powder or ammunition in the wagons to explode, then he wondered what it
would matter once he and his men looked for survivors.
The Indians had struck sure and fast, then disappeared somewhere into
the plain, up the cliffs and rock. L'like the fog wisping away, they had
disappeared, and they had left the death and bloodshed behind them.
'Cimle carefully!' he advised his men.
'A half-dead Comanche is a mean one, remember?'
Riding behind him, Jon Red Feather was silent. Their horses snorted and
heaved as they slowly came down the last of the slope, trying to dig in
for solid footing. Then they hit the plain, and Jamie spurred his horse
to race around and encircle the wagons. There were only five of them.
Poor bastards never had a chance, he thought. He reckoned that someone
had been bringing some cattle north, since there was at least a score of
dead calves lying glass-eyed and bloody along with the human corpses.
There was definitely no one around. And there was not a single Indian
left behind, not a dead one, or a half-dead one, or any other kind of a
one.
He dismounted before the corpse of an old man. There was an arrow shaft
protruding from his back.
Jamie touched the man's shoulder, turning him over. He swallowed hard.
The man had been scalped, and a sloppy job had been done of it. Blood
poured down his forehead, still sticky, still warm.
It hadn't happened more than a half hour ago. If they had headed back
just a lousy thirty minutes earlier, they might have stopped this
carnage.
His men had dismounted too, he realized. At a command from Sergeant
Monahan, they were doing the same as he, searching through the downed
men for any survivors. Jamie shook his head, standing. Hell. He had just
been to see the local Comanche chief. Running River was the peace chief,
not the war chief, of the village, but the white men and Running River's
people had been doing just fine together for years now.
Jamie liked Running River. And though he had never kidded himself that
any Comanche couldn't be warlike when provoked, he couldn't begin to
imagine what in hell would have provoked an attack like this one. If the
Indians were hungry, they would have stolen the calves, not slaughtered
them.
Jon Red Feather was next to him, investigating the body. 'No Comanche
did this,' he said.
Jamie frowned at him.
'Then what do you think? A band of Cheyenne?
Maybe a wandering tribe of Minutes. We're too far south for it to be the
Sioux'--' I promise you, Lieutenant, no self-respecting Sioux would ever
do such a careless job. And the Comanche are warriors, too. They learn
from an early age how to lift the hair.'
'Then what?' Jamie demanded impatiently. His blood run cold as he
realized that Jon was insinuating that it hadn't been Indians who had
made this heinous attack. It wasn't possible, he told himself. No white
man could have killed and mutilated his own kind so savagely.
'Hey, Lieutenant!' Charlie Forbes called to him. Jamie swung around.
