into his mount, racing into the open with that club held high overhead, his mouth o-o-ing with some primal death cry as he lunged toward his pale-skinned enemy.
Starting to leap to the right, Bass feinted and instantly whirled to the left at the last moment instead, causing the warrior to swing his club off balance. It was all the man could do to stay on his pony’s back as he galloped by.
Now he had both time and distance to his advantage.
Rising immediately to burst into a sprint, Scratch raced headlong for the rifle as he heard the cries of not one, but both, of the last two horsemen. He dared not look over his shoulder, afraid to find the bowman from the far bank suddenly within arm’s length.
Onto his soggy knees he skidded, snatching at the rifle as he slid against the brush, yanking back the hammer to full-cock. Setting the rearmost of the two triggers, he started his turn. Wheeling about with the weapon, Bass rose on one knee and rammed the buttstock back into his shoulder, jamming his bare finger into the front of the trigger guard.
Finding that enraged horseman setting his pony in motion again after a knee-grinding turn, kicking the pony savagely as he cried out in rage, swinging his fearsome weapon into the coming light of day … Bass held.
Held.
Held a little longer as he let the front blade rise while the Blackfoot lunged closer. Both warrior and pony wide-eyed, the man’s mouth a large black hole, that horse’s nostrils shooting jets of steam into the cold of the early-spring morning.
Held—
With a roar the rifle erupted.
The ball struck the Blackfoot with such force that it jerked the man back to the rear flanks of the pony, where he sat for a moment as if unfazed; then with the next bounce the body pitched on backward in a graceful somersault to land on its belly. Unmoving, as still as winter grass.
When Titus yanked at the knot on the pouch strap, the shooting bag dropped to his hip as he watched the bowman’s horse leap onto the bank no more than twenty yards away. Digging a hand into the bottom of the bag, he pulled out three balls, stuffing them into his mouth before he jammed the powder-horn stopper between his teeth and pulled it free.
With the horn’s narrow end against the muzzle, he poured some powder down the barrel as the warrior neared, swinging up his bow at the end of his outstretched arm.
Pressing his lips against the rifle’s muzzle, Bass spat a single ball down the barrel at the same moment he yanked the ramrod from its brass thimbles along the underside of the forestock.
No time to prime the son of a bitch.
Without any conscious thought, acting only on animal instinct, Scratch reversed the rifle, gripping both hands around the end of the barrel, starting its swing into the air as the bowman leaned off his pony, smacking that short elk-horn bow against the white man’s temple at the very moment Titus planted the rifle butt in the horseman’s belly.
Stunned into seeing hot, red stars, Scratch pitched to his knees—part of him yelling out to the rest … ordering him to move, to get off his knees, to forget the nausea and the shower of lights and get himself out of danger.
Stumbling up onto one knee, he wobbled to the side and fell over, his head in as much pain as the day he had been scalped by the Arapaho. Feeling as heavy as his trap-sack, Titus feared he wouldn’t get his head off the ground before the warrior got to his feet.
Less than twenty feet away the Blackfoot rolled to a stop against a clump of brush, lunged over onto his knees where he shook his head, then seemed to draw a sudden bead on the white man still stretched upon the frosty ground.
The moment the warrior started forward, the Indian drew a huge double-bladed knife from a long beaver- tailed scabbard at his hip.
Like a puff of winter breathsmoke suddenly gone with a gust of wind, Bass squeezed his eyes shut, then dragged them open reluctantly. Leaning onto his left knee and arm, he struggled to rise, reaching at the back of his belt for the camp ax.
Then remembered it was at water’s edge by his trap sack.
Tomahawk gone. And the knife scabbard empty.
He rose to his full height, wobbled shakily there on the balls of his feet, wondering how much longer his dizzy head would let him focus on the charging warrior, setting himself for the coming impact … his eyes transfixed on that huge, double-edged dagger clutched in the Blackfoot’s hand.
In that last moment Titus glanced at the painted face, the lower half completely black from just below the eyes—that horizontal line disappearing back at both ears, this greasy black smeared over the chin and down the jawline in a ragged semicircle that arced from the bottom of one ear to the bottom of the other…. Then Titus tried hard to fix his wavering, watery eyes on the dagger as his knees buckled, going soft as freshly boiled Kentucky sour mash.
Likely what saved him.
So surprising the warrior that the Blackfoot stumbled, lunging forward with his left arm straightened before him—seizing the white man’s capote in that hand as Bass collapsed backward, yanking the Indian over him in an ungainly somersault.
By the time Titus had rolled onto his hip and rocked up to his feet, the warrior had braced himself on the ground and lashed out with a leg, whipping it against Bass’s ankles—knocking them out from under him. As Titus spilled onto his back, he watched the Blackfoot blotting out a piece of the sky as soon as the Indian leaped for him.
With both hands Scratch locked a grip around the brown wrist that clutched the handle of that huge dagger, its dark wood decorated with the tiny heads of more than a hundred brass nails. Which meant the warrior was free to squeeze down on the white man’s throat with his left hand.
For those next few heartbeats that Bass figured might be his last, he stared up at the contorted face just inches away—the eyes squinted and glaring into his there above that shelf of black war paint. As the warrior grunted, struggling to force the wide double-edged blade into his enemy with one hand, straining to crush the white man’s windpipe with the other—Titus smelled the dried meat on the Indian’s hot, stinking breath.
As much as he tried to breathe, he couldn’t drag any air past that claw closed around his throat. How his lungs began to burn while the black of night slowly seeped down across his eyes. Not much left of the strength needed to hold off that knife.
He had moments left, only heartbeats before he became nothing more than a scalp on some goddamned Blackfoot’s war club or bridle and a coup story told around a fire. Wouldn’t that take the circle? When this red son of a bitch yanked off his fur cap and the bandanna, going to scalp him—finding he’d already lost some hair!
“The last joke’s on you,” he growled, none of those words understandable from that pinched, raspy throat.
But as he said them, he shifted his left hand to dig at the brown fingers—prying. With the other he squeezed down on the wrist, twisting. So painfully slow, the hand that held that dagger began to turn the more Bass twisted and pried. He watched the Blackfoot’s eyes shift suddenly, staring down at his own hand now.
That pain in his throat …
Not knowing how many more breaths he could sacrifice before he had no fight left, Scratch suddenly released the enemy’s fingers and seized a handful of the hair at the back of the Blackfoot’s head in his left hand, pulling with all he had to the side. When the warrior yanked away, Bass was there to drive his forehead up savagely into the warrior’s blackened chin.
With that sharp pain the Indian yanked to the side, away from Bass’s grip, trying to free his hair—just as the dagger twisted up in an agonizingly slow half circle, the tip of the blade now pointed toward that chin where a jagged slash of the black war paint had smeared off on the trapper’s forehead.
He saw the black curtain oozing down over his mind, over his failing strength, over all that he remembered and knew that he ever was … then yanked once more on the enemy’s hair—savagely jerking the head straight back.
At the very instant the warrior resisted, tugging his head forward against the white man’s painful pull, Scratch had the sharp point of the dagger positioned right below the chin … when it dropped violently.
