Spanish worked a hollow for his hip in the sand and went to sleep. After I took John J.'s place, he did the same.
It was still, and overhead the stars were bright as they can only be in a desert sky. A coolness came up from the barranca below, and I listened for any whisper of sound, struggling against my own weariness and the need for sleep. But a few minutes of sleep might mean death for all of us. Only my wariness stood guard, and the thought of them trusting me.
A long while later, Spanish came to me. 'You better get a little sleep,' he said, 'but if we're figuring on getting that horse up the mountain, it won't be much.'
There was no need for me to move. I just let go and closed my eyes, and when I woke up it was with a hand on my shoulder.
'They're stirrin' around down there,' Spanish said, 'and it's gettin' on toward dawn.'
'You two hold 'em,' I said, getting up. 'I'll take that other horse up the mountain.'
'Alone? It can't be done.'
'It's got to be,' I said. 'The Apaches will figure it out if we wait. Maybe they already have.'
John J. was on his feet, his gun belted on and his Winchester in his hand, a spare cartridge belt draped over his shoulder.
'If it gets bad, pull back to Rocca here, and make a stand,' I said. 'I'll get back as soon as I can.'
He indicated the horses. 'Do you think we could make a break for it? Down the slope and right into them, shooting all the while?'
It was a thought, and I said so, but I told him no, not yet. Then I went and caught up the other mustang and headed for the slope. Oddly enough, Dorset's horse took to it as if it was home country. More than likely she could smell the other horse, and knew it had gone this way. Maybe she could also smell Dorset.
Wild horses can follow a trail as good as any wolf -- I've seen them do it many a time. And the other horse, with us working to help, had maybe made the trail a little better.
The horse had to struggle, and I tugged and braced myself and pulled, and that game little horse stayed right with it. With daybreak tinting the sky, we made it to the rim.
And then we heard the shots. Somebody down there was using a Winchester.
We heard the chatter of the rifle, then a few slower, paced shots. There was silence, then another shot.
The children were wide-eyed and scared, but they were pioneer youngsters, and no telling the trouble they'd seen before this. Dorset stepped into the saddle and I taken her hand.
'Ride,' I said, 'and stay with it. Hide out by day, ride by night,' I told her again. 'Don't shoot unless they get close, and then shoot to kill. I figure you're going to make it. We can hold them a day or two.'
She put her hand on mine. 'Tell, thank them for me, will you? All of them?'
'Sure.'
The shooting down there was steady now. They needed me down there. I knew how Apaches could come up a slope. Nothing to shoot at but a few bobbing, flashing figures, you scarce saw them when they vanished, appeared again elsewhere, and came on.
Dorset knew it, too. She turned her horse, lifted a hand, and they rode off into the coming morning. I taken one look and then I hit the slope a-sliding. Far below I could see the Indians.
Battles was on the rim, bellied down behind rock slabs. Far off, near the stream, I could see the Apache ponies, but nothing was moving on the slope.
Behind Battles I could see Spanish, and he was rolling some rocks into place, lifting others, making a sort of rough wall from where John J. was firing to where Rocca was lying. He was getting set for a last-ditch fight, and the lay of the land sort of favored our position by being a mite lower than the rest of the hollow.
Of a sudden an Apache came up from behind a rock and started to move forward, and my Winchester came up as if it moved of its own will, and I taken a quick sight and let go.
High on the slope the way I was, right under the rim, I had a good view of what lay below. That Apache was a good three hundred yards off and lower down, but I held low a-purpose and that bullet caught him full in the chest.
He stopped in his tracks and Battles shot into him, getting off two fast shots before he could drop, but when he did drop he just rolled over and lay sprawled out, face up to the sun.
A number of shots were fired at me, but all of them hit the slope a good fifty feet below me, and I decided right then I was going to stay where I was.
It stayed quiet then, and slowly the afternoon drew on. Our horses had been bunched by Spanish so that they were close to Rocca, and the position seemed pretty good unless the Apaches decided to attack by night. But I kept on thinking about what we might do. There had to be a way out.
Now, my pappy was always one for figuring things. He told me time and again that when in a difficulty a body should always take time to contemplate. 'The only way folks got to where they are,' he'd say, 'was by thinkin' things out. No man ever had the claws of a grizzly nor the speed of a deer -- what he had was a brain.'
Right now we had here a stalemate, but it worked in favor of the Apache. It worked for him because he had access to plenty of water and grass, which we did not have.
And I knew the Apache would no longer wait. He'd be scaling that rimrock himself, and without horses he could get up there all right, although it would take some doing. We could figure on having them above us by the next daybreak, and then that hollow would be nothing but a place to die in.
We had to make it out of there, and right now. Nobody expects to live forever, but nobody wishes to shorten his time. Of course, a body never knows which turn will shorten it. Like when a bunch of us boys went off to the war we left a friend behind who paid a substitute. We all came back, safe and sound, but the one who stayed home was dead -- thrown from a horse he'd ridden for three years ... scared by a rabbit, it jumped, and he lit on his head. So a man never knows.
Only if we didn't get out of this place we weren't going to be laying many plans.
Up there where I was, I began to give study to the country around.
I knew that getting the rest of those horses up to the top was an unlikely chance. In the first place, most of them were larger and heavier, and altogether harder to handle than the two we had got out. We might just possibly get one horse up, or even two. We would never make three or four.
So I cut that out of my thinking. Somehow we had to get out by going downhill, and that meant riding right through that bunch of Apaches ...
Now, wait a minute, I told myself. There to the right ... that's a slide of sand, but there's a mixed lot of growth in it There don't seem to be so many large rocks. I studied it as carefully as the light would allow.
If we could just ... I began to see how we, or some of us, might make it. If we stayed here none of us would make it through tomorrow.
I was going down there right now and face them with it. Only first there was that Apache off to the left. He had been coming up the hill for the last half-hour, creeping, crawling, out of sight more than two-thirds of the time, but always getting closer. Now when he moved again ...
Settling myself into the sand, I braced my elbow and taken a careful sight. Then I waited. His foot moved ... I waited.... Then he lunged into view and I squeezed off my shot. He never even twitched.
Chapter 14
When I came sliding into the hollow Spanish looked at me. 'Was I you, I'd still be travelin' ' he said. 'It don't look like we're goin' no place down here.'
'I've got an idea,' I said.
He searched my face. 'Well, you Sacketts have come up with some good ones. I hear tell whenever one of you boys are in trouble, the rest come a-runnin'. I'd like to see that now. I surely would.'
'They don't know where I'm at.'
John J. was stuffing a pipe. He looked haggard and honed down. I hadn't the heart to look at Rocca yet.
'What's this idea?' John J. asked. 'Right about now I'll buy anything.'
'Yonder,' I said, 'there's a corner of slope that's mostly free of big rocks.
There's some grass and some brush, but it's low stuff, and the sand looks as if ifs packed.'
'So?'
'Come nightfall we mount up. We stampede the horses down that slope into the Apache camp and we go
