Death Rattle (37 page)

Then Roscoe Coltrane reined away, saying no more.

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

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

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

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

“Them hills?”

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

Titus nodded. “Maybeso the mountains.”

“Which’uns?” Jake Corn asked.

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

“Where they rise?” Silas inquired.

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

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

“A’most,” Adair declared wistfully.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Polette Labrosse grunted next to Scratch.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Somehow they managed to hold the Diggers back that third furious charge, then a fourth, but less concerted, rush too.

Between each wave of brown raiders, in those nerve-racking interludes while the trappers prepared for the next assault, the arrows never stopped falling out of the sky or whispering through the brush—most of the missiles falling harmlessly among the stunted cedar and sage. But a few of the deadly stone points randomly struck close to some of the men, causing no more than a nuisance.

But what proved even worse was that, over time, more than two dozen of the arrows—their small, stone tips meant for bringing down rabbits—did manage to strike much bigger targets: tormenting the last of the riding horses individual trappers had picketed close at hand, in camp. What with all the gunfire, screaming warriors, and a steady rain of stone-tipped arrows, these few frightened animals were being driven even more mad, becoming even more noisy as they fought their pins and handlers.

Then one of the riding mules collapsed with a brassy
breee-hawwwww,
spraying piss over two nearby trappers as it went down in a spraddle-legged heap. Two of the men promptly plopped down on the damp ground between the dying animal’s legs, employing its heaving rib cage as a breastwork.