Death Rattle Read Online Free Page A

after every smoky volley. No less than a dozen must be ready should the whole hillside erupt in an avalanche of hooves and bows, flooding in a great rush for the white man’s corral.
    But charge after charge, the five hundred never thundered down the long slope and across the river bottom at once, never dared press close to that maze of deadfall and tree stumps, rushing en masse against that corral of buffalo robes, blankets, and bloating carcasses. As the morning wore on, the ground in front of the dead, stinking horses and mules reminded Bass of an autumn field of barren, windblown cornstalks. Almost as many arrow shafts bristled from those huge animals the mountain men had sacrificed to make this last stand.
    Well before the sun climbed to mid-sky, two of the trappers lay dead, and the rest were grumbling with thirst. The river lay all too seductively close at their backs. Its faint, late-summer gurgle almost loud enough to hear—were it not for the grunts of the sweating men asthey reloaded their rifles, or hurriedly refilled their powder horns from the small kegs pulled from among the scattered baggage. A peaceful, bucolic gurgle as the creek trickled over its gravel bed, to be sure … were it not for the rising swell of war cries and the soul-puckering power of the coming thunder of those hooves.
    “Dey comin’ again!” Fraeb would announce what every last one of the twenty-one others could see with their own eyes while the summer sun beat down on that corral of rotting horseflesh and desperate, cornered men.
    “Remember,” Bass turned to whisper at the redhead nearby. “Wait till you got a target.”
    “What’s it matter?”
    He turned and looked at the youngster’s face. “It’ll matter. Each of us gotta take one of the bastards out with every run they make at us … it’ll soon enough matter to
them.”
    Titus watched the redhead swallow hard and turn away without comment to stare at the oncoming horsemen. Sweat droplets stung Bass’s eyes. Grinding the sleeve of his calico shirt across his forehead, he calmly announced, “They call me Scratch.”
    “Scratch?” the redhead repeated. “No shit. I heard of you.” His eyes went to the black bandanna covering Bass’s head. “Word has it you lost hair.”
    Grinning, Bass nestled his cheek along the stock of his rifle, squinting at the front rank of horsemen. “That was a long time ago, friend.”
    He found another likely target: tall; a muscular youth brandishing what appeared to be an English trade gun in one hand as his spotted pony raced toward their corner of the corral. The Sioux and Cheyenne were clearly going to make another long sweep across a broad front again, hooves tearing up grassy dirt clods as they streaked past the long axis of the barricades where most of the trappers lay or knelt behind the bloating carcasses.
    The redhead’s rifle boomed. Then it was Scratch’s turn to topple his target.
    “Name’s Jim. Jim Baker,” the redhead turned to declare. “I’d like to say I’m glad to meet you,” he explainedas he rolled onto his back to yank up his powder horn and started to reload. “But I don’t figger none of us gonna get outta here anyways.”
    “You listen here, young fella,” Bass snapped. “I been through more’n any one man’s share of scraps with red niggers—from Apach’ on the Heely, to Comanch’ over in greaser country, clear up to the goddamned belly of Blackfoot land itself. We ain’t beat yet—”
    “How the hell you figure we gonna get outta here?” Baker demanded as he jammed a ball down his powder-choked barrel. “We ain’t got no horses left to ride—”
    “We’ll get out, Jim Baker. You keep shooting center like you done so far … these brownskins gonna get tired of this game come dark.”
    “G-game?”
    “Damn straight, it’s a game to them,” Bass explained, then tongued a ball from among those he had nestled inside his cheek. As he pulled his ramrod free of the thimbles