He wondered if the Apache had followed close enough to reach them just before dawn. Wondered too if those strong, bandy-legged warriors were the sort to stop now and again in their pursuit just long enough to sleep for an hour or so before they would again take up the chase.
Bass felt his eyes close as the cold breeze sank off the shoulder of the bluff overhead. He hoped he would hear the Apache as they crept up out of the gloom. Maybe even smell them on the dry desert night air.
Fawn’s hands were cool on his skin where she had pulled back the buffalo robe to expose him to her eyes, to her touch. She wasn’t the sort to tease him, moving her fingers across his belly or down the inside of his thighs. Fawn went straight to his manhood: caressing it without preliminaries, massaging it into readiness, stroking it insistently, often impatiently, until she herself took him and drove his manhood within her. Often would he keep his eyes closed until he felt her moving to straddle him, gazing up to find the Ute woman settling atop him like an ember-lit shadow in the winter darkness of her lodge.
He gazed up now, surprised to find Pretty Water staring down at him. As her moistness clamped around his rigid flesh, he wondered for a moment where Fawn had gone. Wondered where the Ute village had disappeared. Wondered why he had never found them that summer he went looking for them … the summer he was scalped.
This woman riding back and forth slowly atop him was Shoshone. He found her so different from Fawn. Pretty Water was the sort to tease him to the point where he wanted to cry out, to growl at her with her playfulness that he flung her back onto the blankets and thrust himself into her out of the fiery hunger she aroused in him as her fingers barely brushed the flesh around his manhood, but never really caressed it. How she grinned as she watched his penis twitch and grow, even though she wasn’t touching it directly. How she sighed as she gazed upon the growing excitement she had caused. How she groaned when he shoved her legs apart and madly drove himself within her, so crazy had she made him.
There above him she rocked up and back, up and back, raising her buttocks from his thighs just enough to slowly pull him out, then slowly seating him deep within her again….
He felt himself ready to explode as he gripped her small, soft breasts in his hands, wanting so badly to lick the nipples again just as he erupted—
Hannah’s snort brought him awake.
Frantically he dug a knuckle at his eyes, listening.
The mule snorted again, more loudly.
He smelled it too. A change in the air.
What direction was the wind coming from? Bass turned his face into the breeze, drinking deep of all that it could tell him. Upstream. They were upstream … and likely on his side of the river already. Perhaps they had crossed upstream after finding the white man’s trail descending to the bank.
And now they were closing in. Waiting for dawn.
Tightening his grip on the rifle’s wrist, Titus ground his knuckles into his gritty eyes a second time and blinked. Sore and prickly from lack of real sleep, burning from the relentless glare of endless days beneath that wide brim of his felt hat—they felt as if he never would get the grains of sand flushed from them. Red, swollen, so gritty that he wondered if he would ever focus them again.
Upstream. He kept staring upstream through that cleft in the low, waist-high rocks. Watching the light change as he gazed across the gray, shadowy, dreamy texture of boulders and brush and the river’s silvery path through it all.
Behind him one of the horses accompanied Hannah with its own plaintive whinny. They likely felt boxed in back against the tall overhang of the bluff—helpless now with that scent of the enemy growing strong in their nostrils.
Different this must be from anything they had smelled on the northern plains. Thankful too that these animals never grew accustomed to the odor of Indians—no matter where, no matter what tribe.
The light began to bubble a little more, defining edges to the gray of low boulders scattered on either side of the river, giving depth to the black splotches that were the low clumps of brush dotting the banks.
From between the brush and boulders emerged the angular shadows stepping into the midst of the silver ribbon. First there were two, then another pair, then six fanning out in an arrow pointed at the white men.
There surely had to be more.
“Asa!” he whispered harshly, shaking McAfferty’s shoulder.
As the trapper worked at opening his eyes, Bass grumbled, “We got company!”
Sputtering something with his thick, swollen tongue, McAfferty shoved his rifle toward Bass. “Take it.”
Turning quickly to stare at his partner, Scratch asked, “You got you your pistol?”
Painfully, McAfferty worked his fingers around the curved butt and struggled to hold it aloft. “I’ll get one of ’em for sure—they get close enough.”
“Get that other pistol of your’n too.”
“Saving it for me.”
“For you?”
McAfferty licked at his cracked, bloodied lips. “Don’t let these here ’Pache bastards take you alive, Mr. Bass,” he implored. “Better to go under by your own hand—”
“Shoot myself?”
“They’ll roast you over a slow fire if they take a notion to—”
“Shuddup!” Bass snapped. That was the last thing he wanted to hear. Suddenly his mouth was again as dry as it had been for the last three days.
Chastised, Asa closed his eyes and began to mutter, “‘Though a host shall encamp against me, my heart shall not fear.’”
The six slowly crept their way. He had to make each of the rifle shots count. His own. McAfferty’s rifle. And Asa’s big-gauge smoothbore. Along with Bass’s own flintlock pistol. And if Asa used his two pistols, they could account for all six of the bastards.
Pebbles and loose sand skittered down the side of the bluff over his left shoulder, jerking him around—
An unearthly cry raised the hair at the back of his neck.
Whirling, Bass watched the black wisp of shadow materialize out of the ashy gray of that line formed by the rocky outcrop thrust up against the dawn sky just above them. As he brought up his rifle and squeezed back on the trigger, he heard the others let out with their catlike calls from the stream behind him. With the weapon’s roar the warrior let out a shrill shriek as the Apache plunged on through the air, slamming against the muzzle of the rifle an instant after the soft lead ball plowed through his chest. Dead before he spilled to the ground at Bass’s feet.
Knocking Titus backward against a boulder.
McAfferty was kicking against his robes, shrieking, “God’s wrath falls on the necks of the Philistines!”
“Shoot the bastards!” Scratch bellowed as he wheeled about, dropping his rifle and sweeping up McAfferty’s rifle: dragging the hammer back to full-cock.
Breaking into a run, the six were yelping, slogging as fast as they could through the knee-deep river, making straight for the boulders where the white men waited.
Jamming the rifle against his shoulder, Titus aimed into the dim light at one of the black shapes bobbing atop the silvery surface of the water. Pulling back on the trigger suddenly, he felt the gust of wind at his back as the weapon roared, hearing behind him the grunt from his partner.
Squinting his eyes with that second brilliant glare of muzzle flash, Scratch whipped about on his heels, finding an Apache rising from McAfferty, rocking back on his knees and pistoning back an arm. At its end a huge stone club hung in the air.