He laid a hand on the mare’s neck as she breathed her last, stroking the hide until she no longer quivered. Gazing out over the slopes where the warriors gathered just beneath the ranks of their women, children, and old men—he saw her.
Clearly a woman. Dressed in the short fringed skirt that exposed her bare copper legs draped on either side of her brown-spotted pony. A short, sleeveless fringed top hung from her shoulders, where her unbound hair tossed on every hot breeze. Make no mistake: that was a woman. While the warriors were stripped to their breechclouts and moccasins, wearing medicine ornaments and power-inducing headdresses, the one intently watching the action from the hillside was clearly a woman—and probably a powerful one to boot.
Around her stood more than a double handful of attendants, young women and boys, all on foot. Together they joined in her high-pitched chants. She must be imploring the warriors to fight even harder, dare even more with each renewed assault.
“You see dat she-bitch?” the gruff voice asked in a masked whisper.
Bass turned to see Fraeb settling in beside him between the horse’s fore-and hind legs.
“Who she be, Frapp?”
The old German stared at the hill for a moment before answering. “She der princess.”
“Princess?”
“Ya. Princess dey fight for.”
Titus couldn’t quite believe it. “She’s giving the orders to all the rest?”
“Make medicine for them win.”
And Titus had to agree. “Yeah, medicine. I’ll bet if one of us knocked her down—these bucks see their own medicine shrivel up like salt on a green hide.”
“She come close your side—you knock her down, ya?” Fraeb asked as he rocked back onto his hands and knees to crawl off.
Licking his dirty thumb and brushing it over the front blade at the end of his rifle barrel, Bass vowed, “See what I can do for you.”
Back over at the far end of the oval, after the horsemen had made their third deafening rush on the corral, Henry Fraeb once more was squealing out orders, ordering some men to hold off—thereby making sure they would have at least half the guns loaded at all times. No more than a dozen were to fire at once, he reminded them again and again. No less than a dozen had to be ready should the whole hillside decide to make a great rush for them.
Charge after charge, the five hundred thundered down the long slope and across the river bottom toward that maze of deadfall and tree stumps, daring to ride ever closer to that corral of buffalo robes, blankets, and bloating carcasses. As the morning wore on, the ground in front of the dead stinking horses and mules reminded Bass of a field of barren cornstalks. Just as many arrow shafts quivered in those huge animals the mountain men had sacrificed to make this stand.
Well before the sun had climbed to mid-sky, two of the trappers lay dead, and the rest were grumbling with thirst. The river lay seductively close at their backs. Its gurgle almost close enough to hear—were it not for the grunts of the sweating men as they reloaded their rifles or hurriedly refilled their powderhorns from the small kegs among the scattered baggage. A peaceful, bucolic gurgle as the creek trickled over its gravel bed … were it not for the rising swell of war cries and the soul-puckering power of the coming thunder of those hooves.
“Dey comin’ again!” Fraeb would announce what every last one of the twenty-one others could see with their own eyes as the summer sun beat down on that corral of rotting horseflesh and desperate, cornered men.
“Remember,” Bass turned to whisper at the redhead nearby. “Wait till you got a target.”
“What’s it matter?”
He turned and looked at the youngster’s face. “It’ll matter. Each of us takes one of the bastards out with every run they make at us … it’ll matter to ’em.”
Titus watched the redhead swallow hard and turn away to stare at the oncoming horsemen. Sweat droplets stung his eyes. Grinding the sleeve of his calico shirt across his forehead, Bass calmly announced, “They call me Scratch.”
“Scratch?” the redhead repeated. “I heard of you.” His eyes went to the black bandanna covering Bass’s head. “Word has it you lost hair.”
Grinning, Bass nestled his cheek along the stock of his rifle, squinting over the front rank of horsemen. “That was a long time ago, friend.”
He found another likely target: tall, muscular youth brandishing what appeared to be an English trade gun in one hand as his spotted pony raced toward their corner of the corral. The Sioux and Cheyenne were clearly going to make another long sweep across a broad front again, tearing up grassy dirt clods as they streaked past the long axis of the barricades where most of the trappers lay or knelt behind the carcasses.
The redhead’s rifle boomed. Then it was Scratch’s turn to topple his target.
“Name’s Jim. Jim Baker,” the redhead turned to declare. “I’d like to say I’m glad to meet you,” he explained as he rolled onto his back to yank up his powderhorn and started to reload. “But I don’t figger none of us gonna get outta here anyways.”
“You listen here, son,” Bass snapped. “I been through more’n any one man’s share of scraps with red niggers—from Apach’ on the Heely, to Comanch’ over in greaser country, clear up to the goddamned belly of Blackfoot land itself. We ain’t beat yet—”
“How the hell we gonna get outta here?” Baker demanded as he jammed a ball down his powder-choked barrel. “We ain’t got no horses to ride—”
“We’ll get out, Jim Baker. You keep shooting center like you done so far … these brownskins gonna get tired of this game come dark.”
“G-game?”
“Damn straight, it’s a game to them,” Bass explained, then tongued a ball from among those he had nestled inside his cheek. As he pulled his ramrod free of the thimbles pinned beneath the octagonal barrel, he laid another greased linen patch over the muzzle and shoved the wiping stick down for another swab. Only when he had dragged out the patch fouled with oily, black powder residue did he spit the large round hall into his palm and place it in the yawning muzzle.
Baker glanced at the body nearby—a hapless trapper who had raised his head a little too far at the wrong moment and gotten an arrow straight through the eye socket for his carelessness. Penetrating to the brain, the shaft had brought a quick, merciful death. “This damn well don’t appear to be no game to me.”
“No two ways to it, Jim: this here’s big medicine to these brownskins,” Bass explained as he re-primed the pan. “White men ain’t been hurrooed by Sioux and Cheyenne much afore this, you see. Lookit their women up on that hill, singing and hollering their songs for ’em, telling their men to rub us out, all and everyone.”
“They can,” Baker groaned with resignation. “Damn well ’nough of ’em.”
“But they won’t,” Titus argued. “Ain’t their way to ride over us all at once. Sure, they could all come down here an’ tromp us under their hooves. They’d lose a few in rubbing us out, but they’d make quick work of it.”
“W-why ain’t they?”
“There ain’t no glory in that, Jim.” And Bass grinned, his yellowed teeth like pin acorns aglow in the early afternoon light. “Them are warriors. And the only way a warrior gets his honors is in war. This here’s war—a young buck’s whole reason for livin’. Wiping us out quick … why, that ain’t war. That’s just killing.”
Baker shook his head and rolled onto his knees again to make a rest for his left elbow on the ribs of his dead horse. “I don’t rightly care what sort of game them Injuns is having with us. I figger to do my share of killing.”
Bass rocked onto his rump and settled the long barrel atop the fist he made of his left hand, which rested on the horse’s broad, fly-crusted front shoulder. He was surprised to find that the woman had moved. Damn, if she wasn’t coming toward the bottom close enough that he might just have a chance to knock down Fraeb’s warrior princess.