The wagon train Thirty miles east of Fury
Once more, Blake had called a halt to the train’s progress—by calling out “Circle the wagons,” much to Olin Whaler’s disgust—and helped find enough wood to make a fire. Again, it wasn’t much of a fire, but enough to heat up their beans and roast a few prairie hens that Randy had shot along the way.
Laura and Seth sat beside him as they enjoyed their dinner in the fading firelight. Olin, his wife Lena, and their two boys sat nearer the flames, and the two boys eyed the last of the spitted fowl. They were in their teens, fourteen and sixteen, and Blake imagined it took a great deal of food to fill them up. He supposed he’d find out for sure when Seth grew to be their age.
He said, “Randy? Would you mind if the Whaler boys polished off your last hen?”
Randy grinned and hunched his shoulders.
“Okay, boys,” said Blake, and the boys descended on that prairie hen like starving wolves on a fresh deer carcass.
A bubble of laughter broke out from across the littlecamp. It was Becky Mankiller, Randy’s wife. “I guess riding all day must be awful tiring,” she said. She was a tiny thing compared to Randy’s height. Tiny compared to anything really. Blake doubted she was even five feet tall with her shoes on, but she was sharp as a tack.
The eldest Whaler boy, Thor, said, “Yes, ma’am, it is.”
The younger one, Loki, nodded his agreement. His mouth was filled with prairie hen—from the wishbone, his favorite part.
“Slow down, Loki,” said Laura, smiling. “You’ll choke yourself.”
Loki smiled and slowed his chewing.
Thor took advantage of the lull in the conversation to pipe up, “Do you suppose we’ll see any Indians out here?”
It took Blake a moment to figure out that Thor was talking to him. When he did, he said, “I’m praying that we won’t, Thor. They’re bad business.”
How strange to call a gangly redheaded boy by the name of an ancient god, he thought to himself. Thor looked no more like his imaginary namesake than that dismembered prairie hen he was eating looked like a soaring phoenix bird.
Becky and Randy Mankiller had no children, having just gotten married a few months ago, but Blake had no doubt that Becky would be a stellar mother. She reminded him a bit of his Laura, in fact.
He turned his attention back to the Whaler boys.
“Why, Thor?” he asked. “Did you set your heart on—?”
“The boy just wanted to see some Indians, that’s all,” Olin snapped.
“I hoped you told him he was lucky that he hadn’t,” said Wallace Harvey. Harvey worked for the Mankillers driving their second wagon, which was filled with every thing a rock-breaker might need, plus some to sell.
“None of your business, Harvey,” Olin barked.
“All’s I was sayin’was—” Harvey began, climbing to his feet.
“Enough, everybody,” said Blake, who suddenly found himself on his feet, too.
“Richard,” Laura warned softly, tugging on his pants leg.
He held up his hands. “Gentlemen, let’s hold off the Indian talk for now, all right? There’ll be time enough for it when we get to Fury.”
He heard Randy Mankiller mutter, “He wants to see an Indian so bad, he can just look at me. Or a fourth of me anyhow.”
Blake sat back down, the dust puffing up around his seat. “Enough out of you, too, Randy.” He picked up his coffee cup again and took a sip.
The Apache camp
Having made sure that they were no longer being pursued, Lone Wolf had ordered his men to stop make camp in the shelter of the low hills, far to the south of the white settlement. He was presently sitting next to a cook fire, which was circled by his best braves. The ones who remained alive, at any rate.
His losses had been much greater than he had expected.
White Hair, an older brave who had garnered his name from the silver streak that ran from the part in his hair down through one of his braids—a gift from a Mexican’s firestick—spoke to him. “Lone Wolf, we cannot go home without stealing something from the whites. We will be greatly shamed.”
Two of the other warriors nodded, and several grunted their agreement.
“I know that, White Hair,” Lone Wolf said, a little angrily. “We stop here, take a few days to lick our wounds, then go back, stronger and better armed than before. We will steal much. We will take many cattle and horses, and we will go back with honor. Take heart, my brothers. You will see.”
White Hair grunted, unconvinced.
Sneaking Coyote spoke up. “We did badly at their hands the first time. My brother, Runs Fast, was killed, and Long Tortoise, the brother of my first wife. What makes you think we will do any better the next time we meet them in battle?”
Lone Wolf ground his teeth at these questions. His men should trust him to know best. They should follow his bidding with no questions.
But he bit back his anger and said, “Because we have stopped close to a stand of trees which will make for good arrows, to shoot straight and swift and true. Because we have brought with us enough flint to make the finest arrowheads and spearheads. But most of all, because they will not be expecting us. They will not be ready. They will still be soft and licking their wounds from our first attack.”
He had said it correctly, because the men around the fire seemed to relax in their new solidarity. They nodded and grunted their agreement. Good. This was how it should be. Lone Wolf was pleased.
He said, “We know now how they fight. They will continue to fight in this manner. We will make ladders to lean again their walls. We will get inside, and once we do, we will conquer.”
At this statement, cheers broke out from several braves, then several more, along with nods of agreement. It seemed everyone was in accord on at least one point: that once things came to a hand-to-hand combat with the whites, the Apache would emerge overwhelmingly victorious.
Had not they proved this to be fact time and time again? It was the truth, and they all knew it.
Lone Wolf smiled to himself. “It will be good.”
Fury
Jason and Dr. Morelli had chosen the part of the livery still in good shape—the part that still had a roof, that is—in which to house the wounded.
They’d moved Deputy Wanamaker there, along with Rollie Biggston, who’d taken an arrow out in the street. Gil Collins was spending his nights there, too, being treated for the burns his torso had received when he was hit by a flaming arrow.
Sometime today, Rollie had suffered much the same fate, although Jason had no idea where he’d been. At least he hadn’t had a flask in his hand when he’d been hit, Jason thought. That would have been just the thing the town needed: a fat, flaming, Cockney torch. Always good for the ego.
All in all, Jason figured that there were about thirty men, perhaps thirty-two, in the stable, including the wounded they’d picked up on their way back to town. They’d lost seven men altogether, but all in all, Jason thought that they had done fairly well percentagewise.
So far.
Unlike the rest of the men, he wasn’t so certain they were out of the woods. Apache were tricky, and you could always count on them to do exactly the opposite of what you expected, even if you hadn’t thought of it yet.
He figured that the last thing he’d ever do was ride out and try to shoot dice with them to get them to go away. The trick might have worked with the Comanche, but with Apache, it’d be a sure and certain way to end up dead.
Or worse. Apache didn’t have a sense of humor. Let alone a sense of decency.
Jason didn’t want to find out what worse was.
Actually, he didn’t even want to find out what dead was like. He’d seen enough of it to figure that he wouldn’t like it, not one tiny little bit.
But tonight he had to convince the rest of the town to stop being so happy and cocksure of itself. He’d done a great deal of thinking on the way back to town. And he’d decided that it wasn’t going to be easy.
They had only managed to chase the Apache away because they’d surprised them, and had been hidden by their own dust. The Apache hadn’t known how few they were, how outnumbered.
It was a good trick and had worked once, but it wouldn’t work again.
The jail door opened and Saul Cohen walked in. “Am I disturbing you?” Saul asked, his head twisted to one side. “I could come back?”
“No, no,” Jason replied, waving his hands. Saul was already halfway out the door, but stopped. “What can I do for you, Saul?”
Saul came back in, although his posture was more like that of a beaten dog than the town’s hardware store owner and an upstanding citizen. He plopped down in the wooden chair opposite the desk.
“What?” Jason repeated, perhaps a bit more sharply than he intended. It had been a long day. “Sorry, Saul. Don’t mind me. I’m about used up.”
“That’s what I was afraid of.”
Jason frowned, but it was brief. Maybe Saul was feeling the same worries he was. He hoisted one brow. “What you getting at, Saul?”
“I’m not so sure those Apache are done with us, Jason. Now, don’t go believing that I’m a millstone around everybody’s neck, or that I’m making like the boy who cried ‘Wolf!’ It’s just that—”
“Whoa up there,” Jason said with a wave of his hands. “You’re thinking right, Saul. I don’t think this thing is done yet either.”
Saul, looking relieved, nodded his agreement.
“Never say, ‘I expect’ when you’re talking about Apache. But having said that,” Jason added with a grin, “I’d say we could expect them back any day now.”
“They’re just regrouping?”
Jason nodded. “We’ve got to be ready for the next onslaught. And I mean more than ready.”
“So what do we do?”
“Other than getting everybody to stop celebrating?” Jason said.
Saul shook his head sadly. “Salmon Kendall is making a speech.”
“Crud.”
Both men fell into silence.
After five long minutes, Jason stood up.
Saul, startled, suddenly looked hopeful. “You have it?”
Jason walked across the room, toward the potbellied stove, and lifted the coffeepot. “Only if you mean the coffee. Want some?”
Saul shrugged. “I could drink.”
Jason grunted, then poured out two cups. He handed Saul one, then returned to his chair. He didn’t drink, though. He kept turning the metal cup in his hands, around and around, and staring at the mottled blue enamel.
“Does that help for thinking?”
Jason put the cup down. “Not really.”
“Oh.”
Jason kept pushing the cup around with his index finger, still staring down at its steaming black-brown contents. Steam. He thought it looked like smoke rising from the cup.
And then, quite suddenly, something went “click” inside his brain. He gripped the front of the desk. “Saul!” he shouted, and poor Saul jumped. “Aren’t those wagons carrying oil?”
“Y-yes,” Saul answered, still wondering if Jason had lost his mind. “A whole wagon full of whale oil, and half a load of kerosene, too. That’s why we piled all that lumber over the top of it, remember? Why? Is your lamp running low?”
Jason hopped to his feet and grabbed his hat off the rack. “C’mon, c’mon,” he urged, waving a hand toward the door. “We’ve got to start everybody digging!”
Saul took a swig of his coffee. “Digging?”
“Yes, yes!” Jason half-shouted. “We’ve got to dig a whatchacall! A moat!”
Saul still didn’t understand it, but here it was, after midnight, and he was shoveling hard chunks of caliche shoulder to shoulder with Mayor Kendall and Colorado Gooding, digging a ditch about ten feet from the stockade and parallel to it, and digging it three feet deep and six feet across. Jason’s orders.
He hadn’t said anything, but Saul was beginning to have his doubts about Jason. Did he intend to fill this “moat” with water? Did he think it would stop the Apache for a second? But he kept shoveling just the same.
And shoveling wasn’t easy. The ground was hard caliche soil—the crust of it was anyway—and he figured they could have built a castle out of the top blocks they were cutting. Jason was having them pile the caliche into a wall on the stockade side of the moat.
Just how this would protect them was beyond Saul. It was beyond Colorado, too. He didn’t say much, but every once in a while, Saul could hear him mumble, “Boy’s crazy as a loon!”
Salmon was of much the same mind. “What the heck are we digging this thing for?” he’d asked Saul, over and over. “You’d think he’d confide in the mayor!”
Saul imagined that all the men, stretching down the wall, shovels working, were of much the same curious mind. It would have helped a great deal if Jason had given him—or someone, anyone!—an idea of what was going on in that flaxen head of his.
But he hadn’t, and now here they were, digging a moat by lamplight.
He thought back over their conversation—the part before Jason put them all to digging. Jason had asked him about the oil, hadn’t he? But what good would that do? A wagonload wasn’t enough to fill this blasted moat they were digging. And besides, the dry, thirsty ground would drink that measly load of oil straight off.
He had a sudden vision of them pouring barrel after barrel of water on the ground, which acted like a giant sponge, and he shuddered.
“What’s’a matter with you?” Colorado asked from beside him, to the right. “You look like you just seen a ghost.”
“It’s nothing,” Saul said, and hustled himself back to digging. “Nothing at all.”
Jason was on the northern side of the stockade with about twenty men, and they were performing the same duties as the men to the south. He’d put extra men on the south, because that was the side the Apache would likely attack first. Jason might not even need a trench to the north, but he wasn’t about to take any chances.
He dug like the devil himself was on his tail, dug like his life depended on it—because he figured it did. He’d had words with the driver of the oil wagon after he gave orders and put Saul and the others to work.
The driver thought that the oil would soak in, all right, but that enough would stay near the surface that it would burn. And burn for a long time, according to the train’s wagon master, Fred Barlow. He’d said, “Oil don’t soak in near so fast as water.” Especially if there was clay down there under the caliche to block its soaking in any further.
And there was clay.
At least, he remembered that Saul had hit about ten feet of it when he was digging the well. Jason hoped the soil was the same outside the town walls. He’d staked all their lives on it, in fact.
Don’t think about it, he told himself. Just dig. Just dig.
One half mile from the town’s southern wall, an Indian pony stopped and its rider slipped artfully to the ground. Hunching low, even though there was no one there to see him, Strangles Coyotes scurried to a clump of brush and stretched out low, his belly pressed to the ground.
Strangles Coyotes’s eyes were already accustomed to the dark because he’d been riding for hours, riding back up north from the place where his people had stopped. And so he could see through the night as well as a man could. Better than most, in fact. The moon was full, the sky bereft of clouds.
And what he saw to the north disturbed him, although he couldn’t say why. White men were doing what they usually did, which was to act crazy.
Maybe thirty of them were outside the wall on the south side. They had carried lamps like small campfires with them, and they were digging, digging like fools. At first, he thought that perhaps they were going to bury their dead in the long trench, but then he realized that the grave was far too big to hold their dead, even using the most optimistic count.
It was a great puzzle and he wished, for a moment, that Lone Wolf had sent Toad That Hops or Dream Stirrer instead of him. Someone who had more insight into the mysteries of the whites than he had. Someone who could understand what they were up to.
It was beyond him.
He leaned to one side and flicked a sharp rock from beneath his chest, and then went back to puzzling over what those crazy whites were doing.