Beyond Squaw Creek (14 page)

Then there was only the sigh of the wind in the brush along the ridges and the solitary cry of a nighthawk.

“They'll be kickin' around here all night,” Prairie Dog growled. “You two best split the wind, head back to the fort, and don't stop till you get there.”

Fargo continued dressing. The only garments for which he didn't have spares were his hat and boots. He'd have to go bareheaded, but he found a threadbare set of old moccasins at the bottom of one of his saddle pouches.

He pulled them on, then walked over to Prairie Dog, drew the man's bowie knife from its sheath, and grabbed the bottle from the scout's hand.

“Hey, what the hell…?”

“Just need a little to sterilize your knife.”

“My knife? What for?”

Fargo splashed whiskey on both sides of the razor-edged bowie. “That arrow has to come out of there, or you'll bleed dry.”

Groaning, Prairie Dog told Fargo he'd wait for a sawbones, but the old scout knew from experience that he wouldn't make it through the night with the arrow in his back. He removed his hat and sagged belly down into a thick patch of grama grass along the base of the rocky ridge. After another long pull from the bottle, he let Fargo cut his shirt away from the shaft.

Valeria knelt near the scout's head, watching Fargo begin cutting through the bloody skin along the protruding arrow, an expression of horror and fascination on her regal, disheveled features. Behind her, the horses, tied to shrubs, stood tensely, nickering no doubt at the distant sounds of the tracking Indians and the nearer smell of blood.

Prairie Dog had had arrows dug out of his hide before. Biting down on a bullet while Fargo worked, cutting down along the shaft to dislodge the steel tip wedged between two ribs, he grunted and cursed, apologizing to the girl for his language.

Valeria crouched over the scout's back, wincing as Fargo removed the bloody shaft from the wound, and tossed it into the brush.

Panting, Prairie Dog turned his head to one side. “Goddamn, Skye—pardon my blue tongue, little lady—but I do believe you enjoyed that!”

“Ain't done yet,” Fargo grunted, holding up a needle and length of catgut thread from his sewing kit, threading the needle by the light of the rising quarter moon.

He'd just finished sewing up the old scout's wound and splashing whiskey over the sutures when Valeria said suddenly, “Listen!”

Fargo corked the whiskey bottle and froze.

Hooves thudded only a few yards back along the gully.

Fargo motioned for Valeria to remain silent as he rose from beside Prairie Dog and slipped his Henry from its saddle boot. Quietly levering a shell, he ran a settling hand down the Ovaro's long, white-striped snout—both the pinto and Prairie Dog's blue roan had been trained not to start in tense situations—and walked back along the narrow defile.

Near the intersecting ravine, he stopped as guttural voices rose softly, and an unshod hoof clacked off a rock. Fargo cat-footed forward and pressed his back to the rocky wall of the defile a few feet back from the intersecting ravine, half hidden from the ravine by brush and a scraggly cedar.

He held the Henry straight up and down before him, breathed shallowly, listening as the horses moved slowly toward him, hooves clomping, a couple of the Indians muttering quietly. When the horses were close enough to smell, Fargo tensed, pressed his back harder against the rock wall, and squeezed the Henry.

Bulky, black shapes moved on his left. A horse blew. Another shook its head. Men breathed.

Fargo didn't turn his head to look directly at the intersection of the two defiles, but he knew the Indians were staring down the one he was in. He felt the warriors' eyes penetrating the darkness and hoped like hell he blended with the rock wall and the cedar.

Someone clucked, and hooves thumped, growing louder until a horse's head moved into the narrow defile from Fargo's left. The rider drew back on the rope halter, stopping the horse about ten feet in front of the Trailsman. The horse was a steel dust with a small blue Z within an orange sun painted on its neck.

The horse stared straight down the narrow defile, toward Prairie Dog and Valeria about fifty feet beyond. The dun twitched its ears and lifted its snout, working its nose.

Fargo's back tightened. Would the horse sense the other two horses, smell the blood that Prairie Dog had lost?

Still pressing his back against the rock wall, Fargo looked up through the branches of the gnarled pinñon. The tall, light-skinned man sitting the saddle was wearing Fargo's high-crowned, broad-brimmed hat, blond hair falling to his shoulders, his chest bare except for a thin, deerhide vest.

Fargo's pistol belt and Colt .44 were wrapped around the man's waist and loincloth. His moccasined foot was so close that Fargo could have swatted it with his rifle barrel.

If the Trailsman had been alone, he would have shot the mad lieutenant out of his saddle, but there were at least a half dozen braves sitting horses in the shadows behind Duke. Killing the self-proclaimed shaman would get not only Fargo's wick trimmed, but Valeria's and Prairie Dog's, as well.

Duke suddenly threw his head back and howled like a moon-crazed coyote. Fargo started, slamming the back of his head against the rock wall. The high yammer, so loud that it raked the Trailsman's eardrums, chased its own echo around the defile and set a couple of actual coyotes yammering in the northern distance.

The Indians behind the lieutenant grunted and muttered, amused. Duke's horse turned suddenly toward Fargo. The steel dust's eyes, meeting Fargo's, widened suddenly, showing the whites. Fargo began swinging the rifle barrel down and tightening his finger around the trigger.

One of the Indians behind Duke spoke loudly and fast, something about hearing movement on the opposite ridge.

Duke drew back on the horse's reins, clipping the horse's startled whinny, turning the animal away from Fargo and around toward the warriors. Duke and the Indians spoke too quickly for Fargo to follow, and then hooves clomped, tapering off back down the ravine.

Fargo sighed, the painfully taut muscles in the back of his neck relaxing. He took a couple of deep breaths, then tramped back along the defile to where Valeria knelt beside Prairie Dog, who lay belly down, one of the girl's blankets draped across his back. The man breathed steadily, deeply, moonlight reflected off his grizzled, bald pate and the single human tooth hanging from his right ear.

“Did they leave?” Valeria whispered.

Fargo nodded, staring down at Prairie Dog. “He's out?”

“Passed out right after you left.”

Fargo turned to Prairie Dog's blue roan and unbuckled the latigo strap under the horse's belly. When he'd set the saddle, blanket, the scout's saddlebags, and rifle scabbard in the brush, he turned to Valeria. “Sit tight. Try to keep him comfortable. Build a small fire only if it turns cold and he gets overly chilled.”

Holding the ends of the blanket across her chest, Valeria stared up the Trailsman, frowning. “What're you going to do?”

“I'm going after Duke, and I'm going to kill the crazy son of a bitch if I can get a shot at him.”

A thought dawning on him, he reached down and pulled the old scout's target rifle out of its scabbard. The Schuetzen was a better long-range shooter than Fargo's Henry repeater, and a long shot might be the only shot the Trailsman would get.

Holding the fine German rifle in one hand, he pulled the Henry from his own scabbard with the other, leaned it against a rock. “I'll leave that for Prairie Dog, though I hope like hell he doesn't have to use it.”

He slid the Schuetzen into his own saddle boot, and glanced at Valeria. She was still staring up at him, her green eyes bright in the moonlight, her full lips parted slightly. Her breasts pushed against the trade blanket. Fargo moved to her, grabbed her brusquely, and kissed her.

“I'll be back.”

“Be careful.”

He swung onto the pinto and turned the horse down the dark, narrow cavity, heading for the main ravine.

 

Fargo picked up the Indians' trail on the northeast side of the gully. He also found the sign of a bobcat—a fresh track and warm scat—which was no doubt what the braves had heard and what had drawn them out of the ravine.

The Indians had continued northeast along the swelling prairie. Fargo followed slowly, keeping a close eye on their trail, which wasn't easy to follow in the dark and on the relatively hard, grassy ground.

Strips of terrain overgrazed by bison helped to show the tracks of the eight unshod ponies, as did a recent prairie burn. But when daylight streaked the eastern horizon and burnished several long, low clouds, he still hadn't overtaken the group but counted himself lucky not to have ridden into an ambush.

Lieutenant Duke and the braves obviously figured Fargo, Prairie Dog, and the girl were headed back toward Fort Clark and were hoping to cut them off. Rage at the invasion of their camp and at the killing of Iron Shirt must be driving them, because they sure as hell were tearing up the sod.

The sun had just separated from the eastern prairie and Fargo was climbing the long, low swell of a shale-capped dike, when the clap of gunfire broke the morning quiet. A prairie falcon, its wings coppered by the rising sun, swooped over Fargo's head and continued north, shrieking.

Several more quick, angry shots rose from straight ahead—a good mile or more away—and Fargo swung out of the saddle, wincing when his charred soles touched the prickly earth. Ground-hitching the pinto, he jogged to the lip of the dike, which faced east, and dropped to his knees behind a lone hawthorn shrub.

His keen eyes scanned the murky morning shadows beyond him, but he didn't spy movement until several more shots rang out, followed closely by a bizarre, victorious yowl—the crazed yammer of a madman.

Just beyond the next rise, similar to the one upon which Fargo lay, several shadows milled amongst the brush. A horse galloped straight south along the valley, buck-kicking and trailing its reins, its saddle hanging down over its ribs. Its terrified whinny rose shrilly, quickly absorbed by the vast, pale green sky.

Unable to see much from here, Fargo jogged back down the rise, mounted the Ovaro, and rode north, paralleling the crest of the long bluff before dropping over the bluff's north shoulder and into the valley below.

The distant gunfire ceased, replaced by the beseeching screams of a man in deep physical pain.

A narrow ravine twisted through the valley, angling along the base of another bluff standing between Fargo and Duke and his howling victim.

Leaving the Ovaro ground-tied in a cottonwood swale, Fargo grabbed Prairie Dog's Schuetzen from the saddle boot, wedged a second spare revolver—a .36 Colt—behind his cartridge belt, then dropped into the ravine. Keeping his head below the ravine's steep but shallow rim, he followed the dry watercourse's gravelly floor toward the rising screams punctuated by Duke's demonic yelps and howls.

When the screams seemed to be coming from his right, Fargo stopped and edged a look over the ravine's lip. Fifty yards away through the gray sage and bunchgrass tufts, several horseback braves milled, riding in broad circles around Lieutenant Duke who stood menacingly over a blue-clad man sprawled on the ground before him. Waving a bloody knife in the air, Duke howled. He bent down, his blond hair and the Trailsman's own hat dropping below Fargo's field of vision.

A man screamed shrilly—a long, hopeless cry of excruciating agony.
“No!”
he shouted. His voice cracked, and he sobbed, panting. “I don't…I don't know where they went, you crazy son of a
bitch
!”

The Trailsman leaned the Schuetzen against the side of the gully, the barrel extending far enough that Fargo could locate the gun easily if he needed it. Snakelike, he slithered up over the lip of the gully and crawled through the sage and bunchgrass, gritting his teeth, cocked .44 in his right hand.

“It's too bad you don't remember, you feeble white-eyes!” Lieutenant Duke shouted. “It is too bad you—nothing more than prairie vermin crawling out from your civilized white society—had the unfortunate gall to kill the bravest war chief who ever walked the plains and stalked the buffalo!”

A blade whispered through flesh. The soldier howled shrilly. “I didn't kill him, damn your hide. And you're as white as I am, you crazy bastard!”

Lifting his head from a clump of bunchgrass, Fargo glanced around at the horseback riders milling around him—seven painted braves on snorting mounts. Their attention was on the man staked out on the ground before Lieutenant Duke, whose back faced Fargo from twenty feet away.

Fargo stretched the cocked Colt straight out before him through the coarse blond grass, squinting one eye as he stared down the barrel. He planted his sites on Duke's back as the crazy lieutenant leaned down to swipe his blade once more across his staked, howling captive.

Suddenly, hooves thundered to Fargo's right. He turned quickly. A brave was bearing down on him atop a brown and white pinto. The brave shrieked, wide brown eyes glistening in the sunlight as he leaned over his horse's right shoulder, drawing a bow string taut, the nocked arrow aimed at Fargo.

Fargo jerked right, stumbling as he gained his feet. The arrow clattered off a rock to his left. He triggered the Colt then ducked as the horse galloped over him, wincing as a foreleg nipped his thigh.

When he glanced up again the brave was still somersaulting through the air to hit the ground on his head and shoulders, his neck snapping audibly to leave him quivering amidst the grama grass and pokeweed.

Behind the Trailsman rose a coyotelike yammer as the other six braves loosed war whoops and gigged their horses toward Fargo, two bearing down with rifles, two with bows, another with a war lance painted the gray and blue stripes of the Coyote Clan.

Straight ahead of Fargo, Lieutenant Duke cocked his arm and tossed his bloodstained knife. Fargo leaned sideways, and the blade sliced across his upper arm—a long but shallow cut from which blood glistened instantly.

The Trailsman snapped up the .44 and fired at Duke, flinching as the war lance whistled past him. The mad lieutenant howled and clapped a hand to his ear, blood seeping between his fingers. Fargo whipped his gun around and blew the brave who'd just thrown the war lance out of his saddle with two shots through his breastbone.

The brave hadn't hit the ground before Fargo jerked suddenly, as though he'd been hit in the chest with a sledgehammer. An Indian galloping behind the brave he'd just killed screamed victoriously as his horse whipped on past Fargo, who glanced down to see a fletched shaft protruding from his left shoulder.

The Trailsman whipped around. The brave who'd fired the arrow reined his horse sharply with one hand while reaching into his quiver for another arrow.

Fargo emptied his Colt into the brave's neck and chest, then ducked several bullets slicing the air around him. He dropped the Colt and grabbed the spare .36 from behind his cartridge belt.

Suppressing the hot, stabbing pain of the arrow in his shoulder, he began pivoting on his hips and heels, picking out the three other targets surrounding him, the .36 belching and smoking in his clenched right fist—
pop, pop, pop-pop, pop!
—before the last three horses galloped off, riderless, reins bouncing along the ground behind them.

Staggering slightly, squinting through the wafting powder smoke, Fargo looked around.

Four braves lay silent and unmoving. A fifth was crawling feebly after the horses, head and hair hanging, blood painting a swath behind him. A sixth lay on his back, coughing between the somnolent notes of his death song.