Free The Devil's Making by Seán Haldane

put him on the wagon when it gets here.’ Parry paused and seemed to listen for the sound of reinforcements from the woods.
    â€˜The heart of the mouse talks to the eagle’, I thought. The scene of the murder, where Harding and the other Indian were left waiting with the cart, was indeed too far away for any other sound to be heard.
    â€˜Perhaps that would be provocative, Sir’, I said. ‘You do have your revolver trained on him. And if he’s their chief they won’t risk having him shot.’
    â€˜Good’, said Parry, as if relieved of the decision. ‘Klatawa!’, he said to Wiladzap. (‘Go!’)
    Without a backward glance Wiladzap started up the path. ‘Klatawa’, I said to the girl.
    After twenty minutes’ gradual climb through the forest we reached the place where we had left Harding. The cart was there. Several horses were tied to trees, and there were were two more constables. On the cart was a grey blanket covering the body, and beside it a pile of wet and bloodstained clothing.
    Wiladzap sent the other Indian back to camp, though he seemed to protest vigorously. Wiladzap and Lukswaas were told to sit on the cart at the tail, their backs to the corpse. They had to hang on tightly as the cortege set off towards Victoria and the cart lurched along the path. Wiladzap looked thoughtful. Lukswaas was almost as sullen as the whores when I had rousted them out of their shanties near Cormorant Street – a world away from Cormorant Point.

5
    As we came into Victoria, the distant blue hills between us and the Pacific were sharp against a lurid orange sunset. People on the sidewalks stopped to stare at us.
    At the court house, the corpse was slid onto a wide board and carried in, itself as stiff as a board now. Wiladzap was installed in a relatively secluded cell, at the end of the row. The other prisoners yelled out that they didn’t want no drunken Indian murderer with them. The jailer, Seeds, roared at them to shut up and stood observing Wiladzap, as if taking stock of a new possession.
    Wiladzap squatted on the cell floor, hunched in his blanket, his back against the wall, and closed his eyes.
    Lukswaas was brought to make a deposition. Augustus Pemberton had been sent for, and was waiting for us in the room which we used as an officers’ dining room and for interrogations. He gestured to Lukswaas to sit down at one end of the table. Her eyes were wide open in fear and she seemed almost to have stopped breathing. I had to go round behind her to show her the chair. She just stood and looked at it. I realised she did not know what to do. ‘Perhaps we should put aside our good manners and show this lady how to sit down, Sir’, I said to Pemberton, who instantly understood and made a deliberate show of pulling out a chair at the other end of the table, sitting down on it, and pulling himself towards the table. I pulled out a chair for Luskwaas, and she sat down on it rather clumsily as I pushed it forward. My face was just above her hair, which smelled sweetly of cedar smoke.
    Parry and I sat at each side of the table. I looked at Lukswaas again, noticing for the first time a strange ornament which had slipped out from under the blanket around her shoulders, a shiny black stone shaped like a flat paddle or fishtail, hanging from a leather thong around her neck. I got out my notebook and pencil again.
    Pemberton lit up his pipe. He was conducting this examination as Stipendiary Magistrate. His face is that of a dashing Irishman past his prime: resolute yet worn. He has strong eyes and a prominent nose, but his cheeks sag a little and he is going bald. Not an unkind man, but he began to question Lukswaas in a cool detached way.
    â€˜Mesika nem?’ (‘Your name’.)
    â€˜Lukswaas…’ There followed a series of other names, which I could not transcribe.
    â€˜Mesika Tyee klootchman?’ (‘You Tyee’s