on the man’s shoulder, another hand around the pipe itself. “No telling how close them brownskins could try crawling up on us to put a big hole in one of you.”
“The man’s right,” Jake Corn agreed. “No pipes.”
Then Titus went on to remind them all they must stay close to the ground when they felt the need to move about the corral so the evening sky would not backlight them. No sense in learning the hard way if those Sioux and Cheyenne had any true marksmen lying out there in the night.
Later, after the water carriers returned and the men scrounged through possibles sacks for some dried meat or a little pemmican, feeding their wounded first, Scratch could no longer put off the chore. Crabbing over toward the far corner, he rocked up onto his knees and toes to quickly yank aside the front of his breechclout. Here and there in the corral, others were doing the same—every last one of them finding it all but impossible to make water crouching on his knees. Not a one of them dared to stand in doing their business. Too risky, what with the warriors who might well be slipping up in the night.
When finished, Titus shuddered, sensing how quickly this high prairie cooled off once the sun had been sucked from the sky. Dragging his rifle beside him, he did his best to hold his breath while he crabbed back over to the mule’s carcass where he struggled to free one of the thick, wool blankets. It would have to do: his other blanket and the buffalo robe were hopelessly pinned beneath the mule, its hide, the blanket, and the robe all bristling with more than half a hundred arrows. Draping the lone horse blanket across his shoulders, he left the stinking gut pile and the mule’s riven belly behind. Reaching his saddle horse, he sank back against its backbone and let out a sigh.
He pulled off his wide-brimmed, low-crowned hat and flopped it on his belly as he allowed his head to collapse back among a few of the arrow shafts prickling the carcass. He was weary but doubted he could really sleep. Instead he lay watching the stars crawl overhead, inch by inch, listening to the muted sounds of the others, listening for any suspicion of the enemy.
He wondered if she would be watching this same sky too, way up there in Crow country. As she stared up through the smoke hole at that triangle of sky near the top of her mother’s lodge. While Waits-by-the-Water rocked their children to sleep in her arms … singing softly to them, making up those hero stories about their father.
Scratch didn’t realize he had fallen asleep until the quiet whispers of those nearby stabbed through his dreamy reverie. It really had turned cold. He shuddered and ground the heels of both hands into his eyes. Blinking them open, he found that false dawn would arrive momentarily. But for now the skyline behind them was no more than a sliver of gray suspended between a blackened sky and an even darker horizon.
“ ’Bout time you woke up.”
Bass rolled to find Baker sliding up on his haunches, dragging half a buffalo robe with him.
“You been up all night?”
“When I woke up a bit ago, I seen you was asleep,” the redhead explained. “So I decided to stay awake till you got done.”
Looking around at the dim forms taking shape in the first filtered gray of predawn, Bass said, “I figger nothing much happened.”
“One of the wounded fellas died,” Baker declared. “But he went quiet.”
An icy drop of cold snaked its way down his spine. He shuddered in the half-light. “Goddamn, but I hate when a man dies noisy.”
Better that they go like Jack Hatcher. Now, there was a man what knew how to die. Go out singing his favorite song. Mad—Jack—Hatcher. For as noisy a life as the coon lived … he sure went quiet.
Titus asked in a whisper, “No one heard nothing from out there?”
Baker admitted,. “Not that I know of.”
“I better see the others is ready when first light comes,” Scratch said, dragging the blanket off and reaching for his brown, weathered hat. He tugged it down over the black bandanna. “Maybeso you try for some shut-eye while you can, Jim Baker.”
“Uhn-uhn. I’ll come with you,” the redhead volunteered. “Make sure every man’s up and fixed for powder.”
He knelt there, staring at the youngster a moment more, feeling the grin starting to crease his leathery, oak-brown face. “Just like a pup, ain’cha?”
“What you mean by that?”
Wagging his head, Titus set off with Baker at his elbow. “I ’member when I was young and fool-headed like you—back when I could go days ’thout any sleep.”
“I’ll be fine,” the tall one protested.
Finally Bass stopped, grinning as he slapped a hand on Baker’s shoulder. “I’ll bet you will at that.”
One by one the others who had been dozing amid the carcasses were coming awake. The two who were badly wounded soon began to ask for more water. Bass and Baker looked over what remained in the canteens, then asked for volunteers to crawl down to the creek with them before the sky got any brighter. No small wonder the men in that corral had already drained nearly every drop they had brought back from the stream at twilight, what with the way the sun had leached so damn much moisture from them throughout that long, long day beneath the cruel, late-summer sun. Come nightfall and their first chance to slip down to the creek, the men were nigh as parched as a green hide dusted with canning salt and a dose of alum.
As the light slowly ballooned around them, Scratch could see that someone had laid a greasy leather shirt over Fraeb’s head. The old German’s mortifying remains still sat on the ground, leaning back against that hundred- year-old fire-charred stump. But it was clear one of the men simply couldn’t stand looking at that ugly, gap-toothed, death grin of Henry Fraeb’s any longer. Maybe one of the half-superstitious Frenchies, he figured. They were Papists, to be sure.
This bunch would have to decide what to do about their dead when it came time to skeedaddle out of there.
“Them’s the only ones I see,” a man whispered huskily.
“Where? Where?”
There was a lot of muffled shuffling when most of the sixteen who could still move on their own crawled over to the near side of the corral. Every last one of them staring quiet as deer mice at the slope while the coming light continued to give a changing texture to the hillside where the warriors had gathered throughout the previous day. At first, Scratch was not sure what he was seeing—not until enough gray seeped sidelong through the mouth of the valley to their right, exposing more of the slope.
Nothing there but some sage and stunted cedar, along with a scattering of jack pine. No horsemen, as far as he could tell.
“I see ’em!” one of the others called out a little too loud.
“There—on top of the hill!”
“That all there is?”
Plain as the coming sun that six or seven of them, no, at least eight, had stood watch atop that crest through the short summer night.
“I don’t see no more of ’em.”
Hopeful, Titus strained his eyes to be as sure as the rest. If the breast of the hill was no longer blanketed by the horsemen, if those chanting women and old men no longer bristled against the skyline, perhaps this coming sunrise would not be their last.
“Could be they’re only guards,” Baker offered as he stopped at Bass’s hip.
Scratch nodded while many of the others murmured in wonder of just what this meant. “Maybeso they hung back to see if these white men would slip off during the night. To wait up there till first light to be sure we was still here.”
He wanted to laugh a little, perhaps cry too—quickly glancing around their prison, that corral of stinking, putrefying horses and mules.
“Their magic is broken,” Bass explained barely above a whisper.
“What was that?” one of the men asked, edging closer on a knee.
“I said their medicine’s broke.”
“Let’s get,” came the first suggestion.
