Colt then ducked as the horse galloped over him, wincing as a foreleg nipped his thigh.
When he glanced up again the brave was still somersaulting through the air to hit the ground on his head and shoulders, his neck snapping audibly to leave him quivering amidst the grama grass and pokeweed.
Behind the Trailsman rose a coyotelike yammer as the other six braves loosed war whoops and gigged their horses toward Fargo, two bearing down with rifles, two with bows, another with a war lance painted the gray and blue stripes of the Coyote Clan.
Straight ahead of Fargo, Lieutenant Duke cocked his arm and tossed his bloodstained knife. Fargo leaned sideways, and the blade sliced across his upper arm—a long but shallow cut from which blood glistened instantly.
The Trailsman snapped up the .44 and fired at Duke, flinching as the war lance whistled past him. The mad lieutenant howled and clapped a hand to his ear, blood seeping between his fingers. Fargo whipped his gun around and blew the brave who’d just thrown the war lance out of his saddle with two shots through his breastbone.
The brave hadn’t hit the ground before Fargo jerked suddenly, as though he’d been hit in the chest with a sledgehammer. An Indian galloping behind the brave he’d just killed screamed victoriously as his horse whipped on past Fargo, who glanced down to see a fletched shaft protruding from his left shoulder.
The Trailsman whipped around. The brave who’d fired the arrow reined his horse sharply with one hand while reaching into his quiver for another arrow.
Fargo emptied his Colt into the brave’s neck and chest, then ducked several bullets slicing the air around him. He dropped the Colt and grabbed the spare .36 from behind his cartridge belt.
Suppressing the hot, stabbing pain of the arrow in his shoulder, he began pivoting on his hips and heels, picking out the three other targets surrounding him, the .36 belching and smoking in his clenched right fist—
Staggering slightly, squinting through the wafting powder smoke, Fargo looked around.
Four braves lay silent and unmoving. A fifth was crawling feebly after the horses, head and hair hanging, blood painting a swath behind him. A sixth lay on his back, coughing between the somnolent notes of his death song.
The young soldier whom Duke had staked out, spread eagle to the sun, turned his shaggy head left and right and up and down, glancing around, terrified. His blue, yellow-striped uniform pants were threadbare. He wore no tunic, just a torn undershirt and one suspender. Blood glistened from the shallow cuts on his arms, thighs, and belly and from the cuts and bruises on his red-bearded face.
Beyond the young soldier, Duke was running straight west through the brush, toward where a steel dust mustang stood eyeing the man warily. Duke had lost his hat, and his yellow hair swung wildly across his broad, sun-bronzed back.
Fargo jogged around the staked soldier, wincing at the stabbing pain of the arrow in his shoulder, and raised the .36. Aiming quickly as Duke leaped onto the steel dust’s back, he squeezed the trigger.
Dust puffed behind the horse’s swishing tail.
The horse lunged forward, nearly throwing Duke backward. Clutching the rope reins, Duke glanced at Fargo, then grabbed the steel dust’s dancing mane as the horse broke into a ground-eating gallop, heading west.
Fargo drew a bead on the man’s bare back, squeezed the trigger, but the hammer pinged on an empty chamber.
Cursing, Fargo wheeled and ran back toward the ravine.
Behind him, the soldier shouted, “Hey, cut me loose, mister!”
“Hold on, soldier!”
The Trailsman pulled the Schuetzen out of the ravine by its barrel, ran back past the writhing, cursing soldier, making sure the muzzle-loader was ready for firing. He dropped to a knee, snugged the Schuetzen’s deep-curved, silver-fitted butt-plate to his shoulder, raised the rear leaf site, and sighted down the long, polished barrel.
Duke was a good two hundred yards away and dwindling into the distance, horse and rider bounding up a gradual rise.
Fargo adjusted the sites for the distance, snugged his cheek to the stock. Quivering from the pain in his left shoulder, he lowered the rifle, took a deep breath, fought the pain from his consciousness, and raised the rifle once more.
He had time for only one shot. If he missed, Duke would be out of range by the time Fargo could ram another ball down the rifle’s barrel.
The Trailsman lined up the front and rear sights on Duke’s back, barely the size of a moth wing from this distance, and dwindling with each passing second. Holding his breath, relaxing against the lightning searing his shoulder, he held the rifle still, and took up the slack in his trigger finger.
The Schuetzen’s butt-plate slammed against his right shoulder, though he felt it more in the one from which the arrow protruded. He lowered the rifle, blinked against the wafting powder smoke.
One, two, three seconds passed.
Duke continued galloping up the rise. He turned his head slightly as the rifle’s blast reached his ears, then threw up his right arm in the Assiniboine victory wave, and turned forward.
Fargo gritted his teeth. “Shit!”
Less than ten feet from the crest of the distant rise, nearly four hundred yards away, Duke’s head jerked suddenly forward, both arms flying straight out from his body. The lieutenant sagged down toward the lunging horse’s right shoulder, then, as the horse crested the rise, buck-kicking fearfully, rolled off the steel dust’s side, hit the ground on his right shoulder, tumbled head over heels, and slammed against a boulder. As the horse crested the rise and disappeared down the other side, Lieutenant Duke fell in a heap at the base of the rock, unmoving.
Hooves thudded to Fargo’s right, and he turned to see a brave gallop straight past him toward the rise. “Yem-seen!” the warrior cried, crouched over his bloody midsection, ramming his moccasined heels against the lunging pinto’s flanks.
Fargo let the heavy Schuetzen sag to the ground, then fell back on his heels, pain and nausea overwhelming him. He kept his eyes on the wounded brave until, having inspected Duke’s body, the brave continued shouting incoherently as he crested the rise and disappeared in the direction of the Indian village.
“You get him?”
Fargo turned. The young bearded soldier regarded him desperately, face etched with pain.
Fargo nodded as he gained his feet, groaning, and plucked a tomahawk from the belt of one of the dead warriors. He’d no sooner chopped the soldier’s limbs free of the buried stakes than he turned, cast one more glance in the direction of the dead lieutenant, and passed out.
17
Fargo had no idea how long he was out before he opened his eyes and found himself staring at a woman’s deep cleavage—the breasts pushing up from a wine red corset edged with white lace. The deep gap between the pale, lightly freckled breasts rose and fell slowly, moved toward Fargo slightly, and then a woman’s voice said, “How do the stitches look, Doctor?”
From Fargo’s left a man said, “They seem to be holding fine, and no sign of infection yet.”
There was the sound of a cork being popped from a bottle, and then Fargo’s left shoulder was set ablaze. He jerked and lifted his head, sucking air through his teeth.
“Skye,” Valeria said, gently pushing him back down on the bed. “No sudden movements, or you’ll tear the sutures!”
“Do as the young lady says, Mr. Fargo.” The doctor whom Fargo had seen earlier—tall, older, with iron gray hair pulled back in a ponytail, pince-nez glasses perched on his broad, pitted nose—rose from a straight-back chair on Fargo’s left. He dropped a bottle in a leather grip. “That’s a nasty arrow wound, and I had to stitch both sides—a
