Sam Wilde felt the bullet tear through his stomach. Then he was spinning out of control, falling. An instant later the water of the river engulfed him. Down, down he sank, a sickening blackness drawing across his mind.
Sam’s muscles were like wet strings, refusing to respond to the frantic commands of his weakening mind. He could not prevent the current of the river from rolling and tumbling him with its twisting, wet current. He concentrated his last ounce of strength on fighting to hold at bay the terrible pain and invading darkness. To become unconscious was to allow the icy water to drown him.
He partially won the battle. One corner of his mind remained clear and functioning. He struck feebly upward through the slippery water that encased him in its frigid embrace. His lungs screamed for air. He reached high up, but there was only more water above his head. Then a down-dipping current caught Sam and drove him to the bottom of the river.
His feet touched the gravelly bottom and he kicked upward. He broke the surface and gulped a huge draft of the life-giving air. God! How sweet.
He hastily looked around on all sides. One of the rafts, propelled by a naked man at the sweep, was just reaching the land some one hundred yards upstream from Sam. Downriver, the decoy man ran at full speed along the bank. He came parallel to the second raft and then slightly ahead of it. He jerked off his trousers and moccasins and lunged into the river. He swam strongly in the direction of the raft.
Holding low in the water, Sam began to stroke weakly toward the shore. He was in the center of the river more than a hundred yards from land. Wounded, and with the water so cold and swift, he doubted he could swim the long distance.
Sam made slow headway toward the distant, brush-covered bark. The river was all powerful, rushing speedily downstream with him. He seemed little more than part of the floating brush and muddy foam that went where the river willed.
He struggled on across the tide of water. His muscles had weakened to almost nothing, sapped by the loss of blood and the water, which still held winter in its depths. Then abruptly the wild current slackened as Sam broke free and into almost still water behind a point of land.
He pulled himself out of the deep water and into the shallows. Here, the muddy fingers of the rising river swirled and flowed around the stems of the brush that grew along the edge of the shore. He tried to stand up but was too weak to rise to his feet. He crawled, wounded creature that he was, up on the bank.
He lifted his buckskin shirt. The bullet had struck him in the back just below the rib cage and had continued onward, plowing through the flesh of his stomach and tearing free at the front. He could put a finger in the hellish holes— 50-caliber at least. Blood leaked steadily from the hideous injury.
He cursed Farrow, the chief of the party, now dead, who had argued so strenuously that the trapper who called from the shore must be helped. Sam had sensed a trap and had tried to convince the others of his group not to stop. But he had been the most inexperienced of the lot and the others had not been swayed by his argument. Now they were all dead. He had seen them fall.
When the attack commenced, Sam had fired at the man who had decoyed them in toward the shore. Sam wanted to put a bullet through the white skin that had betrayed them, but the man moved too speedily. The bullet missed.
Sam had known he was doomed on the exposed deck of the raft. When the bullet had nicked him on the shoulder, he had exaggerated the tiny wound, dropping his empty rifle and falling across a bale of furs. When the robber started to crawl out of the water to take the raft, Sam had killed him. But that was only partial payment for what they had done.
Sam dragged himself a little farther from the rising river. His head dropped as total blackness caught him.
***
Sam slowly came to consciousness. He lay in some tall grass above the fringe of brush that bordered the river’s edge. He could hear the wet, watery rumble of the river nearby. He was terribly cold. The westering sun, shining fully upon him, held little warmth.
Cautiously he lifted his head to look around. He jerked, startled. A tall man with a long horse face stood upstream not two hundred feet away from Sam. He held a rifle ready in his hands. The man was staring toward the river and had not seen Sam rise up in the grass.
Sam immediately dropped flat and hugged the ground. If the man should come only a little closer, he could not help but spot Sam in the grass.
He felt the terrible ache in his stomach. Without rising, he twisted to look. A large patch of dirt beneath him was soaked with his blood. However, the gaping wound was now seeping only a little blood and lymph. It seemed he might have had some luck that the bullet had not struck a major vein or artery. He hoped it had not punctured his intestines. He had once seen a gut-shot man. It had taken many days full of the worst kind of pain for him to die.
Sam remained motionless watching the man through a break in the grass. He would conserve his strength until the man left. If Sam had to fight him, knife against a rifle, the outcome would be predictable.
Sam heard the thud of horses’ hooves. They grew louder and louder, coming directly at him. Sam lifted his head slightly.
Two mounted men leading three packhorses loaded with bundles of furs pulled their animals to a halt. One of the men spoke to the man with the rifle. “We don’t need a lookout anymore. Come and get one of these packhorses and take the furs to the raft.” He gestured in the direction of the craft down river.
“Okay,” replied the man.
The man on foot took the reins of one of the packhorses and headed along the river. The river pirates had brought their own pelts to add to the ones they had obtained by killing. They passed well away from Sam. When the sound of the horses faded, Sam raised higher to look.
The two men had ridden up river to the second raft that was tied to a bush on the edge of the water. They began to carry the furs aboard the craft. When the last bale was loaded, and lashed down, the men removed the packsaddles and dropped them on the ground. The remainder of their possessions, saddles and other personal gear, were brought onto the raft.
One man shoved the raft away from the bank. He sprang on board as the second man began to swing the sweep to propel them out into the current of the river. The horses stood watching after the men.
Sam saw the last man load his furs and take his personal items onto the raft. He left the horses and worked his craft into the river. He joined with his comrades as they floated past.
The two crafts grew smaller and smaller until they were but mere dots upon the back of the Missouri River. The rafts vanished around a bend and were lost to view.
Sam checked the height of the sun above the horizon. The yellow ball had fallen only a couple of finger widths since he had looked at it while still on the raft. The deaths of six men and the theft of many thousands of dollars in furs had all occurred in less than an hour. He had gone from a relatively wealthy young man bound for the delights of St. Joe to a man badly wounded and a thousand miles deep in Indian country.
The four horses left behind on the river shore upstream from Sam had seen him sitting in the grass. They began to drift in his direction. Occasionally one would lower its head and crop a bite of grass. Then it would continue on with its mates.
Sam painfully climbed to his feet. He held out his hand to the horses and whistled low and soft. The closest horse, a good-looking gray animal, increased its pace toward him.
So someone has been hand-feeding you, thought Sam. “Come on, old fella,” he said gently to the horse.
The gray reached Sam and began to nuzzle his fingers. Sam stroked the long bony jaw. The horse watched him with large gold-flecked brown eyes.
Sam could fashion a halter and perhaps a crude saddle out of the packsaddles left behind by the thieves. However, with his wound, it would be cruel punishment to try to ride the horse south across the plains. There was a second option. His party had passed two trappers beginning to build a raft at the junction of the Knife River and the Missouri. If the Indians did not kill the men, or they did not drown in the swift current, they should be coming downriver in two or three days. Sam had a better chance to heal lying on the raft than riding on the jarring back of the horse for days.
Could he get the men on the raft to stop for him? He grinned without humor. His skin was as white as the thief’s. Sam would take off his shirt and show his skin to the men.
He pulled his skinning knife. “Sorry, old fella,” he said in a sad voice. He slashed the horse across the vulnerable underside of its neck with the keen-edged knife.
The blade cut deeply into the soft neck. The white ends of the severed jugular vein showed just for an instant. Then the bright red blood throbbed out in a great crimson geyser. The hot blood fell upon Sam and the brown grass on the ground.
The gray horse screamed in agony. It spun away from the man who had hurt it so cruelly. Its hard hooves threw clods of grass and dirt as it bolted. The other horses followed in a wild, snorting stampede.
Sam did not follow. The horse could go but only a short distance. He hated what he had done.
The wounded horse halted. It looked back at Sam for a handful of seconds, as if trying to understand why the man had hurt it. The blood still spouted from the gaping neck wound, jetting out with each beat of the strong heart. In the sunlight Sam could see the red stream rapidly weakening.
The dying horse splayed its legs to keep from falling. The proud head began to droop. A moment later the animal began to tremble, every muscle straining to hold the heavy body upright.
The horse fell to its knees, tried to steady itself but failed. It collapsed onto its side.
Sam made his way to the horse. Wincing with each stroke of his knife, he began to skin the animal. Blood started to flow from both the entrance and exit holes of Sam’s wounds. He halted and cut a strip from the tail of his buckskin shirt. This he tied tightly around his waist to close the wounds and lessen the loss of blood.
He recommenced the skinning of the horse. It was going to be a long and difficult chore with his injury.
Near dark he finished, taking the hide only from the back, one side, and the stomach, for he could not turn the heavy body. There was one more chore to do. He cut the flesh of the horse along the backbone and took a three-foot strip of tenderloin.
With the length of meat hanging over a shoulder and dragging the wet horse hide, Sam slowly made his way down onto the point of land and out to the driftwood pile.
As darkness of night fell upon the valley of the Missouri River, the little heat that had accumulated leaked away into the sky. A chilly wind began to blow down from the north. Sam wrapped himself in the green hide, the hairy side to his body. The night would be cold.
He started to tremble, as the horse had trembled from loss of blood. The horse had died. Would he?
His trembling increased. Unconsciousness swept over him. He was falling and spinning as he plunged down into a bottomless pit of blackness.
***
Hours later Sam awoke fuzzy headed and weak. But he no longer trembled. He was even slightly warm. He shoved back the horsehide. The high dome of the sky arched sapphire blue overhead. The sun was halfway to its zenith.
The river had risen another three or four inches during the night. It gurgled wetly as it poured past the bank. The sound brought Sam’s thirst quickly to his attention. He crawled down the river’s edge and drank deeply of the muddy water.
Sam remained by the edge of the water for a time and watched upstream. There was only some brush and patches of brown foam floating on the current. Growing weary, he crawled back to the horsehide. The trappers could not yet have come this far downriver. He let himself slide off into sleep.
On the morning of the second day Sam unbound his wound. The ragged gunshot holes were red and ugly. They started to bleed slightly. He was troubled by the thought of infection. He turned to let the sun shine on the wounds.
After an hour or so, he replaced the binding around his waist. Painfully propping himself into a sitting position against a driftwood log, he watched the river for the balance of the morning. The only living thing he saw was a blue jay that flew in to perch above his head and study him with bright liquid eyes. In the afternoon a herd of forty-seven buffalo— Sam counted them as they unhurriedly filed down the riverbank—came and drank from the brown Missouri. Then they climbed back up to the level of the prairie and disappeared.
Sam tried to eat a piece of the horse meat in the late afternoon. But he spit it out. He had eaten raw meat before, and his lack of appetite was not caused by that. His body simply rejected the food. He knew he was badly hurt and might never leave the riverbank.
Those were bad thoughts. He must prepare for the future. He cut the rest of the meat into thin strips and hung them over the limbs of the cottonwood that grew close to the ground. He would have a fair supply of jerky in a few days. He would need every bit if he should have to travel overland by himself.
Sam studied the drying meat. He should have cut it for jerky the day before. He thought ruefully of yesterday. Then he was just trying to live.
On the third day Sam felt weaker and more light-headed. He thought his wound was infected. He again tried to eat a little of the half-dry horse meat but could not. He propped himself up to watch the river. Come on, somebody— anybody.
His eyes grew heavy and he fell asleep in the afternoon sun. He dreamed that the two trappers he and his partners had seen working on the raft along the river were floating by, just off the end of the point of land. They were sitting on bales of furs and looking downriver. They did not see him.
He jerked and called out in his sleep. The pain of his sudden movement brought him instantly awake. He flung a scanning look out over the river.
A raft with two men sitting on bales of fur was on the river. Sam shook his head, not believing that reality was exactly the same as his dream, that there were in truth two men on a raft on the river. One of the men idly turned to glance toward the point of land.
Sam weakly climbed erect. He gasped at the pain from his wound. Holding his stomach, he staggered to the edge of the water.
“Miller!” Sam shouted. His voice was but a croak. He tried again, raising his voice above the noise of the river. “Miller! Over here! Hey! Over here!” They must see him. He must not be left behind!
The man spotted Sam. He spoke quickly to his comrade. The second man turned to stare toward Sam.
Sam called at the top of his voice. “Miller, Stamper, it’s Sam Wilde. We met upriver a few days back.” He waded out into the river up to his crotch. “Stop. Pull into shore.”
Stamper stepped to the sweep and vigorously began to swing it. The raft, still speeding downstream, angled across the current.
Sam watched for a few seconds longer to be certain the raft was indeed pulling in the direction of the riverbank. Then he turned and, in a stumbling walk, made his way slowly off the point of land and downstream.
The raft made shore two hundred yards below Sam. Miller hopped out and stood near the water’s edge, holding the raft by a rope. Stamper climbed to the top of the bank with his rifle.
“What in God’s name happened to you?” Stamper asked as Sam drew near.
“River pirates. They tricked us into coining close to land and then shot the hell out of us. Everybody but me is dead. They got every fur we had. “
“How long ago?” Miller called up from the river.
“Three days now.”
“How many of them?” asked Stamper.
“There was four but now only three. I knifed one.”
“Well, come on and get aboard the raft,” Miller said. “Let’s shove off. You can tell the story as we go. If they should have some trouble that slows them down, we might catch up.”
Sam went down the bank and climbed out on the raft. Miller moved to the sweep. Stamper shoved them away from the bank.
Sam was dizzy from the exertion and pain. He thought he was going to faint.
“You’d better lay down,” said Miller. “You look awfully peaked. How bad are you hurt?”
“Bullet in the stomach. Went clear through.”
“Well, let Stamper look at it. He’s doctored some bad wounds in his time and is fair at it.”
Stamper snorted through his nose. “I haven’t let anyone die yet,” he said.
Sam stretched out on the deck of the raft. Stamper knelt beside him and removed the buckskin wrap.
“Awful bad to get shot through the guts,” said Stamper, examining the wound.
“It feels like I’m burning up inside,” said Sam.
Stamper’s face was creased with his concern. “Just lay there and rest. It’s good that I won’t have to dig for a bullet. I’ll get some of my herbs and make a poultice. It might take you a few tomorrows of healing before you can hunt down those fur thieves.”
Sam closed his eyes. He just wanted to live to see the first tomorrow.