“Once’t I hear dem Diggers eat their own chirrun when they get hungry ’nough!” Francois Deromme declared as he rode along, perched in his saddle above Titus, his left arm in a sling improvised from a black kerchief.
“Man’d have to be a animal to eat his own young’uns,” Joseph Lapointe grumbled.
“That’s what the hell they are,” Deromme argued. “I neber see’d it with my own eyes—but I hear more’n one man tell me dem Diggers get hungry ’nough, they eat their young.”
“Maybeso you’re right,” Lapointe agreed. “We all know them Mexicans ride up to this here country, for to steal women and young’uns, drag ’em back to Santee Fee and Touse for slaves in the fields. The Comanch’ and the Yutas do it, too—they’re always stealing Digger women and young’uns.”
“So you figgair dese here Diggers don’t give a damn ’bout their chirrun?” Deromme prodded.
“Look around you, fellas,” Scratch interrupted their discussion. “A empty belly in this here country gonna cry out for food only so long afore one of these red niggers gonna fill it any way he can.”
“You figgair they do eat their young, Bass?” Lapointe inquired.
With a halfhearted shrug, Titus said, “I figger these here Diggers gonna eat most anything they can put in their mouths just to stay alive.”
Rumors did indeed abound among the American fur men, not to mention those tales told down in the Mexican provinces, concerning the Diggers’ sacrificing their children to fend off starvation. Although no white man had ever actually witnessed such barbarity with his own eyes, many a trapper had seen how these pitiful wretches shamelessly abandoned their blind, lame, and young to die alone in the desert when fleeing from powerful attackers.
Another certainty that lent a weighty probability to such legendary cannibalism in the minds of these trappers was what this austere country did
Bright as the stars were that night, not to mention the illumination from a three-quarter moon, the wide and scoured trail wasn’t all that hard to follow through those blessed hours of darkness. And in those final moments before the sky began to gray off the east as they trudged along, it even grew outright chilly. Feeling a little weak from the loss of blood and not having a thing to eat in the better part of a whole day, Scratch damn well didn’t want to let the desert’s cold sink in clear to his marrow. He stopped to rest for a few minutes while he untied his trailworn capote from behind the saddle and pulled it onto his arms, knotting the sash around his waist.
Then he continued into what remained of the yawning, black desert night.
“You hear that?” Henry Daws asked.
The few came to a halt around Bass, quieting their animals as all of them fell silent. Listening.
There it was, for certain. The sound of gunfire. Not a rip-roaring battle of it—but a few shots echoing now and then. Of a sudden, they heard the low, rumbling thunder too.
“Dem’s horses!” Francois Deromme cried.
Jack Robinson cheered, “An’ it sounds like they’re coming our way!”
“Damn if they ain’t,” Bass cursed, his eyes flicking left and right, frantically searching for cover. “We better be finding us somewhere to get outta their way.”
“You figgair dem others find the horses?” Lapointe inquired.
“Sure as hell did find ’em!” Deromme declared. “Dey bringing the herd back for us.”
“Hold on—I callate you’ve got things all twisted up,” Bass argued, knowing full well there wasn’t a good reason the herd had turned around in its tracks and was headed for them. “Them horses is on the run.”
Robinson asked, “Bill and the rest got ’em all back from the Diggers, didn’t they?”
That thunder of the hoofbeats seemed to swell noisily in the next few heartbeats as Titus grappled with what to do. In moments the horses would be all but on top of the handful of white men.
“Head for them rocks, fellas!” Bass shouted, lunging away despite the agony in that ham. “Diggers or Californy horses—this here desert’s dead set on killin’ me afore I can get back to the mountains!”
At the very moment the eastern horizon turned a blood-tinged gray, the front ranks of the herd took shape out of that arid dawn. A dark, bobbing wave thundered toward the wounded and halt as they scampered for a low cluster of volcanic rock. The trappers reached their shelter just before the flying manes and fluttering tails took form out of the slanting gray clouds of dust. Intermingled with the pounding hooves arose off-key yips and coyote calls of excited men.
Titus held on to hope that it would be Bill and the others, bellowing on the fringes of the herd.
But when some three dozen of the stolen animals loped past the rocks, the cries and hoots came right behind them, more distinct. And something clearly wasn’t right about those calls.
“It’s the Diggers!” Lapointe shouted.
“Get down!” Bass ordered as he realized the horizon wasn’t darkened with horses. It was clotted with the warriors. “Get down outta sight!”
It was plain that these Indians who had attacked them were, at least for the moment, consumed with chasing after a few dozen of the horses on foot. They were screeching and screaming at the horses, driving them south by west back in the direction where the trappers had been camped. One of the Diggers appeared to spot Bass as the warriors loped past on foot, yelling at the horses, keeping the animals on the run. But none of the Indians stopped. As Titus waited to be discovered and overwhelmed, his heart pounding, more than a hundred of the short brown Indians streaked by, their knees pumping like steam pistons as they raced after their four-legged quarry.
Their shrill, intermittent cries and the hoof thunder quickly died, swallowed by the utter emptiness of that desert morning.
“They didn’t spot us!” Toussaint Marechal called out.
“Shit—they saw us,” Bass protested, relieved that so many of the enemy was now heading away from their line of march. “Had to see us when we ducked in here. They just wanted them horses more’n they wanted our sorry asses.”
“We better get moving,” Joseph Lapointe said as he stood and adjusted the bloody bandanna that covered one of his eyes. “Them brownskins might just turn on around and come back for us.”
“Let’s hope we can catch up to the rest of dem horses,” Marechal said as he hobbled out of the rocks behind the rest.
“Better you pray we catch up to Bill Williams and the rest of our boys,” Scratch argued. “To hell with them Mexican horses while there’s red niggers out to raise our scalps in this here desert!”
It wasn’t until midmorning, with the late-summer sun starting to do its evil work, when Francois Deromme first spotted the faint scum of a dust cloud hugging the horizon to the north. Minute by minute, the cloud grew, advancing on that band of wounded trappers.
“You don’t figger it’s ’nother bunch of them Diggers, do you?” Joseph Lapointe asked.
Bass shook his head. “Naw. Nothing gonna raise dust like that but a whole passel of hooves.”
But just to be sure they didn’t get burned, the trappers quickly looked about, spotting a likely outcrop of rocks where they might find enough room to conceal themselves and their horses.
On and on, minute by minute, the shimmering gold cloud gobbled its way across the desert toward them. From time to time, sunlight glanced like streaks of mercury, rays glittering from the density of the cloud. Then the first of the volving legs emerged from the base of the dust.
“It’s them horses!” Jack Robinson screamed with glee. “See? It’s our horses!”
In the next heartbeat, not only did the front ranks of the horses emerge out of the billowing dust, but also two riders—both of them whooping and yipping like coyote pups on the prowl.
“I’ll be go to hell and et for the devil’s tater!” Scratch cheered as he started hobbling into the open.
He ripped his wide-brimmed felt halt off his head and started waving it at the horses and that daring pair of riders out in the van of the herd. With all those animals racing directly at him—from where he stood right then it seemed as if the desert was belching free every horse that had ever come out of California.
At the head of the herd, those two riders pointed and waved their big hats, one of the horsemen angling off to his left. Once those animals in the front flanks were following him, the other horseman turned aside as the herd
