In the first charge the three had done their greatest damage. As the great red wave split at the western end of the sandbar, the horsemen were forced to veer sharply to drop off the low bank into the dry part of the riverbed. Now a handful of the Shahiyena and Brule already lay in the sand. More fell in their second charge as the three rifles exploded in the face of the red man’s attack, forcing its way down the bank into the very gut of the river itself.
Bull reined up and watched a moment, horrified, three more heartbeats. Brown-skinned warriors crawled, wounded and bleeding, dragging themselves up the dry wash into the willow and plum brush, into hiding. Those that were spotted by the white men were shot where they crawled.
He had to let others know. Roman Nose … Pawnee Killer, anyone. Yet Bull reined up, knowing he alone was called upon to drive the three from their burrow.
His medicine alone had shown him where the trio hid, firing their rifles into the face of each renewed charge. His medicine alone had chosen him to wrench the badger from its hole.
As he grappled with what his plan would be, the mounted chargers pulled off, followed by a half-dozen riderless ponies still heaving at a gallop in the chase. High-Backed Bull cursed: the white men had broken their concerted charge. And for that failure dead and wounded warriors lay less than the length of two arms from the sandbar. The half-a-hundred now forced the horsemen back to their old way of fighting: the circle. The spinning, whirling wheel that pitted each warrior, solitary and alone with his own medicine, against those hated white men hunkered down on the grassy island behind the bloody carcasses of their big American horses and mules.
Behind the leg-flung carcasses the enemy scraped at the sand, clawing up chunks of grass and knotted roots, beginning to scrape their way down.
While a new charge formed itself.
“Stop!” Bull warned, knowing as he did how senseless was his warning.
Instead he could only watch helplessly the blur that wound itself up like the spinning of a dust devil whipping mindlessly across the sun-blistered prairie. Down the horsemen tore into the glittering riverbed, beating their way past the north shore of the island, across the riverbed to leap their ponies onto the south bank, back up the bank in a grand sweep, and into the riverbed once again in a whirl of color and numbing noise. From beneath their snorting ponies’ necks they fired arrows, but it was mostly rifle and pistol fire, each horseman dropping from the far side of his little pony at the critical moment approaching the end of the sandbar.
While the white man’s repeaters kept up a steady racket, unshod hooves reverberated against the dry riverbed in a thunder of terror and noise, the screeching of the horsemen matched only by the cries of their wounded ponies as the animals reared, fought, and pitched sideways as each successive bullet struck.
And on the island, those mad curses muddled with grunts of angry, scared men, scrambling and scratching at the sand—with every precious second digging lower and lower still, like frightened burrow mice as the hawk swoops overhead, claws outstretched.
Still he recognized the squeal of the last of the frightened animals as it struggled, reared, and lunged back to fall on its handler—flinging up cascades of golden, gritty, blinding sand as it went down. Here and there the island cracked with the sharp blasts of the white man’s Colt’s pistols.
Eerie, the young Shahiyena warrior thought as he watched, that humanlike screaming of the horse as its rider shot a bullet into its head, bringing that last of the big animals down in a resplendent spray of sand and blood. It fought to the last: biting, hurling phlegm and piss as it thrashed headlong into the grass, legs still fighting as a second bullet crashed into its brain.
The white man lunged behind his huge brown barricade, safe from the oncoming charge. Another rush came from the north bank, the white men frightened by the quirts slashing, slapping pony rumps as the horsemen tore past. There was more deafening sound now, thunderous and numbing to the young warrior as he grappled with how to reach the trio of white men huddled beneath the bank. To ride until he drew near … or do it all on foot.
Frightened voices filled the steamy air above the island. Though he could not understand it all, Bull did know some of the white man’s tongue: what he had learned from his mother—even more, what he had learned from the white man who had fathered him. Those words he believed he knew best: the profane, desperate prayers. The cries of men hit and bleeding, calling out for help.
It took no special talent to know the warriors had severely hurt and crippled the half-a-hundred in their first few charges, in less time than it took a man to light and smoke a small pipe bowl of tobacco. But they had failed to squash the enemy the way they had planned. It had not been the quick work they had whipped themselves into believing it would be.
For now it became nothing more than hot, gritty labor—the white men having plopped down behind the heaving carcasses of their dying horses, laying their hot-barreled many-shoots rifles over the still-quivering bodies of their dust-slaked, bloody, arrow-pocked barricades. Gray-black powder smoke drifted like a smudge against the blue sky above the sandbar. Below erupted clouds of spurting yellow dust as warrior bullets struck here and there, yet to find a target.
And in the midst of the sandy riverbed lay the naked bodies, most not moving any longer, picked off by the white men on the island, perhaps finished by the three under the bank in their burrow.
The hair on his arms tingled at the faint bugle call from upstream, brassy and clear on the cool air of that dawn. Likely it was one of the renegade turncoats who proudly carried his shiny medicine at all times—soldiers once themselves.
That one who called himself Kan-sas. Cly-bor was his white name. But the Dog Soldiers who had taken him in when he had deserted the pony soldiers called him Kansas. He carried his shiny gold horn on a leather cord over his shoulder. It was likely he who called with his horn for another charge now because many of the horsemen were milling upstream, as if waiting for someone to take control of them.
“Where is Roman Nose?” Bull wondered aloud, reining about and moving out upstream to see for himself. Porcupine would be with him, he knew. No matter what the other war chiefs might try, it remained for the Nose to bring order out of the chaos of those first few charges.
And now near the upstream end of the island, the bullets from Shahiyena snipers began to fall among the hastily dug rifle pits behind the carcasses. Some of the brown-skinned horsemen had abandoned their ponies, diving among the reeds and willow along both sides of the sandy riverbed. There they parted the brush and fired at anything that moved on the sandbar. Still, Bull considered as he gazed along the shallow, sandy riverbed, the white man had exacted his terrible damage on the horsemen. Across the sand and in the lapping river itself lay not only the wounded and dead warriors, but the dying, squealing war ponies as well.
The gall rising in his throat, his decision was made, and with a savage yank on his rein, Bull brought his own animal around abruptly.
“Maiyun!” he called to the mysterious ones. “Help me!”
Instead of forcing it down into the riverbed as the others had, he chose to race along the edge of the north bank. Then, surprising the trio who hid in their burrow, he cut sharply to the right, pushing his reluctant animal directly for the badger’s hole where the three white men waited.
One of them turned and broke as soon as the warrior was but twenty feet from the overhanging bank. The other two attempted to bring their rifles up to fire, but Bull was into and over them before they drew sight on him. Swinging his war club, screaming his death song, he knocked a rifle from the hands of one of the whites, hurling the man aside like white water sliding past a midstream boulder as his pony raced by.