Back at their camp that last evening before they would head out, the nine of them took serious stock of what would have to last them on this long trek to the Bayou Salade, and into a longer autumn trapping season.
“I can’t tell a man not to smoke or chew,” Hatcher began as he stood from looking over the packs with the rest of his men, “but as for me, I’m saving my ’baccy for fall. Most of my coffee too. Saving ’em both for a time when the air turns cool and I hear the first whistle of them elk in the high country.”
It was a damn good idea, Bass remembered thinking. A man didn’t really need tobacco and coffee until then. What a treat they both would be when the quakies began to turn gold on the hillsides of those high places, when a man finally saw his breath halo before his face, when the water began to ice up along the banks of the streams where they were laying their traps—
A bird called. With a sound that just didn’t belong.
Then he saw the first half dozen or so of them reach the brow of the hill just beyond him. They had no idea he was there, watching them as the warriors stealthily poked their heads above the gently waving crowns of grass so they could watch the rest of Hatcher’s men down in their camp far behind Scratch.
Bass felt just as he had back in Kentucky a time or two when he and friends were about to pull a prank on others. He grinned. This surprise would be good.
As the handful of Bannock turned and stealthily retreated back into the tall grass, Titus turned his face back to camp, cupped his hands around his lips, and whistled like a red-winged blackbird. In a heartbeat the gentle reply of a dark-eyed junco floated back to him from below on the long, gently falling slope. Although the others went about giving the appearance of being totally unaware of danger, that birdcall confirmed that the other eight were ready.
Scratch jerked around at the sudden hammer of the many hooves on the ground. As his eyes met the grassy skyline, some two dozen or more horsemen bristled against the blue dome like a mirage for no more than the instant it took for them to break over the hill, spread out in a widening formation. Not a sound had burst from their mouths as they poured off the high ground, racing toward him—strung out to his right. Only after they shot past him at the gallop did they start to holler and yelp, waving pieces of leather and rawhide and blanket, all those fluttering shapes raised to dance on the wind at the ends of their arms in the rose-lit air of dusk.
In another heartbeat they had torn past him.
He saw Hatcher come out from behind a tree, raising that big smoothbore to his shoulder. Kinkead was off to the left, already sighting down the long, heavy barrel of his rifle.
Bass shot to his feet, feeling his heart surge into his throat. As much as he had tried to calm himself while waiting in the grass, he knew it had done no good. Fighting was fighting. And killing was killing. Any man who approached such life-and-death struggles as these with anything less than fear was a man Titus Bass failed to understand.
Caleb Wood was the first to yell as he burst out of the grass halfway down the slope between Scratch and the camp. The first horseman reined aside as he bore down on the lone trapper, but Caleb blew him off the back of his pony.
Titus held on the narrow, copper-skinned back, squeezed on the set trigger, then eased his finger down on the front trigger. Through the pan and muzzle smoke he watched the warrior pitch forward, spinning slightly to the side as his legs came loose of his pony to go tumbling into the tall grass.
Immediately reversing his rifle, Scratch blew hard down the muzzle to clear the breech of any remaining powder embers—a thin, faint stream of smoke jetting from the touchhole. Yanking the plug from his powder horn with his teeth, he quickly poured enough of the coarse black grains up to the right crease in his left palm, then dumped them hurriedly down the muzzle. Bringing the muzzle back to his lips, he spat one of the four balls squirreled in his cheek down the barrel, at the same time dragging the long wiping stick from the iron thimbles at the bottom of the full stock, which he used to ram the unpatched ball home against the powder charge.
Grabbing up the small horn that hung from the strap to his shooting pouch, Bass quickly sprinkled some of the fine grains into the cupped recess of the pan and snapped the frizzen back over it.
The hair bristled on the back of his neck as he heard the yelps and cries behind him. There weren’t supposed to be any behind him.
But suddenly the skyline sprouted four, five … then six more—their arms raised, bows and clubs and axes in their hands as they pounded heels into their ponies’ ribs and rushed toward the fight in a second wave of terror.
Here he stood out in the open now, a good half of him poking above the tall grass, with nowhere to run for cover. The way they swerved as they burst over the top of the rise, Scratch was sure they saw him, sure they must have realized he had been part of a trap laid for them all.
Down below along the gentle slope three more rifles cracked, friends hollered, and those men hit with ball or pierced by arrow grunted and cried out.
Flicking a look at his belt, he saw the big horse pistol stuffed in the side of his wide belt, reassured. That would make two dead niggers, he figured as he slapped the gracefully curved rifle butt into the hollow at his shoulder. He had a tomahawk at the back of his belt, there beside the knife scabbard. That might account for two more when it came to the close and dirty of it.
But that meant there were two more who might swallow him up, fill his lights with arrows, hack off the top of his skull, or pound him beneath their ponies’ hooves as they rode right over him while he was busy fighting off the rest.
As a big-chested warrior leaned off the side of his pony a ways, raising the arm clutching a long shaft, over the top flat of his rifle barrel Scratch spotted the two knife blades planted in the end of that swinging weapon. Plunging downhill at him … he raised the front blade a little higher, there at the notch where the Bannock’s neck met his chest.
And pulled the trigger.
The Indian’s cry was shrill as he was shoved off the back of his pony. Scratch took the rifle into his left hand, letting it fall at his feet as his right yanked the big-bore pistol from his belt, dragging back the hammer to full-cock as it came up. The next one bearing down on him already had his bow strung, the arrow drawn back as he leaned off the side of his animal racing on a collision course for the white man standing alone in the grass, its onrushing eyes and nostrils wide.
Using both hands to steady the pistol, Titus held high on the chest, then pulled the trigger. The weapon bucked back and upward at the end of his arms. Again his left hand dropped the weapon as his right reached round for the small-bladed tomahawk he pulled from his belt.
Three of them were turning his way.
Where was the fourth?
His left hand emptied of the pistol, Bass filled it with the handle of the old skinning knife and dragged the weapon from its rawhide scabbard just at the moment his left leg burned. He looked down, feeling the gorge rise in his throat, knowing he was going to be sick from the pain of it—seeing the arrow stuck clear through the meat of his thigh. At the back of his leg the stone tip glistened in the falling light, bright with his blood. Against the front of his legging the shaft’s three rows of fletching quivered as his muscles tensed and shuddered in pain.
He wasn’t sure how long he could continue standing before his stomach revolted and he threw up. But swallow it down he did as a warrior bore down on him. Twenty feet …
Then, as the Bannock swung back a stone club, he was knocked sideways, the roar of a rifle surprising Scratch.