Keokotah came to me as I emerged from the lodge. 'They wait.' He paused, his black eyes sweeping the terrain before him. 'I think they come soon.'
We waited, our men formed around in a circle, well into the woods near the lodge, waiting for an attack that was long in coming.
'I think they come closer,' Keokotah said. 'This time no time. They come quick.'
I agreed, and waited, and waited.
My stomach felt hollow and my mouth dry. If they were many and they attacked from close in we might all be killed. I felt for my knife, for it would come to that. They would not attack from a distance this time, but would be upon us at once. My guns, if I used them, would get off no more than one hasty shot each. I dared not take a chance on having one wrested from me.
With night it would be cold again. They would draw off then, and build fires--
They came with a rush, and from close in. But our defenses were out, and their approach could not be completely hidden. One arrow left my bow. Then I dropped it and took to the knife. A big warrior leapt at me, and my knife ripped him up. Keokotah swung a club he had been carving. One of our men went down from a thrown spear, and the Ponca woman withdrew the spear and thrust it at the Indian who bent to take his scalp. She held it low with both hands and drove hard and the Indian tried to leap away, too late. I glimpsed her pin him down, saw his eyes staring up at her as his hands grasped at the spear.
It was hand to hand. Men fell. There was a scream. I was struck from behind and driven to my knees. I came up, fell, and rolling over, kicked a man away with my feet and came up. I was face to face with a short, powerfully built Indian who was amazingly agile. He slipped away from a knife thrust and swung his knife at me. Our blades clashed and when we came close I kicked him suddenly, catching him on the knee.
His knife ripped my tunic. My upward thrust cut a thin line along his chest and nicked his chin. We circled. Then somebody leapt on me from behind and my adversary lunged to finish me off. In that moment Itchakomi thrust a spear into his back. I fell, the man atop my back was gripping my hair in one hand, his other coming up with a knife to take my scalp. His hand gripping my hair gave my neck a fearful wrench, and I struck upward with my knife, stabbing him in the side. He wrenched hard on my neck again, wanting only that scalp, and I stabbed again. I felt the cutting edge of the knife on my hair and with a frantic lunge managed to throw him half off me. I came to my knees, driving a fist into his belly.
That broke his hold and he fell back and I leapt on him. He rolled to one side but not fast enough, and I sank the knife deep.
He wrenched free of me, bleeding badly, his face contorted with fury. He leapt at me, but this time I kicked him as he came in and he staggered back. His knees buckled under him then and he fell.
All around me there had been fighting, but suddenly it was over and they were gone. Bloody, gasping, I looked around. Itchakomi was standing in a corner near the lodge, a spear in her hand, its tip bloody.
The man I had fought was crawling away and Keokotah, bloody and bleeding, thrust a spear into him.
They were gone. Why they had broken off the attack, I did not know.
Two of our men were dead, and one had been scalped. A woman had been killed. Only Itchakomi and Unstwita were unwounded.
They had carried off their dead and wounded. How many we had killed, I did not know. Keokotah's woman, a terrible bruise on her shoulder and a cut on her arm, was bathing the blood from his wound.
'They will come again,' Keokotah said, looking at me.
'Aye, and we must be gone.'
Amazingly, I was almost unhurt. There was a thin knife cut at the roots of my hair only an inch or two long and not deep and a few minor scratches. Keokotah had taken a blow on the shoulder that had left his right arm almost useless for the time.
'We will go now,' I said, 'in the night.'
Limping and bloody, we gathered our few belongings and the little meat we had left. By the time we were ready to move it was dark. I knew only one place to go.
My valley.
Chapter Twenty-Eight.
We walked upon the mountains in the night. Limping, I led the way. Constantly we paused to listen for pursuit, but heard nothing. Often we had to pause because our lowland lungs were unaccustomed to the heights. Several times we stopped to rest.
At the first halt I went from one to the other, doing what I could to treat their wounds. It was little enough that I knew, but more than anyone there with the exception of Itchakomi. Surprisingly, she knew a good bit.
When morning came there was a dense fog, a mist lying low in the hollows of the hills. We followed a dim path, probably a game trail, and at first, for at least five miles, it was all uphill. Then the climb eased except for scrambles through boulders and the remains of avalanches that had swept down the mountain during the winter. Stiff, tired, and sore, we climbed, gasped for breath, and then pushed on.
The mist lifted away from us, revealing a world of broken granite and snow, with here and there a dwarf spruce struggling for existence against the wind and the ice. We sat down then and shared bits of jerked meat among us. There was little enough, but it was needed. A Natchee went back a few hundred yards to watch our trail while we ate.
Their faces were gaunt and tired, their wide eyes staring emptily upon nothing. A cold wind blew off the peaks, and I shivered. This was not the way I had hoped to come to my valley.
Rising, I walked down the path, and then waited for them to rise and follow. The Natchee watching our back trail came in. 'There is nothing,' he said, 'or nothing that can be seen. There is mist covering our valley, mist in the passes.'
Halting a half mile further along, I looked back at my straggling band. How did I, Jubal Sackett, a loner, come to be in this place with these people?
A cold wind stirred the limbs of a spruce near me and whined softly through a crack in the rocks. I shrugged my shoulders against the cold of the wind and beat my hands together. Slowly, the others were catching up.
There was a creek cut across our path not far ahead, and there we would build a fire, rest, and eat what we had.
We had been coming downhill for some time now, very slightly at first, but then the descent had grown steeper. The creek was free of ice, the water chuckling along over rocks and gravel, clear and cold. We gathered broken branches and bark for a fire. Building it, we gathered close. The Ponca woman, the best fisherman among us, went to the creek away from us.
I had not eaten when the others had. There was too little food as it was, and I was strong enough to survive. When I looked up at the mountains there was black rock, perhaps wet from melting snow, and a lone golden eagle swinging on wide wings against the sky and the snow.
A thin waterfall, thin from here at least, perhaps forty feet wide where it was, fell from rocky shelf to rocky shelf, mostly melting snow. By late spring it would be only a trickle. Now the mountain was stark and beautiful, a place for no man or animal, just for the clouds and eagles.
I brought sticks for the fire and added fuel. I watched the affectionate flames reach out and clasp the sticks in a fiery embrace, destroying what they loved.
My legs were tired. My back ached. I sat on a fallen tree and looked back the way we had come, rough, broken, and almost treeless.
The Ponca woman came to me in her black moccasins. She was a wide woman who smiled rarely but never complained. She pointed across the way at the mountains. The ones the Spanish call the Sangre de Cristos. 'Caves,' she said. 'Big!'
'You have been here before?'
'With Ponca,' she said. 'My people hunt.'
'Thank you,' I said. 'We will go to the caves.'
She did not linger, but returned to her fishing, and by the time the sun was high had caught a half dozen fish. It was a help.
Keokotah killed a ptarmigan. I saw nothing, but I thought of Itchakomi. She would wish to go home now, back to her own people and the warm weather beside the Great River. Well, I was a loner, anyway. And there were
