Chapter Four
Breckinridge waited until the other three men had waded across the creek, moved down the slope, and headed off to the west, crouching and using every bit of cover they could find as they trotted along.
Once they were out of sight, he canted his rifle jauntily over his shoulder and marched down the hill in plain sight. He followed the creek across the meadow, strolling along as if he didn’t have a care in the world. He even whistled a little tune, although he was still too far away from the camp for the Indians to hear him.
When he was a little more than halfway across the meadow, he noticed that the interlopers had stopped moving around. He looked close but couldn’t see them anymore. That lack of activity convinced him that the Indians had noticed his approach.
Either they had hidden and were watching him as he came closer, or they had decided to leave. He didn’t think the sight of one lone white man would have spooked them, so he was betting on the former.
He glanced to his right, where Morgan, Akins, and Fulbright ought to be working themselves into position. He didn’t see them anywhere, which was good. It meant they were staying out of sight, and if he couldn’t see them, neither could the Indians.
It suddenly occurred to Breckinridge that if anything happened to his three friends, if they were delayed for any reason, he could easily be walking into an ambush in which he was greatly outnumbered.
In that case he would just have to make the best of it. He still couldn’t think of any other plan that would have been better. He and the others couldn’t afford to abandon everything that was in the camp. Their continued survival depended too much on it.
Breckinridge had fallen silent, but he started whistling again as he came within earshot of the bluff. He veered to his left, away from the stream and toward the game trail that led to the top of the shallow rise.
Something flicked through the air toward him, causing his instincts and reflexes to take over. He twisted aside as fast as he could, which was barely fast enough to keep from being impaled by the arrow that flew past him. The shaft came so close it brushed the fringe on the front of his buckskin shirt.
Well, that answered the question of whether or not the Indians were hostile, he thought.
More arrows flew toward him. He dived forward so the deadly missiles sailed over him and buried themselves in the ground behind him.
Whooping and howling, the savages leaped out of their hiding places and charged down the game trail toward him. Since he had successfully dodged their arrows so far, they must have decided it would be better to finish him off at close quarters.
Breckinridge pushed himself up on one knee and lifted his rifle. It was already loaded and primed, so all he had to do was pull back the hammer as he socketed the curved butt against his shoulder. He settled his sights on the chest of the warrior who was leading the charge and squeezed the trigger.
The rifle boomed and kicked hard against him. The Indian went over backward as violently as if he had run full-speed into a low-hanging branch. Breckinridge knew the heavy lead ball had found its mark.
The Indians were still far enough away that he thought he had time to reload before they could reach him. He set about doing so, making an effort to keep his nerves under control and remain calm and cool as he measured a charge of powder from the horn.
He didn’t look at the Indians but instead watched what he was doing. As long as they were letting out those bloodthirsty yells, he didn’t have to see them to know how close they were getting.
More rifle shots suddenly rang out from across the creek. Breckinridge knew his friends were joining in the fight. As he used the flintlock’s ramrod to tamp a patch-wrapped ball down the barrel, he glanced up and saw that a couple more of the warriors had tumbled to the ground.
That left half a dozen of them on their feet, however, so he still had a fight on his hands.
Pistol shots boomed now as Morgan, Akins, and Fulbright charged out of some cottonwoods on the far side of the creek. Breckinridge primed his rifle and raised it again.
The nearest warrior was about thirty feet from him. The man let fly with a tomahawk just as Breckinridge pressed the trigger. That caused him to duck and threw his aim off a little. Instead of hitting the Indian in the chest, the ball blew away a fist-sized chunk of his skull above the left eye. Momentum made the man race forward a few more steps, already dead, before he pitched face-first to the ground.
Either way, the Indian was a goner, Breckinridge figured.
He set the rifle on the ground and pulled out his pistols as he rose to his full height. He leveled the guns and fired.
One of the warriors went down with blood fountaining from his throat where Breckinridge’s shot had torn it open. Another staggered, his right shoulder shattered where the ball had struck it. He stayed on his feet, though, and used his left hand to pluck a knife from his waist as he closed with Breck.
Steel rang against steel as the Indian stabbed down at Breckinridge, who used the barrel of one of the empty guns to turn aside the blade. With his other hand, Breck swung the other pistol against the side of the man’s head. Bone crunched under the smashing impact and the warrior’s legs folded, dropping him into a limp sprawl.
Another warrior slashed at him with a tomahawk. Breckinridge twisted aside and kicked the man in the belly. As the Indian doubled over, Breck brought up his right knee and smashed it into his jaw. The warrior went down, knocked out cold.
By now, Morgan, Akins, and Fulbright had splashed across the creek, and they launched themselves into the thick of the melee. Fulbright carried a tomahawk like the Indians, and the big, black-bearded man wielded it efficiently, shattering a warrior’s skull with it. Akins used the brass-plated butt of his rifle to batter another of the Indians to the ground. Morgan Baxter fired a pistol into the chest of a third man.
That left Breckinridge facing only one of the warriors, but this one was a big, strapping fellow who drove him backward by viciously slashing a knife back and forth. Breck dropped his empty pistols, timed his move, and suddenly lunged forward to grab the Indian’s wrist. He dropped backward, planted a booted foot in the man’s stomach, and levered him up and over.
The warrior let out a startled cry as he found himself flying through the air. He crashed down on his back with enough force to knock the breath out of his body and leave him stunned.
Breckinridge rolled over, snatched his own knife from its sheath, and leaped at the fallen warrior. The knife rose and fell, late afternoon sunlight winking on the blade as it did so. Breck plunged the knife into the warrior’s chest. The man spasmed, kicked, and died.
That left only one of the Indians alive, the man Breckinridge had knocked out a few moments earlier. Breck pulled his blood-dripping knife from the corpse of the man he had just killed, pointed with it, and warned his friends, “Keep an eye on that one. He’s still breathin’.”
“We can do somethin’ about that,” Fulbright said. He leaned over and split the Indian’s skull with one swift stroke of his tomahawk. The warrior would never regain consciousness now.
Breckinridge grunted in surprise and said, “I didn’t figure you’d kill him.”
Fulbright wrenched his ’hawk free and straightened.
“What’d you expect me to do?” he asked. “Did you plan on torturin’ the varmint to death, like they might’ve done to you if they’d caught you?”
“Of course not!”
“Well, we couldn’t let him go. He’d have run right back to the rest of his bunch and told them where we are and that we’d killed a bunch of his friends. We’d have had to move our camp, and that probably wouldn’t have done any good. They’d have tracked us down to settle the score anyway. I can tell from the decorations on their clothes and the way they wear their hair that they’re Blackfeet. Those varmints never forget a grudge. I’ve heard some of the old-timers say they still hate white men ’cause of somethin’ that happened when ol’ Lewis and Clark came through here thirty years ago.”
That was the longest speech Breckinridge had ever heard Fulbright make. Morgan said, “I’m afraid Amos is right, Breck. We couldn’t afford to let any of them get away.”
Breckinridge wiped the blood from his knife and stood up. Since he had killed more of the Indians than any of the others, he supposed he didn’t have any right to complain. And looking at it from a practical standpoint, the others were indeed right.
“So what should we do with them?” he asked.
“There’s a ravine up in the hills about half a mile from here,” Akins suggested. “We could dump ’em in it and maybe throw some rocks down on top of ’em. Nobody’d be likely to find the bodies that way.”
Morgan nodded solemnly and said, “That sounds like a good idea.”
It sounded like a bloody, unpleasant job to Breckinridge, but he didn’t have anything better to offer. He said, “We’d better get at it, I reckon, if we want to finish before dark.”