Bama was puffing and blowing after his skirmish. He hunched down in an awkward, one-sided position, his face as white as a frog's belly, and that was when I noticed that he had been hit.
It was his leg, about halfway between the knee and the hipbone. The Indian rifleman, I guessed, must have done it with that single shot that he let go with.
“Well,” Bama said between puffs, “I guess this about frays it out, Tall Cameron. You'd better make a run for it. There can't be many more of them left. I've still got a bullet. I can stop one of them.”
“Shut up and give mea knife.”
He didn't have a knife, but the Indian on top of the mule had one, and I used it to slit Bama's trousers up to the hip. There was a lot of blood and it was coming out in spasmodic little spurts, and I figured that an artery or something had been hit. But still it wasn't too bad, everything considered. There was a clean hole where the bullet had gone in and come out. There didn't seem to be any bones broken.
I said, “Just keep your eyes open and watch our friends out there.” Then I hacked off the leg of his trousers, wound it up, and tied it loosely above the bullet hole. I got my empty pistol between the leg and the bandage for some leverage, and began to twist. After a minute the spurting stopped.
I took his rifle and put it on top of the mule where I could get to it.
“Just take it easy for a few minutes and we'll be out of here.”
But Bama didn't believe it, and I guess I didn't either. As Bama had said, it began to look as if our string had about frayed out. I could see them moving around out there again—or rather, I could feel them. They were getting closer all the time, but they never showed enough of themselves to shoot at. It was very quiet.
And then it wasn't quiet any longer because they were coming after us.
Bama just sat there looking at them. They split the afternoon wide open with their yelling and shooting—six of them, and I remember thinking that it might as well be six hundred.
They came at us from three sides and it seemed to take them a year to reach us. I had the impulse to shoot as fast as I could at anything that moved, but I choked it down and took my time. I made the one cartridge in Bama's rifle good, but it didn't even slow them down. Bama seemed to have completely disconnected himself from the whole business. He sat there smiling that half-smile of his, as if a hole had suddenly opened up for him and he could look right through that impenetrable barrier that separates the living from the dead. I don't know what he saw there on the other side, but whatever it was, he had reconciled himself to it, and he was waiting for it with no bitterness and no regret.
But not me. I hadn't gone to all this trouble only to be cut down by a few savages. All I had to do was hold onto my guts. I raised my pistol and waited until it seemed that I had the muzzle in an Indian's mouth. Then I pulled the trigger. He was the fast one of the bunch. He was the eager one with a whetted taste for blood, and I could almost smell his rancid breath in my face as the pistol jerked in my hand.
I could count him out. He was traveling the road to hell on a fast horse, and now I could turn my attention on the others and try to figure out a way to make two bullets do the job of one. That was what I was thinking, and the next thing I knew he was hacking at my skull with a hand ax.
I don't know how he did it. I'd never seen a man take a .44 bullet in the face before, and keep coming after you, still determined to kill you. We went down in a bloody tangle of arms and legs and my pistol went flying out of my hand. Something hit the side of my head then. It felt like a mountain falling on me, but I guess it was just a glancing blow from the Indian's hatchet. A smothering black fog rolled in. It was a cool, comfortable fog where there was no noise and no pain, and the most pleasant thing in the world would be just to lie down and let it wash over me.
But I kept fighting. Reflex, I guess, took over where the brain left off, and I grabbed hold of an arm and held on until the fog drifted off somewhere. We seemed to wrestle for a week, kicking, biting, scratching there on the rocky ground. He was gouging at my eyes and giving me the knee every chance he got, but I still held onto that arm. I seemed to be covered with blood and I couldn't tell if it was coming from me or him, or maybe both of us. I held onto that arm.
When it was over it was over all of a sudden. He went limp and the hatchet dropped out of his hand and that's all there was to it. I shoved him away. I knelt on my hands and knees and tried to gulp all the air in Arizona into my lungs. “Well,” I heard somebody say, “the sonofabitch finally decided to die.” It didn't sound like my voice, but it was, I guess. And then—finally—I remembered the other Indians.
I couldn't move. I squatted there like a poled steer and wondered why I wasn't dead. What had happened to the other Indians that had been in on the charge? It worried me, but I didn't have the strength to do anything about it.
I gulped some more air into my lungs. My stomach was sick and fluttery and the muscles in my legs were as weak as buttermilk. Maybe a minute went by while I got a hold on myself. I was pretty sure that those Indians hadn't decided to knock off work and go home just when they had us where they wanted us. Maybe it was one of those miracles that you hear about but almost never see. Like Daniel and the lions. But I didn't put much stock in it. I hadn't led the right kind of life for that sort of thing.
I had a few more theories, but I discarded them. It was time to take a look.
The first thing I saw was Bama. He was still sitting there behind the mule, holding onto the bandage around his leg. He looked as if he knew the answer, but he wasn't saying anything unless I asked him, and I was still too addled to think up words to put into questions. I stood up, finally, and saw that the Indians had been taken care of. They were scattered around carelessly like dirty laundry in a bunkhouse, and just as lifeless. One of them had reached our mule fortress and had died with a knife in his hand just as he was about to go over the top. His trouble had been two rifle bullets in the chest, spaced almost a foot apart. Not very good shooting. But good enough. By that time I had the answer. Johnny Rayburn was walking across the flat with a rifle cradled in the crook of his arm.
I don't know how he did it, but he must have slipped down from the high ground some way and then crawled for about a quarter of a mile on his belly across the flats. The important thing was that he had done it. While all the others had been running, he had been figuring out a way to save my hide.
I guess I hadn't realized before just how close I had been to dying. The thought of it put a watery feeling in my guts.
“He's going to be a big help to you, isn't he, Tall Cameron?” Bama said dryly.
The words jarred me, because that was exactly what I was thinking as the kid came toward us. With some training, with some of the greenness rubbed off and some experience rubbed in, he would be a big help. He would be somebody I could trust; that was the important thing.
That was when I started changing my plans, putting the kid into them, taking Bama out of them. Bama couldn't help me. Not with that leg. But the kid... That was something else again.
Johnny Rayburn grinned nervously as he came up to where we were. He looked awed by the thing he had just done.