“Maria!”
There were at least four rushing John in that next moment, closing in on him as he fired his pistol, then jammed it into his belt to begin reloading the rifle.
Scratch knew the man wouldn’t have a chance.
Looking up the slope to where the Mexicans had fanned out behind their leader to charge into the fray, Bass sawed the reins to the right before he stuffed them into his mouth so he could pull the big pistol from the wide belt around his blanket coat. Dragging the hammer back, Scratch chose the one who would reach Rowland first.
The warrior heard him coming at the last moment, whirling suddenly, his face pinched with surprise as Scratch brought the pistol across his body, held it steady on his target that lone moment as he raced past—pulling the trigger to watch the oak-brown face explode into a bright crimson crescent in that cold mountain sunrise.
As his horse carried him on by, Titus watched Rowland turn in his direction, the trapper now seeing the twisted body of the Comanche only steps from his back. For a heartbeat John gazed up at the horseman, attempting to mouth something, only his eyes able to convey the gratitude.
With shouts and screams of their own, the Mexicans flooded into the clearing with a noisy crash of arms. Their crude smoothbores barked, great mushrooms of gray smoke coughing from the muzzles as their horses balked, many spinning to attempt fleeing the melee. For a narrow sliver of time the Indians burst in all directions at once, like a covey of quail exploding from their hiding place among the tall grass. But in the next heartbeat the Comanche must have realized they still had the advantage of numbers and whipped back to hurl themselves onto the soldiers.
Those tortured moments allowed the trappers to emerge from the trees and rocks where they had awaited the Comanche, where the Americans had slapped shut their trap, where they had fired the first shots of this battle—likely spilling as many riders as there were American guns trained on the raiders.
As he clumsily poured a palmful of powder down the muzzle of his rifle, Bass turned to watch the warriors who mingled with the women and children. The Comanche were forcing their captives slowly back toward the center of the clearing, the first of the children being wrenched from the arms of their mothers and thrown onto the back of a pony. Another warrior savagely kicked a woman, at the same time pulling from her arms a small child he handed up to another warrior already on the back of a horse.
“Maria!” Rowland screeched.
There came no answer that Bass could hear above the roar of guns, the slap of lead among the trees and rocks, the neighing of the horses and the shrieking of the prisoners.
Another woman went down, her skull crushed with a stone club as a Comanche stood over her, swinging the club’s handle back in a graceful, deadly arc, preparing to make another blow. Her brown, naked body twitched in the grass convulsively from that first wound.
“Maria!”
Out of the corner of his eye Bass saw Rowland inching toward the captives, swinging his rifle this way, then that—his eyes just as wide with fear as were every woman’s.
Spilling a few grains of priming powder into the pan, Bass dragged the frizzen down and brought the rifle up to his hip, yanking back on the trigger without consciously aiming just as the warrior began the deadly downward arc of that club.
The ball caught the Comanche in the lower belly, doubling him over in half as he was knocked off his feet, spinning to the side, tumbling over the naked captive. Rowland collapsed at the woman’s side, turned her crushed, bloody skull so he could stare into her face, then stood suddenly, his face one of horror as he peered into the blurry torrent of bodies.
“Maria!”
Bass knew the body wasn’t hers. But where was she?
His eyes raced over the naked prisoners herded within a shrinking compound of horses and warriors. Very few left: women struggling to pull their children out of the arms of a few horsemen attempting to escape, women seeking to shelter their little ones with nothing more than their bare brown bodies.
“Juan!”
As Scratch held the muzzle to his lips and blew down the barrel to clear it of embers, he heard the woman’s shrill voice above the rest of the screeching and war cries and rifle fire.
She was so close. Closer to Bass than she was to Rowland as she fell to her hands and knees, then rolled under the dancing legs of a pony to scramble back to her feet. Scratch could see she was already bloodied, could see her wrists still bound by loops of crude hemp, two sections of rope still wrapped around her ankles to show how her legs had been tied beneath the belly of a pony that carried her out of the Taos valley, her mouth and chin smeared with blood where they had struck her in anger—perhaps to silence her screams, to quiet her sobbing.
Jamming the plug between his teeth, Bass pulled it from the end of the powder horn, spilling the coarse black grains straight down the muzzle. Racing to reload.
She was struggling back into motion, stumbling toward Rowland, raising in the air those hands still tied together. Begging …
“Maria!” John bellowed, focusing his overwhelming relief on the woman.
Titus dropped the powder horn so that it hung suspended there above his shooting pouch as he tongued another ball from the inside of his cheek, pushing it forward with the tip of his tongue.
From his left Bass saw the movement of one of the horsemen as the warrior whipped his pony around, the fourteen-foot-long buffalo lance coming up halfway between earth and sky like a crude splinter against the winter blue. His black hate-filled eyes followed the escape of the woman, spotting the white man rushing toward her.
Spitting the wet lead ball from his lips with a noisy
How Bass wished he would have enough time to finish reloading …
Then knew he wouldn’t—
Just as Rowland was reaching out for her, the warrior cocked the huge lance beneath his arm, his horse leaping into motion as the arm snapped back, then slingshotted forward.
Both Bass and Rowland watched it hit the naked woman stumbling toward her husband. Piercing her body more than six feet of its length, suddenly erupting from her chest, red and glistening as she stumbled two more steps, staring down at the lance that impaled her, imprisoned her there, on the point of death.
She seized hold of the lance with her two grimy hands becoming slicked with her own blood. Fluid gushed from her mouth, spilling off her chin and onto her small brown breasts as she collapsed forward.
“Juan!”
It was more of a gurgle than a scream of pain or anguish.
With a terrifying scream the Comanche flung the long lance forward, releasing it.
Rowland was a few feet shy of catching Maria as she collapsed onto the long point of the lance, teetering there a moment as if in the hovering flight of a nectar-robbing hummingbird, then keeled off the six feet of lance to fall to the side with more than eight feet of the shaft slapping the icy snow behind her as she thrashed on the ground, gurgling.
Lustily screaming in victory, the horseman was pulling an ax from the back of his belt as Rowland spun to his knees over his wife, shrieking in horror.
Kicking his pony and yanking savagely on the horsehair rein—struggling to get his animal slowed and turned around—the Comanche came about and started to dash toward the grieving white man at the instant Scratch jammed the rifle into his shoulder. At the very moment he realized he’d forgotten to remove the ramrod from the barrel, Bass raked back on the trigger.
Both ball and hickory wiping stick exploded from the rifle as the muzzle spat a bright torch of yellow flame. While the lead sphere smashed through the warrior’s breastbone, the long ramrod embedded itself deeply at the base of his throat. There it quivered for a moment before the warrior released his big-headed ax, seizing the wiping stick with both hands as his legs lost their grip on the pony. He slid over onto the snow.
Rowland hunched over the naked, bloody body—sobbing—as Scratch skidded to a stop beside him.
“Gimme your pistol!”
Rowland looked up dumbly, his eyes at once filled with rage, wild and feral, at the very moment they pooled with tears of unfathomable grief.
