he dreamt it by night and dreamt it by day. Sometimes he shot Hugh, sometimes he stabbed him. In one vision Tasmin even gave him a warm hug, as he stood over the corpse of her attacker.

  In the next weeks, as winter edged toward its end and the snows began to melt, Kit nourished his fantasy of rescue. Only in battle, he felt, could he show Lady Tasmin that he was worthy of her. With Tasmin living at the post and old Hugh often about, Kit felt that he did not dare relax his vigilance.

  “Why’s that Carson boy so itchy, when he’s around me?” Hugh asked the Broken Hand. “He comes in puffed up like a rooster, ready to peck. Why would he think I’d need to fight a pup like him?”

  “Oh, young men are like dogs—they go round snarling, half the time.”

  “Blitzschnell! Blitzschnell!” the old parrot said.

  “It ain’t you he’s itchy about, Hugh,” Tom Fitzpatrick replied. “It’s Jimmy Snow’s pretty wife he’s itchy about. I expect Kit thinks you’ve got the randies for her.”

  “No, it’s Kit’s got the randies for her,” Jim Bridger said. “He follows her around like a puppy. Won’t hardly even speak to me, and I’m his partner.”

  “All the same, she is a fair beauty,” Milt Sublette declared.

  “Jimmy Snow got lucky,” his brother said.

  “Maybe he’s lucky and maybe he ain’t—maybe he’s just got trouble,” Hugh allowed. “If he’s so lucky, why’d he run off?”

  No one had an answer for that question.

  “Jimmy Snow leads his own life,” Joe Walker said. “Always has. Holy matrimony may not suit him particularly. It never suited me.”

  Across the room Tasmin was having an animated dispute with George Catlin—the two of them could hardly discuss any subject without quarreling, it seemed, a fact the mountain men took note of.

  “I hope I’ve got better sense than to take up with a quarrelsome woman—and that one’s quarrelsome,” Hugh Glass declared. “In the dark one woman’s as good as another, I expect, provided the hole ain’t plugged.”

  This sentiment required considerable thinking over. The mountain men gave it seasoned consideration, thinking back over their experiences with women, quarrelsome or docile. Most of these experiences had been so brief that a clear statement of principles was hard to arrive at.

  “Hugh may be right,” Bill Sublette allowed.

  “Hasn’t Jimmy Snow got some Ute wives somewhere?” Joe Walker asked.

  “That’s right—I believe they’re down on the Green River,” the Broken Hand said. “They’re sisters, I believe.”

  “Probably went back to them,” Hugh Glass concluded. “Probably got tired of listening to that English girl yap.”

  17

  “That would be the missing valet.”

  JIM Snow and John Skraeling were startled by the warmth of the reunion between Pomp Charbonneau and his father, Toussaint. The old man hugged Pomp tightly, as he wept, his tears wetting Pomp’s hair and dripping onto his shoulder. The old man was too choked up to speak, and Pomp, usually so shy and reserved, wasn’t shy at all about his father’s teary welcome. He held the old man close, patted him, whispered to him.

  This long embrace of father and son, and the delight they took in being together again, was a wonder to Jim Snow, whose own parents had been killed when he was four. As a captive child, with the Osage, he had had to fight the camp dogs for scraps of food; when the Cockerells ransomed him from the Osage he had become an indentured boy, fed and worked but not loved. He saw in the Charbonneaus’ sudden happiness something he had never known— perhaps the lack of it accounted for the fact that he had always felt a man apart. The trader Skraeling must have felt something of the same surprise—he turned away from the Charbonneaus and questioned Jim closely about conditions upriver, the movements of the Partezon in particular.

  “He’s gone back out onto the plains,” Jim said. “We followed him and saw his fires. Coming down here we saw about the derndest thing I’ve ever seen— a man sewed into a buffalo. Frozen hard, over by where that Sans Arc camp used to be.”

  As he talked he noticed that the Spaniard, Malgres, was following him with his eyes.

  “That would be the missing valet,” Skraeling said. “I heard of him from Draga. The Sans Arc—or some of them—believed he was born of a buffalo. I guess the Partezon decided to test the story.”

  “I guess,” Jim said. He wanted to leave, though he wasn’t entirely sure where he wanted to go. The sight of Pomp, so happy to be with his father, make Jim restless. While he was trying to make a plan the old Hairy Horn walked over.

  “The Partezon is my brother,” he said. “How many warriors did he come with?”

  “Plenty of warriors,” Jim said. “Could have been two hundred.”

  “He’s mean, my brother,” the Hairy Horn said. “So is that Spaniard who’s with the Twisted Hair.”

  “You’re right about him,” Jim said. “He’s the man who killed Big White.”

  “He’s a bad one but he won’t kill me—it’s you he wants to kill,” the Hairy Horn said. “You’re more important. I am just an old man who will soon die anyway.”

  Jim glanced at Malgres again—the old Hairy Horn was probably right. Many men killed in battle, but only a few for reputation. Perhaps Malgres was one of that sort—he himself wasn’t worried about the Spaniard but he thought it might be well to warn Pomp about him—Pomp, after all, was a highly respected guide, someone who, in Malgres’s eyes, might be a reputable target.

  Jim said as much to Pomp but Pomp dismissed the threat.

  “He won’t bother us while we’re at the Mandans’,” Pomp said. “I want to stay with my father a few weeks—we may go down and visit my mother’s grave. If you’re expecting to see the boys anytime soon I wish you’d take Joe Walker back his mare. Pa and I and Coal, we’ll walk along and take our time.”

  He didn’t mention Tasmin—Pomp tried his best to be tactful, where Jimmy Snow’s domestic arrangements were concerned. His tact was appreciated, too. Jim didn’t know what he was going to do about Tasmin. Sometimes he felt that Pomp should have married her—after all, he had been raised in Europe and could talk about all sorts of things of which he himself knew nothing; but Pomp, for all his education, didn’t seem to be the marrying kind.

  “Joe Walker’s particular about horseflesh,” Toussaint Charbonneau commented, when Pomp handed over the mare. “If that’s a Joe Walker horse she’ll carry you a good long way.”

  “Guess I’ll find out,” Jim said.

  “Tell Mr. Stewart I’ll meet him on the Yellowstone somewhere, when it’s warm enough to start gathering up his zoo,” Pomp said. Father and son stood watching as Jim rode away.

  He soon learned that old Charbonneau had been right to applaud Joe Walker’s judgment where horses were concerned. The little mare had an easy gait which she seemed able to hold indefinitely. Jim had never been able to afford the luxury of a horse of his own, though he had occasionally been given a mule or a burro to ride, when he was with one of the Santa Fe expeditions. In trapping, workhorses were used
mainly for packing out furs—the trappers themselves usually walked, which meant that twenty miles was about as far as they could expect to get in a day.

  The mare’s name was Janey—the day after he left the Charbonneaus, Jim calculated that she carried him a good fifty miles. Such a pace would bring him back to the Yellowstone in only a few days—but was he ready to go back to the Yellowstone? The weather was warm, the skies absolutely clear. Being alone in such a great space brought Jim a sense of calm that he knew he would soon lose once back in the small tent with his talkative wife. If only Tasmin could learn to behave like Sun Girl and Little Onion, his Ute wives, behaved.

  That evening, while spitting a prairie chicken he had managed to knock over with a rock, a new thought struck Jim Snow. The little mare was hobbled some fifty feet away, grazing avidly on the brown prairie grass. Now and then she pawed away a patch of snow, to get at a few more stems. The thought that occurred to Jim was that, with the mare to carry him, the whole West was open to him. Why not cut south and west to the Green River and join his Ute wives? In fact, the best plan of all might be to take them with him down the Yellowstone to where Tasmin waited. Tasmin was no slow-witted girl—no doubt she would quickly learn by example how a good wife should behave. Also, of course, the child was coming—his Ute wives could be a help with the birthing if they could all get there in time.

  It seemed such a perfect plan that Jim was at a loss to know why it hadn’t occurred to him earlier. His Ute wives could train his English wife, not only in how to work skins or sew leggings, but in how to behave with modesty in relation to her husband as well.

  Well before dawn Jim slid onto Janey and was off to the southwest, down through the Sioux country toward South Pass and the regions below the Great Salt Lake, where Sun Girl and Little Onion lived. The steady little mare carried him almost twenty miles before the morning freshness faded. The weather was warm, spring not far off. The Utes would soon be planting their little plots of corn. Jim felt a sudden, deep relief. Thanks to the energies of Joe Walker’s little mare he had seen a way out of his dilemma. For the moment all he had to do was be watchful and let Janey cover the ground.

  18

  “At the moment he is devoting himself to lichen…”

  “PlET is very gloomy still,” Mary Berrybender confided to her sister Tasmin. “He only smiles now if I fondle him under the lap robe, which frequently produces some spunk.”

  “That’s a detail you might have spared us,” Tasmin replied. “It’s hardly wise to provide casual services of that sort.”

  “Of course it isn’t—and why, may I ask, is he gloomy?” Buffum said. “There’s plenty of botany around here, let him study it. That’s why Papa brought him, after all.”

  “But he is studying it,” Mary assured her. “At the moment he is devoting himself to lichen—fortunately there’s an abundance of lichen quite near the fort. He won’t go farther afield for fear of the great yellow bears.”

  The fact was that, despite the warming weather, all the Europeans wore gloomy looks. They all lingered at table as long as possible, a much-smudged and diminished company, in Tasmin’s view. Señor Yanez, Signor Claricia, and Piet Van Wely were nowadays mostly silent and sad.

  “I see no reason why I shouldn’t do Piet these little favors, since nothing else makes him smile,” Mary said, annoyed, as usual, by her sisters’ unyielding attitudes.

  “Come to that, it is not only males who are frustrated in this lonely place,” Buffum remarked. Unable to arouse much interest in the younger mountain men—Kit Carson was in love with Tasmin, Jim Bridger with Eliza, and young Milt Sublette with Millicent, the laundress—Buffum had been forced to have recourse to Tim, the stable boy; a mostly unsatisfactory recourse, as it happened. Tim had not yet recovered from the forced removal of his frozen digits—he no longer cared to grab Buffum’s hand and hold it against his groin. When she herself attempted to remind him of that useful technique, he burst into tears and thrust her away, a rejection that did not improve her temper.

  “I can’t think why they’re all so gloomy,” Tasmin said. “The post is snug and the winter’s nearly over. Cook, of course, sees that we’re well fed.”

  “Material comforts are not enough, Tasmin,” Bobbety said. “I expect they all despair of seeing good old Europe again—I myself will only be seeing it with one eye next time, if I’m fortunate enough to see it at all.”

  “The fact is, none of them expect to see Europe again, ever,” Mary said. “They think Papa will succeed in getting every one of them killed on these harsh prairies, somehow.”

  “Well, we all have our troubles, in this year of our Lord 1833,” Buffum declared. “Even our fortunate Tasmin at last can be said to have troubles.”

  “Oh, and what might those be, Bess?” Tasmin asked. “I’m aware of no troubles—certainly none worth complaining about.”

  “Really? It matters so little to you that your husband has deserted you while you are heavy with child?” Bess asked. “I consider it most unlikely that we will ever see the handsome Sin Killer again.”

  “Of course we’ll see him—he’s only off trapping somewhere,” Tasmin said lightly. “Americans can hardly be expected to live strictly by the calendar, as we Europeans are apt to do.”

  Her remarks were met with looks of skepticism from her siblings, none of whom appeared to believe a word she said.

  “Besides, I am hardly one to tie a man to my apron strings,” she went on. “Jimmy and I agreed at once to keep certain freedoms for ourselves. It would be foolish to marry a mountain man and expect him never to roam.”

  Such statements—not the first Tasmin had made on the subject of Jim Snow’s absence—were served up mainly for the sake of defiance; privately she was furious with Jim for leaving her in such an embarrassing situation. Of course, in the literal sense her statements were true enough: freedom to roam was what defined a mountain man—in fact, most of the other trappers were now leaving too. Only two, Kit Carson and Tom Fitzpatrick, remained at the post. Hugh Glass, Eulalie Bonneville, Jim Bridger, the Sublette brothers, and Joe Walker had all drifted off, up the Yellowstone or along the Milk River, or the Tongue— anywhere they could expect to find beaver. Jim Snow’s absence was merely a normal part of the spring exodus, though that didn’t keep it from rankling, and rankling deeply, with Tasmin herself. Inwardly she raged one moment, despaired the next. The fact that the two of them had quarreled on the morning Jim left to do his duty by Captain Aitken no longer seemed to have much bearing on the matter. She had known, in fact, that he meant to check on the steamer soon. But almost a month had passed without news of Jimmy, though news did frequently trickle into the trading post through various natives. Only the day before, one of the Minatarees who was related to old Otter Woman had brought news to Drum Stewart: Pomp Charbonneau and his father were waiting for him near the headwaters of the Yellowstone, ready to begin trapping animals for the Scotsman’s zoo.

  No news could have been more welcome to the red-bearded Scot—to Tasmin’s amusement he was packed and gone from the post within three hours, leading two pack animals. His fervor for Vicky Kennet’s embraces had long since abated—it weakened even as Vicky’s determination to become, someday, Lady Stewart grew stronger. In a fairly short time, though large with child now herself, Vicky had worn Drummond Stewart out—he could hardly wait to escape to the peace of the prairies.

  Of course, Tasmin also was great with child. She and Vicky strode about the trading post, heavy and majestic, like two goddesses of the corn, overawing the skittish mountain men by their vast fecundities. Lord Berrybender, offended by the sight, had even attempted to ban the two of them from the common table.

  “Takes my appetite, looking at you two great cows,” he complained. “I always sent Constance to Dorset until the brats were birthed.”

  “It’s rather a long way to Dorset, Father,” Tasmin said.

  “Perhaps I’ll have Boisdeffre set up a tent—confine you until you’ve given birth,”
Lord Berrybender said, ignoring Tasmin’s point. “Most unappealing sight, pregnant women. They look like melons with heads.”

  “Yes, and sometimes the heads even presume to speak, as I myself frequently do,” Tasmin said crossly. “Vicky and I intend to stay where we are—you move into the tent if you don’t like looking at us.”

  “I’ll do better than that, you insolent hussy,” Lord B. told her, turning rather red in the face. “Drum Stewart left and so will I. I’ll go on a hunt, while the weather’s nice and cool. You’ll soon have brats at the teat, a sight I don’t want to see. Of course, I’ll take Millicent with me, to see to the laundry.”

  Due to her swollen state Vicky Kennet, it seemed, had ceased to appeal to Lord B.; he had abruptly transferred his attentions to the black-haired Millicent, a sturdy, solid girl with no pretentions to wit.

  “And of course I’ll need Cook,” Lord B. went on. “And Señor Yanez and Signor Claricia, in case something goes wrong with the buggy or the guns.”

  “Cook’s not going,” Tasmin informed him. “I’ll keep Cook.”

  “What’s that? Of course she’s going—whose cook do you suppose she is, anyway?” Lord B. thundered, half rising in his chair.

  Kit Carson, watching the scene from a distance, felt sure there would be violence; he edged closer— for a moment it seemed it might be her father that he would have to save Tasmin from. But before Lord B. could whack her—which he showed every intention of wanting to do—Tasmin grabbed the same fork that had half blinded her brother and thrust it to within an inch of Lord Berrybender’s nose. When he tried to grab it Tasmin drew back, only to lunge again, this time marking Lord B. slightly on the cheek.