Crack in the Sky

right, Titus moved along the creekbank, finding the warrior’s horse grazing on the far side of some bramble. Then he saw him.

“You fixing to make it to your pony?”

In the middle of pushing himself across the grass, the warrior jerked his head around, discovering the trapper coming up behind him. His eyes instantly filled with a dangerous mix of fear and hatred, the Arapaho tried to lunge forward in escape, grunting in pain as he dragged his broken ribs across the ground.

“Come back here, nigger,” Bass growled, slamming his moccasin down on the warrior’s ankle.

Clearly in agony, the Arapaho attempted to twist back far enough to grab hold of the trapper’s foot, to swat it off his leg. Amused at that effort, Titus cocked his foot back and slammed it under the Indian’s jaw. The warrior crumpled back on the grass, groaning low as blood oozed from his lips.

“Easy, now—I ain’t gonna kill you,” Titus said quietly as he knelt, realizing how much it hurt where the ax had smacked his shoulder minutes ago. “That’d be too damned easy, don’t you see?”

He leaned down and rolled the warrior onto his back. The eyes fluttered a little, as if the man as struggling to stay conscious.

“I wan’cha alive, you red bastard. Just enough alive so you can earn your miserable life back.”

With that he raised his right foot into the air, momentarily suspending it directly over the warrior’s lower leg, then slammed the foot down with savage force halfway between knee and ankle, shattering both bones.

The sudden, excruciating pain wrenched the warrior off the ground in an arch of agony—screeching. Half- coagulated blood spewed from his mouth as he sputtered some garbled oaths, whimpering in pain and spitting out pieces of his teeth and blood to clear his mouth.

“Good,” Scratch muttered as he knelt beside the warrior’s head. “I want you wide-awake for what comes next.”

As the Arapaho writhed, Bass held the scalp inches above his face and shoved the bloody skinning knife right under the man’s nose—pressing up, up, up as crimson drops beaded along the blade. The warrior quickly stopped writhing.

“That’s better,” he said as he got to his feet. “Now you’re coming with me.”

Laying the skinning knife in his left hand with the scalp, Bass filled his right with the warrior’s hair, dragging up the man’s head and slowly bringing the body around in a wide circle to begin slowly, foot by foot, tugging the Arapaho’s deadweight through the grass. Towing him back toward the dead scalper.

Each time he tugged the warrior forward with a lunge, the Indian grunted low in his throat, a guttural sound of deep pain that always ended with a quiet, shrill whimper. Then Bass would drag him another three or four feet through the tangle of grass, the man’s head suspended by his long hair, and he would groan in pain again. On and on, until they crossed better than sixty feet of creekbank to stop at the outflung arm of the dead warrior.

“This here’s the son of a bitch what scalped me,” Scratch told him, releasing the man’s hair.

Then he knelt where the wounded warrior could watch his pantomime of removing the Indian’s scalp. That done, Bass reached up and took the blue bandanna from his head, turning slightly to point to his own bare skull— tapping the bare bone to be certain the wounded man understood. Next he pointed his gnarled finger to that brown hair stitched to the dead warrior’s belt bag. Back to his skull his finger went a second time, then once more to the bag. Over and over that blood-crusted finger moved slowly as he continued to gaze straight into the Arapaho’s hate-filled eyes.

At last he saw something register there, some understanding, perhaps a recognition that only increased the pain and fury in the eyes.

After tugging on his bandanna, Bass held up two fingers. Then he positioned both hands in front of him at waist level, palms and fingers pointed up, fingers waving gently as he raised them slowly.

Again he signaled two.

And once more he made the grass sign for “summer.”

The Indian’s eyes came away from Scratch’s hands to meet the trapper’s eyes. Sure enough sign the warrior understood.

“That’s right. Two summers ago.”

Then he tapped the end of his finger on the dead Indian’s chest. And when the wounded man’s eyes came back to his, Bass said, “This nigger. That’s right. Two summers ago, this here red nigger.”

As before, he used both hands to sign. Extending only the forefinger on the right hand, Titus held out his left arm, the first two fingers on that hand pointing down, symbolizing the legs of a man. Now he struck that man repeatedly with the right forefinger.

Coup.

“Good. This friend of your’n counted coup on me two summers ago. You savvy that, you bastard?”

He signed all of it over again.

Two.

Summers.

Counted coup.

Then he ripped off the bandanna a second time, pointing to the bare skull bone. And finally to that patch of long, wavy brown hair loosely sewn to the buckskin bag.

When those black, luminous eyes locked back on his, Bass resumed signing. He tapped his own breast with his right hand, then placed the back of that hand against his forehead, the first two fingers extended and held apart, slightly curved. He raised the hand slowly, moving it round and round in a simulated rise of smoke from a fire.

“My medicine” he spoke softly as the breeze nuzzled the leaves overhead.

Making a fist of that right hand, Titus slapped it against his chest, right over his heart, then brought the fist down to almost waist level with a bold, confident gesture.

“It is strong. My medicine’s strong.”

Now Scratch opened his hand and placed it near the right side of his forehead, fingers open, separated, and slightly curved into a cup as he twirled the hand back and forth, back and forth in a tight spin to resemble mental instability.

“That’s right: I’m crazy,” he explained, the volume of his voice rising. “A damn fool, crazy. You go tell your people they best not mess with me. I’m a crazy nigger!”

The eyes glared back at him, unflinching.

“Now I’m gonna prove to you just how crazy I am, you son of a bitch,” Titus growled. “When you get back to your people—you be sure to tell ’em all what you see’d here today.”

Leaning to the side, Bass quickly laid the belt bag and the dead man’s knife where they would be safe, more than an arm’s length away, then took out his own skinning knife. It made a faint crackling noise as he drove the narrow blade deep into the base of the dead man’s throat, blood seeping out as he dragged the blade along the flesh and muscle stretched over the breastbone. At the bottom of the sternum he plunged the knife into the abdomen, all the way to the handle. Sawing through the thick rawhide belt that held up the leggings, Titus flung aside the front of the leather breechclout and continued down, down in a ragged line, drawing the full length of the blade through the gush of blood and spill of purple intestines until the knife struck hard bone just above the warrior’s penis.

After wiping the blood from the blade on the dead Indian’s legging, Scratch drove the weapon into the ground beside the body. He rocked forward, rising onto his knees over the warrior. Giving the wounded Arapaho one last, long look of devilish insanity—the trapper stuffed both hands into that wide, grisly incision.

Again and again he ripped apart the gaping slash, pulling out long lengths of that purplish-white intestinal coil, heaving it to the far side of the body until no more remained. Then he retrieved the knife from the ground and went to work on the rest. Bladder and both kidneys he hacked loose, flinging them onto the growing gut-pile. The stomach, and liver, then the gallbladder—chopping it all free with savage slashes of the knife, splattering himself with the Indian’s blood, painting himself in crimson, reveling in the warmth of his victim’s body like some wild, feral beast gorging itself up to the snout in its prey.

He growled, grunted, whooped, and shrieked in shrill exultation every time he pulled some new organ free and hurled it onto the expanding gut-pile there in the grass near the body. Chopping and jabbing, hacking and sawing with the knife, Scratch repeatedly stuffed his arms past the elbows into the chest cavity, tearing free the lobes of lung from the connective tissue on the interior of the chest wall, ripping them from their last grip on the windpipe’s branching forks.