Asa sat dazed from the first blow from the Apache, who leaped upon him from the narrow shelf of rocks directly behind them.
Wheeling, Titus lashed out at the warrior with the heavy octagonal barrel, slamming the Apache on the shoulder as he began his swing at McAfferty. But only enough to shove the warrior to the side, rolling him onto a hip to glare back at Scratch.
Springing to his feet like a mountain cat, the Apache cried out hellishly as he dived headlong for Bass, almost as if he sought to spear the trapper in the middle of the chest with his head.
They fell backward together against the boulder, catching Bass at the back of his hips, bending him on across the curve of the rock. Arcing the muzzle around a second time the instant the warrior drew back to make a try for his own belt knife, Scratch caught the Apache along the temple with a crack as loud as a maul colliding with a tight-grained hickory stump. Titus never watched the warrior settling into the sand at his feet.
He was already spinning back to find the rest.
Yanking back on the hammer—then suddenly remembering that he held an empty rifle.
Hurling it aside as McAfferty scrambled to his knees, wagging his head groggily, Bass scooped up the smoothbore. He was snapping back the huge goosenecked hammer as he caught sight of Asa rocking forward on his knees, the pistol coming out at the end of both arms—a jet of bright, incandescent yellow spewing from the big muzzle.
Shadows loomed even larger in the coming light of morning, playing off the gray of sky and dull shimmer of river surface. The first lunged into the air and landed in a crouch atop the low boulders, his wet moccasins clawing the surface, coiling instantly, then springing on toward the white men.
“Other pistol–”
Bass raked back on the smoothbore’s trigger as he shouted his command, watching the warrior rock sideways. As the Apache fell between the two trappers, gurgling, clawing at the damp sand, Titus turned aside. Lifting the empty smoothbore into the air by its barrel, he brought it down savagely on the warrior’s neck, then smashed the brass-plated butt three more times into the back of the Apache’s skull.
McAfferty cried, “My last shot!”
Pulling back from that last, sodden crush of the enemy’s head, Scratch turned in a crouch the moment McAfferty fired that second pistol of his. As he dropped the smoothbore into the sand beside Asa, Bass lunged for the handles of two of the tomahawks they had laid out in readiness beside the white-head.
Just as he rose and straightened, one of the last two Apache leaped out of the stream like a panther, howling in a crouch as he landed on the rocks, immediately snapping his bow string forward. On the dry air Scratch heard the thwung as Asa gasped, a moment before Scratch swung the tomahawk sideways through the air like a scythe, catching the warrior’s belly, slashing through soft flesh, sensing the hot blood gush across his sunburned wrist as the Apache crumpled backward, nearly cut in half.
A searing cry warned of another behind him.
Spinning around, Titus had no more than a heartbeat before the eighth warrior sprang from the narrow shelf, falling spread-eagled out of the dawn sky for the white man. From the corner of his eye, Bass watched Asa’s arms jab forward, both hands clutching a skinning knife, blade pointed skyward as the Apache plunged downward.
The knife caught the warrior just below the breastbone, where the Apache’s weight and McAfferty’s sudden twist to the side drove the weapon deep, opening up the warrior’s abdomen as he collapsed against Bass, writhing on his knees.
The Apache’s arms flailed helplessly, a knife spilling out of one of the brown hands that clutched his wound. Stumbling backward, Scratch collided with the rocks. For a terrifying moment the warrior’s face seemed to hang in front of his, a dark river of black blood oozing from his lips as the eyes locked on Bass’s … then rolled back to whites as the body continued its slump to the sand.
His heart thumping, hot adrenaline coursing through his veins, Scratch stared down at the warrior crumpled around his knees as if merely resting there, half in a squat. He cocked back with a foot, knocking the Apache free, and leaped aside. Spooked by those eyes that had locked on to his for that moment in time, eyes that were already dead even in that instant.
His right hand wet with drying blood, he shoved the tomahawk into his left, snatching his pistol from his belt. He was dragging the hammer back to full-cock as the last screaming Apache vaulted over the top of the rock downstream suddenly. The warrior lunged forward, knocking Scratch’s right hand out of the way the instant the pistol came up, swinging his own brown hand out wide in a savage arc that showed a glint of steel.
Collapsing back suddenly, Bass sensed the burn of the blade as it raked past his belly. Sensed that sudden cold of the dawn air against the wound, that seep of icy warmth as the blood beaded and oozed.
Already the warrior was beginning a second sweep, coming from Bass’s right this time.
Yanking the pistol back, Titus suddenly shoved the right hand upward, flinging the Indian’s wrist aside as he brought the short barrel’s muzzle under the brown chin and pulled the trigger.
With the Apache’s knife hand crookedly imprisoned beneath the man’s chin, the top of the warrior’s head exploded in a glittering spray of crimson as the first orange rays of light seeped over the edge of the gray desert.
Gripping the tomahawk handle all the tighter in his left hand as he spun back toward the river, Titus stared over the low boulders, ready for the rest.
Everything was quiet but for the murmuring river.
And McAfferty’s raspy breathing.
Nothing moved. Nothing but the light on the water as the ribbon’s surface lost its silvery glitter in those moments … became a river once more. Brush and rocks no longer shadows.
And along the banks, there lay those brown bodies half-submerged in the shallow water, one of the warriors bobbing up to the foot of the waist-high boulders, slowly turning in the gentle current until the Apache stared at the dawn sky with glazed eyes, a great dark smear on his chest as he bobbed to the side, wedged in the eddy that lapped against the rock.
So quiet suddenly, so quiet that he thought he could hear the water lapping against the dead man’s body.
“That … that all of ’em?” Asa croaked.
Bass finally turned and glanced at his partner before his eyes studied the rock ledge behind them. He sighed, “Looks to be. Any more of ’em—they’d be all over us now.”
“‘That thy foot may be dipped in the blood of thine enemies, and the tongue of thy dogs in the same.’”
Scratch knelt, so weary, he wasn’t sure he would ever stand again.
McAfferty watched Titus settle. “You’re cut.”
“Could be worse,” he said, peering down at the slash that yelped in pain with every brush of the dawn breeze.
“Best see to it soon as you can.”
“Let’s just damn well get these guns reloaded,” Bass growled, not wanting to look again at that torn flesh.
“You do that, then you take the scalps.”
Wagging his head, Titus quietly said, “Leave the goddamned scalps.”
“We gonna take the scalps,” McAfferty prompted wearily, rising to his knees. “They’re ours now.”
“I don’t give a damn,” Scratch replied. “I don’t ever figger to be back here—”
“You don’t take your scalps,” McAfferty blurted out as he snatched hold of the front of Bass’s half-damp war shirt, “the ghosts come back for you one day.”
“Ghosts?”
His icy blue eyes squinted half-closed as they slowly volved down to stare at the half-naked bodies there among them in the rocks. “You don’t take this hair—the ghosts come back for you.”