around his knees as if merely resting there, half in a squat. He cocked back with a foot, knocking the Apache free, and leaped aside. Spooked by those eyes that had locked on to his for that moment in time, eyes that were already dead even in that instant.
His right hand wet with drying blood, he shoved the tomahawk into his left, snatching his pistol from his belt. He was dragging the hammer back to full-cock as the last screaming Apache vaulted over the top of the rock downstream suddenly. The warrior lunged forward, knocking Scratch’s right hand out of the way the instant the pistol came up, swinging his own brown hand out wide in a savage arc that showed a glint of steel.
Collapsing back suddenly, Bass sensed the burn of the blade as it raked past his belly. Sensed that sudden cold of the dawn air against the wound, that seep of icy warmth as the blood beaded and oozed.
Already the warrior was beginning a second sweep, coming from Bass’s right this time.
Yanking the pistol back, Titus suddenly shoved the right hand upward, flinging the Indian’s wrist aside as he brought the short barrel’s muzzle under the brown chin and pulled the trigger.
With the Apache’s knife hand crookedly imprisoned beneath the man’s chin, the top of the warrior’s head exploded in a glittering spray of crimson as the first orange rays of light seeped over the edge of the gray desert.
Gripping the tomahawk handle all the tighter in his left hand as he spun back toward the river, Titus stared over the low boulders, ready for the rest.
Everything was quiet but for the murmuring river.
And McAfferty’s raspy breathing.
Nothing moved. Nothing but the light on the water as the ribbon’s surface lost its silvery glitter in those moments … became a river once more. Brush and rocks no longer shadows.
And along the banks, there lay those brown bodies half-submerged in the shallow water, one of the warriors bobbing up to the foot of the waist-high boulders, slowly turning in the gentle current until the Apache stared at the dawn sky with glazed eyes, a great dark smear on his chest as he bobbed to the side, wedged in the eddy that lapped against the rock.
So quiet suddenly, so quiet that he thought he could hear the water lapping against the dead man’s body.
“That … that all of ’em?” Asa croaked.
Bass finally turned and glanced at his partner before his eyes studied the rock ledge behind them. He sighed, “Looks to be. Any more of ’em—they’d be all over us now.”
Scratch knelt, so weary, he wasn’t sure he would ever stand again.
McAfferty watched Titus settle. “You’re cut.”
“Could be worse,” he said, peering down at the slash that yelped in pain with every brush of the dawn breeze.
“Best see to it soon as you can.”
“Let’s just damn well get these guns reloaded,” Bass growled, not wanting to look again at that torn flesh.
“You do that, then you take the scalps.”
Wagging his head, Titus quietly said, “Leave the goddamned scalps.”
“We gonna take the scalps,” McAfferty prompted wearily, rising to his knees. “They’re ours now.”
“I don’t give a damn,” Scratch replied. “I don’t ever figger to be back here—”
“You don’t take your scalps,” McAfferty blurted out as he snatched hold of the front of Bass’s half-damp war shirt, “the ghosts come back for you one day.”
“Ghosts?”
His icy blue eyes squinted half-closed as they slowly volved down to stare at the half-naked bodies there among them in the rocks. “You don’t take this hair—the ghosts come back for you.”
With a snort Bass shook his head. “Of all the softheaded, schoolchild—”
McAfferty jerked down on Scratch’s shirt, shutting him up. “You listen,” he rasped, his dark eyes filled with terror. “Only one scalp I never took, Mr. Bass. Only one. The hair of a Ree medicine man.”
“Hatcher told me …” and then his voice trailed off as he watched how pale his partner’s face became.
Asa’s blue eyes had gone to slate as they flicked left and right, as if he were expecting to catch something more hurtling at them out of the gray of dawn’s light. “Should’a took the hair of that’un … but I didn’t. And now the old bastard’s ghost is gonna come for me.”
Scratch swallowed hard. “You don’t believe—”
“One day he’ll come for me.”
19
They had waited out that short autumn day there beside the river, watching for more Apache.
Better to fight them here, Bass thought, than have them catch you out there on the desert. Here—where a man at least had water, and a few rocks around him, along with a little shade slanting down off the rocky bluff once the sun began its dip into the last quarter of the sky.
By the time Bass turned to move back toward the animals so he could retrieve some bear grease to smear on his tender belly wound, he sidestepped through the rocks to watch one of McAfferty’s packhorses go down. Its knees buckled as the animal snorted, kneeling into the sand clumsily. Arrows bristled from its neck and front flanks. More shafts quivered from the other animals, their packs, and saddles.
He quickly counted—finding one of them missing.
Dropping to one knee, Scratch peered under Hannah’s legs, finding his saddle mount already down, on its side and unmoving—more than a dozen arrows sticking from its bloody ribs and belly, all of them fired from above where the three warriors had crawled along that narrow shelf.
With a groan he let his head sag between his shoulders.
Right then the two of them had tougher problems than Asa’s goddamned ghost.
For a while Titus brooded on just what they could do with all the plunder and supplies without adding to the burden the animals were already carrying. To put any more weight on Hannah and the last of McAfferty’s horses was unthinkable—not with the heat and the desert and all that distance still to go before they would reach Taos.
Another option would be for him to walk those hundreds of miles, wearing out one pair after another of his moccasins. But even in the cool of that desert morning, Titus doubted he could ever accomplish that journey on foot.
Their only choice lay in separating wheat from chaff: packing only what was absolutely necessary on Hannah’s back, caching the rest here beside this river—as if they would one day return to reclaim what they would abandon.
Bass knew he never would.
“I ain’t digging no hole for it,” he growled at McAfferty. “Let the Apache have it all.”
Once the sun rose high enough to warm the air, Scratch settled back against the side of the bluff to wait out the rest of the morning. He simply didn’t have enough strength left to work any longer in the immobilizing heat. By midafternoon, when the sun’s direct rays slid behind the sandstone butte—bestowing a little shade upon their side of the hill—the dead horses had already begun to bloat. Now and then expanding gases whimpered and hissed from the arrow wounds and anuses.
In the cool of twilight, after an entire day with no further sign of more Apache, Bass felt confident enough to stand and move around in the dimming light. Managing to free his saddle from the carcass of the dead mount, he propped it atop the boulders while he went to work pulling the supply packs from the dead packhorse. After removing the last of the packs from Hannah and McAfferty’s second horse, Titus began to tediously go through all that they possessed—setting aside what was essential. That done, he put everything else in two stacks: what they would readily put to use, and what was more luxury than necessity. This last pile they would leave here in the
