Death Rattle

13

“This big son of a bitch figgered to dip his stinger in one’r both of these gals while them soldiers was away chasing horse stealers?” Kersey asked as he inched closer to Bass.

“Easy to see he’s a hard user, Elias,” Bass sighed, his mind working, squeezing down on their predicament with the two women.

Corn started, “This messes things up real good—”

But Frederico interrupted, sputtering something in his worked-up, incomplete Spanish.

Nonetheless, Titus caught enough words. In his own halting Spanish, he told the Indian, “Stay put now.”

“This genizaro^* speaks my language too, chaguanoso?” the blacksmith growled.

“Si, he does—”

“Like you, gringo,” the Mexican said.

“Chaguanoso,” Titus repeated the word the blacksmith had used. “What’s it mean?”

“You’re a horse stealer,” said the blacksmith. “A low form of life, horse stealer.”

“Better than a big-talking man who hides behind women.”

The big Mexican grinned. “You want these women, eh?”

“Yes, we came for the women.”

The blacksmith’s eyes narrowed in confusion. “Aren’t there enough Indian women where you come from, gringo? Can’t you get some for your own fun?”

For an agonizing few moments Bass translated that in his mind, turning it over and over to make sure he got it right. Then he said, “We came to take the women away with us—”

“Get your own women, chaguanosos!”

“No,” Bass shot back, twisting the knife in his right hand. “We come to take these two women back to their people.”

Slowly the blacksmith’s eyes crawled to the Indian. From there he glanced at Purcell and Adair both crumpled on the ground, bleeding. Then his eyes quickly danced over some of the soldier bodies scattered across the compound. Those black, forbidding eyes that so reminded him of Emile Sharpe’s glare eventually came back to rest on the old trapper.

“That nigger’s gotta go down afore we leave here,” Kersey observed as he peered at Adair and Purcell.

“I give you one of the women,” the blacksmith offered with a shrug. “Go, whore!” and he shoved the muzzle of his pistol against the back of her head.

She stumbled forward a step and froze, her eyes wide with terror as she turned slightly to gaze at the Mexican.

“We are leaving with both of them,” Bass warned, just as he spotted the Indian guide going into a crouch. “Frederico—don’t move! This one, he is mean. If you do anything stupid, he will kill your sister.”

“S-sister?” the blacksmith echoed.

Titus’s gut sank with the realization he’d made a terrible mistake.

The Mexican asked again, “This one I will keep is the Indian’s sister?”

Titus shook his head. “We’re taking both—”

“No, gringo. I give you the sister and we keep the other whore.”

“Both.”

“Maybe … they are both sisters, eh?” The big Mexican’s eyes squinted cruelly.

“You give us both, or we kill you,” Titus said. “There’s many more whores at the mission. You can have them to keep—”

“Si, there are so many Indian whores at the mission,” the blacksmith interrupted. “Why don’t you gringos get some whores from the padres there—just the way the holy friars give us women for our beds. And when we need more women, the friars give us all we need, the ones do not work hard enough in the vineyards.”

Scratch took a tentative step forward. “Why do you need other women when you already have—”

With a loud, harsh gush of laughter, the blacksmith rocked his head back quickly, then said, “Women do not always last. Some get hurt very bad when our play with them is too rough. Then we can no longer use whores who are hurt so bad. And,” he shrugged, “some of the whores, they kill themselves if they get the chance—grab a gun or knife to hurt themselves badly. Ah, the holy fathers know not to ask any questions when we go to them to ask for more Indian whores from the mission!”

Sure as hell those men of God didn’t ask, Titus brooded. This was nothing short of a deal made between the devil and his evil minions themselves. At every California mission the soldiers kept hundreds of Indian slaves terrorized and docile for those self-righteous Franciscan friars, while the padres repeatedly turned over an array of the youngest, prettiest Indian girls to the army posts. Appeared that the friars and the soldiers both had something the other needed badly. And with their most unholy bargain, a peaceful colonial order was struck in this new world.

“When the soldiers come back,” Titus said, “go get some others. Can’t you see how you’ve used these women up?”

“What?” roared the blacksmith. “They are not dead yet! Go away before I have to kill them just for fun while I have myself poked inside one. A geniazo whore is bound to die sooner or later anyway!”

In a frightening blur, Frederico dove forward, tackling Celita, both of them spilling to the side at the Mexican’s feet. At this moment Mayanez twisted in the blacksmith’s grip and planted the fingers of both hands into his face, unmindful of the slashing he did along her forearms with his knife. She screamed in pain—but dug her claws into his face even more fiercely as she kicked and thrashed with her tiny bare feet. The Mexican shrieked in his own torment.

Backwards he stumbled as Kersey and Bass lunged forward.

“Stay down!” Titus yelled at Frederico as he rushed toward the blacksmith. “Get her out of here!”

Another step backward the blacksmith stumbled, desperately attempting to hack the shrieking woman from his flesh. Up and down his face, neck, and across his chest she scratched, ripping ribbons of crimson on his brown skin. With the two Americans closing in the big Mexican roared in pain and desperation, seizing a handful of Mayanez’s black hair. He yanked her head back and shoved the pistol into her face.

“NO!”

But just as Titus reached the blacksmith, the Mexican pulled the trigger.

The back of the woman’s head exploded, bright blood splattering the Mexican, Titus, and even Elias Kersey too.

With a shriek of horror, Celita tried to grab for her brother, but an enraged Frederico sprang to his feet and flung himself on the blacksmith at the moment Bass was diving under that huge hand gripping the knife. Together they thrust the Mexican back against the adobe wall with a loud grunt.

Back and forth Titus raked his skinning knife across the soldier’s gut, slicing deeper and deeper with each heave of the bone-handled weapon. Gut spilled at their feet, the two trappers slipping, stumbling in the blood and greasy coil as the Mexican slowly, slowly slid downward, his back pressed against the wall.

The stench was heavy and foul, nothing new to Bass. Both trappers inched back. Kersey knelt to pull Mayanez’s body away from the blacksmith as the Mexican’s half-lidded eyes gazed up at Titus.

For a moment he stared down at his riven belly, the pile of dirty intestine between his legs, blood flooding his uniform breeches; then his glazing eyes fought to focus on Scratch.

“Chaguanoso, eh—I think women only bring the trouble for a man. See how it is with me? The women, they only bring big, big trouble for a man.…”

With a rush the air escaped the Mexican’s chest, making that distinct and unmistakable rattle Titus had heard more times than he dared count. Years and years, surrounded by sudden, capricious death.

Behind him, Frederico and Celita crouched over Mayanez’s body.

Scratch turned to Kersey. “Get me a blanket, Elias.”

With the gray soldier blanket, Frederico and Celita wrapped up their dead sister while Bass and Kersey went over to join Corn and Coltrane by the wounded Adair and Purcell.

“Gonna use your belt, Silas,” Scratch said as his fingers worked at the buckle.

When Roscoe had his friend Adair propped up, Titus dragged the scabbard and a small pouch from the belt, then stuffed the wide strap under Silas’s thigh, a few inches above the dark smear of blood. Once the end of the belt was back through the round buckle, Titus tugged it tight, then half-hitched the strap under itself to secure the tourniquet.

“I lost lotta blood,” Adair groaned in a weakened whisper, his head sinking back against Coltrane’s chest.

“You ain’t gonna die here,” Scratch said. “Less’n you want me to leave you.”

“Silas? Die here? With a bunch of dead Mex’can soldiers?” Kersey chortled, his s’s whistling as he clearly did what he could to cheer up Adair. “Now that’d be a yank on the devil’s short-hairs!”

Bass turned to give his attention to Purcell. “How’s Rube?”

With Jake Corn’s help, the skinny man pulled the tail of his shirt up even farther so Titus could see for himself. “Well, damn-me, Scratch, if that ball didn’t go right on through. An’ that’s the preacher’s truth.”

“The man’s nothing but bone and sinew-strap anyway,” Corn declared. “If a ball don’t hit him in a bone, you ain’t gonna hurt this nigger none.”

“That’s the narrow truth of it,” Purcell said.

Scratch nodded. When he stood, Titus flexed his back, suddenly aware of his own raw flesh wound once more. “Wrap him up, Jake. Me and Roscoe gonna boost Silas into the saddle. We best be making tracks for the hills.”

On his own, Elias cleared out the long, low-roofed stables, driving what few horses and mules remained in their stalls out to the central placita. Celita and Frederico tied their sister over one of the soldier horses while Bass and Coltrane got Adair hoisted into his saddle and settled with a startled grunt of agony. Titus studied the thigh one last time, not finding any new blood dampening the crusty buckskin around the bullet hole.

“Damn,” he said quietly as he gazed up at Adair.

“W-what?”

He grinned. “Looks like you’re gonna live, nigger.”

“I’d kick you with that bum leg if’n I could, Titus Bass,” Silas grumbled as Scratch turned away.

Jake Corn handed Titus his reins, and Bass rose to the saddle as the late-afternoon light was stretching shadows to their fullest.

“Rube!” he called. “You start out the gate, make tracks for the hills. We’ll start these animals moving behind you.”

Corn asked, “Taking ’em all?”

“What critters don’t run off from us between here and that big herd the others is driving up to the pass,” Scratch replied. “Like Bill Williams said, we aren’t gonna leave any of these here Californios a way to come ridin’ after us. Not if I can help it.”

Damn if just about sundown they didn’t run into a herd of wild horses. A large band of them, roaming the hills, free as you please.

Bass decided that if the fourteen riderless soldier horses were going to drift off and mix in with those rangy mustangs, then he’d let them wander. No sense in the trappers laboring their own saddle mounts so hard just to keep the army horses together. They already had their work carved out for them in just getting up to the pass itself. But to Scratch’s surprise, rather than enticing the soldier horses away from the raiders, the curious leader of the wild herd instead loped along beside the trappers’ procession as it wound into the foothills.

“Looks to be we’re dragging even more horses outta California,” Kersey observed with a wry smile. His mark of distinction was a once shiny, now worn, black beaver-felt top hat, its stylish ash-gray ribbon and bow greasy from much handling. Although much tattered, the top hat gave Elias a very proper air at times.

“I’ll wager this bunch don’t stick around with us for long,” Titus countered.

But for a second time that day Scratch was proved wrong. It was almost enough to make a man take stock of his hunches! Time was, he was pretty damn trail savvy about most anything he came across. Oh, there were occasions when he’d get things wrong—like with a drunk or especially when it came to women. Never could callate what either of those would do when they put their minds to something. But guessing wrong on what those horses would do was a matter quite unsettling to him.

For many years now, Titus Bass had believed he understood horses and mules better than he understood a lot of folks. But maybe he had gotten old and a little soft in the brain. Or, maybe times had changed everything around him. That might account for the strange behavior of these wild, four-legged critters. Or … maybe everything had been turned cattywhampus out here in California—nothing the way it was back in his mountain world.

At least now his nose was pointed for home. But that only made him yearn for her all the stronger.

Jake Corn rode drag, bringing up the rear of their small cavvyard. Roscoe Coltrane stayed even farther back from the rest, riding just out of sight of the others, training his constant attention down their back trail. He was to fire a warning shot if he spotted any soldados or vaqueros chasing their tail roots. The plan was to put the wounded Adair and Purcell, along with the two Indians, ahead on the trail with as many horses as would join the four to provide them some cover, while the other four turned and waited for Coltrane to come up.

Plan was, if they ended up being tailed by a small bunch of Mexicans, then the trappers could spring an ambush along the way. But if it turned out to be a large force of soldiers, like that outfit they had watched ride away from the fort earlier that day—then there would be no waiting around. They’d whip and lather their horses, climbing hard for the pass, hoping to catch up to the others driving the herd they had just yanked out from under the noses of the Californios. They could slip over the mountains and down to the desert—on their way back home without any more trouble … if the vaqueros and the soldados didn’t end up joining forces in the pursuit.

In his own way, Titus prayed he wouldn’t have to hear Roscoe Coltrane’s warning shot. Then all they’d have to worry about was the possibility that big swarm of soldiers they’d watched ride out of the fort earlier in the day was somewhere between them and Peg-Leg’s bunch.

Twilight lingered long enough for them to wrangle their horses through that last patch of low, wind-stunted scrub timber nestled across the pass. While the west slope behind them remained sunny, night was already seeping over the hillside before them. The way the shadows had disappeared and twilight hovered around them, Bass wasn’t certain when he called a halt to wait for Coltrane to catch up. At first he thought his eye might be playing tricks with him; he decided he had to trust in his ears. That dark mass far down the slopes below them had to be the noisiest gathering for several hundred square miles.

Inching his small herd forward at a walk now, he watched a pair of riders take shape at the tail end of the crawling procession, heard their voices too as those human sounds mingled with thousands of snorting weary animals having started their way down the eastern slopes.

Elias Kersey whooped and whistled, causing the pair to turn in their saddles, spotting the small band of horses approaching from behind, down out of the wide, rolling saddle. Both of them called out to the raiders ahead in the march.

In minutes Bill Williams and Tom Smith were loping back along the edges of that huge herd.

“You lose anyone?” Peg-Leg asked as he pulled up.

Kersey waited till Bass came to a halt beside him. Elias explained, “No dead. But we got shot up at the fort.”

Williams asked, “Them bastards was laying for you?”

Shrugging, Bass replied, “Maybeso. Purcell’s gonna pull through. Ball passed right through him. Adair an’ his leg ain’t doing near so good.”

“Silas gonna make it?” Smith asked.

“Next day or two gonna tell,” Kersey responded.

Titus looked at Williams. “You gonna put some more country between us and them Mexicans afore we rest, Bill? Maybe drive the herd all night?”

With a shake of his head, Williams said, “We recollect a spring down below a ways—saw it back when we was coming up. Me and Tom figgered to take the herd on down there for to camp a few hours.”

Smith agreed. “These horses likely to smell that water anyway and go on down there on their own. We’ll bed ’em down there for the night and push on when there’s enough light to see.”

Williams sighed, “They’re tired, and so are we.”

Frederico and his sister passed by the four trappers at that moment. Smith waited till they were disappearing into the gloom, then asked, “Where’s the other gal? Wasn’t we busting two women out?”

“One of them Mex’ kill’t her,” Bass said. “But them two brung her body along other’n leaving it with the Californios.”

With a low whistle of approval as the end of the small herd approached, Williams asked, “Where the hell you get all them horses, Scratch?”

“Didn’t wanna leave the soldiers nothing to ride, so we drove out with ever’thing in the stables,” Kersey explained.

“Most of ’em is wild,” Scratch declared. “I kept thinking them wild ones gonna drag off the soldier horses—but they didn’t. Stayed with us all the way up to the pass, so we brung ’em all over together.”

“Damn, Bill,” Smith exclaimed, then turned to Kersey and Bass. “You fellas got any idee how many horses we come outta California with?”

“More’n I ever see’d with a white man!” Titus roared.

“I ain’t at all for sure,” Peg-Leg said. “But we’ll get us some count come morning.”

Williams quickly added, “We was callating we got more’n four thousand awready!”

“F-four thousand!” Kersey echoed in astonishment. “Yee-awww!”

“How the hell we gonna divide up all them?” Bass inquired.

“Maybeso we don’t have to,” Bill responded. “What we sell ’em for, we’ll divide. But the herd gets sold together.”

“That’s more’n the Bents can buy,” Kersey stated.

Scratching at his chin thoughtfully, Williams said, “What they don’t buy, we’ll shoo on back to Missouri and sell the rest of ’em to the corncrackers in the East.”

The last of the soldier horses and wild mustangs were easing past. “C’mon, fellas,” Smith prodded. “Let’s get these animals on down to water and fort up for the night.”

Silas Adair was a grumpy sort who might be given to complaining a little about this or that, but he had not groused once during that painful, jarring ride up and through the pass. When a patch of ground got too rough, Adair jammed a short stick wrapped with antelope skin between his teeth and suffered on through. By the time the rest had the herd pulled off by the spring and the thousands of horses were milling about, waiting to water, Bass joined Kersey and Coltrane, who were seeing to Silas. His face with that big bulbous nose glistened in the first flames at that small fire they built back against the rocks to radiate the heat. Beneath that copper-red hair, he was drenched with sweat.

“I’ve had me better days’n this, boys,” Adair confessed a little breathless.

Coltrane knelt over Silas with a bandanna he had soaked in the spring. With it he bathed his friend’s face.

“The bleeding stopped,” Kersey announced after inspecting the thigh wound. “I’ll fetch you something to eat, soon’s it ready, Silas.”

Night came down quickly, tucked here as they were on the east slope while the sun slid on past that narrow strip of Mexican California. The Americans quickly sorted out a rotation of nighthawks as the able-bodied would all take their turn at riding the fringes of the herd until enough light oozed out of the eastern sky for them to move on. Scratch’s watch would be the last before dawn.

As weary as he was, sleep was still slow in coming. The ground was either too rocky, or his thick blanket wasn’t warm enough, or the throb of too many hooves on the ground where he rested his ear too loud … it all made sleep hard to come by for him, his blankets close to where they had settled Purcell and Adair for the night.

Titus Bass lay staring at the stars here on the high ground between California and the desert where they would once again be tested. This time across, however, they could push as hard as they wanted. With all these horses, the raiders would have no worry for fresh mounts, no reason to concern themselves over a steady food supply, even a source of moisture between springs and water holes as they navigated the wastes for that land of the Ammuchabas. Enough stringy horsemeat to fill their bellies until they reached buffalo country; and enough of the thick, hot horse blood to see them all the way back to the cold, clear streams of the Rocky Mountains.

Just as he felt himself drifting off on that hard ground, Titus heard the soft, stifled sobs of the two Indians weeping for their dead sister. He listened for some time, wondering what Frederico and Celita would do with the body. What was the custom of their people? Did they scoop holes out of the ground as the white man did, or did they leave the departed in the limbs of tall trees for the winds to reclaim them? Or as some claimed the Cheyenne did, would they wedge the body back into the rocks, seated upright and facing the rising sun?

What would the two do now with Mayanez? They were leaving behind their home, those hills and valleys of California where their people had been enslaved by the indolent Franciscan friars and forced to labor in the mission vineyards and fields or be brutalized by the Mexican soldiers. Where would the two of them go now? Did it make sense for Frederico to return to his new life in the Ammuchaba villages?

Where did one go when there was nowhere else to turn?

It was a question Titus Bass prayed he would never have to face.

Lying there in the dark, Bass pulled the thick blanket over the side of his head, pressing it against his ear, doing his best to blot out that quiet sobbing. It served only to make him sense a gnawing emptiness of his own. Titus realized he knew something of how the two Indians felt, had some experience with mourning. As the beaver trade died, as the annual summer rendezvous slipped farther and farther into the past, as more and more of his fellow white men fled the Shining Mountains—Titus Bass had pondered just where he was to go. Where was he to point his nose when there no longer was any direction for him to take?

Wallowing in that confusion, her face swam before the dark of his eyes—her cheeks smooth as the day she had first spoken to him beside the icy river. Cheeks yet untouched by the smallpox scourge that had ravenously devoured the northern plains, sated its appetite on the Blackfeet and others, in the process nearly robbing him of his wife. The swimming vision smiled and held out her arms to him, pulling him down upon her, welcoming him into her wet, waiting warmth. He sensed how she reached out to seize his hardened manhood insistently, to guide it inside her, her own breathing coming quick and shallow as she thrust her hips upward, seating him hungrily to his full length—

Suddenly he was aware of the Indians crying—no longer sobbing softly. Their wails immediately dispelled the heat of that too-real vision he was desperately reaching for here on the low divide between Mexican California and that no-man’s-land of desert wilderness. Now they were wailing, supplicating their own god.

Would his own god answer his private prayer, Titus wondered? Would he make it back to Absaroka alive and whole to caress her soft flesh, to have Magpie press her head into the crook of his neck and to bounce Flea upon his knee?

He rolled onto his other hip and did his best to conjure her up again, thinking how good it felt to sleep curled against her bare back, one of his hands nestled between her soft breasts … how she often reached back and took hold of him in his sleep, arousing him with her fingers, awakening him—knowing he could never refuse her.

“Bass!”

Yanking the edge of the blanket from his face, Titus blinked into the black of night—realizing he had finally fallen asleep. After rubbing the heels of his hands into both eyes, Bass recognized Pete Harris kneeling above him.

“Get up, goddammit,” insisted this friend of Philip Thompson’s. “You’re taking over my watch.”

“Where?” he asked as he kicked his blanket off.

Harris pointed east before he trudged off without a word.

Scratch pulled on his capote, belted it, then stuffed two pistols into the belt. Finally he grabbed his rifle and pouch and started for the edge of the herd. Carefully feeling his way along in his moccasins, Titus toed atop some of the tall boulders scattered around the watering hole, settled onto his haunches, and stared out over the extent of the herd. The sheer size of the remuda dwarfed their little camp—the horses filling the narrow, grassy meadow that stretched farther than he could see here in the cold, dry air of these last hours before dawn. They’d be pushing the animals on when it grew light enough. On down to the sands where they would begin their crossing.

This high desert darkness had a dreamlike quality all its own: cold enough to keep him wide awake although he was never really sure what was real and what was not in this world of darkness that had closed in around him. Over time the sky lightened below them, along the horizon at first, slowly grinding his way, yard by yard. Shapes took form in the coming of day. He began to recognize brush from horse, boulder from man. Animals snorted. Someone threw some kindling on a dying fire.

He could see it was Peg-Leg, kneeling there on his good leg, that wooden pin shoved out from him at an angle, shoving the old coffeepot closer to the flames with a grating scrape across the rocks—

Erupting in a hundred directions at once, the big, black pot exploded. Smith tumbled backward as embers from the fire shot upward in spirals like a thousand fireflies suddenly hurled up, freed from a clay jar. Many of the raiders were yelling, one of them crouching over Smith, helping Peg-Leg up when a second gunshot echoed in this rocky hollow where they found water for their stolen horses.

A third, then fourth, gunshot reverberated off the rocky walls now. One of the trappers went down in the half-light, noisily screaming. Bass was already off the rock and on his belly, staying low, watching the wounded trapper slide backward as Adair rolled sideways off his improvised travois, painfully pulling himself out of the firelight the moment the rocky defile came alive with the roar of confident voices. Mexicans.

“They ambushed us, goddammit!” Williams was growling.

Smith peered from behind a low boulder, his eyes sweeping the rocky ledges above him. “Came up on us while we was camped.”

“How’d they follow our trail in the dark?” a voice called out.

“It wasn’t no big secret where we was headed,” Williams grumbled as he shoved his rifle against his shoulder.

“Silas!” Scratch hissed as he slid in beside Adair. He started to rock the wounded man off his bad leg.

“Can’t get up!”

Titus shoved his rifle into Adair’s hands, then hoisted the man back onto the crude travois. Stepping into the vee, Titus grabbed the cradle’s support and heaved forward as the air around them was rent with bullets. A damn good thing those soldiers never weren’t any good with their poor smoothbores, or they’d likely have more of us already cut down.

Above the Americans reverberated the commands of the Mexican officers, echoes ordering the soldiers down from the timber and rocky cliffs, goading them to close quickly on the outnumbered and surprised Americans. Those horses grazing nearest the camp grew restless, stirring this way, then that, like a flock of wild wrens as stray balls landed among them, gunfire drawing closer and closer, voices growing strident and desperate. Shots ricocheted off the rocks with shrill cries of warning.

The wild horses were the very first to break, lunging past Titus, sweeping some of the California horses with them as the nervous animals blocked him from reaching the boulders where the rest of the Americans were retreating one by one by one.

“They got knives on their guns!” Adair screeched.

Huffing wearily, Scratch whirled, glancing over his shoulder—finding that the Mexicans did have long knives pinned beneath the muzzles of their rifles. Four of those bayonets glittered in the remnants of the fire’s light that gray morning as the soldados slowly advanced over the rocky ground toward Bass and his travois. “Titus Bass!”

He whipped back around to find two of the trappers standing atop the rocks, making conspicuous targets of themselves as they leveled their weapons on those four soldiers closing in on Scratch. He and Adair were trapped—frightened horses milling between him and the boulders where the others had taken cover.

One of the Americans fired. Scratch watched the bullet graze the forestock of a soldier’s musket before it slammed into the man’s chest, shoving him backward off his feet as his own weapon discharged into the air.

Dropping Adair’s travois, Titus reached down and yanked his rifle out of the wounded man’s hands. He dragged the hammer back as the weapon reached his hipbone. Set the back trigger and leveled the muzzle at the closest Mexican.

He felt a ball rake his upper arm with fire as brilliant flame jetted from his own barrel. Not far past the shreds of burning patch that had exploded from the flintlock’s muzzle, he watched the soldier spin around on his boot heel, screwing himself into the grass with a grunt of surprise and pain.

Another gun roared on those rocks behind him. A third soldier pitched backward off his feet, landing flat on his back in the grass. Only one more of them to keep off Adair, one more Mexican who instantly stopped, eyes wide with terror as he gazed around him at his three dead companions.

“Get over here, Titus Bass!” another voice boomed from the rocks.

Turning on his heel he found only a few horses blocking his retreat now. Laying the rifle alongside Adair’s hip, he yanked one of the pistols from his belt, then slapped it into Silas’s waiting hand.

“Use it when they get close,” he huffed. “Only when they’re close enough you’re sure to kill one of the bastards!”

His lungs were screaming with hot tongues of breathless fire by the time he lunged to the bottom of the boulders and dropped the travois. Quickly kneeling beside Adair, Scratch raised one of the trapper’s arms. He ducked under that thick blacksmith’s arm and rolled Silas across the back of his shoulders. Dragging his own legs beneath him, Titus rose slowly, unsteadily, with the heavy man’s bulk centered atop his spine.

“Merciful a’mighty!” Adair gasped in pain as his wounded leg dragged off the ground and slammed into the back of Scratch’s hip. Silas clutched desperately at the front of Titus’s shirt with one of those broad-beamed blacksmith’s hands.

“Help him!” Williams was roaring as Bass stumbled uncertainly around the base of the rocks.

Coltrane was at Titus’s side in the next heartbeat. Short and stocky, but built like a whiskey barrel—Roscoe slipped under Adair’s other arm and dragged Silas crosswise onto his own shoulders. With his two thick arms looped under Adair’s armpit and one of his legs, Coltrane sidestepped into a narrow crevice between the jumble of boulders as lead smacked the rocks around them.

One of the Mexican’s bullets grazed the boulder just above the spot where Scratch knelt to retrieve his rifle. With a shrill scream of its own, a tiny fragment of granite was shaved off near his ear. The long cut it opened along his left cheek burned with a tongue of icy fire.

Looking up, he found Tom Smith holding his hand down for him. Grasping Peg-Leg’s wrist, Scratch dragged himself through the crevice behind Coltrane and Adair.

“You’re the last,” Smith growled.

“The bastards’re chivvying the herd!” someone roared above them.

“Kill as many of ’em as you can!” Bill Williams ordered. “We’ll drive ’em back, then go round up them horses again!”

But there were too many Mexicans.

That was plain enough for Titus to see. They were all over the rocks, bristling at the edge of the cliff to their left, more shoving their way through the frightened horses. Vaqueros and soldiers both. Yelling at one another now that they knew they had the horse thieves surrounded and whipped. Yelling at the Americans to surrender or be killed.

“S-surrender?” Williams screeched as Smith translated.

Two more balls of lead smacked the rocks behind them.

“Don’t fret none, Bill,” Peg-Leg said. “Ain’t none of us goin’ to no California hoosegow for a hanging now.”

“They’d sooner kill us all as put us behind their bars,” Scratch explained. “If we surrender, we’ll be helpless. That’s when them bean-bellies gonna cut us down.”

“That’s right,” Kersey snorted. “They won’t waste no trouble hog-tying us back to California.”

“Maybeso we’re gonna go down here and now,” Scratch told them all as he rammed a ball home against the breech of his rifle. “But leastways, fellas … we can show these pelados how to die like men.”

^* The Mexican term for the “wild” or “gentile” Indians who had been acquired by the Franciscans or the ranchos through capture or purchase.