Prairie Dog. “Does it hurt bad, Mr. Charley?”
“Hell.” Prairie Dog gritted his teeth as he leaned over his knees. “I been stung worse by horse fli—achh! Goddamnit, Skye, what the hell you tryin’ to do to me?”
Fargo had nudged the arrow slightly with his right index finger, to see how firmly the tip was set. “Horse flies, huh?” He made a face. “Looks to me like that point is resting against a rib. No way to push it through
“Ah, Lordy—no, I reckon not.” Prairie Dog rocked forward, then back. “You’re gonna have to leave me while you two go on north. Don’t worry—I got a bottle of whiskey and my sweet Brunhilda.”
“I’m not gonna leave you, you old bastard.”
Fargo walked over to his saddlebags, withdrew a whiskey bottle and tossed it to the old scout, who caught it one-handed, wincing, then grinned and popped the cork. He began tipping the neck to his mouth, glanced at the girl sheepishly, stopped, and offered the bottle to her.
When she shook her head, staring down at him with a pained, concerned expression, he chuckled, relieved, and threw back a shot. He raised the bottle to check the level. “With the bottle I got in my own pouches, that’ll do me till tomorrow, anyways. You go on, Skye. Those Injuns’ll be scourin’ this country in no time…’ specially since I ventilated old Iron Shirt.”
Fargo had no intention of leaving his old friend here alone to die. He fished a bundle of spare clothes from his saddlebags and, untying the leather thong knotted around the bundle, turned to Prairie Dog, frowning. “What about those shooters in your attack party?”
“They’re what’s left of a lost patrol out of Fort William. They’d been
“They were holed up in an old prospector’s sod shanty. Didn’t have a single horse amongst ’em, and they were shot up somethin’ awful. One had even lost his hand. But they still had the bark on, and some ammunition, and they all wanted a go at those Injuns—even if it was a
“We all agreed to split up after our so-called attack. The soldier boys—them that made it—are probably circling back to their soddy. I told ’em I’d send help when I could find help my ownself.”
“You had me fooled.” Fargo had pulled on a pair of long underwear and was stepping into his spare buckskin breeches. “I thought for sure you were a whole company.”
“I reckon my buglin’ helped.” Prairie Dog tossed back another drink. “I was a bugle boy for C company back in Illinois, when we was fightin’ the…”
He let his voice trail off, lowering the bottle and lifting his head to peer along the black ridge rising before him. Fargo had heard the distant thump of a half dozen sets of horse hooves and the muffled, guttural strains of Indian talk. The hooffalls grew slightly louder in the west before gradually dwindling as the Indians, skirting the canyon, continued north.
Then there was only the sigh of the wind in the brush along the ridges and the solitary cry of a nighthawk.
“They’ll be kickin’ around here all night,” Prairie Dog growled. “You two best split the wind, head back to the fort, and don’t stop till you get there.”
Fargo continued dressing. The only garments for which he didn’t have spares were his hat and boots. He’d have to go bareheaded, but he found a threadbare set of old moccasins at the bottom of one of his saddle pouches.
He pulled them on, then walked over to Prairie Dog, drew the man’s bowie knife from its sheath, and grabbed the bottle from the scout’s hand.
“Hey, what the hell…?”
“Just need a little to sterilize your knife.”
“My knife? What for?”
Fargo splashed whiskey on both sides of the razor-edged bowie. “That arrow has to come out of there, or you’ll bleed dry.”
Groaning, Prairie Dog told Fargo he’d wait for a sawbones, but the old scout knew from experience that he wouldn’t make it through the night with the arrow in his back. He removed his hat and sagged belly down into a thick patch of grama grass along the base of the rocky ridge. After another long pull from the bottle, he let Fargo cut his shirt away from the shaft.
Valeria knelt near the scout’s head, watching Fargo begin cutting through the bloody skin along the protruding arrow, an expression of horror and fascination on her regal, disheveled features. Behind her, the horses, tied to shrubs, stood tensely, nickering no doubt at the distant sounds of the tracking Indians and the nearer smell of blood.
Prairie Dog had had arrows dug out of his hide before. Biting down on a bullet while Fargo worked, cutting down along the shaft to dislodge the steel tip wedged between two ribs, he grunted and cursed, apologizing to the girl for his language.
Valeria crouched over the scout’s back, wincing as Fargo removed the bloody shaft from the wound, and tossed it into the brush.
Panting, Prairie Dog turned his head to one side. “Goddamn, Skye—pardon my blue tongue, little lady—but I do believe you enjoyed that!”
“Ain’t done yet,” Fargo grunted, holding up a needle and length of catgut thread from his sewing kit, threading the needle by the light of the rising quarter moon.
He’d just finished sewing up the old scout’s wound and splashing whiskey over the sutures when Valeria said suddenly, “Listen!”
Fargo corked the whiskey bottle and froze.
Hooves thudded only a few yards back along the gully.
16
Fargo motioned for Valeria to remain silent as he rose from beside Prairie Dog and slipped his Henry from its saddle boot. Quietly levering a shell, he ran a settling hand down the Ovaro’s long, white-striped snout—both the pinto and Prairie Dog’s blue roan had been trained not to start in tense situations—and walked back along the narrow defile.
Near the intersecting ravine, he stopped as guttural voices rose softly, and an unshod hoof clacked off a rock. Fargo cat-footed forward and pressed his back to the rocky wall of the defile a few feet back from the intersecting ravine, half hidden from the ravine by brush and a scraggly cedar.
He held the Henry straight up and down before him, breathed shallowly, listening as the horses moved slowly toward him, hooves clomping, a couple of the Indians muttering quietly. When the horses were close enough to smell, Fargo tensed, pressed his back harder against the rock wall, and squeezed the Henry.
Bulky, black shapes moved on his left. A horse blew. Another shook its head. Men breathed.
Fargo didn’t turn his head to look directly at the intersection of the two defiles, but he knew the Indians were staring down the one he was in. He felt the warriors’ eyes penetrating the darkness and hoped like hell he blended with the rock wall and the cedar.
Someone clucked, and hooves thumped, growing louder until a horse’s head moved into the narrow defile from Fargo’s left. The rider drew back on the rope halter, stopping the horse about ten feet in front of the Trailsman. The horse was a steel dust with a small blue Z within an orange sun painted on its neck.
The horse stared straight down the narrow defile, toward Prairie Dog and Valeria about fifty feet beyond. The dun twitched its ears and lifted its snout, working its nose.
Fargo’s back tightened. Would the horse sense the other two horses, smell the blood that Prairie Dog had lost?
Still pressing his back against the rock wall, Fargo looked up through the branches of the gnarled pinnon. The tall, light-skinned man sitting the saddle was wearing Fargo’s high-crowned, broad-brimmed hat, blond hair falling
