Death Rattle (14 page)

The quiet one nodded and quickly turned away.

Purcell said, “He don’t talk?”

“Coltrane ain’t a mute,” Adair replied. “But, he ain’t ever been one to talk much at all.”

“Sometimes, that’s a good thing,” Bass observed as he watched Coltrane scooping up a length he cut from the coil of buffalo intestine, dropping the gut into a small kettle at a nearby fire where Philip Thompson and his bunch were entertaining a number of the warriors.

“Any one of them fellas’d cut your throat if that
Thompson so much as asked ’em to,” Corn declared right out of the blue.

Bass turned suddenly to look at the man seated to his right. “That’s a strange thing to say to me.”

“Jake is right,” Kersey agreed. “That bunch of hard cases sticks with Thompson like ticks gone fat on an ol’ bull. They’re gonna jump you when that sumbitch says to jump you.”

Scratch put a bite of dumpling in his mouth and sucked the grease from his fingers before he said, “Don’t matter what those bastards try, or when they do it. I’ll be ready.”

“Yeee-awww!” snorted Kersey. “That’s what I liked about you right from the start over there in the fight we had when Fraeb was rubbed out. There ain’t no shuffle-footing about you, Titus Bass. You’re a man what sees things for what they are. This is this, and that is that. I tell you, I much admire that in a man.”

Bass glowed at the compliment, feeling his cheeks grow hot with the blush that spread beneath his gray beard. “Most all my friends, they call me Scratch.”

“Scratch, is it?” Silas Adair asked. “Why, I didn’t know you was the one I heerd of called Scratch.”

“What’d you hear ’bout him?” Purcell asked, his mouth stuffed with dumpling as the quiet Roscoe Coltrane returned, setting down his kettle filled with intestine and humpribs.

Pushing an unruly sprig of copper-red hair out of his eyes, Adair grinned at Bass and winked. “Heerd how you died, two or three times. That’s what I heerd tell.”

“Only three times, they say?” Scratch echoed. “Hell, I’ve riz up from the dead more’n that!”

“Help yourselves, fellas,” Kersey suggested, gesturing at the sizzling skillet.

They watched Adair and Coltrane greedily dig in, scooping dumplings from the grease. Around the fire the six of them ate and ate till they belched, making room for more of the greasy dumplings, their lips, indeed the entire lower half of their faces, shiny in the firelight. About the time the last of Kersey’s dumplings had been speared
from the skillet, Jake Corn was kneeling at the far side of the pit, using a long twig to scoop his boudins out of the coals. As he speared each one with the tip of his knife, picking it up to plop the footlong section of broiled intestine onto a man’s plate, steam hissed from the tiny puncture wound Corn had poked in the stiffened, crackling tube of gut.

It was well after dark when Smith and Williams finished their parley with the leaders of the Ute hunting party. Illuminated by the low flames of a half dozen small fires, the white men got to their feet with the warriors who rose and moved off for their ponies. Bill Williams called three of his men close, then momentarily watched them step away into the dark before he shambled over to the fire where Titus and the five others sat smoking their pipes in the afterglow of their hearty repast.

“Need three of you to take the next watch,” Bill ordered. “After a couple hours go by, those three I sent off gonna come back here and get the next watch. That bunch’ll come wake me when their time’s done.”

Bass nodded to Kersey.

Elias looked up at Williams. “Me and Scratch here will go.”

As Kersey was glancing over the rest of the men, Williams said, “You need one more.”

“How ’bout you, Roscoe?” Bass inquired, staring at the solemn one.

Without any change in his expression, even looking up from the fire where he knelt with a twig to relight his pipe, Coltrane nodded.

“That makes three of us, Bill.”

Just before he turned away, Williams said, “See you in the morning.”

“You ’spectin’ trouble?” Purcell asked as the leader turned his back on them.

Bill contemplated the flames a moment before he answered. “We’re bringing our stock in close, ’specially them broodmares we need. Those Injuns figger on riding off with our horses, I don’t aim to make it easy for ’em.”

“We’ll sleep light, Bill,” Titus said.

The bunch at the fire remained quiet in their own thoughts for some time until Silas Adair stood and stretched. He tugged down on the brim of his battered, black-felt hat. In the fire’s light it appeared the hat had been singed at the back where it caught on fire when he used it to fan some flames of a time. “C’mon, Roscoe—we best go get our blankets.”

Bass watched the two men trudge away to the nearby fire. Then he turned to the trio left with him. “You fellas promise me something.”

“What’s that, Scratch?” asked Jake Corn.

“Trouble ever comes—no matter when, no matter where … you fellas promise me you’ll watch my back.”

“A fight starts,” Kersey began, “there ain’t no Injun gonna get close enough—”

“I ain’t talking ’bout Injuns, Elias,” Titus interrupted. “I need you to watch out for Thompson and his weasels.”

“That’s just what we aim to do,” Corn vowed. “ ’Cause I figger you for a man what’d do the same for any of us.”

Likely, those warriors were sitting out there in the dark, watching every precaution the trappers took to bring their stock in close to camp and post guards around those animals. More than once Bass chuckled to himself how that must irritate the piss right out of those Ute who had plainly come into camp with no better purpose than to eat the trappers’ food, drink the trappers’ coffee, and count the trappers’ guns. Something about the redskins had convinced him they were a thieving lot, right off … and if they coveted anything the white men had along for their journey to California, it was the guns. In the constant warfare waged against their Apache neighbors, those rifles and pistols and smoothbores would more than tip the scales in the Utes’ favor.

How it must gall the hunting party to watch the white men prepare for trickery even though the double-tongued Ute leaders had professed only the strongest of affections for those trappers who passed through their land!

Twice during his watch that night, Titus was certain at least one of the warriors was making a crawl for the horses. A sound out of place, maybe an odor brought him on the shifting breeze. Both times he would bring the rifle’s hammer back to full cock and noisily stride toward that side of the remuda. That second time he was sure enough of what he’d heard that he dropped to his knees, lowered his head, and peered at that strip of horizon where the pale, starlit sky met the darker earth. There he spotted three of them lying among the sage, really nothing more than shadows humped upon the ground.

The temptation to shoot and wound one of them, even kill one of the slippery bastards, was almost more than he could endure. But Bass was sure they saw him too, had to hear him approach before his moccasins ground to a halt on the flinty hardpan, sure that’s what brought the trio to a stop in their crawl toward the animals. Maybe just fire a warning shot somewhere between them …

“You two-tongued sonsabitches!” he bellowed instead. “You don’t get and stay gone, I’ll wear your hair my own self afore morning!”

From either side of him he heard running feet as Kersey and Coltrane sprinted out of the dark to join him.

Huffing, Elias asked breathlessly, “You see something?”

“Three of ’em,” Bass replied, kneeling and motioning the others down close to the ground with him. “Lookee there.”

“If that ain’t a yank on the short-hairs!” Kersey exclaimed.

Scratch asked the other two, “What you figger we oughtta do with ’em?”

“Run ’em off,” Kersey declared loudly as he stood in the dark, punching a wide hole out of the starry sky as Bass peered up at the man. Elias stomped toward the warriors as voices grew sharp in camp behind them.

“You sneaky bastards,” Kersey was grumbling out loud, his s’s whistling past a broken front tooth.

Scratch was just turning, drawn to look over his shoulder with the approach of footsteps coming out from
camp, when he heard the telltale
thwung
of a twisted rawhide bowstring. On instinct he flung himself to the ground beside Coltrane. In that same instant he heard Kersey yelp.

Bass watched the trapper collapse to the ground, lost from sight along the skyline. But he could hear Elias groan, twisting, his body grinding noisily in the sage and dirt out there in the dark.

Coltrane was already moving, lunging off the ground into the night. A second bowstring snapped in the dark.

Scratch started to rise, crying, “I’ll kill ever’ one of you bust-ass red-bellies!”

Of a sudden the night glowed for an instant as the pan on Roscoe Coltrane’s rifle ignited and the muzzle spat a long tongue of bright yellow flame. The roar of his weapon was immediately answered with a loud screech.

As he started toward the noises, Titus watched Coltrane take form out of the dark as the wide barrel of a man went to his knee over a clump of sage. Skidding to a halt, Bass saw that it wasn’t brush at all, but Elias Kersey balled up on the ground, clutching at his hip.

Coltrane’s eyes flicked up.

“I took an arrow,” Kersey grumbled between clenched teeth.

Scratch was already bringing the flintlock Derringer up—

—as Kersey added, “Don’t know how bad I’m hurt.”

At first he only heard them as he inched cautiously away into the dark. Then he saw one materialize, and suddenly another. They were doing their best to drag the third one off but were making a noisy rescue of it. In that next heartbeat they must have heard him slipping up behind them because they stopped, both of them dropping their wounded comrade and reaching for their weapons as they spun into a crouch. On their knees the small warriors were no taller than the scrub oak and bristly sage. …

But Titus thought he knew one of those shadows out there was more than some leafy brush. He brought the rifle to his shoulder.

Without taking time to think, Titus laid the front sight on the dark clump, clenched his eyes against the coming glare, and pulled the trigger in one fluid motion. The moment the gun boomed and shoved against the crook of his shoulder Scratch opened his eyes, watching one of the shadows tumble backward with a loud gust of air slammed from the warrior’s lungs.

In an instant all became pandemonium behind him in the direction of camp. For a fleeting moment he had just started to turn to look back over his shoulder. That’s when another sliver of the night peeled away from the ground with a hair-raising shriek. An arm held high and brandishing a stone club, the Ute bolted toward the trapper, bounding over the sage and brush with ease.

Taking one step back, Scratch shifted his empty, rifle to his left hand and with his right yanked out that short belt pistol. Dragging back the hammer with his thumb, he held … watching how the shadow raced closer and closer, dodging side to side, screaming his vengeance.

Wait, wait till he gets close enough to make a sure shot of it. Closer … wait—

Extending his arm he followed the target through the next heartbeat … until the emerging shadow suddenly became bare chest and naked legs. Holding on a spot midway between breechclout and that screaming mouth—he squinted his eyes shut to the coming glare and pulled the trigger.

Immediately opening his eyes, Scratch could almost make out the man’s face, and the look of utter surprise on it, as the Ute’s legs went out from under him and he toppled backward in a sprawl, kicking at a clump of sage.

“Bass!”

It was Peg-Leg’s voice.

“Over here!”

Out of the dim glow emanating from the flickering light of their campfires appeared the wooden-legged booshway and four others, all of them huffing as they followed their ungainly leader through the maze of scrub brush to reach the scene.

“They get any horses?”

Bass recognized the voice of Philip Thompson. He answered, “Not a goddamned one.”

Smith teetered to a halt beside Titus to say, “Did they get any of the men?”

“One for sure—Kersey.” And he pointed back off to the left.

Thompson stepped up to Smith’s elbow, leaning in so his taut face was lit with starshine. “And how many of them Yutas you let get away, Bass?”

His eyes narrowing, Titus looked away from Thompson and gazed evenly at Smith. “We saw three of ’em. Coltrane dropped the first one—”

“Afore, or after, Kersey was hit?” Thompson interrupted.

“Elias was awready down afore Roscoe pulled down on ’em,” Bass explained to Peg-Leg, doing his damnedest to ignore the proximity, the very sneer of the other man.

“How’d you come to fire your gun?” Smith inquired.

“They was dragging off the one Coltrane shot,” Titus explained. “I figgered to teach ’em some manners when it comes to jumpin’ fellas like us.”

“How many of ’em get away?” Thompson demanded.

Now Bass gazed back at the man. “Can’t rightly say ’bout your side of camp, Thompson. But speaking for my watch on horse guard, not a one of them thievin’ brown-skins is still breathing.”

“I damn well didn’t realize just how handy you was to have around, Titus Bass,” Thompson replied, dripping with sarcasm. Then he started to snigger as he turned on his heel and started back for camp, followed by the others who had raced up with Smith.

Peg-Leg hobbled past Scratch. “Let’s go see for ourselves what you’ve dropped out here.”

They found his second kill no more than a few yards away, the first warrior out farther in the cold and the dark.

Smith sighed as he stared down at the body. “You want the skelp?”

“What the hell’m I going to do with this wuthless nigger’s hair?”

Shrugging, Peg-Leg said, “Don’t matter what we do now, I s’pose. The rest of them Yutas gonna dog our back trail here on out.”

“An’ if we bring them California horses back through this same country,” Titus grumped, “likely them Yutas gonna make things even harder on us … all over again.”