Ride the Moon Down

by Terry C. Johnston

  There were six or seven of them retreating from the open ground where Sweete had spilled another warrior from his pony. Six of them, he counted carefully now—a half dozen reining up at the tree line. Likely the horsemen didn’t know they were still within range of the trappers’ big guns … then again, they might well realize it but figure the white men weren’t going to empty one of their guns attempting to shoot at them across this distance. It appeared the milling warriors were arguing, pointing, planning. Far off to the left he watched the unhorsed warrior hobbling toward the creek, the wind shoving a black braid across the middle of his face.

  “Goddammit, Scratch!” the big man’s voice called out. “You alive?”

  Rolling to his left, Bass noisily slid down the side of the coulee. Magpie choked off a sob in her throat as he skidded to a stop before her, crouched, and hugged the children.

  “Stay here,” he whispered in Crow. “You’re safe right here.”

  “Hush! Father needs you to be quiet, Flea,” she reminded the boy as Titus continued to the mouth of the draw.

  “Damn you, Bass!” Sweete growled. “Least you could’ve done was answer me—”

  “I was a little tied up with two of ’em, Shadrach,” he snapped.

  Sweete’s eyes instantly flicked to the deep interior of the brushy wash, up to the bare rim of the gully. “What you figger we can do?”

  Glancing down at the blood smear across the big man’s blanket capote, he gazed into Sweete’s eyes. “I don’t figger you’re much for getting around right now.”

  Shad reluctantly shook his head.

  “Best you stay here,” he explained, motioning Waits to come over. “Tween the two of you, keep them rifles loaded—always have two of ’em ready.”

  For a moment Sweete studied the middistance, staring at the horsemen gesturing and yelling among themselves. One of them broke from the group and started toward the north, racing to reach the warrior who hobbled across the sage on foot.

  Shad said, “Two guns. That still leaves four of them niggers. They split up and slip around on top of the hill up there—”

  “That’s four we know of,” Bass interrupted, worried to the soles of his feet. With a burst of inspiration it came to him. “I dropped one of their horses up there, Shadrach. Maybeso I can hunker down behind that carcass where they won’t see a thing till they’re right on top of me, and I can throw some lead at ’em while they skedaddle back out of range.”

  “You’re only gonna have one chance at it,” Sweete warned. “Once they know you’re up there, them Injuns either stay shy of you or … they’ll come ride you into the ground.”

  “Here I figured you had some faith in me, Shadrach.”

  His lips pressed into a grim line, Sweete nodded. “I do got faith in you, Scratch. Don’t you ever doubt it.”

  “Waits-by-the-Water,” he said in Crow, turning to the woman, “are all the weapons loaded?”

  She nodded. “Give me your belt guns and I will load them too.”

  “When you do, keep them for yourself,” Bass said. “If things turn out badly”—and his eyes flicked at the children—“make sure the young ones do not suffer from these enemies.”

  Laying a hand on top of his, Waits said, “We have seen one another through worse than this, husband. None of us are afraid.”

  Those words reassured him, perhaps because he himself was damned scared.

  “There are five loaded pistols in my saddlebags,” he said, squeezing her cold hand. “Get them. I will take two with me and leave the others with you.”

  Then he turned to his partner and said in English, “Soon as she’s loaded these here two pistols, you’ll have five. I’m taking two with me, and three of them rifles.”

  Nodding once, Sweete said, “Between us, we oughtta cut down the last of these bastards purty quick.”

  Bass glanced at the sky, finding the pale, buttermilk-yellow globe sinking toward the west beyond the hills on the far side of the creek. “I’d sure like to drive them off a’fore nightfall. Maybe we could slip on in to the post when it gets good and dark.”

  “How far you figger it to the fort?”

  After calculating a few moments, he sighed. “Don’t know. Maybe ten miles.”

  “That’d take half the night, less’n we run flat-out.”

  “You figger it better to lay here waiting till morning—when more of ’em might show come sunup, or try to slip off and make a run for it?”

  Shrugging, Sweete answered, “I don’t figger we got anything but bad choices to make right now.”

  He laid a hand on the big man’s shoulder. “Then let’s see how many of them red niggers we can knock down a’fore it gets dark.”

  For a moment Sweete laid his bloody paw atop Bass’s hand. “You watch your topknot, Scratch.”

  With a grin he started away for the rifles. “Keep ’em busy as you can out front, and I’ll doe-see-doe with the rest.”

  “Bass?”

  Titus stopped in a crouch and turned there on the floor of the wash.

  Shad blinked once, then asked, “Who you s’pose they are?”

  Peering past the mouth of the draw, Bass eventually said, “From what them Snakes was telling that feller named Sinclair—I figger you and me just been interduced to the Sioux, Shadrach.”

  “Then I reckon we should teach these niggers they better watch their manners around us free men.”

  “That’s right, Shadrach,” he replied, taking two of the loaded pistols from his wife’s hands, stuffing them into his belt. “No Injun better go stirring up trouble with the likes of us two.”

  As he stopped by the stack of rifles to select three of the long weapons, Titus thought how good it was that Shadrach Sweete should now regard himself as a free man. After all these years in the mountains, every one of them endured as a company trapper—from those youthful days as an Ashley man, through that golden era reigned over by the various incarnations of the Rocky Mountain Fur Company, and on to these final days as the huge St. Louis monopoly strangled the last breath out of the beaver business—Sweete was at last his own man.

  Not that Titus had ever heard the man complain of his lot. Quite the contrary, for Shad, like Joe Meek, enjoyed a reputation as a merry soul, always seeking the bright side of every dire situation.

  Titus sensed a genuine feeling of immense satisfaction that by quitting the company at rendezvous more than four months ago, Sweete now regarded himself as a free man at last. Only trouble was, with a partner, there wasn’t any well-manned brigade to scare off war parties. More often than not free men died alone and in pairs. Anonymous. No others to know where their bones lay for the magpies and the wolves to scatter.

  Angrily he shut his eyes a moment, opening them to look at his daughter and son. Flea waved innocently to his father, then gazed up at his sister. She nodded and the boy waved again. Bass smiled at them, turned, and trudged away, penetrating the brush at the head of the draw.

  Standing the rifles against the side of the wash, he clawed his way up to the edge and peered over—locating the dead pony. After sliding back to the bottom, he carried the weapons to the top one at a time and laid them on the lip of the prairie, finally legging his way over with the third rifle.

  In bellying through the sage to the pony’s side, Titus passed the fallen warrior. The chertlike eyes stared unblinking at the cold, dimming sky overhead, slowly glazing as they lost their luster in these first minutes following death.

  Titus dragged the last rifle between the horse’s legs as one of Shad’s guns boomed. Below, at the mouth of the draw, the big man yelped, kip-kip-keeyi-ing like a coyote. Out on the flat three of the warriors set up their own wolf howl, one of them suddenly nudging his pony into a gallop so he could ride back and forth past the white man in a bravery run. Peering out from that shelter of the dead horse’s legs, the smell of its frozen blood not disagreeable, Scratch thought the daring warrior made a fine target of himself. He pushed one of the rifles forward, settling
it back against his shoulder.

  Then he remembered. As tempting a target as that rider might be, if he did fire, Scratch realized the enemy would know he was up there and his surprise would be ruined. So instead he watched the brazen horseman dash back and forth while the other two looked on—

  Two? Them and the rider, they made for three. And that meant there was another trio he could not account for as he studied the creek bottom.

  Inching his head a little higher, Scratch cautiously peered across more than one hundred eighty degrees of that river valley, searching for the other horsemen in what light was left to that late afternoon. Try as he might, he couldn’t locate them among the trees and brush lining the flat. Down below he heard Waits’s voice—likely talking low to the children. And he thought he heard Sweete—more than likely talking to himself, if not to those three warriors.

  Maybe the light would drain from the sky and night would fall before they had any more trouble. Then they could just slip away into the dark—

  The missing trio of horsemen popped up at the brow of the hill right above him, as if they had sprung right out of the sagebrush itself.

  Scratch wasn’t hidden behind the horse. No, not with them coming from the opposite direction now.

  He stayed flat on his belly, his breath stilled, watching them kick their ponies into a gallop as they broke the crest, beginning to shriek and holler. They weren’t racing for his side of the gully. Instead, the horsemen were reining for the far side.

  Which damn well might mean they hadn’t spotted him lying there in the shadow of the dead pony’s legs, smelling its dried blood pungently metallic on the cold wind.

  As the clatter of their hooves grew louder, he heard Waits scream at the bottom of the coulee, her yell stifled the moment she realized she had caused Magpie and Flea to cry out. How he wanted to yell—try to reassure them … even to turn and look at the flat ground to see if the reason Waits had cried was that the other three were charging in to ride right over Shad.

  But Scratch assumed that’s just what the bottom three were doing: coming from that direction, holding the attention of the two white riflemen, while another trio swept around and over the top of the hill to trap the enemy in their graves at the bottom of the wash.

  Not today, goddammit.

  When they were sixty yards away, Bass decided he had two shots to make from the three rifles. Take one by surprise, then get another warrior riding away before a third was too far and chancy in the coming gloom.

  Forty yards.

  But if he felt really lucky, he might just scramble to the top of the hill to take a shot at that third horseman.

  Grabbing a smoothbore for this closest shot, he swung the muzzle across the pony’s stiffened leg, resting the forestock atop the foreflank. Snapping the big hammer back to full cock, he laid the stock against his cheek, picked the target, and let his breath out halfway. Held … then pulled the single trigger.

  With a bright gush of light the pan ignited, but the rifle did not fire.

  Suddenly screaming with that discovery of the white man in hiding, the warriors reined up, hooves skidding as Bass pitched the smoothbore aside.

  He rose to his knees as the warriors attempted to settle their frightened ponies, trying their best to get a fix on the white man and fire their bows at the enemy. To full cock went the rifle’s hammer. This might well be his last chance to drop one of them.

  Over the gray cloud he watched a horseman spill backward off the rear of his pony, his long blanket coat and the coil of rope the warrior had tucked beneath his belt becoming entangled with the animal’s legs.

  Turning to lay the rifle aside and take up the last of the weapons, Bass heard the arrow smack into the carcass right where his left shoulder had been a moment before. Grabbing the loaded smoothbore, Scratch felt that shoulder ache … remembering the Arapaho arrow that had fully skewered the very same shoulder more than five winters before.

  Sweete’s gun boomed again from the wash below.

  Another arrow slammed into the flinty ground before him, then one tugged at the coyote-fur cap he had pulled down over his ears, knocking it so the fur slipped down, blinding him. Angrily tugging it back with his left hand, Scratch felt the shaft that had pierced the cap.

  “Not near good enough!” he roared at them, tearing the cap from his head before he laid the forestock of the fusil along the horse’s shoulder and took aim.

  He knew he had the man even before the smoke cleared and he saw that second riderless horse clattering away. The moment the last warrior sat there, daring him, throwing an arm into the air and shaking his bow at the white man—shrieking an oath—Bass cursed the misfire of that first smoothbore.

  Leaping up as the fusil tumbled to the ground, Scratch drew the old English horse pistol from his belt. Of the three, it had the longest barrel—the best chance to make this shot at more than twenty-five yards.

  With both hands gripping the butt, he yanked back on the dragon’s-head hammer, bringing the end of the muzzle down on his target limned in the fading light, intending to hold a little high. In the instant he was slipping his bare finger inside the big half-round trigger guard, Bass heard the hooves behind his right shoulder.

  Not moving the pistol or his arms, the white man turned his head, finding a warrior had forsaken his attack on the mouth of the draw to ride up the slope to the aid of those at the top of the hill.

  Coming out of the west, horse and horseman were one liquid shadow … the bow brought up—

  As Bass whirled, his arms still extended and wrists locked together, he dropped to one knee there in the crescent of the dead pony’s frozen legs. With a breathless pause in the cold autumn wind, he heard the rawhide bowstring thwung a heartbeat before his finger flexed, firing at that widest part of the shadow crowning the pony.

  In that instant before the wind rose once again and the air possessed such a stillness, the ball slammed into its target, driving the air from the man’s lungs with a grunt, immediately followed by a second grunt as the warrior smacked the ground. His pony dashed on past as the Indian’s body disappeared into that gloom inking the ground with an indelible darkness.

  “Balls of thunder!” Sweete called out from the gloom. “How many of ’em you got up there, Bass?”

  Even as that breath of frozen wind gusted there in the wake of Shad’s words, Scratch heard the rustle of dry sage, the grinding of the flaky ground. All of it meaning that the warrior he had unhorsed was moving, maybe crawling—still alive.

  “Goddammit—stay down here, woman!”

  Bass spun around at Sweete’s warning cry. Squinting hard, he could not make out anything but liquid indigo in the wash below him now that the sun had sunk, leaving nothing more than a band of lavender along the rocky breast of the far hills.

  He licked his lips, desperately working to finger just the right words in Crow. “Stay with the children,” he ordered her.

  “Ti-tuzz—”

  “The children! Stay with them until this is over!”

  A sigh of relief gushed from him, and that next moment Bass heard the faintest trace of sound from the sage. Almost as if he could hear the man breathing hard as he pulled himself along the frozen ground. Those sounds disappeared the moment Scratch turned, began moving in their direction through the growing darkness.

  Bass was all but upon the warrior before he made out the horseman sprawled among the low clumps of sage. Bass stopped there near the Indian’s moccasins. His eyes slowly swept the valley, straining to find any more attackers. Realizing his blood pounded in his ears, that he still held the empty pistol at the end of both extended arms, Scratch slowly brought the weapon down—staring now at the warrior who had his eyes fixed on the white man.

  “Bass?”

  “Up here,” he said tersely.

  Then softly, so much in a whisper that Titus wasn’t sure at first, the warrior began to sing. More a discordant chant as the man huffed his medicine song, obviously in great pain.
<
br />   “Where you, Bass?”

  “Keep coming—you’ll find me.”

  With two more steps Scratch stood directly over the warrior. In the enemy’s belt were a knife and a tomahawk, neither of which he had pulled to defend himself. As Titus started to kneel over the warrior, the man jerked his fingers to the handle of that knife, but Bass grabbed the wrist before the weapon could clear the scabbard.

  “Goddamn, it got dark quick,” Sweete grumbled as he slid over the side of the draw, stood painfully, getting his bearings.

  “There ain’t no more of ’em to worry about down your way?” Scratch asked as he stuffed his pistol away in his belt, then quickly pried the warrior’s fingers loose from the knife handle.

  He ripped the tomahawk from the belt and stood.

  “There’s maybe two still down there in the brush,” Sweete explained as he came to a stop on the other side of the warrior.

  The Indian’s eyes flicked in fear as the tall trapper stared down at him. Then the warrior’s eyes quickly filled with loathing.

  Scratch said, “I figger it’s time for us to make a run for that post.”

  “Why—we can hold off them two niggers ’thout making our balls sweat.”

  “Think hard on it, Shadrach,” he whispered. “What Injuns did we figger these are?”

  “Likely them Sioux the Snakes warned was riding through this country.”

  “And if them Sioux was coming all the way over here where they never been a’fore … you figger there’d be only ten or a dozen of ’em come?”

  Sweete sighed. “No. They’d send a whole shitteree of ’em.”

  “So when these don’t show up tonight, things gonna get hot around here,” Titus explained. “I’m gonna make a run for the fort with the young’uns.”

  “What about this’un here? You wanna finish him?”

  For a moment more Bass thought on it. “Time was, I would have. Might kill me a nigger like this again one day … but this’un I’ll let go.”

  “Just free as you please?”

  Of a sudden it struck him what to do. “No. If the rest of them Sioux find this nigger alive—find all the rest of ’em dead—I want this son of a bitch to tell all the rest what happened.”