Crack in the Sky (59 page)

“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.”

They had waited out that short autumn day there beside the river, watching for more Apache.

Better to fight them here, Bass thought, than have them catch you out there on the desert. Here—where a man at least had water, and a few rocks around him, along with a little shade slanting down off the rocky bluff once the sun began its dip into the last quarter of the sky.

By the time Bass turned to move back toward the animals so he could retrieve some bear grease to smear on his tender belly wound, he sidestepped through the rocks to watch one of McAfferty’s packhorses go down. Its knees buckled as the animal snorted, kneeling into the sand clumsily. Arrows bristled from its neck and front flanks. More shafts quivered from the other animals, their packs, and saddles.

He quickly counted—finding one of them missing.

Dropping to one knee, Scratch peered under Hannah’s legs, finding his saddle mount already down, on its side and unmoving—more than a dozen arrows sticking from its bloody ribs and belly, all of them fired from above where the three warriors had crawled along that narrow shelf.

With a groan he let his head sag between his shoulders.

Right then the two of them had tougher problems than Asa’s goddamned ghost.

For a while Titus brooded on just what they could do with all the plunder and supplies without adding to the burden the animals were already carrying. To put any more weight on Hannah and the last of McAfferty’s horses was unthinkable—not with the heat and the desert and all that distance still to go before they would reach Taos.

Another option would be for him to walk those hundreds of miles, wearing out one pair after another of his moccasins. But even in the cool of that desert morning, Titus doubted he could ever accomplish that journey on foot.

Their only choice lay in separating wheat from chaff: packing only what was absolutely necessary on Hannah’s back, caching the rest here beside this river—as if they would one day return to reclaim what they would abandon.

Bass knew he never would.

“I ain’t digging no hole for it,” he growled at McAfferty. “Let the Apache have it all.”

Once the sun rose high enough to warm the air, Scratch settled back against the side of the bluff to wait out the rest of the morning. He simply didn’t have enough strength left to work any longer in the immobilizing heat. By midafternoon, when the sun’s direct rays slid behind the sandstone butte—bestowing a little shade upon their side of the hill—the dead horses had already begun to bloat. Now and then expanding gases whimpered and hissed from the arrow wounds and anuses.