Tightening his fingers around the knife handle, Bass brought the blade down now, striking savagely, slashing the warrior across the jaw, down the great muscles of his neck, across his windpipe.
Blood splattered over him as the warrior gasped his last, noisy breath, jerking back in black-eyed shock, yanking the empty hand from Bass’s neck to his own to vainly attempt to stop the spurts of bright blood.
Then his dark eyes widened all the more in sudden surprise, slowly looking down at the white man below him as Titus drove the knife home—right into the warrior’s belly … yanking, jerking, working it crudely from right to left, opening the cavity up, blood and gore spilling out as Bass kicked himself free of the dying man.
“Eeegod!” Hatcher gushed hoarsely. “You kill’t that red-belly!”
“Him … or me,” he gushed, hauling in snatches of breath.
“C’mon!” Fish yelled, trying his best to get himself under one of Hatcher’s arms.
Bass slipped under the other, and together they raised Jack off the ground as he cried out in pain. Whirling clumsily, they dragged Hatcher toward the trees where Elbridge Gray emerged with a rifle in each hand.
“Get down!” Gray ordered.
Thinking that was a stupid thing for any man to tell him when he and Fish had Hatcher suspended between them, Bass glanced over his shoulder—finding a half-dozen horsemen coming for them at a hard gallop.
“Down!” Elbridge screamed again.
Fish was the first to obey, pitching forward, dragging Hatcher and Bass with him as Simms stepped out of the trees with a rifle in one hand, a stubby, short-barreled weapon in the other.
But Gray didn’t wait on Bass to get all the way down. As soon as Scratch collapsed to his knees, Elbridge fired the shot that struck the closest warrior. His pony pitched sideways into another horse. Now Simms brought the long, heavy rifle up in his right hand, pulling the trigger as it reached the top of its arc.
Like a steam piston he let the right arm sink as he brought up that short weapon and fired it. A wide spray of orange light lit the shadows as four ponies screeched in pain and dismay, twisting and rearing, their warriors fighting for control as the animals pitched their riders off this way and that.
“Get moving!” Simms bellowed as he stuffed that strange short weapon under his right arm and pulled a pistol from his belt.
“Git on! See Hatcher gets back to camp!” Gray ordered. “We gotta make a stand there.”
Just as Bass was clambering to his feet, feeling naked without a weapon, Jack suddenly had hold of the front of Scratch’s bloody shirt, pulling himself up so he could peer into Titus’s face. “’Member them rocks?”
“Rocks?”
Hatcher had to be crazy with pain to be talking about rocks.
Jack struggled to hold on to Titus’s shirt. Pain had turned his face into a gray, pasty mask of agony. “Where I come found you at sundown, you idjit!”
“Rocks—yeah,” he said, remembering.
“Take us there—”
Bass interrupted, “We won’t ever make it.”
For a moment Hatcher’s eyes closed slowly as if he were weakening, then opened again, a thin veil of teary pain clouding them. “We don’t get to them rocks, goddammit … we won’t none of us make it.”
For an instant more Bass gazed deeply into Hatcher’s red-rimmed eyes—when he realized just how fight Jack was at that moment.
“Follow me!” Titus ordered as he dragged his gaze from Hatcher and raked it across Solomon Fish.
Jack croaked, “Tell … tell ’em—”
Bass stood, yanking the tall Hatcher up on his shoulder as Fish stood beneath the other arm to prop himself under Jack.
Titus hollered, “Jack says we drop back to the rocks!”
“No!” Wood shouted, emerging from the trees, one of his arms hanging bloody, useless, at his side. “We make our stand in camp!”
“Get your pouches!” Simms hollered, wheeling away from Caleb. “We’re going to the rocks with Hatcher!”
They pushed past Wood in a rush as Caleb swore at them, but when Bass twisted his head to look over his shoulder, he found the trapper right behind them. While Fish and Bass dragged Hatcher on through the center of their camp, the rest scattered here and there to scoop up weapons and shooting pouches. Behind them the warriors were clearly working up for another rush.
“They coming again!” Jack whimpered in pain. “B-be ready!”
“We ain’t gonna make it,” Wood bellowed.
“C’mon!” Bass cried to those behind him now as they reached the timber on the far side of camp. “It ain’t that far!”
“Too … too far!” Jack suddenly said.
At that moment he looked down at Hatcher. It seemed that as he watched, all the starch went right out of the man. His face turned a doughy gray, eyes sunken into his skull.
“No, goddammit!” Bass shouted at Jack, yanking Hatcher up by the collar of his buckskin shirt, shaking him for good measure. “We’re gonna make it! Just like you said: we’re gonna make it to the rocks!”
“L-leave me—”
Gray’s eyes were wide with worry as he looked at Hatcher, then turned to flick a look behind them. “How far?”
“Too far,” Hatcher answered, sinking low between the two who propped him upright.
“It ain’t too far!” Bass shouted. “C’mon!”
Across those last two hundred yards … then only a hundred, they could hear them coming. Yelping and crying out in dismay at the death of their companions—screeching louder still when they burst into the white man’s camp, tearing through it looking for the white man’s guns. Perhaps knowing already where the cornered quarry was headed. Rushing on out of that camp to herd the trappers as they would herd deer.
The growing noise of their coming only served to bristle the hair on the back of Scratch’s neck. That, and to drive him onward with Hatcher on his shoulder. Bass was beginning to gasp for breath, his belly sickening with the effort, his head dizzying from lack of air when the boulders leaped into view ahead. Off to the right.
From there they might have a chance.
“I see ’em!” Kinkead bawled.
The forest behind them seemed to erupt with the cries of warriors as they rushed after their prey, hearing that shrill announcement from the pursued.
Simms was the first to climb up the outside shell of rocks, sliding down into the wide crevice that would take them into the center of the natural fortress. Setting his weapons aside, he reached down to pull Rowland and Kinkead in; then all three turned to helped Fish and Bass shove Hatcher up the five-foot wall of granite like a child’s rag doll. With Jack propped up against the rocks, the others handed in their weapons and vaulted up themselves— just as the warriors exploded from the trees.
There were fewer of them now than there had been. But there wasn’t any man counting. Hell, Bass thought, when you’re jumped by that many, dropping a few from their ponies don’t make all that much of a dent in the odds.
But the warriors stopped dead in their tracks, some circling left and some going right, while most of them stayed right there in the center—staring at the rock fortress. Kneeling, a few snapped off some arrows at the trappers hunkering down in the rocks. The stone tips clattered against the boulders, spun crazily in among the trappers. Noisily yelling, the Indians screeched war cries and bloody oaths.
“What’re they?” Scratch asked, taking his rifle from Rowland.
“Cain’t rightly say,” Wood replied, wagging his head and shoving a ball down his barrel.
“Hell,” Jack coughed below them at the bottom of the crevice. “We damn well know what them sumbitches are.”
“Hatcher’s right,” Gray agreed as he slid up between Kinkead and Bass. “Blackfoots.”
“Blackfeets,” Bass repeated, finally slipping the blue scarf from his belt and knotting it around his head once more.
