Death Rattle tb-8

by Terry C. Johnston

  He found another likely target: tall; a muscular youth brandishing what appeared to be an English trade gun in one hand as his spotted pony raced toward their corner of the corral. The Sioux and Cheyenne were clearly going to make another long sweep across a broad front again, hooves tearing up grassy dirt clods as they streaked past the long axis of the barricades where most of the trappers lay or knelt behind the bloating carcasses.

  The redhead’s rifle boomed. Then it was Scratch’s turn to topple his target.

  “Name’s Jim. Jim Baker,” the redhead turned to declare. “I’d like to say I’m glad to meet you,” he explained as he rolled onto his back to yank up his powder horn and started to reload. “But I don’t figger none of us gonna get outta here anyways.”

  “You listen here, young fella,” Bass snapped. “I been through more’n any one man’s share of scraps with red niggers—from Apach’ on the Heely, to Comanch’ over in greaser country, clear up to the goddamned belly of Blackfoot land itself. We ain’t beat yet—”

  “How the hell you figure we gonna get outta here?” Baker demanded as he jammed a ball down his powder-choked barrel. “We ain’t got no horses left to ride—”

  “We’ll get out, Jim Baker. You keep shooting center like you done so far … these brownskins gonna get tired of this game come dark.”

  “G-game?”

  “Damn straight, it’s a game to them,” Bass explained, then tongued a ball from among those he had nestled inside his cheek. As he pulled his ramrod free of the thimbles pinned beneath the octagonal barrel, he laid another greased linen patch over the muzzle and shoved the wiping stick down for another swab. Only when he had dragged out the patch fouled with oily, black powder residue did he spit the large round ball into his palm and place it in the yawning muzzle.

  Baker glanced at the body nearby—a hapless trapper who had poked his head up just a little too far at the wrong moment and gotten an arrow straight through the eye socket for his carelessness. Penetrating into the brain, the shaft had brought a quick, merciful death. The redhead grumbled, “This damn well don’t appear to be no game to me.”

  “No two ways to it, Jim: this here’s big medicine to these brownskins,” Bass explained as he reprimed the pan. “White men ain’t been hoo-rooed by Sioux and Cheyenne much afore this, you see. Lookit their women up on that hill, singing and hollering their medicine for ’em, screaming billy-be-hell for their men to rub us out, all and every last one.”

  “They can do it,” Baker groaned with resignation. “Damn well ’nough of ’em out there.”

  “But they won’t,” Titus argued. “Ain’t their way to ride over us all at once. Sure they could all come down here an’ tromp us under their hooves. They’d loose a few in rubbing us out but they’d make quick work of it.”

  “W-why ain’t they?”

  “There ain’t no glory in it, Jim.” And Bass grinned, his yellowed teeth like pin acorns aglow in the early-afternoon light. “Them are warriors. The gen-yu-wine article. And the only way a warrior gets his honors is in war. This here’s war—a young buck’s whole reason for livin’. Wiping us out quick … why, that ain’t war. That’s just killing.”

  Baker wagged his head and rolled onto his knees again to make a rest for his left elbow on the ribs of his dead horse. “I don’t rightly care what sort of game them Injuns is having with us. I figger to do my share of killing.”

  Bass rocked onto his rump and settled the long barrel atop the fist he made of his left hand, which rested on the horse’s broad, fly-crusted front shoulder. Green and black bottleflies already busy laying their eggs in the ooze and the gore.

  Gazing up the slope, he was surprised to find the woman had moved. Damn, if she wasn’t coming down toward the bottom close enough that he might just have a chance to knock down Fraeb’s warrior princess.

  Closer, closer … come on now, he heard himself think in his head as she and her unmounted courtiers inched down the hillside, their shrill voices all the more clear now in the late-afternoon air. If he held high, and waited for that next gust of hot wind to die … he might just hit her. If not the warrior princess, then drop her horse. And if not her pretty spotted pony, then one of them others what stood around her like she was gut-sucking royalty.

  He let out half a breath and waited for the breeze to cease tugging on that thin braid of gray-brown hair that brushed against his right cheek. Bass quickly set the back trigger, then carefully slipped his fingertip over the front trigger, waiting, waiting—

  When the rifle went off he bolted onto his knees to have himself a look, not patient to wait for the pan flash and muzzle smoke to drift off on the next gust of wind.

  Her brown-spotted pony was rocking back onto its haunches, suddenly twisting its head and neck as the double handful of courtiers scattered—diving and scrambling off in every direction. As if plucked into the sky, the warrior princess herself sprung off the rearing pony the moment its forelegs pawed in the air a heartbeat, then careened onto its side.

  A few of the more daring attendants immediately surrounded the princess and started dragging her up the slope, away from the fighting, out of range of the white man’s far-reaching weapons.

  Scratch watched how reluctant she was to back away, amused at how she continued to stare over her shoulder in utter disbelief as she was yanked up that hillside, her eyes transfixed on the tiny corral where the trappers were somehow holding out. Perhaps she even wondered just which one of the cursed, doomed whiteskins had killed her beautiful, invincible pony. Likely heaping her vilest curses on the man who had gone and soured her powerful medicine she had been using to spur the naked horsemen to perform their death-defying charges.

  “And well you should do your share of the damned killing, Jim Baker,” Bass replied to the redhead as he rocked backward and dragged the long barrel off the horse’s front shoulder.

  Scratch swatted at a dozen flies hovering around his sweaty face and tugged the stopper from the powder horn between his teeth. “Because killin’ ever’ last one of these bastards we can drop afore sundown comes is the only way this bunch of half-dead hide hunters is gonna slip outta here when it gets slap-dark.”

  * Ride the Moon Down

  * Dance on the Wind

  2

  But there wasn’t a man among them willing to attempt slipping off before moonrise lit up this high desert.

  Good men these were, but … Scratch realized most of them were followers. Not that they lacked in courage, just that they weren’t eager to strike out on their own in the dark without Henry Fraeb leading them back to the Green River.

  “He’s for sure dead?” Bass asked some of the first to crawl up to meet him near the tree stumps.

  “Enfant de garce!” Basil Clement swore. “I see lot of dead, and that Frapp ees ver’ dead!”

  Jim Baker sat staring at how Fraeb’s corpse leaned back against one of the stumps, his jaw hanging open in a horrifying grin, rivulets of blood dried over most of his face as it spilled from the bullet wound that had nearly blown off the top of his head. Baker shuddered and turned back to the council. “He sure does make a damn ugly dead man.”

  “Remind me to say some kind words over your worthless, fly-blowed carcass when you go under,” Bass chided, jabbing an elbow into Baker’s ribs.

  “Didn’t mean no disrespect by it,” the redhead grumbled apologetically.

  Scratch turned from Baker and asked the group, “So how many of you gonna come with me?”

  Not a one spoke up. The silence of that twilight council was almost suffocating to him. Bass slowly eyed most of the twenty others who huddled nearby in an arch around the dead booshway.

  “Ain’t none of you got the eggs to make a break for it with me?”

  “They’ll have scouts prowling,” Jake Corn finally put an argument to it.

  “But they’re like to come at us again in the morning,” Bass grumbled to those men who first started to cluster near the center of their corral back when twilight be
gan to erase the last of the day’s shadows. “How long any of you figger our powder to hold out?”

  No one had an answer to that.

  “I’m gonna stay,” Jake Corn volunteered bravely.

  At least give the man credit for speaking up and spitting out his mind.

  A lot of the half-breeds and Frenchmen nodded without saying a thing. Good, spineless followers they were. Almost made Scratch want to puke.

  But he knew when he was beat. Knew how fruitless it would be to try to convert noisy cowards into quiet heroes. “Maybeso you’re right,” Bass relented, his shoulders sagging.

  “I’ll go with you, Scratch,” Baker offered immediately.

  He weighed it a moment, then decided. “Thankee, Jim. But, maybeso we all ought’n go … or we all ought’n stay. Best we’ll hang together or we’ll fall separate.”

  “Leastways, we got us some cover here,” Elias Kersey offered.

  Then Rube Purcell added, “And we know they ain’t likely to run us over tomorrow if’n they couldn’t today.”

  Several of the faceless men grunted their assent.

  “It gets dark enough,” Bass suggested, “some of us oughtta belly down to the river and bring back some water.”

  Five men volunteered. He could tell that handful really were brave men. They just needed to be told what to do.

  When the cloaking darkness finally came and the first faint stars were just beginning to twinkle in full radiance, the five crawled from the far side of the corral with what oaken and gourd canteens the whole bunch could find among the scattered baggage or tied to those saddles still strapped on the bloating horses.

  Bass watched them go, then turned to catch one of Fraeb’s half-breed, no-brained Frenchmen loading his pipe bowl with shreds of tobacco.

  “That spark you’ll strike gonna make for a good target of your poor self,” he growled as he closed a bony claw on the man’s shoulder, another hand around the pipe itself. “No telling how close them brownskins could try crawling up on us to put a big hole in one of you.”

  “The man’s right,” Jake Corn agreed. “No pipes.”

  Then Titus went on to remind them all they must stay close to the ground when they felt the need to move about the corral so the evening sky would not backlight them. No sense in learning the hard way if those Sioux and Cheyenne had any true marksmen lying out there in the night.

  Later, after the water carriers returned and the men scrounged through possibles sacks for some dried meat or a little pemmican, feeding their wounded first, Scratch could no longer put off the chore. Crabbing over toward the far corner, he rocked up onto his knees and toes to quickly yank aside the front of his breechclout. Here and there in the corral, others were doing the same—every last one of them finding it all but impossible to make water crouching on his knees. Not a one of them dared to stand in doing their business. Too risky, what with the warriors who might well be slipping up in the night.

  When finished, Titus shuddered, sensing how quickly this high prairie cooled off once the sun had been sucked from the sky. Dragging his rifle beside him, he did his best to hold his breath while he crabbed back over to the mule’s carcass where he struggled to free one of the thick, wool blankets. It would have to do: his other blanket and the buffalo robe were hopelessly pinned beneath the mule, its hide, the blanket, and the robe all bristling with more than half a hundred arrows. Draping the lone horse blanket across his shoulders, he left the stinking gut pile and the mule’s riven belly behind. Reaching his saddle horse, he sank back against its backbone and let out a sigh.

  He pulled off his wide-brimmed, low-crowned hat and flopped it on his belly as he allowed his head to collapse back among a few of the arrow shafts prickling the carcass. He was weary but doubted he could really sleep. Instead he lay watching the stars crawl overhead, inch by inch, listening to the muted sounds of the others, listening for any suspicion of the enemy.

  He wondered if she would be watching this same sky too, way up there in Crow country. As she stared up through the smoke hole at that triangle of sky near the top of her mother’s lodge. While Waits-by-the-Water rocked their children to sleep in her arms … singing softly to them, making up those hero stories about their father.

  Scratch didn’t realize he had fallen asleep until the quiet whispers of those nearby stabbed through his dreamy reverie. It really had turned cold. He shuddered and ground the heels of both hands into his eyes. Blinking them open, he found that false dawn would arrive momentarily. But for now the skyline behind them was no more than a sliver of gray suspended between a blackened sky and an even darker horizon.

  “ ’Bout time you woke up.”

  Bass rolled to find Baker sliding up on his haunches, dragging half a buffalo robe with him.

  “You been up all night?”

  “When I woke up a bit ago, I seen you was asleep,” the redhead explained. “So I decided to stay awake till you got done.”

  Looking around at the dim forms taking shape in the first filtered gray of predawn, Bass said, “I figger nothing much happened.”

  “One of the wounded fellas died,” Baker declared. “But he went quiet.”

  An icy drop of cold snaked its way down his spine. He shuddered in the half-light. “Goddamn, but I hate when a man dies noisy.”

  Better that they go like Jack Hatcher. Now, there was a man what knew how to die. Go out singing his favorite song. Mad—Jack—Hatcher. For as noisy a life as the coon lived … he sure went quiet.

  Titus asked in a whisper, “No one heard nothing from out there?”

  Baker admitted,. “Not that I know of.”

  “I better see the others is ready when first light comes,” Scratch said, dragging the blanket off and reaching for his brown, weathered hat. He tugged it down over the black bandanna. “Maybeso you try for some shut-eye while you can, Jim Baker.”

  “Uhn-uhn. I’ll come with you,” the redhead volunteered. “Make sure every man’s up and fixed for powder.”

  He knelt there, staring at the youngster a moment more, feeling the grin starting to crease his leathery, oak-brown face. “Just like a pup, ain’cha?”

  “What you mean by that?”

  Wagging his head, Titus set off with Baker at his elbow. “I ’member when I was young and fool-headed like you—back when I could go days ’thout any sleep.”

  “I’ll be fine,” the tall one protested.

  Finally Bass stopped, grinning as he slapped a hand on Baker’s shoulder. “I’ll bet you will at that.”

  One by one the others who had been dozing amid the carcasses were coming awake. The two who were badly wounded soon began to ask for more water. Bass and Baker looked over what remained in the canteens, then asked for volunteers to crawl down to the creek with them before the sky got any brighter. No small wonder the men in that corral had already drained nearly every drop they had brought back from the stream at twilight, what with the way the sun had leached so damn much moisture from them throughout that long, long day beneath the cruel, late-summer sun. Come nightfall and their first chance to slip down to the creek, the men were nigh as parched as a green hide dusted with canning salt and a dose of alum.

  As the light slowly ballooned around them, Scratch could see that someone had laid a greasy leather shirt over Fraeb’s head. The old German’s mortifying remains still sat on the ground, leaning back against that hundred-year-old fire-charred stump. But it was clear one of the men simply couldn’t stand looking at that ugly, gap-toothed, death grin of Henry Fraeb’s any longer. Maybe one of the half-superstitious Frenchies, he figured. They were Papists, to be sure.

  This bunch would have to decide what to do about their dead when it came time to skeedaddle out of there.

  “Them’s the only ones I see,” a man whispered huskily.

  “Where? Where?”

  There was a lot of muffled shuffling when most of the sixteen who could still move on their own crawled over to the near side of the corral. Every last one of th
em staring quiet as deer mice at the slope while the coming light continued to give a changing texture to the hillside where the warriors had gathered throughout the previous day. At first, Scratch was not sure what he was seeing—not until enough gray seeped sidelong through the mouth of the valley to their right, exposing more of the slope.

  Nothing there but some sage and stunted cedar, along with a scattering of jack pine. No horsemen, as far as he could tell.

  “I see ’em!” one of the others called out a little too loud.

  “There—on top of the hill!”

  “That all there is?”

  Plain as the coming sun that six or seven of them, no, at least eight, had stood watch atop that crest through the short summer night.

  “I don’t see no more of ’em.”

  Hopeful, Titus strained his eyes to be as sure as the rest. If the breast of the hill was no longer blanketed by the horsemen, if those chanting women and old men no longer bristled against the skyline, perhaps this coming sunrise would not be their last.

  “Could be they’re only guards,” Baker offered as he stopped at Bass’s hip.

  Scratch nodded while many of the others murmured in wonder of just what this meant. “Maybeso they hung back to see if these white men would slip off during the night. To wait up there till first light to be sure we was still here.”

  He wanted to laugh a little, perhaps cry too—quickly glancing around their prison, that corral of stinking, putrefying horses and mules.

  “Their magic is broken,” Bass explained barely above a whisper.

  “What was that?” one of the men asked, edging closer on a knee.

  “I said their medicine’s broke.”

  “Let’s get,” came the first suggestion.

  “On what?” another shrieked in indignation. “We ain’t got a horse one!”

  “I’ll walk, goddammit.”

  “That’s for sure,” Baker growled, then turned to Bass. “But where we going?”

  Scratch sighed, staring down at his mule and the saddle horse, the animals he had sacrificed to save his life. “Anywhere but here.”