Charles couldn't help both of them. He chose the one visibly near and in peril of instant death.
Wooden Foot swayed backward. Charles caught him with his left hand while firing at the nearest Cheyenne with his right. Because of his wound, his gun arm throbbed and shook. His bullet sped yards wide of the target.
The Cheyennes were going to finish them, so all Charles could do was go out fighting. He knelt and worked his knee under his partner's sagging back. The trader braced there, his eyes wide, his limp hands falling away from his shirt. Helpless, Charles watched the color leach from his face.
Wooden Foot recognized his partner. He tried to touch Charles but couldn't lift his hand. Beyond the rise, Fen abruptly stopped barking, then yelped once.
Charles put his ear near Wooden Foot's mouth. He thought he heard, "Thanks for all —" Bright lightning whited out everything. When he recovered his sight he almost cried. Wooden Foot's eyes were still open but nothing lived behind them.
From over the rise the three Cheyennes appeared and recaptured their ponies. They trotted down toward Scar, who was waiting at the spot where Charles had first seen the Indians.
Charles raced toward the place where Boy had disappeared. As he ran, the storm threw bits of grass and particles of dirt into his eyes. When Scar saw Charles move away from Wooden Foot's body, he signaled his remaining cohorts to ride toward it.
Charles passed two fallen pack mules bleeding to death from bullet wounds. Lightning blazed. The ground rocked under him. He sensed rather than saw a fence of fire spring up behind him, where lightning had struck again. "Boy?" he shouted, struggling up the rise on legs shaking with weakness. "Boy, answer me."
The lightning answered, a scorching sizzling swordstroke straight down into the hollow between rises, the place the three dismounted Cheyennes had just quitted. Grass smoked, glowed orange, then burst into flame. Godamighty, the end of the world, Charles thought as he stumbled down the slope toward a dry stream bed. On the near side, trampled grass glistened wet and black. Amidst that blood lay something as shapeless as a potato sack.
Over the rise behind him, flames six feet high burned in a rampart of scarlet, orange, white. The rampart spread forward and backward and sideways simultaneously. Once in Texas he'd seen a similar prairie fire. It destroyed forty square miles.
He reached the shapeless thing and gazed down, driven past feeling by shock. Boy lay with his sadly swollen head resting in the dry stream bed. A blade had split him open from throat to groin. From the chest cavity already swarming with flies protruded the remains of Fen. A leg, the bone visible in bloody fur; part of the collie's snout and skull, including an eye. Other pieces were strewn on the glistening grass.
Charles stared at the butchery no more than five seconds, but it might as well have been a century. Finally he turned and started back up the rise and the fire rampart behind it. Wooden Foot's dead, Boy's dead, he thought. I'll go next but I've got to take that scarred bastard with me.
From the rise he saw Scar and five others sitting their ponies some distance away, appearing and disappearing behind the blowing smoke. The Cheyennes had shifted slightly to the south of their original position and despite the smoke, Charles recognized something new on their faces: apprehension; or at least doubt. The fire, had advanced nearly halfway up the rise where the Jackson Trading Company had made its futile stand.
Sweat dripping from his face, he stumbled back to the place he'd left Wooden Foot. It's Sharpsburg all over again, he thought. It's Northern Virginia all over again.
Behind fuming smoke, Scar smiled. Charles wondered about that as he staggered to Wooden Foot's corpse. Looking down, he choked.
His partner's pale body lay denuded of clothing. A red hole between the legs crawled with flies. Bloody genitals had been forced into Wooden Foot's mouth. On his eyes the Cheyennes had poured little mounds of diamond and triangle pony beads.
The fire made them sparkle. Scar had a fine touch when it came to barbarity.
"You bastards," Charles screamed. "You filthy, inhuman bastards."
Scar stopped smiling. Charles pointed his Colt at the Cheyenne leader, steadying it with bloody hands. Smoke thickened, hiding Scar and the others. Charles squeezed off a round. Another. Another. Until the cylinder emptied.
By then the wall of smoke and fire completely hid the Cheyennes. To reach Charles they'd have to ride through or very wide around one of the ends that kept extending north and south. Gusty wind blew his hair. The fire roaring on the slope lit his wild face as if it were noonday.
The smoke parted again. The Cheyennes were still there. Every one of Charles's shots had missed. Scar signaled the others to advance.
One Cheyenne shook his head, then another. They had no more stomach for the shouting madman on the rise protected by a wall of fire and smoke. Though they didn't understand his words, they understood the meaning of his yelling. "Come on, show me how brave you are! You killed an old man and a boy and a dog. Let's see what you can do with me!"
One of the reluctant Cheyennes shook his head again, emphatically. That displeased Scar. He grabbed the last man to shake his head. The Cheyenne knocked Scar's hand away, turned his mount, and rode off into the stormy darkness.
Four others followed in single file. Left alone, Scar gave Charles a scornful look before he joined the retreat.
"Come back, goddamn it. You yellow sons of bitches!"
The starch went out of him as the fire once more leaped high and hid them. Charles kept yelling at Scar. "You deserve to be wiped off the earth, you and your whole tribe. I'll find a way, you can count on that."
Count on that ... count on that...
He turned and moved from the heat and glare. Using his wounded arm, he tried to jam his Colt into the holster. He kept missing. The gunsight ripped his pants and dug his leg so that it bled. He neither saw nor felt it. From his left hand dangled Wooden Foot's personal parfleche, which he didn't remember snatching off his partner's dead horse.
The storm front flew on eastward, miles away now. A light rain started, not strong enough to put out the fire. Charles staggered among the dead mules to see what else he might salvage from the disaster. Two mules were still alive, unhurt. With their reins gathered in his left hand he started back toward the rise.
The fire stopped him. The great white-and-scarlet wall now curved across the main rise and around to his right, behind the continuation of the rise shielding the creek bed where Boy and Fen had died. As he watched, the fire completely engulfed the rise where Wooden Foot's body lay.
I can't even bury them.
At that, he wept tears of wrath.
By a lucky chance — his only luck of the day — Charles found his piebald about two miles northeast of the fire site. He was riding one of the two mules and leading the other. A wide strip of cloth torn from his trousers and twisted with a stick had stopped the bleeding of his right arm. The wound hurt and needed attention, but it was far from fatal.
When he came on Satan, standing head down, still as marble except for the movement of his eye, Charles changed mounts and headed on into the north, his emotions a raw mass of sorrow and outrage. At dusk he stopped to rest and camp. He built a buffalo-chip fire, then chewed some pemmican from his own parfleche. Two bites and his belly ached. Four bites, it all came up.