Beyond Squaw Creek

12

Fargo squeezed off three rounds over the lip of the ridge, hearing a couple of grunts and enraged screams amongst the Indians approaching from below, then turned and followed Prairie Dog further into the woods. In spite of the inky tree columns and low-hanging branches, he ran hard, overtaking Prairie Dog in about seventy yards.

“Keep going!” Fargo growled. “I’m gonna circle around, see if I can sneak the girl outta the village!”

Prairie Dog took several more leaping strides through the woods. “But, hell, I won’t make it, neither, so I reckon I’ll see ya on the other side!”

“I’ll see ya back at the fort!”

Fargo swung right into the trees, his keen night vision picking out deadfalls, which he hopscotched, ducking under branches, tracing a wide angle down hill and back toward the stream. He bolted through a juneberry thicket then stopped, listening.

Behind, branches and shrubs cracked under running feet, and the rasps of labored breaths rose.

Fargo ducked behind the thicket and edged a look back the way he’d come. Two jostling shadows ran toward him, starlight dancing on spear heads and on bone talismans hanging around the braves’ necks.

Fargo snapped the rifle to his shoulder, triggered a shot. The Henry’s bark shattered the heavy silence, and the brave on the left screamed. There was a heavy, crunching thud as he hit the ground and rolled.

The brave on the right kept coming, screaming, starlight reflecting from his wide eyes as he bolted into the thicket, drawing his spear back behind his ear, preparing to throw.

Fargo shot him twice in the chest. As the dying brave drove the spear into the ground and continued half running and half falling, propelled downhill by his own momentum, the Trailsman ejected the spent shell and continued scrambling down the bluff’s steep shoulder.

He stopped beside a sprawling box elder at the lip of the stream bank, and turned back toward the Indian village. He could see nothing but the willows and cottonwood saplings lining the stream. Up the hill behind him came the occasional distant whoop of a brave still on Prairie Dog’s trail.

Taking his Henry in one hand, Fargo grabbed a stout root bowing out of the bank, and dropped down to the soft sand lining the riverbed. He plunged through the willows and straight into the water, which, in spite of the sweat basting his shirt to his back and soaking his beard, braced him with its chill.

On the other side, he climbed the bank, water sluicing off his buckskins. Slogging through the scrub willows and sage and knee-high wheatgrass, he angled back toward the village, which he couldn’t see from this distance.

When the lodges became conical shadows against the stars, the fire glowing ahead and right, near the confluence of the streams, he moved forward quickly, crouching, keeping his head below the tops of the scrub willows. A dog barked somewhere to his left. Fargo hoped the beast was tied, or his position would be discovered in no time.

Continuing to steal through the scrub, ignoring the sting of prickly pear and hawthorn, he crept between several dark lodges, firewood piles, and stretched buffalo hides. Edgy, angry voices rose around him—men’s as well as women’s—and several times he changed his route to avoid braves lurking about, armed with rifles or nocked arrows.

He crabbed around a heap of split wood, and stopped. Thirty yards away lay the fire, which had diminished considerably since Prairie Dog’s errant shot. Fargo had just begun to scan the ground around it for Valeria, when angry female voices sounded faintly on his left.

He swung the Henry around, heart thudding. The cackling harangues, muffled as though by buffalo hide, seemed to originate from a nearby lodge.

Fargo jogged toward the voices but dropped when two braves jogged toward him from the fire. When they’d disappeared in the darkness, he continued forward. He didn’t stop again until he knelt beside the closed door of the lodge from which cackles, angry snarls, and Assiniboine epithets emanated. Inside, a girl was sobbing, and there was the smack of a strap on bare flesh.

Fargo cursed, looked around, and crawled on hands and knees to the lodge’s painted deerskin door. He lifted an edge of the flap and peered into the shadows jostled by a fire in the lodge’s center, the smell of buffalo hide and smoke nearly taking his breath away.

Two Indian women knelt in the shadows, on either side of a pale figure writhing upon a buffalo robe. One woman had her hand on the back of Valeria’s neck, forcing the girl’s head down hard against the robe, while another, who wore her silver-streaked brown hair in a long braid down her back, lashed a strip of rawhide against Valeria’s bare bottom.

As Fargo pushed through the door and stood, aiming his Henry straight out from his right hip, the woman facing him gasped, rising and stumbling straight back toward the far side of the lodge. The other remained kneeling before Valeria but turned toward Fargo.

She was a crone with a wizened face spotted with warts, and slanted, evil eyes. She neither gasped nor started but regarded Fargo coolly, almost bemusedly.

Fargo wagged the Henry’s barrel and warned the women in his rough Assiniboine to think twice about calling out, for he had no qualms about shooting ugly Indian wenches. He’d barely slung the insult before he realized the woman facing him from across the lodge was far from ugly.

No older than eighteen, if she was that, she was strikingly beautiful—her black hair long and thick and burnished by the leaping flames at her side. She wore a wolf cloak around her shoulders, and her eyes in her heart-shaped face, with its strong nose and well-bred jaw, were almond-shaped bits of obsidian flamed by the thick wings of her hair.

A true Indian princess if Fargo had ever seen one. The slight drop of her chin and the flicker in her eyes told him she’d read the appreciation in his gaze.

Neither she nor the crone said anything as Fargo moved forward, grabbed a skinning knife from an overturned gourd, and reached down to cut the hide strap tying Valeria’s right hand to a stake above her head. Long red welts streaked her back and buttocks.

It wasn’t until he’d freed her left hand that her eyes snapped open, and she turned her head slightly, blinking as she stared up at him.

“Skye?” she said weakly.

“Shh.” He waved his rifle back and forth between the princess and the crone. The princess kept her chin down, upper lip curled, lustrous black eyes squinted.

When he’d cut all the straps, he held the rifle on the two women with one hand while awkwardly pulling Valeria up with the other. Obviously, she was too drugged to walk, so he drew her naked body over his shoulder. Hand clamped across her thigh, her head hanging down his back, he rose, backed to the door, and repeated his warning to the Indian women about calling out.

They glared at him like dark statues.

Fargo turned, bolted through the lodge’s door, and crouched as he glanced around quickly. He hadn’t taken more than two strides back the way he’d come before the crone in the lodge began shrieking like a hyena in a bear trap and the girl began shouting out the door in her quick, guttural tongue that a tall white man was making off with the fire-headed whore.

Wishing he had shot them, Fargo broke into a run, meandering between the lodges humping darkly around him. He turned past a large meat rack when men’s voices and the clatter of running feet rose ahead.

Wheeling, he sprinted toward the horse remuda, the girl groaning and grunting down his back. He tripped over a lodgepole brace, and fell forward, the girl rolling on the ground before him, sobbing and yowling his name accusingly.

Behind him and left, enraged voices and footfalls rose.

Fargo reached for Valeria. “Sorry.” Grabbing her arm, he tossed her over his shoulder, scrambled back to his feet, and, holding the rifle in his left hand, sprinted forward again.

If he could nab a horse, they’d have a chance…but the yowls of pursuing braves trailed him like devils’ screams.

As Fargo passed the last lodges at the camp’s southern edge and bounded over the lip of a steep gully, a panting, growling dog shot toward him like a missile and, when he was halfway down the slope, clamped its jaws around Fargo’s left ankle.

“Fuckin’ mutt!” Fargo barked, his left boot flying out from beneath him. The girl flew out of his arms and a half second later they were both tumbling down the grassy slope, limbs tangled, rolling over and over.

The girl groaned as she rolled in the grass before him. When they hit the gully’s brush-choked floor, he reached for the rifle that had hung up on a shrub.

He swung the Henry around, but before he could poke his finger through the trigger guard, he froze. While the snarling cur tugged on his pants cuff, three long-haired, bare-chested figures stared down at him, nocked arrows cocked back behind their ears, the sharp stone tips aimed at Fargo’s head. The ash bows creaked like leather.

“Hold it!” a voice boomed on the ridge, in English. “I want him alive!”

Fargo stretched his gaze beyond the three braves slightly relaxing their bows before him. Two men stood on the gully’s lip. One, pale skinned and blond haired. The other, just as tall but slightly stooped and wearing a plumed warbonnet and buffalo robe, a feathered tomahawk in his right hand.

“We’ll kill him and the girl together, thus doubling the amusement of Kundra-May-Na-Tee…and doubling our power against the white-eyes!” With that, Lieutenant Duke raised his arm above his head, waved his hand, and danced in place, howling like a coyote, then wheeled and strode away.

Chief Iron Shirt descended the slope, eagle feathers shimmering in the firelight behind him, necklace teeth clattering softly on his chest. He pushed between the braves to squat before Fargo, the man’s black eyes meeting the Trailsman’s. Iron Shirt smiled, showing naked gums between his long eyeteeth, the creases in his long, haggard face deepening.

“Skye Fargo,” he grunted. “The war gods told me you would come. They spoke to me the night I learned you killed my son, Blaze Face. They told me you would come, and I and the war god, Yem-seen, who speaks in the voice of Lieutenant Duke, would satisfy my desire for revenge.”

“Skye!” Valeria cried as one of the braves grabbed her hair and jerked her to her knees.

Fargo lunged toward him, bounding off his heels. Before he knew what he was doing, he felt the brave’s neck in his hands. The brave screamed a half second before his spine snapped.

Fargo let the body fall, and wheeled. In the corner of Fargo’s right eye he saw Iron Shirt flick his hand toward him, starlight winking off the stone club in his fist. The back of Fargo’s head went numb, and the last sensation he had was of falling back into the brush, staring up at the sky, and watching the stars wink out.