14
Skye Fargo was not a man to give up easily, but after trying several times to loosen both his rawhide bonds and Valeria’s, and receiving nothing for his efforts but broken, bloody fingernails, he threw in the cards.
He’d never be able to break the stout cottonwood post to which he and the girl were tied, but he gave it a couple of furious attempts…receiving little for
The Indians only watched and laughed, a couple warriors wandering up to point out Fargo’s and the girl’s privates. One grabbed her breast, then sprung away, laughing, as she lunged to slap him. A stocky, middle-aged warrior who seemed to enjoy impressing the younger braves, came up and urinated on the post that Fargo was trying to pry out of the ground. Laughing and tucking himself back into his loincloth, he walked away, muttering to the others about dressing for the ceremony.
Fargo slumped down beside Valeria, on a dry side of the post, and propped his elbows on his naked knees. The girl hung her head and sobbed, which she’d been doing for the past few hours. Fargo didn’t try to comfort her. She’d seen the wood the braves had gathered and chopped and seen, too, the post they’d erected in the middle of the fire pit. She’d read enough stories of Indian atrocities to know what the post was for.
She and the Trailsman were not to be stabbed or run through with war spears. They were to be burned at the stake, naked as the day they were born.
He turned to the boys tossing the chopped wood around the base of the stake, then glanced at the sky. The sun was nearly down, deep shadows bleeding out from the hills and knolls. The water gurgled beyond the cattails and willows.
He was still staring in silent frustration at the brush along the stream when, just after sundown and during the kindling of the first stars in the east, a drum began throbbing somewhere on the far side of the village.
The girl started.
Fargo turned to see five braves walking toward him through the willows, their purple shadows raking the sage and buck brush clumps. Three were bare-chested while one wore a tunic of bobcat hide with several emblems painted on it. Their eyes were dark, faces expressionless. The man in the tunic carried a wide-bladed, bone-handled knife down low in his right hand, while one of the others carried a spear. The other three fixed bows to arrow strings, angling the bow tips threateningly toward Fargo and Valeria.
Fargo stared hard at the approaching braves but directed his words at the girl. “Don’t show fear. They don’t respect fear, only bravery.”
“Does it really matter at this point?”
“Just do as I tell you, damnit. It’ll go worse if you show sign of weakness. And, if you see an opportunity, run to the river and swim for your life.”
“What about you?”
“I’ll put in a good word for you with the war gods.”
“Thanks.”
“Don’t mention it.”
The approaching braves spread out in a semicircle around Fargo and Valeria. The one in the tunic, the oldest of the five, gestured for the two captives to move back away from the pole.
When his orders had been obeyed, he stepped forward, crouched, and chopped through the two cords connecting Fargo and Valeria to the cottonwood post. As the man straightened, Fargo eyed the knife in his hand. If he could somehow grab it and chop the leather strap binding Valeria’s feet, he might give the girl a chance, however slim, to live.
The Indian followed Fargo’s gaze to the knife in his hand, and smiled. He stepped back, grinned conspiratorially at the other braves flanking him, then turned back to Fargo, open challenge in his eyes. He extended the knife toward the Trailsman in his open palm, as though daring him to grab it.
The Indian then closed his hand about the knife handle, swung his arm down to his right side, and snapped it up. The knife careened about six feet over his head, turning end over end once before falling. Falling, it turned end over end twice more before the handle dropped back into the Indian’s extended hand.
The Indian stared with wide-eyed mockery at Fargo, then grinned broadly, his flat cheeks dimpling. He cut his eyes toward the other braves, who chuckled.
Fargo laughed.
The laugh died on his lips as he lunged off his bound feet, throwing himself up and forward and chopping his bound fists down against the hand in which the Indian lightly grasped the knife. The brave gave a startled grunt and stumbled straight back as the knife hit the ground in front of his moccasins.
Before the other braves realized what had happened, Fargo grabbed the knife, then twisted around and sprang toward Valeria, diving toward her feet. With a single chop, he cut her ankles free.
“Run!” he shouted, as an arrow parted his hair and sliced into the ground behind him.
He quickly chopped through the ties binding his own ankles, and straightened. An iron-bladed hatchet careened toward him at the end of a naked brown arm. Fargo ducked. The hatchet whistled over his head, blowing his sand-crusted hair.
Instinctively, he thrust the knife forward and up.
The Indian grunted sharply, and warm blood gushed over the Trailsman’s right fist. Before he could pull the knife out, an arm snaked around his neck, drawing his head up as it tightened, pinching off his wind and blood, and making his head feel like an overfilled balloon. Each heartbeat felt like a hammer smashed across his brain plate.
As the Indian drew him back and down, he glimpsed Valeria running off to his left, toward the confluence of the two streams. One of the other braves was close on her heels, yowling as he dove, wrapping his arms around her feet, tripping her. She fell face-first in the brush, screaming.
Fargo dug his fingers under the arm of the brave strangling him. Seeing two other braves standing before him, arrows aimed at his face from two feet away, their faces pinched with silent fury, he opened his hands, turned them palm out in surrender.
The arm of the brave in the wolf-hide tunic slackened around Fargo’s neck. One of the braves before him slitted his eyes, drew his aimed arrow back slightly.
The brave under Fargo asked the enraged brave, in Assiniboine, if he would cheat the war gods’ fire. Both warriors quickly lowered their arrows. The arm drew away from Fargo’s neck, and the warrior in the wolf-hide tunic shoved him aside, rising and cursing in Assiniboine as he turned away from Fargo to the brave kneeling with the knife still embedded in his belly.
Calling the brave a girlish fool to be killed so easily, he reached down, pulled the knife from the brave’s bloody gut. The brave threw his head back screaming, then fell straight back in the brush, thrashing. The warrior in the wolf-hide tunic extended the blood-drenched knife toward Fargo, wagged it up and down from a good five feet away, the mockery in his eyes replaced by wary respect.
Swallowing, trying to reopen his pinched, battered windpipe, Fargo straightened. Behind him, the girl sobbed and kicked against her captor, who dragged her by the hair through the brush, and tossed her down at Fargo’s bare feet.
“Pick up your whore, white man,” the warrior in the wolf-hide tunic ordered, grabbing Fargo’s own Henry repeater off the ground, racking a fresh shell in the chamber, and aiming at Fargo’s head. “Then over to the fire pit, where the war gods will enjoy seeing you dance together in flames.”
Fargo reached down to where the girl sobbed, legs curled, her head buried in her arms. He grabbed one of her arms, gently drew her up beside him. She no longer tried to cover herself, and her bare breasts, sandy and dusty and spotted with grass seeds, jostled and swayed.
“Sorry,” he grumbled as the braves flanked him from several cautious feet away.
She rose up on her tiptoes, kissed his lips, then turned to let him guide her toward the fire pit. “Thanks for trying, Skye.”
