I kicked Nellie and she broke into a shambling trot, and then into a gallop as David lashed her rump with his quirt. Behind us, a shrill undulating war whoop rang out as the ever-nearing war party gave chase.
The sound of that horrendous, bloodcurdling cry spooked my old mare, and she lined out in a dead run, her ears flat. Neck and neck, David and I flew down the hill toward the trading post. Each time Nellie began to lag behind, I dug my heels into her ribs, praying she wouldn’t stumble or step into a hole.
Never had home seemed so far away. Glancing over my shoulder, I saw that the Indians were gaining on us. Their faces, streaked with paint, were hideous and unreal, like something from a nightmare.
We were almost home when Nellie stumbled. My heart dropped into my stomach as I sawed on the reins. I cried, “Oh, God, help me!” then sobbed with relief as Nellie scrambled to her feet and began running again.
Her gray coat was yellow with foamy lather, her heart pumping like a bellows, when we finally reached the safety of the stockade walls.
“Indians!” David hollered. Leaping from his horse, he closed the heavy gates and dropped the cross-bar in place.
Pa and Hobie Brown burst out of the house, checking their weapons as they ran. Hobie’s boys were right behind him. Pa threw David a rifle and a box of shells, and the men clamored up the ladder to the catwalk that ran around the fortress walls. I heard Pa holler, “Make every shot count!” as the men spread out.
I led Nellie and David’s gelding into the corral and turned them loose, then raced into the house and grabbed a rifle from the rack. Picking up a box of .44 cartridges, I scooted up the ladder and took a place beside Pa.
“Get on down from here,” Pa said curtly. “Go back to the house and stay with your mother.”
“Mother’s coining, too,” I said. “Look.”
Pa frowned as he saw Mother climbing the ladder, laden with a rifle, bandages, and three canteens of water.
“Dammit, Mary, this ain’t no place for you or Hannah,” Pa scolded, but Mother silenced him with a wave of her hand.
“Don’t be silly, Sam Kincaid,” she scolded right back. “This is our home, too, and we aim to fight right here beside you.”
Pa got that stubborn look in his eye, but there was no time for further argument. The Indians reached the stockade in a rush of noise and dust and the battle was on. We were outnumbered ten to one, but we had the high ground, so to speak, and the protection of the stockade’s stout wooden walls. The Indians, not armed with guns, unleashed their deadly arrows as rapidly as we levered our rifles. For what seemed an eternity there was nothing in all the world but the feathered hum of bowstrings, the hiss of arrows, and the echoing roar of our rifles.
Dust and powdersmoke choked the air, clogging my nose and throat, making my eyes water. I fired the rifle until the barrel grew hot in my hands, feeling sick to my stomach each time one of my shots struck home. And even as I fired into the Indian ranks, I prayed with all my heart that Shadow was not down there—that none of the feathered, screaming, paint-streaked warriors was the man I loved.
Funny—I knew Shadow was an Indian, knew he lived and behaved the same as the rest of his tribe, and yet I could not imagine him painted for war. I could not visualize his handsome face twisted with implacable hatred, his dark eyes wild with the lust for blood, his mouth drawn back in a savage grin.
And yet I knew he had killed a man. A Pawnee. He had said as much, and the feather in his hair gave credence to his words.
There was a brief lull in the battle as the Indians pulled out of range to regroup, and I found myself searching their ranks for a tall warrior astride a roan stallion. Abruptly, I tore my eyes away. If he was down there, I didn’t want to know.
I glanced around the catwalk, grinning as I saw my mother wiping dust and perspiration from her face. I had never seen her with her face dirty before or her hair uncombed.
Beside me, Pa was staring hard at the brave nearest the stockade wall and when I asked him what was wrong, he said, “That’s Jed Tabor’s palomino mare. I’d recognize her anywhere.”
“Looks like it,” I agreed. So the Tabors had been hit, too. There was always a chance, of course, that the Indian had stolen the horse from the Tabor corral, but I knew it was a mighty slim chance and that, more likely, Jed Tabor and his family were dead.
Further down the line, I saw David. He threw me a crooked grin and waved, and I waved back. Hobie Brown and his four sons were good shots, and the ground beneath their part of the stockade wall was littered with the bodies of more than a dozen Indians.
Only one of the Indians wasn’t dead. Slowly, he sat up, shaking his head as if to clear it. He had been hit twice, once in the leg and once in the side. Bracing his hands against the stockade, he slowly gained his feet.
We were all watching him now, including the Indians. The injured warrior must have felt our gaze, for he turned and glanced up at us. His dark eyes glittered with hate and contempt as he pushed away from the wall and started to walk boldly toward his comrades.
He had gone only a few feet when his wounded leg buckled, and he fell to the ground. Paul Brown raised his rifle and sighted down the barrel, the Indian his target, but he hesitated to pull the trigger as one of the Indians out of range broke away from the group.
With a wild cry, the warrior raced his horse toward his stricken companion. Dropping to the side of his paint pony, he reached out to grasp the fallen warrior’s upraised arm.
It was a brave act, but one that cost him his life. Simultaneously, two shots rang out as Paul Brown and his brother, Benjamin, killed the two Indians.
It seemed cruel, to kill a man who was trying to rescue a friend. And yet I knew Paul and Benjamin were just trying to even the odds against us.
“Hell of a shot,” Pa murmured.
And then the Indians charged us a second time, and there was no more time for talk.
For a while we held our own, and I prayed the Indians would get discouraged and retreat. But then the tide began to turn as half a dozen braves pulled out of the battle and began lobbing fire arrows over the stockade walls. Others found a log and began ramming the gates, while their companions kept up a steady stream of covering fire, forcing us to keep our heads down or risk getting them blown off.
When it looked like the gates were about to give way, Pa hollered for us to retreat to the house. It was, I knew, the only logical place to hole up. There were only two windows upstairs, both too small for a grown man to crawl through, so we wouldn’t have to worry about them sneaking in on us, and there was no back door.
Pa and Hobie were the last to leave the catwalk. They were running for the house when the gates collapsed and a horde of screaming Indians poured into the stockade. Hobie cussed as an arrow caught him in the back, and I felt my heart skip a beat as I saw my father stop, whirl around, and spray a murderous stream of bullets toward the charging warriors.
Paul and Benjamin immediately laid down a hail of covering fire while Pa scooped Hobie up in his arms and sprinted for the house. David slammed the door shut and shot the bolt home as soon as Pa crossed the threshold.
While Mother looked after Hobie, the rest of us manned the windows. Pa and I took one of the front ones, David and John the other, leaving Benjamin and Paul to cover the single window in the rear of the house.
Once we gained the safety of the trading post, the Indians ignored us. A few warriors caught up our animals and drove them outside the stockade, while others disappeared from sight around the corner of the house, presumably toward the barn and the smokehouse.
I felt a great sadness when I saw one of the braves leading Nellie away. She had been mine ever since I was a little girl, had been my first friend—my only friend before I met Shadow.
But there was no time for memories, no time for regret. The Indians were firing again, circling the house as they looked for a way to break in. There were footsteps on the roof, and Mother quickly lit a fire in the fireplace to discourage any brave who might be thinking of dropping through the chimney.
Time lost all meaning. The past and the future ceased to exist, there was only the horror of now. Bullets and arrows whistled through the air like angry hornets, and I cringed, frightened by the confusion and the noise and the sudden realization that I was going to die a horrible death. Our house, which only moments before had seemed like a haven of refuge in a world gone mad, had become a death trap. There was no way out, no way we could possibly escape.
Across the way, John Brown screamed and fell forward. A torrent of blood gushed from a bullet hole in his throat. David’s face contorted with rage and grief when he saw his brother fall, and he began to fire recklessly, wasting precious ammunition as he hosed off a dozen rounds.
“David!” I yelled. “David, get down!”
But my warning fell on deaf ears. A bullet exploded in David’s face and he toppled over backwards, his body awash in a sea of bright crimson.
“David,” I whimpered, and turned away as Pa ran over to the now unguarded window and fired point blank into the paint-daubed face of a howling Sioux warrior. Vomit rose in my throat, thick and hot and vile, and I could not choke it back. Retching violently, I doubled over, and as I did, I felt a warm rush of air sweep past my head. Behind me, Mother cried out in pain, and then there was a terrible silence as all firing suddenly ceased.
As if from far away I heard Pa whisper Mother’s name, heard him curse the Indians and his own hard-headed stubbornness—and I knew that my mother was dead. The realization hit me with such force that for a moment I was numb, unable to move or think. Tears of grief welled in my eyes as I stared blankly out the window into the smoke-filled yard.
A lone Indian had ridden into the stockade, and I surmised that it was his unexpected arrival that had brought the shooting to a halt. The stranger’s face and chest were hideously streaked with broad slashes of vermillion. A single white eagle feather adorned his waist-length black hair. A black wolfskin clout covered his loins, moccasins beaded in red and black hugged his feet. For a moment he sat unmoving, his narrowed eyes sweeping the yard, the burning barn, and the house in one long glance.
He dismounted with the lithe easy grace of a panther as a stocky Sioux warrior wearing an elaborate warbonnet called to him. The two warriors conferred for some time, and although I could not hear their words, I could tell by their gestures that they were arguing and that we were the source of their disagreement.
After several minutes, Warbonnet gave a shrug of resignation, and the lone warrior strode toward us, unfurling a square of white cloth pulled from inside his clout.
About twenty feet from the house he stopped and called out, “Sam Kincaid, can you hear me?”
My knees went weak as the warrior’s voice penetrated my mind. Unable to believe my ears, I leaned out the window for a closer look, whispering his name as I recognized the face beneath the hideous red paint.
“Shadow.”
“I hear you,” Pa hollered. “Speak your piece and then say your prayers, cause you’re dead where you stand.”
“Don’t be a fool, Kincaid.”
“You’re the fool, redskin,” Pa retorted, levering a round into the breech of his Winchester. “I cut you down, that’s one less guteater to kill later.”
“I am not fighting you,” Shadow replied evenly. “I am not carrying a weapon.”
Pa studied Shadow thoughtfully for a few moments before he said, “What is it you want?”
“You and the others have no chance of getting out of here alive,” Shadow said dispassionately. “The Sioux can burn you out or starve you out. You agree?”
“Maybe,” Pa allowed grudgingly. “What are you getting at?”
“I cannot save you, Sam, or the other men, but the Sioux chief, Tall Cloud, is willing to let me take Hannah and Mary and ride out of here.”
“Mary’s dead,” Pa said hoarsely, and the pain of my mother’s death tore through me again. She had been so gentle, so kind and loving, it was inconceivable to me that she should die so violently and leave me bereft.
“I am sorry, Kincaid. She was a good woman.”
There was a long pause, and then Pa said, “How’d you know Hobie and his boys were here?”
“I have been watching your place for the last two weeks, waiting for something like this to happen.”
Pa laughed bitterly. “How come the Sioux beat the Cheyenne to the punch?”
“My people have gone to Montana to meet Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse. Tall Cloud and his warriors are headed that way, too.”
Pa let out a sigh that seemed to come all the way from his toes. “So it’s started, huh?”
“I warned you, Kincaid. You should have listened. There is going to be a big battle between your people and mine, one that will make all the others look like child’s play. I do not know where or when, but I know it is coming.”
“Your people will lose,” Pa said tonelessly. “Unless you can figure out a way to unite all the tribes, the Army will rub you out one by one.”
“I think you speak wisdom,” Shadow remarked. “The good times are gone. The whites will not rest until they have killed every Indian on the plains or confined them on reservations. Myself, I would rather be dead than penned up like the white man’s cattle. But enough of this. We are wasting time. Let me take Hannah out of here before Tall Cloud changes his mind.”