“Get the guns, woman!” he flung the words over his shoulder in English, his breath a frosty streamer gone on the cold autumn wind. “All of ’em!”
Whirling, he dropped to a crouch and measured what distance the warriors had to cross before they got to Shad, before they could rush the entrance to their coulee. Drawing back on the set trigger, he brought the rifle to his shoulder just as Sweete raised his head, shook it slowly like a sleepy bear blinking awake of a spring morning after a long winter’s nap.
Scratch flicked his eyes to the front blade, laying it within the notch at the bottom of the buckhorn rear sight, and poked his finger inside the front of the trigger guard. The closest horseman was starting to lean off his pony, the bowstring taut, his left arm straightened at his groggy target on the ground.
The moment the rifle roared, Sweete jerked awake. “Balls of thunder!”
Hearing the woman clatter up behind him, Titus turned, finding her arms filled with six long weapons. Leaning the empty rifle against the side of the wash, he quickly took the six from her, standing them in a row. With a loaded one in hand, he turned back to find the bowman had toppled into the sage, those closest around him reining their horses aside as they bawled in rage at the white men.
Shad crawled backward a few yards, starting away from the draw to snag his rifle from the sage, then struggled to stand onto one leg, dragging himself up hand over hand on the long-barreled flintlock. Pivoting, he hobbled into motion, lunging step by step toward the mouth of the wash.
“Goddammit!” Scratch bellowed. “Don’t you lollygag, Shadrach!”
As the big man approached, Bass suddenly recognized how pasty Sweete’s face was—almost the color of that pale limestone of the Ohio River valley.
Four of them were coming, swiftly snapping into focus over the tall man’s shoulders. Bobbing side to side, they weaved atop their ponies, galloping straight for the lone white man. Shoving the second rifle against his shoulder, Bass felt inside the guard, finding this weapon did not have a set trigger. An arrow hissed into the sage at the big man’s lumbering feet. Another phtted against the wall of the wash near Bass’s head where it quivered inches from his eyes.
Instinctively, Titus wheeled the rifle, pinning the front blade onto that bowman’s chest, and pulled the single trigger.
With a shrill cry the horseman toppled to the side off his pony, bounced once in the sage, then sprawled for a moment before he began to crawl slowly back from the mouth of the wash, blood smearing the frozen ground as he bravely retreated.
Bursting into the open, Scratch sprinted toward the big man. When he reached out with his arm, looping it around Shad, his left hand struck the arrow shaft, causing Sweete to emit an inhuman cry.
“Jehoshaphat—you’re hit!”
Swallowing down that gush of pain as they hobbled into the wash together, Shad growled between clenched teeth, “You idjit! Figger I’m out there lollygagging on a Sunday stroll all for nothing?”
“Had me no idee you was out catching arrows, Shadrach,” Bass apologized, helping him to collapse onto the good hip. “Woman!”
As Sweete groaned behind him, Waits was there in a heartbeat, handing him a third rifle and standing the empty weapon beside the first. He could see she had looped the strap of her shooting pouch over her shoulder. Turning her back on the men now, she yanked the stopper from the powder horn in her teeth and poured the black grains into a large brass measure that hung by a thin cord from her pouch strap.
Clicking back the hammer on the loaded rifle, Bass glanced at his children, finding Magpie huddled against the side of the draw and clutching Flea on her lap, both of them nearly hidden by a blanket Waits had draped over them and some brush.
Kneeling beside the wounded man, Scratch gripped Shad’s knee. “What you figger to do with that arrow?”
“This’un?” Sweete said, holding up the long, bloody, headless shaft.
“Damn if you ain’t pulled it!”
Wagging his head, Shad said, “Nope—broke it.”
“Save the goddamned thing, Shadrach. You’re gonna wanna bite down on it when I go to digging in your hip with my skinner.”
The big man’s eyes went half-closed as he said, “Maybeso I can pray I’ll just bleed to death … or pray these goddamned Injuns kill me a’fore you get your knife in me—”
“You gonna be wuth a damn with that rifle of your’n?” he shut Sweete right up as he pivoted onto one knee and brought his own weapon up, hearing the approach of the pounding hooves.
“Them stupid niggers hurt me—” he bawled. “You goddamned right I’m gonna hurt ’em back!”
“I don’t wanna waste two balls on one of the bastards,” Scratch warned. “Which one you want?”
“You take that’un with the purty feathers round his head, and I’ll bust the one with that red blanket.”
At the last moment another warrior crossed his pony in front of the one wearing that wild spray of turkey feathers like a halo at the back of his head. Bass quickly shifted the front blade, held for that breathless moment, and squeezed the trigger. With its explosion the rifle shoved back into the notch of his shoulder with a completely different feel than he was accustomed to.
Beside him, Sweete’s weapon roared.
Instantly Shad was dragging his pouch away from that wounded hip, the fingers of both hands crusted with his own frozen blood. “Hold ’em off while I reload!”
“Waits!” he shrieked in warning, wheeling the instant he heard the children cry, the empty rifle held out before him.
She was dropping to one knee as the muzzle of the weapon she clutched swung upward in a jagged arc. With the buttstock pressed against her hip, she fired over the heads of the children—aiming at the horseman who had just skidded to a halt at the brow of the wash, directly over Magpie’s head.
The lead ball struck the Sioux pony just below the eye, slamming the animal’s head to the side as it crumpled, the warrior leaping off as his horse flopped into the sage. With a grunt he clambered off his knees, tore an arrow from his left hand, nocking it against the bowstring he drew backward with one smooth motion.
Lunging to the side, Titus threw his shoulder against his wife, pitching Waits-by-the-Water to the ground as he yanked a pistol from his belt. Dragging back the hammer, he pulled the trigger as the bowstring snapped forward. The arrow pierced the flap of his elk-hide coat as the ball caught the warrior just below the breastbone, crumpling him in half as he was driven backward from the brow of the wash.
“You loaded yet, Shadrach?” he cried as he reached down to pick the woman out of the brush and wheel her behind him.
“I am now!”
Shoving the empty pistol into her hand, Bass dragged the second loaded pistol from his belt, never taking his eyes off the top of the draw where the warrior had landed. Up there the only sound was the gentle pawing of the pony that lay dying in the sage, one solitary leg flexing across the flaky, frozen ground.
“Load,” he whispered to her as he stepped away, “then take a gun to him!”
The moment she nodded in understanding, he was moving in a crouch, roostering another ten yards into the brushy wash where he pulled himself up the side of the draw.
Behind him Sweete’s rifle roared, and he heard Shadrach whoop.
Slowly he hoisted himself against the hard-packed erosion of that coulee until his eyes could peer over the top. Off to his left lay the pony, totally still now. Far beyond it whirled six or seven of the horsemen, gathering among the willow and brush on the north bank of Vermillion Creek.
In that cold silence he heard the gurgle. Poking his head up a little farther, Scratch spotted the warrior less than five yards away. Lying on his back in the sage, the wounded man had drawn his knees up, clutching his belly with both hands, dark, glistening ooze creeping out between the fingers. As Bass hitched himself over the lip of the draw, the dying man slowly flopped his head from side to side, groaning, gurgling, and coughing as more of the shimmering ooze seeped from the side of his mouth, onto his bronze cheek, spilling down his neck into his unfettered hair.
Hooves pounded on the hard ground with a dull, hollow thud.
Clumsily whirling, Scratch clutched the side of the wash with his left hand as he dug in with the toes of his moccasins. And found another horseman bursting into view on the far side of the wash.
