The other two Indians had hold of Minerva, the one of them wearing the wolfskin and the other with his face painted entirely blue. Bobbo couldn’t reload, they gave him no time “to reload. He ran to where his mother was trying to fight them off, and swung the stock of his rifle at the back of the one with the wolfskin, but the Indian was strong and fierce and shrugged off the blows like they were flies annoying him. Minerva was holding to the wagon wheel with one hand, and with the other she was hitting them with her hairbrush. The Indians kept talking to themselves all the while they tried to pry her loose from the wagon wheel, and finally the one with the wolfskin began punching her repeatedly in the chest, and the one with the blue face turned on Bobbo with a knife and came at him with the blade extended toward his gut.
Bobbo reached for the Indian’s thrusting hand instinctively, ignoring for the moment the knife that was clutched in it, grabbing for the wrist the way he’d grabbed for Will’s or Gideon’s when they were rassling, pulling the Indian toward him, using the force of his own momentum, and at the same time bringing his knee up into the Indian’s groin. The Indian’s eyes opened wide in the painted face. Bobbo saw the face an instant before he dropped the knife. As Bobbo stooped to pick it up, he thought: He’s no older’n me. His hand closed around the bone handle. Maybe younger, he thought. The Indian was doubled in pain on the ground, his hands clutching his balls. Bobbo plunged the knife blade deep into his chest. He raised the knife and plunged it again. And then another time. Then he turned away and vomited into his hands.
Behind him, the Indian with the wolfskin pulled Minerva off the wagon wheel, looped one arm around her waist, and began dragging her toward where she could hear horses whinnying and pawing the earth. They had torn her petticoat up the front during the struggle and her breasts were exposed; she was embarrassed that her son would see her this way. Oddly, she felt neither fear nor anger. She knew only that this Indian painted red was trying to take her someplace she didn’t want to go. Stubbornly, she resisted. Kicking, striking with her closed fists wherever she could reach him, she resisted with every ounce of strength she possessed. She could still feel the pain where he had struck her between the breasts, but she struggled fiercely until he hit her again full in the mouth, splitting her lip and causing it to bleed, knocking loose two teeth, which she spat with blood into her hand. He knocked her hand away from her mouth, and the teeth went flying. He caught hold of her wrist, dragged her into the darkness. She could see four painted horses. He unhobbled one of them and threw her over a blanket stinking of sweat and piss, and then swung himself up over the horse’s back and made a clucking sound to the animal. She knew then that unless she did something at once, unless she found the will and the strength to stop him, he would take her wherever he wished. She thought suddenly of the patroon Jimmy Jackson. The horse was in motion.
She rolled back against him and eased herself upright so that she was riding as she might have sidesaddle. He must have thought she was preparing to leap from the horse; he immediately put his left arm around her, twisting his hand into the torn petticoat, his right hand clinging to the reins, the wolfskin on his shoulder stinking as bad as had the blanket. It was then that she clawed for his face, reaching for his eyes. He screamed aloud, the horse veering as he yanked at the reins. Her spread right hand found something soft and jellylike, her fingers were closing on his right eye, she would pluck the eyeball from its socket like a hard-boiled egg, in an instant she would blind him.
He threw her from the horse. He flung her away from him as though she were a curse. He did not look back. He kept galloping away from her while behind him she lay trembling on the ground with the thought of what she had almost done.
By their reckoning, they were still two hundred miles from Fort Laramie.
They feared Annabel would die before they got there. They had made poultices of spirit turpentine and sugar, and they applied one of these to the head wound, and wrapped it tight with a clean cotton petticoat torn into bandages. The second poultice was larger; they put it over the jagged gash in her side, but the blood wouldn’t stop, it kept seeping up through the poultice. They changed the poultice three, four times that night, and each time the blood worked its way through, and they didn’t know what else to do to get it to stop. They had no recourse to remedies they knew: chimney soot mixed with lard, pine resin. All they could do was change the poultice each time it got drenched again with blood.
They kept expecting the Indians to come back.
They figured the one who’d got away, the one wearing the wolfskin, would return with a passel of them this time, if only to retrieve the horses. There were angry black and blue marks on Minerva’s breasts where the Indian had struck her, and she ached with each breath she took. Hadley had pulled the stumps of her broken teeth, and she’d stuffed a rag into her mouth to stop the bleeding. But her jaw and lip were swollen, the lip split besides from the force of the Indian’s blow. She swore to Hadley she’d have blinded him like Samson given just another moment. He said, “No, you wouldn’t have, Min.”
The horses were fine animals, a stallion and a pair of mares, looked like the Chickasaw running woods horses they were familiar with back home, Spanish breeds crossed with those the colonists brought from England. Bobbo wanted to ride one of them ahead, try to catch up with the wagon train. If there was a doctor in the party...
“No,” Minerva said.
“Ma,” he said, “I could fetch him back with me.”
“I’d fear for your life,” Minerva said softly.
By morning, Annabel’s bleeding had stopped. They put a fresh poultice on the wound below, and bandaged it tightly, and changed, too, the poultice and bandage on her head. At six o’clock, they broke camp and began moving ing toward the South Fork of the Platte.
She was burning with fever when they crossed the river on the morning of the seventh. The weather had turned sticky and hot, adding to her discomfort. She lay on a quilt in the wagon bed, covered with a linen bed sheet had been part of Grandmother Chisholm’s dower. There had been little rain in this part of the country, and the river was low and the bottom firm. For this much they were grateful; they could not have coped with anything the likes of the Kansas.
“Have I been scalped, Pa?” she asked.
He smiled and patted her hand. “No, darlin,” he said. “You’ve still got all your beautiful hair on your head, where it’s sposed to be.”
“What happened to your ear that’s all bandaged?”
“An Injun figgered I’d look best with but a single ear.”
He’d seen the Indian an instant before the blow struck, saw the rounded stone head of the weapon in his hand and knew it was not a hatchet. There’d been the whistle first, and then the sound behind him, and he’d turned to see the Indian with his face painted blue, the same one Bobbo later stabbed, and the maul coming for the back of his head. He’d turned, trying to duck away, but the blow caught him full on the ear, and that was the last he knew of anything till he felt Minerva’s gentle hands upon him, washing away the blood and dressing the wound. He had a headache now the likes of which he’d never had in his life.