Only meat, he brooded as he gave the shaft a tentative tug. The torment was white hot, making him clamp his eyes shut with the diminishing waves of sharp, piercing pain—but he kept tugging nonetheless. No bone— nothing but meat—for that tip to bury itself into. Nothing at all like Ol’ Bridger’s arrowpoint, left to calcify in his back for more than three years.* So he managed to pluck the damned thing out of his ass with an agonizing, teeth-clenching struggle.
The sheer oozy tenderness of the wound, not to mention the ignominy of where he’d been shot this time, only served to make him all the madder at these exasperating enemies. Doing his best to shift his weight onto the opposite knee, Titus hurried through the ritual of reloading without wasting time digging for a greased patch to nestle the huge lead ball he shoved against the grains of powder he already had poured down the long barrel.
Aim, fire … then reload again—while the Diggers screamed at every charge and sang their death songs with every retreat. Aim, fire … then reload—while the trappers around him cried out when they were struck with an arrow, all of them cursing their little brown enemies, or shouting a fading encouragement to one another.
Damn, Scratch sulked angrily, chewing on the inside of his cheek, realizing just how thirsty he had become as their fight ground on and on. Just to think of it: here they were now, caught out in this godforsaken wilderness fit only for frightened ground rats, emaciated jackrabbits, and hairy spiders the size of a man’s tin cup—finding themselves with all but a handful of their horses run off. Put afoot here after all they’d gone through to steal those California horses, to rub the Mexicans’ noses in their theft. Stranded now in this blazing desert with no way out but to walk.
And to top things off, Bass knew with that jagged, seepy wound soaking the back of his breechclout, he wouldn’t be sitting a horse for days to come!
As much as the Diggers tried their damnedest to inch in close enough to attempt one final, deadly rush—they never worked up the courage to see it through. Wounded as some of the trappers were, they stoically, quietly, steadfastly went about their business tugging out the tiny stone arrowpoints, wrapping black silk bandannas around their bloody wounds, then went back to reloading, firing again, reloading and firing over and over as the shadows lengthened.
The sun settled to the far edge of the earth, and shadows faded there in the lee of those red-hued, iron- tinged rocks.
With that gradual, but most dramatic, change in the light playing off the huge boulders, all the fire gradually seemed to slowly seep out of the Diggers’ attack. One by one, and in small clusters, the warriors retreated behind the jagged rocks, slipping out of sight before they disappeared out of range—not only refusing to charge the thunderous guns anymore, but every last one of them choosing instead to race barefoot after those scattering horses.
“They got what they wanted,” Bass grumbled as the trappers watched the last of their attackers pull off and the desert fell quiet.
He tried to get up on one knee again, but that buttock still cried out in pain. The muscles had stiffened, cramping around the wound. Titus barely caught himself from falling to the side, then propped the rifle under his shoulder, pushing his way up on the good leg, refusing to think about what poison the goddamned red niggers had used to turn their annoying little arrowpoints into weapons that would bring a slow death.
“Daws, get a fire started,” Bill Williams ordered, more angry than a spit-on hen. “A big goddamned fire!”
“We gonna use that fire to light the night, Bill? Keep them Diggers off us?” Henry Daws asked.
“Yeah?” Pete Harris chimed in. “So’s we can see ’em coming after dark?”
“No, the fire I’m telling you to stoke ain’t for us,” Williams explained, his jaw muscles flexing in harsh ribbons.
Right then Scratch could read something in the older man’s eye that most of the younger men never would. Uncertainly, he hobbled up beside Williams and stopped to ask, “You fixing to roast some of this here meat, Bill?”
Williams nodded, a wild look to his bloodshot eyes. “Digger meat.”
In utter disbelief, Adair stuttered, “B-burn these here Injuns, Bill?”
“Damn right he is,” Titus confirmed.
“Y-you ain’t fixin’ to make meat outta these damn Diggers, are you!” Dick Owens shrieked.
“Meat’s meat,” Bill explained angrily, then turned to Scratch with a malevolent glint to his eyes. “You hear these whining squaws, Titus Bass? Men like you an’ me we ain’t never been so squampshus ’bout what we put down our feed bags!”
When Williams stomped away angrily, headed for the closest of the dead warriors, Rube Purcell stepped up and nervously asked Titus, “You two ain’t serious ’bout cooking them Injuns for us to eat?”
Bass stared at Bill’s back a moment more, then looked Purcell in the eye, declaring, “Maybeso we go an’ burn them dead niggers—it’s gonna teach the rest of ’em a lesson so they won’t follow us outta here.”
“That mean we ain’t gonna cook ’em to eat, right?” John Bowers prodded, wanting some real reassurance.
“Solitaire can eat Digger if he wants,” Titus grumbled. “As for me—I ain’t about to eat nothin’ or no
Samuel Gibbon asked, “Sounds like we’re gonna burn ’em?”
“Ever’ last hell-dog of ’em,” Scratch declared defiantly. “You heard Bill! Now build a fire! A goddamned
“We … we leaving, Scratch?” Reuben Purcell inquired as he came up to Bass’s elbow.
Titus pivoted around on his heel. “Damn right we’re leaving. We’ll count heads and what horses we got left. Bury them men we have to, drag the rest best we can. Once’t we get that fire blazing and them dead niggers throwed on the flames—we’re gone from here under them stars.”
Adair inquired, “Where you figger you and Williams gonna lead out tonight?”
Titus dragged the back of his hand across his parched, cracked lips. “Where, you’re asking me, Silas? Why— to see what horses we can still round up afore we push on for the Uncompawgray.”
Titus Bass elected to walk, leading his horse. It was that or suffer the agony of a saddle-pounding. That snare saddle with a thick leather mochilla draped over its frame simply wasn’t going to give his poorly placed wound the slightest comfort. Even with the furry padding of a small section of buffalo hide Scratch sliced from his sleeping robe, he found himself flinching with discomfort, if not wincing in downright pain when he tried to nestle down atop the saddle.
Unsteadily, he dropped to the hardpan desert floor, where he began to trudge the canyon ridges among the handful of their winged and wounded—those not able to move on their own. The rest hurried on into the dark with Bill Williams, following the wide, moonlit trail of the fleeing horses, their hoofprints dotted with the clutter of small moccasin tracks. Ol’ Solitaire had vowed he would make the Diggers pay for the trouble they had visited the trappers, even if Bill and the others didn’t get back but a dozen of those hard-won Spanish barb horses.
From time to time that evening, and on into the blackening of the desert night, Scratch turned to peer over his shoulder at that fading cone of flickering yellow light. A good thing the wind blew out of the west as evening came on, he pondered. The unearthly stench of those burning bodies was more than a right-minded man could stand. Not that Titus was squeamish—not in the least. Across all those seasons he’d spent west of the Big Muddy, after all, he’d killed enough of those who had attempted to kill him.
The Diggers could have sneaked up and cut out a small portion of the herd to feed their miserable selves, instead of attacking the white men settled down for some hard-won sleep, instead of greedily running off all those hundreds of California horses. Had the brownskins been satisfied at slipping off with just a few, chances were Scratch could have talked Williams and the others out of wasting any time or effort pursuing a paltry number of the scrawny animals.
But when those red niggers made it plain as sun they were out to kill white men, those red niggers deserved no quarter.
A man often made some allowance for simple-minded savages what didn’t know any better—but when the Diggers descended upon the trappers with their full intention of killing Williams’s raiders so they could steal everything of any glittering value … then the red-bellies sealed their own death warrants.
Out here in this hostile environment, just like the predator and the preyed upon—life had never been anything more than cheap.
