boys. Before he figured the Comanche could escape with their prisoners.
There was a lot of dust coming from the north now, hung like a faint smudge against the blue of the midday sky. Far and beyond the pony herd.
Jonah figured some of the Comanche were already skedaddling. Retreating north. Fleeing as soon as the first cry had gone out that white men were coming. Damn, but that dust lay a long way off to the north. Far enough away that Hook prayed his boys were not already among those first to escape. To have that kind of head start.
“Good Lord!” exclaimed the man beside him.
Jonah’s attention was yanked back to the warriors ahead of them as they passed the half-mile point. The Comanche horsemen still moved forward at no more than a walk, the heads of their ponies bobbing, a’flutter with scalp locks lashed to hackamores and shields and the muzzles of rifles and just back of the foot-long iron points on their buffalo lances. It seemed the number of riders doubled, then doubled again of a sudden as more and more appeared on the near side of that dusty arroyo. As if sprung from the ground itself.
“Quiet in the ranks!” Coffee snarled as more of the Rangers uttered surprise at getting their first good view of the numbers they were now facing.
But they held, and not one turned back nor slowed his gait. Jonah’s heart swelled to be among these men who had helped bring him here to get his boys. These, the cold, cast-iron, double-riveted sort who now showed what they were made of, showed that they possessed the nerve few men are ever pressed to dig deep enough to find within themselves.
Then Lockhart was standing again in his stirrups, twisting about to give his command. “For Texas and our families!
His words were barely uttered, driven on across that line by the cold breeze when Company C hammered their horses into a gallop behind their captain: the ringing of bit and spur chains, the clinking of stirrup irons, of buckles against cinches, the tinkling of bridle snaps and linkings, the groans of saddle leather and the squeak of fenders and skirts, the rubbing of the tall boots … then the air above the thirty blistered with their shouts and yells and profane vows. Hook’s own throat ached with his
As if that were the very cue for their own action, the Comanche burst into a ragged charge, closing the last quarter of a mile left to that arroyo in the space of a half-dozen heartbeats. Only enough time for Jonah to fire one shot with the Winchester before he booted it and yanked out his first belt gun.
He fired it once, then a second time as they closed on the fluttering line of half-naked horsemen glistening copper and wild-eyed in the midday winter sun. Hook stuffed the two thick latigo reins between his browned teeth and slid the second pistol from its holster.
There was time to fire one shot with it and a third from his right hand before the two lines collided in a crash of dust and stinging, swinging, swirling confusion. To his right he watched one of the Rangers go down, hurled from his saddle at the end of a warrior’s lance. Jonah reined up savagely, his tired mount fighting the bit as he sawed about, firing at the warrior who had toppled the Ranger.
For the most part, the Comanche line had charged on through the Ranger flanks without great damage. Two more of Lockhart’s men had been spilled, but they had clambered back to their knees, continuing to fire at the backs of the Comanche as the great warrior front came about, screeching and singing out their death songs.
He looked for Two Sleep, found the Shoshone just this side of the arroyo, struggling with the frightened mules near Lockhart. Barking his orders in that loose-shouldered way of his in the dust, noise, and confusion, the captain’s mouth was no more than a black O in his shadowy face. No telling what he was ordering. But he was pointing, waving his pistol hand as his horse pranced high-headed, round and round in a tight circle.
Then Jonah saw what Lockhart was hollering about. More warriors were swarming out of the village now, plunging down into the arroyo, catching the Rangers between the two groups of painted horsemen.
Hook really didn’t need to hear the captain’s voice to sense what order was being given. He saw those who were closest to Lockhart whirl about and retreat, falling back on Two Sleep. Come the time to fort up.
There in some of the brush by the lip of that snow-crusted arroyo smeared darkly with a narrow trickle of runoff against its far side.
“Throw them down!” they were yelling at each other. “Throws ’em down!”
The first of the horses were falling as Hook slid his mount to a halt near Two Sleep and stuffed one of the pistols away. He snugged the animal’s muzzle down tight, struggling to shoulder the animal up beside Callicott’s horse already down and kicking its last. He fought him, fought the smell of blood and gunpowder strung in thick layers in the air. Stuffing the gun’s barrel in front of the ear, he pulled the trigger. The big roan yanked its head away, thrashing as its legs went to water beneath its great weight. He barely had time to leap out of the way as it crashed onto the thin, icy crust of snow and lay there at Hook’s feet heaving its head, as if willing itself to stand. Then, as its life seemed to ebb before his eyes, the roan lay almost still in a matter of moments, still except for the last wheezing cries coming from that heaving chest. In a shudder it was done.
“Awright, boys!” Niles Coffee was yelling. “In a matter of minutes there’s gonna be lead smacking around here, thicker’n smoked bees!”
Jonah dropped behind it as the new line of warriors came splashing across the narrow creek and flung sand from a couple hundred hooves in great golden cascades like roosters’ tails. To his left came one of the men running for the barricade on foot. Slade Rule slid behind the carcass of horse, his chin whiskers and the front of his dirty shirt smeared with blood. The man rolled onto his side, wheezing, trying to speak, his back and chest pocked with uncounted bullet holes.
“You made it,” Jonah said, kneeling over him. Gazing into the fear-drenched, teary eyes of that youngster beneath him. “You hang on for now—you’re gonna make it rest of the way.”
As Jonah tried to inch away, Rule snagged his sleeve, pulling him back, his mouth working mechanically, soundlessly against the great cacophony of battle snarling around them: bullets whining past or thudding into the bodies of their dying horses, the cursing of men, the bellows of Lockhart’s and Coffee’s and Deacon Johns’s orders, the cries of the wounded Rangers, the shrill death songs of the enemy, the wailing of the women across that arroyo … in the village where Jonah had intended to go.
“Good and kind, brother Jesus!” the deacon shrieked, half standing, firing with a pistol in each hand. “Heartily smite these heathen sinners!”
As he gazed back down at the Ranger, Rule’s eyes widened, then eased half-down the mast. His hand loosened on Jonah’s arm as the rest of his body slumped. Hook used two thumbs to ease the eyelids closed.
“What the hell are those bastards up to now?” June Callicott was hollering, half standing at the barricade of carcasses.
Hook found the greater number of warriors breaking off their attack after those first few grinding minutes. The Rangers, what was left of Company C inside that ring of carcasses, lay waiting among the sprawled and leg- flung horses for the next rush by the Comanche.
“Sonsabitches gonna work us down with their goddamned wheel,” Coffee reminded them.
Harley Pettis dropped his serious bulk to his knees. “They re-forming, Sarge?”
Coffee and the rest watched the horsemen pulling off. The second wave from the village joined up with the first, swirling about one another, working themselves up into a fighting frenzy, shrieking at one another, waving lances and shaking scalps.
“Looks like they’re ready to wear us down, boys!” Lockhart promised them.
But as the Rangers watched, breaking open the actions on their pistols to dump empty cartridges, jamming new ammunition into their heated weapons, the lords of the southern plains surprisingly did not form into that spinning, death-carrying wheel that would work itself around and around its prey, inch by inch, yard by yard, moment by moment grinding away, working ever closer to the white man until the enemy could be overrun in one great sweep of terror.
Instead, the Comanche drew off.
Stunned, slack-jawed in shock, Jonah stood, watching the horsemen drive their ponies into the arroyo, plunging across the sand and up the far side into the remnants of the village where all was of a sudden panic.
Above the screaming and wailing of the women, the barking of the dogs and the war cries of the men, above it all floated the first distant, but no less distinct, notes of a bugle.
