At first some of the trappers had hesitated dropping all the horses and mules. They bunched the nervous animals together, tying them off nose to nose, two by two. But in those first frantic, wholesale charges, the Sioux and Cheyenne managed to hit enough of the outer ring of animals that the saddle horses and pack mules grew unmanageable, threatening to drag off the few men who attempted to hold on to them. Arrows quivered from withers and ribs and bellies and flanks.
Then the first lead balls whistled in among Fraeb’s men. Damn, if they didn’t have some smoothbore trade guns, fusils, old muskets, English to be sure. Maybe even some captured rifles too—taken from the body of a free man killed here or there in the mountains. One less free trapper to fret himself over the death of the beaver trade.
Arrows were one thing, but those smoothbore fusils were a matter altogether different. While they didn’t have the range of the trappers’ rifles, the muskets could nonetheless hurl enough lead through their remuda so those Indians could start whittling the white men down.
There were a half-dozen horses and mules thrashing and squealing on the ground already by the time the St. Louis-born German growled his thick, guttural command.
“Drop de hurses!” Fraeb shouted. “Drop dem, ebbery one!”
Many of those two dozen mountain men grumbled as they shoved and shouldered the frightened animals apart in a flurry. But every one of them did what they knew needed doing. Down the big brutes started to fall in a spray of phlegm and piss as the muzzles of pistols were pressed against ears and the triggers pulled. A stinking mess of hot horse urine splashing everyone for yards around, bowels spewing the fragrant, steamy dung from that good grass the horses were on two days back.
In those first moments of sheer deafening terror, Bass even smelled the recognizable, telltale odor of gut. Glancing over his shoulder, he watched as the long coil of purple-white gut snaked out of the bullet hole in that mule’s belly where the animal and other horses tromped and tromped and tromped in nervous fear and pain, yanking every last foot of gut out of the dying pack animal’s belly.
He had quickly poured some powder into the pan of his belt pistol, lunged over a horse already thrashing its way into eternity, and skidded to a halt beside the very mule that had been his companion ever since that momentous birthday in Taos.
Stuffing his left hand under the horsehair halter, his fingers white as he jerked back on the mule’s head, he shouted out in what he hoped would be a familiar voice, a calming voice. As a horse went down behind him, a slashing hoof clipped him across the back of his calf and he crumpled to his knees. Gritting his teeth with the pain as he got back on his feet, Bass pulled on the mule’s halter again and shouted as he pressed the muzzle of the short-barreled .54 just in front of the mare’s ear.
“Steady, girl,” he whimpered now. Tears streaming. Anger. Regret, too. Lots of regret. Then pulled the trigger.
He held on to the halter as she pitched onto her forelegs, her back giving a few kicks until she rolled onto her side. Nestled there in the shadow of her body lay the dirty, grass-coated rumple of her gut.
Titus knelt down at the head, staring a moment at the eyes that would soon glaze, watching the last flexing of the nostrils as the head slowly relaxed, pulling away from him.
“Good-bye, girl,” he whispered, the words sour on his tongue.
Bass patted the mule between the eyes, then quickly vaulted to his feet and wheeled around to reload. To continue the slaughter that was their only hope of living out this day.
He remembered another mule, the old farm animal that had grown old as Titus had grown up on that little farm back near Rabbit Hash, Boone County, Kentucky, beside the Ohio River. And then he felt the cold stab of pain remembering Hannah. The best damned four-legged friend a free man could ever have in these here mountains. Hannah—
The trappers dropped them all. Fraeb and some others hollering orders above the tumult. They all knew what was at stake. The resisting, dying animals must have smelled the dung and the piss, smelled the blood of their companions already soaking into the dust and sun-stiffened grass of this late-summer morning. They dropped them one by one, and in twos as well. Until there was a crude oval of carcasses and what baggage the men could tear off the pack animals and throw down in those gaps between the big, sweaty bodies that would begin stinking before this day was done and night had settled upon them all.
Twenty-four of them pitted against half a thousand Sioux and Cheyenne. Not to mention a hundred or more Arapaho who showed up not long after the whole shebang got kicked off with the first noisy, hoof-rattling charge. They must have been camped somewhere close and come running with all the hurraw and the gunfire.
Titus grinned humorlessly and pushed aside the one narrow braid that hung at his temple. The rest of his long, graying hair spilled over his shoulders like a shawl. Tied down with a faded black silk bandanna, holding a scrap of Indian hair over that round patch of naked skull from long ago. He thought on the bunch that had caught him alone many, many summers before—and stole his hair. Remembering how he eventually ran across the bastard who had taken his topknot—and lifted that small circle of hair from the crown of the warior’s head. Recalling how good it had felt to take his revenge.
So he grinned: maybeso some of the bastard’s relatives were in that bunch watching the Sioux and Cheyenne have at the white man’s corral. And pretty soon those Arapaho would figure it was time to grab some fun of their own.
Glancing at the sky, Bass found the blazing sun and figured it was not yet midmorning. That meant they had a long, long day ahead behind these packs and stinking carcasses. And with the way the first of the women were bristling along the crest of that hilltop yonder, the warriors weren’t about to ride off anytime soon, not with the whole village showing up to chant and sing them, on to victory, on to daring feats of bravery, on to suicidal charges that would leave the body of one warrior after another sprawled in the grass and dust of that no man’s land all around the white man’s corral. Bodies too close to the rotting breastworks for other riders to dare reclaim.
Titus blinked and wiped the sweat out of his eyes with the sleeve of his faded, grease-stained calico shirt. And saw the flecks of blood already dried among the pattern of tiny flowers. The mule’s blood. Bass glanced quickly at the sun once more, wondering if this was the last day he would ever lay eyes on it.
Would he ever see the coming sunset, as he had promised himself summers and summers ago when he rode away from that scalping, a half-dead shell of a man clinging to Hannah’s back? Would he ever see another black mountain night with its brilliant dusting of stars as he lay by the fire, staring up at the endlessness of it all, Waits-by-the-Water’s head nestled into his shoulder after they had just coupled flesh to flesh? Would he ever again see the children when they awoke each morning, clambering out of their blankets and tottering toward him as he fed the fire and started the coffee—eager to fling their little arms around his neck and squeeze him with what he always took to be utter joy in having another day to share together.
Together.
How he wished he was with the three of them now.
How thankful he was that he had compelled Waits to remain behind with the little ones. If the three of them were here with these twenty-four fated men now …
With the breakup of that last pitiful gathering of a few holdouts in the valley of the Green River, Bass had watched old friends disperse on the winds. Some just gave up on the mountains and pointed their noses back east to what they had been. Others, like Meek and Newell, set a new course for Oregon Country, where the land was fertile and free. But a hardy few had determined they would hang on, clinging to the last vestige of what had been their finest days. What had been their glory.