Man in the Saddle

by Matt Chisholm

  Spur and Pagley settled down behind their shelter, undecided, not knowing what they should do, knowing that there was no escape from here in daylight.

  They waited out the rest of the day, sweating under the tarp they stretched again to shelter from the blistering sun. The girl slept a little, then they made coffee and talked while they watched the Indian camp. Jane told them something of her captivity. Knowing the Kiowas5 treatment of white women, they asked no questions. When she had finished, Spur asked: “How about your pa? Has he tried to contact the Indians for your release?”

  “Pa?” she said, showing her surprise. “Why, didn’t you know? Pa and my brother Jim were killed when the Indians jumped us.”

  The two men mumbled their regrets.

  “Have you any other folks, miss?” Pagley asked.

  “No. I don’t even know where pa came from. All I can remember is chasin’ the wild ones.”

  As the heat of the day started to decrease, the girl went to the river and bathed as best she could exposed to the gaze of the three camps as she was. But when she came back her face was clean and she had removed the dust and grime from her Indian clothes. Spur was struck by the change in her appearance. He saw a touch of beauty in her face.

  As soon as it was dark, they moved camp some twenty yards along the river bank, going as quietly as they could. They were worried about the horses, because they had not been on grass all day, so decided to hobble them two at a time for grazing during the night which would mean that at all times they would have animals to escape on if the necessity arose. They could see the Indians’ fires burning brightly and the figures of the warriors moving around them. The Comanchero camp was silent, but Pagley and Spur knew that it was watchful.

  The two men took it in turns to keep watch while the other slept.

  Spur was keeping guard under a bright moon just past midnight when the Indians made their first move.

  With a suddenness that made him nearly take leave of his skin, a small bunch of horsemen burst out of the night along the edge of the river, coming down at full tilt on the little camp. It was as much as he could do to let off a shot before they were on top of him. He heard the vicious hum of an arrow as it went past his face and fired into the black mass of riders.

  At once the night was split by a blood-curdling series of cries. As the Indians hit the camp, he heard his own horses fighting to get off the tie-ropes. He yelled to the girl to keep down and felt Pagley come to his knees beside him. There seemed to be charging horses all around him, the dust came up in a cloud to choke him and then the Kiowas were gone, taking the horses with them.

  Spur raged helplessly as hoofs pounded away into the night. To be caught like a damned greenhorn. Cursing, he ran to the hobbled horses and brought them back into camp. Pagley led in one of the tied mounts that had run into the river. The two men and the girl were shaking like leaves.

  “By God,” Pagley said, “we get out of here. Now.”

  Spur didn’t like the idea because tomorrow the Indians would catch up with them and finish them, but he couldn’t see any alternative.

  “Do you know this country at all?” he asked the girl. She nodded.

  “Sure, pa worked around here a good bit.”

  “Which way should we head?”

  “This time of year, I’d say follow the river. That’s the best chance of coming on a settlement and you have water all the way.”

  Pagley reckoned that made sense.

  They had no saddles left to them, so it meant riding bare-back. They didn’t like the idea but there was no alternative. They listened to the night and took a long look at the Indian fires. Someone was singing in a wild monotone over there.

  “I sure feel like busting over there and getting our horses,” Spur said.

  “Forget it,” Pagley told him. “You wouldn’t stand a chance and we have the girl with us.” He mounted a sorrel pony and said: “Come on.” The girl got aboard, but Spur was hesitating. “What’s keepin’ you?”

  “We’re forgetting the Grimes girl.”

  “Right now,” Pagley said, “we sure are.”

  Spur mounted and they headed their horses into the river. The water was running low at this time of the year and they crossed without trouble. Maybe nobody saw them go and maybe they did, but they reached the other side safely and followed the stream due east.

  Chapter Nine

  They did not travel fast, for they were heavily laden. With them they had all their supplies and ammunition. They rode through the night and found shelter the following noon among some willows growing at the water’s edge. All through the daylight hours they rode with their chins on their shoulders watching their back-trail for dust, but they saw nothing. Spur was more worried by this inaction on the part of the Indians than he would have been by dust. Toward evening when Pagley was riding to the rear, Spur fell back beside him and had a word out of hearing of the girl.

  “I don’t like it,” he said.

  “Me neither. Come dark, I’ll go back a ways.”

  After dark, the Indian rode his tired horse back upstream. The girl slept, but Spur found that his nerves were too tight for rest. Cradling his rifle and listening to the night sounds, he asked himself for the hundredth time why he had got himself into this. He liked a quiet life, sketching and writing. An hour later, he challenged the sound of a hurrying horse. Pagley answered from the darkness. A moment later, he was beside Spur with bad news.

  “They’re there all right. Travelin’ in the dark. They’re comin’ fast an’ we have to move.”

  “The horses’re bushed,” Spur told him.

  “We find someplace to fort up.”

  They woke the girl, got on their animals and kicked them into a weary run.

  They followed the river into the night, stopping every now and then to listen. Pagley said that he could hear them coming, but neither Spur nor the girl could.

  Suddenly without warning, the Delaware swung into the darkness abruptly to the left. Spur and the girl yanked their animals around, following and at once feeling the ground rising beneath the hoofs of their horses.

  They heaved up a long gradual rise until hoofs hammered on rock and loose stones clattered. Pagley brought his pony to a halt and Spur almost rode him down. They all came piling off their animals and the Indian was saying: “This will have to do.” He led his horse through brush and rock. They followed and halted when he did.

  “Here they come now,” he told them, “hold your horses’ noses.”

  They did as they were told and listened.

  They knew how close a thing it had been when they at once heard the rush and thunder of a bunch of hard-ridden ponies going by them no more than a quarter-mile away. They listened to the sounds going away into the distance, then Pagley and the girl slept while Spur kept watch, huddled in a blanket against the night chill with his rifle across his knees.

  With the coming of the first gray finger of light that denoted the false dawn, one of the horses trumpeted the alarm. The sound woke the sleeping Spur and he rolled sleepily clear of his blanket, feeling for his rifle.

  Pagley caught him by the arm and whispered: “They’re above us.”

  Spur stared around into the murk, but could make nothing definite out.

  A fox yipped sharply between them and the river. A cold dawn wind blew up from the river and Spur shivered. He bent and woke the girl, putting his hand over her mouth, and whispered a warning in her ear. She touched his face with her fingers, then got quickly from her blanket. They stood in the chill dark, holding the muzzles of the ponies, their senses alert, their nerves taut.

  Miserably, they awaited the dawn.

  The first thing that came into Spur’s view was the girl’s drawn face. She turned and caught him looking at her and gave him a brief smile of comradeship. Spur looked around and saw that they were on a small pimple of rocks that stood up on a long slow gradient that swept on to a mile or more above them where it ended in a high ridge. This grade was
broken here and there with scatterings of rocks and gullies. He looked back toward the river and saw that rocks and brush could hide a dozen Indians from their view.

  He didn’t like their position much. Short term it would do at a pinch. Long term it was bad. They were too far from water and a good rifleman above them could make it hell in their small fort. He could tell by the way Pagley looked that the Delaware was of a like opinion.

  They tried to make the horses lie down. One would, but the other two refused. Pagley swore softly, but with venom.

  “Tie the horses,” Spur said.

  His own horse was lying down. He lashed its legs together. The girl hitched hers to some brush. Pagley put a close hobble on his with some rawhide.

  A single shot sounded.

  The ball hit twenty feet short uphill showing that a marksman above them had not allowed for the falling away of the land.

  The three of them in the fort got down.

  Spur told the girl: “Watch the river side.” She crawled past a horse and took up her position. Uphill he watched the puff of dark smoke blossoming in the cold air. It was a long way off and he was ready to bet that mounted men were hiding somewhere nearer in a gully which he couldn’t see.

  Rifle-fire splattered out from the rocks above and lead patted rock viciously, but none of it near them.

  “There’s something over there on the right,” Pagley said. “Look at the horses’ ears.” Spur looked. The two standing animals were gazing alertly into the east, their ears forward. No better watchdog than a prairie-bred mustang.

  Spur reached for a box of cartridges and broke it open, laying a row in front of him on a rock and stuffing a handful into his pocket. Pagley crawled over and took his share.

  The firing started from above again. This time the shooting was more accurate and prolonged. Both to Pagley and Spur it was plain that the riflemen had come in closer. One slug ripped the rump of Spur’s horse and it screamed. The girl turned a startled face. Spur called: “Watch the river,” as a clatter of hoofs told them all that there were riders close by.

  As the sun broke over the ridge tops it flashed upon gleaming metal and brightly fluttering feathers. Suddenly before the eyes of the watchers, there were flashes of ocher and vermilion. A tightly packed bunch of riders burst like a living explosion seemingly out of the ground not a hundred yards from the rocks. The firing from above stopped at once and the two men rose to their knees and swung their rifle muzzles to meet the onrush.

  “I’ll take the first,” Pagley called calmly.

  The first was a thickset man with a spray of feathers set in a skin cap, giving him the appearance of a savage cockatoo. He held a befeathered coup-stick out in front of him like a lance. His grullo pony had been slit in the nostrils for better breathing. Rings of paint encircled its rolling eyes.

  Immediately behind this man was a taller warrior, resplendent in war-bonnet and carrying a combination bow-lance. As his paint-pony swept him forward in the wild charge, he fitted an arrow to the string.

  The girl screamed: “They’re coming from the river” and a shrill kiyacking punctuated her sentence.

  Spur fired at the second rider. At the same moment, the man with the coup-stick swerved his horse and Pagley fired. The Indian took both shots through the chest, was lifted from the back of his horse and hurled under the hoofs of the animals behind. One jumped him, one stumbled over him and the others turned aside. For a second, the Indians’ pace was broken. They milled in an untidy knot, yelling. Pagley levered and fired into their midst several times as Spur turned and ran to the girl’s side.

  She was firing his revolver downhill.

  About a half-dozen Indians were jumping their ponies up the grade.

  Spur fired and apparently missed.

  “Save your powder, girl,” Spur said. “You’ll hit nothing with that gun at this distance.” He gave her a quick glance and saw that she was steady. This was one real woman.

  The horses did not break their stride. Spur waited a moment for the riders to turn side on to him and start to circle, but they did not. Behind him, he heard the Indians from the gully coming ahead. A small flutter of panic was born in his belly.

  Pagley’s horse tore itself loose and clattered out of the rocks, running off westward. Spur made a vain attempt to catch its dragging rein, then turned his attention again to the Indians below him. The nearest man was not fifty yards away, crouched over his pony’s neck, firing a rifle as he came. The lead hummed around the defenders. Spur drew a bead, fired and hit the pony in the head. The animal stumbled, lurched to one side and went over. The rider was slow in getting clear and had a leg pinned underneath the dead animal. His howl of rage or pain drifted up to Spur above the noise of the charge.

  The charge of the Indians from above rose to a crescendo of din. Spur glanced over his shoulder, saw Pagley’s crouched form wreathed in black powder smoke and saw an Indian vault his pony over him. The animal landed just behind Spur who, turning, was caught by the animal’s shoulder and knocked spinning. The man jumped his pony past the girl and was gone downhill and almost caught in the rush from below.

  As he gained his feet, scooping up his fallen rifle, Spur heard the attack from the gully sweep on past unable to face Pagley’s fire and also heard the deafening thunder of the hoofs of the other charge as the Indians reached the little fortress.

  The girl was standing to meet them, cocking and firing her belt-gun as fast as she could move thumb and finger.

  The scene was a turmoil of screaming faces, rearing horses, dust and powder-smoke. Choking, Spur triggered the rifle at a charging horseman and found that he had not jacked a fresh round into the breech. The girl screamed and fired point-blank into the animal’s face. It stumbled forward and hurled its rider from its back. Spur went down again, floundering under the propelled man, kicking and striking with blind savagery, dropping his rifle and smashing his bare fists into the encarmined face.

  Suddenly, the man was no longer there. Dazed, Spur stumbled to his feet, reached for his knife, found it and drew, throwing himself forward as a man on foot seized the girl by the hair and dragged her from her feet. Even as the heavy stone war-hammer rose for the fatal blow, Spur drove the knife in to the hilt in the region of the kidney.

  The man shrieked piercingly, rearing up in the sudden intolerable agony of the thrust. With his left hand, Spur spun him and, as the brown throat showed, drove the blade forward as hard as he could.

  A rifle slammed noisily almost in his ear and he glimpsed an Indian pitching back from a rock above him. Then he choked on the smoke and dust and heard Pagley say at a great distance: “They’ve gone.”

  Squinting through the fog of battle, Spur saw the ponies cantering downhill toward the river. Twenty yards away an Indian crawled slowly after them, calling. Pagley raised his rifle.

  “No,” Spur croaked, “let him go.”

  Pagley gave him a bleak look, hesitated and lowered his rifle.

  “Times like this, I forget I’m a Christian,” he said. “And that’s wise.”

  Spur said: “The fight’s not over yet. They could do the same to us.”

  “That,” Pagley replied, “could be the best death they could offer.”

  The girl pulled herself to a sitting position, looking dazed.

  “Aw, my Gawd,” she whispered.

  “You all right, miss?” Pagley asked, leaning on his rifle, not looking at her, but turning his eyes this way and that, keeping his eyes on the distant Indians.

  “I’m alive,’ she said.

  “You were good,’ Spur told her. “You’ll do to ride the river with.”

  “Sure,” she said.

  She looked as though she could do with a good cry. Her lower lip quivered.

  “Go ahead,” Spur said. “Howl.”

  She glared at him.

  “Who said I wanted to howl?”

  “You look as if you wanted to do something like that.”

  “You know what I want?” />
  “What?”

  “I want one of you damn fools to quit standin’ around there starin’ and put an arm around me.”

  Spur grinned, went down on one knee beside her and obliged. She turned her face into his shoulder and burst into tears.

  The Delaware grunted.

  When she had cried herself out, they sipped water from a canteen and it tasted better than anything they had ever drunk before.

  Two Indians rode up from the direction of the river, bent from the saddle when they reached the crawling man and lifted him between them. The three in the rocks watched them without making a move against them.

  “Fighting Indians,” Pagley said, “is gettin’ so Goddam civilized, it ain’t real.”

  They checked their weapons. They found that one of the canteens had a bullet through it and was empty of water. Their position was bad, but it could have been worse. They had a plentiful supply of ammunition, two horses and one and a half canteens of water.

  Two hours passed without the Indians making a move except to ride up and down out of gunshot yelling insults at them. The sun grew hot and there was no shade. Before long they were suffering in the airless heat. They agreed to try and not touch their water until the sun went down.

  “After dark,” Spur said, “either they go away or one of us goes out and starts killing Kiowas.”

  “You’re crazy,” Pagley told him.

  “Sure,” Spur said, “but can you think of anything better?”

  Pagley could not.

  Noon came and went. They were too thirsty to chew jerky and sucked stones instead. That didn’t help a lot. They watched the Indians drinking at the river and watering their ponies. Then using a blanket, some brush and a couple of ramrods, they managed to make a patch of shade for the girl to lie in.

  During the afternoon, the Indians above them dropped a few idle shots into their camp without hitting either the two men and the girl or the horses. Towards dusk, Pagley said quietly: “We’re goin’ to have visitors any minute now.”