Above the Americans reverberated the commands of the Mexican officers, echoes ordering the soldiers down from the timber and rocky cliffs, goading them to close quickly on the outnumbered and surprised Americans. Those horses grazing nearest the camp grew restless, stirring this way, then that, like a flock of wild wrens as stray balls landed among them, gunfire drawing closer and closer, voices growing strident and desperate. Shots ricocheted off the rocks with shrill cries of warning.
The wild horses were the very first to break, lunging past Titus, sweeping some of the California horses with them as the nervous animals blocked him from reaching the boulders where the rest of the Americans were retreating one by one by one.
“They got knives on their guns!” Adair screeched.
Huffing wearily, Scratch whirled, glancing over his shoulder—finding that the Mexicans did have long knives pinned beneath the muzzles of their rifles. Four of those bayonets glittered in the remnants of the fire’s light that gray morning as the
He whipped back around to find two of the trappers standing atop the rocks, making conspicuous targets of themselves as they leveled their weapons on those four soldiers closing in on Scratch. He and Adair were trapped— frightened horses milling between him and the boulders where the others had taken cover.
One of the Americans fired. Scratch watched the bullet graze the forestock of a soldier’s musket before it slammed into the man’s chest, shoving him backward off his feet as his own weapon discharged into the air.
Dropping Adair’s travois, Titus reached down and yanked his rifle out of the wounded man’s hands. He dragged the hammer back as the weapon reached his hipbone. Set the back trigger and leveled the muzzle at the closest Mexican.
He felt a ball rake his upper arm with fire as brilliant flame jetted from his own barrel. Not far past the shreds of burning patch that had exploded from the flintlock’s muzzle, he watched the soldier spin around on his boot heel, screwing himself into the grass with a grunt of surprise and pain.
Another gun roared on those rocks behind him. A third soldier pitched backward off his feet, landing flat on his back in the grass. Only one more of them to keep off Adair, one more Mexican who instantly stopped, eyes wide with terror as he gazed around him at his three dead companions.
“Get over here, Titus Bass!” another voice boomed from the rocks.
Turning on his heel he found only a few horses blocking his retreat now. Laying the rifle alongside Adair’s hip, he yanked one of the pistols from his belt, then slapped it into Silas’s waiting hand.
“Use it when they get close,” he huffed. “Only when they’re close enough you’re sure to kill one of the bastards!”
His lungs were screaming with hot tongues of breathless fire by the time he lunged to the bottom of the boulders and dropped the travois. Quickly kneeling beside Adair, Scratch raised one of the trapper’s arms. He ducked under that thick blacksmith’s arm and rolled Silas across the back of his shoulders. Dragging his own legs beneath him, Titus rose slowly, unsteadily, with the heavy man’s bulk centered atop his spine.
“Merciful a’mighty!” Adair gasped in pain as his wounded leg dragged off the ground and slammed into the back of Scratch’s hip. Silas clutched desperately at the front of Titus’s shirt with one of those broad-beamed blacksmith’s hands.
“Help him!” Williams was roaring as Bass stumbled uncertainly around the base of the rocks.
Coltrane was at Titus’s side in the next heartbeat. Short and stocky, but built like a whiskey barrel—Roscoe slipped under Adair’s other arm and dragged Silas crosswise onto his own shoulders. With his two thick arms looped under Adair’s armpit and one of his legs, Coltrane sidestepped into a narrow crevice between the jumble of boulders as lead smacked the rocks around them.
One of the Mexican’s bullets grazed the boulder just above the spot where Scratch knelt to retrieve his rifle. With a shrill scream of its own, a tiny fragment of granite was shaved off near his ear. The long cut it opened along his left cheek burned with a tongue of icy fire.
Looking up, he found Tom Smith holding his hand down for him. Grasping Peg-Leg’s wrist, Scratch dragged himself through the crevice behind Coltrane and Adair.
“You’re the last,” Smith growled.
“The bastards’re chivvying the herd!” someone roared above them.
“Kill as many of ’em as you can!” Bill Williams ordered. “We’ll drive ’em back, then go round up them horses again!”
But there were too many Mexicans.
That was plain enough for Titus to see. They were all over the rocks, bristling at the edge of the cliff to their left, more shoving their way through the frightened horses. Vaqueros and soldiers both. Yelling at one another now that they knew they had the horse thieves surrounded and whipped. Yelling at the Americans to surrender or be killed.
“S-surrender?” Williams screeched as Smith translated.
Two more balls of lead smacked the rocks behind them.
“Don’t fret none, Bill,” Peg-Leg said. “Ain’t none of us goin’ to no California hoosegow for a hanging now.”
“They’d sooner kill us all as put us behind their bars,” Scratch explained. “If we surrender, we’ll be helpless. That’s when them bean-bellies gonna cut us down.”
“That’s right,” Kersey snorted. “They won’t waste no trouble hog-tying us back to California.”
“Maybeso we’re gonna go down here and now,” Scratch told them all as he rammed a ball home against the breech of his rifle. “But leastways, fellas … we can show these
* The Mexican term for the “wild” or “gentile” Indians who had been acquired by the Franciscans or the ranchos through capture or purchase.
14
He wondered if the Mexicans hung horse thieves. Maybe they wouldn’t waste time with a rope—just stand them up in front of a firing squad, their backs against the fort wall, blindfolded or not, and let these bad-shooters bang away at them.
Right then Bass didn’t know which way he preferred to die. Hanging seemed like such a terrifying, prolonged way to go, especially if his neck did not break at the bottom of the drop: suspended, swinging there until he choked to death, legs kicking while he soiled himself.
Any time these greasers hit something with their muskets, it was more idiot’s luck than it was skill. Chances were a firing squad would botch the job but good, wounding him badly rather than killing him outright with a clean bullet through the heart. Then he’d be no better off than swinging from a noose, forced to endure the agony of his wounds until he bled enough to pass out, no longer in misery.
“How many goddamned greasers they bring after us?” Thomas Smith shrieked as he whirled with those two big horse pistols in hand: .62-caliber smoothbores they were.
Their attackers weren’t all soldiers. Not all wore those short blue jackets draped with braid and the flat- brimmed hats. The rest must damn well be vaqueros come after the thieves—maybe to even a personal score for all the killing done yesterday morning in the valley.
“We need powder!” one of the trappers yelled.
“What’s in my horn s’all I got,” another explained.
Kersey’s voice bellowed, “How you fixed for balls? Anything less’n fifty-four’ll work. Who can spare me some balls?”
“Here, Elias,” Scratch called out, digging into his pouch as he crabbed over. “I got a handful for you.”
Appreciation lay deep in Kersey’s eyes as he scooped out more than a dozen from Titus’s palm. “Ain’t this a
