Death Rattle

16

Soon as it was light enough for a man to see, Bill Williams and the others watched as Thomas L. Smith cut out a small part of the herd for himself. Peg-Leg had elected to take Curnutt and Warren with him, if not for companionship in that lonely expanse of desert they were staring in the face, then for their help in wrangling the three hundred horses that the other raiders felt Smith was due for seeing them through to the valleys of southern California.

“I reckon you know the way if any man does, Tom,” Williams said when the horses had been divided off and the sky was graying hundreds of miles away to the east. “You go on back by way of the Ammuchabas, you’ll fare good.”

Smith’s eyes narrowed as he glared down on his old partner from horseback. “You make it sound like you ain’t coming back through the Ammuchaba villages.”

Taking a step back, the lanky old trapper said, “We ain’t.”

Startled, Smith asked, “H-how you going back, Bill?”

“This here’s your chance, Peg-Leg,” Williams repeated mysteriously. “I’m doin’ this ’stead of killing you an’ them others outright—”

“Why you treating me this way?” Peg-Leg demanded, clearly unrepentant.

“You come down on the side of murdering a friend of mine in his sleep. I got nothin’ more to say to you. Use this chance, Tom.”

For a moment Smith pressed his lips tightly together as if about to spew some venom, then he vowed, “I’ll see you back to the mountains, Solitaire.” His dark, dangerous eyes snapped over to glare at Scratch. “See you back in the mountains too, Titus Bass.”

They watched the trio pull away into the murky, predawn light as another two dozen of the horses ambled off from the herd to join Smith’s animals. Bass, Williams, and the others had seen to it that the three men were equipped with a horn of powder, enough lead to see them to one of the southern posts, and only enough fixings to keep them alive in the deadly crossing that lay ahead.

That seemed fitting to Scratch, really seemed more than fair, considering they all had a hand, one way or another, in scheming to murder a man in what was clearly less than a fair fight. Maybeso Peg-Leg didn’t have a direct role in plotting or carrying out Thompson’s scheme to cut Bass’s throat … but Smith had made no bones about siding with Thompson and his kind ever since the day all twenty-four of the raiders set off from Robidoux’s Fort Uintah.

Even now on this red, raw, desert-summer morning as the thousands of horses grew restless—it made Bass wonder what he himself had ever done to Tom Smith that would cause Peg-Leg to throw his weight on the side of Phil Thompson and his compatriots. It simply couldn’t be Scratch’s hand in taking back those horses Smith, Thompson, and the others stole from Fort Hall and the Shoshone chief named Rain early in that winter of ’39.

Something far deeper, something down under the skin had gnawed away at Thompson across the intervening seasons. Something Bass was coming to realize that he himself had kept from his conscious thoughts, a matter that had come to trouble him so deeply over the last few years it went to the core of everything he was as a man.

With the death of the beaver trade, the summer rendezvous had withered right along with it. And with that demise of everything these beaver men had placed all stock in—their world was shattered, destroyed, gone forever. With nothing at all to replace it.

Not that the beaver men didn’t have anything to do in the mountains. They could choose to live with the tribes moving slowly with the seasons, or they could stay busy hunting meat for the fur posts, perhaps even ride into California for some horses. But … any of that was nothing more than a vain attempt to fill the real, gaping void of what had torn apart their lives.

Never again would they be what they had been. Beaver men. A rare breed with an unwritten code between them. They endured shoulder to shoulder against all enemies, and stood at one another’s backs when death loomed near. Never again could they be what once had given their lives worth.

But now … now that they were no longer beaver men, cracks opened up in that code. White men stole from white men, and from the friendlies too. And finally … white men had turned on white men.

If outright, cold-blooded murder had come to the mountains, Titus knew the West would never again be the same. The West he had come to know was as good as gone, good as dead and all but buried.

As Bass watched those three men and their horses fade beyond the distant curve of the earth, disappearing into the desert dawn, he was suddenly struck with a remembrance like clabbered milk. Silas Cooper, Bud and Billy too, had stolen his beaver before fleeing the mountains with their booty, land pirates who preyed on the labors of other men. The remembrance lay inside him like meat gone bad.

While they had lied, cheated, and stolen from him—Silas, Bud, and Billy had never murdered. Rotten as they were, especially Cooper, none of the three had never committed any evil worse than thievery. Leastways, what Scratch knowed of.

There had always been men Titus would just as soon not ride or camp with in these mountains. Except for those three thieves who ran off with his furs back in the spring of 1827, there had never been a question of him trusting the partners he hooked up with. Even those company men and booshways he stayed as far away from as possible because they simply were not his sort of men, he knew the chances were good he could even count on them when the stakes were high and the last raise of the night was called.

That’s just the way things were in the mountains. Were. The way things bad been in the wild, raw yonder he had come to call home. The unspoken code of these first, hardy few was no more. Right now he found himself more sure than he had ever been that his was not just a dying breed, but a breed that had already been rubbed out.

“Let’s get them pack mules loaded!” Williams cried as he turned around to face the half circle of Americans. “We’re riding out in less time it takes you niggers to piss in the sand!”

They scattered as Hezekiah’s Indians shook out their coarse straw mats and thick Navajo blankets, then rolled them together and tied them over their shoulders beside those quivers of short, deadly arrows. Quivers almost empty after that furious battle with the Mexicans.

Titus quickly looked over the shorter, brown men until he spotted the tall one. “Hezekiah!”

Christmas turned, finding Scratch coming, and smiled in that ebony face. “Titus Bass. These white men you come here with, they ain’t going back by the Ammoochabees?”

“The booshway figgers on us tracking farther north. It’s high summer now. Water’s drying up even more this far south. We’re gonna lose a bunch of these horses no matter—”

“We can tell you where you’ll find the springs,” Hezekiah interrupted, extending his arm to point off to the northeast.

“S-springs,” Scratch echoed. “You can tell us?”

Bass hurried Hezekiah over to Williams and announced what information the freedman could provide.

“Why don’t you come and show us?” Titus asked, hopeful.

Peering over the other trappers for a moment, the tall Negro could not help but see how that invitation nettled some of the white men. He wagged his head and sighed, “I belong with my men—”

“Bring them too.” Titus interrupted. “The Bent brothers got ’em a Negress for a cook over to their fort. Her husband’s the blacksmith—a Neegra too. You damn well ain’t the only black-skinned son of a bitch in the mountains—”

“No, it’s better I show you where you’ll find them springs are—let you go on with your own kind, Titus Bass.”

And before Scratch could protest any further, Hezekiah dropped to one knee there before them, motioning Williams and Bass to crouch with him. A handful of others came up to stand over the three. First, Christmas shoved some sandy dirt into a footlong mound. Here and there he placed some pebbles, other places he used the tip of one index finger to burrow some tiny, shallow indentions in his crude map.

“Watch the rocks, Titus. Count the rocks,” Hezekiah instructed gravely. “Here. Here. And here too—no matter how hot it gets, you’ll still find water. But less’n you count the rocks, I fear you’ll miss the springs. Water comes out up again’ the rocks. But mind you—not all them rocks got water by ’em. Count the rocks as you go an’ you’ll be sure which ones.”

The white men closely studied the map the Negro scratched on the ground. Then one by one Williams, then Bass stood and dusted the knees of their leggings.

“Why’n’t you come ’long with me?” Titus pleaded.

“My people are back there.” And Christmas pointed. “In those mountains.”

“Go fetch your family, catch up to us. We’ll damn well go slow with this herd so you can find us. We get over the mountains we figger to sell the horses and you’ll get your share of them wild ones—”

“Better I stay where there ain’t no question that I’m a free man,” Christmas cut off Bass’s argument, looking into the faces of the other white men not all ready to turn over any of their horses to a Neegra gone to the blanket. “Right here’s where I found some li’l peace for the first time in my life, Titus Bass. It’s plain on the faces of these others that back in that land where you’re headed with your horses … they won’t never look at me like a free man.”

“Things don’t have to be that way up high enough, back far enough you won’t likely see ’nother white face but mine for a long time to come,” Scratch explained, hopelessness starting to sink in. “Why, there’s even a ol’ friend of mine—a Neegra named Beckwith—was a war chief for the Crow, my wife’s people. This Beckwith was—”

“After what you done to help me all them years ago—it’s enough for Hezekiah Christmas that my friends helped save your life, Titus Bass,” he interrupted. “ ’Long with the lives of your friends too.”

Titus looked his old friend in the eye. “Damn if you ain’t as good a man as ever come to the mountains, Hezekiah Christmas. Which way your stick float now?”

He sighed thoughtfully, then said, “We’ll go back by way of the ground where we kill’t the Mexicans. Gather our arrows out of the dirt, pull ’em from the dead bodies too, afore goin’ on back to our wives and chimin.”

“Your grandchildren too, Hezekiah.” He had felt this same sentiment welling up in him before. Nonetheless, after all those last and final farewells he had endured, the partings never got any easier. “Damn if you ain’t gone and discombobulated things all over for me.”

“Why you say that?”

“I set you free back on the Natchez Trace long ago … and here you gone and not just saved my ol’ hide once, but twice’t in two days?”

“We’re square, Titus Bass. Never you make no mistake of that.”

“But you pulled my hash outta the fire twice—”

“Don’t you see,” Hezekiah snorted, “if’n you’d never set me free from that slaver’s cage, never pertected me when them slavers come after us, I’d never been out here to save your poor white hide two times for good measure!”

Scratch stepped close to the Negro, held out his hand, and they clasped as Bass said, “You give me back my life, twice, Hezekiah.”

“An’ I’d save your worthless white ass again if’n it come down to it, Titus,” Christmas promised as he gripped Scratch’s wrist in his big, black hand, the veins prominent on its back like an oiled, knotted Kentucky riverboatman’s rope. “No matter how many times God His own self puts it in my hands to save you … I’ll do it again without question—’cause I’d never had this life with these good Injun people less’n you set me free and took me north to the Ohio.”

Scratch felt the instant sting of tears burn his eyes. “You’re as good a man as ever there was, Hezekiah Christmas.”

The Negro grinned as daylight limned across the desert spread at their feet. “You give me back my life years ago. ’Bout time I done something to repay you. Now we are square.”

“Just ’bout as square as any two men could ever be.”

All around him the others were mounting up and Williams was barking orders for the march, sending men out to sweep in the sides of their monstrous herd of California horses. Titus finally released his old friend’s forearm.

“You ever come to the northern mountains, you best ask for me, hear?”

Hezekiah nodded with a smile. “Count on that. I ask for Titus Bass.”

“It’s for damn sure most folks gonna point you the right way you ask for me.”

“If ever I turn my back on this world here, I find you, Titus Bass. I find you no matter what.”

He had watched the Negro turn without another word and gesture for his men to mount upon their half-wild California horses, shooing a small herd before them as they wheeled about and started back up the long, grassy slopes dotted with scrub cedar and the last of the lean Joshua trees, heading for their homeland and their families.

Once the others were on their way, Hezekiah stopped his horse and reined around to have himself a look down the slope, long black legs dangling down from the rounded belly of his short, California pony. Bass held his arm high, outstretched, with his big-brimmed hat in his hand. Side to side he waved it in one long arc, and when he saw Hezekiah hold his bow aloft, Bass swallowed down the bitter clog of regret that lay thick in his throat. He turned his horse around and pulled his hat down over the sweat-stained bandanna.

All he had to do now was get back to the mountain country, cross over, and sell off his share of those horses that would survive the deadly crossing. Spring to spring. From one clump of rocks to another … until he could gaze into her eyes again. Just to see her and the little ones again, he would cross this fiery furnace of a desert, he would crawl all the way over those high and terrible places. To hold them once again, and promise never, never to ride away to California again.

Family. The feelings he had for his own kin often made him think back on those two gentile Indians the Franciscan friars had baptized with names symbolizing their new Catholic status. It made perfect sense for Frederico and Celita to turn back to the mountains with Hezekiah’s fighting men now. They belonged to that growing band of runaways more than they would ever belong to any cluster of cowed and brutalized neophyte slaves at the Mission San Gabriel. They were free again, just as Christmas had been given his freedom near the banks of the Mississippi three decades before.

Many times across the next weeks Scratch had vowed he’d drink that whole muddy river by himself … if only they could find more water.

They found that first spring—right where Hezekiah said it would be. Nestled in among the rocks where the horses fought to get at the pools formed as the warm, underground water bubbled to the surface. Williams had them lay over a long day and night at the spring before continuing the next leg of their crossing.

That hot, dry, late-summer air sucked every drop of moisture right out of the men and the animals with a relentless brutality as they moved east-northeast, transcribing a path between each intervening landmark until they reached the second spring three days later. There they found a little less of the warm water bubbling out of the ground. Summer was torturing the desert, drying up what narrow ribbons of rivers had briefly flowed weeks ago, relentlessly sucking the seasonal life out of the underground springs a drop at a time as their subterranean moisture evaporated into air heated by a long-riding, merciless sun that refused to go down while it baked a man’s skin the way a narrow strip of gristle would sizzle in an iron skillet.

By then they had begun to lose horses—a few at first—the weakest, the youngest perhaps. Williams and the others made sure the six Ute broodmares they had driven all the way to and back out of California were the first to drink at every stop, and the first to be allowed what skimpy grass they came across when it came time to rest the herd. The mares were vital to them all—man and beast alike—dragging the herd and the raiders all back to the mountains by a primal lure compelling them to return to their young.

Titus was beginning to think he knew how both life and death now clung to those mares.

Every time Titus would shade his eyes and turn in the sweaty saddle to gaze upon their back trail, he would spot those dark forms wavering with a waterlike quality out there on the pale horizon. Poor, played-out horses that could no longer go on—both those that somehow still managed to stand weaving with their heads hung in defeat, and those that had already accepted defeat, their legs crumpling in sheer exhaustion and dehydration, lying sprawled, heaving on the sunbaked hardpan of the desert to breathe their last: waiting, waiting, waiting as the skies above them slowly filled with the patient, high-soaring, black-winged birds of death sinking lower and lower toward their exhausted prey.

Never before had the buzzards and vultures had it so good in this land void of most everything but a slow, agonizing death. An emptiness filled with little more than arid heat, a limitless expanse that not only sucked the moisture right out of a man but also leached his hope and will to go on, drop by relentless drop.

He dreamed of Absaroka through those days on the precipice of hell—his mind’s eye yearning on the high, lofty snowfields mantling the mountains, the green of grasses tall enough to brush a horse’s belly, the blues and teals of streams or ponds lying beneath a never-ending sky. He dreamed of her still as the bottom went out from under him and his horse sank beneath him, tumbling into the sand.

Bass lay there exhausted, totally unmoving too, aware only on some nonmobile plane of urgency—listening to the horse grunting helpless as it attempted to get up, whimpering low in its throat because the animal realized in its own primitive way that it would never get back on its legs.

He closed his eyes, feeling how the sun stabbed right on through his thin cloth shirt, pierced the buckskin leggings—wondering if he would ever get back up. Titus tried to dream of the cool of Absaroka again one last time before it would be too late and he could remember no more.

“Bass.”

He blinked, looking up, finding the outline of a face hovering right over his—totally in shadow because the man’s head completely blocked out the sun. Squinting, he blinked again as the man’s salty, stinging sweat trickled into his eyes. The sweat in his own made everything swim, but Titus finally made sense out of the features, that pale, blond hair turning gray.

“Ros … Roscoe.”

“Brung a horse for you,” Coltrane said sparingly as he pulled on Scratch’s arms, slowly dragging Bass to his feet.

His mouth pasty, tongue thick and slow, Titus asked, “How come you—”

“Ain’t leaving a one of us to die,” Coltrane explained, likely stringing more words together than he had in a month of Sundays. “You’re steady enough here, I’ll get your outfit.”

Roscoe dragged Bass’s saddle from beneath the dying horse, then cinched it onto another of the spare animals he brought over, its legs plodding, big hooves scuffing furrows in the hard sand.

Without a word, Coltrane made a stirrup by weaving his fingers together and hoisted Titus into the saddle.

Just staring down at the short, squat man made him feel more clearheaded, less woozy, despite the compelling heat. As he watched the hundreds of horses continue to plod by, recognizing one lone trapper after another strung out there at the edge of the dwindling herd, Titus was suddenly struck with the realization that Roscoe had just spoken more words than the man had ever uttered to him before.

“W-why?” he asked when Coltrane remounted and their horses lumbered into a shuffling gait once more.

“I know you’d do the same for me.”

Then Roscoe Coltrane reined away, saying no more.

For the rest of that long, sizzling afternoon, Scratch’s thoughts dwelled on those few words spoken by a man not given much to speech at all. “Ain’t leaving a one of us to die.” Then he would think again of, “I know you’d do the same for me.”

It gave him enough hope that there might be a few still left who remembered the glory days, remembered the old ways. Men who still fervently clung to the code.

Spring by spring, with long stretches of relentless heat in between the warm seeps when they did their level best to rest the horses, short nights when they traveled in the starlit darkness, feeling their way along past the landmarks Hezekiah Christmas noted for them. Spring by spring, the summer aged on them—days grown so old and parched they began to find less and less water. The land was drying up about the time they reached a country more rumpled. If nothing else, a stunted and scrawny vegetation prickled the surface of a changing panorama. And then—there in the distance one sunrise as they slowly brought the herd to a halt for the day near a dry lake bed—Bass believed he sighted a ragged skyline where the orange of a new day was brushing itself clear across the uneven horizon. From one end of the earth to the other.

“Elias—lookee there and tell me what you see,” he prodded as they came out of their saddles that late-summer morning.

“Them hills?”

“More’n hills,” Silas Adair ventured as he came down on his good leg, still favoring the other with its wound so long in healing.

Titus nodded. “Maybeso the mountains.”

“Which’uns?” Jake Corn asked.

“Dunno what they’re called,” Bass said. “If’n they be the ones I’m figgering on.”

“Where they rise?” Silas inquired.

“Far south of the Salty Lake. We crossed below ’em coming down the Green.”

Excitement brightened Corn’s parched face. “W-we come that far? You mean we’re back in the Rocky Mountains?”

“A’most,” Adair declared wistfully.

It was a remarkable moment as the Americans stripped the damp saddles and soggy blankets off their horses, picketing the riding animals in the scrub vegetation before they rolled out their dusty bedrolls and lay down to wrap themselves around a few hours’ sleep while the sun came up behind that distant, saw-toothed skyline. Hope crept back into their parched souls, hope itself beckoning from the very edge of the earth.

Bass slowly rolled over there atop his sweaty blanket in the late-afternoon heat and peered from underneath the wide brim of his felt hat. He hadn’t been sure what he saw flitting in and out of the nearby rocks—not sure at all even why he had awakened to sight the merest hint of motion. Whatever it was … whoever it was, hadn’t made a sound yet. Nothing that alarmed any of the dozing men, not a noise to spook any of their horses.

That jumble of rocks lay at one side of what they had left of the herd after those weeks of dry, desert crossing—something on the order of half the horses they had driven east over Cajon Pass. The rest had perished mile after grueling mile back there in the wastes before the trappers reached this rocky, canyon country where rattlesnakes and jackrabbits abounded.

For a good part of this day those huge boulders had provided little shelter for the weary men, but now that the sun was in its final quadrant of the sky, the glare was threading its way through a scattering of wispy clouds, no longer scorching the skin-clad figures curled atop their dust-caked, threadbare blankets.

In the shadow of those iron-red rocks, more of the forms showed themselves, then were gone with a wolf spider’s quickness. Titus wasn’t sure if they were human or just some overcurious critter. There—a flicker of hair. Next, a flitting glimpse of skin tanned so brown their hides blended right into the sere-colored boulders. So quick the movement could have been that of an antelope fleeing a predator … or maybe the movement of the predator itself circling in on its prey.

Slowly he extended his left arm as if stretching, his fingers tapping Kersey’s elbow. “Elias!” he whispered under his breath. “Lookit the rocks. Tell me them ain’t red niggers.”

Cracking one eye and slowly shifting his head, Kersey peered at the rocks warily. “Diggers.”

“I was ’fraid of that,” Bass grumbled. “Trouble be—they don’t seem scare’t of us.”

“Only one reason for that, I’d wager,” Jake Corn whispered under the floppy hat he had laying on his face. “They likely got us outnumbered four or five to one.”

Kersey shifted his rifle slowly. “Maybe they just got their curiosities up an’ don’t really mean no harm—”

“Don’t be chuckleheaded, Jake. Them brownskins wouldn’t be skulking around if’n they didn’t mean us no harm,” Bass snorted as he sat up suddenly, wrenching up the rifle where he had it pinned between his legs. “Bill!”

Scratch had no sooner spit out that alarm than the Indians took form, bolting up from the boulders. Shrieking, they boiled out of their hiding places in the nearby rocks. Almost as one, the groggy trappers snapped awake, snatching up weapons and bellowing commands or curses in their surprise.

Quickly his eyes raked left, then right across the rocks, looking for which one might prove to be the squat enemy’s leader. But Titus could not tell which of the poor, naked brown men might be commanding the rest. Even more of them washed over the rocks in waves.

“Make your first shot count, boys!” Scratch bellowed at those around him as the trappers threw themselves down behind what skimpy baggage they were dragging back to the mountains. “We might not get us a second one.

“Blazes!” Williams thundered over his shoulder as he plopped on his belly and slid the barrel of his rifle atop a small pack of furs. “Bring up them other guns!”

Rising onto one knee, Titus took aim offhand at the flitting forms charging in a zigzag toward the trappers’ camp across a wide front. He was the first to fire. An instant later a half dozen guns exploded. A heartbeat behind them even more. Beyond the pall of gray gunsmoke, brown bodies flopped onto the pale, sandy soil. Writhing, screaming, clutching at glistening red wounds penetrating their sun-blackened bodies.

That sudden, unremitting horror knocking holes in their ranks brought the rest skidding to a dusty halt. Some knelt to grab their wounded and their dead, turning in their tracks to drag bodies back to the rocks as more than a hundred voices cried out for retribution in a frightening cacophony.

“Merciful a’mighty!” Silas Adair cried. “How the hell many of ’em are there?”

“What the hell are they is what I wanna know!” Charles Swift asked.

“Diggers!” Scratch yelled as he dug out a lead ball from his pouch and thumbed it into the muzzle of his rifle without taking the time for a patch. He could tell the lands and grooves of the bore were already fouling with powder.

“Usual’ they’re more nuisance than trouble,” Williams growled. “But this arternoon I s’pose they figger we’re easy pickings—”

He and the rest were suddenly interrupted, falling quiet the instant they became aware of the herd: hundreds of horses neighed and whinnied, growing nervous, frightened by the unexpected gunfire. In a matter of moments, the horses would be heeling about, thundering away across the broken canyonland.

“They come for the horses?” Reuben Purcell asked. “Let the li’l bastards have some of our goddamned horses!”

Bass angrily rammed the ball home, eyeing the Diggers as they appeared to be forming up for another charge. “They want our plunder too, Rube.”

“Shit!” Williams muttered, rolling close with his rifle. “An’ we was almost back to the Rocky Mountings with them horses too.”

Answering the cry from one throat, the enemy swarmed out of the rocks for another assault. Midway to the white men, most of the Indians stopped to fire their short bows—some standing, others dropping to their knees—then yanked more of their short, deadly arrows from rabbitskin quivers looped over their walnut-brown shoulders.

Here in the desert of the Great Basin, these impoverished, barefooted people subsisted on tiny animals, insects, and even an occasional wild or stray horse they managed to capture. With such a capricious and precarious existence, Bass realized, it was no surprise that these Diggers were emboldened by the wealth of the white men—compelled to attack for no loftier reason than survival itself.

The white man’s plunder, not to mention those hundreds upon hundreds of enticing horses, together represented a continued existence to these primitive, feral, distrustful Indians.

Polette Labrosse grunted next to Scratch.

Bass immediately spun on his knee, catching the half-breed Frenchman as the man collapsed, clutching one of those tiny arrows where it was lodged in the muscles of his neck. Labrosse laced his fingers around the shaft, tugging frantically as he crumpled onto the wind-polished hardpan desert sand. The blood was dark, so dark it appeared to be about as black as a glistening Popo Agie tar as it oozed through the half-breed’s fingers.

“C-cain’t get it out!” he gurgled, bright gushes pouring from his tongue, spilling down his chin.

“Leave it!” Scratch ordered, enfolding the man in his arms, squeezing him against his chest as Labrosse began to gag his life away. He knew the man was good as dead where they sat.

Polette Labrosse pulled his head away from Bass’s chest, sighed a little as he gasped, “Kill dem for me, Scratch. Kill dem all, would you?”

Without another noisy gurgle, the half-breed’s eyes rolled back and he went limp in Scratch’s arms, surrendering to that blessed unconsciousness come as he lost a gush of blood from his mouth. Titus let the man sink gently to the sand, then whirled around on his knee, dragging out his priming horn.

Sprinkling a hurried spray of fine priming powder, he dragged the frizzen back over the pan and yanked back on the rear trigger as he jerked the rifle into position against his shoulder. Once more, the enemy was everywhere around them. So many of them rushing in that they became a blur.

But in gazing down his barrel, it wasn’t the charge that snagged Scratch’s attention. It was some two dozen short, brown warriors turning away from the charge unexpectedly, wheeling aside to make a wide loop around the trappers’ camp where they reached the outskirts of the herd.

Waving their arms and screaming like demons, the Diggers succeeded in spooking the nervous horses. Bolting off, their tails held high and their eyes as big as Mexican dollars, the animals scattered this way and that, racing north in a leaderless stampede.

“Ah, shit!” Williams bellered like a buffalo bull with its bangers caught in catclaw brush.

“There go our goddamned horses!” Purcell screeched in pain.

Not only were the trappers under attack by an overwhelming number of daring bowmen … but in one fell swoop the white men had just lost all their hard-won California horses.