Death Rattle (38 page)

“Lookit them li’l brown niggers!” Dick Owens cried, pointing at the two dozen or so warriors who had raced in a wide loop around the trappers’ camp and were scampering away after the fleeing herd.

“They’ll run from now clear to Judgment Day,” John Bowers declared. “Never gonna catch them California horses!”

But it was only a matter of minutes before those Diggers appeared to realize the futility of their footrace, grinding to a halt and turning around out there against the distant horizon. Failing to herd those frightened, stolen horses, the warriors sprinted back to rejoin the fight.

Moment by moment now, the brown noose formed by those Digger warriors perceptibly drew tighter and tighter around the white men. And as it did, the Indians were sure to grow more bold, certain to inch all the closer with their deadly bows. With the sheer number of arrows landing among them, the first of those terrible little stone-tipped missiles pierced Toussaint Marechal’s thigh. Then another arrow clipped Francois Deromme in the arm. The damned things came floating down at an arch, falling out of the late-afternoon sun, finding a man here or there. No matter where the arrows struck—in the arm, or the leg—they managed to leave a nasty and oozy wound, even where a tiny flint point slashed along Joseph Lapointe’s skull, scraping a bloody furrow just beneath that skin from the outer edge of his eye clear back to where it protruded from his ear, dripping crimson on his shoulder.

With a sudden grunt of surprise, Bass sensed the stone tip pierce the thick ham of his left buttock.

“Damn you, sonsabitches!” he roared while collapsing onto his opposite hip, seizing the arrow’s shaft in his free right hand.

Only meat, he brooded as he gave the shaft a tentative
tug. The torment was white hot, making him clamp his eyes shut with the diminishing waves of sharp, piercing pain—but he kept tugging nonetheless. No bone—nothing but meat—for that tip to bury itself into. Nothing at all like Ol’ Bridger’s arrowpoint, left to calcify in his back for more than three years.
^*
So he managed to pluck the damned thing out of his ass with an agonizing, teeth-clenching struggle.

The sheer oozy tenderness of the wound, not to mention the ignominy of where he’d been shot this time, only served to make him all the madder at these exasperating enemies. Doing his best to shift his weight onto the opposite knee, Titus hurried through the ritual of reloading without wasting time digging for a greased patch to nestle the huge lead ball he shoved against the grains of powder he already had poured down the long barrel.

Aim, fire … then reload again—while the Diggers screamed at every charge and sang their death songs with every retreat. Aim, fire … then reload—while the trappers around him cried out when they were struck with an arrow, all of them cursing their little brown enemies, or shouting a fading encouragement to one another.

Damn, Scratch sulked angrily, chewing on the inside of his cheek, realizing just how thirsty he had become as their fight ground on and on. Just to think of it: here they were now, caught out in this godforsaken wilderness fit only for frightened ground rats, emaciated jackrabbits, and hairy spiders the size of a man’s tin cup—finding themselves with all but a handful of their horses run off. Put afoot here after all they’d gone through to steal those California horses, to rub the Mexicans’ noses in their theft. Stranded now in this blazing desert with no way out but to walk.

And to top things off, Bass knew with that jagged, seepy wound soaking the back of his breechclout, he wouldn’t be sitting a horse for days to come!

As much as the Diggers tried their damnedest to inch
in close enough to attempt one final, deadly rush—they never worked up the courage to see it through. Wounded as some of the trappers were, they stoically, quietly, steadfastly went about their business tugging out the tiny stone arrowpoints, wrapping black silk bandannas around their bloody wounds, then went back to reloading, firing again, reloading and firing over and over as the shadows lengthened.

The sun settled to the far edge of the earth, and shadows faded there in the lee of those red-hued, iron-tinged rocks.

With that gradual, but most dramatic, change in the light playing off the huge boulders, all the fire gradually seemed to slowly seep out of the Diggers’ attack. One by one, and in small clusters, the warriors retreated behind the jagged rocks, slipping out of sight before they disappeared out of range—not only refusing to charge the thunderous guns anymore, but every last one of them choosing instead to race barefoot after those scattering horses.

“They got what they wanted,” Bass grumbled as the trappers watched the last of their attackers pull off and the desert fell quiet.

He tried to get up on one knee again, but that buttock still cried out in pain. The muscles had stiffened, cramping around the wound. Titus barely caught himself from falling to the side, then propped the rifle under his shoulder, pushing his way up on the good leg, refusing to think about what poison the goddamned red niggers had used to turn their annoying little arrowpoints into weapons that would bring a slow death.

“Daws, get a fire started,” Bill Williams ordered, more angry than a spit-on hen. “A big goddamned fire!”

“We gonna use that fire to light the night, Bill? Keep them Diggers off us?” Henry Daws asked.

“Yeah?” Pete Harris chimed in. “So’s we can see ’em coming after dark?”

“No, the fire I’m telling you to stoke ain’t for us,” Williams explained, his jaw muscles flexing in harsh ribbons.

Right then Scratch could read something in the older man’s eye that most of the younger men never would. Uncertainly, he hobbled up beside Williams and stopped to ask, “You fixing to roast some of this here meat, Bill?”

Williams nodded, a wild look to his bloodshot eyes. “Digger meat.”

In utter disbelief, Adair stuttered, “B-burn these here Injuns, Bill?”

“Damn right he is,” Titus confirmed.

“Y-you ain’t fixin’ to make meat outta these damn Diggers, are you!” Dick Owens shrieked.

“Meat’s meat,” Bill explained angrily, then turned to Scratch with a malevolent glint to his eyes. “You hear these whining squaws, Titus Bass? Men like you an’ me we ain’t never been so squampshus ’bout what we put down our feed bags!”

When Williams stomped away angrily, headed for the closest of the dead warriors, Rube Purcell stepped up and nervously asked Titus, “You two ain’t serious ’bout cooking them Injuns for us to eat?”

Bass stared at Bill’s back a moment more, then looked Purcell in the eye, declaring, “Maybeso we go an’ burn them dead niggers—it’s gonna teach the rest of ’em a lesson so they won’t follow us outta here.”

“That mean we ain’t gonna cook ’em to eat, right?” John Bowers prodded, wanting some real reassurance.

“Solitaire can eat Digger if he wants,” Titus grumbled. “As for me—I ain’t about to eat nothin’ or no
one
what shot me in the ass.”

Samuel Gibbon asked, “Sounds like we’re gonna burn ’em?”

“Ever’ last hell-dog of ’em,” Scratch declared defiantly. “You heard Bill! Now build a fire! A goddamned
big
fire!”

“We … we leaving, Scratch?” Reuben Purcell inquired as he came up to Bass’s elbow.

Titus pivoted around on his heel. “Damn right we’re leaving. We’ll count heads and what horses we got left. Bury them men we have to, drag the rest best we can. Once’t we get that fire blazing and them dead niggers
throwed on the flames—we’re gone from here under them stars.”

Adair inquired, “Where you figger you and Williams gonna lead out tonight?”

Titus dragged the back of his hand across his parched, cracked lips. “Where, you’re asking me, Silas? Why—to see what horses we can still round up afore we push on for the Uncompawgray.”

Titus Bass elected to walk, leading his horse. It was that or suffer the agony of a saddle-pounding. That snare saddle with a thick leather mochilla draped over its frame simply wasn’t going to give his poorly placed wound the slightest comfort. Even with the furry padding of a small section of buffalo hide Scratch sliced from his sleeping robe, he found himself flinching with discomfort, if not wincing in downright pain when he tried to nestle down atop the saddle.

Unsteadily, he dropped to the hardpan desert floor, where he began to trudge the canyon ridges among the handful of their winged and wounded—those not able to move on their own. The rest hurried on into the dark with Bill Williams, following the wide, moonlit trail of the fleeing horses, their hoofprints dotted with the clutter of small moccasin tracks. Ol’ Solitaire had vowed he would make the Diggers pay for the trouble they had visited the trappers, even if Bill and the others didn’t get back but a dozen of those hard-won Spanish barb horses.

From time to time that evening, and on into the blackening of the desert night, Scratch turned to peer over his shoulder at that fading cone of flickering yellow light. A good thing the wind blew out of the west as evening came on, he pondered. The unearthly stench of those burning bodies was more than a right-minded man could stand. Not that Titus was squeamish—not in the least. Across all those seasons he’d spent west of the Big Muddy, after all, he’d killed enough of those who had attempted to kill him.

The Diggers could have sneaked up and cut out a
small portion of the herd to feed their miserable selves, instead of attacking the white men settled down for some hard-won sleep, instead of greedily running off all those hundreds of California horses. Had the brownskins been satisfied at slipping off with just a few, chances were Scratch could have talked Williams and the others out of wasting any time or effort pursuing a paltry number of the scrawny animals.

But when those red niggers made it plain as sun they were out to kill white men, those red niggers deserved no quarter.

A man often made some allowance for simple-minded savages what didn’t know any better—but when the Diggers descended upon the trappers with their full intention of killing Williams’s raiders so they could steal everything of any glittering value … then the red-bellies sealed their own death warrants.

Out here in this hostile environment, just like the predator and the preyed upon—life had never been anything more than cheap.

“Once’t I hear dem Diggers eat their own chirrun when they get hungry ’nough!” Francois Deromme declared as he rode along, perched in his saddle above Titus, his left arm in a sling improvised from a black kerchief.

“Man’d have to be a animal to eat his own young’uns,” Joseph Lapointe grumbled.

“That’s what the hell they are,” Deromme argued. “I neber see’d it with my own eyes—but I hear more’n one man tell me dem Diggers get hungry ’nough, they eat their young.”

“Maybeso you’re right,” Lapointe agreed. “We all know them Mexicans ride up to this here country, for to steal women and young’uns, drag ’em back to Santee Fee and Touse for slaves in the fields. The Comanch’ and the Yutas do it, too—they’re always stealing Digger women and young’uns.”

“So you figgair dese here Diggers don’t give a damn ’bout their chirrun?” Deromme prodded.

“Look around you, fellas,” Scratch interrupted their
discussion. “A empty belly in this here country gonna cry out for food only so long afore one of these red niggers gonna fill it any way he can.”

“You figgair they do eat their young, Bass?” Lapointe inquired.

With a halfhearted shrug, Titus said, “I figger these here Diggers gonna eat most anything they can put in their mouths just to stay alive.”

Rumors did indeed abound among the American fur men, not to mention those tales told down in the Mexican provinces, concerning the Diggers’ sacrificing their children to fend off starvation. Although no white man had ever actually witnessed such barbarity with his own eyes, many a trapper had seen how these pitiful wretches shamelessly abandoned their blind, lame, and young to die alone in the desert when fleeing from powerful attackers.

Another certainty that lent a weighty probability to such legendary cannibalism in the minds of these trappers was what this austere country did
not
provide in the way of sustenance. Rarely had a fur man ever sighted any real game in the form of deer or antelope. Most of the time, even the bony jackrabbits were hard to spot. In certain seasons, these Diggers somehow sustained themselves on a diet of crickets and grasshoppers, even ants and spiders too. Word had it the Indians dried these insects beneath the blazing sun, then pounded the bodies into a fine meal that, when mixed with a little water or the moisture squeezed from a cactus frond, would form a paste they could bake on flat rocks at the edge of their fires.

Bright as the stars were that night, not to mention the illumination from a three-quarter moon, the wide and scoured trail wasn’t all that hard to follow through those blessed hours of darkness. And in those final moments before the sky began to gray off the east as they trudged along, it even grew outright chilly. Feeling a little weak from the loss of blood and not having a thing to eat in the better part of a whole day, Scratch damn well didn’t want to let the desert’s cold sink in clear to his marrow. He stopped to rest for a few minutes while he untied his trailworn
capote from behind the saddle and pulled it onto his arms, knotting the sash around his waist.

Then he continued into what remained of the yawning, black desert night.

“You hear that?” Henry Daws asked.

The few came to a halt around Bass, quieting their animals as all of them fell silent. Listening.

There it was, for certain. The sound of gunfire. Not a rip-roaring battle of it—but a few shots echoing now and then. Of a sudden, they heard the low, rumbling thunder too.

“Dem’s horses!” Francois Deromme cried.

Jack Robinson cheered, “An’ it sounds like they’re coming our way!”

“Damn if they ain’t,” Bass cursed, his eyes flicking left and right, frantically searching for cover. “We better be finding us somewhere to get outta their way.”

“You figgair dem others find the horses?” Lapointe inquired.

“Sure as hell did find ’em!” Deromme declared. “Dey bringing the herd back for us.”