Brule warriors. Ciriaco and the others had spread out wider now, finding whatever cover they could.
From a mile away. Windy Mandalian and Henry Walks Quickly heard the rifle fire. They had been walking their horses, but now stepped quickly into a gallop, checking their rifles as they rode.
At the site of the skirmish, the B rules had retired into the draw for a moment, and there was no fighting as Windy and the Delaware rode in.
“Xerxes is hit, and Michel,” Otio said, running his coat sleeve across his brow. “And six sheep killed. The sons of bitches!”
Windy and the Delaware had swung to the ground.
“They came from nowhere,” Ciriaco said. “Like that!”
. And he swept his two palms together in front of him.
“That’s the prairie,” Windy told them. “Those draws can hide an army, and when you’re at ground level it looks like it’s all straight, level ground.”
And suddenly the Sioux hit again. They poured out of the draw like a flooding river, their war cries tearing the air, driving right at the herders, who by now had moved in front of the flock of sheep to protect them.
Windy’s Sharps added a new note to the fight. Walks Quickly kept up steady fire with his trapdoor Springfield. And again the Sioux broke their charge, not wishing to come too close to those Spencers and Windy Mandalian’s highly effective Sharps.
Suddenly a howl went up from one of the sheep dogs as it was hit.
Otio swore. “We must follow the bastards!”
“That’s too good a way to get your ass ambushed,” Windy warned. “They’ll be waiting for you.”
“How?”
Windy started to explain, but the language was too difficult for Otio.
Ciriaco told it to him in Basque. “They will pretend, Otio. Then they will hide and attack us in the back.”
“The bastards!”
Now, suddenly Otio’s eye caught a hostile breaking from a stand of cottonwoods.
In one flowing movement he had dropped to his knee, shouldered the Spencer, paused for only a split second, and then squeezed.
The Indian jerked upward in his saddle, and then toppled to the ground.
“Jesus!” said Windy, his jaws racing faster than usual. “That there is neat shootin’, if I might say so.”
Ciriaco’s eyes danced as he looked at Otio. “It sure is,” he said, and in superb imitation of Windy, he let fly a wad of spittle at a lump of earth that had been kicked up in the melee.
Windy looked sourly at the sheepherder, but Ciriaco just stood there with a friendly smile on his face.
“Might hire you on as a second scout,” Windy said, and he lowered one eyelid slowly, keeping the other wide open. This served to drive Ciriaco into peals of laughter. Otio smiled. It was a good moment, washing away some of the thing that had just happened.
“You got him plumb center,” Windy said, nodding toward the fallen Brule.
Otio nodded. “It was what he deserved,” he said sim- ply.
A grin appeared through Windy’s whiskers. “And don’t tell me that old one about how you was really aiming for the horse.”
Ciriaco had to translate, and then Otio took his uncle by the arm and turned him so that Windy could see his back. With his forefinger, Otio felt down Ciriaco’s spine.
“Here,” he said. “Here is where I aim.”
When they walked out to the dead Indian, the herder