Sin Killer

by Larry McMurtry

  “He sounds like he needs to be taken down a notch or two,” Malgres said. “I expect he’s just an old bluffer.”

  Both Skraeling and Charbonneau looked hard at Malgres, a killer, but a man of little judgment.

  “If you think he’s a bluffer, why don’t you pay him a visit?” Skraeling suggested. “If you’re hot to kill somebody, go kill the Partezon.”

  Malgres didn’t answer. John Skraeling was yellowish and thin. No doubt he would die soon. Malgres and the Ponca had discussed killing Skraeling and taking his money and the two young Hidatsa girls he had acquired; but the Ponca advised caution. Even sick, Skraeling was still quick with gun and knife. Besides, all the tribes trusted him and brought him furs. Let him get a little sicker and a little richer: then they could kill him.

  Toussaint was not at ease in Skraeling’s camp, but he had to stop somewhere until the threat from the Partezon passed. In a day or two, when it was safe, he meant to take Coal and rejoin the English party on the Yellowstone; the only impediment to that plan was the Hairy Horn, who was still officially Charbonneau’s charge. There were plenty of Sioux around; the old man could have easily made it back to his band, but now the old fool was resisting all efforts to send him home. Captain Clark, safe in his office in Saint Louis, had specifically instructed Charbonneau to take the old chief home—but it was not easy to make an Indian go home if the Indian didn’t want to.

  “My people chase around too much,” the Hairy Horn said, when pressed on the matter. “I might just stay here, near the river, where there is no danger of thirst. There is some pretty dry country out where my people live.”

  “If you need a wife I’ll sell you one,” Skraeling suggested. “I’ve got one to spare.”

  This offer annoyed Malgres—if Skraeling was going to dispose of one of his girls, Malgres felt his own wishes should have been considered.

  The Hairy Horn didn’t want either of the skinny Hidatsa girls. The best woman around, in his view, was Sharbo’s plump little wife. For some reason it didn’t occur to Sharbo that he ought to share her, and this despite the fact that the Hairy Horn had made his interest plain enough. White men were often obtuse when it came to the common business of sharing women.

  “I hope the Partezon wasn’t too hard on George Aitken,” Charbonneau said—he had a guilty conscience on that score. If he had just been a little more persuasive, George and the other two white men might have left the boat and come with him to safety. George’s concern had been for the boat, but after all, his employers were rich men and could always build another boat.

  “If the Partezon caught any white men he probably burned them,” the Hairy Horn said. “He doesn’t like to parley with white men, but he doesn’t mind burning them.”

  “Well, at least George is dead—past suffering,” Skraeling remarked. It had begun to snow a little. They all stood around outside the lodge, idle but anxious. Whatever business they might pretend to be conducting, what they were really doing was watching for any sign of the marauding Sioux. No one wanted to be caught snoozing in a lodge if the Sioux riders came flying through the snow.

  Suddenly they all saw the Ponca, running as if for his life from the direction of the river—his leggings were loose, evidently he had just been with a woman and had to pull his pants up in a hurry. They all thought of the Partezon, but surely the Sioux would be coming from the prairies, not from the river.

  The Ponca, out of breath, babbled his news, and Charbonneau relaxed.

  “It ain’t the Partezon,” he said. “It’s Pomp. My boy’s coming.”

  Tears started in the old man’s eyes, at the thought of seeing Pomp, his dancing little Baptiste, as Captain Clark had called him when Pomp was an infant. The thought of Pomp reminded him of Sacagawea, and of the fine family life they had had, so long ago.

  “Why, that’s good news, Sharbo,” Skraeling said. “I like Pomp. We’ll kill a buffalo, if we can, and have a fine family reunion.”

  The Ponca grabbed Skraeling’s arm—he was not through reporting, evidently.

  “Oh, Jim’s with him,” Charbonneau said. “I guess that’s why this fellow’s upset.”

  “Jim Bridger—I thought he was over at the Yellowstone,” Skraeling said. He knew that Jim Bridger and Pomp Charbonneau were good friends— it was merely surprising that the lanky young Bridger would be at the Mandans’ instead of deep in the mountains where the rich beaver streams were.

  To Skraeling’s surprise the Hairy Horn, after chattering for a minute, suddenly launched into his death song, a tiresome chant that none of them wanted to hear.

  “No, not Jim Bridger—it’s Jimmy Snow that’s with him,” Charbonneau said.

  “Well, well—this will be interesting,” Skraeling said. “We don’t get a visit from the Sin Killer every day.”

  15

  Far in the distance, now and then, they saw a few brown specks …

  THE buffalo, so plentiful for the past weeks, had suddenly become scarce, Jim observed. Perhaps the fact of the Partezon and his two hundred warriors scared them off. On the trek over to the Knife River the two of them had seldom been out of sight of the great herds; but now, as he and Pomp moved cautiously downriver, toward the Mandan camps, they saw no buffalo—or at least none close. Far in the distance, now and then, they saw a few brown specks, many miles away. Other game was scarce also—scarce enough that when they saw a strange mound in the snow and discovered that it was a dead buffalo, their first thought was food. Cold as it had been, the meat would likely not be spoiled.

  Pomp got out his knife and kicked at the carcass, to knock some of the snow off, when he got a bad surprise. The stump of a man’s hand protruded several inches from the dead cow’s belly.

  “Jimmy, look here,” he said.

  Jim Snow looked—they poked tentatively at the frozen carcass a time or two. Though it was plain enough that the man inside the buffalo would have to be dead, they still moved cautiously. Both had seen numerous instances of decapitation and dismemberment; but neither of them had ever seen a man sewn into a buffalo before. It was impossible to say how long the man and the dead cow had been there, but thanks to the deep chill, they were now frozen together.

  “Do you want to try and hack him out?” Pomp asked.

  “What would be the point?” Jim said. “We’ve got no way to bury him. It must be that little fellow from the boat, the one who carried the guns for Tasmin’s pa. He was lost in the storm and never found.”

  “Someone found him, I guess,” Pomp said. “Didn’t there used to be a good-sized Sans Arc camp around here somewhere?”

  “I think so,” Jim said. “I wonder where they went.”

  The two of them wandered around the area for a while, hoping some clue to the mystery might turn up. But they found nothing, and it began to snow. Soon the buffalo, with the small man sewn into it, was once more just a mound on the snowy plain.

  When they left, drifting south with the snow on their backs, both felt that somehow things were drifting out of kilter. They had not managed to save Captain Aitken or anyone else from the boat, or even managed to bury them properly. The fate of Pomp’s father and his young wife remained to be determined. The best place to start a search seemed to be the Mandan villages, and yet, as they went south, Jim Snow seemed so uneasy with the proceedings that Pomp stopped to consider what best to do.

  “You don’t have to come with me, Jimmy,” he said. “Pa’s probably at the Mandans’—I imagine he’s safe, otherwise we’d have found him. You’ve got a wife and all. If you want to head back for the Yellowstone, suit yourself.”

  “No, we better stick together for a while yet,” Jim said. “There could still be some of the wild men on the loose.”

  In fact he didn’t believe his own answer—he just didn’t want to go back to Tasmin yet. When he tried to think about what to do with Tasmin he felt tired— the complications of marriage took the spring out of his step, a thing that didn’t happen when he thought of his Ute wives; but th
en he almost never thought of his Ute wives. They didn’t fill his mind in the way that Tasmin did.

  As things stood Jim was glad to have an errand to help Pomp with. It allowed him to put off, for a while, having to deal with the forceful English girl he had married, a woman who didn’t understand that the duty of a wife was to be silent before the Lord. What if she never accepted that duty? What if she never obeyed? It was a problem Jim didn’t want to think about too much, and yet he couldn’t get it out of his mind as he plodded along behind Pomp.

  To Pomp the fact that Jim Snow and Tasmin Berrybender had somehow proceeded into a marriage was one of those perplexing facts that no amount of reasoning could explain. That such incongruous matings happened, and happened often, was obvious, though. In Europe great princes were always confounding their subjects by marrying Gypsy dancers or Turkish slave girls—even, now and then, a French whore. If well-born princes couldn’t manage to align their fancies with dynastic needs, there was no reason that a frontier boy such as Jim would be any more likely to choose a wife suitable to the circumstances of a mountain trapper or Santa Fe trail guide—professions that were sure to entail long absences from the domestic hearth. Of course, Jim had two Indian wives, but he seldom saw them and they were very likely much easier to deal with than Tasmin Berrybender.

  It was a puzzle—on the whole Pomp felt glad that it wasn’t his puzzle.

  The snow, after a last intense flurry, suddenly stopped falling. The sky cleared, the sun cast down a thin winter light, and to the south, a dog barked.

  “Hear that?” Jim said.

  “Yep, a Mandan dog, I suppose,” Pomp said.

  Just then an Indian who had evidently been copulating with a woman jumped up from behind a snowbank, pulling at his leggings—the woman, short and almost square, scurried off like an outraged prairie chicken.

  “Why, there’s Pa,” Pomp said. His father stood a head taller than many prairie travelers and was usually easy to spot in a crowd. He was standing with an old Indian and three or four other men near a Mandan earth lodge, but the bright sun on the new snow made it hard to see exactly the people they were approaching. A thin, high chant reached them, and the dog continued to bark.

  “That’s the Hairy Horn singing,” Jim said. “At least your pa managed to keep up with one of the three chiefs.”

  “I believe I see John Skraeling,” Pomp said, squinting against the glare.

  “Be watchful of the little Spanish fellow who’s with him,” Jim cautioned. “He’s the one who punctured Big White’s liver.”

  “Skraeling don’t usually run with killers,” Pomp observed.

  “He probably picked this one up by accident and ain’t figured out how to get rid of him,” Jim said.

  16

  “I shall never look noble now,” Bobbety complained…

  SINCE Jim Snow was gone, and Pomp Charbonneau too, Kit Carson quietly appointed himself Tasmin’s guardian; he stuck to her like a burr on her walks from tent to trading post. Most days he waited with her while Cook dressed Bobbety’s socket, a task Cook performed imperturbably, while Tasmin distracted her deeply depressed brother by reading him long passages from Pope or Prior.

  Father Geoffrin soon made a cautious reappearance, in the main keeping well clear of Tasmin. Once he ventured to suggest that Bobbety might enjoy a snatch of Rousseau, but Tasmin greeted the comment with a look of such chill that the little priest retreated. He began to spend more time with George Catlin, who, despite the bitter cold, seldom passed a day without doing three or four Indian portraits. Some of the sitters had traveled long distances to be painted by the likeness maker.

  “I shall never look noble now,” Bobbety complained, though in fact the kitchen girl, Eliza, clumsy with plates but skilled with the needle, had made Bobbety a very practical eye patch out of the soft leather on one of Lady Berrybender’s old purses.

  “You never did look noble, Bobbety,” Tasmin told him frankly. “At best you looked silly.”

  “Quite right,” Buffum agreed. “If anything, Eliza’s eye patch lends you a particle of dignity.”

  “Something sorely lacking up to now,” Mary remarked. “Now you look like an evil pirate—one of a sodomitical bent.”

  “You are all cruel, too cruel,” Bobbety complained, though without force. “I wish Father would come and lash you with his horsewhip.”

  “Not likely—he is off lashing his horses with it, in hopes of catching up to some wild beast he wants to shoot,” Tasmin told him.

  “Ha ha, perhaps he’ll run off a cliff, in which case the title will be mine and I’ll make you all pay for your cruelty,” Bobbety said. “I’ll immediately parcel you out to minor curates and vicars. All frivolities will immediately cease—from then on you will be expected to walk the modest path of piety.”

  Kit Carson could only stand in wonder when the English spoke to one another in such fashion. What it meant he had no idea, though he did think it likely that Lord Berrybender might someday run his buggy off a cliff. Even the mountain men, well accustomed to the dangers of the wild, looked sharp when in close company with Lord Berrybender. A man who could casually poke out his own son’s eye was to be allowed a certain space.

  Kit did not understand the business about vicars and curates, but he didn’t think that Bobbety stood much of a chance against three such forceful sisters. It was odd how the English could keep on insulting one another hour after hour—insult feeding on insult, rising now and then to an occasional slap or pinch. Among the mountain men ten minutes of such slanderous talk would have led, at the very least, to fisticuffs, and knife fighting or gunplay would not have been out of the question; but with the English it seemed to go no further than words. One thing Kit saw clearly was that Tasmin could easily outtalk anyone in her family—even the old lord grew tongue-tied and red in the face when he tried to match words with Tasmin, the woman with whom Kit was now so deeply in love that he spent most of his nights and days thinking about her. He was not so disloyal as to wish Jim Snow dead, but he did allow himself to hope that Jim would be a while getting back. Perhaps a desire to trap the southern Rockies would come over him—some task that would occupy him for several months. Kit knew that this was unlikely—Tasmin, after all, was with child—but he couldn’t help hoping. The mere fact that several of the mountain men had begun to exchange pleasantries with Lady Tasmin had begun to annoy him, a fact not lost on his friends and colleagues. Jim Bridger was huffy about it—not only did Kit no longer have time for him, but he had also begun to ignore the camp chores the two of them had been sharing.

  “Kit wouldn’t bring in a stick of firewood unless he stumped his toe on it,” Jim observed to Eulalie Bonneville.

  “Men in love need no firewood,” Eulalie reminded him. “Their nuts keep them warm.”

  “Yes, but what keeps their compañeros warm?” Jim Bridger asked—though he himself had begun to think rather warmly of the pert Eliza, Cook’s brown-eyed helper, who frequently allowed plates and platters to slip through her grasp. She had twice managed to spill gravy in Jim Bridger’s lap, a sure sign of ripening affection, in Bonneville’s view. Both times Eliza had made a great flutter and tried to daub Jim dry, attentions that embarrassed him and provoked caustic comment from the other mountain men.

  “She’s wanting pokes, I expect,” Tom Fitzpatrick allowed, as the old parrot wandered up and down the long table, seeking scraps. “I suppose she thinks that if she spills enough gravy in Jimmy’s lap he’ll rise to the task.”

  “Anybody can spill gravy,” Jim replied—he did not like the imputation of coarse motives to his Eliza, although it had to be admitted that his own thoughts often took a coarse turn when Eliza was about.

  Tasmin knew, of course, that young Kit was deeply smitten—she had only to let her eyes meet his for a moment to bring a deep blush to his cheeks—even his ears turned a fiery red. When once she gave way to an irresistible impulse, grabbed his silly cap, and flung it onto the snow, Kit was so astonished that it
seemed he might pass out.

  Of course, in such a place, with the winter deep and the company limited, it was only to be expected that attractions would form and affections flourish or even rage. Tasmin saw with amusement that Drum Stewart, the overheated Scot, had unleashed a tigress in Venetia Kennet. Cook confided the colorful truth to Tasmin: Vicky had obtained some potent sleeping drafts from Monsieur Boisdeffre; these she stirred liberally into the old lord’s brandy each night, putting him deeply under and leaving Vicky free to pursue strenuous nightlong tourneys of carnality with the highborn hunter—so strenuous were these tourneys that Drum Stewart only now and then had energy left for the hunt.

  For the first week or so after Jim Snow’s departure, Tasmin took an amused and lofty attitude toward what she observed at the post. After all, whatever her immediate differences with her husband, she was a satisfied woman, one who did not have to seek casual heats. But as the weeks passed she began to feel less amused, and also less serene—where was he, Jim Snow? News had reached them through native runners of the destruction of the steamer. Though too late, Jim had done his duty by Captain Aitken—why didn’t he come back and take up his duties to his wife?

  For three weeks she went every night to the tent, escorted by the faithful Kit. She knew that when Jim returned he would expect to find her there. It was their home; he had chosen the campsite; so she waited through more than twenty nights, never feeling quite safe, not sleeping very deeply, always half on guard against whatever threats might arise.

  But Jim didn’t come. Every night, walking out with Kit, Tasmin’s spirits sunk a little lower. Why didn’t he come? How could he leave her in such uncertain circumstances? That old raunch Hugh Glass had begun to follow her boldly with his eyes. Her noble blood did not impress old Hugh, nor did the fact that she was the Sin Killer’s wife. To a man who had survived a bear, Jim Snow may have seemed like small beer. Tasmin did not want to make too much of what, after all, were only looks—but she didn’t want to make too little of them, either. In one respect Hugh Glass was like her father: he was all appetite.