pan. “White men ain’t been hoo-rooed by Sioux and Cheyenne much afore this, you see. Lookit their women up on that hill, singing and hollering their medicine for ’em, screaming billy-be-hell for their men to rub us out, all and every last one.”
“They can do it,” Baker groaned with resignation. “Damn well ’nough of ’em out there.”
“But they won’t,” Titus argued. “Ain’t their way to ride over us all at once. Sure they could all come down here an’ tromp us under their hooves. They’d loose a few in rubbing us out but they’d make quick work of it.”
“W-why ain’t they?”
“There ain’t no glory in it, Jim.” And Bass grinned, his yellowed teeth like pin acorns aglow in the early- afternoon light. “Them are warriors. The gen-yu-wine article. And the only way a warrior gets his honors is in war. This here’s war—a young buck’s whole reason for livin’. Wiping us out quick … why, that ain’t war. That’s just killing.”
Baker wagged his head and rolled onto his knees again to make a rest for his left elbow on the ribs of his dead horse. “I don’t rightly care what sort of game them Injuns is having with us. I figger to do my share of killing.”
Bass rocked onto his rump and settled the long barrel atop the fist he made of his left hand, which rested on the horse’s broad, fly-crusted front shoulder. Green and black bottleflies already busy laying their eggs in the ooze and the gore.
Gazing up the slope, he was surprised to find the woman had moved. Damn, if she wasn’t coming down toward the bottom close enough that he might just have a chance to knock down Fraeb’s warrior princess.
Closer, closer … come on now, he heard himself think in his head as she and her unmounted courtiers inched down the hillside, their shrill voices all the more clear now in the late-afternoon air. If he held high, and waited for that next gust of hot wind to die … he might just hit her. If not the warrior princess, then drop her horse. And if not her pretty spotted pony, then one of them others what stood around her like she was gut-sucking royalty.
He let out half a breath and waited for the breeze to cease tugging on that thin braid of gray-brown hair that brushed against his right cheek. Bass quickly set the back trigger, then carefully slipped his fingertip over the front trigger, waiting, waiting—
When the rifle went off he bolted onto his knees to have himself a look, not patient to wait for the pan flash and muzzle smoke to drift off on the next gust of wind.
Her brown-spotted pony was rocking back onto its haunches, suddenly twisting its head and neck as the double handful of courtiers scattered—diving and scrambling off in every direction. As if plucked into the sky, the warrior princess herself sprung off the rearing pony the moment its forelegs pawed in the air a heartbeat, then careened onto its side.
A few of the more daring attendants immediately surrounded the princess and started dragging her up the slope, away from the fighting, out of range of the white man’s far-reaching weapons.
Scratch watched how reluctant she was to back away, amused at how she continued to stare over her shoulder in utter disbelief as she was yanked up that hillside, her eyes transfixed on the tiny corral where the trappers were somehow holding out. Perhaps she even wondered just which one of the cursed, doomed whiteskins had killed her beautiful, invincible pony. Likely heaping her vilest curses on the man who had gone and soured her powerful medicine she had been using to spur the naked horsemen to perform their death-defying charges.
“And well you should do your share of the damned killing, Jim Baker,” Bass replied to the redhead as he rocked backward and dragged the long barrel off the horse’s front shoulder.
Scratch swatted at a dozen flies hovering around his sweaty face and tugged the stopper from the powder horn between his teeth. “Because killin’ ever’ last one of these bastards we can drop afore sundown comes is the only way this bunch of half-dead hide hunters is gonna slip outta here when it gets slap-dark.”
*
*
2
But there wasn’t a man among them willing to attempt slipping off before moonrise lit up this high desert.
Good men these were, but … Scratch realized most of them were followers. Not that they lacked in courage, just that they weren’t eager to strike out on their own in the dark without Henry Fraeb leading them back to the Green River.
“He’s for sure dead?” Bass asked some of the first to crawl up to meet him near the tree stumps.
Jim Baker sat staring at how Fraeb’s corpse leaned back against one of the stumps, his jaw hanging open in a horrifying grin, rivulets of blood dried over most of his face as it spilled from the bullet wound that had nearly blown off the top of his head. Baker shuddered and turned back to the council. “He sure does make a damn ugly dead man.”
“Remind me to say some kind words over your worthless, fly-blowed carcass when you go under,” Bass chided, jabbing an elbow into Baker’s ribs.
“Didn’t mean no disrespect by it,” the redhead grumbled apologetically.
Scratch turned from Baker and asked the group, “So how many of you gonna come with me?”
Not a one spoke up. The silence of that twilight council was almost suffocating to him. Bass slowly eyed most of the twenty others who huddled nearby in an arch around the dead booshway.
“Ain’t none of you got the eggs to make a break for it with me?”
“They’ll have scouts prowling,” Jake Corn finally put an argument to it.
“But they’re like to come at us again in the morning,” Bass grumbled to those men who first started to cluster near the center of their corral back when twilight began to erase the last of the day’s shadows. “How long any of you figger our powder to hold out?”
No one had an answer to that.
“I’m gonna stay,” Jake Corn volunteered bravely.
At least give the man credit for speaking up and spitting out his mind.
A lot of the half-breeds and Frenchmen nodded without saying a thing. Good, spineless followers they were. Almost made Scratch want to puke.
But he knew when he was beat. Knew how fruitless it would be to try to convert noisy cowards into quiet heroes. “Maybeso you’re right,” Bass relented, his shoulders sagging.
“I’ll go with you, Scratch,” Baker offered immediately.
He weighed it a moment, then decided. “Thankee, Jim. But, maybeso we all ought’n go … or we all ought’n stay. Best we’ll hang together or we’ll fall separate.”
“Leastways, we got us some cover here,” Elias Kersey offered.
Then Rube Purcell added, “And we know they ain’t likely to run us over tomorrow if’n they couldn’t today.”
Several of the faceless men grunted their assent.
“It gets dark enough,” Bass suggested, “some of us oughtta belly down to the river and bring back some water.”
Five men volunteered. He could tell that handful really were brave men. They just needed to be told what to do.
When the cloaking darkness finally came and the first faint stars were just beginning to twinkle in full radiance, the five crawled from the far side of the corral with what oaken and gourd canteens the whole bunch could find among the scattered baggage or tied to those saddles still strapped on the bloating horses.
Bass watched them go, then turned to catch one of Fraeb’s half-breed, no-brained Frenchmen loading his pipe bowl with shreds of tobacco.
“That spark you’ll strike gonna make for a good target of your poor self,” he growled as he closed a bony claw
