Morning came early.
At the same time the Apache attacked the Morton home and found it empty, the remainder of the Indians were attacking the walls of Fury.
Those attacking Fury had little luck. Their numbers were few, and the men on the walls mowed them down without mercy. The truth was that the whites were tired and angry: tired of the constant onslaught and the interruption of their daily routines, and angry that the Apache had had the unmitigated nerve to attack them in the first place.
And the braves at the Mortons’? They found no one, not one person, not one head of livestock, nothing. All they found was a few buildings to burn and some crops, but the crops were too young and green to catch fire, and there was no one inside the flaming buildings to scream out.
It was a failure, no matter how you looked at it.
And Lone Wolf was not one to look on the sunny side of anything.
They burned the house and the outbuildings, including the fine barn the brothers had worked so hard to complete, along with its store of baled hay and straw and bins of oats and corn. They destroyed everything they could to show that a white had ever lived there, had ever thought of living there, or even thought of daring to pass by.
Lone Wolf gained some degree of satisfaction from this, but not all he could have. There was no word from his scouts that the people from the town were on their way. Obviously, whoever lived here had been taken into the town, along with their livestock, before Lone Wolf thought to send someone to watch the way.
Forgive me, Hawk Fingers, he thought.
There had been more than enough time for the town to notice their smoke. More than enough time for them to send help to the farm, if they were going to send it at all. And they are not, he decided.
He signaled for his braves’ attention, and then he stepped up on a large rock. “The whites have tricked us, shamed us, my brothers. We have burned their buildings, but the people and animals are gone.”
“They probably fled to the town last night, and that is why Hawk Fingers is dead,” called a voice from the crowd.
Lone Wolf continued. “That is correct. We will go back and attack the town from the north side, and aid our brothers who storm it from the south.”
Then he raised his battle ax into the air and screamed out a war cry. This was echoed by the braves about him before they scattered toward the hill over which they’d left their ponies.
“Tonight we will dance on their bones,” he muttered in a tone both determined and icy. “For today they will all perish, to the last dog and tiniest child.”
Jason found himself up on the stockade wall again, but facing easier odds than he had ever imagined. The boys on the north and east walls reported no action. Nothing at all. And so most of them, leaving a few sentries behind, had joined in the fight to the south.
By eight o’clock that morning, they had no one left to fight.
But Jason was still worried. He supposed the rest of their force might have gone north with the intention of sacking the Morton place, though. And when a cry came that there was smoke on the northern horizon, he knew it for a fact. He only prayed that the livestock had been driven far enough away that they wouldn’t find them.
And he didn’t suppose they had, because next came the call that a cloud of dust was coming toward them from the north—dust on the road to the Morton farm.
He left a few men on the south wall—the Apache would likely circle them, he knew—but he wanted to get in the best possible volley when they reached the north side. He wanted to shock them into going away and never coming back, if possible.
To tell the truth, it was beyond him why the Apache had picked this particular time to attack them anyway. They hadn’t trespassed on Apache Territory, the crops were too young to steal, they still didn’t have much in the way of livestock—except for cats, that is—the Milchers’ mother cat, along with her get, had been on a kitten-making binge ever since they got to Fury—but he didn’t think the Apache were fond of them.
Also, they weren’t blocking the stream of water that he knew ran down through Apache Territory. And they certainly weren’t depleting the herds of pronghorn antelope the Apache relied upon to feed them. Oh, they shot one every once in a while, but so far they’d been able to survive on their own goats, hogs, sheep, cattle, ducks, and chickens. They prided themselves on being a self-sufficient lot.
So what had gotten into these blasted Apaches? He’d be damned if he knew. All that was certain was that they’d better have a good reason for killing all these men in a battle—a battle that he fervently hoped they would never win.
He stopped by his house to tell the Morton men what was going on—and that they’d probably lost their buildings—but Eliza haltingly informed him that their men had picked up their arms and were gone.
“The rest of us can fight, too, you know,” she said defensively, if shakenly. Jason guessed that there’d been a little row about it before he got there that had displaced her more than the small apoplexy Doc Morelli had reported she’d suffered.
“I thank you, Eliza,” he said, “and I’ll keep it in mind. But for the time being, you can be the most help by staying inside and staying down, all right?”
She nodded grudgingly—if a little to the right—and he hightailed it to the wall before she could let loose with anything else.
Mayor Kendall was still standing, Jason noticed as he climbed up the stockade ladder, and he had taken up a position about thirty feet down the wall. Saul Cohen was up and at ’em, too. Jason saw Ezra and Joel Evans down the way, and several of the wagon drivers from the convoy camped in the center of town, including Treat Paris and Jesse Figg and their leader, Fred Barlow. But they were far fewer in number than when they had started out, and Jason’s hope for a good outcome began to shrink.
They still couldn’t see anything but dust coming from the north, but the cloud was getting bigger by the second. Somebody down the line fired, and Jason automatically yelled at him to hold on. “Stop wasting ammunition!” he hollered.
And then a shot rang out from the oncoming Indian storm. He didn’t know where they had picked up a firearm, but he hoped they knew even less about it than that shot indicated.
Maybe yes, maybe no. But he saw the slug sink into the ground with a puff of dust about thirty feet out from the trench.
They were closer than he’d thought.
He shouted, “Everybody, fire at will!” after counting to five. They still couldn’t see any braves for the dust cloud, but by now, their slugs should reach into the approaching pack of them.
If they were lucky, they could knock out at least half of them before they reached the wall.
If they were lucky.
And luck was on their side, for when the actual forms of the attackers could be seen through the dust, many of the horses were riderless. If they hadn’t shot half, they’d at least made a good-sized dent in the attackers’number. The townsmen kept up firing, kept it up even while what was left of the war party split—some going toward the east, some dropping from their racing, lathered ponies and taking up positions.
“Now!” Jason shouted, and every fourth man slid down the nearest ladder and headed for a new position. A third of them went to the east, the rest to the south.
Jason stayed right where he was, and he took out three warriors by the time it took his men to cross the town square and mount the south wall.
Ward Wanamaker must have given Doc Morelli the slip, because Jason thought he caught a glimpse of him, firing a handgun from the south wall. “Poor Apache didn’t have a notion of what they were getting into,” he muttered, momentarily cheered.
Then an arrow zinged into the throat of the man next to him, and he found himself holding the man back from falling from the scaffolding and urgently shouting for Doc Morelli.
Ward Wanamaker was still wobbly from Doc Morelli’s powders, but nobody was going to keep him from fighting today. It seemed to him that there were surely a lot fewer Apache out there, and he wondered why the heck they didn’t just give up and go home. Their numbers had been seriously depleted, and he figured that it would be an awfully long time before they had Apache trouble again in Fury.
He would have gone on home, if he were in their shoes. Or in their moccasins, if you wanted to put a really fine point on it. Which, he supposed, Milcher would. It occurred to him that he hadn’t seen hide nor hair of the reverend since the first day of the attack, and even then Milcher was running away, shooing his family before him like a frightened flock of goslings.
Somebody ought to paint a big, fat, yellow stripe down his back, that’s what.
Didn’t he believe in “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth”?
Some man of God he was.
Ward finished reloading his six-shooter and slowly rose up again, carefully aiming his weapon at one particular brave who was sneaking too close.
A steady pull on the trigger, and the brave moved no more.
Why didn’t they just give up? There couldn’t be more than twenty or twenty-five braves attacking on the south. And why the hell hadn’t one of the forts seen the smoke and sent their troops to come rushing in?
No, he corrected himself. The forts were too far off to have seen any smoke, even that big, black billow that went up from the oil. Fury was located on a boil on the backside of the devil’s butt, that was for sure, and nobody was looking out for them but Jason.
And maybe God.
Although God wasn’t doing an awful good job of it lately.
He trained his sights on yet another brave, and downed him in no time. Then one other, which he figured he’d at least wounded by the whoop that the brave gave out before he twisted out of sight behind a clump of brush.
If nothing else, these Apache were surely brushing him up on his marksmanship, he thought. And then he missed one.
“Dad-blast it,” he hissed, and took another shot. This one hit home and the brave fell forward, on his face.
Dr. Morelli came halfway up the ladder and called, “Anyone need me here?”
“Just keep down,” Ward answered. “We’re doin’ all right for a bunch of sodbusters. How they doin’up north?”
“Two casualties, but no one killed. As of yet.”
“I mean, how they doin’ Indian-wise?”
“Jason says their ranks are much withered. He’s expecting them to back off and go home at any moment.”
Ward chuckled. “Well, me, too, but if wishes was horses…”
Doc Morelli showed a little smile and nodded. “I know. Frustrating, isn’t it?”
Ward turned back toward the attacking Apache. And took a potshot at a brave a little too far off. His bullet had no effect, and he crouched down to reload.
“Take care of yourself, Ward,” the doctor said.
“That’s why I’m using my Colt. Don’t make my shoulder hurt me near so bad.”
“Good man,” said the doctor, and slid down the ladder.
“I’m only good iffen I live through this,” Ward muttered to himself as he chucked shell after shell into the handgun’s chambers.
Jason signaled his men to hold their fire when he saw the braves trying to move east and take their wounded with them. He hoped and prayed that this was the sign he’d been waiting for—that they were giving up and going home. Finally.
One of the men, a wagon driver whose name Jason didn’t know, kept on firing on the retreating Indians until Saul bashed him in the face with the butt of his rifle and broke his nose.
“Easy there, killer,” Jason said.
“Oy, mein Gott,” said Saul, sinking to his knees beside the fallen man.
“There wasn’t anything else you could do,” Jason said as he squeezed past, noting the trail of the last Apache warrior in sight.
The brave wasn’t moving any too quickly. He was leading a pony upon which he’d balanced the body of his injured buddy.
The men had passed along his order to hold their fire, and not a shot rang out as Jason circled the town. “Keep your places, men,” he said as he passed through them. “Just in case.”
Although in truth, he had never seen a sorrier, more exhausted batch of men than those he crept around on his way to the south wall. Unless it was the Apache outside their walls.
And he knew exactly how they felt.