Buffalo Palace

Damn, if this dead mule didn’t smell like a month-old grizzly-gutted badger!

Titus Bass swiped the back of his black, powder-grimed hand under his nose and snorted with the first faint hint of stench strong enough to make his eyes water. Without lingering, he spilled enough grains of the fine 4-F priming powder into the pan, then carefully raised his head over the dead mule’s still-warm rib cage.

The sonsabitches were gathering off to the left, over there by Shad Sweete’s side of the ring. Really more of a crude oval the two dozen of them had quickly formed around this collection of ancient tree stumps by dropping every last one of their saddle stock and pack animals with a lead ball in their brains.

“Don’t shoot till you’re sure!” Henry Fraeb was bellowing again.

He’d repeated it over and over, beginning to nettle the gray-haired Bass. “We ain’t none of us lop-eared pilgrims, Frapp!” he growled back at the trapping brigade leader.

The man they called Ol’ Frapp twisted round on that leg he was kneeling on, spitting a ball out of his gopher-stuffed cheek into his sweaty palm. “Gottammit! Don’t you rink I know ebbery wund of you niggurs?”

“We’ll make ’em come, Frapp!” Elias Kersey shouted from the east side of their horse-and-mulc breastworks.

“Don’t you worry none ’bout us!” another growled from Bass’s right.

“Here they come again!” arose the alarm.

Titus rolled on his hip, gazing behind him at the far side of the narrow oval, where some of the defenders hunkered behind a stump here or there. Then his eyes slowly climbed over the heads of these twenty-three other beaver trappers as they all sat entranced, eyes fixed on the half-a-thousand. Sure was a pretty sight the way they had been forming themselves up over yonder after every charge, gathering upon that wide breast of bottom ground where the horsemen knew they were just out of range of the white man’s long-barreled flinters.

About as savvy as Blackfoot, Bass ruminated as he watched the naked riders spill out in two directions, like a mountain torrent tumbling past a huge boulder plopped squarely between a creek’s banks. Foaming and roiling, building up force as it was hurtled into that narrow space between the boulder and the grassy bank itself, huge drops and narrow sheets of mist rising from the torrent into shafts of shimmering sunlight—

“Shoot when you’re sure!” Jake Corn reminded them.

“One nigger at a time!” Reuben Purcell cried out as the hoofbeats threatened to drown out every other sound in this river valley. “One red nigger at a time, my mama Purcell allays said!”

Sure as spit, these Indians were getting smart about the white man’s guns, maybe hankering to have a white-man gun for their own.

From their hair, the way they made themselves up, Bass figured them to be Sioux. He knowed Sioux. A bunch of them had jumped him and Sweete, Waits-by-the-Water, and their young’uns couple summers back when they were returning down the Vermillion, making for Fort Davy Crockett on the Green. In that scrap Titus had been close enough to see the smeared, dust-furred colors of their paint, close enough to smell the old grease on their braids and forehead roaches. Not till then—no, he’d never seen a Sioux before.

But he and Shad had hacked their way out of that war party and made a desperate run for the fort.

Sioux.

If that didn’t mean things was changing in the mountains, nothing else did. To think of Sioux on this side of the divide. Damn, if that hoss didn’t take the circle—

Titus picked one out. Made a fist of his left hand and rested the bottom of the full-stock flintlock on it as he nestled his cheekbone down in place and dragged the hammer back to full cock.

Down the barrel now, that one didn’t look to be Sioux. Most of them on this end of their grand, fronted charge didn’t appear to be similar to the warriors who had jumped him and Shad two years back. He guessed Cheyenne.

The way they started to stream past, peeling away like the layers of the wild onion Waits gathered in the damps of the river bottoms, he could lead the son of a bitch a little. The warrior took the outside of the procession, screaming and shaking his bow after each arrow he fired.

Titus held a half breath on that bare, glistening chest—finding no hair-pipe breast ornament hanging from that horseman’s neck. Instead the warrior had circled several places on his flesh with bright-red vermilion paint. Likely his white, puckered hanging scars directly above each nipple, where he’d strung himself up to a sundance tree. And a couple more, long ones, though, down low along his ribs. Wounds from battle he proudly marked for all to see. Let his enemies know he was invincible.

Bass held a little longer, then raised the front blade of his sights to the Indian’s head and eased off to the right a good yard. What with the way the whole bunch was tearing toward the white man’s corral at an angle, there was still a drop in the slope—he was surprised when the gun roared, and felt the familiar slam of the Derringer’s butt plate against his right shoulder.

What with the muzzle smoke hanging close in the still, summer air, Bass didn’t see if his shot went home. But as the parade of screaming horsemen thundered past his side of the breastworks, he did notice that a handful of ponies raced by without riders. One of those animals had likely carried the big fella with the painted scars.

Other horsemen farther back in the stream were slowing now, reining this way and that to avoid a horse that had plunged headlong and flipped, pitching its rider into the air. Other horsemen slowed even more; two by two they leaned off their ponies to scoop up a wounded or dead comrade, dragging his limp body back across the coarse, sun-seared grass that crackled and snapped, through the powdery dust that rose in tiny puffs with each hoofbeat, the dead man’s legs flopping over every clump of sage, feet crazily bouncing, wildly sailing against the pale, pale summer-burnt-blue sky.

Few of their arrows made it all the way to the breastworks they had formed out of those sixty or more animals. The half-a-thousand clearly figured to make this a fight of bravery runs while the waterless white men slowly ran out of powder and lead.

At first some of the trappers had hesitated dropping all the horses and mules. They bunched the nervous animals together, tying them off nose to nose, two by two. But in those first frantic, wholesale charges, the Sioux and Cheyenne managed to hit enough of the outer ring of animals that the saddle horses and pack mules grew unmanageable, threatening to drag off the few men who attempted to hold on to them. Arrows quivered from withers and ribs and bellies and flanks.

Then the first lead balls whistled in among Fraeb’s men. Damn, if they didn’t have some smoothbore trade guns, fusils, old muskets, English to be sure. Maybe even some captured rifles too—taken from the body of a free man killed here or there in the mountains. One less free trapper to fret himself over the death of the beaver trade.

Arrows were one thing, but those smoothbore fusils were a matter altogether different. While they didn’t have the range of the trappers’ rifles, the muskets could nonetheless hurl enough lead through their remuda so those Indians could start whittling the white men down.

There were a half-dozen horses and mules thrashing and squealing on the ground already by the time the St. Louis-born German growled his thick, guttural command.

“Drop de hurses!” Fraeb shouted. “Drop dem, ebbery one!”

Many of those two dozen mountain men grumbled as they shoved and shouldered the frightened animals apart in a flurry. But every one of them did what they knew needed doing. Down the big brutes started to fall in a spray of phlegm and piss as the muzzles of pistols were pressed against ears and the triggers pulled. A stinking mess of hot horse urine splashing everyone for yards around, bowels spewing the fragrant, steamy dung from that good grass the horses were on two days back.

In those first moments of sheer deafening terror, Bass even smelled the recognizable, telltale odor of gut. Glancing over his shoulder, he watched as the long coil of purple-white gut snaked out of the bullet hole in that mule’s belly where the animal and other horses tromped and tromped and tromped in nervous fear and pain, yanking every last foot of gut out of the dying pack animal’s belly.

He had quickly poured some powder into the pan of his belt pistol, lunged over a horse already thrashing its way into eternity, and skidded to a halt beside the very mule that had been his companion ever since that momentous birthday in Taos.

Stuffing his left hand under the horsehair halter, his fingers white as he jerked back on the mule’s head, he shouted out in what he hoped would be a familiar voice, a calming voice. As a horse went down behind him, a slashing hoof clipped him across the back of his calf and he crumpled to his knees. Gritting his teeth with the pain as he got back on his feet, Bass pulled on the mule’s halter again and shouted as he pressed the muzzle of the short-barreled .54 just in front of the mare’s ear.

“Steady, girl,” he whimpered now. Tears streaming. Anger. Regret, too. Lots of regret. Then pulled the trigger.

He held on to the halter as she pitched onto her forelegs, her back giving a few kicks until she rolled onto her side. Nestled there in the shadow of her body lay the dirty, grass-coated rumple of her gut.

Titus knelt down at the head, staring a moment at the eyes that would soon glaze, watching the last flexing of the nostrils as the head slowly relaxed, pulling away from him.

“Good-bye, girl,” he whispered, the words sour on his tongue.

Bass patted the mule between the eyes, then quickly vaulted to his feet and wheeled around to reload. To continue the slaughter that was their only hope of living out this day.

He remembered another mule, the old farm animal that had grown old as Titus had grown up on that little farm back near Rabbit Hash, Boone County, Kentucky, beside the Ohio River. And then he felt the cold stab of pain remembering Hannah. The best damned four-legged friend a free man could ever have in these here mountains. Hannah—

The trappers dropped them all. Fraeb and some others hollering orders above the tumult. They all knew what was at stake. The resisting, dying animals must have smelled the dung and the piss, smelled the blood of their companions already soaking into the dust and sun-stiffened grass of this late-summer morning. They dropped them one by one, and in twos as well. Until there was a crude oval of carcasses and what baggage the men could tear off the pack animals and throw down in those gaps between the big, sweaty bodies that would begin stinking before this day was done and night had settled upon them all.

Twenty-four of them pitted against half a thousand Sioux and Cheyenne. Not to mention a hundred or more Arapaho who showed up not long after the whole shebang got kicked off with the first noisy, hoof-rattling charge. They must have been camped somewhere close and come running with all the hurraw and the gunfire.

Titus grinned humorlessly and pushed aside the one narrow braid that hung at his temple. The rest of his long, graying hair spilled over his shoulders like a shawl. Tied down with a faded black silk bandanna, holding a scrap of Indian hair over that round patch of naked skull from long ago. He thought on the bunch that had caught him alone many, many summers before—and stole his hair. Remembering how he eventually ran across the bastard who had taken his topknot—and lifted that small circle of hair from the crown of the warior’s head. Recalling how good it had felt to take his revenge.

So he grinned: maybeso some of the bastard’s relatives were in that bunch watching the Sioux and Cheyenne have at the white man’s corral. And pretty soon those Arapaho would figure it was time to grab some fun of their own.

Glancing at the sky, Bass found the blazing sun and figured it was not yet midmorning. That meant they had a long, long day ahead behind these packs and stinking carcasses. And with the way the first of the women were bristling along the crest of that hilltop yonder, the warriors weren’t about to ride off anytime soon, not with the whole village showing up to chant and sing them, on to victory, on to daring feats of bravery, on to suicidal charges that would leave the body of one warrior after another sprawled in the grass and dust of that no man’s land all around the white man’s corral. Bodies too close to the rotting breastworks for other riders to dare reclaim.

Titus blinked and wiped the sweat out of his eyes with the sleeve of his faded, grease-stained calico shirt. And saw the flecks of blood already dried among the pattern of tiny flowers. The mule’s blood. Bass glanced quickly at the sun once more, wondering if this was the last day he would ever lay eyes on it.

Would he ever see the coming sunset, as he had promised himself summers and summers ago when he rode away from that scalping, a half-dead shell of a man clinging to Hannah’s back? Would he ever see another black mountain night with its brilliant dusting of stars as he lay by the fire, staring up at the endlessness of it all, Waits-by-the-Water’s head nestled into his shoulder after they had just coupled flesh to flesh? Would he ever again see the children when they awoke each morning, clambering out of their blankets and tottering toward him as he fed the fire and started the coffee—eager to fling their little arms around his neck and squeeze him with what he always took to be utter joy in having another day to share together.

Together.

How he wished he was with the three of them now.

How thankful he was that he had compelled Waits to remain behind with the little ones. If the three of them were here with these twenty-four fated men now …

With the breakup of that last pitiful gathering of a few holdouts in the valley of the Green River, Bass had watched old friends disperse on the winds. Some just gave up on the mountains and pointed their noses back east to what they had been. Others, like Meek and Newell, set a new course for Oregon Country, where the land was fertile and free. But a hardy few had determined they would hang on, clinging to the last vestige of what had been their finest days. What had been their glory.

No more would the big companies dispatch their trapping brigades into the high country. There was no money to be made in trading supplies for beaver pelts at a summer rendezvous on the Wind, the Popo Agie, or some fork of the legendary Green. Bridger and Fraeb formed a new partnership and brought out that last, undersized packtrain from St. Louis. Afterward, while Bridger led a small band of trappers north, Fraeb and Joe Walker started for California with a few men.

Bass had marched his family north with Gabe’s undermanned bunch. And when Bridger turned off for Blackfoot country, Bass had steered east for Absaroka and the home of the Crow. There would always be beaver in that country—even if he had to climb higher, plunge deeper into the shadowy recesses than he had ever gone before. And, besides, traders like Tullock were handy with their post over at the mouth of the Tongue. He’d continue to trap close to the home of his wife’s folk, trade when he needed resupply, and wait for beaver to rise.

The way beaver had before. The way it would again.

They had a fair enough winter—cold as the maw of hell for sure, but that only meant what beaver he brought to bait were furred up seal-fat and sleek. When the hardest of the weather broke, he took a small pack of his furs down to Fort Van Buren, only to find that Tullock couldn’t offer him much at all. So Titus bought what powder and lead he needed, an array of new hair ribbons for his woman, a pewter turtle for Magpie to suspend around her neck, and a tiny pennywhistle for Flea.

How Bass marveled at the way that boy grew every time he returned to the village. At least an inch or more for every week Titus rode off to the hills. Even more so when he returned from the long journey to the Tongue. He was four winters old now, his beautiful sister to turn seven next spring, looking more and more like her mother with every season.

When it used to break his heart at how Waits-by-the-Water first hid her pox-ravaged face,* it now gave him comfort that she had made peace with what the terrible disease had cost her: not only the marred and pocked flesh, but the loss of her brother. Every time Bass returned from the hills, came back from the wilderness to his family, he quietly thanked the Grandfather for sparing this woman, the mother of his children. And he never neglected to thank the All-Maker for the days they had yet to share.

With the coming of that spring following the last rendezvous, he decided to mosey south, taking a little time to trap, if the country looked good—but with the primary intention of being in the country of the upper Green come midsummer, when Bridger planned to reunite with Fraeb. Last year, before going their separate ways, there had been serious talk of erecting a post of their own.

Damn, if that news didn’t stir up a nest of hornets! Old hivernants the likes of Gabe and Frapp ready to give up on trapping beaver, them two turning trader!

Bass chose trapping and hunting over the mindless chores of a cabin-raising sodbuster. He figured he’d pounded enough nails and shingled enough roofs to last him the rest of his days.† So when Henry Fraeb’s twenty-two rode out for the Little Snake, Titus went along. He reckoned on sniffing around some country he hadn’t seen much of since he lost hair to the Arapaho. Might just be a man might find a few beaver curious enough to come sniffing at his bait.

Besides … among the old German’s outfit were some of the finest veterans still clinging to the old life in the mountains. This hunt into the coming fall might well be the last great hurraw for them all.

The long days of late summer seeped slowly past. There wasn’t much beaver sign to speak of, and where the men did tarry long enough to lay their traps, they didn’t have much success. The hunting wasn’t all that fair either. Game was pushed high into the hills. Bass and others figured the critters had been chivied by the migrations of the Ute and Shoshone.

Turned out the game was driven away by the hunting forays of this huge village of wandering Sioux and Cheyenne, not to mention that band of tagalong Arapaho.

The sun had been up a good three hours that morning when one of Fraeb’s outriders spotted a half-dozen horsemen on the crest of the hill across the Little Snake.

“If’n they was Yuta, them riders be running down here first whack,” Jake Corn snorted. “Begging for tobaccy or red paint.”

“Snakes too,” Rube Purcell added. “Poor diggers they be.”

“Ain’t either of ’em,” Elias Kersey growled. “That’s for certain.”

“Lookit ’em,” Bass remarked. “Just watching us, easy as you please. Ain’t friendly-like to stare so, is it, Frapp?”

The old German hawked up the last of the night-gather in his throat and spat. “Trouble is vhat dem niggers lookin’ at.”

Fraeb picked four men to cross the river ahead of the rest, making for the far slope and those unfriendly horsemen. Then the rest started their animals into the shallow river just up the Little Snake from the mouth of a narrow creek. The trappers had the last of the pack animals and spare horses across right about the time the first muffled gunshot reached them.

Every man jack jerked up in surprise, finding their four companions returning lickety-split, like Ol’ Beelzebub himself was right on their tails, one of their number clinging the best he could to his horse’s withers as they lumbered down the slope. Behind them came the six strangers. And just behind that half-dozen … it seemed the whole damned hillside suddenly sprouted redskins.

“Fort up! Fort up!” came the cry from nearly every throat as the four trappers sprinted their way.

The twenty spun about, studying things this way, then that—when most decided they would have to make a stand for it right there with the river at their back.

“Pull off them packs for cover!” one of them bellowed.

But Bass knew right off there weren’t enough packs to make barricades for them all. Not near enough supplies lashed to those pack saddles, and sure as hell not any beaver bundles to speak of. One last-ditch thing to do.

“Put the horses down!”

One of the bold ones gave voice to their predicament.

“Shoot the goddamned horses!” another voice trumpeted as the four scouts reined up in a swirl of dust.

That’s when Titus could make out the yips and yells, the taunts and the cries—all those hundreds of voices rising above the dull booming thunder of thousands of hooves.

A tall redheaded youngster next to him came out of the saddle and was nearly jerked off his feet when his frightened mount reared. From the look on the man’s pasty face Bass could tell this might well be the most brownskins he’d ever seen.

“Snub ’im up quick and shoot him!” Bass grumbled as he lunged over to help the redhead.

“Pistol?”

“Goddamned right.” Then Titus turned his back and double-looped his own mule’s lead rope around his left hand as he dragged the pistol from his belt with his right.

“Drop de goddamned hurses. Ebbery one!” Fraeb repeatedly roared, as the first animals started falling.

From the corner of his eye, Bass watched the redhead obey. As the mount’s legs went out from under it, the horse nearly toppled the trapper. But the redhead scrambled backward in time, spilling in a heap atop Titus’s thrashing horse.

“You got a pack animal?” Bass demanded.

The redhead lunged onto his feet, craning his neck this way and that, then shrugged.

“Get down and make ready to use that rifle of your’n,” Titus ordered, then turned to bid farewell to the mule just a breath or two before the screeching horsemen dared to break across the flat into range of their big, far-reaching rifles.

He laid a hand on the mare’s neck as she breathed her last, stroking the hide until she no longer quivered. Gazing out over the slopes where the warriors gathered just beneath the ranks of their women, children, and old men—he saw her.

Clearly a woman. Dressed in the short fringed skirt that exposed her bare copper legs draped on either side of her brown-spotted pony. A short, sleeveless fringed top hung from her shoulders, where her unbound hair tossed on every hot breeze. Make no mistake: that was a woman. While the warriors were stripped to their breechclouts and moccasins, wearing medicine ornaments and power-inducing headdresses, the one intently watching the action from the hillside was clearly a woman—and probably a powerful one to boot.

Around her stood more than a double handful of attendants, young women and boys, all on foot. Together they joined in her high-pitched chants. She must be imploring the warriors to fight even harder, dare even more with each renewed assault.

“You see dat she-bitch?” the gruff voice asked in a masked whisper.

Bass turned to see Fraeb settling in beside him between the horse’s fore-and hind legs.

“Who she be, Frapp?”

The old German stared at the hill for a moment before answering. “She der princess.”

“Princess?”

“Ya. Princess dey fight for.”

Titus couldn’t quite believe it. “She’s giving the orders to all the rest?”

“Make medicine for them win.”

And Titus had to agree. “Yeah, medicine. I’ll bet if one of us knocked her down—these bucks see their own medicine shrivel up like salt on a green hide.”

“She come close your side—you knock her down, ya?” Fraeb asked as he rocked back onto his hands and knees to crawl off.

Licking his dirty thumb and brushing it over the front blade at the end of his rifle barrel, Bass vowed, “See what I can do for you.”

Back over at the far end of the oval, after the horsemen had made their third deafening rush on the corral, Henry Fraeb once more was squealing out orders, ordering some men to hold off—thereby making sure they would have at least half the guns loaded at all times. No more than a dozen were to fire at once, he reminded them again and again. No less than a dozen had to be ready should the whole hillside decide to make a great rush for them.

Charge after charge, the five hundred thundered down the long slope and across the river bottom toward that maze of deadfall and tree stumps, daring to ride ever closer to that corral of buffalo robes, blankets, and bloating carcasses. As the morning wore on, the ground in front of the dead stinking horses and mules reminded Bass of a field of barren cornstalks. Just as many arrow shafts quivered in those huge animals the mountain men had sacrificed to make this stand.

Well before the sun had climbed to mid-sky, two of the trappers lay dead, and the rest were grumbling with thirst. The river lay seductively close at their backs. Its gurgle almost close enough to hear—were it not for the grunts of the sweating men as they reloaded their rifles or hurriedly refilled their powderhorns from the small kegs among the scattered baggage. A peaceful, bucolic gurgle as the creek trickled over its gravel bed … were it not for the rising swell of war cries and the soul-puckering power of the coming thunder of those hooves.

“Dey comin’ again!” Fraeb would announce what every last one of the twenty-one others could see with their own eyes as the summer sun beat down on that corral of rotting horseflesh and desperate, cornered men.

“Remember,” Bass turned to whisper at the redhead nearby. “Wait till you got a target.”

“What’s it matter?”

He turned and looked at the youngster’s face. “It’ll matter. Each of us takes one of the bastards out with every run they make at us … it’ll matter to ’em.”

Titus watched the redhead swallow hard and turn away to stare at the oncoming horsemen. Sweat droplets stung his eyes. Grinding the sleeve of his calico shirt across his forehead, Bass calmly announced, “They call me Scratch.”

“Scratch?” the redhead repeated. “I heard of you.” His eyes went to the black bandanna covering Bass’s head. “Word has it you lost hair.”

Grinning, Bass nestled his cheek along the stock of his rifle, squinting over the front rank of horsemen. “That was a long time ago, friend.”

He found another likely target: tall, muscular youth brandishing what appeared to be an English trade gun in one hand as his spotted pony raced toward their corner of the corral. The Sioux and Cheyenne were clearly going to make another long sweep across a broad front again, tearing up grassy dirt clods as they streaked past the long axis of the barricades where most of the trappers lay or knelt behind the carcasses.

The redhead’s rifle boomed. Then it was Scratch’s turn to topple his target.

“Name’s Jim. Jim Baker,” the redhead turned to declare. “I’d like to say I’m glad to meet you,” he explained as he rolled onto his back to yank up his powderhorn and started to reload. “But I don’t figger none of us gonna get outta here anyways.”

“You listen here, son,” Bass snapped. “I been through more’n any one man’s share of scraps with red niggers—from Apach’ on the Heely, to Comanch’ over in greaser country, clear up to the goddamned belly of Blackfoot land itself. We ain’t beat yet—”

“How the hell we gonna get outta here?” Baker demanded as he jammed a ball down his powder-choked barrel. “We ain’t got no horses to ride—”

“We’ll get out, Jim Baker. You keep shooting center like you done so far … these brownskins gonna get tired of this game come dark.”

“G-game?”

“Damn straight, it’s a game to them,” Bass explained, then tongued a ball from among those he had nestled inside his cheek. As he pulled his ramrod free of the thimbles pinned beneath the octagonal barrel, he laid another greased linen patch over the muzzle and shoved the wiping stick down for another swab. Only when he had dragged out the patch fouled with oily, black powder residue did he spit the large round hall into his palm and place it in the yawning muzzle.

Baker glanced at the body nearby—a hapless trapper who had raised his head a little too far at the wrong moment and gotten an arrow straight through the eye socket for his carelessness. Penetrating to the brain, the shaft had brought a quick, merciful death. “This damn well don’t appear to be no game to me.”

“No two ways to it, Jim: this here’s big medicine to these brownskins,” Bass explained as he re-primed the pan. “White men ain’t been hurrooed by Sioux and Cheyenne much afore this, you see. Lookit their women up on that hill, singing and hollering their songs for ’em, telling their men to rub us out, all and everyone.”

“They can,” Baker groaned with resignation. “Damn well ’nough of ’em.”

“But they won’t,” Titus argued. “Ain’t their way to ride over us all at once. Sure, they could all come down here an’ tromp us under their hooves. They’d lose a few in rubbing us out, but they’d make quick work of it.”

“W-why ain’t they?”

“There ain’t no glory in that, Jim.” And Bass grinned, his yellowed teeth like pin acorns aglow in the early afternoon light. “Them are warriors. And the only way a warrior gets his honors is in war. This here’s war—a young buck’s whole reason for livin’. Wiping us out quick … why, that ain’t war. That’s just killing.”

Baker shook his head and rolled onto his knees again to make a rest for his left elbow on the ribs of his dead horse. “I don’t rightly care what sort of game them Injuns is having with us. I figger to do my share of killing.”

Bass rocked onto his rump and settled the long barrel atop the fist he made of his left hand, which rested on the horse’s broad, fly-crusted front shoulder. He was surprised to find that the woman had moved. Damn, if she wasn’t coming toward the bottom close enough that he might just have a chance to knock down Fraeb’s warrior princess.

Closer, closer … come on now, he heard himself think in his head as she and her unmounted courtiers inched down the slope, their shrill voices all the more clear now in the late afternoon air. If he held high and waited for that next gust of hot wind to die … he might just hit her. If not the warrior princess, then drop her horse. And if not her spotted pony, then one of them others what stood around her like she was gut-sucking royalty.

He let out half a breath and waited for the breeze to cease tugging on that thin braid of gray-brown hair that rested against his right cheek. Bass set the back trigger, then carefully slipped his fingertip over the front trigger, waiting—

When the rifle went off, he bolted onto his knees to have himself a look, not patient to wait for the pan flash and muzzle smoke to drift off on the wind.

Her brown-spotted pony rocked back onto its haunches, suddenly twisting its head and neck as the double handful of courtiers scattered—diving and scrambling off in every direction. As if plucked into the sky, the warrior princess herself sprang off the pony the moment its forelegs pawed in the air a heartbeat, then careened onto its side.

A few of those young men and women immediately surrounded the princess and started dragging her up the slope, away from the fighting, out of range of the white man’s far-reaching weapons.

Scratch watched her reluctantly back away, amused at how she continued to stare over her shoulder as she was yanked up that hillside, her eyes transfixed on the tiny corral where the trappers were holding out. Perhaps she even wondered just which one of the cursed whiteskins had killed her beautiful pony. Likely heaping her vilest curses on the man who had gone and soured her powerful medicine that she had been using to spur the naked horsemen to perform their death-defying charges.

“And well you should do your share of the damned killing, Jim Baker,” Bass replied to the redhead as he rocked backward and dragged the long barrel off the horse’s front shoulder.

Scratch swatted at a dozen flies hovering around his sweaty face and tugged the stopper from his powderhorn between his teeth. “Because killin’ ever’ last one of these bastards we can drop afore sundown comes is the only way this bunch of half-dead hide hunters is gonna slip outta here when it gets slap dark.”

*Ride the Moon Down

†Dance on the Wind