Whatever it was had attracted him, he was no longer so sure he was right as he knelt over the clump now, the odor growing stronger than ever. Giving it a good sniff, Bass assured himself he was right about the smell, but remained uncertain what the clump was. He poked a finger at it, then a second time to confirm it.
Cloth—a pile of some greasy cloth. Soaked in blood. It was plain from the looks of the area right around the clump of bloody rags that someone had lain here. With the flat of his bare palm he found the snowy ground as cold as the air.
He heard the saddle horse snort quietly behind him, a sound that yanked him back to the urgency of the moment.
Rising, Scratch hurried back to Workman and the soldiers.
“What’d you find?”
“They been here,” Bass disclosed. “I s’pect this is where they waited out the night. Moved on not too long ago.”
Both of them glanced at the eastern horizon far away, far out on the eastern plains beyond the top of the ridge they were nearing.
Workman said, “We ain’t got long. If them Comanche pulled out, they’ll be bumping into Hatcher and the boys real soon.”
“Get them soldiers moving with us,” Scratch suggested as he rose to the saddle.
Once the rest were moving up in tight order behind the two Americans, Bass leaned close and whispered, “I found where one of ’em was bleeding real bad.”
“They leave a body behind?”
Shaking his head, he spoke low. “No. Just some bloody rags.”
“You look close at them rags?”
“No. Why?” For a minute Workman didn’t answer. “I was just wondering if they … they was someone’s … clothes, is all. Some woman’s dress … maybeso a child’s, a li’l—”
“I don’t even wanna think about it,” Scratch snapped, cutting him off.
They rode on in silence.
Intently listening, they were both anxious to give that long-delayed signal to the soldiers, the strings inside each man strung so tight, they were stretched to the point of popping. Both of them listened to the darkness ahead as it slowly converted itself into that inky gray of dawn-coming.
As the light grew, so did the muttering of the nervous soldiers riding on their tails. Bass realized their fear must be mounting with each passing moment as they pressed on toward the break of that day—these Mexicans who had grown up learning to fear a raid by the Comanche as early in life as they had learned their own language. Hadn’t it been that way for his Grandpap? Titus pondered.
For those innocent folks settling at the ragged edge of a dangerous frontier, whether in the valley of the Ohio River or in that Taos valley he and the others had left down below, a person simply came to accept the raw odds of life versus death. Some men just naturally figured they would be brave enough to stare their enemy in the eye if that time ever arose … while others prayed they would never have to find out.
He couldn’t blame these soldiers for doubting what they had gotten themselves into; the more ground they put between them and their homes, the farther they climbed into the mountains, the colder and darker became the smother of night. Just as he couldn’t really blame folks back in America for figuring they could push against the frontier without having to pay the price in blood and lives. It had always been that way, Bass figured. Back to the time of his grandpap. Down through the days of his own father.
Here in his thirty-fifth winter, Titus realized he could no longer blame his father for trying to give his son what he figured his son would want from life. Even though it turned out that Thaddeus’s life of peace and quiet and security was about as far away as anything could be from what Titus wanted for himself.
If that man hadn’t been the sort to go forth, to push against the starry veil of the frontier, to dare dance on the winds of fate … then at least Thaddeus must be the sort of man who could summon up the courage to defend his family, those dear to him. To defend his own kind against those who came to steal from him. Like these Comanche.
He hoped these soldiers would be brave enough for what stared them in the eye this cold morning.
With that first distant shot echoing through the timber ahead, down in his marrow Bass wondered if any of them—American or Mexican—had any idea what they had bitten off.
9
Workman was shouting, waving for all he was worth, already a horse length behind Bass, doing his best to goad the Mexicans into hurrying their stubborn horses into motion.
It was like dragging a reluctant, harness-sore mule out of its stall to plow a field.
In a matter of moments the air on the other side of a low rise dotted with pine and spruce was cluttered with more gunshots, the yelps of warriors, and shrieks of women and children.
One of the women kept screaming so long and so loud Bass wondered if she would ever take another breath. But as long as she was hollering, he figured she was still alive.
At the top of the knoll he burst out of the timber, the clatter of the Mexican brigade coming up behind him, the noise of the fight rising from below him.
But for their straight black hair and the feathers tied in it, the warriors didn’t look any different from the trappers—except that the white men stood back at the edge of the trees and rocks, jamming more powder and ball down the long barrels of their rifles—the Comanche threw tomahawks and knives, fighting to control their frightened ponies so they could rush their enemy as they wildly swung long-handled clubs or dashed toward a target with one of their buffalo lances. Others fought dismounted in the swirl of horses and bodies, seeking a target for their small, strong bows of Osage orangewood, firing their rosewood arrows.
“Save the women! Watch for you don’t shoot the women!”
On that far side of the meadow he heard his friends yelling to one another, each of the eight fighting his own battle against more than four or five bandy-legged raiders against every white man. Already the ground was littered with more than a dozen Comanche bodies.
With a mournful anguish Rowland darted from the trees, shouting, “Maria? Maria?”
Where were the women and children?
Then Scratch saw them as the horses jostled and sidestepped. There … in the middle of some ten or so Indians the women struggled against the enemy, who clamped on to wrists, yanking them off their horses, dragging them brutally away from the fight. Children clawed and kicked at the warriors, crying out for their mothers.
He shot one last glance over his shoulder as he jabbed heels into the horse’s ribs, seeing the whiskey maker working everything he could out of his animal, the Mexican officer and about ten of them right behind him.
Down the gentle slope Bass raced, beginning to yell. All the fear, all the goddamned, paralyzing fear … just yelling always got rid of most of it as he reined right for those horsemen in the middle of the pack who had charge of the prisoners.
Somewhere among them would be Rowland’s Maria.
The hillside behind him suddenly filled with the garbled commands in a foreign tongue, the depression in front of him a torrent of war cries, gunshots, and the screams of utter terror.
“Bass!”
He was too late in turning: finding the Comanche already driving the sharp blade of a short cutlass down into the top of a woman’s skull, part of her head peeling away from the blow like a thick layer of onion. Too late to save her, he brought the rifle up anyway as the warrior whirled about in sheer ecstasy, bellowing full-mouthed, shaking that bloody blade at the end of his arm.
The ball caught him high in the chest, knocking him back the distance of two full steps, his legs churning, before his feet touched the ground again and he collapsed beneath one of the milling, stamping ponies.
Rowland was struggling to fight his way into the open, grassy depression, screaming her name as if it were a battle cry.
