Slapping the mule, driving his knee up against her belly, Scratch got Samantha turned a quarter circle before she threw her weight back against him, angrily twisting her head around to stare at him with wide, cruel eyes—as if she couldn’t understand why he wasn’t doing more to ease her pain.
The third shaft struck the far side of the packsaddle with such force that it quivered as she lunged in a sidestep against him, knocking his feet out from under him, suspending her master from that shaft buried in the wooden packsaddle frame.
Grunting in torment, he scrambled to regain his footing. His wet moccasins slipping on the damp grass, Bass choked down the hot ball his stomach hurled against his tonsils. A wave of icy pain had begun to numb his brain. Scratch’s eyes glazed over with stinging tears as he finally planted his feet and stood, instinctively reaching for the belt pistol with his left hand—yanking the weapon free as the mule twisted, shoving him backward so hard he lost his balance again.
Pushing himself upright, Titus blinked his eyes clear, finding the warrior dropping his quiver off his shoulder to the ground.
At that moment Bass went dry-mouthed, suddenly hearing the approach of another pony, another voice—this second still disembodied somewhere in the trees behind the first attacker.
Narrowing his gaze on that bowman who was straightening after removing the quiver so he could drag a brass-headed tomahawk from the back of his belt, for the first time Titus realized how the cards were stacked against him.
One-handed.
With only one shot.
And now a second warrior had appeared back in that dapple of light and shadow among the skinny lodgepole and bone-bare quaky.
The bowman was already in motion, his arm cocked overhead as he sprinted toward the white man and the mule, screaming with guttural bravado over a sure kill.
No more than fifteen yards between them.
Scratch firmly squeezed his sweaty left hand around the pistol butt.
Ten yards …
But he had to relax that grip to clumsily thumb back the hammer mounted on the right side of the weapon.
Five yards—
With the frizzen flush against the pan, and the hammer back to full cock, he didn’t allow himself the time to hold and aim as he plopped his pistol arm down atop the mule’s rump.
The warrior dodged to his right, starting to careen around the rear of the mule.
Whirling to his left with the target, Scratch pulled the trigger.
Samantha shuddered, jerked sideways at the gunshot, prompting another wave of nausea through him as the icy pain flushed clear up to his shoulder the moment she settled back to all four.
On the far side of the mule the bowman skidded to a stop, backed one step, then a second, when he collapsed backward, a dark stain spreading on the left side of his chest. There he thrashed and gurgled a moment before the second attacker emerged from the tree line.
Free of the tangle of lodgepole and aspen, the horseman brutally kicked his pony. This second attacker did not wear a war shirt—only a buffalo-fur vest that flapped open with the rhythm of the gallop as he brought the forestock of his muzzle loader down to rest on the crook of his bare left arm—racing toward the open ground where the white man and that mule began to dance in a tight circle.
Yelling at Samantha didn’t help settle the mule, but it was nonetheless as loud as that Arapaho war cry.
Flinging the empty pistol aside, the trapper wrapped his left hand around the shaft and gave it another mighty heave. Unable to budge the arrow.
He had no weapon but his knife now. His rifle was propped against the distant brush, his camp ax lay a few yards closer among a small pile of float-sticks. Both weapons might as well have been on the other side of those peaks for all the good they could do him now.
If he couldn’t free the arrow from the packsaddle, he had to free his hand.
Clenching his teeth, Scratch threw a shoulder into the mule’s ribs to turn her, putting Samantha between him and the oncoming horseman for the moment—then snapped the shaft off just above his bleeding hand.
He tasted sour, stinging bile as he dragged his right hand up the short section of arrow, over the frayed splinters, and it was free.
Dragging in a huge breath to push back the warm, liquid unconsciousness he realized was about to overwhelm him, Titus looked at the rifle. Saw it was too far. And realized the camp ax lay too far away too.
Now that the mule had danced them around part of a tight circle, Bass found himself staring down at the dead warrior.
Leaping aside, dodging right, then left, as the horseman approached, Titus gave the warrior nothing more than a moving target as he raced by.
Once the horseman shot past and was wrenching back on his single rein, Scratch lunged for the dead bowman. Skidding onto his knees, he peeled back those fingers locked around that tomahawk handle, one by one, until he ripped the weapon free of the death grip.
Wheeling in a crouch, he found the horseman had turned, kicking his pony savagely, coming back for another try with his short-barreled rifle. Bass dodged, the warrior swerved, swinging the weapon’s muzzle toward the white man as he started his pass—
Scratch was already leaping, that left arm swinging, planting the brass-headed tomahawk under the two bare brown arms crooked to hold the rifle on its target.
Sensing the broad blade crunch through bone, Bass drove the weapon into the naked chest with all that left arm and both shoulders could muster—toppling the horseman as he ripped downward with the tomahawk.
Even as the rider landed on his back, he had both hands locked around Bass’s wrist as he struggled to pull the tomahawk from his rib cage. Spewing bloody, gurgling oaths, the warrior struggled with an unheralded fury in his final moments.
With his strong left arm imprisoned by the enemy, Bass reached at the back of his belt with the injured right hand for his thin-bladed skinning knife, pulled it from the sheath decorated with brass tacks.
In that instant the trapper’s knife hung frozen above him, the warrior relaxed his grip on the white man’s left wrist—staring transfixed at the weapon poised above him.
Driving the blade deep into that notch at the base of the Indian’s throat, Scratch yanked and pulled with all his might, savagely tearing back and forth, slashing the windpipe that wheezed with a last rush of air, severing thumb-thick arteries that gushed free those last tremulous pumps of a heart not yet stilled.
Hot blood splattered him with such force that he was blinded as he tumbled back from the horseman’s body.
Landing on his side, Bass heaved for wind. Resting on his right elbow, he dragged his left forearm across his eyes, clearing them of crimson spray.
A few feet away the warrior lay motionless on his back—totally still but for the quivering flex of the fingers on both hands that once had gripped the white man’s wrist, still but for the tremble of his lips as they fought to speak unuttered words in that deadly silence suspended between killer and killed.
He began to catch his breath, the thunder slowly diminishing in his ears. Staring at the dying man, Scratch grew aware of the breeze quietly nuzzling the branches of the surrounding trees. Aware that the warrior’s pony had come to a stop near Samantha and contentedly tore at the short new grass emerging at the border of the old snow still crusted in a dirty, ragged line at the edge of the tree shadows.
Eventually he realized that in staring at the horseman’s bloody chest, he was noticing something odd, something out of place. There above the abdomen smeared with the splatter of glistening crimson, some of the copper flesh was not near as dark as the rest.
Rocking onto his knees, Titus crabbed over to the warrior and studied that skin. Scarred—perhaps by hanging himself from a sun-dance pole. Then he suddenly realized those scars covered more flesh than sun-dance punctures high on the pectoral muscles.
There was even something of a pattern to them.
With his bloody right hand Scratch swiped at some of the spatter of thick, congealing blood. It took another
