Thanks for nothing, Fargo thought, as the Indians prodded him and the girl into the fire pit, turning their backs to the post. She would have been better off dying by Lieutenant Duke’s knife than dying with him here tonight—slowly, by fire.
Valeria didn’t seem to feel the same way, however. Fargo was amazed at how stoically she suddenly seemed to accept her fate.
As three warriors held the rifle and the bows on her and Fargo, the fourth bound them to the cottonwood pole with coiled rope. The rope was wrapped around their bodies and the pole between them from their shoulders to their ankles, drawn so taut that Fargo could take only shallow breaths.
The brave had no sooner knotted the rope around the base of the pole than a distant drum began to throb, and the Indians—old and young warriors, old and young squaws, children, and their dogs—began to filter onto the ceremonial grounds from the lodges. A handful of warriors rode in on sweat-lathered mustangs, dismounting and howling victoriously, as though fresh from a raid, joining the milling throng around the fire pit.
When they’d all gathered, dancing and singing, dogs barking and running with the children, a torch shone in the direction of the village, a bright, flickering light in the thickening darkness.
“Here we go,” Fargo muttered.
The girl, out of sight behind him, on the other side of the pole, said, “Skye?”
“Still here.”
“I would never have admitted this under ordinary circumstances, but…” Her voice trailed off uncertainly, dwindling beneath the din of the surrounding revelers.
“If it’s a long confession, you’d best hurry.”
“I love you.” Valeria paused as the drum’s beat grew louder, the torch grew brighter before Fargo. “I fell in love with you the moment I first laid eyes on you in Mandan.”
“Figured as much.”
In the corner of his right eye, Fargo saw her head turn sideways to the pole. Rage trilled in her voice. “You
“Right changeable, aren’t we?”
A rock careened out of the milling shadows of the crowd to his left, struck the pole just above his and Valeria’s heads. A little boy, naked and holding a short, feathered lance, ran into the crowd, grinning devilishly.
“You little urchin!” Valeria cried. “Can’t you people raise your children any better than that?”
The drum grew louder. Fargo stared straight ahead as a tall, blond silhouette and a stooped, stocky figure approached through the willows, flanked by braves carrying torches, the hide lodges lifting conical shadows behind them.
Lieutenant Duke, wearing nothing but a loincloth, a red bandage on his upper right arm, moccasins, and a hide thong around his head, grabbed a torch from a brave, held it aloft, his eyes fluttering, trancelike, as he sang in the ethereal, ceremonial tones of the Assiniboine. His tattooed breasts were hideously scarred from the sun dance ceremony.
Light, sparking embers, and shadows danced bizarrely.
Beside Duke, clad in warbonnet and buffalo robe, the regal Iron Shirt thumped the drum in his hands, taking little march-dancing steps, rising on the balls of his feet, as he and Duke drew up to the ring of branches mounded about the cottonwood post.
The pair stopped in front of the ring of wood piled haphazardly around the stake, about ten feet in front of Fargo. Both men locked gazes with the Trailsman. Iron Shirt’s tobacco brown eyes were glazed with solemn religious fervor. Lieutenant Duke’s blue eyes, above small lightning bolts of chokecherry die on the nubs of his sunburned cheeks, owned as much zeal as Iron Shirt’s, but the white man’s zeal was sheathed in raw, blind insanity.
The man should have been locked up in the funny house. Instead, here he was, having thrown in with one of the most powerful war chiefs on the Great Plains, exacerbating Iron Shirt’s hatred for the whites. In addition, he’d convinced Iron Shirt that he had a direct link to the Assiniboine war gods, and could lead him in war.
As Duke and Iron Shirt sang, Duke’s features garish in the light as he waved the torch, the Trailsman spied the princess he’d coupled with last night, standing about ten feet to Lieutenant Duke’s right.
Beside her stood the gray-haired crone who had whipped Valeria’s bare bottom. On the other side of the crone stood another, heartbreakingly pretty Indian girl—obviously the princess’s sister though slightly taller, her belly rounded with child.
Duke’s child, judging how the girl stared at the crazed white man with gooey, proprietary admiration.
The princess who’d shared Fargo’s robes last night held a fox cloak around her shoulders, her hair glistening in the firelight. She must have sensed his stare. She turned toward him, gazed at him obliquely, then quickly turned to the two men leading the ceremony, drawing her cloak tighter about her shoulders and shaking her head haughtily.
Fargo turned back to Duke and Iron Shirt still singing and waving the torch and thumping the drum while the throng sang and danced and the children laughed and the dogs barked.
Fargo clamped his jaws and shouted, “Just get on with it, you long-winded sonso’bitches!”
As if to comply with the Trailsman’s wishes, Duke moved to his right, Fargo’s left, and touched his torch to the dry wood. The brittle brush instantly caught fire, glowing, sparking, and smoking.
The wind pushed the smoke toward the stake, making Fargo’s eyes sting. Valeria coughed and swung her head from side to side.
Still singing, Duke walked past Fargo, to Fargo’s right, and touched the torch to the brush at the west end of the ring. He danced back toward Iron Shirt, singing, dancing, and waving the torch, his blue eyes flashing the religious zeal of the unequivocally mad, and reclaimed his position beside Iron Shirt.
As the flames began leaping up from the wood on either side of Fargo, the Trailsman coughed and blinked his burning eyes. The heat pushed against him, sweat gushing from his pores and dribbling down his chest and arms. He heard Valeria coughing behind him, felt her fighting against her stays.
He glanced at Iron Shirt. The old chief held Fargo’s gaze with an enraged one of his own, lifting his right fist, clenching it furiously.
The war chief’s expression tightened, and the anger in his eyes was replaced by a vague surprise. Through the undulating heat waves, Fargo saw a black circle in the middle of the old man’s chest.
The Trailsman blinked. Had the circle been there before—some talisman or war marking?
As though wondering the same thing, Iron Shirt glanced down, stumbling straight back and dropping his drum at his feet. He looked up again, brown eyes glazing, and the report of a high-caliber rifle echoed above the crowd’s din.
A fraction of a second later, there rose the buoyant bugling of a cavalry horn.
15
As the peal of the bugle cut across the night, evoking a collective grunt from the Indian revelers, Lieutenant Duke turned to Iron Shirt. The chief raised his hands toward the bullet hole in his chest, and dropped to his knees.
The crone standing between the two pretty princesses to Fargo’s left began shrieking like a witch with wolves on her heels. At the same time, rifles popped above the fierce attack cadence of the growing bugle cry.
The gunfire rose from the buttes above the river, as well as from the flats straight east, and the Indians— women, children, old warriors, and young braves—began scattering south and west. Several of the armed braves loosed war cries, looking around wildly while raising their feathered lances. A half dozen others gathered around Iron Shirt now lying belly down in front of the fire.
Coughing and blinking against the smoke and leaping flames around him, Fargo turned to see Lieutenant Duke running toward the lodges, shouting orders for the others to grab their weapons and hold back the blue army hordes.
Behind Fargo, Valeria gasped and groaned at the wafting smoke and leaping flames.
