of this game come dark.”
“G-game?”
“Damn straight, it’s a game to them,” Bass explained, then tongued a ball from among those he had nestled inside his cheek. As he pulled his ramrod free of the thimbles pinned beneath the octagonal barrel, he laid another greased linen patch over the muzzle and shoved the wiping stick down for another swab. Only when he had dragged out the patch fouled with oily, black powder residue did he spit the large round hall into his palm and place it in the yawning muzzle.
Baker glanced at the body nearby—a hapless trapper who had raised his head a little too far at the wrong moment and gotten an arrow straight through the eye socket for his carelessness. Penetrating to the brain, the shaft had brought a quick, merciful death. “This damn well don’t appear to be no game to me.”
“No two ways to it, Jim: this here’s big medicine to these brownskins,” Bass explained as he re-primed the pan. “White men ain’t been hurrooed by Sioux and Cheyenne much afore this, you see. Lookit their women up on that hill, singing and hollering their songs for ’em, telling their men to rub us out, all and everyone.”
“They can,” Baker groaned with resignation. “Damn well ’nough of ’em.”
“But they won’t,” Titus argued. “Ain’t their way to ride over us all at once. Sure, they could all come down here an’ tromp us under their hooves. They’d lose a few in rubbing us out, but they’d make quick work of it.”
“W-why ain’t they?”
“There ain’t no glory in that, Jim.” And Bass grinned, his yellowed teeth like pin acorns aglow in the early afternoon light. “Them are warriors. And the only way a warrior gets his honors is in war. This here’s war—a young buck’s whole reason for livin’. Wiping us out quick … why, that ain’t war. That’s just killing.”
Baker shook his head and rolled onto his knees again to make a rest for his left elbow on the ribs of his dead horse. “I don’t rightly care what sort of game them Injuns is having with us. I figger to do my share of killing.”
Bass rocked onto his rump and settled the long barrel atop the fist he made of his left hand, which rested on the horse’s broad, fly-crusted front shoulder. He was surprised to find that the woman had moved. Damn, if she wasn’t coming toward the bottom close enough that he might just have a chance to knock down Fraeb’s warrior princess.
Closer, closer … come on now, he heard himself think in his head as she and her unmounted courtiers inched down the slope, their shrill voices all the more clear now in the late afternoon air. If he held high and waited for that next gust of hot wind to die … he might just hit her. If not the warrior princess, then drop her horse. And if not her spotted pony, then one of them others what stood around her like she was gut-sucking royalty.
He let out half a breath and waited for the breeze to cease tugging on that thin braid of gray-brown hair that rested against his right cheek. Bass set the back trigger, then carefully slipped his fingertip over the front trigger, waiting—
When the rifle went off, he bolted onto his knees to have himself a look, not patient to wait for the pan flash and muzzle smoke to drift off on the wind.
Her brown-spotted pony rocked back onto its haunches, suddenly twisting its head and neck as the double handful of courtiers scattered—diving and scrambling off in every direction. As if plucked into the sky, the warrior princess herself sprang off the pony the moment its forelegs pawed in the air a heartbeat, then careened onto its side.
A few of those young men and women immediately surrounded the princess and started dragging her up the slope, away from the fighting, out of range of the white man’s far-reaching weapons.
Scratch watched her reluctantly back away, amused at how she continued to stare over her shoulder as she was yanked up that hillside, her eyes transfixed on the tiny corral where the trappers were holding out. Perhaps she even wondered just which one of the cursed whiteskins had killed her beautiful pony. Likely heaping her vilest curses on the man who had gone and soured her powerful medicine that she had been using to spur the naked horsemen to perform their death-defying charges.
“And well you should do your share of the damned killing, Jim Baker,” Bass replied to the redhead as he rocked backward and dragged the long barrel off the horse’s front shoulder.
Scratch swatted at a dozen flies hovering around his sweaty face and tugged the stopper from his powderhorn between his teeth. “Because killin’ ever’ last one of these bastards we can drop afore sundown comes is the only way this bunch of half-dead hide hunters is gonna slip outta here when it gets slap dark.”
*
†
Copyright © 1996 by Terry C. Johnston.
Map design by Jeffrey Ward.
