From there they might have a chance.
“I see ’em!” Kinkead bawled.
The forest behind them seemed to erupt with the cries of warriors as they rushed after their prey, hearing that shrill announcement from the pursued.
Simms was the first to climb up the outside shell of rocks, sliding down into the wide crevice that would take them into the center of the natural fortress. Setting his weapons aside, he reached down to pull Rowland and Kinkead in; then all three turned to helped Fish and Bass shove Hatcher up the five-foot wall of granite like a child’s rag doll. With Jack propped up against the rocks, the others handed in their weapons and vaulted up themselves—just as the warriors exploded from the trees.
There were fewer of them now than there had been. But there wasn’t any man counting. Hell, Bass thought, when you’re jumped by that many, dropping a few from their ponies don’t make all that much of a dent in the odds.
But the warriors stopped dead in their tracks, some circling left and some going right, while most of them stayed right there in the center—staring at the rock fortress. Kneeling, a few snapped off some arrows at the trappers hunkering down in the rocks. The stone tips clattered against the boulders, spun crazily in among the trappers. Noisily yelling, the Indians screeched war cries and bloody oaths.
“What’re they?” Scratch asked, taking his rifle from Rowland.
“Cain’t rightly say,” Wood replied, wagging his head and shoving a ball down his barrel.
“Hell,” Jack coughed below them at the bottom of the crevice. “We damn well know what them sumbitches are.”
“Hatcher’s right,” Gray agreed as he slid up between Kinkead and Bass. “Blackfoots.”
“Blackfeets,” Bass repeated, finally slipping the blue scarf from his belt and knotting it around his head once more.
With a pained snort Jack tossed his head and growled, “Who the hell you ’specting wants hair so bad up this way—”
Twisting near fully around at the shrill cry, Bass found a warrior leaping from the rocks right above them. Simms caught the Blackfoot in his arms as they both slammed into the ground, the Indian’s knife crudely raking Isaac’s shoulder, opening up a bloody gash. In that next instant Gray swung the butt of his flintlock across the back of the warrior’s head—driving the enemy off Simms with an audible crunch and a spray of blood. In a fury Isaac was on top of the warrior, dragging the enemy’s head back to expose the neck, suddenly slashing a knife across the warrior’s throat.
“Scratch!”
He whirled at Graham’s cry, just as Rufus fired. A second warrior on the rocks above them jerked as the lead ball struck him, driven back a step, then crumpling to his knees. Yet as the Blackfoot clutched his bloody fingers over the wound in his side, he still managed to cock the tomahawk over his head, hurling it down into the knot of white men.
While the wounded warrior pitched backward from sight, the tomahawk spun itself against the boulder right behind Gray, then struck Elbridge a ricochet blow. Solomon leaped to Gray’s side as the man slumped to the ground—a huge knot already puffing across his brow and temple, blood beginning to ooze down the side of his face.
“He’s out,” Fish muttered as he yanked the loaded pistol from Elbridge’s hand.
“Red niggers whittling us down,” Hatcher groaned in resignation.
Two more painted warriors appeared at the far side of the ring of boulders, poking their heads over only long enough to take aim, pull back the strings on their bows, and let their arrows fly. Although noisy and frightening, the two shafts clattered harmlessly into the rocky fortress.
“There!” Rowland shouted.
Where the warrior with the tomahawk had been a moment before, now three more popped into view. Two more arrows flew in among the trappers, and a Blackfoot with a musket fired his shot—the big lead ball splattering against the rock beside Jack Hatcher.
Immediately souatting beside Hatcher, Caleb Wood dusted some rock fragments off Jack, saying, “We sit in here like a bunch of nesting hens, the fox gonna get us eventual.”
Hatcher’s eyes flicked over the others quickly. “You coons got any idees, now’s the time to be spitting ’em.”
“I say we get the hell out of here,” Graham suggested, his eyes raking the tops of the rocks, ready for the appearance of more warriors. He resolutely tugged down on his beaver hat with the rawhide brim scraped so thin, it was almost translucent. “Make a run for it.”
“We can’t: they’ll catch us out there one at a time,” Bass declared, wagging his head as he kept his eyes on the south rim of the rocks. “In here we got us a chance.”
Hatcher drew in a quick breath of torment as he shifted his hip. “I got things figgered the same way as Scratch. Leastways in here they gotta fight to get to us. Not much of one—but we got a chance.”
“The ones of us what can, we gotta climb the sides of these rocks,” Bass instructed, pointing toward the skyline with the barrel of his rifle. “Up there we can keep ’em from crawling over the rocks.”
“Might work,” Kinkead admitted, pursing his thick lips in determination. “Let’s climb.”
Rufus Graham led them, scrambling up the rocks to a high position. Wood and Rowland chose to climb off in another direction. Simms and Fish, Bass and Kinkead, all spread out until the seven of them had the ring of boulders better protected, no longer sitting below, at the mercy of the enemy as the Blackfeet climbed up the rocks and fired down on their quarry. From up near the top of the boulders, the white men could now watch their enemy breaking out of the trees.
A fella didn’t get him all that many chances to win big at a card game, Titus thought as his eyes raked the tree line—spotting some shadowy movement, listening to the Blackfeet hollering to one another. True enough, a man don’t get a chance less’n he hangs his bare ass right out over the fire like this once’t in a while.
Coming here to the mountain west all on his lonesome had been the biggest gamble he figured he’d ever made. Bigger even than leaving home at sixteen. But the bigger the gamble, the sweeter the stakes.
Off to his left two warriors skulked from the morning shadows toward the rocks, pretty much unseen for the thick brush. They scrambled to slip into a crevice that would put them between Caleb and Titus. Laying his left hand flat on the top of the boulder, then resting the forestock on the back of that hand, Bass took a quick sight target on the chest of the one who wore no leggings as he started to slip out of the brush there at the base of the crevice. Son of a bitch wore only moccasins, a breechclout, and a headdress made of a spray of turkey feathers tied to the back of his head.
It surprised him when Wood’s gun echoed the blast from his own rifle. As the turkey-feather headdress twisted and slumped at the foot of the rocks, the other warrior turned on his heel and scampered back for the tree line.
Stuffing his hand back into his shooting pouch, Scratch scooped up as many of the balls as he had left and brought them out. There in his cupped hand he estimated he had fewer than two dozen shots left. Quickly glancing over the others perched near the top of the boulders nearby, Bass wondered if they were in any better shape for to make a long fight of it. He doubted that any of them would have enough shots to last until nightfall. And even then, there was a damn good chance the Blackfeet might just come to call once darkness hid their movements.
No matter that he and the rest had knocked a few off their ponies, or had shot a couple here after reaching the rocks—the warriors still had the trappers outnumbered better than four, maybe five, to one. Having to make every shot count, every last lead ball left among them now … that was stretching the odds even thinner.