his father, then gazed up at his sister. She nodded and the boy waved again. Bass smiled at them, turned, and trudged away, penetrating the brush at the head of the draw.
Standing the rifles against the side of the wash, he clawed his way up to the edge and peered over—locating the dead pony. After sliding back to the bottom, he carried the weapons to the top one at a time and laid them on the lip of the prairie, finally legging his way over with the third rifle.
In bellying through the sage to the pony’s side, Titus passed the fallen warrior. The chertlike eyes stared unblinking at the cold, dimming sky overhead, slowly glazing as they lost their luster in these first minutes following death.
Titus dragged the last rifle between the horse’s legs as one of Shad’s guns boomed. Below, at the mouth of the draw, the big man yelped, kip-kip-keeyi-ing like a coyote. Out on the flat three of the warriors set up their own wolf howl, one of them suddenly nudging his pony into a gallop so he could ride back and forth past the white man in a bravery run. Peering out from that shelter of the dead horse’s legs, the smell of its frozen blood not disagreeable, Scratch thought the daring warrior made a fine target of himself. He pushed one of the rifles forward, settling it back against his shoulder.
Then he remembered. As tempting a target as that rider might be, if he did fire, Scratch realized the enemy would know he was up there and his surprise would be ruined. So instead he watched the brazen horseman dash back and forth while the other two looked on—
Two? Them and the rider, they made for three. And that meant there was another trio he could not account for as he studied the creek bottom.
Inching his head a little higher, Scratch cautiously peered across more than one hundred eighty degrees of that river valley, searching for the other horsemen in what light was left to that late afternoon. Try as he might, he couldn’t locate them among the trees and brush lining the flat. Down below he heard Waits’s voice—likely talking low to the children. And he thought he heard Sweete—more than likely talking to himself, if not to those three warriors.
Maybe the light would drain from the sky and night would fall before they had any more trouble. Then they could just slip away into the dark—
The missing trio of horsemen popped up at the brow of the hill right above him, as if they had sprung right out of the sagebrush itself.
Scratch wasn’t hidden behind the horse. No, not with them coming from the opposite direction now.
He stayed flat on his belly, his breath stilled, watching them kick their ponies into a gallop as they broke the crest, beginning to shriek and holler. They weren’t racing for his side of the gully. Instead, the horsemen were reining for the far side.
Which damn well might mean they hadn’t spotted him lying there in the shadow of the dead pony’s legs, smelling its dried blood pungently metallic on the cold wind.
As the clatter of their hooves grew louder, he heard Waits scream at the bottom of the coulee, her yell stifled the moment she realized she had caused Magpie and Flea to cry out. How he wanted to yell—try to reassure them … even to turn and look at the flat ground to see if the reason Waits had cried was that the other three were charging in to ride right over Shad.
But Scratch assumed that’s just what the bottom three were doing: coming from that direction, holding the attention of the two white riflemen, while another trio swept around and over the top of the hill to trap the enemy in their graves at the bottom of the wash.
Not today, goddammit.
When they were sixty yards away, Bass decided he had two shots to make from the three rifles. Take one by surprise, then get another warrior riding away before a third was too far and chancy in the coming gloom.
Forty yards.
But if he felt really lucky, he might just scramble to the top of the hill to take a shot at that third horseman.
Grabbing a smoothbore for this closest shot, he swung the muzzle across the pony’s stiffened leg, resting the forestock atop the foreflank. Snapping the big hammer back to full cock, he laid the stock against his cheek, picked the target, and let his breath out halfway. Held … then pulled the single trigger.
With a bright gush of light the pan ignited, but the rifle did not fire.
Suddenly screaming with that discovery of the white man in hiding, the warriors reined up, hooves skidding as Bass pitched the smoothbore aside.
He rose to his knees as the warriors attempted to settle their frightened ponies, trying their best to get a fix on the white man and fire their bows at the enemy. To full cock went the rifle’s hammer. This might well be his last chance to drop one of them.
Over the gray cloud he watched a horseman spill backward off the rear of his pony, his long blanket coat and the coil of rope the warrior had tucked beneath his belt becoming entangled with the animal’s legs.
Turning to lay the rifle aside and take up the last of the weapons, Bass heard the arrow smack into the carcass right where his left shoulder had been a moment before. Grabbing the loaded smoothbore, Scratch felt that shoulder ache … remembering the Arapaho arrow that had fully skewered the very same shoulder more than five winters before.
Sweete’s gun boomed again from the wash below.
Another arrow slammed into the flinty ground before him, then one tugged at the coyote-fur cap he had pulled down over his ears, knocking it so the fur slipped down, blinding him. Angrily tugging it back with his left hand, Scratch felt the shaft that had pierced the cap.
“Not near good enough!” he roared at them, tearing the cap from his head before he laid the forestock of the fusil along the horse’s shoulder and took aim.
He knew he had the man even before the smoke cleared and he saw that second riderless horse clattering away. The moment the last warrior sat there, daring him, throwing an arm into the air and shaking his bow at the white man—shrieking an oath—Bass cursed the misfire of that first smoothbore.
Leaping up as the fusil tumbled to the ground, Scratch drew the old English horse pistol from his belt. Of the three, it had the longest barrel—the best chance to make this shot at more than twenty-five yards.
With both hands gripping the butt, he yanked back on the dragon’s-head hammer, bringing the end of the muzzle down on his target limned in the fading light, intending to hold a little high. In the instant he was slipping his bare finger inside the big half-round trigger guard, Bass heard the hooves behind his right shoulder.
Not moving the pistol or his arms, the white man turned his head, finding a warrior had forsaken his attack on the mouth of the draw to ride up the slope to the aid of those at the top of the hill.
Coming out of the west, horse and horseman were one liquid shadow … the bow brought up—
As Bass whirled, his arms still extended and wrists locked together, he dropped to one knee there in the crescent of the dead pony’s frozen legs. With a breathless pause in the cold autumn wind, he heard the rawhide bowstring thwung a heartbeat before his finger flexed, firing at that widest part of the shadow crowning the pony.
In that instant before the wind rose once again and the air possessed such a stillness, the ball slammed into its target, driving the air from the man’s lungs with a grunt, immediately followed by a second grunt as the warrior smacked the ground. His pony dashed on past as the Indian’s body disappeared into that gloom inking the ground with an indelible darkness.
“Balls of thunder!” Sweete called out from the gloom. “How many of ’em you got up there, Bass?”
Even as that breath of frozen wind gusted there in the wake of Shad’s words, Scratch heard the rustle of dry sage, the grinding of the flaky ground. All of it meaning that the warrior he had unhorsed was moving, maybe crawling—still alive.
“Goddammit—stay down here, woman!”
Bass spun around at Sweete’s warning cry. Squinting hard, he could not make out anything but liquid indigo in the wash below him now that the sun had sunk, leaving nothing more than a band of lavender along the rocky breast of the far hills.
He licked his lips, desperately working to finger just the right words in Crow. “Stay with the children,” he ordered her.
“Ti-tuzz—”
“The children! Stay with them until this is over!”
