CHAPTER FORTY
Duncan Regret could not believe that he was still alive. His legs hurt like hell. So did breathing. Even opening his eyes, pained him, but he could see, and even though each breath caused him to grimace or gasp, he had survived. His hearing had returned. Horses lay around him, legs broken, some screaming, others already dead, and he felt the weight of Matilda’s barrel against his left hip. He lay on his side, half buried in the sand, but those horses—and the dirty rats who had driven those crazed beasts—had failed to do something many others had failed to do. They hadn’t killed Duncan Regret. And they would pay with their lives.
He was crippled. He hurt all over, but he . . . he . . . he . . . smelled something. He heard something. Beyond him came a shot. Another. But that wasn’t what he’d heard. It was something closer. It whispered. No . . . it sizzled. Craning his neck, he looked up at the barrel of Matilda, the mountain howitzer. It was hard to see because of the pain throughout his body and the sand in his eyes, but he thought he saw traces of smoke. And the sound? The sound?
“Oh, hell.”
Panic seized him. The fuse. That fuse. All those mustangs, overturning the cannon, killing other animals, wrecking Matilda. And destroying his dreams . . . and those of Don Marion Wilkes. Someone had failed to stamp out the fuse.
His head turned toward the barrel’s opening, and he saw it buried deep in the Arizona sand along the Dead River. So deep, he realized what would happen if that fuse burned to the powder. The barrel would rupture, and the charge would split the barrel, sending its contents—two bags of grapeshot—all over the place.
Duncan Regret would be blown to pieces.
“No,” he screamed. His hands desperately and furiously began digging at the sand. He gave up, reached out, tried to pull himself from underneath the sand. At that point, he was sobbing without control, choking on his tears, tearing his fingernails out because the ground was so hard. And the sound of the burning fuse almost burst his eardrums.
“No. No. No. No. Nooooo!!!!!!”
When he paused to catch his breath, he heard an eerie silence. The fuse, he thought with great relief, has burned itself out.
The explosion would have told Duncan Regret just how wrong he was had he lived to hear the detonation and destruction that ripped his body into pieces the ants and ravens would enjoy for days upon days.
* * *
“By the saints, man, we would have shot you off that horse had you not cut loose with that Rebel yell!” The thin old man was walking straight toward Matt McCulloch after he leaped off his horse and started to take a position behind one of the wagons. McCulloch caught a glance at the man holding one hand out, his other gripping an Enfield rifled musket.
The boys from the train were starting to push the wagon back, sealing off the entrance.
“Not yet!” McCulloch’s voice boomed. “I got friends out there. They are with me!”
The man who wanted so badly to shake McCulloch’s hand stopped. The boys looked at the old gentleman. Another one of the young men, however, who was sitting in the driver’s box, raised up his musket, and yelled, “There’s a crazy red devil chasing them!! He’s almost at them!!”
Shooting a quick glance, McCulloch realized what the boy saw.
“No!” he yelled. “No! That’s a fri—” He lunged toward the kid and the wagon.
Reaching out, McCulloch dropped his weapon, oblivious to the galloping horse of Jed Breen’s. He had to stop that kid from shooting Wooden Arm out of his Comanche saddle. The entire world—from McCulloch’s legs and arms to his voice, to the sounds of the battle all around him, to the beating of his heart—slowed into an eternal crawl. And McCulloch knew he’d never be able to reach the kid in time.
Suddenly, he was lifted off his feet and slammed back hard, with a fury he had never felt in all his years. He crashed hard into the old gent who had so wanted to shake his hand.
* * *
Annie Homes lay on her back, metal chimes ringing somewhere deep in her head. Her father had been walking toward a dark-clothed man who had ridden a horse that might have come out of the deepest part of Hades. What then? She tried to clear her thoughts, her mind, but the most likely guess as to what had knocked her into Winfield Baker’s body was . . . a volcano had erupted. She saw black smoke rising high over the canvas coverings of most of the wagons, but that was drifting, fading. It could not have been from a volcano.
“Annie?”
She heard that, which meant she was not deaf, maybe not even dead.
Winfield Baker’s face appeared before her.
“Are you all right, darling?”
She blinked. She thought. She heard the pounding hooves of horses. Winfield Baker brushed sand and ash off her forehead and slowly lifted her to a seated position.
“Riders are coming in,” he told her. “They are shutting the gap.”
She was in his arms, but she did not know how that had happened. The faces of men and women she knew, even Mrs. Primrose and Betsy Stanton, passed by. She felt herself being laid onto blankets in the shade and saw his face come closer, and closer, and closer, and felt something cool touch her forehead.
His lips, she thought. He has kissed me. Just on the head but . . .
“You rest,” Winfield Baker told her. “Just rest. I’ll send Mr. Randall over to see you.”
That would be the barber from Dead Trout, but he had been known to patch a few cuts and set some busted bones, and he had even tried to cut out Josiah Armagost’s appendix two years back, although Mr. Armagost had not survived the surgery.
“Winfield?” she said softly.
His face came back into view.
“Who is that man who rode up?”
“I don’t know, Annie.”
“He looks like the devil.”
He smiled. “That devil might have saved us all.”
Winfield Baker walked away, and Annie Homes drifted off into a deep, peaceful, wonderful sleep.
* * *
“We have those men surrounded still,” Don Marion Wilkes told the men, most of whom no longer looked anything remotely like a Navaho Indian. “We have water, and they are trapped. We have demoralized them.”
He looked at the men still with him, those not dead, or not high-tailing it for safer climes. Matilda had been blown to Kingdom Come. Clouds of black smoke drifted across the Dead River country. This Indian massacre, so carefully planned, had not gone anywhere near the way it should have gone, but Don Marion Wilkes was not about to quit. “We have killed their leader and several of their men. They have not enough horses to pull their wagons out. And will remain in the Dead River. No one will travel this way. No one will come to their rescue. We shall starve them out. We shall negotiate a truce, and when they accept our truce, we shall smote them all.”
That speech did absolutely nothing but waste his breath.
So he added, “And you all shall be paid one thousand dollars in gold for seeing this job finished.”
* * *
Broken Buffalo Horn’s eyes slowly opened, and he stared into the eyes of his horse, which looked down on the Comanche medicine man and snorted. He realized he had held on to the hackamore after being pitched over the side of his horse as it galloped after the fleeing cowardly white-eyes. His hand felt blisters from where the hackamore had pulled tightly, but he still had a horse to ride.
“Can you sit up, my friend?” Killed A Skunk asked.
“Yes,” Broken Buffalo Horn said. “Of course, I can sit up. I am Comanche.” He waited. When Killed A Skunk just stared at him, he said, “Help me up, my friend.”
Lost His Thumb rode up, then waved his bow to the south and west. “The white-eyes we chased have moved into a fort of wagons that have been attacked by a strange group of white-eyes.” He held up what appeared to be a scalp, but this black hair did not drip with blood. “They are dressed like Indian peoples.”
“Comanche?” Broken Buffalo Horn asked.
“No.” Lost His Thumb pointed north. “Those who like silver and black. The ones who many summers ago lived at the edge of Comanche land, at the fort of Long Knifes at Bosque Redondo.”
“The Navajo.” Broken Buffalo Horn let his head move up and down. It did not fall off, and that was a good sign.
“Yes. That is how they are called. The Navajo.”
“And my son?” the medicine man asked.
Lost His Thumb frowned. “He is in the fort with the white eyes. The fort made of the wagons.”
For a long while, Broken Buffalo Horn stared at the sand, but had nothing to say. His breathing barely reached the ears of the two other Comanches, but at length, after some great thought, the medicine man looked up. “What of the Comanche ponies?”
It was Killed A Skunk who frowned. Many are dead, my friend,” he whispered. They rode over a wheel gun that kills so many . Some died there. Then the wheel gun that kills so many was swallowed by a monster that breathes fire and rains silver and gray balls. That killed more ponies, but some of those would have died anyway.”
Gunshots began a few hundred yards away.
“They shoot again at the fort made of wagons,” Lost His Thumb said.
“Which means they shoot at my son,” Broken Buffalo Horn said.
“Yes, it is so.” The Comanche warrior shook his head. “And there are three of us. But at least ten times that of them.”
“It is not like a Comanche to ask for help,” Killed a Skunk said.
“A Comanche would never ask for help,” Broken Buffalo Horn said. “But it would not be right to count coup and take scalps in this country without receiving permission from the Navajos. This is their country.” He nodded.
“Then perhaps,” Lost His Thumb said, “We should see if the Navajos would like to help us take coups and scalps.”
* * *
Hans Kruger shoved a .45 barrel against the back of Jed Breen’s head.
“Vere!” he cried out. “Vere is mein Bruder?”
“Easy, pard, easy.” A tall man in buckskins decorated with scalp locks walked toward him. “We’re in a pickle, ol’ boy, and this don’t really make me feel so good, but, well, hell, we might need that gent’s gun. That’s Jed Breen, Hun. A bounty hunter.”
“The bounty hunter,” Breen said.
“Nein.” Kruger shook his head. “Nein. I vill not do anything until I know vere mein Bruder is. Somebody vill tell me or else I vill kill dis bounty hunter. I must see mein Bruder—”
Blood and brains exploded from the center of Hans Kruger’s forehead before anyone heard the shot. The man in buckskins ran one way, and Hank Benteen went the other way. Kruger lowered the Colt unfired, turned with a look of complete amazement on what was left of his face, and toppled to the ground. He shuddered, messed his britches, and lay still.
Breen rolled over, palming his Colt, and found the homesteaders from the wagon train taking positions. Matt McCulloch crawled to an opening, and Breen took a spot beside him.
Hell’s bells, Breen thought. He couldn’t find the widowmaker named Charlotte Platte, but the homesteaders began returning fire at those Indians that had them pinned down. “What are our chances?”
McCulloch began feeding cartridges into his Winchester. When he ran out, he frowned, but Charlotte Platte came over holding the gun belt she had just pulled off Hans Kruger’s corpse.
“Thanks,” McCulloch said as the woman began thumbing cartridges out of the leather loops and placing them into McCulloch’s hands.
“What kind of Indians are those?” Breen asked, after not getting an answer to his first question.
“The worst kind,” McCulloch answered. “White men.”
“Damn.” Breen ducked after a bullet whined off the iron wheel of the wagon next to him. “Maybe I should get my Sharps.”
“We’d appreciate that,” Charlotte said.
McCulloch asked, “You seen Wooden Arm?”
Breen looked north, then west, finally south. He smiled. “Some kids are staring at that splint you made. He’s entertaining them, keeping them out of harm’s way.” Breen pointed. “They’re behind a fort within our fort.”
“What kind of fort?” McCulloch fired, levered another round into the Winchester, and stared at where he had shot.
“The best kind,” Breen said. “Dead horses, dead oxen, dead mules.”
“Won’t be long before there are dead people,” McCulloch said.
“Matt?”
“Yeah.”
“Where’s Sean?”
McCulloch lowered his rifle. He looked at the still smoldering ruins where that cannon had exploded, at the dead bodies of men and animals all around that spot, and the dead littering the . . . Dead River. Aptly named.
“Hell,” he said in a dry whisper. “Do you reckon that stinker up and died on us?”