Crack in the Sky

18

Just what hell would be worse?

Dying of thirst? Or dying at the hands of those Apache?

One was slow … painful to the point of sheer, unbearable agony it was so slow. While the other was nothing short of a real gamble. It could be fast: taking a stone arrow in the lights, or through the heart, maybe having his head caved in by a war club or his throat slit with a knife as those pursuing warriors closed in for the dirty eye-to-eye of it.

Then again … from what they had decided some days back, the Apache likely could make a white man’s dying such a slow and exquisitely unimaginable torture that he might yearn all the more for this slow death from thirst as his tongue bloated until he could no longer swallow, no longer breathe. A savvy man might just have to prefer this agonizing broil right out under the sun itself to having the Apache hang him upside down over a low fire so that his brain slowly cooked and the blood that pooled in his head was eventually brought to a boil, his own juices so hot steam escaped from his ears.

At least that’s the way Hatcher’s bunch had described some of the most delicious ways the Apache could make a white man linger in his dying.

And all the way south from Pierre’s Hole, Asa had told him even more stories he had heard from other trappers who had worked the southwestern streams out of Taos and Santa Fe. Men who rode with the likes of Sylvester Pattie and his son, James Ohio Pattie, other men who trapped with Ewing Young or Etienne Provost. While the southern trapper did not have to concern himself with the horse-thieving Crow and the scalp-hungry Blackfoot, McAfferty made it plain that they would have to cross the land of the troublesome Diggers—so poor they ate insects and dressed in rabbit hides, a people who shot small rock-tipped arrows at the white trappers and their horses, arrows the Diggers used to hunt their small game and birds, rock-chip points nowhere big enough to cause death—just big enough that the Diggers would be a nuisance to their remuda of horses.

Pushing south from there a man entered the land of the Apache.

He realized the horse below him was beginning to move more slowly now, almost rocking from side to side as it plodded ahead. Bass did what he could to keep his head tucked to the side, his eyes closed. As the late sun dipped below the big brim of his hat, it still had enough glare to peel a man’s skin back. As he rocked atop his saddle, his thoughts slid back and forth, in and out of dream.

He desperately tried to remember, scolding himself that he must open his eyes every now and then to scan the horizon behind them for sign of the Apache—perhaps no more than a telltale spiral of dust barely discernible as it rose into the buttermilk sky.

Ahead or to the side he was forced to squint to cut out the glare in his search for some dark border that hinted at enough moisture to be a creekbed, murmuring something on the order of a prayer that he might locate that river bottom. Praying that they would again run onto the meandering course of the Heely they had abandoned days ago when they sprinted away to escape from these warriors who wore long breechclouts and tall leather boot moccasins, wide bandannas of colorful Mexican cloth tied around their heads. And poor skin quivers rattling with arrows.

Scratch hadn’t really seen them up close, not yet anyway.

Days back McAfferty had run across the sign late one afternoon—fresh tracks that suggested there were Apache in the area. Moccasin prints only, no pony hooves.

“That much be the Eternal Lord’s blessing,” Asa had exclaimed. “This ain’t a riding bunch. Ain’t stole no horses from the greasers east of here. Maybeso we got a chance to outrun ’em.”

That’s when Scratch had chortled. “Outrun ’em? Jehoshaphat! Have your brains been fried down in this country? Course we can outrun ’em—bunch of poor Injuns ain’t even got no horses to ride—”

“You stupid idjit!” McAfferty interrupted with a warning. “On foot them Apache can damn well keep up with a man on horseback.”

He had stopped his chuckling when he saw the serious pinch on Asa’s face. “You ain’t blowing a bald-face windy?”

“This is the Lord’s truth,” McAfferty swore. “I see’d it once my own self. Heard of it more’n a handful of times from others what saw it with their own eyes. ’Arise, O Lord; save me, O my God: for thou hast smitten all mine enemies upon the cheek bone; thou hast broken the teeth of the ungodly.’”

So those bastards could near keep up with a white man on horseback. And what little lead a man might gain through a day of riding was most times eaten right up when he stopped for the night, stopped to water and graze his done-in mount, stopped because it got just too damned dark to attempt crossing that unforgiving stretch of near-barren rock.

After crossing the Snake as they headed south from Pierre’s Hole, Scratch and Asa struck out for the Soda Springs northwest of the Sweet Lake before pushing on down along the foot of the Wasatch front, which took them through the valley of the Great Salt Lake. Skirting the eastern edge of that first, startlingly flat desert, they trapped the narrow streams draining the Pahvant Range, able to bring nothing more to bait than some miserably small beaver, their poor plews hardly worth skinning out. They plodded on, day by day, remaining hopeful that by working this far south, that autumn would last all the longer, that they could trap the Heely country right on into the middle of winter.

Resolutely they continued past the brilliant colors and haunting, wind-sculpted bridges and monoliths that made Scratch uneasy as he imagined those tall formations to be the ancient haunts of petrified monsters of a bygone era that might just return to life come dark, freed to roam this strange canyon and land of high desert until the next sun would rise.

Every distant sound, every changing shadow cast upon the rocks rising about him—it all pricked his imagination to conjure up fierce hoo-doos and formless wraiths.

Bass didn’t sleep near as good as Asa those nights they were forced to wait out the hours of darkness in this frightening journey through such an evil country. Without fail he sat up awake with their fire blazing, weapons in his lap, ears attentive to every groan of the incessant wind as it carved its way through the canyon, listening to every rolling rumble of the distant rocks tumbling off some nearby precipice, listening to the fading echoes of what might be footfalls of nameless beasts, the hair standing at the back of his neck.

As the sun itself arched farther to the south with each day, they tramped on, climbing through a high country before crossing a great river and striking across part of its desert, making for the green, lofty mountains they watched rise in the distance.

Choosing not to tarry at all to set their traps in those hills visited by Taos brigades, they put that high land behind them, pressing on south by west, guided every plodding step of the way by those landmarks Asa McAfferty had set to memory, recited firsthand from the lips of those who claimed to have looked down from those foothills at the basin below, where a man got his first glimpse of the Gila as it spilled southwest across a virgin land.

“No man you know of ever trapped this river?” Scratch had asked that first night they’d camped beside the Gila. This sure didn’t appear to be beaver country the likes of which he’d ever seen before.

“No one I heard of ever gone on down toward the Mex desert to see what lies in that country,” McAfferty had asserted. “The trapping outfits turned back from here.”

There had to be a cause, Bass reasoned. After all these weeks and, lo, the endless miles—surely there was something that had caused those hardy brigades to turn about and search for more hospitable country to the north and east of the Heely. At first he had figured it was only the heat and the yawning maw of the desert the farther south they rode that gave him a sense of unease … as they stopped here, then there, whenever they came upon beaver sign.

On their fourth day moving downstream the partners ran onto the beginnings of a lush valley fed by untold creeks spilling into the main river, a long and meandering country verdant enough to support a rich population of industrious flat-tails busily damming up their world into an endless series of ponds as the Gila continued its path between the foothills of two mountain ranges.

For more than a month they worked through the slowly shrinking daylight hours, trapping the unwary beaver never before chivvied in that country. Then McAfferty had spotted the moccasin prints late of an afternoon. After returning to camp, then taking Bass to study them with him, they both decided there was sign of enough warriors to cause them concern—no matter that those warriors were prowling about the country on foot.

“I heard tell from one of Pattie’s men that a man can foller the Heely upstream into the mountains,” Asa had asserted.

“How far them mountains be?”

“Far enough,” and McAfferty had pointed to the east. “A good ride will put ground atween us and them red heathens. ’Pour out thy wrath upon the heathen that have not known thee, and upon the kingdom that have not called upon thy name.’”

McAfferty had gone on to describe how he was told they could continue up the Gila, following it into the foothills, and eventually the mountains—saying all a man had to do was continue north by east from there in making his crossing of the high country, up and down through a series of broken ridges until he eventually dropped into the valley of the Rio Grande del Norte.

“The river what leads us right on into Taos for to winter up,” Asa had declared, gesturing dramatically with an outswung arm as he pointed to the northeast.

“You figger we ought’n load up and set off soon as it’s dark?”

But McAfferty had shaken his white head as he considered the plateau above the brushy draw where they had made camp the night before. “Nawww. Each of us take our watch tonight, go out come morning to collect our traps and turn back upriver for the mountains. The Lord my God will watch over and deliver us.”

Instead, they had spotted the warriors approaching from the rocks above just before first light. Abandoning what traps remained in the waters of the Gila, the white men fled, doggedly pursued right on into a country that reminded the ex-circuit-riding preacher of that land where Moses had led his Hebrews in their escape from a vengeful Pharaoh.

“Verily—that ol’ King of Egypt watched the destruction of his army beneath the hand of the one true God!” McAfferty had declared optimistically. “But God still had to punish His people with years of wandering in the desert because they turned from His voice.”

At their backs now, the sun was sinking behind the low, jagged, rocky bluffs that passed for hills in this desert country. Scratch remembered how three days before he had begun to wonder if he and McAfferty hadn’t themselves turned away from God’s voice—punished by being driven into an unforgiving desert, pursued so relentlessly by the Apache that they had eventually abandoned the Gila in a vain hope of eluding the warriors.

Leaving the river and crossing a low, rocky divide, Bass and McAfferty had fallen headlong into a basin where little but stunted brush and withered cactus struggled above the sun-baked hardpan. A sandy soil dotted with wide patches of golden, heat-seared bunchgrass broke up the monotony of the landscape as they pressed on for that thin, jagged line of purple beckoning from the distance.

In those mountains he knew they would find water, shelter, escape from their pursuers.

But on the morning of their second day without water they had spotted a second band of Apache off to their right in the distance—and were forced to turn sharply away from their goal. Forced to plunge deeper into a desert tracked only by jagged scars of waterless, scorpion-infested arroyos. At the bottom of one after another they had stopped only long enough to scrape down through the powdery sand with no luck, finding not so much as any damp soil before remounting their thirsty horses and urging their pack animals on behind them. Relentlessly keeping an anxious eye on the country at their backs, Bass was sure they had passed through the gates of hell itself.

Too many days. More waterless miles than he could recall. So much of his hope shriveled and drying the way the stunted plants in that land curled up and died. There had been no turning back. In every direction the prospects looked much the same. But only to the east did there appear the promise of cool, beckoning shade beneath that jagged scrap of autumn sky, while over their heads, hour after hour, hung nothing more than the sun, hovering like a sulled mule refusing to budge. It made his mouth water to gaze at that distant line of purple high country where a ragged batch of black-bellied clouds cluttered the eastern horizon.

Autumn rain. Bright green streaks of hot, phosphorescent lightning cracking the distant sky. Offering no more than a remote hope. Perhaps nothing more than despair for the man gradually dying of thirst now forced to watch those faraway thunderclouds, realizing he might never again feel the caress of cool rain upon his cracked, peeling, sunburned face.

Yet enough light flickered from heaven, streaking down through each jagged crack in the sky with every burst of that pale-green heat lightning, enough to give him renewed hope as they struggled on now, struggled on past the falling of the sun at their backs.

Suddenly the horse beneath him jerked its head, tugging the rawhide reins from his loose grip. In that next moment he heard Hannah snort. Instantly afraid the animals had winded Indians, Bass peered quickly to the right and left, painfully twisting his aching, thirst-ravaged body to gaze behind them. Nothing but a spiny dust column here and there as tiny whirlwinds zigzagged their way across the barren wastes. Nothing but those capricious spirals of the same alkali dust coating his nostrils, seeping into every pore, gumming up his swollen, blackened tongue and parched throat, making it hard to swallow around the tiny pebble he held beneath his tongue.

As he watched, the horse bearing McAfferty’s body suddenly side-stepped, pulling at the reins Scratch was holding—yanking them right out of his hand. Before he could get his own legs to respond, to kick his mount into motion, Asa’s horse was lumbering away, rolling into a clumsy lope with that deadweight of the trapper slung sacklike over its saddle.

Much as he might want to keep making for the distant mountains, Bass let his horse have its head as he followed vainly behind McAfferty’s animals. In their midst waltzed his ever-loving Hannah, her loads shimmying from side to side as she struggled to keep her footing on the uneven sands.

Wide-eyed were every one of the creatures, their dust-caked nostrils swelling all the bigger as they loped on yard after yard up a long, low rise toward a band of striated white and ocher bluffs looming in the middistance.

Up ahead of him some fifty yards at the top of that rise, he watched Asa’s body slipping to the off side, spilling headfirst onto the hard ground after the horse took another half-dozen steps. His body cartwheeled away from the hooves and came to rest on its back.

Struggling to stop his own resistant mount, yanking back repeatedly on the reins to get it halted, Bass had barely begun to swing his offhand leg over the saddle when the horse suddenly bolted, yanking his hands from the braided loop of rawhide, snatching the big cottonwood stirrup from his left moccasin and spilling him onto his hip.

Dazed, Scratch crawled to his knees and crabbed over to his partner.

“As-Asa,” he croaked, his voice disused in those last dry hours of the chase.

Gripping McAfferty’s chin in one hand, he pulled off the sweat-soaked hat and shook the white head.

“‘I am forgotten as a dead man out of mind: I am like a broken vessel,’” he gasped as Bass’s shadow came over his face. “Figgered to lay here till I was dead, Mr. Bass.”

“You ain’t dead.”

“I can see by the looks of your face you ain’t St. Peter waiting for me at the gates of heaven neither.”

Bass watched McAfferty’s eyes close, then flutter open again in the fading light as day slowly gave way to night. “Sundown, Asa.”

“What happened?”

Scratch looked up. “Animals bolted on us.”

“Might as well be dead now. No horses. Been this long, and no horses.”

“You been out of your mind, Asa,” he explained. “We been … been covering ground.”

“Don’t matter, I s’pose. ’Thout them horses,” he whispered wearily. “‘For my life is spent with grief, and my year with sighing: my strength faileth because of mine iniquity, and my bones are consumed.’”

How he wished McAfferty wouldn’t keep on spouting about their being without horses now. Peering behind them, Bass declared, “I don’t see nothing. Maybe they give up.”

“’Pache don’t give up,” said the cracked, swollen lips. “We’re in a fix anyways you set your sights,” Bass admitted as he rocked up onto one knee and started to stand. “Damp powder and no way to dry it, that’s our fix here and now.”

“Leave me,” McAfferty demanded. “Find some water.”

“Night’s coming on. Ain’t gonna leave you—”

“Best leave me when it gets dark.”

He brooded on that, again measuring horizon after horizon, then brought his eyes back to that bluff ahead of them where the rise of land lay smeared in contrasting layers. “Maybeso I’ll figger to go see where them horses run off to. Foller tracks. Catch one up. Come back for you.”

“‘Give us help from trouble: for vain is the help of man,’ Mr. Bass.”

Scratch started to rise onto the other leg, painfully. “You rest. I’ll … find us some water.”

“Get water or there ain’t no sense coming back for me.”

Something strange in the voice yanked him back to stare down at McAfferty’s face once more. There was a new, distant look in those dust-caked eyes. The haunted look of a man teetering on the precipice of the eternal and staring into the bottomless void at the instant his feet were about to give way.

Titus briefly touched Asa’s shoulder, laying his hand there in the hollow, where he swore he could feel the rattle of each of McAfferty’s shallow breaths.

“I’ll be back,” he whispered. “Shortly.”

After watching the eyes close within that dark, sunburned face, Bass struggled back onto his wobbly legs, uncertain of each step as he commanded his feet to shuffle forward beneath his weight. Yard by painful yard he slowly ascended what remained of the gentle slope toward that rise from where he figured he might look over enough ground to spot the runaway animals disappearing toward the striated bluff, its hues beginning to darken as the light continued to fade from the desert sky.

A soft breeze met him in the face as he neared the top of the slope. Something more than a choking, sand-dry wind—bearing with it a hint of some new scent on that warm air as he dragged it into his nostrils.

At the top his legs stopped beneath him suddenly of their own accord. It was better than lunging on over, only to have to come back up, he figured. His eyes began to descend to the base of the bluff as he drew in another of those mercifully blessed breaths of that new air. Then spotted the five animals below him.

No more than three hundred yards away at the bottom of the gentle slope, they stood among a scattered profusion of belly-high brush and boulders that had tumbled from the side of the nearby sandstone bluff. At least the animals had found some cover for the two of them to hole up in—someplace where they could make it a little tougher for the Apache to get at them than it would be out on the open flat.

He needed to get one of the saddle mounts and lead it back for Asa. Couldn’t leave him out there now that night was coming. No matter that the dark might conceal him from their pursuers. The Apache would likely have no trouble following tracks beneath the stars and that thin rind of a moon until they bumped right into the half-dead white man.

“Then they’d make me listen to your screams all night,” Bass brooded to himself as he forced his legs to wobble down the slope toward the animals huddled in the brush. “Damn you anyways, Asa McAfferty—for making me listen to them cut on you slow while them bastards tear you gut from gizzard like one of their goddamned animals they was getting ready to eat. Maybe even hang you over their fire.”

One leg at a time, he braced a knee and swung the other leg forward.

“You ain’t gonna make me listen to that, you son of a bitch. I’m gonna get you down here with these damned animals … if I have to drag you in my own—”

He lurched to a halt. Watching the horses and that pretty mule of his, all with their heads bent low, snuffling, as if they were grazing.

Then, as the warm breeze quieted its evening sigh, he heard their noisy drinking.

Water! They were drinking water.

A whimper broke free of his throat as his feet lumbered forward on their own, hurrying him on down the slope toward the animals. Now he saw how they stood up to their knees in the stream. Its semiglossy surface lured him on, glittering in the dim, silvery shine of those first stars and rind of moon.

Shoving his way past the huge, dusty rumps and heaving sides of the burdened animals, Bass waded ankle-deep into the dark liquid ribbon some fifteen feet across. Not just water—but one helluva lot of it!

Collapsing onto his knees, Scratch flung himself forward, landing face-first into the cool stream. Wagging his head back and forth deliciously beneath the surface, he drank and drank and drank as he remained submerged. Then yanked his head out and sputtered, sucking in a long breath, the warm evening air singing past his tortured membranes as his lungs swelled to bursting.

Down under he dived again, reveling in the glorious sanctuary this much water gave him, feeling it finally soak through the thick buckskin of his war shirt, wetting the linsey-woolsey shirt, making it all clammy against his sunburned chest and back.

Flipping his head back, he yanked off the soppy hat and hurled it back toward the bank, suddenly aware of just how much his long, curly hair weighed as he flung the mass of it back over his shoulders. In the next breath he rolled over onto the sandy river bottom. Now he leaned back, slowly back, until he was submerged right up to his chin—just the way he had dreamed he would when his last vestige of hope seemed about as far away as those distant, jagged lines of lightning that savagely split the sky asunder.

Now they would survive the night. Here they could fort up the next day until they regained their strength. They could drink their fill until the following night, when they would press on toward range after range of the distant mountains dark against the twilit sky. Perhaps they stood some small chance of making it back to Taos. Perhaps they …

They.

Bass sat upright in a noisy gush of water, feeling the liquid sluice off him as he gazed up the long slope toward the high ground. Beyond that rise, somewhere on down the other side, lay Asa McAfferty.

Feeling renewed, strong enough to clamber out of the water, Scratch seized up the reins to his own animal as he dragged its muzzle out of the water.

“Don’t want you getting loggy On me,” he scolded it as he yanked on the reins.

For a moment the horse protested, then reluctantly allowed Titus to pull it around and climb into the saddle, water pouring out of his leggings and off the twisted fringes at the bottom of the war shirt, spilling in sheets down over the saddle as he tapped his heels into the ribs before stuffing his moccasins into the stirrups.

“Hep-hep! Let’s git!”

The horse was slow getting him back up to the top of the rise, but it was far better than trudging up the slope on his own two legs. At the top his eyes began to search the sandy ground for a dark object large enough to be McAfferty.

Bass spied something to the left, and a few moments later he hauled back on the reins, staring down at the body a heartbeat before he dragged himself from the saddle, wet leggings gluing themselves to wet saddle. His leathers weighed as much as a trap sack.

Going to his knees beside his partner, Scratch bent over Asa’s face as he yanked up the long flap of his own breechclout and rubbed the wet wool across McAfferty’s hot face.

With a groan Asa stirred fitfully beneath the insistent rubbing.

Clenching a fist around a corner of the trade wool, Bass squeezed some water out of the thin cloth he held right over his partner’s swollen, blackened lips. Then he wiped the breechclout against the cracked lips, parting them with his fingertips and squeezed some more. When there was no more water left in the wool, he yanked up the fringed bottom of his war shirt, pulling it aside so he could grab the long tail of the linsey-woolsey shirt. From it he squeezed more water between the slack lips until McAfferty finally sputtered. Then coughed as the tiny stream of water pooled at the back of his throat.

But Asa managed to get it down, swallowing with a harsh, raspy, choking sound while his eyes blinked open. “W-water?”

“I found some.”

“Wa-wa-water,” and he licked his swollen lower lip with the tip of his blackened tongue. “Praise be.”

For some time Titus remained there beside McAfferty, squeezing what was left in the breechclout and shirttail until there was no more. Eventually he raised his partner off the ground, across his shoulders, and stood shakily with the larger man for the second time that day. Stumbling forward, Bass got Asa over to his horse and thrown over the saddle.

“Ain’t far, long as you don’t go and fall off on me again,” he assured as he gently patted McAfferty on the back and took up the reins. “I figger I ain’t got no bottom left in me to get you pulled off the ground again.”

There was no answer but the whisper of the night breeze as darkness seemed to suddenly grip the desert the moment he turned to nudge the horse into motion, like a huge black wing silently passing over the land. Back up that rise he led the animal, straining to reach the crest, where he finally peered down again at the dark meandering line of that narrow river, on over to begin their descent.

He led the horse into the midst of the others about the time Hannah raised her snout and announced her satisfaction with a watery snort. Up to his knees in the river, Bass stopped the horse, dropped the reins then and there, and turned back to grip a hand under each of Asa’s armpits. Leaning back with his own failing strength, Titus tugged far enough to get McAfferty’s legs over the wet saddle with a struggle—then the man’s deadweight took over, and Asa spilled headfirst into the water.

Sinking to his knees, Bass snagged hold of the back of his partner’s long white hair and dragged his head out of the water. Asa sputtered helplessly, so weak he couldn’t raise his own head. He stared up at Scratch, eyes blinking, those swollen lips moving wordlessly at first until he finally got the words out.

“P-praise God for our deliverance.”

“Better you praise these here goddamned horses for smelling water, Asa McAfferty,” Bass grumbled as he turned his partner’s head to the side, supporting the man so his tongue could lap right at the river’s surface.

McAfferty drank, then drank some more, and finally cocked his head so he could peer up at those animals standing about them in the dark river while he shoved long, dripping tendrils of his wet, white hair out of his eyes.

Finally his gaze came to rest on Scratch, those eyes of his glowing once again like twelve-hour coals. “God made these here dumb brutes under us to be thirsty critters, Titus Bass. Verily I say, that same God led these brutes to find us this water.”

Funny thing how a little water could change a man’s whole outlook. Enough that he didn’t mind being clammy and cold as the wind came up and the temperature dropped as if all that day’s heat was nothing more than a long-ago memory.

The desert had a way about it of pointing out to a man just how fickle nature could be. Almost as fickle as damn near every white woman he had ever known. At sunrise the earth began to warm, the cold air slowly dissipating in the mists clinging back in low places. But long before sundown, a man might well vow all he possessed and half his soul in exchange for a patch of shade and a pool of tepid water. And by the next sunrise that man would be shivering, his teeth rattling like bone dominoes in a hardwood box, praying for the sun to rise once more so it could warm the chill from his bones.

For the longest time the two of them had remained in the shallow river, soaking in the cool water as if it were life’s elixir. And by the time that Bass suggested they get to the far shore and find a place to fort up beneath the bluff, McAfferty was able to clamber to his feet with a little help. His arm locked over Scratch’s shoulder, he hobbled toward the bank.

Titus left him there with his rifle while he went upstream in search of a likely spot among the rocks. And when he got Asa and the animals moved that two hundred yards farther along the north bank, Scratch pulled their buffalo robes from the packs. With them both he wrapped McAfferty against the deepening cold of the desert night, then settled down beside his partner, clutching a pair of blankets around his own shoulders.

He had begun to shiver as the moon rose late, spun toward the west, then fell quickly. Only after it set had he finally warmed within his wet clothing, snug enough that he no longer trembled. Through the long hours his shivering had served to keep him awake, too fitful even to doze. Beside him now in the first graying of the night, McAfferty snored softly, another sound among all the others magnified on the wind that came to him off the desert, moving up the river valley.

He wondered if the Apache had followed close enough to reach them just before dawn. Wondered too if those strong, bandy-legged warriors were the sort to stop now and again in their pursuit just long enough to sleep for an hour or so before they would again take up the chase.

Bass felt his eyes close as the cold breeze sank off the shoulder of the bluff overhead. He hoped he would hear the Apache as they crept up out of the gloom. Maybe even smell them on the dry desert night air.

Fawn’s hands were cool on his skin where she had pulled back the buffalo robe to expose him to her eyes, to her touch. She wasn’t the sort to tease him, moving her fingers across his belly or down the inside of his thighs. Fawn went straight to his manhood: caressing it without preliminaries, massaging it into readiness, stroking it insistently, often impatiently, until she herself took him and drove his manhood within her. Often would he keep his eyes closed until he felt her moving to straddle him, gazing up to find the Ute woman settling atop him like an ember-lit shadow in the winter darkness of her lodge.

He gazed up now, surprised to find Pretty Water staring down at him. As her moistness clamped around his rigid flesh, he wondered for a moment where Fawn had gone. Wondered where the Ute village had disappeared. Wondered why he had never found them that summer he went looking for them … the summer he was scalped.

This woman riding back and forth slowly atop him was Shoshone. He found her so different from Fawn. Pretty Water was the sort to tease him to the point where he wanted to cry out, to growl at her with her playfulness that he flung her back onto the blankets and thrust himself into her out of the fiery hunger she aroused in him as her fingers barely brushed the flesh around his manhood, but never really caressed it. How she grinned as she watched his penis twitch and grow, even though she wasn’t touching it directly. How she sighed as she gazed upon the growing excitement she had caused. How she groaned when he shoved her legs apart and madly drove himself within her, so crazy had she made him.

There above him she rocked up and back, up and back, raising her buttocks from his thighs just enough to slowly pull him out, then slowly seating him deep within her again….

He felt himself ready to explode as he gripped her small, soft breasts in his hands, wanting so badly to lick the nipples again just as he erupted—

Hannah’s snort brought him awake.

Frantically he dug a knuckle at his eyes, listening.

The mule snorted again, more loudly.

He smelled it too. A change in the air.

What direction was the wind coming from? Bass turned his face into the breeze, drinking deep of all that it could tell him. Upstream. They were upstream … and likely on his side of the river already. Perhaps they had crossed upstream after finding the white man’s trail descending to the bank.

And now they were closing in. Waiting for dawn.

Tightening his grip on the rifle’s wrist, Titus ground his knuckles into his gritty eyes a second time and blinked. Sore and prickly from lack of real sleep, burning from the relentless glare of endless days beneath that wide brim of his felt hat—they felt as if he never would get the grains of sand flushed from them. Red, swollen, so gritty that he wondered if he would ever focus them again.

Upstream. He kept staring upstream through that cleft in the low, waist-high rocks. Watching the light change as he gazed across the gray, shadowy, dreamy texture of boulders and brush and the river’s silvery path through it all.

Behind him one of the horses accompanied Hannah with its own plaintive whinny. They likely felt boxed in back against the tall overhang of the bluff—helpless now with that scent of the enemy growing strong in their nostrils.

Different this must be from anything they had smelled on the northern plains. Thankful too that these animals never grew accustomed to the odor of Indians—no matter where, no matter what tribe.

The light began to bubble a little more, defining edges to the gray of low boulders scattered on either side of the river, giving depth to the black splotches that were the low clumps of brush dotting the banks.

From between the brush and boulders emerged the angular shadows stepping into the midst of the silver ribbon. First there were two, then another pair, then six fanning out in an arrow pointed at the white men.

There surely had to be more.

“Asa!” he whispered harshly, shaking McAfferty’s shoulder.

As the trapper worked at opening his eyes, Bass grumbled, “We got company!”

Sputtering something with his thick, swollen tongue, McAfferty shoved his rifle toward Bass. “Take it.”

Turning quickly to stare at his partner, Scratch asked, “You got you your pistol?”

Painfully, McAfferty worked his fingers around the curved butt and struggled to hold it aloft. “I’ll get one of ’em for sure—they get close enough.”

“Get that other pistol of your’n too.”

“Saving it for me.”

“For you?”

McAfferty licked at his cracked, bloodied lips. “Don’t let these here ’Pache bastards take you alive, Mr. Bass,” he implored. “Better to go under by your own hand—”

“Shoot myself?”

“They’ll roast you over a slow fire if they take a notion to—”

“Shuddup!” Bass snapped. That was the last thing he wanted to hear. Suddenly his mouth was again as dry as it had been for the last three days.

Chastised, Asa closed his eyes and began to mutter, “‘Though a host shall encamp against me, my heart shall not fear.’”

The six slowly crept their way. He had to make each of the rifle shots count. His own. McAfferty’s rifle. And Asa’s big-gauge smoothbore. Along with Bass’s own flintlock pistol. And if Asa used his two pistols, they could account for all six of the bastards.

Pebbles and loose sand skittered down the side of the bluff over his left shoulder, jerking him around—

An unearthly cry raised the hair at the back of his neck.

Whirling, Bass watched the black wisp of shadow materialize out of the ashy gray of that line formed by the rocky outcrop thrust up against the dawn sky just above them. As he brought up his rifle and squeezed back on the trigger, he heard the others let out with their catlike calls from the stream behind him. With the weapon’s roar the warrior let out a shrill shriek as the Apache plunged on through the air, slamming against the muzzle of the rifle an instant after the soft lead ball plowed through his chest. Dead before he spilled to the ground at Bass’s feet.

Knocking Titus backward against a boulder.

McAfferty was kicking against his robes, shrieking, “God’s wrath falls on the necks of the Philistines!”

“Shoot the bastards!” Scratch bellowed as he wheeled about, dropping his rifle and sweeping up McAfferty’s rifle: dragging the hammer back to full-cock.

Breaking into a run, the six were yelping, slogging as fast as they could through the knee-deep river, making straight for the boulders where the white men waited.

Jamming the rifle against his shoulder, Titus aimed into the dim light at one of the black shapes bobbing atop the silvery surface of the water. Pulling back on the trigger suddenly, he felt the gust of wind at his back as the weapon roared, hearing behind him the grunt from his partner.

Squinting his eyes with that second brilliant glare of muzzle flash, Scratch whipped about on his heels, finding an Apache rising from McAfferty, rocking back on his knees and pistoning back an arm. At its end a huge stone club hung in the air.

Asa sat dazed from the first blow from the Apache, who leaped upon him from the narrow shelf of rocks directly behind them.

Wheeling, Titus lashed out at the warrior with the heavy octagonal barrel, slamming the Apache on the shoulder as he began his swing at McAfferty. But only enough to shove the warrior to the side, rolling him onto a hip to glare back at Scratch.

Springing to his feet like a mountain cat, the Apache cried out hellishly as he dived headlong for Bass, almost as if he sought to spear the trapper in the middle of the chest with his head.

They fell backward together against the boulder, catching Bass at the back of his hips, bending him on across the curve of the rock. Arcing the muzzle around a second time the instant the warrior drew back to make a try for his own belt knife, Scratch caught the Apache along the temple with a crack as loud as a maul colliding with a tight-grained hickory stump. Titus never watched the warrior settling into the sand at his feet.

He was already spinning back to find the rest.

Yanking back on the hammer—then suddenly remembering that he held an empty rifle.

Hurling it aside as McAfferty scrambled to his knees, wagging his head groggily, Bass scooped up the smoothbore. He was snapping back the huge goosenecked hammer as he caught sight of Asa rocking forward on his knees, the pistol coming out at the end of both arms—a jet of bright, incandescent yellow spewing from the big muzzle.

Shadows loomed even larger in the coming light of morning, playing off the gray of sky and dull shimmer of river surface. The first lunged into the air and landed in a crouch atop the low boulders, his wet moccasins clawing the surface, coiling instantly, then springing on toward the white men.

“Other pistol–”

Bass raked back on the smoothbore’s trigger as he shouted his command, watching the warrior rock sideways. As the Apache fell between the two trappers, gurgling, clawing at the damp sand, Titus turned aside. Lifting the empty smoothbore into the air by its barrel, he brought it down savagely on the warrior’s neck, then smashed the brass-plated butt three more times into the back of the Apache’s skull.

McAfferty cried, “My last shot!”

Pulling back from that last, sodden crush of the enemy’s head, Scratch turned in a crouch the moment McAfferty fired that second pistol of his. As he dropped the smoothbore into the sand beside Asa, Bass lunged for the handles of two of the tomahawks they had laid out in readiness beside the white-head.

Just as he rose and straightened, one of the last two Apache leaped out of the stream like a panther, howling in a crouch as he landed on the rocks, immediately snapping his bow string forward. On the dry air Scratch heard the thwung as Asa gasped, a moment before Scratch swung the tomahawk sideways through the air like a scythe, catching the warrior’s belly, slashing through soft flesh, sensing the hot blood gush across his sunburned wrist as the Apache crumpled backward, nearly cut in half.

A searing cry warned of another behind him.

Spinning around, Titus had no more than a heartbeat before the eighth warrior sprang from the narrow shelf, falling spread-eagled out of the dawn sky for the white man. From the corner of his eye, Bass watched Asa’s arms jab forward, both hands clutching a skinning knife, blade pointed skyward as the Apache plunged downward.

The knife caught the warrior just below the breastbone, where the Apache’s weight and McAfferty’s sudden twist to the side drove the weapon deep, opening up the warrior’s abdomen as he collapsed against Bass, writhing on his knees.

The Apache’s arms flailed helplessly, a knife spilling out of one of the brown hands that clutched his wound. Stumbling backward, Scratch collided with the rocks. For a terrifying moment the warrior’s face seemed to hang in front of his, a dark river of black blood oozing from his lips as the eyes locked on Bass’s … then rolled back to whites as the body continued its slump to the sand.

His heart thumping, hot adrenaline coursing through his veins, Scratch stared down at the warrior crumpled around his knees as if merely resting there, half in a squat. He cocked back with a foot, knocking the Apache free, and leaped aside. Spooked by those eyes that had locked on to his for that moment in time, eyes that were already dead even in that instant.

His right hand wet with drying blood, he shoved the tomahawk into his left, snatching his pistol from his belt. He was dragging the hammer back to full-cock as the last screaming Apache vaulted over the top of the rock downstream suddenly. The warrior lunged forward, knocking Scratch’s right hand out of the way the instant the pistol came up, swinging his own brown hand out wide in a savage arc that showed a glint of steel.

Collapsing back suddenly, Bass sensed the burn of the blade as it raked past his belly. Sensed that sudden cold of the dawn air against the wound, that seep of icy warmth as the blood beaded and oozed.

Already the warrior was beginning a second sweep, coming from Bass’s right this time.

Yanking the pistol back, Titus suddenly shoved the right hand upward, flinging the Indian’s wrist aside as he brought the short barrel’s muzzle under the brown chin and pulled the trigger.

With the Apache’s knife hand crookedly imprisoned beneath the man’s chin, the top of the warrior’s head exploded in a glittering spray of crimson as the first orange rays of light seeped over the edge of the gray desert.

Gripping the tomahawk handle all the tighter in his left hand as he spun back toward the river, Titus stared over the low boulders, ready for the rest.

Everything was quiet but for the murmuring river.

And McAfferty’s raspy breathing.

Nothing moved. Nothing but the light on the water as the ribbon’s surface lost its silvery glitter in those moments … became a river once more. Brush and rocks no longer shadows.

And along the banks, there lay those brown bodies half-submerged in the shallow water, one of the warriors bobbing up to the foot of the waist-high boulders, slowly turning in the gentle current until the Apache stared at the dawn sky with glazed eyes, a great dark smear on his chest as he bobbed to the side, wedged in the eddy that lapped against the rock.

So quiet suddenly, so quiet that he thought he could hear the water lapping against the dead man’s body.

“That … that all of ’em?” Asa croaked.

Bass finally turned and glanced at his partner before his eyes studied the rock ledge behind them. He sighed, “Looks to be. Any more of ’em—they’d be all over us now.”

“‘That thy foot may be dipped in the blood of thine enemies, and the tongue of thy dogs in the same.’”

Scratch knelt, so weary, he wasn’t sure he would ever stand again.

McAfferty watched Titus settle. “You’re cut.”

“Could be worse,” he said, peering down at the slash that yelped in pain with every brush of the dawn breeze.

“Best see to it soon as you can.”

“Let’s just damn well get these guns reloaded,” Bass growled, not wanting to look again at that torn flesh.

“You do that, then you take the scalps.”

Wagging his head, Titus quietly said, “Leave the goddamned scalps.”

“We gonna take the scalps,” McAfferty prompted wearily, rising to his knees. “They’re ours now.”

“I don’t give a damn,” Scratch replied. “I don’t ever figger to be back here—”

“You don’t take your scalps,” McAfferty blurted out as he snatched hold of the front of Bass’s half-damp war shirt, “the ghosts come back for you one day.”

“Ghosts?”

His icy blue eyes squinted half-closed as they slowly volved down to stare at the half-naked bodies there among them in the rocks. “You don’t take this hair—the ghosts come back for you.”

With a snort Bass shook his head. “Of all the softheaded, schoolchild—”

McAfferty jerked down on Scratch’s shirt, shutting him up. “You listen,” he rasped, his dark eyes filled with terror. “Only one scalp I never took, Mr. Bass. Only one. The hair of a Ree medicine man.”

“Hatcher told me …” and then his voice trailed off as he watched how pale his partner’s face became.

Asa’s blue eyes had gone to slate as they flicked left and right, as if he were expecting to catch something more hurtling at them out of the gray of dawn’s light. “Should’a took the hair of that’un … but I didn’t. And now the old bastard’s ghost is gonna come for me.”

Scratch swallowed hard. “You don’t believe—”

“One day he’ll come for me.”