stood left of the wagon. Something had been attached to the trunk with a feathered arrow. Fargo moved down the knoll and circled the wagon, squinting at the tree trunk until the object attached to it became the head of the Frenchman’s freighting partner, Jan Hallbing.
The arrow had been drilled through the man’s forehead. The eyelids, brushed by wisps of wheat blond hair, drooped as though with extreme fatigue. The tongue protruded from the mouth, angled slightly as though to lick blood from the swollen lower lip. Blood dribbled from the ragged flaps of torn skin at the neck, streaking the cottonwood’s trunk below.
So much for Hallbing’s truce with the Assiniboine.
Fargo wheeled suddenly and peered back in the direction of the roadhouse. His heart thudded as a slender column of gray-black smoke rose in the far distance, nearly too thin to see from this vantage point—a good three miles—unless you were looking for it.
The roadhouse was on fire, which probably meant that Smiley’s relations with the local aborigines had chilled along with Hallbing’s. Dropping his gaze and shading his eyes from the sun’s glare, Fargo could make out the jostling brown blurs of distant riders moving toward him across the rolling prairie.
“Mount up!” the Trailsman shouted as he ran back toward the pinto.
Kneeling where he’d left her, holding her arms across her stomach, Valeria turned toward him, her gaze both questioning and fearful.
“More company!”
Fargo paused to lift the girl brusquely to her feet then half dragged, half carried her over the rise to where the Ovaro waited, craning its neck to stare back toward the roadhouse. The horse had obviously scented the Indians; it twitched its ears and nickered anxiously, prancing in place.
Fargo threw the girl up behind the saddle, then grabbed the reins and swung into the leather. He didn’t have to spur the horse into motion; almost before he’d gotten seated, the pinto bulled forward into the cattails and willows, leaped over the rushing creek, and bounded up the opposite side of the cut.
As the horse gained the crest of the ridge, snorting and blowing, hooves thumping, Fargo turned back to see the jostling brown blurs moving toward him. The Indians were a mile away but moving fast and spread out in a loose group, with several holding war lances or rifles.
Behind them, the smoke from Smiley’s roadhouse ribboned skyward.
“What’s got into those crazy savages?” Fargo muttered. He gave the pinto its head and tipped his hat brim low. The horse galloped up and down the gentle prairie knolls and hogbacks, swerving wide of the occasional alder or cottonwood copse.
With the pinto’s blazing speed, it wasn’t long before Fort Clark rose up out of the prairie ahead, at the confluence of two streams—Little Porcupine Creek and the Mouse River. A low jog of steep buttes rose a quarter mile from the fort’s right wall, and a hat-shaped bluff towered over a cottonwood forest on the left.
Clark was a stockade-surrounded fortress hewn, adzed, and back-and-bellied from trees felled in the breaks of the Missouri River. From this distance, and even with its blockhouses and guard towers looming over its four corners, the fort appeared little more significant than a small schooner on a large sea of gray-green grass and scattered oak, cottonwood, and ash. But Fargo had never been as happy to see one of these far-flung military outposts in his life.
The happiness was short-lived.
Valeria tapped his shoulder and said in a frightened voice shaken by the horse’s pounding strides, “Fargo… over there!”
He looked west. A half dozen painted warriors bounded over a low, rocky rise, maniacally heeling their mustangs into turf-chewing gallops, angling southeast on an interception course.
Swirling war paint glistened on their cherry red faces. Their hair—braided, feathered, greased, and trimmed with rawhide strips and bone amulets—blew out behind them. The knife slashes of their mouths spread with glory whoops and battle cries. Several braves raised their ash bows or plucked arrows from quivers flopping down their backs.
“Keep your head down!” Fargo ordered, clawing his .44 from its holster.
The pinto jerked a glance toward the Indians thundering toward them on the right, bounding over the prairie swells, their horses stretched out in long, leaping strides. The pinto gave an anxious snort and lowered its head, stretching its own legs, driving ahead even faster.
Before Fargo, the fort rose up out of the bunchgrass and wild timothy. To his right, the Indians drew within fifty yards. Several loosed arrows. They whirred like bats around the Trailsman’s head, one cutting close enough that he could hear the shriek of the feathered shaft before it broke on a lone boulder to his left.
Another knifed the air just behind Valeria, who gave a miserable cry.
Fargo loosed a couple of errant shots at the Indians. They didn’t so much as hesitate but continued on their driving, slanting course, which in another hundred yards would put them between the fort’s front stockade wall, and Fargo.
But then the pinto began to pull away, and the Indians’ cunning, kill-crazy expressions tensed. All but that of one young warrior on a small blue roan. He kept pace with the pinto.
Drawing to within thirty yards of Fargo’s right stirrup, and taking his braided halter ribbons in his teeth, the glory-drunk brave knocked and cocked an arrow. Fargo extended the .44 in his right hand, aimed as well as he could from his jouncing seat, and fired.
The Colt roared. The brave loosed the arrow, which flew wildly above and behind Fargo and Valeria.
At the same time, the bullet plunked through the Indian’s breastbone and drove him off the right side of his horse. As he got tangled with the roan’s scissoring legs, the horse gave a shrill scream, and then horse and rider both hit the ground and rolled and somersaulted wildly, dust puffing up around their wind-milling limbs and the scattering arrows as though from a cannon ball explosion.
“Ah, shit!” Fargo muttered, watching another brave whip his lathered horse up on his right and raise a Henry rifle to his shoulder.
Fargo stiffened as he saw the brave angle the barrel to deliver a killing shot to the Ovaro’s beautiful head.
6
Fargo knew he had no time to shoot the brave bearing down on the Ovaro or to turn the mount away without spilling the horse, himself, and Valeria. He flicked back the Colt’s hammer, angled the pistol straight out toward the brave galloping about twenty yards off Fargo’s right stirrup.
Before Fargo could trigger the .44, the brave’s rifle spoke.
Fargo squeezed the Colt’s trigger. At the same time that the revolver leaped in his hand, the Ovaro lurched. Fargo knew his own shot had sailed wide of the brave, but the brave’s rifle dropped from his hand, hit the ground, and tumbled back behind the racing mustang. Then the brave himself flew straight back off his striped blanket saddle, as though a noose had been pulled taut around his neck from behind. He rolled off the horse’s rump, flew out over the tail, and hit the ground, rolling and tumbling out of sight in a sifting cloud of dust, grass, and dirt clods.
The Trailsman glanced at the pinto, relieved that the horse was still striding unharmed, snorting and blowing as it raced toward the stockade looming ahead. As Fargo’s eyes raked the wall, he became aware of pistols and rifles popping and booming, smoke puffing from above the wall’s pointed log tips. Several soldiers stood on the shooting ledge on the inside of the wall, and were firing over the wall toward the Indians, most of whom now drew back on their horses’ reins while another screamed and flew off the back of his racing mustang.
Movement ahead caught Fargo’s eye, and he turned forward to see the stockade’s double doors split apart and swing toward him. Two soldiers in dark blue tunics and tan kepis pushed out between the parting doors. Two dashed right of the gate, one left, and, dropping to their knees and raising their Springfields to their shoulders, bore down on the Indians now drawing their horses to skidding halts on Fargo’s right.
