Kersey nodded, rubbing a hand across his dusty leggings cut from a red wool blanket. “Count me in too, Scratch. You’ll need some men at your back, even with them fat Mex soldiers.”
“Awright,” Adair relented. “Me and Roscoe gonna throw in too.”
“We all go down there an’ kill ourselves,” Purcell groaned, wagging his head.
“Maybe not,” Kersey suggested in a whisper, rubbing the end of his sharp, aquiline nose, a most prominent feature on his face: tracked with tiny blood vessels as if someone had crisscrossed it with an inked nib filled with indigo. “Scratch, I got a notion for you an’ the Injun here.”
“Dust it off and spill your idee.”
“We have the Injun go round to that post—on foot it’s gotta be. Act like he’s just a dumb, lost Injun, needing to find his way back to his mission.”
Bass smiled, a light coming across his whole brown face. “I’ll wager them soldiers gonna let the Injun in —”
“And he can have a look at things on the inside,” Corn interrupted to finish the plan.
“So he’s got inside to see if his sisters are still around,” Titus said, nodding with approval.
He rolled onto his hip and quickly stammered through his skimpy Spanish vocabulary, wishing the California Indians understood sign language as well as those tribes of the high plains savvied it.
Sliding backward on their bellies until they were no longer in danger of breaking the skyline, Scratch and Frederico started down to the animals. There he stopped, grabbed the youth by the shoulders, and studied the youth up and down.
He retightened the black bandanna around the bloody arm, then—without a word of warning—Titus bent to scoop up a handful of dirt. Spitting into his palm, Scratch mixed the mud with a couple of fingers. When he went to smear the mud on Frederico’s face, the Indian flinched, pulling aside.
“No,” Bass said in a soothing manner. “We make you look dirty. You have been lost. You were hungry for days. You must fool the soldiers to free your sisters.”
A light went on behind Frederico’s eyes, and he nodded his permission. Titus smeared a little of the mud on his face, some across his chest, and the rest on his knees. Then he took another handful of dust and powdered it on the mud before stepping back to look at his handiwork.
Suddenly he pulled his knife and snatched up the long flap of the Indian’s breechclout, nearly ripping off a long corner of the cloth, leaving the fragment hanging.
“See? You do not wear the Mexican pantaloons the other Indian slaves wear at the mission,” Titus explained as he stepped back and gave Frederico another appraisal. “You are a wild Indian. The soldiers must believe you are a wild Indian to let you inside that fort.”
“Si, this will work,” Frederico said quietly as he held out his right arm to Bass. They clasped wrists.
“We’ll be watching from up there,” Titus declared. “Get away as quick as you can.”
The Indian nodded and turned away, trotting around the bottom of the wide knoll.
“Frederico!” Bass called. “Don’t cause any trouble by yourself. And don’t let your sisters know you have come to rescue them.”
With a fading grin, the youth took off on foot.
Titus and the others scrambled back up to the top of the rise and bellied down among the brush. He took out his spyglass and waited for Frederico to appear on the plain below them, zigzagging through the undergrowth, making for the stockade at a lope.
After long minutes of peering through the lens, watching almost breathless until the gates finally opened, Scratch announced in a whisper, “He’s in.”
Frederico disappeared, and the gate was closed once more.
“We wait?” Purcell asked impatiently.
“We wait,” Elias Kersey told him.
But even Titus itched to know what was going on by the time Jake Corn revealed in a rasp, “Gate’s opening!”
“Is he coming?” Purcell inquired, squinting in the harsh sunlight. “The Injun coming?”
The gate swung clear, and two horsemen left the compound.
“Nawww,” Adair responded, disappointment heavy in his voice. “It’s just a couple of soldiers—”
“Be-gawd!” Corn said little too loudly. “Them soldiers’re draggin’ the Injun off somewhere!”
Behind those two Mexicans a third horse emerged from the gate. Frederico sat astride its bare back, his arms held out straight, lashed to a narrow tent pole laid across the top of his shoulders, wrists tied to either end. His brown ankles were lashed to another tent pole that hung underneath the belly of the horse. Trussed up like a hog for the slaughter.
“T-they gonna kill the Injun?” Kersey asked.
“Could’ve done that in their fort,” Bass said, wagging his head in angry consternation. “He must’ve done something wrong—said something wrong, for them soldiers to be cartin’ him off.”
“Where they taking him?” Corn inquired. “Back to the mission where they near killed ’im last time?”
Titus nodded as another pair of soldiers brought up the rear of the short procession behind their prisoner. “I think they’re taking the Injun to them holy padres as a gift. A wild Injun for them padres to make a slave.”
Kersey wondered, “They can’t have no way of knowing he’s their whores’ brother?”
“Hope not,” Scratch said with a long sigh, “C’mon, fellas. We gotta bust that Injun free.”
“Shit,” Purcell grumped as he crawled off his knees. “I just knowed you was gonna say that.”
They had no choice but to make a race out of it.
Mission San Bernardino wasn’t all that far away, through a short string of tree-lined hills. No time to gallop ahead and set up an ambush.
When the soldiers came in sight ahead of them, the adobe walls and flying buttresses of the mission off in the distance beyond the Mexicans, Scratch kicked his heels into the horse and roared, “It’s a stand-up ride-through, boys!”
As he shot away, the five others yipped or grunted as they jabbed their horses into a hard gallop. Now and then across those last moments as they raced up on the Mexicans, the soldiers disappeared around a bend in the wagon road, or were momentarily hidden by a stand of leafy trees. They were taking a leisurely pace with their prisoner and their march.
With less than sixty yards separating the trappers from the enemy, one of the soldiers suddenly turned and peered over his shoulder. He nearly spilled off his horse when he twitched in surprise and fear, whirling back around in the saddle so quickly that one of his boots slipped out of its stirrup. He called out—the man next to him jerked around to look back down the trail.
Then they both started yelling to the pair in front. Frederico did his best to turn at the waist, unable to accomplish much with his legs tied under the horse’s belly. When the two guards in the lead slowed up, the Indian’s horse nearly collided with them. With a struggle Frederico managed to keep himself upright as the animal lurched to the side of the road. All four of the soldiers reined their horses around, putting themselves between their prisoner and the Americans.
Bass figgered the soldiers had to be surprised to see the Americans show up. They must have believed all the trappers were wrangling the stolen herd right about then, on their way up to the mountain pass. Besides, the guards could have no idea why the
“Empty their saddles, boys!” he bellowed as he brought up the long flintlock.
Tugging on the back trigger to set the front, Titus attempted to match the bob and surge of the horse beneath him. Finding a target—
But the Mexicans fired first. A ball whirred past Scratch’s shoulder like an angry hornet. One of the horses behind him cried out. Then came the loud clatter as the animal went down. In a fury again at the scorching, weepy flesh wound on his side, Scratch squeezed down on the front trigger, felt the rifle’s sharp-edged butt plate slam back against his chest.
Passing through the billow of gray gunsmoke at a gallop, he watched the lead ball knock the soldier heels
