“Signals!”
As in confirmation, an arrow cut a few strands of hair.
General Grant bucked at the shrieks, and two Sioux warriors galloped their pinto ponies from out of nowhere—the Indians knew even more hiding places in this country than Zerel—er, Zee—Dobbs. Something roared, and as Dooley felt his rump leave the saddle and the tops of his boots catch the tops of his spurs, keeping him from being pitched to a sure and ugly death but sending his rump crashing hard back on the saddle and shooting spasms of pain up his backbone, Dooley saw the first warrior fly off his pinto. Zee had shot him dead.
She shot the second one, too.
“Ride fast, hombre! I’m faster than a bolt of lightnin’, and if you ain’t no faster, you’re deader than a skunk!” Zee Dobbs did not need to tell Dooley twice. General Grant had recovered, ceased his bucking, and Dooley gave the bay all the rein he wanted. He took off after the woman, looked behind him, and counted at least six more Indians chasing him.
Dooley leaned forward, held out the reins, tried to breathe, and between curses, muttered a few prayers that his parents and that circuit-riding preacher had made him memorize years earlier, and a few he came up with on the spot.
Dear God, don’t let General Grant step in a prairie-dog hole.
Wind whipped the side of his face.
An arrow flashed through General Grant’s mane and underneath Dooley’s reins.
Lord, if I am killed, please let it be mercifully quick.
Hooves of their horses cut down grass like reapers and churned up clods of dirt and sod. They rode in a southerly direction, but turned this way and that, dodging arrows. The Sioux warriors yipped, shouted, and one even blew a cavalry bugle that sounded more like squeaky, panting groans than some signal. Another arrow flew past. Dooley followed Zee. Even as fast as General Grant was, the gelding could not keep up with the outlaw’s daughter’s mount.
They turned east. Dooley held his breath, his rump pounding the saddle, his boots bouncing in the stirrups. A Sioux brave with a pockmarked face painted vermillion and green came alongside him, raising a tomahawk over his head. The handle was studded with brass tacks and hawk feathers. The warrior swung the war axe, missed, brought it up to swing again. Dooley shot at the brave, missing him, but killing the horse. The warrior yelped, pitching the tomahawk to his left, crashing hard and swallowed by the grass. The dead horse rolled over and over, before landing on its side, but causing two other warriors to lose their seats as their ponies became caught up in the wreck.
Dooley looked at the Colt in his hand. He did not even remember ever drawing it.
A bullet scratched his chin, and Dooley looked to his left. Beside him rode another Sioux, this one holding an old Remington cap-and-ball pistol. This one’s face was younger, his black braids flapping in the wind, his thumb earing back the hammer of the old .44.
Dooley’s right hand swung around, and he raised his left arm out of the way. He squeezed the trigger, felt the muzzle blast, and caught just a glimpse of the blood that sprayed from the Indian’s stomach, just beneath the ivory-white bone breastplate he wore. The Indian was gone, falling from his horse, and Dooley kept riding.
Kept following Zee Dobbs.
Kept praying.
Somehow, his luck held. He turned, surprised to find that they had put some distance between themselves and the still-yipping, screaming, shooting Indian warriors.
Dooley looked off to the east, hoping to find Zee’s father and his partner and the rest of the killers riding hell-bent for leather, like the United States Cavalry galloping to the rescue.
He saw only grass and sky.
“Dagnab it!”
Somehow, Dooley managed to hear Zee Dobbs’s cry. She was pulling hard on the reins, turning her horse—still at a gallop—toward the southwest. Dooley understood her reasoning and urged General Grant to follow the leader.
More Sioux warriors—somewhere between four and eight—were loping hard from the south. The ones, Dooley told himself, who had been sending up the smoke signals from that direction.
They splashed through a creek, went up, down, up again. Dooley felt the sweat already drenching his shirt, but he could see the foams of lather appearing on General Grant’s withers. He could feel something else, too, and that made him uncomfortable. The great bay gelding was beginning to tire. Oh, Dooley knew the horse would ride, ride till his valiant heart broke. He looked behind him, saw the Indians keeping their distance but not turning back. They were playing it smart, having lost a few more warriors than they had expected to while chasing a white woman and a white man.
Zee cut back north, then east, riding hard, but Dooley knew her horse was about played out, too. They kept going, and Dooley looked back. Those Indians weren’t giving up the chase, not by a damned sight.
Shoot Zee. Then yourself.
The thought flashed through his head, but Dooley quickly shook it off. For one thing, he didn’t think he’d be able to shoot the girl, not with her bouncing in the saddle on a fast horse and himself doing the same.
Suddenly, Zee was jerking hard on the reins, pulling her gallant beast to a stop, and leaping off the saddle. Before her boots hit the ground, she had jerked out her revolver and put a bullet into her horse’s head.
Down, crashed the dead beast, and the woman jumped behind the animal, shouting to Dooley as she slid behind the horse’s stomach and snapped a shot at the charging Indians behind them.
“Shoot yer bay, boy! We’ll fort up an’ make our last stand here!”
“Keep running, General!” Dooley screamed. “Run as hard as you can!”
Dooley leaped off the bay, landed hard, rolled over six or seven times, but somehow managed to keep a grip on his pistol.
He came to his feet. An arrow sliced his left thigh. He whirled, and saw the Indian coming right at him, holding a lance, and Dooley wondered what it would feel like to be skewered.
The red-skinned warrior’s nose disappeared in an eruption of blood and gore, and the lance went between Dooley’s legs, just missing his manhood. He tripped over the ash lance, and staggered as another arrow tore off the hat that somehow had not come off his head. A second later, and he was diving over Zee’s dead horse, sliding between the saddle and the horse’s tail. He came up, surprised to find the Colt still in his hand. The revolver bucked in his hand, and he tasted and smelled gun smoke, and thought he saw an Indian slammed into the grass.
“Yee-hiii!” screamed Zee.
Dooley came to his knees, thumbed back the hammer, found another target. The gun roared, and another Sioux somersaulted over the back of his horse.
At any moment, Dooley knew that his body would resemble a pincushion, that arrows would tear into his body. His ears roared and rang, and dust stung his eyes, but he saw most of the Sioux braves chasing after General Grant, who had kept running northeast.
The Indians seemed more interested in catching that horse than in taking Dooley’s scalp. Most of them. But not all.
“Good thinkin’, Dooley!”
Zee had the wrong impression of Dooley Monahan. He knew she had wanted him to kill his horse, the way she had done, which made sense. Fort up. Hold them off for as long as they could. Die bravely. Only, most of the Indians went galloping after the bay gelding. That’s not what Dooley had expected. He just did not have it in his heart to kill that fine horse.
Zee had tossed her empty pistol beside her dead horse’s head, and now worked the lever and trigger on her Winchester carbine. One Indian went down. Then another’s horse. That Indian jumped to his feet, but Dooley shot him dead.
“Yeee-hiiii!” Zee bellowed. “Let’s die game!”
Let’s not die at all, Dooley thought. But he knew that hope was forlorn.
The hammer of his Colt fell, but he felt no buck, heard no report. He thumbed back the hammer, tried again, then tossed the empty revolver toward a charging warrior. That one ducked to his left as the Colt sailed past him. The Indian smiled, but then Zee shot him out
of the saddle.
“I’m empty!” Zee shouted.
“Me, too!”
Dooley braced himself for death. A tall Sioux had pulled his brown mustang to a stop and brought up a lever-action rifle. The Indian drew a bead on the center of Dooley’s chest, but Dooley refused to cower, to run, to cry. He told himself that he would die like a man.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Not his life flashing before his eyes. Not the flash of gunpowder sending a leaden bullet through his heart. No instant blackness. All Dooley Monahan saw was a blur.
A streak of darkness leaped out of the grass and slammed against the Sioux warrior, sending the rifle sailing end over end, and the mustang snorting, kicking out with its hind legs, and moving quickly out of the way. The Indian shrieked like a girl and let out a groan as he landed on the hard sod with the blur still atop him. Suddenly, Dooley heard the growl.
Reality hit him hard.
I’m still alive! he thought. And then he shouted:
“Blue!”
Yes, his loyal shepherd was tearing through the Indian’s flesh, fierce, savage, protecting his master. Zee ran to help, a butcher knife in her hand.
Dooley recovered instantly and bolted for the Henry .44 the Indian had dropped. He looked quickly for Indians—but found none—and he thought that the rest of the war party must have gone off after General Grant, leaving the young braves to count coup and take scalps and torture and whatever the hell else Sioux warriors did. He lifted the rifle, checked the barrel to make sure it was free of dirt, and turned to the east.
He half expected to see Hubert Dobbs and Frank Handley leading the gang of cutthroats like cavalry to the rescue, yet all he saw was waving grass and blue skies—no clouds, no smoke signals this time.
The Indian’s mustang danced a few stutter steps a few yards away, frightened but staying close to its master. Dooley looked southwest, saw the dust, and used his left hand to grab the horsehair hackamore. The brown mare pulled away, but Dooley held firm, shot a final glance at the back of Zee Dobbs as she lifted the butcher knife over her head and prepared to bring it down, and then Dooley was turning, leaping into the rough Indian saddle.
“Stay here!” he shouted, either to Blue or Zee, or maybe both.
Later, it struck him: Where else would they go?
Slamming the Henry’s barrel against the brown pony’s side, he leaned forward and felt the burst of locomotion as the Sioux’s horse galloped after the dust . . . after the war party . . .
After General Grant.
Over the pounding of the mustang’s hooves, Dooley heard Blue bark and Zee call out, “Where the hell are you off to, Dooley?”
In all his years cowboying, Dooley had ridden a lot of horses, used a lot of different types of bridles and reins, and forked various kinds of saddles, yet never had he ever . . .
1) Ridden an Indian pony.
2) Sat in an Indian saddle.
3) Used a hackamore.
The brown mustang wasn’t a bad horse. Far from it, Dooley had to concede, though a bit small for Dooley’s liking. The hackamore was all right; just took some getting used to. The saddle? Well, that was something different, but Dooley had ridden bareback before, and he had sat in some lousy saddles. He kept thinking about something Old Man Buckshot Harrigan used to tell him back when Dooley was riding for the 5-Bar-Double-H outfit in the South Texas brush country.
“Ain’t the saddle. Ain’t the bridle. Ain’t even the rider. It’s the hoss. The hoss is all that matters.”
The brown mustang was a mighty good horse.
Dooley figured the horse knew this country better than he did, for he assumed that the Sioux Indians had ridden across this country a few times before this day. The mare also knew where she was going, or where Dooley wanted her to go. She just followed the trail of dust.
After a couple of miles, however, two of the Indians must have realized they were being followed, and they gave up on trying to catch General Grant and turned back toward their pursuer. Dooley saw them loping easily toward him, saw them stop, and saw them kick their mounts into a gallop.
One swung off to Dooley’s right, the other to the left. Their war whoops reached his ears.
He had little time to think, which reminded him of another thing Old Man Buckshot Harrigan used to tell the greenhorns who wanted to become cowboys.
“Don’t think. React.”
Dooley reacted. The Indian on his right had a bow and quiver full of arrows. The one to his left waved a long gun. Dooley couldn’t tell for sure, but it certainly looked to be an old single-shot muzzle-loader. Maybe a shotgun. Maybe a rifle. It didn’t really matter that much to Dooley.
Still gripping the hackamore in his left hand, he raised the Henry rifle with his right, pointing, not even aiming, letting his instinct guide him. He squeezed the trigger and saw the Indian with the bow catapult over the back of his pinto.
Shoot that one first, Dooley had told himself. The other’s got only one shot.
Besides, he had seen how fast a Sioux could fire those arrows—almost as fast as Dooley could squeeze a trigger.
He was, of course, shocked that he had actually hit the Indian, but did not marvel over his luck or accuracy. The kick of that old Henry almost ripped his arm from the elbow socket, and he kept the .44 in his hand only through some sort of miracle. He heard a roar, but felt no bullet, and wheeled the brown pony toward the remaining brave.
That warrior had covered a lot of ground quickly, and Dooley barely had time to duck as the gray-headed Sioux swung the barrel of the rifle—it was not a shotgun, but it was a single shot—that glanced off Dooley’s back as he ducked. The Indian rode past, cursing in what Dooley thought was French, and Dooley sucked in a deep breath, the air burning his lungs, and turned the brown mustang around.
Through the dust, he spotted the Indian wheeling his pinto, pitching the empty rifle to the dust, and kicking the pony’s sides hard with his moccasins as he charged again, this time bringing a tomahawk up over his head.
The brown mustang was already galloping without waiting for Dooley’s command, ready to meet the charge like one of those Knights of the Round Table Dooley had read about in a line shack seven or eight winters back. As the horse carried him into duel, Dooley jerked his wrist, sending the stock of the Henry forward. He kept a fierce grip on the repeater’s lever, and then jerked forward. The motion brought the rifle back, fully cocked and loaded—providing at least one round remained in the Henry. He swung the rifle up, over the saddle, ducked as the Indian swung the hatchet, and squeezed the trigger.
The Henry roared like a cannon, and it kicked as if Dooley were holding a cannon. This time, he could not keep the rifle in his hands, and felt the heavy .44 tear free and fall into the grass. It almost ripped Dooley out of the seat of the Indian saddle, but he did the old cowboy’s version of pulling leather—which was much harder on an Indian saddle than a slick fork.
He came up quickly, grimacing as he turned around, fully expecting to find the Indian there, swinging that war axe into Dooley’s brain. What he saw, however, was another riderless Indian pony galloping away. Dooley blinked, looked around, and this time found the gray-headed brave lying faceup in the sun. The .44 slug had caught the Indian in his side, blown through the old man’s vitals, and torn a fist-sized hole in his other side.
The Sioux had had no time to sing his death song.
Dooley steadied the brown mare, who wanted to run after the other ponies. He caught his breath and swung down from the brown, keeping a firm grip on the hackamore. Refusing to let go of the hackamore, he knelt and grabbed the Henry. After slowly levering another cartridge into the magazine, he eased down the hammer and climbed back onto the pony’s back.
Dooley stared off in the direction of the two ponies, riding straight for Wyoming or the Black Hills or some parts unknown. Maybe to a Sioux encampment. Would those horses bring back other warriors?
He didn’t know. Actually, he didn’t care, although he hoped that t
hat Indian village was a good three-or four-day ride from here. Make that, three- or four-week ride from here.
Dooley blinked, swallowed, and wet his lips. He was alive. Somehow, he was alive. He glanced over his shoulder, but saw no dust, no sign that Zee and Blue, or the rest of the Dobbs-Handley Gang, might be following.
“Come on, girl,” he said, his voice hoarse, his throat parched, every muscle in his body aching. But he was game. And so was the mare.
He kicked the mustang’s sides and started off in a lope, heading after General Grant and however many Sioux warriors were trying to steal Dooley’s horse.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Uncertain about the land and how long he might have to chase those horse-thieving Indians—or if any more might be riding back toward him—Dooley Monahan slowed the mare to a lope, and then a trot. After another mile, he let the brown even walk as he looked around. The land was just one big bunch of nothingness as far as anyone could see. By now, even the dust had settled, so he just followed the trail of trampled grass and hoped he was following the right trail.
For the next hour, he took his time, guessing more than tracking. Every now and then, he swung down to the ground and walked the mustang. He seemed to recall an old army sergeant telling him that the 4th Cavalry spent a lot of time walking their horses. If it was good enough for the United States Cavalry, then it seemed sound logic to Dooley Monahan. He didn’t want to run the mustang to her death and be caught afoot in Nebraska—especially with Sioux warriors around.
When he came to a shallow creek, he felt better, and since the mare had cooled off some from the walk, he let her drink. Stepping upstream from the brown, Dooley then lowered himself onto his belly and dropped his face into the cool water. It revived him instantly, and he drank his fill, soaked his head, and splashed water onto the back of his neck. Eventually, he rolled onto his back, and looked at the sky.
His muscles still ached, and his stomach let him know that it had been a hard day and he had eaten nothing since jerky for breakfast. He sat up. The horse snorted, and Dooley pushed himself to his feet. Suddenly, the horse’s head went straight up, and her ears bent forward.
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