Buffalo Palace

by Terry C. Johnston

  Closer, closer he came … then the puff of smoke from the tube. The dull thud of the ball furrowing the earth there between Bass and Hatcher.

  Closer still as the Indian realized he had missed, jerked back, sitting up to yank brutally on the single rein, attempting to turn the pony before—

  But Bass was already rising, the right arm out straight, elbow locked, sensing when to pull the trigger at the very moment the warrior sat upright, making more of a target.

  The ball struck him high in the chest, there below the vee of the collarbone where he wore a brass gorget around his neck, catapulting the warrior off to the left side as his pony continued its turn to the right.

  “That was purty!” Hatcher cried out, both arms lunging for Bass—to hold on, to pull himself up. “Gimme my pistol.”

  Slapping it back into Jack’s hands, Bass took the knife from his left and slid it into its scabbard just as Fish hollered.

  “Scratch!”

  Hatcher and Bass both grunted as another horseman pitched off his pony right over them, arms spread wide, flying into the trappers as the pony leaped past. For that fleeting moment Titus thought how bad the Indian stank of dried meat and buffalo grease on his hair. Cold, dried sweat—days old now. Then all three of them were tumbling into Hatcher together: Jack whimpering every time Bass or Fish or the warrior rolled over that broken shaft in his hip.

  But Hatcher was still all spidery arms and legs—thrashing and heaving about, attempting to throw off the Indian as Scratch struggled to secure a hold on the warrior’s right arm: the hand that held a large iron knife. One of the biggest Titus had ever seen. With his right hand clutching his own knife, Bass seized hold of the warrior’s hair, right up at the top of his forehead where the horseman had it bound up with a weasel skin.

  They rolled off Hatcher as Fish flew in the other direction, both of them wheezing from the strain, the weight, the bare-boned knowing they were locked in something from which only one of them would emerge.

  Somewhere behind him Bass heard another gun roar. Not a pistol, but the sure-enough boom of a rifle. He wondered if it was another warrior’s smoothbore musket. They didn’t have rifled weapons—

  Suddenly the warrior twisted himself on top of Bass, his left hand shoving Scratch’s head back into the forest floor. Bass felt the pine needles and dirt grind against the ring of flesh surrounding his bare skull, shooting through him with the heat of a dying star, as if his scalp were being torn from him all over again.

  With his strength failing in the left arm as he held that big knife away from his face and neck, Bass surprised the warrior by letting go of the weasel-wrapped hair. In that instant the Indian glanced upward to find the white man’s hand—Scratch smashed the knife handle down into the Indian’s forehead. Again into the side of his eye socket … sensing the warrior’s struggle weaken.

  Again and again he pounded the hard bone handle into the side of the enemy’s head, splitting open the skin over the eye, across the temple, blood coursing down over the ocher and brown face paint applied in crude lightning bolts.

  The warrior’s left hand came loose first, releasing Bass’s hair, then shooting down to clamp around the white man’s throat.

  Again Titus smashed the handle into the enemy’s face, feeling the cheekbone give way beneath his blow.

  An instant later the warrior’s right arm weakened some more, beginning to drop as the Indian’s body seeped a little more of its strength.

  Tightening his fingers around the knife handle, Bass brought the blade down now, striking savagely, slashing the warrior across the jaw, down the great muscles of his neck, across his windpipe.

  Blood splattered over him as the warrior gasped his last, noisy breath, jerking back in black-eyed shock, yanking the empty hand from Bass’s neck to his own to vainly attempt to stop the spurts of bright blood.

  Then his dark eyes widened all the more in sudden surprise, slowly looking down at the white man below him as Titus drove the knife home—right into the warrior’s belly … yanking, jerking, working it crudely from right to left, opening the cavity up, blood and gore spilling out as Bass kicked himself free of the dying man.

  “Eeegod!” Hatcher gushed hoarsely. “You kill’t that red-belly!”

  “Him … or me,” he gushed, hauling in snatches of breath.

  “C’mon!” Fish yelled, trying his best to get himself under one of Hatcher’s arms.

  Bass slipped under the other, and together they raised Jack off the ground as he cried out in pain. Whirling clumsily, they dragged Hatcher toward the trees where Elbridge Gray emerged with a rifle in each hand.

  “Get down!” Gray ordered.

  Thinking that was a stupid thing for any man to tell him when he and Fish had Hatcher suspended between them, Bass glanced over his shoulder—finding a half-dozen horsemen coming for them at a hard gallop.

  “Down!” Elbridge screamed again.

  Fish was the first to obey, pitching forward, dragging Hatcher and Bass with him as Simms stepped out of the trees with a rifle in one hand, a stubby, short-barreled weapon in the other.

  But Gray didn’t wait on Bass to get all the way down. As soon as Scratch collapsed to his knees, Elbridge fired the shot that struck the closest warrior. His pony pitched sideways into another horse. Now Simms brought the long, heavy rifle up in his right hand, pulling the trigger as it reached the top of its arc.

  Like a steam piston he let the right arm sink as he brought up that short weapon and fired it. A wide spray of orange light lit the shadows as four ponies screeched in pain and dismay, twisting and rearing, their warriors fighting for control as the animals pitched their riders off this way and that.

  “Get moving!” Simms bellowed as he stuffed that strange short weapon under his right arm and pulled a pistol from his belt.

  “Git on! See Hatcher gets back to camp!” Gray ordered. “We gotta make a stand there.”

  Just as Bass was clambering to his feet, feeling naked without a weapon, Jack suddenly had hold of the front of Scratch’s bloody shirt, pulling himself up so he could peer into Titus’s face. “’Member them rocks?”

  “Rocks?”

  Hatcher had to be crazy with pain to be talking about rocks.

  Jack struggled to hold on to Titus’s shirt. Pain had turned his face into a gray, pasty mask of agony. “Where I come found you at sundown, you idjit!”

  “Rocks—yeah,” he said, remembering.

  “Take us there—”

  Bass interrupted, “We won’t ever make it.”

  For a moment Hatcher’s eyes closed slowly as if he were weakening, then opened again, a thin veil of teary pain clouding them. “We don’t get to them rocks, goddammit … we won’t none of us make it.”

  For an instant more Bass gazed deeply into Hatcher’s red-rimmed eyes—when he realized just how fight Jack was at that moment.

  “Follow me!” Titus ordered as he dragged his gaze from Hatcher and raked it across Solomon Fish.

  Jack croaked, “Tell … tell ’em—”

  Bass stood, yanking the tall Hatcher up on his shoulder as Fish stood beneath the other arm to prop himself under Jack.

  Titus hollered, “Jack says we drop back to the rocks!”

  “No!” Wood shouted, emerging from the trees, one of his arms hanging bloody, useless, at his side. “We make our stand in camp!”

  “Get your pouches!” Simms hollered, wheeling away from Caleb. “We’re going to the rocks with Hatcher!”

  They pushed past Wood in a rush as Caleb swore at them, but when Bass twisted his head to look over his shoulder, he found the trapper right behind them. While Fish and Bass dragged Hatcher on through the center of their camp, the rest scattered here and there to scoop up weapons and shooting pouches. Behind them the warriors were clearly working up for another rush.

  “They coming again!” Jack whimpered in pain. “B-be ready!”

  “We ain’t gonna make it,” Wood bellowed.

  “C’mon!”
Bass cried to those behind him now as they reached the timber on the far side of camp. “It ain’t that far!”

  “Too … too far!” Jack suddenly said.

  At that moment he looked down at Hatcher. It seemed that as he watched, all the starch went right out of the man. His face turned a doughy gray, eyes sunken into his skull.

  “No, goddammit!” Bass shouted at Jack, yanking Hatcher up by the collar of his buckskin shirt, shaking him for good measure. “We’re gonna make it! Just like you said: we’re gonna make it to the rocks!”

  “L-leave me—”

  “No!” Scratch shouted him down as the others reached them, their arms loaded with longrifles, belts, and sashes bristling with pistols and axes.

  Gray’s eyes were wide with worry as he looked at Hatcher, then turned to flick a look behind them. “How far?”

  “Too far,” Hatcher answered, sinking low between the two who propped him upright.

  “It ain’t too far!” Bass shouted. “C’mon!”

  Across those last two hundred yards … then only a hundred, they could hear them coming. Yelping and crying out in dismay at the death of their companions—screeching louder still when they burst into the white man’s camp, tearing through it looking for the white man’s guns. Perhaps knowing already where the cornered quarry was headed. Rushing on out of that camp to herd the trappers as they would herd deer.

  The growing noise of their coming only served to bristle the hair on the back of Scratch’s neck. That, and to drive him onward with Hatcher on his shoulder. Bass was beginning to gasp for breath, his belly sickening with the effort, his head dizzying from lack of air when the boulders leaped into view ahead. Off to the right.

  From there they might have a chance.

  “I see ’em!” Kinkead bawled.

  The forest behind them seemed to erupt with the cries of warriors as they rushed after their prey, hearing that shrill announcement from the pursued.

  Simms was the first to climb up the outside shell of rocks, sliding down into the wide crevice that would take them into the center of the natural fortress. Setting his weapons aside, he reached down to pull Rowland and Kinkead in; then all three turned to helped Fish and Bass shove Hatcher up the five-foot wall of granite like a child’s rag doll. With Jack propped up against the rocks, the others handed in their weapons and vaulted up themselves—just as the warriors exploded from the trees.

  There were fewer of them now than there had been. But there wasn’t any man counting. Hell, Bass thought, when you’re jumped by that many, dropping a few from their ponies don’t make all that much of a dent in the odds.

  But the warriors stopped dead in their tracks, some circling left and some going right, while most of them stayed right there in the center—staring at the rock fortress. Kneeling, a few snapped off some arrows at the trappers hunkering down in the rocks. The stone tips clattered against the boulders, spun crazily in among the trappers. Noisily yelling, the Indians screeched war cries and bloody oaths.

  “What’re they?” Scratch asked, taking his rifle from Rowland.

  “Cain’t rightly say,” Wood replied, wagging his head and shoving a ball down his barrel.

  “Hell,” Jack coughed below them at the bottom of the crevice. “We damn well know what them sumbitches are.”

  “Hatcher’s right,” Gray agreed as he slid up between Kinkead and Bass. “Blackfoots.”

  “Blackfeets,” Bass repeated, finally slipping the blue scarf from his belt and knotting it around his head once more.

  With a pained snort Jack tossed his head and growled, “Who the hell you ’specting wants hair so bad up this way—”

  Twisting near fully around at the shrill cry, Bass found a warrior leaping from the rocks right above them. Simms caught the Blackfoot in his arms as they both slammed into the ground, the Indian’s knife crudely raking Isaac’s shoulder, opening up a bloody gash. In that next instant Gray swung the butt of his flintlock across the back of the warrior’s head—driving the enemy off Simms with an audible crunch and a spray of blood. In a fury Isaac was on top of the warrior, dragging the enemy’s head back to expose the neck, suddenly slashing a knife across the warrior’s throat.

  “Scratch!”

  He whirled at Graham’s cry, just as Rufus fired. A second warrior on the rocks above them jerked as the lead ball struck him, driven back a step, then crumpling to his knees. Yet as the Blackfoot clutched his bloody fingers over the wound in his side, he still managed to cock the tomahawk over his head, hurling it down into the knot of white men.

  While the wounded warrior pitched backward from sight, the tomahawk spun itself against the boulder right behind Gray, then struck Elbridge a ricochet blow. Solomon leaped to Gray’s side as the man slumped to the ground—a huge knot already puffing across his brow and temple, blood beginning to ooze down the side of his face.

  “He’s out,” Fish muttered as he yanked the loaded pistol from Elbridge’s hand.

  “Red niggers whittling us down,” Hatcher groaned in resignation.

  Two more painted warriors appeared at the far side of the ring of boulders, poking their heads over only long enough to take aim, pull back the strings on their bows, and let their arrows fly. Although noisy and frightening, the two shafts clattered harmlessly into the rocky fortress.

  “There!” Rowland shouted.

  Where the warrior with the tomahawk had been a moment before, now three more popped into view. Two more arrows flew in among the trappers, and a Blackfoot with a musket fired his shot—the big lead ball splattering against the rock beside Jack Hatcher.

  Immediately souatting beside Hatcher, Caleb Wood dusted some rock fragments off Jack, saying, “We sit in here like a bunch of nesting hens, the fox gonna get us eventual.”

  Hatcher’s eyes flicked over the others quickly. “You coons got any idees, now’s the time to be spitting ’em.”

  “I say we get the hell out of here,” Graham suggested, his eyes raking the tops of the rocks, ready for the appearance of more warriors. He resolutely tugged down on his beaver hat with the rawhide brim scraped so thin, it was almost translucent. “Make a run for it.”

  “We can’t: they’ll catch us out there one at a time,” Bass declared, wagging his head as he kept his eyes on the south rim of the rocks. “In here we got us a chance.”

  Hatcher drew in a quick breath of torment as he shifted his hip. “I got things figgered the same way as Scratch. Leastways in here they gotta fight to get to us. Not much of one—but we got a chance.”

  “The ones of us what can, we gotta climb the sides of these rocks,” Bass instructed, pointing toward the skyline with the barrel of his rifle. “Up there we can keep ’em from crawling over the rocks.”

  “Might work,” Kinkead admitted, pursing his thick lips in determination. “Let’s climb.”

  Rufus Graham led them, scrambling up the rocks to a high position. Wood and Rowland chose to climb off in another direction. Simms and Fish, Bass and Kinkead, all spread out until the seven of them had the ring of boulders better protected, no longer sitting below, at the mercy of the enemy as the Blackfeet climbed up the rocks and fired down on their quarry. From up near the top of the boulders, the white men could now watch their enemy breaking out of the trees.

  A fella didn’t get him all that many chances to win big at a card game, Titus thought as his eyes raked the tree line—spotting some shadowy movement, listening to the Blackfeet hollering to one another. True enough, a man don’t get a chance less’n he hangs his bare ass right out over the fire like this once’t in a while.

  Coming here to the mountain west all on his lonesome had been the biggest gamble he figured he’d ever made. Bigger even than leaving home at sixteen. But the bigger the gamble, the sweeter the stakes.

  Off to his left two warriors skulked from the morning shadows toward the rocks, pretty much unseen for the thick brush. They scrambled to slip into a crevice that would put them between Caleb and Titus. Laying his left hand f
lat on the top of the boulder, then resting the forestock on the back of that hand, Bass took a quick sight target on the chest of the one who wore no leggings as he started to slip out of the brush there at the base of the crevice. Son of a bitch wore only moccasins, a breechclout, and a headdress made of a spray of turkey feathers tied to the back of his head.

  It surprised him when Wood’s gun echoed the blast from his own rifle. As the turkey-feather headdress twisted and slumped at the foot of the rocks, the other warrior turned on his heel and scampered back for the tree line.

  Stuffing his hand back into his shooting pouch, Scratch scooped up as many of the balls as he had left and brought them out. There in his cupped hand he estimated he had fewer than two dozen shots left. Quickly glancing over the others perched near the top of the boulders nearby, Bass wondered if they were in any better shape for to make a long fight of it. He doubted that any of them would have enough shots to last until nightfall. And even then, there was a damn good chance the Blackfeet might just come to call once darkness hid their movements.

  No matter that he and the rest had knocked a few off their ponies, or had shot a couple here after reaching the rocks—the warriors still had the trappers outnumbered better than four, maybe five, to one. Having to make every shot count, every last lead ball left among them now … that was stretching the odds even thinner.

  “What other choice you got?” he asked himself in a whisper.

  Little matter that none of them would likely see the sun go down on this day.

  In all those years spent working and gambling beside the Ohio River, across all those seasons of drinking and whoring and playing the pasteboards in St. Louis—it had always been his way to stay in the game until the last raise of the night had been plopped down onto the table, until the last call had been made. And he’d just have to see this through to the end too.

  The sun had climbed halfway to midsky with the trappers fighting off the Blackfeet that way—one or two at a time … here or there. Then things fell quiet. The forest became eerily silent.

  Not that they couldn’t hear the snort and movement of ponies yonder in the timbered shadows. But for the longest time, no warriors raced from the trees to assault the rocks.