by Carl Dane
“A Comanche would keep more men in place, I think,” Carmody said. “They’re crafty, and they’d be suspicious from the get-go. But they also wouldn’t let an attack go unanswered. So I see your seven and raise you three. I think we’ll be up against ten men.”
“Not great odds. And they’re sure as hell on alert now. And we can’t just go in shooting – we have to get that crazy girl, get her on a horse, and somehow get back to town ahead of them. We don’t know where to find her. Don’t even know if she can ride a horse, or how well. And if she’s there, I doubt that she’ll be in plain sight. She might be in a teepee.”
“Probably,” Carmody agreed. “And we have no way of knowing which one.”
We were high on a ridge and the dawn came upon us with unexpected swiftness.
Carmody was the first to spot the encampment below. I drew out the telescope, gave a look, and handed it to Carmody.
“We can’t get much closer without risking them spotting us,” he said. “There’s an overlook down this hill we can reach by horseback. We could probably reach it without them sniffing us out but it’s too far to get a shot. There’s brush and woods all round the camp but we can’t sneak up on them. It’s their game and their table and we can’t beat them. The same path you took last night leads right to the camp and continues past it, but that’s wide open and they’d cut us down in a second.”
“We need a diversion,” I said, and came to a decision.
“You need to unpack all the ammunition we took off the Durans and match it up to the rifles and handguns. Load everything. And I need the four junkiest Indian rifles. No ammunition. In fact, pull the pins or jam the triggers so they can’t be fired and used against us.”
Carmody’s gave me a hard look. “I got a bad feeling about this. You know what I’m afraid of?
I waited.
“That you’re going to start drawing more of them pictures.”
Chapter 26
I found a route down to the main path into the camp. I brought along the fastest-looking of the pack horses and hitched it to a willow about a half-mile away. I advanced a few hundred more feet, holding a stack of rifles under my arm, dismounted, and placed the butts in piles of dirt and carefully arranged the barrels and some tree branches I’d cut down. Then I checked my sidearm, the rifle I carried in my free hand, and the one in the scabbard. And then I took a deep breath.
Probably the last thing the Comanches would have expected was a crazy man galloping full speed into their lair. They heard me in plenty of time to pick up their rifles, but curiosity seemed to get the best of them and they waited to see what I was up to.
But then they heard the angry buzz of the bullets and the crack of the rifle fire above.
Most Indians are superb warriors but they don’t fight the same kind of strategic battles as American and European soldiers. They’re not particularly well-organized, and they think in terms of skirmishes and not tactical campaigns.
I was betting they wouldn’t notice the lag time between the bullets and the shots, something I’d had drilled into me during the war. Major Thaddeus Munro, who commanded me and Billy Gannon with the Raiders, had drawn up a table of times and distance as the related to gunfire and made us practice and calculate. It was an odd thing to think of as I waited for a hail of gunfire, but maybe that’s the goal of training – to insinuate itself into your mind and resurface when you need it.
Monro, who last I heard was a state senator in Texas, trained us to pay attention to the time between the buzz of the bullet and the snap of the gun. You generally hear the bullet first, because sound is surprisingly slow compared to the speed of big-bore rifle fire. If you hear the bullet and the crack doesn’t come right on top of it, you know the round is being fired from far away, meaning it’s more likely that the shooter will miss.
I guess the Comanches hadn’t worked out that theory because they started diving for cover. They didn’t realize there was little direct threat. Now, I won’t say there was no chance that Carmody’s shots would hit them but it would have been pure happenstance as he was probably a quarter mile away. No one – even Carmody – could shoot that accurately.
But he sure as hell could fire quickly. The shots cracked off like they were coming from a Gatling gun and the bullets fell like rain in about a hundred-foot radius, thudding into the ground and angrily snapping through leaves and branches.
It occurred to me that I’d better get down to business because the hail of bullets was just as likely to kill me as them.
I shot from the hip and killed the first Comanche who’d turned toward me. Firing a rifle that way isn’t particularly difficult but it delays your second shot because you have to compensate for the recoil, which is generally much more powerful than from a pistol. I shot at another brave who was raising his weapon. I missed. So did he, distracted by the thud of a bullet digging into a nearby tree. My second shot caught him in the forehead.
There was no time to take inventory but I guessed there were about seven men left, and I was running out of options. I could keep exchanging fire, but the Comanches were retreating to a stand of trees a couple hundred feet away and once they got there and had some cover it was open season and I was a clear target. I couldn’t very well run from teepee to teepee and peek in the flaps, so I bet it all on one roll of the dice.
One teepee, the largest, still had its flap closed. If Cassie were in this camp, I was betting that’s where she’d be. I rode by, grabbed a handful of the hide, and tore the whole contraption out of the ground.
On occasion, time just seems to stop. I’ve seen that effect on the battlefield when a big shell lands, and despite all the mayhem everybody just freezes in slack-jawed shock and wonder. That’s what happened. For a second, the braves froze as still as figures in a painting. I wanted to yell to her, but the words caught in my throat. Carmody’s arsenal kept cracking and the bullets kept tearing up the landscape, but in those few moments a half-dozen men engaged in mortal combat were paralyzed, transfixed.
And horrified.
Chapter 27
I think he was their leader, maybe even a chief. Not all warriors wore bonnets, but chiefs did and there was a beauty on the ground near his head. It was large, made out of a buffalo scalp, and had a trail of feathers attached. The feathers looked red, but maybe it was the blood and not the bird that produced the color.
Cassie sat blinking in the sudden sunlight. The first thing I noticed about her were her arms, painted with blood to her armpits, and at first – uncomprehendingly – I had wondered why she was wearing shoulder-length scarlet gloves. Then I saw the knife. It was magnificent; Indians had good judgment in trade knives and preferred them to their own comparatively crude weapons, and the chief, or whoever he was, had secured a gleaming two-foot-long Bowie knife with a wicked hook on the end, a hook that would be sharpened on both sides.
She’d cut his clothes off before doing the deed with his own knife. I would guess she had snatched the knife, killed him quickly, and then worked methodically on dissecting him because he would certainly have made his displeasure known to others had the sequence been reversed.
Next to his war bonnet, nestled in the grass, were his eyeballs, white and round and seemingly alert in a nasty, life-like way. Apparently, they had been carefully wiped clean of gore. His legs were spread, and atop a pad made from a neatly folded buckskin tunic were his penis and testicles.
I held out my hand and Cassie took it and I hoisted her into the saddle in back of me. She hugged me tight; the knife was still in her hand and the point was uncomfortably close to my throat but there was no time to discuss it so I spurred the Steeldust and we headed back the way we came.
I risked a look back. You don’t want to spend a lot of time looking back when you’re running for your life because your attention should be focused on what’s in front of you but my curiosity got the best of me. There were five of them left alive. They were getting their wits together and gath
ering their mounts and would be after us in a heartbeat.
She wasn’t a big girl but an extra hundred pounds will slow down any horse, and we would need a sizeable lead in order to switch her to her own mount, which was staked farther down the trail.
“Can you ride?” I shouted.
“No one will ever do that to me again,” she replied.
“Can you fucking ride?”
Her being crazy was going to make this difficult, although in all fairness the fact that she was out of her mind had enabled us to get this far, at least.
“I have a horse staked out for you ahead.”
“Yes, I can ride.” Her voice was strong and possessed of a lunatic calm. “But if we stop they’ll be on us.”
I unholstered my pistol and handed it to her.
“When I give you the word, turn around and fire. You probably can’t hit them, but give them something to think about. All six rounds, as fast as you can.”
She didn’t question me or argue. Perhaps my plan seemed logical to her, in the unspoken code of insane people everywhere.
As soon as I spotted one of the rifle barrels protruding from the brush I ordered her to fire.
A full second later, bullets started humming and chewing through the tree limbs above us, and a full second after that I heard the reports of Carmody’s rifles. I knew that he would essentially be firing wild, and there was a risk that his covering fire could hit me, but that would be a one-in-a-million chance. Hardly even worth considering.
And then, of course, one of his bullets sliced into my leg. It was a through-and-through flesh wound, I guessed, and my first thought was actually relief that it somehow missed the horse, but then I noticed the blood and knew I was in trouble.
Leg shots can make you bleed out in a hurry. It didn’t hurt, though. The pain would come later, I knew. If there was a later.
Suddenly I heard confused voices, the irregular hoofbeats of horses being pulled up short, and rifle fire from behind me. The pursuers had seen the rifle barrels. I’d planted two on each side, protruding just enough to be noticed. They’d figure out it was a ruse in just a moment.
But a moment could save our lives.
I was on my own now. The plan was that Carmody would abandon his perch as soon as I passed the planted rifles and hightail it to the main trail. I’d be without covering fire for several minutes.
Everything depended on getting to the staked horse, keeping our lead, and waiting for Carmody to pull up the rear.
I felt my horse tiring and noticed that my field of vision was narrowing. It was like peering down two gray, narrowing tunnels.
A movement and a sensation surprised me. Cassie was pulling rounds out of my gunbelt and reloading the pistol.
“There’s four of them,” she shouted. “And they’re gaining on us.”
“Five,” I said, and the words felt thick. “There’s five of them.”
“No, four. I got lucky the first time I fired.”
I was going to say something encouraging but the words wouldn’t come any more. I looked down and saw that blood had painted my thigh and the flank of the horse.
The Comanches started firing from horseback and all the shots, as far as I could determine, went high.
Cassie emptied the gun again.
“Three,” she said.
I wanted to offer some words of encouragement but my mind and body wouldn’t cooperate. I began to slide off the left side of the horse and I hit hard. I twisted as I fell and knocked the girl off, too. My rifle flew probably another ten feet from me. It might as well have been ten miles. The staked horse was a lifetime away.
The pistol I’d given Cassie was empty. I’d counted the shots. Counting shots is soldier’s habit.
Old habits die hard even when you’re dying.
Improbably, Cassie still had the Bowie knife. She’d stuck it in the belt of her tattered and bloodstained dress and somehow it had not disemboweled her when she fell.
I was going to try to get the knife and kill her. It would be quick. There was no predicting the mood of a Comanche, but I believed that what they had in store for her after all this would be slow. Intentionally, methodically, barbarically slow.
I reached over and a bullet tore into my shoulder.
It was hot, I realized. We were in a wide, sandy clearing guarded by craggy rocks. It was late November but some Texas days could still be scorchers this time of year, and it looked like this one would develop that way, even if I didn’t get to see it.
Heat and sun have always added to the agony of death, I think. Wounded men will sometimes use their last ounce of strength to crawl to the shade, if they can. I wouldn’t have that opportunity, it appeared. If they decided to torture us for a while Carmody might save us, but the oldest Comanche, presumably exasperated by the whole process and wanting this to be over now, raised his rifle and aimed.
The hiss and slap was barely audible, at least to me, and the Comanche with the upraised rifle looked more confused than anything else. His eyes grew wide and he looked up without comprehension. As he turned in a stumbling circle, there was another hiss and slap and another Comanche dropped his rifle and reached both arms behind his back, clawing at something.
The older one fell flat on his face and the arrow protruded from his back at a perfect perpendicular angle. It stuck in the air like a flagpole. The second wounded brave fell backward; I heard the arrow snap as he fell on it.
One Comanche remained and he had his rifle to his shoulder. He spotted the archer atop the hill and raised his sights. The arrow went through his throat before he was able to get off a shot.
The last thing I remembered that day was seeing Taza climb down the hill and what looked to be a dozen Apaches sprouting from the rocks. He moved gingerly and I remembered that he’d still be nursing a fresh wound and a few broken ribs.
Taza came at me with a strap of leather and in the gloom of my seeping consciousness I wondered why.
Was he going to strangle me? Why didn’t he just put an arrow through me?
He tied the strip around my leg above the bullet wound.
“We will fight,” he said, “and I will kill you. But as you say, it will be another day.”
Chapter 28
I woke up in Elmira’s bed what they told me was four days later.
You’d think four days of sleep would make a man rested but I had trouble staying alert for more than a few minutes at a time. Every hour or so a face would pop into my consciousness, I’d do or say something, and then drift off again. I had trouble keeping the dreams and reality sorted out. There were some nice dreams about Elmira’s face popping up in front of me. Carmody’s face spurred some dreams about sea monsters and the like. There was a doctor in both my dreams and reality. He poked around doing things that vaguely hurt and fed something to me with a spoon. I didn’t dream at all after I swallowed the stuff in the spoon.
It was probably a full week before I had all my wheels on the tracks. It seemed to happen all at once: I felt stronger, moved myself up toward the headboard, almost sitting up, and called for Elmira. I was hungry. And I wanted to see her.
Carmody appeared instead.
“What do you want now? For somebody who sleeps like a bear in winter you sure make a lot of demands.”
“I was going to ask for something to eat but for some reason I just lost my appetite. Anyway, what happened?”
“I been telling you the same story for days but it just goes in one ear and out the other,” Carmody said. “Are you ready to pay attention now?”
“I think so. I’ve been in and out. Go ahead.”
Carmody swung a chair around and leaned his forearms over the top. “Firstly, you damn near bled out. From where I saw the first drops of blood on the trail I figured it was my bullet that hit your first. Sorry about that.”
“One-in-a-million shot,” I said.
“Yep. Go figure. And I damn near had a heart attack
when I got to the pass and saw you was in the middle of a regular Indian convention. That Taza, the Apache…he was there and he held up his hand and I didn’t do nothing. He probably saved your life with that tourniquet, an odd thing to do considering the beating you put on him. He didn’t say it, but I think he was grateful you didn’t kill him after that freak accident and he’s waiting to finish the job of killing you the proper way someday.”
I nodded and waited for Carmody to continue.
“Now, I got something unhappy to tell you. The girl.”
I tensed, and when I did my shoulder hurt like hell.
“Taza ‘claimed’ her. That was his word. Said she was his now. And the damndest thing – she didn’t kick. She said she liked the idea. That girl has squirrels running loose in her head.”
“You don’t know the half of it. Did she tell you what happened when I found her in the Comanche camp?”
“Only that you pulled her outta the chief’s teepee. There’s more?”
There was, of course, and I told him.
“Shee-it,” he said.
“Exactly. I almost feel sorry for Taza. How is Elmira? She must be frantic about Taza taking Cassie.”
“She ain’t happy, but she ain’t real broke up, neither. She knows Taza, knows some of the Apaches, and used to live in the same camp with Taza’s father. She thinks Cassie will be all right until you can get her back.”
I wasn’t in the mood to start planning that particular adventure yet, so I let him continue.
“You’re new to these parts, and so am I, actually, but the story is that as much as the Apaches hate us, they hate the Comanches worse. This used to be big Apache territory right here, but the Comanches more or less drove the Apaches into hiding, and some of them way down into Mexico. That’s why Taza was more than happy to make porcupines outta those Comanches when he got the drop on them.”
It wasn’t important, really, but I had to ask my next question.