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Turn the page for a special preview of
DEATH RATTLE
a Titus Bass novel
by Terry C. Johnston
Master storyteller Terry C. Johnston again recreates the fearsome and wondrous life of the free trappers of the Rockies in this thrilling sequel to Ride the Moon Down, as his beloved character Titus Bass must watch the end of his mountain man way of life. Death Rattle continues the adventures of Titus Bass as he searches for a way to carve a place for himself and his family on the changing and deadly frontier … and remain one of the untamed breed.
Damn, if this dead mule didn’t smell like a month-old grizzly-gutted badger!
Titus Bass swiped the back of his black, powder-grimed hand under his nose and snorted with the first faint hint of stench strong enough to make his eyes water. Without lingering, he spilled enough grains of the fine 4-F priming powder into the pan, then carefully raised his head over the dead mule’s still-warm rib cage.
The sonsabitches were gathering off to the left, over there by Shad Sweete’s side of the ring. Really more of a crude oval the two dozen of them had quickly formed around this collection of ancient tree stumps by dropping every last one of their saddle stock and pack animals with a lead ball in their brains.
“Don’t shoot till you’re sure!” Henry Fraeb was bellowing again.
He’d repeated it over and over, beginning to nettle the gray-haired Bass. “We ain’t none of us lop-eared pilgrims, Frapp!” he growled back at the trapping brigade leader.
The man they called Ol’ Frapp twisted round on that leg he was kneeling on, spitting a ball out of his gopher-stuffed cheek into his sweaty palm. “Gottammit! Don’t you rink I know ebbery wund of you niggurs?”
“We’ll make ’em come, Frapp!” Elias Kersey shouted from the east side of their horse-and-mulc breastworks.
“Don’t you worry none ’bout us!” another growled from Bass’s right.
“Here they come again!” arose the alarm.
Titus rolled on his hip, gazing behind him at the far side of the narrow oval, where some of the defenders hunkered behind a stump here or there. Then his eyes slowly climbed over the heads of these twenty-three other beaver trappers as they all sat entranced, eyes fixed on the half-a-thousand. Sure was a pretty sight the way they had been forming themselves up over yonder after every charge, gathering upon that wide breast of bottom ground where the horsemen knew they were just out of range of the white man’s long-barreled flinters.
About as savvy as Blackfoot, Bass ruminated as he watched the naked riders spill out in two directions, like a mountain torrent tumbling past a huge boulder plopped squarely between a creek’s banks. Foaming and roiling, building up force as it was hurtled into that narrow space between the boulder and the grassy bank itself, huge drops and narrow sheets of mist rising from the torrent into shafts of shimmering sunlight—
“Shoot when you’re sure!” Jake Corn reminded them.
“One nigger at a time!” Reuben Purcell cried out as the hoofbeats threatened to drown out every other sound in this river valley. “One red nigger at a time, my mama Purcell allays said!”
Sure as spit, these Indians were getting smart about the white man’s guns, maybe hankering to have a white-man gun for their own.
From their hair, the way they made themselves up, Bass figured them to be Sioux. He knowed Sioux. A bunch of them had jumped him and Sweete, Waits-by-the-Water, and their young’uns couple summers back when they were returning down the Vermillion, making for Fort Davy Crockett on the Green. In that scrap Titus had been close enough to see the smeared, dust-furred colors of their paint, close enough to smell the old grease on their braids and forehead roaches. Not till then—no, he’d never seen a Sioux before.
But he and Shad had hacked their way out of that war party and made a desperate run for the fort.
Sioux.
If that didn’t mean things was changing in the mountains, nothing else did. To think of Sioux on this side of the divide. Damn, if that hoss didn’t take the circle—
Titus picked one out. Made a fist of his left hand and rested the bottom of the full-stock flintlock on it as he nestled his cheekbone down in place and dragged the hammer back to full cock.
Down the barrel now, that one didn’t look to be Sioux. Most of them on this end of their grand, fronted charge didn’t appear to be similar to the warriors who had jumped him and Shad two years back. He guessed Cheyenne.
The way they started to stream past, peeling away like the layers of the wild onion Waits gathered in the damps of the river bottoms, he could lead the son of a bitch a little. The warrior took the outside of the procession, screaming and shaking his bow after each arrow he fired.
Titus held a half breath on that bare, glistening chest—finding no hair-pipe breast ornament hanging from that horseman’s neck. Instead the warrior had circled several places on his flesh with bright-red vermilion paint. Likely his white, puckered hanging scars directly above each nipple, where he’d strung himself up to a sundance tree. And a couple more, long ones, though, down low along his ribs. Wounds from battle he proudly marked for all to see. Let his enemies know he was invincible.
Bass held a little longer, then raised the front blade of his sights to the Indian’s head and eased off to the right a good yard. What with the way the whole bunch was tearing toward the white man’s corral at an angle, there was still a drop in the slope—he was surprised when the gun roared, and felt the familiar slam of the Derringer’s butt plate against his right shoulder.
What with the muzzle smoke hanging close in the still, summer air, Bass didn’t see if his shot went home. But as the parade of screaming horsemen thundered past his side of the breastworks, he did notice that a handful of ponies raced by without riders. One of those animals had likely carried the big fella with the painted scars.
Other horsemen farther back in the stream were slowing now, reining this way and that to avoid a horse that had plunged headlong and flipped, pitching its rider into the air. Other horsemen slowed even more; two by two they leaned off their ponies to scoop up a wounded or dead comrade, dragging his limp body back across the coarse, sun-seared grass that crackled and snapped, through the powdery dust that rose in tiny puffs with each hoofbeat, the dead man’s legs flopping over every clump of sage, feet crazily bouncing, wildly sailing against the pale, pale summer-burnt-blue sky.
Few of their arrows made it all the way to the breastworks they had formed out of those sixty or more animals. The half-a-thousand clearly figured to make this a fight of bravery runs while the waterless white men slowly ran out of powder and lead.