than any man he knew—to act before others had time to react.
The menacing growl rumbled from the animal’s throat as it rocked farther back on its legs, as if ready to spring with its teeth exposed, staring up at its master now in anger, robbed of not just one, but both the bones.
“You’d love to gnaw on my flesh, wouldn’t you, Alexander?” he said, reaching out to pat the top of the great head.
The hound snapped at the hand. And as quickly that huge, manicured hand batted the dog’s head aside with a ringing snap. It lay whimpering a moment, sprawled in the grass, then picked itself up, a totally different being from what it had been a moment before: now contrite and pleading for its master’s beneficence. Usher stroked its neck, presenting the hound the bone.
“Go on now, Alexander. There are more where that came from.”
Jubilee straightened and held his hands out before him. George hurried up, a china bowl cradled between his ebony paws like a pale offering of a full moon in the blackness of the firmament, a crisp hand towel draped over one forearm. Usher washed hands and face, dabbed them dry, then dropped the towel over the Negro’s shoulder.
“Time I should awake the woman,” he told no one in particular, as those who had gathered began to move off of their own accord, back to the breaking of camp, the loading of the wagons, and the saddling of horses brought in from the good grass down by the river where they had been hobbled of last night.
Yes, he thought. How he loved gazing upon her skin in the morning, slowly disrobing her, taking her hands and placing them around his own flesh to arouse himself, bring himself to readiness. At long last across these years, he had finally brought her flesh back to a pristine, milky purity by keeping her out of the sun—and the horrendous toll that it took on a woman’s beauty, aging her before her time. Usher had instead stopped the clock, allowing the woman only the shade of a tree, the depths of the shadowy ambulance, or the protection of their oiled tent. With such vigilant protection, she would stay every bit as beautiful as this, for many a year to come.
Her eyes found his as he came in and closed the flaps behind him. Then those same blue eyes crawled to and held the top of the tent. And did not move as he unbuttoned his britches, took her hands, and wrapped the unwilling fingers about his swelling flesh.
Jubilee eagerly set about slowly pulling apart the folds of her sleeping gown, aroused at the pure, unsullied beauty of her.
Truly, this was one woman worthy of him—worthy enough to be the wife of the new Prophet of Zion.
Bull was now among them, deep in their throbbing midst, a part of that massive flow like a red tide, a crimson coursing of a heartbeat destined to pound all life right out of the half-a-hundred. The leaders swept close to the sandbar, forcing their wild-eyed cayuses into the river itself, circling north of the island as they dropped to the off side of their ponies, there to hang by nothing more than a heel and wrist clutched in the matted, beribboned manes, from first to last of them firing, yelling, lobbing hissing arrows among what frightened, milling horses the white men had not already killed themselves.
The scene had almost a surreal effect on the young Shahiyena: this great flood of warriors washing over the river valley. Never before had he been part of something so overwhelming, so savage, so undeniable. It not only gave his heart strength for the coming fight, but gave his spirit rebirth for the days to come when he would hunt the one he sought more than any other.
The hundreds had appeared out of the west as if out of nowhere, as if the ground itself sprouted the naked horsemen. Suddenly blooming out of the thickets, up from the streambed itself, they magically appeared at the top of every hill, in every direction as they swarmed toward the helpless whites, every mouth screeching its own irreverent death songs.
There had been no sound when first he had drawn off and stopped to look back on the white men reaching the island—then nothing more than the echo of hammering hooves. But with his next heartbeat, the riverbed flooded with screeching, painted horsemen sweeping past the island. High-Backed Bull had actually felt the breast of the earth tremble beneath his pony’s legs before he urged the animal into that great cavalcade two thousand hooves strong.
Yipping like coyotes out on a bloody spree, waving blankets, firing their bows and rifles, the whole heavy procession became a blurred parade of colors running out in water-strewn streamers of new light seeping into the valley of the Plum River.
As Bull brought his pony about and in a wide sweep to the west once more, to make a second pass along the north end of the island, he caught a glimpse of three of the whites who had not joined the rest among the thrashing carcasses of their horses on the sandbar. While most hurled themselves down in the tall grass and swamp willow, hiding behind the plum brush and the first of the dying horses, there were three who hung back, hugging those murky shadows beneath the low, overhanging riverbank. From there the trio could not be seen by the onrushing warriors until it was too late and the horsemen were directly in the teeth of the white man’s guns.
In the first charge the three had done their greatest damage. As the great red wave split at the western end of the sandbar, the horsemen were forced to veer sharply to drop off the low bank into the dry part of the riverbed. Now a handful of the Shahiyena and Brule already lay in the sand. More fell in their second charge as the three rifles exploded in the face of the red man’s attack, forcing its way down the bank into the very gut of the river itself.
Bull reined up and watched a moment, horrified, three more heartbeats. Brown-skinned warriors crawled, wounded and bleeding, dragging themselves up the dry wash into the willow and plum brush, into hiding. Those that were spotted by the white men were shot where they crawled.
He had to let others know. Roman Nose … Pawnee Killer, anyone. Yet Bull reined up, knowing he alone was called upon to drive the three from their burrow.
His medicine alone had shown him where the trio hid, firing their rifles into the face of each renewed charge. His medicine alone had chosen him to wrench the badger from its hole.
As he grappled with what his plan would be, the mounted chargers pulled off, followed by a half-dozen riderless ponies still heaving at a gallop in the chase. High-Backed Bull cursed: the white men had broken their concerted charge. And for that failure dead and wounded warriors lay less than the length of two arms from the sandbar. The half-a-hundred now forced the horsemen back to their old way of fighting: the circle. The spinning, whirling wheel that pitted each warrior, solitary and alone with his own medicine, against those hated white men hunkered down on the grassy island behind the bloody carcasses of their big American horses and mules.
Behind the leg-flung carcasses the enemy scraped at the sand, clawing up chunks of grass and knotted roots, beginning to scrape their way down.
While a new charge formed itself.
“Stop!” Bull warned, knowing as he did how senseless was his warning.
Instead he could only watch helplessly the blur that wound itself up like the spinning of a dust devil whipping mindlessly across the sun-blistered prairie. Down the horsemen tore into the glittering riverbed, beating their way past the north shore of the island, across the riverbed to leap their ponies onto the south bank, back up the bank in a grand sweep, and into the riverbed once again in a whirl of color and numbing noise. From beneath their snorting ponies’ necks they fired arrows, but it was mostly rifle and pistol fire, each horseman dropping from the far side of his little pony at the critical moment approaching the end of the sandbar.
While the white man’s repeaters kept up a steady racket, unshod hooves reverberated against the dry riverbed in a thunder of terror and noise, the screeching of the horsemen matched only by the cries of their wounded ponies as the animals reared, fought, and pitched sideways as each successive bullet struck.
And on the island, those mad curses muddled with grunts of angry, scared men, scrambling and scratching at the sand—with every precious second digging lower and lower still, like frightened burrow mice as the hawk swoops overhead, claws outstretched.
Still he recognized the squeal of the last of the frightened animals as it struggled, reared, and lunged back to fall on its handler—flinging up cascades of golden, gritty, blinding sand as it went down. Here and there the island
