"Thanks for not shooting him, Gus," said Falconer, deadpan. "Where did you learn to throw iron like that?"
"My ma," replied Jenkins, pouring river water out of the moccasins. "She was almighty good at it. Ask my pa if you don't believe me."
The unconscious Indian was floating facedown with the current, and Falconer had him fished out before he could drown. Meanwhile, everyone took a quick inventory of their belongings. Despite uncommon vigil, a few items turned up missing. Fortunately, the horse herd was intact. Falconer had taken the precaution of doubling the guard, and Eben had done a few hours of duty as a pony nurse himself.
All were in accord that the sooner they put the Diggers behind them the better. Forgoing their morning coffee and smoke, the mountain men broke camp in record time and made tracks south. Falconer put scouts on both flanks and had one man trail behind with orders to hasten forward and warn the others if the Diggers appeared to be pursuing the brigade.
The men kept their eyes peeled all day, expecting trouble. But not an Indian was seen. By evening, everyone was breathing a little easier—until it became apparent that Newell, the one-man rearguard, was overdue. Falconer called the brigade together.
"Something's happened to Joe Newell," he said. "I want two volunteers to go back and find him."
"You mean find what's left of him," growled French Pete Bordeaux. "Them Injuns, they done him in, old Joe."
"We should go back and clean their plows," was someone's truculent opinion.
"No," said Falconer. "We don't know what's happened."
Eben expected every man in the company to step forward and volunteer. After all, Newell was one of their own, and to let your partner down was to violate a cardinal tenet of the mountain man code. But no one moved. Overcoming his initial astonishment, Eben concluded that the Digger Indians had these men spooked. A man fears what he does not know, and the Diggers were markedly dissimilar from any of the Indians to which the trappers were accustomed. Consulting his own soul, Eben found himself more than a little spooked, too. But he hitched his shoulders and stepped forward just the same.
"I'll go."
Falconer nodded, a ghost of an approving smile lurking beneath his tawny beard. "One more."
Sixkiller pushed through the crowd. "I go."
Eben stared at the Flathead Indian. His first thought was that Sixkiller intended to wait until they were well away from camp before seeking long-nurtured revenge for the humiliation Eben had heaped upon him back at rendezvous.
"You both realize you must go now, tonight. We can't wait until morning to begin the search."
Sixkiller nodded. "Sky clear. Moon come soon. We see."
"If you find no trace of him by daybreak, come back. We will linger here until mid-morning before moving on."
As the brigade dispersed, Eben took the journal from beneath his buckskin tunic and presented it to Rube Holly, who, as usual, stood close by.
"I want you to hold on to this for me, Rube, in case I don't make it back."
"Can I read it while yore gone?"
"Not until you throw dirt on my face, Rube Holly."
Holly chuckled. "Hell, boy, yule outlive me. 'Course you're gonna make it."
But, try as he might, Rube Holly couldn't hide the fact that he was a little worried, too.
Chapter 12
It wasn't difficult to follow the brigade's backtrail, even at night. The passage of almost a hundred horses in the soft ground along the river produced sign a blind man could have followed. As Sixkiller had pointed out, a full moon appeared an hour after sunset, casting its silver light upon the cooling face of the earth. It also cast deep black shadows around every bush, and Eben Nall tried to keep his imagination in check, because it had a disconcerting habit of fashioning a Digger Indian out of every shadow, leaving his nerves overwrought.
Sixkiller's presence didn't help much, either. Eben was careful not to turn his back on the Flathead Indian. You'd do well to slit that Injun's throat first night out, Rube Holly had said. Iffen you don't he'll have yore head tied to his saddle. Eben silently cursed old Rube's fondness for such graphic descriptions. He also cursed himself for being so all-fired foolish as to volunteer for this mission. What in the world was he trying to prove? That he could get himself killed just as easily as the next man? Braver men than he—men like Gus Jenkins and French Pete Bordeaux and Doc Maguire—had balked at this business. Braver men—and clearly smarter men, as well.
They rode for an hour, seeing nothing out of the ordinary, hearing little besides the splash and gurgle of the river in its rocky bed and the scurry of furtive night critters in the shinnery. A soothing breeze, redolent with the scent of sage, whispered in Eben's ears.
Eben knew instinctively that he could rely on the Appaloosa to warn him if something was amiss, and the mare did not let him down. The horse sniffed a disturbing scent on the night air and whickered softly, plunging her head down against the pull of the rein leather in Eben's grasp. Eben froze in the saddle, straining his eyes into the darkness, thinking that it must be Diggers the mare had sensed. The Indians were lurking in ambush. His heart pounded against his rib cage, like a man shaking the bars of his cell trying to get out. Perhaps if he fired off his Kentucky rifle the Diggers would scatter, as he had seen them do before. He slid the rifle out of its horn strap, but Sixkiller reached over and pushed the barrel down.
"The mare smells something she doesn't like," whispered Eben. "Might be those . . ."
Sixkiller shook his head. His eyes glittered like chips of black ice in the night. "No. Blood she smells. I know. She mine once."
Eben grimaced. He didn't cotton to the idea that Sixkiller knew the Appaloosa better than he did. But this was neither the time nor the place to make an issue of that.
The Flathead Indian slid off his pony and made a sharp gesture indicating he wanted Eben to do the same. Leading their horses, they moved cautiously forward, side by side. Directly ahead, a deadfall tangle of brush was wedged against a cutbank, lodged there by long-ago floodwaters and resembling in the moonlight a charnel house pile of broken skeletons.
At the foot of the deadfall they found Joe Newell—or what was left of him.
Eben Nall had seen one or two dead men in his time. He had witnessed a hanging back in Ohio, and another man had been shot down in the street in front of the Nall dry goods store. He'd seen a trapper cut to ribbons in a knife fight at the rendezvous, wounds that had proved fatal. But none of it had prepared him for what he witnessed now.
Newell resembled a bloody piece of raw meat. There was no way of telling how many times he had been struck by the spears and arrows and clubs of the Diggers. Then his body had been stripped clean, though Eben could not imagine what the Indians could want with clothing that must have been torn and soaked with blood beyond repair.
While Eben stared in gut-churning horror at the mutilated remains, Sixkiller spared the body the merest glance and then proceeded to examine the sandy soil all around. Eben was too busy trying to swallow bile and keep from puking to be aware of what the Flathead warrior was up to, until a guttural sound from Sixkiller's throat wrested his attention from the grisly scene.
"Here," said Sixkiller, pointing to the ground. "And here. Over there. Much blood. Big fight."
"Reckon Newell accounted for some of them?"
"Think maybe yes."
"Good." Eben had suddenly ceased to think of the Diggers as human beings. They were savage animals. As such, they were fair game.
"They pull him off horse, there," said Sixkiller, pointing yonder. "He fight good, but they too many. He trapped. No escape."
Eben nodded. Newell had indeed been cornered against the cutbank and the deadfall, with no way over either obstacle, especially with—how many?—Diggers nipping at his heels. He asked Sixkiller if he could calculate the odds Joe Newell had faced in the last moments of his life.
The Flathead shrugged. "Twenty, maybe. They take dead, and horse. Go that way." He pointed upriver, in the direc
tion of the Digger village.
"Well, at least they're not after the brigade. We had better get back and tell Falconer what happened."
Sixkiller clutched at his sleeve. "They not far. They not move in dark. I smell fire."
"How close?"
"One mile. Maybe less."
Eben squinted suspiciously at Sixkiller. Could the Flathead really smell a campfire a mile away? Or was he hoping to lure Eben to a suitable place for recovering the Appaloosa mare—and at the same time doing away with the white man who had humiliated him?
"Forget it," said Eben. "Falconer sent us out here to find out what happened to Newell. Not to get ourselves killed."
Sixkiller glanced at Newell's remains with a cold and clinical detachment. "Him mountain man. You not mountain man?"
Eben knew what the Flathead was trying to do. A true mountain man did not leave a colleague's death unavenged if he could help it. What would the others in the brigade think if he told them how Newell had been butchered by a handful of Diggers and then confessed that he had not even tried to retrieve Newell's horse and possibles from the murderers, who were camped, unsuspecting, only a mile away? Eben swore softly. Sixkiller could sense how much the regard of the trappers meant to him. The Flathead warrior was cannily using Eben's pride to manipulate him.
"Why do you care?" hissed Eben. "You don't care that Joe Newell's lying there dead. He means nothing to you. Why do you want to pick a fight with those Diggers so bad?"
Sixkiller looked at him as though he were a doddering idiot. "Count coup. Many scalps make great warrior." He struck his chest with a fist.
"Whether you're a great warrior or not is of no consequence to me," said Eben indignantly, "and I'm certainly not going to be sacrificed on the altar of your glory."
Sixkiller's brows knit together. He did not understand Eben's last comment, but he got the gist of the response.
"You no different. You want scalps."
"I most certainly do not. I would never take a scalp."
"You want big name. You want be like Falconer. You kill many Indians, get big name."
Eben shook his head. "No," he said, his tone bitter with self-disgust. "But we'll go after them. Because you're right about one thing. It isn't right not to strike a blow for poor Newell. He'd do the same for us."
Sixkiller grunted. It was obvious by his expression that he believed Eben's real motive for going after the Diggers was, as he had discerned, to seek glory rather than vengeance.
"Come on," snapped Eben, turning abruptly to the Appaloosa. "If we're going to commit suicide, let's get it over with."
They rode another half mile along the river, single file, with Sixkiller in the lead, before dismounting to go the rest of the way on foot, leaving their ponies tied to heavy stones by their rein leather. Before moving on, Sixkiller stripped off his leggins and fringed deerskin shirt. Clad now only in loincloth and moccasins, he squatted at the river's edge, scooped mud up in both hands, and smeared it in horizontal bands across his forehead, chest, and thighs. When he turned to Eben he was grinning like a wolf about to close in for the kill. With a curt gesture, he took off upriver at a lope.
"Sweet Jesus," breathed Eben, as he fell in behind the Indian. He was thinking that if he had to die it would at least be better to die among friends. But now he would not even have that small consolation.
Before long they could see the yellow flicker of a campfire straight ahead. Sixkiller veered away from the river and scrambled with the agility of a monkey to the rim of a cutbank. Eben stayed right behind him. Another fifty yards along the rim, and then Sixkiller suddenly plopped to the ground, crawled to the edge of the cutbank on his belly, and peered down into the river bottom.
There they were, gathered around a cookfire, with four of their dead companions laid out to one side, and Newell's horse, butchered, laid out on the other. They were cooking choice cuts of horse meat over the fire, impaled on sticks or on the ends of spears. Two of them were quarreling over the possession of Newell's rifle. Eben was fairly confident that none of them would know how to load the gun. Considering what they had done to Newell with their traditional weapons, though, this was cold comfort.
"I count fourteen," whispered Eben. "Reckon that's all there are? Maybe there's a guard . . ."
Sixkiller shook his head.
"What do we do? We could shoot down into them, maybe kill a couple before they scatter." Even as he said it Eben didn't cotton to the idea. It meant trying to get back to their horses with a bunch of angry aborigines lurking in the night shadows. "Let's go back and get the horses," he suggested. "Then we can ride right through them and bring down a few and be long gone before they know what hit them."
''No. They kill horses."
"Well, then, what do you want to do?" rasped Eben, exasperated and wondering why he was such a fool to be here in the first place.
"I go around," said the Flathead. "When I shoot, you shoot."
"Wait a minute . . ."
But Sixkiller was already gone.
Eben muttered bitterly to himself. "Now that's downright stupid. There are fourteen of them and only two of us and we split up? I've got half a mind to haul my freight out of here."
But of course he knew down deep inside that he could not abandon a colleague—not even Sixkiller—and not even if it meant certain death to stay.
Chapter 13
Eben Nall checked his Kentucky rifle's load and made sure there was a dab of powder in the flashpan. Then he rolled over on his back in the sparse grass at the crest of the cutbank and stared up at the stars. The moon was setting behind distant mountains, shading to an arctic blue the cloaks of ice and snow on the shoulders of the soaring crags. Clutching the rifle to his chest, Eben waited for Sixkiller's opening shot—a wait that proved almost unbearable. It gave him entirely too much time to contemplate all the things he had never experienced and now, it appeared, never would. And it gave him time to consider the fate that would befall his Appaloosa mare. He hated to think of her at the mercy of these savages.
When Sixkiller fired, Eben stopped thinking. Leaping to his feet, he brought the rifle to shoulder. Down below, confusion reigned in the camp of the Digger Indians. One of them was sprawled facedown; Sixkiller's bullet had hit him dead center between the shoulder blades. Caught by surprise, the Diggers did not know where the shot had come from. Some stood their ground, crouched, spears or clubs ready. Others were on the run. One seemed intent on clambering up the steep side of the cutbank, clawing at the fluted red hardpack. Halfway to the rim, he saw Eben above him for the first time—an instant before Eben fired. The bullet struck the Indian above one eye and exited the back of the skull in a pink mist. The corpse flopped to the base of the cutbank.
Eben hastened to reload, fumbling with shot pouch and powder horn, his eyes and nostrils stinging from the powder smoke. Then, aware that several Diggers were about to dispatch spears or arrows in his direction, he threw himself to the ground. The spears and arrows hissed like snakes as they sailed harmlessly overhead. Rolling over on his side, Eben reloaded, his ears ringing with the guttural shouts of the Diggers and the rapid pounding of his pulse. He had his wits sufficiently about him to roll to his right a few yards before rising again, this time to one knee, so that when he reappeared it was not in the same spot.
Sixkiller was entering the camp now, charging out of the darkness and looking like the devil himself bounding through the gates of hell. Uttering a bloodcurdling scream, he fired his rifle pointblank into the belly of a Digger, then used the butt of the weapon to crack open another's skull. Dropping the empty rifle, he picked up a fallen spear, with which he parried the lance of a third Digger, before impaling his adversary on it. Mesmerized by the ferocious audacity of the Flathead warrior's attack, Eben saw the head of the spear emerge from the Digger's back, so powerful was Sixkiller's killing thrust.
Letting go of the spear, Sixkiller whirled with knife drawn, somehow evading the swinging club of another Digger. The knife fl
ashed; the blade nearly decapitated the Digger. A scarlet geyser of blood arched skyward as the Digger toppled sideways into the campfire, creating a shower of burning embers.
In a matter of seconds Sixkiller, a whirling dervish of sudden death, had dispatched four of the Diggers. But there were eight still alive, and only two of these had fled, while the others converged on the Flathead from all points. Eben fired a second time. The rifle jumped against his shoulder. Through a drift of acrid white powder smoke he saw one of the Diggers stumble and fall.
As he began to reload, Eben caught movement out of the corner of his eye. A Digger, armed with a war club, had gained the cutbank rim and was coming for him. This was one of the Indians Eben had thought was running away. Eben tried to club him to the ground with the butt of the rifle. The Digger ducked under and hit him hard. Eben fell backward, wrenched away as the Digger swung the club. The chiseled stone head of the club missed Eben's skull by a hair's breadth. Eben brought a leg up and knocked the Digger sideways, then scrambled in the opposite direction, tugging frantically at the pistol in his belt as he rose. The Digger recovered and came at him with club raised. Eben triggered the pistol, and the impact of the bullet lifted the Indian off his feet and hurled him backward. Sprawled on the ground at the lip of the cutbank, the Digger convulsed once and then lay forever still.
Breath rasping in his throat, Eben tucked the pistol back in his belt and retrieved the Kentucky rifle. It occurred to him then that until today he had never killed another human being. Now, in a matter of seconds, he had taken three lives. He found himself curiously ambivalent. He had trouble thinking of these primitive men as humans, especially after what had been done to poor Joe Newell. This was more like shooting at a pack of wolves. He knew, in an analytical way, that he was probably wrong in thinking like that. But now was not the time to debate the matter with himself.
Down below, the Diggers had converged on Sixkiller. Eben's heart sank. The Flathead warrior had gravely underestimated the fighting ability of these Indians, and now the sheer weight of numbers doomed him. Three of the Diggers bore him to the ground. Two others turned their attention to Eben. The awareness that he now stood alone against these savages rattled Eben. As the two Diggers loped toward the cutbank, Eben turned and fled into the night.
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