They did not travel fast, for they were heavily laden. With them they had all their supplies and ammunition. They rode through the night and found shelter the following noon among some willows growing at the water’s edge. All through the daylight hours they rode with their chins on their shoulders watching their back-trail for dust, but they saw nothing. Spur was more worried by this inaction on the part of the Indians than he would have been by dust. Toward evening when Pagley was riding to the rear, Spur fell back beside him and had a word out of hearing of the girl.
“I don’t like it,” he said.
“Me neither. Come dark, I’ll go back a ways.”
After dark, the Indian rode his tired horse back upstream. The girl slept, but Spur found that his nerves were too tight for rest. Cradling his rifle and listening to the night sounds, he asked himself for the hundredth time why he had got himself into this. He liked a quiet life, sketching and writing. An hour later, he challenged the sound of a hurrying horse. Pagley answered from the darkness. A moment later, he was beside Spur with bad news.
“They’re there all right. Travelin’ in the dark. They’re comin’ fast an’ we have to move.”
“The horses’re bushed,” Spur told him.
“We find someplace to fort up.”
They woke the girl, got on their animals and kicked them into a weary run.
They followed the river into the night, stopping every now and then to listen. Pagley said that he could hear them coming, but neither Spur nor the girl could.
Suddenly without warning, the Delaware swung into the darkness abruptly to the left. Spur and the girl yanked their animals around, following and at once feeling the ground rising beneath the hoofs of their horses.
They heaved up a long gradual rise until hoofs hammered on rock and loose stones clattered. Pagley brought his pony to a halt and Spur almost rode him down. They all came piling off their animals and the Indian was saying: “This will have to do.” He led his horse through brush and rock. They followed and halted when he did.
“Here they come now,” he told them, “hold your horses’ noses.”
They did as they were told and listened.
They knew how close a thing it had been when they at once heard the rush and thunder of a bunch of hard-ridden ponies going by them no more than a quarter-mile away. They listened to the sounds going away into the distance, then Pagley and the girl slept while Spur kept watch, huddled in a blanket against the night chill with his rifle across his knees.
With the coming of the first gray finger of light that denoted the false dawn, one of the horses trumpeted the alarm. The sound woke the sleeping Spur and he rolled sleepily clear of his blanket, feeling for his rifle.
Pagley caught him by the arm and whispered: “They’re above us.”
Spur stared around into the murk, but could make nothing definite out.
A fox yipped sharply between them and the river. A cold dawn wind blew up from the river and Spur shivered. He bent and woke the girl, putting his hand over her mouth, and whispered a warning in her ear. She touched his face with her fingers, then got quickly from her blanket. They stood in the chill dark, holding the muzzles of the ponies, their senses alert, their nerves taut.
Miserably, they awaited the dawn.
The first thing that came into Spur’s view was the girl’s drawn face. She turned and caught him looking at her and gave him a brief smile of comradeship. Spur looked around and saw that they were on a small pimple of rocks that stood up on a long slow gradient that swept on to a mile or more above them where it ended in a high ridge. This grade was broken here and there with scatterings of rocks and gullies. He looked back toward the river and saw that rocks and brush could hide a dozen Indians from their view.
He didn’t like their position much. Short term it would do at a pinch. Long term it was bad. They were too far from water and a good rifleman above them could make it hell in their small fort. He could tell by the way Pagley looked that the Delaware was of a like opinion.
They tried to make the horses lie down. One would, but the other two refused. Pagley swore softly, but with venom.
“Tie the horses,” Spur said.
His own horse was lying down. He lashed its legs together. The girl hitched hers to some brush. Pagley put a close hobble on his with some rawhide.
A single shot sounded.
The ball hit twenty feet short uphill showing that a marksman above them had not allowed for the falling away of the land.
The three of them in the fort got down.
Spur told the girl: “Watch the river side.” She crawled past a horse and took up her position. Uphill he watched the puff of dark smoke blossoming in the cold air. It was a long way off and he was ready to bet that mounted men were hiding somewhere nearer in a gully which he couldn’t see.
Rifle-fire splattered out from the rocks above and lead patted rock viciously, but none of it near them.
“There’s something over there on the right,” Pagley said. “Look at the horses’ ears.” Spur looked. The two standing animals were gazing alertly into the east, their ears forward. No better watchdog than a prairie-bred mustang.
Spur reached for a box of cartridges and broke it open, laying a row in front of him on a rock and stuffing a handful into his pocket. Pagley crawled over and took his share.
The firing started from above again. This time the shooting was more accurate and prolonged. Both to Pagley and Spur it was plain that the riflemen had come in closer. One slug ripped the rump of Spur’s horse and it screamed. The girl turned a startled face. Spur called: “Watch the river,” as a clatter of hoofs told them all that there were riders close by.
As the sun broke over the ridge tops it flashed upon gleaming metal and brightly fluttering feathers. Suddenly before the eyes of the watchers, there were flashes of ocher and vermilion. A tightly packed bunch of riders burst like a living explosion seemingly out of the ground not a hundred yards from the rocks. The firing from above stopped at once and the two men rose to their knees and swung their rifle muzzles to meet the onrush.
“I’ll take the first,” Pagley called calmly.
The first was a thickset man with a spray of feathers set in a skin cap, giving him the appearance of a savage cockatoo. He held a befeathered coup-stick out in front of him like a lance. His grullo pony had been slit in the nostrils for better breathing. Rings of paint encircled its rolling eyes.
Immediately behind this man was a taller warrior, resplendent in war-bonnet and carrying a combination bow-lance. As his paint-pony swept him forward in the wild charge, he fitted an arrow to the string.
The girl screamed: “They’re coming from the river” and a shrill kiyacking punctuated her sentence.
Spur fired at the second rider. At the same moment, the man with the coup-stick swerved his horse and Pagley fired. The Indian took both shots through the chest, was lifted from the back of his horse and hurled under the hoofs of the animals behind. One jumped him, one stumbled over him and the others turned aside. For a second, the Indians’ pace was broken. They milled in an untidy knot, yelling. Pagley levered and fired into their midst several times as Spur turned and ran to the girl’s side.
She was firing his revolver downhill.
About a half-dozen Indians were jumping their ponies up the grade.
Spur fired and apparently missed.
“Save your powder, girl,” Spur said. “You’ll hit nothing with that gun at this distance.” He gave her a quick glance and saw that she was steady. This was one real woman.
The horses did not break their stride. Spur waited a moment for the riders to turn side on to him and start to circle, but they did not. Behind him, he heard the Indians from the gully coming ahead. A small flutter of panic was born in his belly.
Pagley’s horse tore itself loose and clattered out of the rocks, running off westward. Spur made a vain attempt to catch its dragging rein, then turned his attention again to the Indians below him. The nearest man was not fifty yards away, crouched over his pony’s neck, firing a rifle as he came. The lead hummed around the defenders. Spur drew a bead, fired and hit the pony in the head. The animal stumbled, lurched to one side and went over. The rider was slow in getting clear and had a leg pinned underneath the dead animal. His howl of rage or pain drifted up to Spur above the noise of the charge.
The charge of the Indians from above rose to a crescendo of din. Spur glanced over his shoulder, saw Pagley’s crouched form wreathed in black powder smoke and saw an Indian vault his pony over him. The animal landed just behind Spur who, turning, was caught by the animal’s shoulder and knocked spinning. The man jumped his pony past the girl and was gone downhill and almost caught in the rush from below.
As he gained his feet, scooping up his fallen rifle, Spur heard the attack from the gully sweep on past unable to face Pagley’s fire and also heard the deafening thunder of the hoofs of the other charge as the Indians reached the little fortress.
The girl was standing to meet them, cocking and firing her belt-gun as fast as she could move thumb and finger.
The scene was a turmoil of screaming faces, rearing horses, dust and powder-smoke. Choking, Spur triggered the rifle at a charging horseman and found that he had not jacked a fresh round into the breech. The girl screamed and fired point-blank into the animal’s face. It stumbled forward and hurled its rider from its back. Spur went down again, floundering under the propelled man, kicking and striking with blind savagery, dropping his rifle and smashing his bare fists into the encarmined face.
Suddenly, the man was no longer there. Dazed, Spur stumbled to his feet, reached for his knife, found it and drew, throwing himself forward as a man on foot seized the girl by the hair and dragged her from her feet. Even as the heavy stone war-hammer rose for the fatal blow, Spur drove the knife in to the hilt in the region of the kidney.
The man shrieked piercingly, rearing up in the sudden intolerable agony of the thrust. With his left hand, Spur spun him and, as the brown throat showed, drove the blade forward as hard as he could.
A rifle slammed noisily almost in his ear and he glimpsed an Indian pitching back from a rock above him. Then he choked on the smoke and dust and heard Pagley say at a great distance: “They’ve gone.”
Squinting through the fog of battle, Spur saw the ponies cantering downhill toward the river. Twenty yards away an Indian crawled slowly after them, calling. Pagley raised his rifle.
“No,” Spur croaked, “let him go.”
Pagley gave him a bleak look, hesitated and lowered his rifle.
“Times like this, I forget I’m a Christian,” he said. “And that’s wise.”
Spur said: “The fight’s not over yet. They could do the same to us.”
“That,” Pagley replied, “could be the best death they could offer.”
The girl pulled herself to a sitting position, looking dazed.
“Aw, my Gawd,” she whispered.
“You all right, miss?” Pagley asked, leaning on his rifle, not looking at her, but turning his eyes this way and that, keeping his eyes on the distant Indians.
“I’m alive,’ she said.
“You were good,’ Spur told her. “You’ll do to ride the river with.”
“Sure,” she said.
She looked as though she could do with a good cry. Her lower lip quivered.
“Go ahead,” Spur said. “Howl.”
She glared at him.
“Who said I wanted to howl?”
“You look as if you wanted to do something like that.”
“You know what I want?”
“What?”
“I want one of you damn fools to quit standin’ around there starin’ and put an arm around me.”
Spur grinned, went down on one knee beside her and obliged. She turned her face into his shoulder and burst into tears.
The Delaware grunted.
When she had cried herself out, they sipped water from a canteen and it tasted better than anything they had ever drunk before.
Two Indians rode up from the direction of the river, bent from the saddle when they reached the crawling man and lifted him between them. The three in the rocks watched them without making a move against them.
“Fighting Indians,” Pagley said, “is gettin’ so Goddam civilized, it ain’t real.”
They checked their weapons. They found that one of the canteens had a bullet through it and was empty of water. Their position was bad, but it could have been worse. They had a plentiful supply of ammunition, two horses and one and a half canteens of water.
Two hours passed without the Indians making a move except to ride up and down out of gunshot yelling insults at them. The sun grew hot and there was no shade. Before long they were suffering in the airless heat. They agreed to try and not touch their water until the sun went down.
“After dark,” Spur said, “either they go away or one of us goes out and starts killing Kiowas.”
“You’re crazy,” Pagley told him.
“Sure,” Spur said, “but can you think of anything better?”
Pagley could not.
Noon came and went. They were too thirsty to chew jerky and sucked stones instead. That didn’t help a lot. They watched the Indians drinking at the river and watering their ponies. Then using a blanket, some brush and a couple of ramrods, they managed to make a patch of shade for the girl to lie in.
During the afternoon, the Indians above them dropped a few idle shots into their camp without hitting either the two men and the girl or the horses. Towards dusk, Pagley said quietly: “We’re goin’ to have visitors any minute now.”
He pointed to the mouth of the gully where there arose light wisps of dust. The girl came from her shelter, holding the pistol in a steady hand.
The atmosphere was close now and a haze of cloud drifted over the sun. A little after they heard the dull rumble of thunder. The whole wild scene before them seemed to take on a gray hue, then the dull sky was ripped apart by a blinding flash of lightning. The clap of thunder that followed was deafening.
“If it rained now,” Pagley said quietly, “my prayer would be answered.”
They all looked heavenward and listened to the performance of celestial orchestras. The uproar covered the thunder of the ponies’ hoofs as they made their charge.
Pagley heaved up his rifle, aimed and found the light too poor for good shooting. The Indians rode abreast in a ragged line, adding their yipping war-cries to the crash of thunder. They looked and sounded like ferocious demons of the storm. They seemed to float over the ground without effort.
Spur glanced toward the river and saw the slope bare of warriors, but glancing westward, he saw a line of riders racing along the angle of the grade.
He put a hand on the girl’s shoulder. “Save your shots for them that get in close,” he told her. She nodded and gave him the briefest flicker of a smile.
In a sudden break in the thunder, Spur heard the rattle of loose stones and the roll of hoofs on hard ground. He raised his rifle and heard Pagley start to shoot. The Indians he faced dropped to the far side of their horses as one man. He sighted the breast of the foremost horse and fired at an angle. It was a long shot, but it was safest to whittle the numbers down before they got too close.
The horse somersaulted violently and in apparent silence. As soon as the rider hit ground and started to run, Spur fired again. The animated figure twisted and ran off at an abrupt angle, tripped and fell. Spur at once levered and fired at the next rider, knowing, even as he did so, that it would take more than one rifle to stop them all. A glance at the way these men advanced was enough to tell him that they would not break before him. Nerves and muscles braced themselves for the moment when the ponies were jumped in among the rocks. There was just time for him to promise himself that he would save a shot for the girl, when the nearest warrior appeared on the back of his horse, rearing himself erect and firing at Spur with a revolver as he came.
Spur fired at him and missed, the horse balked at the rocks and the man heaved its head around by the rawhide thong tied over its lower jaw. Hoofs slipped on stone and the animal looked as if it were going over. The warrior leapt from the primitive saddle, bounded forward and ran into a shot from the girl’s gun.
The rider behind sent his animal straight into the rocks. Both the girl and Spur fired at him as another Indian smashed his way past Pagley and almost rode into his fellow tribesman.
After that everything was an untidy mess, a chaos of point-blank shooting, clubbing with rifle butts, stone clubs swinging and knives slashing. Spur was knocked away from the girl, heard her scream, emptied his rifle frantically into figures moving nightmarishly before him, painted faces showing in garish horror in the lightning flashes. He felt one shoulder go numb under a heavy blow., something crashed into his jaw and threatened to tear it away. He lost his rifle and ripped human gut with his bowie knife. His boot heel snapped a wrist. A horse whinnied piteously and ended in abrupt silence.
Then, as suddenly as they had come, the Indians were gone.
Spur found himself kneeling by a man who floundered like a landed fish. Spur tried to stand, but his body refused to obey his will. He found that he wasn’t seeing too well and could make little of the objects around him. He strove to sight the retreating Indians and found that his sight seemed to be failing. Something wet and cold splashed against his cheek and he heard the girl say: “Rain.”
The floundering man groaned and said: “Mother of God!”
Spur leaned close and saw that it was Pagley.
The rain fell like a solid sheet of water, sending a chill through his shaking body. He felt a touch on his arm and, turning his head, looked into the girl’s eyes.
“You all right?” he asked.
“It’s Pagley,” she said.
Lightning flashed.
The Delaware’s face showed ashen, hollow-eyed as a ghoul’s. Spur reached out a hand and touched the haft of the spear that transfixed him to the ground. In the gloom that followed the lightning, he ran his hand down the haft to the shoulder socket through which the head was driven.
Pagley said hoarsely: “Break it.”
With trembling hands Spur tried to snap the befeathered and painted wood and failed. The girl tried with as much success. The Indian moaned softly. Spur found his knife and worked its keen edge on the haft. After five minutes, he broke the spear and rested on his haunches, sweating in the chill of the rain.
“Get the liquor,” he told the girl and she went to the downed horse.
“Pull it through,” Pagley told him.
“I can’t do that,” Spur said. “It’ll kill you.”
“It’s missed the bone. Get me up and pull it through. We don’t have all night.”
Spur marveled at this man.
The girl came back with the small flask of whiskey.
“They killed both the horses,” she said.
Spur gave the Indian a drink of whiskey. Then the girl and he drank.
“Help me sit him up,” he told the girl.
He stood up and looked around, straining his eyes, but he could see nothing but driving rain. Even the river was obliterated. When he turned back to Pagley again, the girl had the Indian by the right shoulder and the neck, using all her strength to hold him in a sitting position.
“Hurry,” she said, “I can’t hold him.”
She looked up at him, her dark eyes large in her pale face, her hair plastered to her forehead by the rain.
“For Christ’s sake,” Pagley said, “get on with it.”
Spur walked around the back of him and saw the bone head of the lance protruding from the left shoulder down near the armpit. Maybe Pagley was right and it hadn’t touched bone.
He got down on one knee and grasped the spearhead in both his hands. At his touch the muscles of the Indian’s back braced themselves.
“Now,” Spur said softly, and pulled.
Pagley moaned softly again.
Spur rose to his feet, put one knee in Pagley’s back and heaved steadily. Spear-head and broken haft came away in his hands, followed by a rush of dark blood. The Delaware arched his back in pain and the girl struggled to hold him, muttering encouragement to him. But the Indian tore himself from her grasp. Spur dropped the remains of the spear and grasped him by both shoulders and said to the girl: “Rag, quick.”
She took Pagley’s neck-scarf off him and handed it to Spur who balled it in his hand and thrust it hard against the rear wound.
“He’s bleedin’ in front,” the girl said.
Spur thrust an arm over the Delaware’s shoulder and pressed hard on the forward wound.
“Feels better already,’ Pagley said and fainted.
Spur laid him down on his right side. He said to the girl: “Take over here. Put pressure on both wounds.” She took his place. Spur went to the saddlebags on the dead horse, found a spare shirt and tore it in strips. With this, he hastily dressed both wounds and made both secure with the bloody scarf. Then he dragged Pagley into the shelter of the blanket that had protected the girl from the burning sun.
By midnight the Delaware was in a fever, tossing restlessly and muttering in his own language. Spur knew that he had to get him to better shelter, had to keep him warm. Shortly after, the rain stopped abruptly. The girl came close to Spur and he put an arm around her.
Were the Indians still out there? he asked himself. He weighed the risks for Pagley: the risk of their staying where they were, the risk of moving him. He put it to the girl and she said: “My guess is they’ve gone.”
Spur said: “If we move him and they haven’t gone, it’s all up with us.”
“We can’t light a fire here,” the girl told him. “It’s fire he wants. We have to get in a gully. Where they can’t see the flame if they are still around someplace.”
Spur thought about it.
Finally, he said: “All right. We’ll try it.”
Ten minutes later, he carried Pagley cradled in his arms like a child out of the rocks while the girl staggered along behind with as much of the supplies as she could carry. Entering the first gully they came to was a trial of nerves. The moon was high and clear now and the plain along the edge of the river almost as light as day. But nothing happened. They walked a quarter mile up the gully and found a comparatively safe spot under an overhang. Here Spur lay Pagley down and left him with the girl. He searched around for tinder and wood. With his bowie knife he cut brush and soon “had a fire going. He left the girl to watch over Pagley and after he had made two trips back to the rocks to fetch the rest of the supplies, he took up a station on the rim of the gully to keep watch.