one.
“Blazes!” Williams thundered over his shoulder as he plopped on his belly and slid the barrel of his rifle atop a small pack of furs. “Bring up them other guns!”
Rising onto one knee, Titus took aim offhand at the flitting forms charging in a zigzag toward the trappers’ camp across a wide front. He was the first to fire. An instant later a half dozen guns exploded. A heartbeat behind them even more. Beyond the pall of gray gunsmoke, brown bodies flopped onto the pale, sandy soil. Writhing, screaming, clutching at glistening red wounds penetrating their sun-blackened bodies.
That sudden, unremitting horror knocking holes in their ranks brought the rest skidding to a dusty halt. Some knelt to grab their wounded and their dead, turning in their tracks to drag bodies back to the rocks as more than a hundred voices cried out for retribution in a frightening cacophony.
“Merciful a’mighty!” Silas Adair cried. “How the hell many of ’em are there?”
“Diggers!” Scratch yelled as he dug out a lead ball from his pouch and thumbed it into the muzzle of his rifle without taking the time for a patch. He could tell the lands and grooves of the bore were already fouling with powder.
“Usual’ they’re more nuisance than trouble,” Williams growled. “But this arternoon I s’pose they figger we’re easy pickings—”
He and the rest were suddenly interrupted, falling quiet the instant they became aware of the herd: hundreds of horses neighed and whinnied, growing nervous, frightened by the unexpected gunfire. In a matter of moments, the horses would be heeling about, thundering away across the broken canyonland.
“They come for the horses?” Reuben Purcell asked. “Let the li’l bastards have some of our goddamned horses!”
Bass angrily rammed the ball home, eyeing the Diggers as they appeared to be forming up for another charge. “They want our plunder too, Rube.”
“Shit!” Williams muttered, rolling close with his rifle. “An’ we was almost back to the Rocky Mountings with them horses too.”
Answering the cry from one throat, the enemy swarmed out of the rocks for another assault. Midway to the white men, most of the Indians stopped to fire their short bows—some standing, others dropping to their knees— then yanked more of their short, deadly arrows from rabbitskin quivers looped over their walnut-brown shoulders.
Here in the desert of the Great Basin, these impoverished, barefooted people subsisted on tiny animals, insects, and even an occasional wild or stray horse they managed to capture. With such a capricious and precarious existence, Bass realized, it was no surprise that these Diggers were emboldened by the wealth of the white men— compelled to attack for no loftier reason than survival itself.
The white man’s plunder, not to mention those hundreds upon hundreds of enticing horses, together represented a continued existence to these primitive, feral, distrustful Indians.
Polette Labrosse grunted next to Scratch.
Bass immediately spun on his knee, catching the half-breed Frenchman as the man collapsed, clutching one of those tiny arrows where it was lodged in the muscles of his neck. Labrosse laced his fingers around the shaft, tugging frantically as he crumpled onto the wind-polished hardpan desert sand. The blood was dark, so dark it appeared to be about as black as a glistening Popo Agie tar as it oozed through the half-breed’s fingers.
“C-cain’t get it out!” he gurgled, bright gushes pouring from his tongue, spilling down his chin.
“Leave it!” Scratch ordered, enfolding the man in his arms, squeezing him against his chest as Labrosse began to gag his life away. He knew the man was good as dead where they sat.
Polette Labrosse pulled his head away from Bass’s chest, sighed a little as he gasped, “Kill dem for me, Scratch. Kill dem all, would you?”
Without another noisy gurgle, the half-breed’s eyes rolled back and he went limp in Scratch’s arms, surrendering to that blessed unconsciousness come as he lost a gush of blood from his mouth. Titus let the man sink gently to the sand, then whirled around on his knee, dragging out his priming horn.
Sprinkling a hurried spray of fine priming powder, he dragged the frizzen back over the pan and yanked back on the rear trigger as he jerked the rifle into position against his shoulder. Once more, the enemy was everywhere around them. So many of them rushing in that they became a blur.
But in gazing down his barrel, it wasn’t the charge that snagged Scratch’s attention. It was some two dozen short, brown warriors turning away from the charge unexpectedly, wheeling aside to make a wide loop around the trappers’ camp where they reached the outskirts of the herd.
Waving their arms and screaming like demons, the Diggers succeeded in spooking the nervous horses. Bolting off, their tails held high and their eyes as big as Mexican dollars, the animals scattered this way and that, racing north in a leaderless stampede.
“Ah, shit!” Williams bellered like a buffalo bull with its bangers caught in catclaw brush.
“There go our goddamned horses!” Purcell screeched in pain.
Not only were the trappers under attack by an overwhelming number of daring bowmen … but in one fell swoop the white men had just lost all their hard-won California horses.
17
Somehow they managed to hold the Diggers back that third furious charge, then a fourth, but less concerted, rush too.
Between each wave of brown raiders, in those nerve-racking interludes while the trappers prepared for the next assault, the arrows never stopped falling out of the sky or whispering through the brush—most of the missiles falling harmlessly among the stunted cedar and sage. But a few of the deadly stone points randomly struck close to some of the men, causing no more than a nuisance.
But what proved even worse was that, over time, more than two dozen of the arrows—their small, stone tips meant for bringing down rabbits—did manage to strike much bigger targets: tormenting the last of the riding horses individual trappers had picketed close at hand, in camp. What with all the gunfire, screaming warriors, and a steady rain of stone-tipped arrows, these few frightened animals were being driven even more mad, becoming even more noisy as they fought their pins and handlers.
Then one of the riding mules collapsed with a brassy
“Lookit them li’l brown niggers!” Dick Owens cried, pointing at the two dozen or so warriors who had raced in a wide loop around the trappers’ camp and were scampering away after the fleeing herd.
“They’ll run from now clear to Judgment Day,” John Bowers declared. “Never gonna catch them California horses!”
But it was only a matter of minutes before those Diggers appeared to realize the futility of their footrace, grinding to a halt and turning around out there against the distant horizon. Failing to herd those frightened, stolen horses, the warriors sprinted back to rejoin the fight.
Moment by moment now, the brown noose formed by those Digger warriors perceptibly drew tighter and tighter around the white men. And as it did, the Indians were sure to grow more bold, certain to inch all the closer with their deadly bows. With the sheer number of arrows landing among them, the first of those terrible little stone-tipped missiles pierced Toussaint Marechal’s thigh. Then another arrow clipped Francois Deromme in the arm. The damned things came floating down at an arch, falling out of the late-afternoon sun, finding a man here or there. No matter where the arrows struck—in the arm, or the leg—they managed to leave a nasty and oozy wound, even where a tiny flint point slashed along Joseph Lapointe’s skull, scraping a bloody furrow just beneath that skin from the outer edge of his eye clear back to where it protruded from his ear, dripping crimson on his shoulder.
With a sudden grunt of surprise, Bass sensed the stone tip pierce the thick ham of his left buttock.
“Damn you, sonsabitches!” he roared while collapsing onto his opposite hip, seizing the arrow’s shaft in his free right hand.
