Beyond Squaw Creek (8 page)

The dark head of an Indian appeared above the wall, between two red hands grabbing log points, one hand also holding a war hatchet. As the brave leaped over the wall, shrieking demonically, another bolted over the wall beside him to smash a tomahawk into the head of a sergeant who'd dropped to one knee to reload his Springfield. The hatchet nearly cleaved the soldier's hatted head in two, killing him instantly.

Fargo stopped and, cursing, shot the brave who'd killed the sergeant, his round plunking through the Indian's right ear to splash another wall-leaping brave with blood and brains. Fargo turned to shoot another brave, ducked to avoid a war hatchet somersaulting toward him, then blew the brave back off the wall with two hastily fired .44 rounds.

Fargo looked left and up.

A screaming brave leaped toward him, the feathered spear in the Indian's right hand angled toward the Trailsman's chest. Fargo snapped off the Colt's last shot, drilling a small, dark hole in the brave's upper middle chest. Dropping the empty revolver, he threw up both hands, grabbing the dying brave's left arm and spear hand, thrusting the spear to one side as the painted, grease-coated body bulled him off his feet and into the ground on his back.

Fargo rolled the brave's writhing, grunting body off his chest, glancing right and left along the stockade wall. Small clumps of soldiers fought the Indians leaping the wall from the backs of their galloping mounts, arrows whistling while rifles and pistols popped and flashed in the twilight.

Amidst the yells to his right, Fargo heard the rumbling curses of Prairie Dog Charley between angry pistol barks and above the shouted Irish-accented commands of a sergeant encouraging his men against the storming hoard of shrieking natives.

Spying a brave aiming a nocked arrow at him from the shooting ledge, Fargo grabbed a war hatchet embedded in the ground near his right shoulder, and heaved it. At the same time the hatchet buried its head into the brave's chest, his arrow twanging into the ground beside Fargo's right knee, a high-pitched scream rose above the cacophony.

A woman's scream.

“Skye!”
It was Valeria.
“Help meeeeee!”

Rising to a knee, Fargo looked to his right, in the direction from which Valeria had screamed.

“Skye!” she cried again.

About thirty yards away, a howling brave broke out from between the hay stables, sprinting toward a ladder leaning against the stockade wall, carrying Valeria across his right shoulder.

“The major's daughter!” a soldier shouted beyond the running Indian, his voice nearly drowned by the gunfire and yowling savages.

Fargo slipped his Arkansas toothpick from his boot and sprinted after the girl. Above and left, a brave leaped over the wall and dropped onto the shooting platform. The brave loosed an arrow at Fargo. He ducked as the arrow shrieked over his head and plunked into a stable wall. Another brave leaped off the shooting wall and into Fargo's path. Fargo stopped, pulled his hips back as the Indian slashed at him with a bone-handled knife, then drove the toothpick into the brave's bare belly.

The Indian howled like a gut-shot coyote.

Shoving the brave back against the stockade wall, Fargo pulled his toothpick free of the man's entrails, and continued sprinting. The Indian carrying Valeria was halfway up the wall when Fargo reached the ladder. Pounding her fists against the Indian's bare, glistening back, Valeria's gaze met Fargo's, her green eyes alight with bone-rending terror.

“Skyyyyyyyye!”

Fargo leaped up the ladder, slashing at the Indian's calves with the toothpick but missing, catching the toothpick's sharp blade into the hide attaching the rungs to the two cottonwood poles. Around him, men were shooting and shouting. Out of nowhere, an Indian grabbed Fargo from behind and pulled him down the ladder, battering the Trailsman's head and shoulders with his bare fists.

At the base of the ladder, Fargo whipped around and drove his right boot into the Indian's jaw. As the brave stumbled straight back, groaning and clutching his face, Fargo lunged up the ladder's squawking rungs, using his arms as much as his feet.

Above, the Indian carrying Valeria dropped a leg over the stockade wall. Valeria clutched the pointed log tips as the Indian pulled her over the top. Fargo thrust his right arm at Valeria's hand, wrapped his fingers around hers.

The girl screamed as her fingers slipped from Fargo's. Fargo lunged for her hand once more. But it was gone, leaving only the sharpened log ends she'd been clutching and a couple of strands of long red hair wisping from slivers.

The shooting ledge bounced and shuddered beneath the Trailsman's boots. He looked around. Braves ran toward him from both sides of the ledge.

Fargo grabbed a Colt revolver from the holster of a dead soldier on the ledge, thumbed back the hammer, and triggered one shot left, another right. Then he bounded up and over the stockade wall, dropping down the other side and landing on both feet, bending his knees to absorb the shock with his boots.

The girl screamed once more—a thin, vibrating rattle dwindling into the distance. The Trailsman turned to see the brave running north through the ankle-high grass, a gray shadow in the dying light, the girl flopping down his back, red hair flying.

Horseback Indians galloped in circles as rifles spoke from the stockade wall. The attackers seemed to be withdrawing, loping away or sprinting off toward the horses they'd left when they'd stormed the fort. Several lay humped in the grass, bleeding, while a couple crawled, groaning or wailing their death songs.

Fargo leaped over a dying warrior and stretched his legs in the direction of the brave retreating with Valeria. A couple of arrows stitched the air around him, bullets from the fort whistling over his head, but he continued pushing off his heels, raising his knees high, scissoring his arms, bounding after the brave.

He crested a low hump of ground tufted with young chokecherry shrubs, and felt his gut knot with frustration. About forty yards ahead, a brave on a cream horse led a tall paint toward the brave carrying Valeria. Both braves whooped and shrieked victoriously as the first brave threw Valeria over the paint's back.

“Skye!”
the girl screamed again.

Fargo cursed, his breath rattling in and out of his laboring lungs, and increased his speed. The thunder of hooves suddenly grew out of nowhere to flank him, horses snorting and blowing. Fargo kept his gaze straight ahead, on the brave now mounting the paint behind Valeria.

He closed the gap to within ten yards.

The brave with Valeria turned his head toward Fargo, grinning maniacally while Valeria, lying belly down across the horse before him, kicked and thrashed. Fargo threw himself forward, preparing to bolt from his heels to throw the brave from the paint's back. But before he could set his feet, a horse's head smacked his right shoulder blade.

Suddenly, he was airborne, twisting and pivoting. The ground came up to smack him hard between the shoulders, the back of his head feeling as though it had just been cleaved by a war ax. He slid through the grass, the ground raking him, tearing at his buckskins and making his spurs ring.

As the horse that had rammed him continued past, more hooves thundered, making the ground shake. Fargo lifted his head, blinking the stars from his eyes.

A zebra dun closed on him, blocking out the dull green sky and the first kindling stars. The brave on the zebra's back screamed, mouth and eyes wide, as he stretched a nocked arrow back behind his right ear, aiming at Fargo.

The Trailsman threw himself belly down on the ground. At the same time, he heard the whistle of the arrow and felt the wind of the horse passing over him, a hoof nipping his calf.

The brave who'd just passed over him and the brave who'd sent him wheeling galloped off after the brave who'd nabbed Valeria, all three horses turning gradually west and disappearing into the thickening prairie shadows.

Fargo glanced ahead. Not two feet away, a painted arrow shaft angled up from the ground, its point buried in the short grass between a small sage shrub and a flat, lichen-mottled rock. The arrow was fletched with raven feathers, bespeaking the Raven Clan of the Blackfeet, a people Fargo had last seen in their customary stomping ground near the Milk River paralleling the Canadian border in northern Montana Territory.

Pain lanced the back of his head, driving deep into his shoulders and down his spine. Fargo let his head sag back against the ground, noting the dwindling of the rifle fire and of the hooves clomping around and behind him.

He was vaguely aware of time passing, then, as if in a waking dream, a man's deep-throated voice called his name. Spurs chinked. Prairie Dog Charley called again, his voice and spurs growing louder. There was a flapping sound, like a holster smacking a thigh. A bulky silhouette dropped down to Fargo's right, sheathed in the smell of sweat, tobacco, and gunpowder, and a thick hand clutched Fargo's arm.

Prairie Dog was breathless. “You still kickin', Skye?”

Fargo lifted his eyelids, which seemed weighted down by an unseen hand.

“I see you still got your hair, you son of a bitch!” said Prairie Dog, kneeling beside Fargo and whipping his head around cautiously. “How you've managed to keep that thick mane after all these years in Injun country, I'll never know!”

Fargo lifted his head slightly, wincing at the daggers of pain. “The girl,” he croaked. “They got the major's daughter…”

“You think I'm deaf, blind,
and
stupid?” Prairie Dog gave a tug on Fargo's arm. “Let's get you back inside the stockade where the sawbones can tend that wooden mallet wabblin' around atop your shoulders.”

“Don't need a sawbones,” Fargo growled, rising clumsily, nearly tripping over his own feet as he stared after the fleeing Indians. “Have to get after the girl.”

“You ain't gettin' after the girl tonight. Those savages'd love to pick us off in the dark.”

Fargo cursed and let Prairie Dog lead him back toward the stockade. A few shots rose from inside the wall—no doubt soldiers finishing off wounded Indians. The rolling terrain around Fargo and Prairie Dog was eerily silent in the aftermath of the raid, with here and there a dark body humping up above the grass or a riderless pony dropping its head to graze.

In the far distance, the fleeing raiders yowled like coyotes over fresh carrion.

“How many of our men bought it?” Fargo asked.

“Hard to tell. I'd say a dozen, maybe more. Good thing we had our best riflemen on the shooting ledge.” Prairie Dog spat. “As soon as they got the girl, the whole bunch skedaddled. Almost like she was what they came for.”

He and Fargo were twenty feet from the wall when the double doors shoved outward with a raspy rake of unoiled hinges, the door bottoms crunching cacti and sage and raising dust. Obviously, the doors on this side of the stockade were rarely used.

The silhouettes of a half dozen soldiers in various condition of dress jostled out, holding rifles high across their chests and swiveling their heads around nervously. The group opened to reveal two more men moving slowly behind them. One—an older gent with long gray hair in a ponytail falling over his shoulder and wearing a tattered red robe and slippers—held the other around the waist as they shuffled toward the Trailsman and Prairie Dog.

“Fargo, is that you?” the major barked, his voice pinched with pain. “Don't tell me those savages got away with my daughter!”

As the soldiers fanned out in front of the wall, crouching over the fallen Indians and prodding the bodies with their rifles, Fargo and Prairie Dog drew up before the major and the gray-haired gent, doubtless the camp medico.

Ten or so inches of an arrow shaft sprouted from the major's left shoulder, which meant the point was protruding from the man's back. He must have taken off his tunic before the attack; he now wore only a white, long-sleeve undershirt and suspenders. The blood had formed a dark stain down the front of his shirt to his cartridge belt. His red hair was mussed about his hatless head. Howard's right hand was wrapped around the shaft where it met his shoulder, blood glistening in the ambient light, and he staggered on his booted feet as though drunk.

“They got her, Major.”

“Christ!” Howard winced and groaned, stumbling back against the doctor. “I told her not to go traipsing about the grounds after dark.”

Fargo felt his face heat with chagrin. He thought he saw Prairie Dog glance at him knowingly, but maybe it was only his imagination.

“Corporal!” the major barked toward one of the soldiers milling about the dead Indians beyond the stockade wall. “Form a contingent immediately! I want those savages run down before—!”

“Now, Major,” Prairie Dog broke in, still holding one of the Trailsman's arms. “You'd only be sending those men to their graves. We're badly outnumbered out here, and any contingent you sent out wouldn't see midnight.”

“For the love of Christ, Robert, come to your senses!” the doctor added in a slight German accent. “That's just what the Indians are hoping you'll do, so they can
slaughter
some more of us. You'll have to wait till morning. Now, let's get you over to the infirmary so I can remove that arrow before you
bleed
to death!”

Shifting his weight from one foot to the other, the major turned to Fargo, a helpless, confused, beseeching cast to his gaze.

“Prairie Dog and I'll head out at first light,” Fargo said. “The smaller the pursuit party, the better. We'll get her, bring her back, and
then
we'll go after Lieutenant Duke.”

The major nodded dully. He let the doctor half turn him toward the fort, then stopped and glanced skeptically at the Trailsman. “Have you any idea what she was doing around the stables, Fargo? Not a very likely place to find my daughter at such a time…”

Fargo flicked his gaze toward Prairie Dog, then back to Howard, and hiked a shoulder. “I reckon she's fond of horses, Major.”

Major Howard squinted one eye.

“Come on, Robert,” the doctor said, tugging on the man's good arm.

Howard let the doctor lead him back through the open gate. The Trailsman turned to see Prairie Dog regarding him severely. “Child, you're gonna get yourself shot one of these days, with that overused organ of yours up the wrong girl's honeypot!”

More sporadic gunfire sounded from behind the stockade wall as Fargo and Prairie Dog tramped after the major, the Trailsman muttering, “We should all retire so nobly.”

Just inside the stockade, he and Prairie Dog stopped and looked around at the dead Indians and soldiers lying in the shadows behind the hay barns and remount stables. Small groups of living soldiers crouched around the wounded while others hauled men toward the infirmary on stretchers.

Torches cast a guttering radiance from the direction of the parade ground and officers' quarters. Occasional horse whinnies broke the eerie quiet while coyotes yammered in the hills surrounding the fort, no doubt frenzied by the smell of blood.

“If they'd used fire arrows, this coulda been a whole lot worse,” Prairie Dog remarked. “I reckon I'll help tend the wounded and haul off the dead savages. You best get to bed, Skye. We'll get started at first light.”