“All of us will go,” Pahkah said.
“No. He is following our dust. The two of you will go on and he will follow you. I will swing around behind him and take him by surprise.”
Any argument the others might have offered was nipped by the jab of Soko’s heels. He rode east at a slow walk so as not to raise dust of his own, avoiding tracts where the grass was particularly thin. When he had gone far enough not to be seen by whoever was shadowing them, he reined in a wide loop that should bring him up on the stalker’s rear. It worked. The ground was hard, but there were partial tracks here and there, tracks made by a shod horse.
“It is a white man,” Soko said, and smiled. It pleased him to have Sargento and Pahkah proven wrong. He hefted his war club but continued at a walk. He would wait until evening to move in close. The white man might have a rifle.
The sun climbed but a short way when Soko reined up in surprise. Ahead stood a horse. Not just any horse. The bay he and his friends had chased. Its reins dangled and it was cropping grass.
Soko’s every nerve tingled. Something was not right. It must belong to the white man, but the white man would not go off and leave it. Yet that appeared to be what the white man had done. The ground was flat, the grass no more than knee-high and sparse. There was nowhere the white man could hide.
Still, Soko stayed where he was. His instincts warned him not to go nearer. Then the bay moved and Soko saw how it limped. Apparently, something was wrong with its front leg.
Soko thought he understood. The horse had gone lame and the white man had gone on, on foot. Soko kneed his mount forward. The bay raised its head and looked at him but showed no alarm and did not run off. He wondered if maybe the leg would heal and then the bay could be his, as fine an animal as any Nemene owned.
Soko was thinking of the bay when the grass broke apart and the white man rose up out of the earth and a sharp, penetrating pain filled Soko’s belly even as he was torn from his horse and thrown to the ground. He lost his grip on the war club, but he still had his knife and would have grabbed for it except that the pain bent him in half. It was worse than any pain he’d ever felt. He tried to suppress it but could not.
His knife was plucked from its sheath.
Gasping for breath, Soko looked up. The white man was big and broad-shouldered and bearded and held a folding knife coated with blood. His blood, dripping from the knife and from the white man’s hand.
“How?” Soko marveled. “How did you kill me?”
The white man astounded him then. The white man spoke to him in the language of the Nemene. “I put a stone in the hoof of my horse to make it limp.”
“But how did you hide in plain sight?”
The white man moved to where the grass had broken apart. He lifted a section of sod almost as long as he was tall and made a chopping motion with the knife.
Soko understood. The man had cut large pieces of sod, scattered the dirt under it, then covered himself with the sod as with a blanket and waited for a fly to ride into his web. It was clever. It was brilliant. “You have a name, white man?”
“Grizzly Killer.”
“Why do you hunt us?”
“You killed the woman and her mate.”
“How is it you speak the Nemene tongue?”
“I am an adopted Shoshone. The Shoshone tongue and the Nemene tongue are much alike. It is said that once the Nemene were Shoshone. That the Nemene drifted south and stayed and became a separate tribe but to this day the two tongues are very much alike.”
“Our elders tell us the same,” Soko said, with great effort.
“That makes us brothers.”
His brow beaded with sweat, his teeth clenched against the torment, Soko smiled. “The only true brother a man has is himself.” The world was growing dark, yet the sun was high in the sky.
“I have a water skin.”
“No. But thank you.” Soko gazed down at the gore and his intestines. “I did not expect it to be like this.”
“We never do,” Grizzly Killer said.
Soko shuddered uncontrollably.
“I can end it quickly if the pain is too much.”
“I do not have long left,” Soko said. The darkness was increasing. Already the sky was a dark brown and the white man a shadowy shape.
“Your friends will join you soon.”
“One of us has gone on ahead with his dead brother,” Soko said. “The white woman stabbed him.”
“This I did not know,” Grizzly Killer said.
The darkness was complete but Soko could still hear. “Will you hunt him as well?”
The answer was a while coming.
“No.”
“You are an honorable enemy,” Soko said, and died.
Nate King now had two horses, a war club, a knife, and the folding knife. He rode the bay and led the dead warrior’s horse. He was not in any hurry. The china pitcher and the washbasin were not going anywhere. They would be at the trading post when he went to collect them.
Nate had found himself liking the Comanche he slew, but that did not change anything. Nothing short of his own death would stop him. He reckoned the other two Comanches would keep on south, expecting their friend to slay him before the day was out. They would not suspect anything was amiss.
The sun, the heat, and more miles of eating dust made for a long afternoon. He stopped often to rest the bay.
Nate had never been this far south on the prairie. So his surprise was that much greater when, late in the afternoon, the plain sloped gradually to a rise that overlooked a verdant valley. Approximately four miles long and maybe half that wide, the valley could harbor an entire village. The tracks of the two Comanches led into it, and smoke rose from amid the trees.
Nate dipped below the rise and circled to the west. He debated letting well enough alone and lighting a shuck for Bent’s Fort. If there was a village, going after the two warriors would only get him killed.
But he had come this far.
He would not quit.
A coulee that fed into the stream was as good a spot as any to lie low until dark. Nate picketed the horses and stretched out in some shade. He could use the rest. He needed to have his wits about him later.
The sun was about to set when Nate woke up. He stretched, treated himself to pemmican, and walked the horses down the coulee to the stream. After they slaked their thirst, he led them back up the coulee and tethered them so they would not wander off.
Nate turned and took several steps, and changed his mind. Leaving the bay, he led the warhorse to the stream, climbed on, and rode east along the bank. In the twilight, from a distance— provided he kept his chin tucked to his chest so his short beard was not visible—he might pass for a returning warrior.
The Comanche’s knife was in his own sheath, the war club in his right hand. Primitive by white standards, the club was nonetheless a superbly effective weapon in close combat. He should know. He had lost count of the number of enemy warriors who had tried to dash his brains out with one.
The woodland that bordered the stream lay quiet under the descending pall of night. The small birds that had been flitting about all day were now in their nests and roosts. Small game had sought haven from nocturnal predators. It seemed he had the woods to himself, but in the wild, as in civilization, appearances were deceiving.
Nate smelled smoke long before he spotted the flames that produced it in the middle of a clearing. He brought the horse to a halt and probed with all his senses. Tranquility seemingly reigned.
But the fire had not kindled itself.
The two warriors, and possibly others, could be anywhere.
Nate resorted to a ruse he had learned from the Shoshones. Gigging the horse toward the campfire, he swung onto its off-side and clung by an elbow and an ankle to give the illusion the horse was without a rider. From under its neck he sought sign of an ambush, but the horse advanced unmolested to the edge of the clearing, then stopped of its own accord.
Nate hun
g on, waiting for something to happen. No shouts arose. No flurry of feet greeted him. Yet the Comanches had to know the horse was there.
Nate had thought to catch them off-guard, to have them walk up to the horse to catch hold of the reins, only to be met by his war club and his knife. But no one was at the fire. No one was in the clearing.
There could only be one explanation.
Nate let go and dropped. As he did an arrow streaked out of the gloom. The tip that should have imbedded itself in his back instead imbedded itself in the horse. Rearing in pain, the animal whinnied, then fled across the clearing, the feathers jutting from its shoulder.
Nate had not meant for the horse to be hurt, but he could do nothing to help it. Scrambling onto all fours, he plunged into the underbrush. It was well he did, for another shaft bit into the dirt exactly where he had landed.
Movement registered out of the corner of Nate’s eye. He flattened a heartbeat before an arrow whizzed overhead. Scuttling low to the ground, he came to a log, slid up and over, and froze.
The Comanches did not come after him. They were seasoned warriors, and too savvy.
Nate’s blood roared through his veins. It had been a close thing. Much too close. The pair had not fallen for his trick. Now it was him against them and they had the edge. Two against one, and they had better weapons.
Before the night was out, he might well be dead.
Sargento was mad. That they had missed once could be excused. But to miss with a second arrow, and then once more, was inexcusable. As an archer he had few peers, and Pahkah was almost as skilled. The dark was a factor, and the tangle of vegetation, but he was still mad. He had loosed two of the shafts himself.
Sargento’s anger at himself was compounded by his anger over Soko. The older warrior had always been friendly to him, unlike some of the others. Since the white man was there and Soko was not, it left but one conclusion. The white man had killed Soko. All the more incentive for Sargento and Pahkah to kill the white man.
Staying low, Sargento glided nigh-soundlessly through the vegetation. He was unsure where the white man had gotten to but confident he would spot the white before the white spotted him. Sargento had hunted whites before and they were ridiculously easy to kill. Almost as easy as Mexicans. Sargento held both in the highest contempt. With few exceptions, their skill as warriors was laughable. The reason the whites had exterminated so many tribes lay in their numbers and their guns, not in their prowess as warriors.
The thought of guns caused Sargento to go slower. The white man was bound to have a rifle and pistol. It surprised Sargento a little that the man had not fired at them. That was the first reaction on every white’s part. Shoot in a panic, and miss. But this one had not panicked, had not wasted a bullet. It hinted he might be more cautious than most of his kind.
Sargento had lost sight of Pahkah. The other warrior was somewhere to his right, no doubt searching for the white even as he was doing. If things went as they should, they would catch the white man between them.
Time passed. Sargento stopped beside a tree, his brow furrowed. There had not been any sign of his quarry. It was most strange. He was about to move on when Pahkah crept out of the brush to his side. Pahkah’s brow, too, was puckered in puzzlement.
It was too dark for sign talk so Pahkah whispered. “I do not like this. He has vanished.”
“He is probably lying on his belly somewhere shaking with fear,” Sargento said.
“Not this one,” Pahkah disagreed. “He rode to the clearing on Soko’s horse. Fear is not in him.”
“He is white,” Sargento said.
“Did you not see? He wears buckskins.”
“So? A lot of whites wear buckskins and they are no more formidable than fleas.”
“Some of the buckskins live with Indians. Some take Indian wives. They are not sheep like most whites. They are wolves.”
Sargento had not thought of that. It would take considerable skill to best a wily warrior like Soko. “You have a suggestion?”
“One of us will lure him out of hiding and the other will be ready to slay him,” Pahkah proposed.
“Who does the luring and who does the slaying?”
“Since it is my idea, I will be the bait. You know what to do.” Without another word Pahkah stalked toward the clearing, a shadow among shadows, only this time he made more noise than he ordinarily would. The rustle of a bush here, the scrape of a leaf there. Enough to make it seem natural.
Sargento followed, the string to his bow pulled halfway back. He must be ready. He must let fly in the blink of an eye and he must not miss. He saw that Pahkah was stopping every few strides to present a tempting target.
Sargento admired the other’s bravery. It took great courage to dare a blast from the white’s gun. Determined not to let any harm come to him, Sargento marked every shadow, every possible point of ambush. But nothing happened. The white man did not appear. No shots boomed in the dark.
Pahkah came to within a few steps of the clearing, and hunkered. He was rubbing his chin when Sargento came up to him.
“I do not understand.”
“You are not alone,” Sargento admitted.
“Where is he?” Pahkah whispered.
“This time I will be the one to lure him out. I will go to the stream. You follow, but not too near.”
“I will be ready.”
Sargento did as Pahkah had done, moving stealthily but not so stealthily the white man would fail to spot him. The skin between his shoulder blades crawled. He fully expected the white man to shoot him in the back. Such cowardly acts were typical of his kind. But again no shots crackled. Again, the white man did not show himself.
More perplexed than ever, Sargento came to the bank, and stopped.
Soon Pahkah joined him. “Maybe the white man has gone. Maybe our arrows put fear into him.”
Sargento grunted. “It does not take much to put fear into a white. I only had to hold my knife next to the neck of the woman with the yellow hair and she could not stop screaming.”
“We will wait until daylight and hunt him” Pahkah said. “He will not escape us.”
“We should hide our horses before he decides to come back and steal them,” Sargento advised.
That is what they did. They crept to the clearing, quietly mounted, and rode east side by side.
As they passed under an oak, Sargento’s mount pricked its ears and raised its head. Sargento snapped his own head up in time to glimpse something launch itself from an overspreading bough.
“Above us!”
The white man dropped between them. He had a knife in one hand and a war club in the other, and he struck at both of them as he dropped.
Pain exploded in Sargento’s shoulder, courtesy of the war club. He threw himself from the other side of his horse and alighted like a cat on the balls of his feet. He looked to put a shaft into the white man, but the white man was not there. Only Pahkah, lying still, limbs akimbo, the hilt of a knife sticking from his chest.
Sargento was stunned. It had been so quick. He turned right and then left. A shadow moved, and the bow was knocked from his hands. Grabbing for his knife, he attacked. He ducked a swing of the war club, speared the knife out. The white man dodged. He evaded a thrust and stabbed low, only to have the blade deflected by the war club. Feinting at the white man’s gut, he lanced the tip of the blade at the man’s throat. It was a move he had used before, a move that never failed him. Somehow the white man avoided it.
The war club was a blur. More pain racked Sargento’s left knee. His leg buckled and he stumbled. Before he could recover, pain burst in his right knee. He tried to straighten but his legs would not work. He looked up and saw the war club arc toward his head.
It cannot end like this! Sargento frantically told himself. Not at the hands of a white man!
The next explosion of pain brought a flood of white light followed by a plunge into the inkiest blackness.
Sargento’s last thought was that
this was a stupid way to die.
Twelve
The whiskey did it.
One-Eye Jackson planned to pass on by Bent’s Fort. He had plenty of supplies, what with the packhorse he had stolen from the Beechers. He had an extra rifle and extra pistols, the weapons he had taken from Nate King. He had no reason at all to stop at the trading post on his way to the mountains. No reason at all except for the whiskey.
One-Eye had a fondness for red-eye. He liked whiskey like some men liked women. He had the sense not to indulge when he was in the wilds, but whenever he stopped at a frontier outpost he made up for lost opportunity.
So it was the whiskey that brought One-Eye to Bent’s. The whiskey, and the extra horses, the mounts belonging to Shipley and Cynthia. One-Eye figured they would fetch a nice price. Money he could convert to more whiskey before setting out for the high country.
One-Eye had been at the post half an hour, ensconced in a shaded corner where he could drink in peace. He had downed half the bottle, which for him was barely enough to whet his thirst. He was tipping the bottle for another long swig when an individual he had never much cared for came striding toward him.
Ceran St. Vrain, as aristocratic as ever, with two hirelings in two, made no pretense at friendliness. “You again.”
One-Eye finished his swig and wiped his mouth with his sleeve. “I never have savvied why you dislike me so.”
“Let me see. You are a liar, a cheat, and a thief. Half the mountain men despise you and the rest would as soon gut you as look at you. The Shoshones say you are bad medicine and have spread word to the other tribes to have nothing to do with you. I would say that is ample reason enough.”
One-Eye smirked. “So long as I don’t lie, cheat, or steal within these walls, I’m free to come and go as I please. That is your rule, isn’t it?”
“It is,” St. Vrain acknowledged.
“As for the Injuns,” One-Eye said, “I’m not the only white they won’t have any truck with.”
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