Death Rattle Read Online Free Page B

pinned beneath the octagonal barrel, he laid another greased linen patch over the muzzle and shoved the wiping stick down for another swab. Only when he had dragged out the patch fouled with oily, black powder residue did he spit the large round ball into his palm and place it in the yawning muzzle.
    Baker glanced at the body nearby—a hapless trapper who had poked his head up just a little too far at the wrong moment and gotten an arrow straight through the eye socket for his carelessness. Penetrating into the brain, the shaft had brought a quick, merciful death. The redhead grumbled, “This damn well don’t appear to be no game to me.”
    “No two ways to it, Jim: this here’s big medicine to these brownskins,” Bass explained as he reprimed the pan. “White men ain’t been hoo-rooed by Sioux and Cheyenne much afore this, you see. Lookit their women up on that hill, singing and hollering their medicine for ’em, screaming billy-be-hell for their men to rub us out, all and every last one.”
    “They can do it,” Baker groaned with resignation. “Damn well ’nough of ’em out there.”
    “But they won’t,” Titus argued. “Ain’t their way to ride over us all at once. Sure they could all come down here an’ tromp us under their hooves. They’d loose a few in rubbing us out but they’d make quick work of it.”
    “W-why ain’t they?”
    “There ain’t no glory in it, Jim.” And Bass grinned, his yellowed teeth like pin acorns aglow in the early-afternoon light. “Them are warriors. The gen-yu-wine article. And the only way a warrior gets his honors is in war. This here’s war—a young buck’s whole reason for livin’. Wiping us out quick … why, that ain’t war. That’s just killing.”
    Baker wagged his head and rolled onto his knees again to make a rest for his left elbow on the ribs of his dead horse. “I don’t rightly care what sort of game them Injuns is having with us. I figger to do my share of killing.”
    Bass rocked onto his rump and settled the long barrel atop the fist he made of his left hand, which rested on the horse’s broad, fly-crusted front shoulder. Green and black bottleflies already busy laying their eggs in the ooze and the gore.
    Gazing up the slope, he was surprised to find the woman had moved. Damn, if she wasn’t coming down toward the bottom close enough that he might just have a chance to knock down Fraeb’s warrior princess.
    Closer, closer … come on now, he heard himself think in his head as she and her unmounted courtiers inched down the hillside, their shrill voices all the more clear now in the late-afternoon air. If he held high, and waited for that next gust of hot wind to die … he might just hit her. If not the warrior princess, then drop her horse. And if not her pretty spotted pony, then one of them others what stood around her like she was gut-sucking royalty.
    He let out half a breath and waited for the breeze to cease tugging on that thin braid of gray-brown hair that brushed against his right cheek. Bass quickly set the back trigger, then carefully slipped his fingertip over the front trigger, waiting, waiting—
    When the rifle went off he bolted onto his knees tohave himself a look, not patient to wait for the pan flash and muzzle smoke to drift off on the next gust of wind.
    Her brown-spotted pony was rocking back onto its haunches, suddenly twisting its head and neck as the double handful of courtiers scattered—diving and scrambling off in every direction. As if plucked into the sky, the warrior princess herself sprung off the rearing pony the moment its forelegs pawed in the air a heartbeat, then careened onto its side.
    A few of the more daring attendants immediately surrounded the princess and started dragging her up the slope, away from the fighting, out of range of the white man’s far-reaching weapons.
    Scratch watched how reluctant she was to back away, amused at how she continued to stare over her shoulder in utter