Crack in the Sky

by Terry C. Johnston

  The sting, the burn, the heat of the deerfly’s bite spreading through that tiny knot of flesh—Scratch seized the painful site between a finger and thumb, pinching as hard as he could. It was about all a man could do when the devil creatures bit: squeeze for all he was worth to flush the poison back out. If he didn’t, the bite would go on stinging for days. Pinching the skin until it grew numb, Bass finally swiped a finger over the site, smearing what blood he had oozed out of the tiny wound into his brown beard.

  He licked the blood from his fingers. And as he did, Bass remembered he hadn’t eaten since early that morning, just before light when they had prepared for another long day on the trail. Back among the two skimpy packs he had pulled off Hannah was his share of some meat they had dried yesterday after dropping two antelope. He chided himself for not bringing some along to chew on, if only to remind his stomach that he wasn’t forgetting to feed it.

  There hadn’t been all that much in the way of supplies the company brigade leaders or Pilcher could lay out on blankets before those free trappers assembled there at the southern end of Sweet Lake. Only natural that they would hold back the lion’s share of most everything for their own. So he and Hatcher and the rest had looked over what was offered: the powder and bar lead, spare flints and hickory ramrods, some flour and a little coffee. No Indian trade goods here. Everything Sublette and Jackson brought out early last winter they intended their trappers to use firsthand.

  As it turned out, Hatcher’s bunch ended up bartering with men who knew directly the value of a trapper’s labor. Jack and the rest traded for a little more of everything, enough perhaps to hold them over for several more months until they put the fall hunt behind them and reached the Mexican settlements far to the south beyond the Arkansas River.

  “We still got furs we ain’t traded, Jack,” Rowland had complained.

  “So we’ll keep ’em,” Hatcher declared. “These company men don’t have anything more what we can use to trade us, so it looks like we’ve got us a start on next fall’s hunt awready.”

  Back at their camp that last evening before they would head out, the nine of them took serious stock of what would have to last them on this long trek to the Bayou Salade, and into a longer autumn trapping season.

  “I can’t tell a man not to smoke or chew,” Hatcher began as he stood from looking over the packs with the rest of his men, “but as for me, I’m saving my ’baccy for fall. Most of my coffee too. Saving ’em both for a time when the air turns cool and I hear the first whistle of them elk in the high country.”

  It was a damn good idea, Bass remembered thinking. A man didn’t really need tobacco and coffee until then. What a treat they both would be when the quakies began to turn gold on the hillsides of those high places, when a man finally saw his breath halo before his face, when the water began to ice up along the banks of the streams where they were laying their traps—

  A bird called. With a sound that just didn’t belong.

  Then he saw the first half dozen or so of them reach the brow of the hill just beyond him. They had no idea he was there, watching them as the warriors stealthily poked their heads above the gently waving crowns of grass so they could watch the rest of Hatcher’s men down in their camp far behind Scratch.

  Bass felt just as he had back in Kentucky a time or two when he and friends were about to pull a prank on others. He grinned. This surprise would be good.

  As the handful of Bannock turned and stealthily retreated back into the tall grass, Titus turned his face back to camp, cupped his hands around his lips, and whistled like a red-winged blackbird. In a heartbeat the gentle reply of a dark-eyed junco floated back to him from below on the long, gently falling slope. Although the others went about giving the appearance of being totally unaware of danger, that birdcall confirmed that the other eight were ready.

  Scratch jerked around at the sudden hammer of the many hooves on the ground. As his eyes met the grassy skyline, some two dozen or more horsemen bristled against the blue dome like a mirage for no more than the instant it took for them to break over the hill, spread out in a widening formation. Not a sound had burst from their mouths as they poured off the high ground, racing toward him—strung out to his right. Only after they shot past him at the gallop did they start to holler and yelp, waving pieces of leather and rawhide and blanket, all those fluttering shapes raised to dance on the wind at the ends of their arms in the rose-lit air of dusk.

  In another heartbeat they had torn past him.

  He saw Hatcher come out from behind a tree, raising that big smoothbore to his shoulder. Kinkead was off to the left, already sighting down the long, heavy barrel of his rifle.

  Bass shot to his feet, feeling his heart surge into his throat. As much as he had tried to calm himself while waiting in the grass, he knew it had done no good. Fighting was fighting. And killing was killing. Any man who approached such life-and-death struggles as these with anything less than fear was a man Titus Bass failed to understand.

  Caleb Wood was the first to yell as he burst out of the grass halfway down the slope between Scratch and the camp. The first horseman reined aside as he bore down on the lone trapper, but Caleb blew him off the back of his pony.

  Titus held on the narrow, copper-skinned back, squeezed on the set trigger, then eased his finger down on the front trigger. Through the pan and muzzle smoke he watched the warrior pitch forward, spinning slightly to the side as his legs came loose of his pony to go tumbling into the tall grass.

  Immediately reversing his rifle, Scratch blew hard down the muzzle to clear the breech of any remaining powder embers—a thin, faint stream of smoke jetting from the touchhole. Yanking the plug from his powder horn with his teeth, he quickly poured enough of the coarse black grains up to the right crease in his left palm, then dumped them hurriedly down the muzzle. Bringing the muzzle back to his lips, he spat one of the four balls squirreled in his cheek down the barrel, at the same time dragging the long wiping stick from the iron thimbles at the bottom of the full stock, which he used to ram the unpatched ball home against the powder charge.

  Grabbing up the small horn that hung from the strap to his shooting pouch, Bass quickly sprinkled some of the fine grains into the cupped recess of the pan and snapped the frizzen back over it.

  The hair bristled on the back of his neck as he heard the yelps and cries behind him. There weren’t supposed to be any behind him.

  But suddenly the skyline sprouted four, five … then six more—their arms raised, bows and clubs and axes in their hands as they pounded heels into their ponies’ ribs and rushed toward the fight in a second wave of terror.

  Here he stood out in the open now, a good half of him poking above the tall grass, with nowhere to run for cover. The way they swerved as they burst over the top of the rise, Scratch was sure they saw him, sure they must have realized he had been part of a trap laid for them all.

  Down below along the gentle slope three more rifles cracked, friends hollered, and those men hit with ball or pierced by arrow grunted and cried out.

  Flicking a look at his belt, he saw the big horse pistol stuffed in the side of his wide belt, reassured. That would make two dead niggers, he figured as he slapped the gracefully curved rifle butt into the hollow at his shoulder. He had a tomahawk at the back of his belt, there beside the knife scabbard. That might account for two more when it came to the close and dirty of it.

  But that meant there were two more who might swallow him up, fill his lights with arrows, hack off the top of his skull, or pound him beneath their ponies’ hooves as they rode right over him while he was busy fighting off the rest.

  As a big-chested warrior leaned off the side of his pony a ways, raising the arm clutching a long shaft, over the top flat of his rifle barrel Scratch spotted the two knife blades planted in the end of that swinging weapon. Plunging downhill at him … he raised the front blade a little higher, there at the notch where the Bannock’s neck met his chest.

  And pulled th
e trigger.

  The Indian’s cry was shrill as he was shoved off the back of his pony. Scratch took the rifle into his left hand, letting it fall at his feet as his right yanked the big-bore pistol from his belt, dragging back the hammer to full-cock as it came up. The next one bearing down on him already had his bow strung, the arrow drawn back as he leaned off the side of his animal racing on a collision course for the white man standing alone in the grass, its onrushing eyes and nostrils wide.

  Using both hands to steady the pistol, Titus held high on the chest, then pulled the trigger. The weapon bucked back and upward at the end of his arms. Again his left hand dropped the weapon as his right reached round for the small-bladed tomahawk he pulled from his belt.

  Three of them were turning his way.

  Where was the fourth?

  His left hand emptied of the pistol, Bass filled it with the handle of the old skinning knife and dragged the weapon from its rawhide scabbard just at the moment his left leg burned. He looked down, feeling the gorge rise in his throat, knowing he was going to be sick from the pain of it—seeing the arrow stuck clear through the meat of his thigh. At the back of his leg the stone tip glistened in the falling light, bright with his blood. Against the front of his legging the shaft’s three rows of fletching quivered as his muscles tensed and shuddered in pain.

  He wasn’t sure how long he could continue standing before his stomach revolted and he threw up. But swallow it down he did as a warrior bore down on him. Twenty feet …

  Then, as the Bannock swung back a stone club, he was knocked sideways, the roar of a rifle surprising Scratch.

  Jerking to his right, putting most of his weight on the one strong leg, Bass spotted Solomon Fish hurrying through the grass as he blew down his muzzle, reloading on the move. Behind them, on down the slope, those raiders not knocked off their ponies were ascending the far side of the shallow bowl, scattered and demoralized that their surprise had not succeeded.

  “Bass! Behind you!”

  Scratch whirled at the thunder of hooves.

  A pure wonder, Bass thought. The son of a bitch boldly sat straight up atop his pony—drawing back the bow’s rawhide string with one hand, a cluster of arrows in the other that gripped the center of the horn bow.

  All he could do now was wait—wait and anticipate when the bastard would release that arrow. When he saw the string snap, Bass lunged to the right, landing in the grass, tumbling over onto the wounded leg—crying out as the shaft broke at the back of the thigh and splintered at the front in his clumsy roll. It hurt so damn bad, he wanted nothing more than to get up and yank the rest of the shaft from his flesh.

  Struggling to his knees, then raising himself on that good leg, Scratch heard one of them yell again. And the hoofbeats—

  He only had time to get his arms up to catch the warrior flinging himself off his pony as the animal raced on by the trapper. Together Bass and the bowman pitched into the grass, tumbling over one another, grunting and groaning as the warrior struggled to dig fingers into his windpipe and gouge his eyes while Titus flailed away with his weapons.

  The thick-chested warrior stuffed a thumb into the side of Scratch’s mouth and started to rip downward against the cheek and jaw. To his tongue that thumb tasted like smoke and dirt as Titus bit down hard, grinding the back of his teeth against the sharp pain as the enemy worked at ripping his jaw off.

  Striking out with his clenched fist, the Bannock knocked the tomahawk out of Bass’s hand, then seized the white man’s upper arm in his grip.

  Unable for the moment to make use of his knife, Scratch flung both arms around the powerful chest, locking his free hand around the other wrist, starting to squeeze as he bit down all the harder on the thumb.

  With a shrill wail of agony the Bannock popped his head forward savagely, smacking his broad forehead against Titus’s brow. Bits of shattered glass and fractured, mirrored light spun outward from his eyes as he jabbed a knee into his enemy, again, and then a third time—hearing the man grunt with each blow, feeling each strike shudder through that bare, sweaty chest he gripped within his arms.

  As the Bannock cocked his head back, Titus released his grip, the fingers on his free hand shooting past the Bannock’s hair, immediately snatching hold in time to yank back as the warrior tried again to smack his forehead.

  At the same instant he felt the Indian’s fingers close around his ear. Digging, tearing with almost as much pain as there was in that quivering thigh of his as Scratch lumbered onto his knees, sweeping the knife in a huge arc toward his enemy’s back. He sensed the blade drag along a rib for a moment before it plunged on through the taut muscle there in the lower back.

  Scratch yanked it free, then drove the knife downward again, this time fighting to drag it to the side as the warrior stiffened, his whole body gone rigid while Titus struggled to turn the weapon this way, then that, twisting the blade through the soft tissue below that hard-strap muscle.

  The enemy pitched to the side suddenly, stared up at the white man with glazed eyes as he took three quick gasps of air, then breathed no more.

  It was quiet for a heartbeat; then Bass became aware of the fading hoofbeats, the raucous shouts of the others as they trudged his way up the slope. Off to his right he watched Isaac Simms rise out of the tall grass, lift an arm with a tomahawk in his hand, then swing it down savagely.

  “Ain’t none of these alive now, Jack,” Simms called when he finally stood fully.

  Fish and Wood were the first to reach Scratch.

  “Who … who else hurt?” he asked.

  Solomon dragged up one of Bass’s arms, and together with Caleb, they lifted Titus out of the grass. “No one. You’re the only nigger got enough stupids to wait out here for ’em to ’sprise you the way they done.”

  “Everyone awright?”

  Wood replied this time, “Maybe a scratch or two.”

  “The horses?” Titus asked. “An’ my mule?”

  “They didn’t get a damn thing for their trouble,” Fish growled.

  Bass tried to turn partway around in their arms. “Get my guns—”

  “We’ll get yer guns,” Hatcher snapped as he came up out of the deepening gloom. “Get him down to the fire, boys.”

  “Damn, if I ain’t the ailin’ one again, Jack.”

  “That’s right,” Hatcher said quietly. “But this time we ain’t got time to sit around waiting for ye to heal up.”

  Solomon asked, “What you aimin’ to do, Jack?”

  “We’ll build us a big fire and cut that arrow out’n his leg—so we can be long gone afore morning light.”

  6

  Two of them brought all their stock right into camp and began to load the pack animals in the bright glare of that roaring fire Bass was certain would mean the death of them all, backlighting the white men as some went about preparing for the trail, others busy with heating a little water in a kettle to use in Jack’s surgery.

  “Hold ’im down, boys,” Hatcher ordered when he finally dragged his thin-bladed skinner from the edge of the coals.

  Bass struggled for a moment as five of them seized him, shoved him back onto the grass there beside the fire pit. He knew what was coming.

  “Sorry we gotta do it this way, friend,” Hatcher explained, his merry green eyes gone dark with concern. “We ain’t got time to soften yer brain on whiskey.”

  “Hell, you ain’t got no whiskey left anyway,” Scratch said between gritted teeth, struggling slightly against the others as his eyes narrowed on the blade headed for his leg. Then he quickly glanced at the other faces hovering near his—knowing there wasn’t a lick of sense in fighting them all.

  Hell, he realized he’d do the same for any of them—whatever it took to save a friend’s life.

  “Get that legging off’n his belt,” Hatcher commanded, his lean face gone taut and gray in the firelight, eyes narrowing on the job at hand.

  It all went so slowly after that. Brutally, brutally slow. With the legging straps
unknotted and the tube of deerskin tugged down around his knee, it was clear to see the ends of the splintered arrow poking from the two blackened, bloody holes.

  Hatcher dragged the back of his hand across his dry lips and murmured, “Gimme yer ramrod puller, Caleb.”

  In a moment Wood returned with the small pair of anvil-forged pliers a trapper used to give himself leverage on his hickory ramrod in pulling a ball back out of the long-barreled flintlocks that were the constant companions to these men far beyond the frontier.

  With the fingers of his left hand, Jack pressed down on the bloodied skin around the hole on the front of the thigh, spreading the edges of the wound a little, and began digging into the torn flesh with the narrow, open jaws of the puller. Each time he squeezed down on the handles, thinking he had a bite on the shaft, all he dragged out was reddened splinters.

  “Dammit,” he grumbled quietly. “Roll ’im over for me.”

  Bass gritted his teeth as they twisted him onto his belly and sat back down on his shoulders and legs.

  Jack tapped Rowland on the arm. “Get outta my light, Johnny.”

  Rowland shifted his weight on the wounded leg.

  “That’s better,” Hatcher said. “Ye’re a lucky nigger, Titus Bass.”

  “T-this don’t feel like lucky.” Then he twitched with the sudden flare of pain.

  “Didn’t hit that big bone,” Hatcher explained as he leaned over the wound, pressed down on the flesh around the hole with his weight, and dug in with the puller.

  Scratch ground his teeth together as the pain continued to swell, rising to a feverish red heat, glowing in overlapping waves that rose right up through his buttock and into the pit of him, spreading deep through his belly. Again and again Hatcher dug—yanking and swearing with each attempt, only to dig again. Each time coming up empty-handed.