They rolled off Hatcher as Fish flew in the other direction, both of them wheezing from the strain, the weight, the bare-boned knowing they were locked in something from which only one of them would emerge.
Somewhere behind him Bass heard another gun roar. Not a pistol, but the sure-enough boom of a rifle. He wondered if it was another warrior’s smoothbore musket. They didn’t have rifled weapons—
Suddenly the warrior twisted himself on top of Bass, his left hand shoving Scratch’s head back into the forest floor. Bass felt the pine needles and dirt grind against the ring of flesh surrounding his bare skull, shooting through him with the heat of a dying star, as if his scalp were being torn from him all over again.
With his strength failing in the left arm as he held that big knife away from his face and neck, Bass surprised the warrior by letting go of the weasel-wrapped hair. In that instant the Indian glanced upward to find the white man’s hand—Scratch smashed the knife handle down into the Indian’s forehead. Again into the side of his eye socket … sensing the warrior’s struggle weaken.
Again and again he pounded the hard bone handle into the side of the enemy’s head, splitting open the skin over the eye, across the temple, blood coursing down over the ocher and brown face paint applied in crude lightning bolts.
The warrior’s left hand came loose first, releasing Bass’s hair, then shooting down to clamp around the white man’s throat.
Again Titus smashed the handle into the enemy’s face, feeling the cheekbone give way beneath his blow.
An instant later the warrior’s right arm weakened some more, beginning to drop as the Indian’s body seeped a little more of its strength.
Tightening his fingers around the knife handle, Bass brought the blade down now, striking savagely, slashing the warrior across the jaw, down the great muscles of his neck, across his windpipe.
Blood splattered over him as the warrior gasped his last, noisy breath, jerking back in black-eyed shock, yanking the empty hand from Bass’s neck to his own to vainly attempt to stop the spurts of bright blood.
Then his dark eyes widened all the more in sudden surprise, slowly looking down at the white man below him as Titus drove the knife home—right into the warrior’s belly … yanking, jerking, working it crudely from right to left, opening the cavity up, blood and gore spilling out as Bass kicked himself free of the dying man.
“Eeegod!” Hatcher gushed hoarsely. “You kill’t that red-belly!”
“Him … or me,” he gushed, hauling in snatches of breath.
“C’mon!” Fish yelled, trying his best to get himself under one of Hatcher’s arms.
Bass slipped under the other, and together they raised Jack off the ground as he cried out in pain. Whirling clumsily, they dragged Hatcher toward the trees where Elbridge Gray emerged with a rifle in each hand.
“Get down!” Gray ordered.
Thinking that was a stupid thing for any man to tell him when he and Fish had Hatcher suspended between them, Bass glanced over his shoulder—finding a half-dozen horsemen coming for them at a hard gallop.
“Down!” Elbridge screamed again.
Fish was the first to obey, pitching forward, dragging Hatcher and Bass with him as Simms stepped out of the trees with a rifle in one hand, a stubby, short-barreled weapon in the other.
But Gray didn’t wait on Bass to get all the way down. As soon as Scratch collapsed to his knees, Elbridge fired the shot that struck the closest warrior. His pony pitched sideways into another horse. Now Simms brought the long, heavy rifle up in his right hand, pulling the trigger as it reached the top of its arc.
Like a steam piston he let the right arm sink as he brought up that short weapon and fired it. A wide spray of orange light lit the shadows as four ponies screeched in pain and dismay, twisting and rearing, their warriors fighting for control as the animals pitched their riders off this way and that.
“Get moving!” Simms bellowed as he stuffed that strange short weapon under his right arm and pulled a pistol from his belt.
“Git on! See Hatcher gets back to camp!” Gray ordered. “We gotta make a stand there.”
Just as Bass was clambering to his feet, feeling naked without a weapon, Jack suddenly had hold of the front of Scratch’s bloody shirt, pulling himself up so he could peer into Titus’s face. “’Member them rocks?”
“Rocks?”
Hatcher had to be crazy with pain to be talking about rocks.
Jack struggled to hold on to Titus’s shirt. Pain had turned his face into a gray, pasty mask of agony. “Where I come found you at sundown, you idjit!”
“Rocks—yeah,” he said, remembering.
“Take us there—”
Bass interrupted, “We won’t ever make it.”
For a moment Hatcher’s eyes closed slowly as if he were weakening, then opened again, a thin veil of teary pain clouding them. “We don’t get to them rocks, goddammit … we won’t none of us make it.”
For an instant more Bass gazed deeply into Hatcher’s red-rimmed eyes—when he realized just how fight Jack was at that moment.
“Follow me!” Titus ordered as he dragged his gaze from Hatcher and raked it across Solomon Fish.
Jack croaked, “Tell … tell ’em—”
Bass stood, yanking the tall Hatcher up on his shoulder as Fish stood beneath the other arm to prop himself under Jack.
Titus hollered, “Jack says we drop back to the rocks!”
“No!” Wood shouted, emerging from the trees, one of his arms hanging bloody, useless, at his side. “We make our stand in camp!”
“Get your pouches!” Simms hollered, wheeling away from Caleb. “We’re going to the rocks with Hatcher!”
They pushed past Wood in a rush as Caleb swore at them, but when Bass twisted his head to look over his shoulder, he found the trapper right behind them. While Fish and Bass dragged Hatcher on through the center of their camp, the rest scattered here and there to scoop up weapons and shooting pouches. Behind them the warriors were clearly working up for another rush.
“They coming again!” Jack whimpered in pain. “B-be ready!”
“We ain’t gonna make it,” Wood bellowed.
“C’mon!” Bass cried to those behind him now as they reached the timber on the far side of camp. “It ain’t that far!”
“Too … too far!” Jack suddenly said.
At that moment he looked down at Hatcher. It seemed that as he watched, all the starch went right out of the man. His face turned a doughy gray, eyes sunken into his skull.
“No, goddammit!” Bass shouted at Jack, yanking Hatcher up by the collar of his buckskin shirt, shaking him for good measure. “We’re gonna make it! Just like you said: we’re gonna make it to the rocks!”
“L-leave me—”
“No!” Scratch shouted him down as the others reached them, their arms loaded with longrifles, belts, and sashes bristling with pistols and axes.
Gray’s eyes were wide with worry as he looked at Hatcher, then turned to flick a look behind them. “How far?”
“Too far,” Hatcher answered, sinking low between the two who propped him upright.
“It ain’t too far!” Bass shouted. “C’mon!”
Across those last two hundred yards … then only a hundred, they could hear them coming. Yelping and crying out in dismay at the death of their companions—screeching louder still when they burst into the white man’s camp, tearing through it looking for the white man’s guns. Perhaps knowing already where the cornered quarry was headed. Rushing on out of that camp to herd the trappers as they would herd deer.
The growing noise of their coming only served to bristle the hair on the back of Scratch’s neck. That, and to drive him onward with Hatcher on his shoulder. Bass was beginning to gasp for breath, his belly sickening with the effort, his head dizzying from lack of air when the boulders leaped into view ahead. Off to the right.