“Look out, boys, they intend to ride us down this time,” Son’s voice lifted high and shrill.
The Comanches’ horses’ hooves drummed the ground, and nothing on earth could match the terrible war cries issued from the warriors’ throats. The Prussian ordered half his men to shoot, and the other half to ride forward when the first group’s guns were emptied. It might have been a sound tactic if applied, or if the Comanches didn’t have them so outnumbered. More Comanches fell before their guns, but nothing was going to stop their momentum. In an instant Texans, Tonks, and Comanches were mixed together at close quarters. All around Odell was dust and confusion, wounded horses, and dying men. It was a brutal, root-hog-or-die kind of fighting, and a man had to be rabid mean and half crazy to stand a chance of surviving.
Odell stretched out the long barrel of his pistol before him and shot a Comanche at point-blank range. He had no time to gauge the effect of his shot, for another horse almost ran into him as it tore by. In that instant he got a brief glimpse of Son Ballard reeling lifelessly in his saddle with an arrow protruding from his eye socket. Beyond, sunlight flashed on polished steel, and he saw the Prussian slashing right and left in the middle of two Comanches trying to club him from his horse. Odell plunged Crow forward and pressed his pistol into the ribs of one of the Comanches and shot him off of the Prussian’s back.
A war club struck Odell between the shoulders and he backhanded with the pistol barrel. His swing only found air, and he nearly toppled from his horse. He wheezed for breath and began firing at the deadly phantoms sliding in and out of the veil of dust. To the right and left of him, his friends in arms had won themselves some breathing room. The slackening rifle fire and the Comanches’ receding yells seemed ominously quiet after the hell that he had just witnessed.
He snapped his pistol at a retreating Comanche twice before he realized it was empty. He holstered it and drew the other while he looked wildly around him. Kentucky Bob was down on the ground with a lance stuck through him and the dead Comanche who had wielded it still holding onto the shaft. His brother Dub was sitting his horse nearby, but just as dead with a handful of arrows in his torso. Several more men were wounded, and possibly dying, but surprisingly the Prussian’s force was mostly intact.
In fact, the battlefield wasn’t littered with the bodies Odell expected. A lame or dead horse could be spotted on the prairie here and there, but the only Comanche corpses visible were a couple in the Texans’ midst. Granted, the Comanches made every effort to haul off their dead and wounded, but the casualty count was small for such vicious fighting.
The Prussian stepped down off of his horse and picked up his carbine. He rested for a brief moment against the side of his horse before climbing back on. “Reload, and let’s take it to them while they’re on the run.”
After a little study of his empty Colt Paterson, Odell punched out the barrel wedge with his knife tip and pulled the barrel forward to remove the discharged cylinder. He replaced it with a capped and loaded replacement cylinder from one of the little pouches on his gun belt and reassembled the pistol. He missed his rifle, but he had to admit that while the Colt pistols were underpowered, the ability to shoot so many times between reloads seemed tailor-made for Indian fighting.
The Prussian started them forward at a high lope toward the Comanche warriors assembling near the village. The Texans who could ignored their pain and exhaustion and followed him. Several of the Tonks had been put afoot, but they came along just the same. A handful of men too seriously injured to fight were left in the creek bed.
The Comanches’ numbers appeared little weakened, and if possible, they seemed more ready to fight than ever. Half of the camp had already gathered what little it could and was on the move. The warriors fought a rearguard action in random little groups, buying time for their women and children and horse herd to get free of the fight that had turned against them.
Odell stood in his stirrups and looked for signs of escaping Comanches. As the Prussian led them onward, he kept his eyes on the dust cloud worming its way across the prairie a mile to the west. He hoped Red Wing wasn’t already being dragged away.
The Texans boiled into the camp with their horses at a dead run. Women who hadn’t fled quickly enough ducked and dodged among the remaining lodges with their children dragging behind them, or clutched screaming in their arms. The Comanche warriors were everywhere, sniping with arrows, and smoking trade fusils. A loss of momentum would have meant being surrounded and certain death for the Texans. The Prussian led the run through the gauntlet, with the Texans taking snapshots with their rifles on the fly. They reined their horses through the maze of lodges, leaping them over obstacles, and crashing against the hide walls of the tepees in their wild charge.
They crossed a dry streambed at the far side of the camp and caught a young squaw in the act of trying to mount her frightened horse between two half-disassembled tepees. One of the Tonks had managed to race ahead of the rest of them and he caught her just as she finally swung up on her dancing pony. He wrapped one arm around her waist and pulled her across his horse’s withers in front of him.
The Texans were checking up their winded horses to dismount and form a skirmish line facing back the way they had come. Odell saw the fat squaw come out from behind the tepee as if it were in slow motion. Before he could call out a warning, she sent an arrow into the Tonk’s back. The rest of the party had seen her too, but she was as quick with her bow as were the men of her tribe. She took aim again and let loose another arrow just as a bullet took off the top of her head.
Her last arrow had missed its mark, but she did shoot good enough to kill Placido’s horse in its tracks. While the men poured fire at the Comanche warriors steadily filtering through the camp toward them, Odell was still trying to get his mind to accept the fact that they had just had to kill a woman. He remembered the bodies falling among the lodges as they had raced through the camp and wondered how many of them had been women too, or even children. He and the other Texans only had eyes for Comanche braves, but there wasn’t much time to cautiously pick targets at a dead run under fire.
“Hang in there, men. We just about have the sonofabitches beat,” the Prussian shouted.
Odell looked past the men to the open prairie, and the black-clad Prussian turned to look with him. Three Comanches burst out of the streambed a hundred yards beyond the camp. They were fleeing at a dead run away from the Texans, and Odell was about to look away when the squaw in the rear turned her head to look back.
Chapter 33
Red Wing heard the gunfire and war cries growing nearer in the distance, but from where she was at the far side of the camp she couldn’t see the battle she knew was taking place. Little Bull’s son had led in five horses for them, but he was just a small boy, and the sounds of fighting and the frantic goings-on of the camp had the animals nervous and flighty. He led them by neck ropes, and a big blue roan set back on the rope and jerked the boy to the ground. He tried to hang on and keep them from wheeling away, but the rawhide ropes bit into his hands and the horses drug his light body along the ground as if he were no more than a feather. The roan and two others got away from him and stampeded off at a run with their heads held high and wide to avoid stepping on their trailing lead ropes. The two horses he managed to keep hold of and his own mount weren’t enough to both pack the household and to carry them all away.
Buffalo Butt immediately accepted the fact that she was going to have to leave behind her home and most of the items that she cherished. She hastily began packing a single, small bundle of necessaries that she could carry with her.
Meanwhile, Speckled Tail was torn between her treasures and the fear of still being in camp if the Tejanos should win a victory. In the end, her treasures won out, and she attempted to roll all her personal belongings, as well as Red Wing’s valise, into a buffalo robe.
“You’re going to get us all killed if the Tejanos come,�
�� Buffalo Butt shouted at the Kiowa. “Our husband told us to be gone quickly.”
Speckled Tail ignored the scolding and kept gathering things she couldn’t bear to part with. Every time she told herself she was through, she would spy something else that she had to have.
Red Wing stood back and watched it all. While the two squaws argued, she decided to take another look at the gray buffalo runner staked out just beyond the women. She turned to find the boy staring at her. He was obviously worried about the fight and his failure to hold on to the horses, but he made a valiant effort to mask his concern. She remembered another boy who had been much like that at his age—always fierce on the outside and worried on the inside. Looking at the boy was like going back ten years and seeing her brother again as a teenager.
He seemed not to notice that she was studying the buffalo runner and soon lost interest in her and frowned impatiently at his mother and Speckled Tail. “Hurry up. My father trusted me to see you away from here.”
Secretly, Pony Heart was torn between the fear he felt among the women of the camp and the need to watch his father and the rest of the warriors fight the Tejanos. He had gone to see the prisoners tortured less out of a desire to see enemies suffer than to lay his eyes on the devils he had heard so much about. Nothing he had seen about the three white men had explained all that he had heard of them, or the concern of his people at the arrival of a small war party of their kind.
Red Wing noticed that the boy was lost in his own thoughts, and she decided that it was then or never if she was going to escape. She ran for the buffalo runner and thought she had passed the arguing squaws without them even knowing it. The boy was slow to react, and she had hold of the horse’s stake rope before his mouth could even form a warning.
She tugged the anchor loose from the ground and worked her way up the long rope to the shying horse. Hiking her doeskin dress up her thighs a little, she took hold of the gray’s mane at the withers and swung her right leg up over his back. He instantly made two stiff-legged jumps and promptly bucked her off. Before she could get back up and try again, Buffalo Butt jerked the rope from her hands. She stood glaring over Red Wing while the sound of warriors calling out warnings to the camp, and the gunfire of the Texans grew closer.
Red Wing wanted to cry with frustration. She had blown an easy chance by her own stupidity. She had been so long among the white men that she had grown used to mounting on the left side of her horses. Comanches, and most other Indians, used the off side, and many of their wilder horses never learned to tolerate anything different. The gray was obviously no kid horse, and she had startled him by mounting on the wrong side.
She avoided Buffalo Butt’s hot gaze and got to her feet. She was dusting herself off when Little Bull rode up mounted behind another warrior. His left arm was bound in a crude sling, and his face was riddled with pain. He leapt off and strode directly for her while the other warrior turned and went back through the camp at a run.
“The Tejanos have beaten us,” Little Bull said. It was plain his anguish wasn’t all because of his broken arm.
“Here is your horse.” Pony Heart offered the buffalo runner’s rope to him.
Little Bull went to one of the other two horses and brought it back to Red Wing. “Get on.”
She stood stoically and tried to bluff him. “I will not.”
He slipped the war club from his belt and brandished it at her. His eyes were crazy with pain. “You’ll ride, or I’ll tie you belly down on this horse.”
“Forget me, brother, and let me be dead again,” she said. “Save your family.”
“I would kill you myself before I would see you lost to the Tejanos again.” He sounded as if he had truly gone mad.
Sweat was dripping off his face, and she saw that both his mind and his body had been pushed to the brink. Delay was her only chance, but she knew he meant what he said. Even injured as he was, there was no way she could fight off the four of them.
She didn’t move quickly but got on the horse as he had ordered her. He took his knife and cut a section of the gray’s stake rope. He made a one-handed noose and slipped it over her foot and tied her two ankles together under the horse’s belly. With an agility that was shocking given his condition, he swung on the gray’s back with her lead rope in his hand.
“Come, woman. There’s little time,” he said to Buffalo Butt.
“Go on. I’ll be right along.” Buffalo Butt held the last remaining horse at ready, but her eyes went back to where Speckled Tail had disappeared into one of the tepees.
“Speckled Tail!” Little Bull shouted.
The Kiowa finally appeared with her mirror and her comb clutched against her chest. She tucked the items into her buffalo robe and struggled to get the large roll of the hide draped over the horse’s back. Buffalo Butt knocked the robe from her hands, and Speckled Tail cried out and went to her knees to dig her mirror and comb back out of the crude pack.
“Get up behind me, and leave that fool!” Little Bull was looking across the village, and he sounded as if the Texans were already upon them.
Red Wing realized that the fight had moved into the camp itself, and her heart pounded with hope. The mix of terror and stubborn courage she felt was the same as the last time she had stood in such a camp just before the Texans had appeared with their guns belching hell’s smoke and their big-brimmed hats shading eyes wilder than any Comanche. Only this time, she wanted the Texans to take her away.
Buffalo Butt slapped Little Bull’s horse across the rump with the palm of her hand and sent him off in a jump. Red Wing’s horse followed by its lead rope and the boy raced alongside them. They turned into the dry streambed and Red Wing looked back to see Buffalo Butt trying to calm her frightened horse into letting her and Speckled Tail mount.
The streambed ran due west of the camp and gradually shallowed until it no longer provided cover for them. Little Bull turned out of it and pointed them westward toward the dust trail of those that had already fled the camp.
Red Wing kept looking back at the camp and saw the Texans overrun Little Bull’s lodges and Buffalo Butt shoot one of them before she died. Red Wing started to call out when she recognized the Prussian, but then spotted the tall man sitting his horse a little ways from the others. It was her Odie, and she lifted a hand to him.
Chapter 34
The Texans started back through the lodges on foot like pirates swarming over the side of a ship, and the fighting in the village swiftly turned into more of a wild brawl than a pitched battle. The Comanche warriors continued to linger, but the fight they put up was only a last, wrathful effort to protest the enemy plundering their camp. Odell and the Prussian had spotted Red Wing at the same time, and both of them spurred out of the mayhem in pursuit. Neither one of them said anything to each other, as they raced side by side across the prairie.
Crow was already tired from the battle, but when Odell asked him for speed he didn’t refuse. He ran like his lungs were made of cast iron and his heart as big as Texas. There were few horses to match his like, but the Prussian’s Kentucky horse ran neck and neck with him just the same. Red Wing’s captors had what should have been an insurmountable lead, but there hadn’t been enough time for Little Bull’s gray buffalo runner to totally heal from his abscess. There was an ever-so-slight falter to his stride every time the sole of that hoof struck the ground. That was just enough of a handicap to make it a race.
Over the course of a mile, they had closed to within a hundred yards of the two Comanches and Red Wing. They were close enough for Odell to recognize the warrior he had fought with earlier, and the wild and pleading looks Red Wing threw back at him brought on a rage like none he had felt before. He banged his heels unmercifully into Crow’s belly. The Comanche warrior leading Red Wing was heading for the dust trail on the horizon some four miles ahead. Odell knew that it wasn’t just a race to run the brave down, but to do it before he
and the boy reached the aid of the other refugees fleeing the camp.
Odell felt how hard Crow was straining underneath him, and although the horse still seemed willing, he knew he was running him into the ground. He looked to the Prussian and saw that the Kentucky horse was lathered and roaring from the back of his throat with every breath. The Prussian whipped the horse with the long tail of his harness leather reins, but it was plain that his thoroughbred was almost running dead.
When they cut the distance in half over another long stretch of ground, the Prussian leveled his carbine on the warrior’s back. It was plain that he knew his horse had nothing left to close with, and he was going to take a chance. Odell started to shout at him not to risk hitting Red Wing, but the Kentucky horse’s front legs buckled and it broke to a staggering trot and almost fell. By the time the Prussian regained his seat the Comanche leading Red Wing was already too far away to chance a shot with the smoothbore carbine.
Odell left the Prussian sitting his wind-broke horse and continued the chase. He saw that Red Wing was leaning out over her horse’s neck and trying to slip its rope hackamore over its ears. Crow had brought him to within twenty yards of the Comanche in front of her, and Odell drew one pistol. A deep but narrow wash cut across their way from the foot of a low hill, and the Comanche hit it at a run. All three riders disappeared over the bank before Odell even recognized what was coming. Crow was running blind and didn’t even feel the check of the bit when Odell tried to slow him. They sailed off the six-foot drop and hit in a cloud of silty sand.
The Comanche’s gray had fallen on impact, throwing him. Crow came over the lip of the bank at the same time and almost trampled the fallen warrior. Odell twisted in the saddle to fire a shot into the Comanche as he passed, but Crow reached the far bank and stalled halfway up it. He reared high and fell over backward, and Odell was hard-pressed to avoid being smashed by his saddle horn. He pushed himself away from the saddle just before the horse’s crushing weight thumped into the ground.
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