Death Rattle (39 page)

“Hold on—I callate you’ve got things all twisted up,” Bass argued, knowing full well there wasn’t a good reason the herd had turned around in its tracks and was headed for them. “Them horses is on the run.”

Robinson asked, “Bill and the rest got ’em all back from the Diggers, didn’t they?”

That thunder of the hoofbeats seemed to swell noisily in the next few heartbeats as Titus grappled with what to do. In moments the horses would be all but on top of the handful of white men.

“Head for them rocks, fellas!” Bass shouted, lunging away despite the agony in that ham. “Diggers or Californy horses—this here desert’s dead set on killin’ me afore I can get back to the mountains!”

At the very moment the eastern horizon turned a blood-tinged gray, the front ranks of the herd took shape out of that arid dawn. A dark, bobbing wave thundered toward the wounded and halt as they scampered for a
low cluster of volcanic rock. The trappers reached their shelter just before the flying manes and fluttering tails took form out of the slanting gray clouds of dust. Intermingled with the pounding hooves arose off-key yips and coyote calls of excited men.

Titus held on to hope that it would be Bill and the others, bellowing on the fringes of the herd.

But when some three dozen of the stolen animals loped past the rocks, the cries and hoots came right behind them, more distinct. And something clearly wasn’t right about those calls.

“It’s the Diggers!” Lapointe shouted.

“Get down!” Bass ordered as he realized the horizon wasn’t darkened with horses. It was clotted with the warriors. “Get down outta sight!”

It was plain that these Indians who had attacked them were, at least for the moment, consumed with chasing after a few dozen of the horses on foot. They were screeching and screaming at the horses, driving them south by west back in the direction where the trappers had been camped. One of the Diggers appeared to spot Bass as the warriors loped past on foot, yelling at the horses, keeping the animals on the run. But none of the Indians stopped. As Titus waited to be discovered and overwhelmed, his heart pounding, more than a hundred of the short brown Indians streaked by, their knees pumping like steam pistons as they raced after their four-legged quarry.

Their shrill, intermittent cries and the hoof thunder quickly died, swallowed by the utter emptiness of that desert morning.

“They didn’t spot us!” Toussaint Marechal called out.

“Shit—they saw us,” Bass protested, relieved that so many of the enemy was now heading away from their line of march. “Had to see us when we ducked in here. They just wanted them horses more’n they wanted our sorry asses.”

“We better get moving,” Joseph Lapointe said as he stood and adjusted the bloody bandanna that covered
one of his eyes. “Them brownskins might just turn on around and come back for us.”

“Let’s hope we can catch up to the rest of dem horses,” Marechal said as he hobbled out of the rocks behind the rest.

“Better you pray we catch up to Bill Williams and the rest of our boys,” Scratch argued. “To hell with them Mexican horses while there’s red niggers out to raise our scalps in this here desert!”

It wasn’t until midmorning, with the late-summer sun starting to do its evil work, when Francois Deromme first spotted the faint scum of a dust cloud hugging the horizon to the north. Minute by minute, the cloud grew, advancing on that band of wounded trappers.

“You don’t figger it’s ’nother bunch of them Diggers, do you?” Joseph Lapointe asked.

Bass shook his head. “Naw. Nothing gonna raise dust like that but a whole passel of hooves.”

But just to be sure they didn’t get burned, the trappers quickly looked about, spotting a likely outcrop of rocks where they might find enough room to conceal themselves and their horses.

On and on, minute by minute, the shimmering gold cloud gobbled its way across the desert toward them. From time to time, sunlight glanced like streaks of mercury, rays glittering from the density of the cloud. Then the first of the volving legs emerged from the base of the dust.

“It’s them horses!” Jack Robinson screamed with glee. “See? It’s our horses!”

In the next heartbeat, not only did the front ranks of the horses emerge out of the billowing dust, but also two riders—both of them whooping and yipping like coyote pups on the prowl.

“I’ll be go to hell and et for the devil’s tater!” Scratch cheered as he started hobbling into the open.

He ripped his wide-brimmed felt halt off his head and started waving it at the horses and that daring pair of riders out in the van of the herd. With all those animals
racing directly at him—from where he stood right then it seemed as if the desert was belching free every horse that had ever come out of California.

At the head of the herd, those two riders pointed and waved their big hats, one of the horsemen angling off to his left. Once those animals in the front flanks were following him, the other horseman turned aside as the herd pushed on.

“Jehoshaphat! If that don’t look to be Ol’ Solitaire hisself!” Bass roared, wagging his hat once more at the end of his arm.

Williams came up at a lope, his horse skidding on the flinty ground. Every inch of the man was coated with a thick layering of fine talc that shook loose, forming a gauzy cloud that billowed into a bright halo around him as his animal shuddered to a halt.

“Titus Bass! That really you?”

Scratch spat out some of the sand that was settling around them all, a choking, blinding cloud of it kicked up by those hundreds of horses. “ ‘Onery as ever, Bill,” he coughed.

“Damn, if you ain’t covered ground on your own shanks! Walked all this way with that arrer hole in your ass?”

“He did, Bill!” Deromme said with a cheer.

“That our horses?” Titus inquired, glancing at the herd as it peeled aside, headed west.

“What we could get wrangled back together,” Williams confided. “The rest we’ll let the desert have. Maybe them Diggers run across some of ’em one of these days.”

“Roast a haunch or two of Mexican horse, eh?” Bass said. “Where was you headed with ’em?”

“The horses? Why—we was comin’ back for you boys.”

“See?” Robinson said. “I told you all along Bill wouldn’t light out of the desert without us!”

Bass scooted closer to Williams’s bony knee, gazing up at the old trapper coated with that layer of brown dust. “Who’s leading ’em now?”

“Kersey,” he replied. “We figgered to find water for ’em afore night over yonder at them hills.” He pointed. Then looked down at Bass. “You coming with us?”

“Damn right I am,” Scratch growled. “A whole passel of them horses are mine, Bill. To get ’em this far, I near died of thirst, got my head shot off by Californy greasers, and a’most had my throat cut by a white man. I ain’t about to let any of you side-talking varmints run off with what critters are mine!”

Williams rocked his head back and laughed so hard some more fine dust shook off him in a mist. “I figger that means you’re coming with us! You sit a saddle yet?”

“Ain’t tried—but I’ll keep covering ground on foot any way you care to lay your sights.”

“That’s what I like in this man, boys!” Williams cheered. “You just can’t beat a good man what puts his head down and keeps on coming!”

“You heard, Solitaire,” Titus said to the others as he turned around to face them. “There’s a herd to wrangle. All you fellas what are fit to help them others with the horses, saddle up and catch them horses. The rest of you what’re ailin’ too bad can lay back and come along with me.”

Only Toussaint Marechal and Joseph Lapointe ended up staying behind with him, watching the others wave their farewells, then ease away toward the tail end of that massive herd.

Titus suddenly looked up and asked, “Ain’t you going on with the rest, Bill?”

Patting his dust-crusted, lathered horse on the withers, Williams said, “I’ll lay off running them animals for a while, Scratch. Maybeso, you boys could use some company on your leetle walk.”

“Much ’predated, Bill.”

The four of them had covered several miles in the blazing sun before Williams, right out of the blue, confessed, “We got less’n half what we drove outta California, fellas.”

Bass glanced over at the skinny man walking beside
him, leading his own horse. “You figgered you’d make it back to the mountains with more, did you?”

Williams was slow to grin, but smile he did, his brown teeth a shade or two darker than the pale dust coating his severely tanned face. “Shit, Scratch—you got me there! Never in all my days could I have figgered to get this many horses out of California and ’cross that killer desert.”

“But we done it, Bill.”

“By damn, if we didn’t!” Williams exclaimed. “But just think of all them horses what left their bones behind us.”

“No reason for you to feel sad for gettin’ only half of ’em to the mountains. Lookit us—we’re standing here, still alive!” Titus snorted some dust out of his nose onto the desert hardpan. Then he looked squarely at Bill. “We had us some shining times out to Californy, didn’t we, ol’ friend?”

Williams smiled hugely, no longer grave, and slapped Titus on the back. “We did have us some fun, didn’t we, Scratch? By blazes, if we didn’t have us a whole damn lotta fun!”

It took them the better part of a week, but they finally put the Green River at their backs, escaping the worst of that broken canyonland where it took all they had to keep any more of the stolen horses from slipping away in that rugged country.

Throughout the days the trappers kept the animals under a rotation of wranglers while the rest of the men slept. At dusk they saddled up and
ki-yiiied,
waving hats and coils of buffalo-hair rope to start the last three broodmares they still had alive. No longer were they pushing the rangy animals, not the way they had run the herd out of California, goaded them over the mountains and into those first stretches of desert. None of the survivors wanted to lose any more of their horses. So the cautious men inched forward each night, searching out the water holes and springs.

For nights on end, Bass had been forced to follow the slow-moving caravan on foot. But by the time they had begun their climb into the first low foothills, Titus was tying on his last pair of moccasins, deciding it was time to give that ham a try before he was forced to walk barefoot. That evening he settled back into the saddle, tenderly doing what he could to keep his weight off that wounded buttock. Trying his best to ignore the painful hammer of the horse’s gait as it made its way over the uneven ground.

Far off in the distance, the verdant green of the Rocky Mountains beckoned seductively to these men who had outlasted months of desert sand, scorching sun, and their own limits.

It set Scratch to wondering how could a man live in such warm places as these, especially the sort of man who settled in valleys where other men congregated—building their shacks and huts and barns, forced to breathe each other’s air, where they had no seasons of winter, spring, or fall to their lives? How did folks live like that?

But he realized there were lots of men who did live out their lives perfectly content to do without the harsh edges any wilderness scraped away on a man, settlers who were absolutely content to live a life untested. His father had been one. One of the many.

It was Titus Bass himself who was too damned different to get along with the steady sort what came to fill up these open, feral, unforgiving spaces.

Crossing a wind-scoured country of cedar, juniper, and stunted yellow pine, the raiders were forced to angle north along the base of a great plateau. Once around the end of that towering ridge, Williams curved them around to the south-southeast. From here on out they would no longer travel at night and rest out the sun.

Three more days of driving the herd and they struck what the mountain men called the Blue River,
^*
one of the
tributaries of the mighty Colorado. Finding enough water for their horses was no longer a problem. Nor wood for their night fires. No more would they have to cook their stringy horseflesh over smoky, struggling, greasewood fires.

They had returned to the Shining Mountains.

“We ain’t far now,” Bill Williams had declared last night after they went into camp and killed another skinny yearling to last them the next couple of days.

“Robidoux’s post?” Titus asked.

The old trapper nodded. “Up the Blue a ways, afore we hit the mouth of the Uncompawgray. Should be there afore sundown tomorrow.”

After all they’d endured, that was about the best damned news. Had there been any whiskey in their camp that summer night, there’d been one hell of a collection of drunks sleeping off their revels when the order came to roll out the next morning. As it was, the trappers could only look forward to reaching Robidoux’s post, where they were certain to find some Mexican whiskey or sweet fruit brandy, not to mention a few Ute squaws and some greaser gals who just might be convinced to cozy up with a lonely fella gone too long in the desert without some soft and curvaceous companionship.