Above, the Indian carrying Valeria dropped a leg over the stockade wall. Valeria clutched the pointed log tips as the Indian pulled her over the top. Fargo thrust his right arm at Valeria’s hand, wrapped his fingers around hers.
The girl screamed as her fingers slipped from Fargo’s. Fargo lunged for her hand once more. But it was gone, leaving only the sharpened log ends she’d been clutching and a couple of strands of long red hair wisping from slivers.
The shooting ledge bounced and shuddered beneath the Trailsman’s boots. He looked around. Braves ran toward him from both sides of the ledge.
Fargo grabbed a Colt revolver from the holster of a dead soldier on the ledge, thumbed back the hammer, and triggered one shot left, another right. Then he bounded up and over the stockade wall, dropping down the other side and landing on both feet, bending his knees to absorb the shock with his boots.
The girl screamed once more—a thin, vibrating rattle dwindling into the distance. The Trailsman turned to see the brave running north through the ankle-high grass, a gray shadow in the dying light, the girl flopping down his back, red hair flying.
Horseback Indians galloped in circles as rifles spoke from the stockade wall. The attackers seemed to be withdrawing, loping away or sprinting off toward the horses they’d left when they’d stormed the fort. Several lay humped in the grass, bleeding, while a couple crawled, groaning or wailing their death songs.
Fargo leaped over a dying warrior and stretched his legs in the direction of the brave retreating with Valeria. A couple of arrows stitched the air around him, bullets from the fort whistling over his head, but he continued pushing off his heels, raising his knees high, scissoring his arms, bounding after the brave.
He crested a low hump of ground tufted with young chokecherry shrubs, and felt his gut knot with frustration. About forty yards ahead, a brave on a cream horse led a tall paint toward the brave carrying Valeria. Both braves whooped and shrieked victoriously as the first brave threw Valeria over the paint’s back.
Fargo cursed, his breath rattling in and out of his laboring lungs, and increased his speed. The thunder of hooves suddenly grew out of nowhere to flank him, horses snorting and blowing. Fargo kept his gaze straight ahead, on the brave now mounting the paint behind Valeria.
He closed the gap to within ten yards.
The brave with Valeria turned his head toward Fargo, grinning maniacally while Valeria, lying belly down across the horse before him, kicked and thrashed. Fargo threw himself forward, preparing to bolt from his heels to throw the brave from the paint’s back. But before he could set his feet, a horse’s head smacked his right shoulder blade.
Suddenly, he was airborne, twisting and pivoting. The ground came up to smack him hard between the shoulders, the back of his head feeling as though it had just been cleaved by a war ax. He slid through the grass, the ground raking him, tearing at his buckskins and making his spurs ring.
As the horse that had rammed him continued past, more hooves thundered, making the ground shake. Fargo lifted his head, blinking the stars from his eyes.
A zebra dun closed on him, blocking out the dull green sky and the first kindling stars. The brave on the zebra’s back screamed, mouth and eyes wide, as he stretched a nocked arrow back behind his right ear, aiming at Fargo.
The Trailsman threw himself belly down on the ground. At the same time, he heard the whistle of the arrow and felt the wind of the horse passing over him, a hoof nipping his calf.
The brave who’d just passed over him and the brave who’d sent him wheeling galloped off after the brave who’d nabbed Valeria, all three horses turning gradually west and disappearing into the thickening prairie shadows.
Fargo glanced ahead. Not two feet away, a painted arrow shaft angled up from the ground, its point buried in the short grass between a small sage shrub and a flat, lichen-mottled rock. The arrow was fletched with raven feathers, bespeaking the Raven Clan of the Blackfeet, a people Fargo had last seen in their customary stomping ground near the Milk River paralleling the Canadian border in northern Montana Territory.
Pain lanced the back of his head, driving deep into his shoulders and down his spine. Fargo let his head sag back against the ground, noting the dwindling of the rifle fire and of the hooves clomping around and behind him.
He was vaguely aware of time passing, then, as if in a waking dream, a man’s deep-throated voice called his name. Spurs chinked. Prairie Dog Charley called again, his voice and spurs growing louder. There was a flapping sound, like a holster smacking a thigh. A bulky silhouette dropped down to Fargo’s right, sheathed in the smell of sweat, tobacco, and gunpowder, and a thick hand clutched Fargo’s arm.
Prairie Dog was breathless. “You still kickin’, Skye?”
Fargo lifted his eyelids, which seemed weighted down by an unseen hand.
“I see you still got your hair, you son of a bitch!” said Prairie Dog, kneeling beside Fargo and whipping his head around cautiously. “How you’ve managed to keep that thick mane after all these years in Injun country, I’ll never know!”
Fargo lifted his head slightly, wincing at the daggers of pain. “The girl,” he croaked. “They got the major’s daughter…”
“You think I’m deaf, blind,
“Don’t need a sawbones,” Fargo growled, rising clumsily, nearly tripping over his own feet as he stared after the fleeing Indians. “Have to get after the girl.”
“You ain’t gettin’ after the girl tonight. Those savages’d love to pick us off in the dark.”
Fargo cursed and let Prairie Dog lead him back toward the stockade. A few shots rose from inside the wall— no doubt soldiers finishing off wounded Indians. The rolling terrain around Fargo and Prairie Dog was eerily silent in the aftermath of the raid, with here and there a dark body humping up above the grass or a riderless pony dropping its head to graze.
In the far distance, the fleeing raiders yowled like coyotes over fresh carrion.
“How many of our men bought it?” Fargo asked.
“Hard to tell. I’d say a dozen, maybe more. Good thing we had our best riflemen on the shooting ledge.” Prairie Dog spat. “As soon as they got the girl, the whole bunch skedaddled. Almost like she was what they came for.”
He and Fargo were twenty feet from the wall when the double doors shoved outward with a raspy rake of unoiled hinges, the door bottoms crunching cacti and sage and raising dust. Obviously, the doors on this side of the stockade were rarely used.
The silhouettes of a half dozen soldiers in various condition of dress jostled out, holding rifles high across their chests and swiveling their heads around nervously. The group opened to reveal two more men moving slowly behind them. One—an older gent with long gray hair in a ponytail falling over his shoulder and wearing a tattered red robe and slippers—held the other around the waist as they shuffled toward the Trailsman and Prairie Dog.
“Fargo, is that you?” the major barked, his voice pinched with pain. “Don’t tell me those savages got away with my daughter!”
As the soldiers fanned out in front of the wall, crouching over the fallen Indians and prodding the bodies with their rifles, Fargo and Prairie Dog drew up before the major and the gray-haired gent, doubtless the camp medico.
Ten or so inches of an arrow shaft sprouted from the major’s left shoulder, which meant the point was protruding from the man’s back. He must have taken off his tunic before the attack; he now wore only a white, long-sleeve undershirt and suspenders. The blood had formed a dark stain down the front of his shirt to his cartridge belt. His red hair was mussed about his hatless head. Howard’s right hand was wrapped around the shaft where it met his shoulder, blood glistening in the ambient light, and he staggered on his booted feet as though drunk.
“They got her, Major.”
“Christ!” Howard winced and groaned, stumbling back against the doctor. “I told her not to go traipsing about the grounds after dark.”
