best be making tracks—then we best be on our way.”
“Get the horses!” Elbridge hollered as he wheeled about, sweeping up a rein.
“Put them Blackfoot ponies out in front of us and keep ’em going,” Jack ordered. “No matter what, keep them ponies going.”
Hatcher was the next up after throwing his saddle onto a fresh mount. He had Fish and Wood heft Bass up behind him.
“Now, get me one of them picket ropes,” Jack said. “Wrap it round us both so ye can tie him to me.”
“D-do me up tight, fellas,” Bass demanded of them, knowing the chances were good that he would grow too weak to hold on to Hatcher by himself. “I don’t wanna fall off so them Blackfoot niggers get me.”
They made a half-dozen loops around the two men, then knotted the ends in front of Hatcher so he could free himself or Bass if the need arose.
“Get a leg up, boys!” Jack cried. “Move them ponies out!”
Wide-eyed, Solomon said, “Only one way out of this here canyon, Jack.”
“We’ll run right into them niggers waiting for the rest to come up!” Caleb shrieked.
“That’s just what I figger Jack wants to do,” Solomon shouted.
Hatcher nudged his heels into the horse. “Right, the first whack! Do our best to run right on over ’em on our way out! Hep! Hep-ha!”
As the horse’s powerful flanks surged beneath him, Bass locked his fingers around the loops of rope imprisoning Hatcher’s chest. Ahead of them the others were yelling and screaming, driving the horses before them, sure to scare the billy-be-hell out of the half-dozen or so Blackfoot waiting at the mouth of the canyon.
“You really gonna ride right into ’em?” Scratch asked against the back of Hatcher’s neck.
“Damn right we are!” he said, turning his head slightly. “A goddamned sit-up, straight-on ride-through!”
Cautiously, Bass loosened the hold he had with his right hand and slid it between himself and Hatcher until he filled his hand with the butt of the flintlock pistol.
“Hold tight, son!” Jack warned. “We’re about to do-si-do!”
What few war cries the Blackfoot raised were swiftly drowned out by the hammer of hooves on the flaky hardpan of the earth’s crust as the horses and trappers galloped into the open, heading right for their enemy who waited among the sage and buckbrush in the day’s new light. Hatcher’s men shouted back with their own bravado, hurtling through the few who had dared to follow them.
A lone gunshot. Bass figured it had to be one of the boys. The Blackfoot simply didn’t have that many weapons, and chances were good they wouldn’t dare try to shoot their weapons from horseback anyway. What Jack had said was true: Indians simply weren’t much in the way of marksmanship.
“Take a lookee there, Scratch!” Hatcher called.
He turned his head, immediately catching sight of the warrior racing toward them at an angle—putting himself on a collision course not that far ahead. In one hand the Blackfoot held the elk-antler quirt he used to whip the pony’s rear flank. And in the hand that clutched the pony’s rein, the warrior also held a long wooden club from, the end of which protruded a long, wide knife blade. Two feathers streamed back from his long, unfettered hair while the pony raced around and over the stunted sagebrush.
“Maybe I should ride right into him?” Jack mused.
“You do, you’ll knock me off,” Scratch replied.
“I’ll wager that’s what he’s fixin’ to do.”
All the jarring, jolting, side-to-side hammering inflicted on his wound was about to overwhelm Bass. For a moment he bit down on his lower lip again, then said, “You pull up—I’ll shoot the son of a bitch.”
“I ain’t stoppin’ for nothing! Not when I got a head of steam behind me!”
It was like a nausea that threatened to surge up his gullet, a blackness doing its best to put an end to the torment in his side. And out of the shrill ringing in his ears, Bass heard the other pony. Opening his eyes, he struggled to focus: discovering the warrior racing just behind them, just over his right shoulder.
“Hatcher!”
“I know, goddammit!”
Bass watched the Blackfoot switch the reins into his free hand, beginning to swing his left arm back. “Can you shoot him, Jack!”
“It’s all I can do to keep us on top of this damned horse!”
With a sudden swerving lurch, the warrior brought his pony sharply to the left as he swung the long club forward. Both Hatcher and Bass ducked out of the way as the knife blade hissed past their heads—that sudden shift of weight causing the horse below them to stumble and sidestep at full stride. Both trappers barely held on as the animal dodged through the sagebrush: Hatcher locked on to the saddle, Titus locked on to him.
Bass cried, “Son of a bitch’s coming back for another go!”
“He’ll keep it up till he gets one of us,” Hatcher growled, “or he drops us both!”
“Can you ram your horse into him?”
“S’pose I can,” Jack admitted grittily. “But it might spill us!”
“He comes close enough—just give ’im the idea you’re gonna.”
For the next few moments Bass was able to watch the look of grim determination on the warrior’s face as the Blackfoot inched his animal closer and closer to the white man’s horse. He saw how the man’s hair was cut with long bangs that tossed in the wind, the hair on the top of his head tied up with a few feathers, like a bold challenge to try taking that topknot. And he saw how those black-cherry eyes glittered with hate.
Titus wondered how anyone could ever possess such hate like that for someone he didn’t know. Besides the horses—why would these warriors carry such rage for the white men? After all this time, were they still licking their wounds after being driven off by the Shoshone last spring? To Scratch’s way of thinking, even that could not account for the unadulterated hatred and contempt he read in the Blackfoot’s eyes as the warrior drew closer and closer.
“Now!” Bass screamed.
Hatcher was right on the money, yanking hard on the rein. Their horse twisted suddenly, just as Jack yanked back to the left to correct it. That sudden lunge did the trick: enough to make the warrior pull off.
And when the Indian realized what the white men had done, even more rage clouded his face.
“I gotta get rid of the son of a bitch,” Jack grumbled.
“This horse ain’t gonna last long under us both,” Bass said into the back of Hatcher’s neck, feeling himself breaking into a fevered sweat. “Maybe we get a chance, you get us stopped, tie me on another horse. This’un can’t carry us much—”
“Shuddup! I ain’t about to trust ye to make it on yer own.”
Off to the right, the warrior was coming at them again as they reached more open ground, the land falling away gently toward the distant river valley, that beckoning vale rushing at them with its wide border of green disclosing its meandering course to these battle-weary travelers.
“Then gimme a chance to shoot him,” Bass demanded.
“How in the devil’s eggs are ye gonna shoot ’im?” Hatcher snorted, getting a new grip on the horse’s rein. “Ye can barely hang on to me as it is, child!”
“J-just … g-get him on the other side of us.”
“Don’t let go of me, Bass!”
“I ain’t, Jack,” he vowed weakly. “Just get him on our left. Cross over, hard and sharp.”
“An’ put him on our left,” Jack repeated. “If what ye got in mind don’t work—that nigger likely to take off the top of yer head with that club on his next go-by.”
“You just keep us both on this here horse—I’ll do the rest, Hatcher.”
Whooping and wagging his head in astonishment, Jack kept looking over his right shoulder as the Blackfoot urged his pony closer and closer to their horse, and when he figured the warrior was close enough, Hatcher yanked hard to the right.
But the Blackfoot figured this was another feint and didn’t go for the bait. Instead, he spurred forward, the nose of his animal nearly crashing into the rear flank of the trappers’ horse as it shifted sides. As the startled enemy straightened himself on his war pony, Bass found that Hatcher had done it. The warrior was now inching up on them from their left.
Closer.
