[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.' Manitou shaded his eyes against the slant of the sun.'Dust's in the south.Looks like, along our same route.''We split up?' Shaw checked the loads on Mary and Martha, his long Kentucky rifles.When they'd slipped away from the Omaha war camp, Veinte-y-Cinco had managed to retrieve three rifles, but the warriors who'd taken the captives' knives had kept them.Manitou was the only man who had powder and ball.'Give 'em a horse trail to follow.' Manitou tossed one of his knives to Shaw; pulled a spare skinning-knife from his moccasin to hand to January.'These poor beasts are so tired, I doubt they could outrun 'em.''I'll take 'em on north.' Shaw was already unwinding reins from trees.'Those rocks we passed at the top of the ridge 'bout four miles back—''We should make it.''Once I turn the horses loose I'll head for the camp,' went on Shaw.'Let 'em know we need help bad.' He held out one of his rifles to Manitou - January didn't even want to think about the Kentuckian's chances of making it the ten miles back to the Green River, after leading the Omahas several miles further along the ridge.Hannibal - who had shown a surprisingly adept touch in such things - scratched the tracks from around their campsite with a branch.Veinte-y-Cinco touched Shaw's arm as he started to move off: 'You make it back to camp, you tell Pia—'She hesitated.Tell her what? thought January.That she's on her own, at age thirteen, in the middle of the Rocky Mountains, with no home to go back to, dependent utterly on the likes of Edwin Titus and Mick Seaholly?A slave cabin shared with twenty other people, and a drunken lunatic master thrown in for lagniappe, seemed like a sanctuary in comparison.Veinte-y-Cinco's voice was almost a whisper.'Tell her that her mama loves her.'Shaw put his hand briefly to the woman's dirty cheek, then turned away.With the horse and the mules he headed off up the ridge, clumsily dusting at the tracks to make it look as if an effort at concealment had been made.Manitou led the way downslope to where a deadfall made a sort of road toward stonier ground that would hold no tracks.From there they doubled on their trail and moved back south toward the nearest cover, a distant tangle of huckleberry in a dip of ground.They went as swiftly as they could, but both Hannibal and Veinte- y-Cinco lagged, despite themselves, and it felt to January as if the hoofbeats of the Indians - still some miles off - hammered in his head.As if the sun was nailed to the sky above the ridge, never to go down again.As soon as they could, they went to ground - the thicket indefensible if they were discovered, but enough, January prayed, to shield them from enemy eyes until the Indians had ridden past.After what felt like over an hour he heard the hooves, dim with distance as they swung on to Shaw's trail.Manitou lay with his ear on the ground for a longer time yet, waiting until they were far off before he signaled them to move on.It was halfway to darkness by then, and Hannibal was falling further and further behind, the leg that he'd broken eighteen months before visibly weakening.They were in timber now, the rocks Shaw had spoken of still some distance off.January recalled they were a couple of boulders and a sort of granite elbow, close to twenty feet tall, thrusting up from the ground amid a tangle of sagebrush and laurel.He tried to picture where defenders could situate themselves to hold off a determined attack and failed.And it didn't matter.Behind them he half-guessed, half- heard what might have been hooves, glanced back - Manitou grabbed Hannibal by the arm and dragged him along, though the rocks weren't even in sight in the slow-gathering twilight.Veinte-y-Cinco fell back beside January, hurrying her steps to his, looking back also.Damn it, it's not my imagination, she hears it, too.'I'll fire first,' Manitou said.'You others, keep your rifles pointed but don't shoot 'til I say.Indians they mostly don't have enough powder or ball to waste it on a threat.You handle loading, Sun Mouse? Good.Winter Moon, you see anything big enough to get our backs against?'Every tree - fallen or otherwise - in the dusky forest seemed uniformly less than a foot in diameter.The hooves were definitely audible, and he could see movement behind them in the trees, on both sides, too.Christ, did they get Shaw? He'd heard no shots—'There!'It didn't look like much of a bastion - a dip in the ground formed when a lightning-struck tree had fallen, the trunk itself small, but a tangle of branches still relatively fresh.In the gloaming, it might be enough to confuse attackers' aim.They ran for it, skidding and stumbling on the slope of the ground, January thinking, in spite of himself: Rose, I should never have left Rose by herself with a baby coming.The thought that he'd never see her again was almost worse than the thought that he was going to die.Two painted horses flashed past them as they neared the fallen tree, wheeled to cut them off from it.Manitou raised his rifle and fired, one of the riders toppling and two others swinging in from the other side.They were still twenty yards from the log, and January knew that this was as good as they were going to get.He raised his rifle, put his back to Manitou's, covering the horses that whirled close, then veered away, ghostly shapes in the lowering dark.He recognized Iron Heart, and Dark Antlers, and other men who'd taken them before.Recognized, too, Franz Bodenschatz, in his bright Mexican coat and with his big American horse, riding at the back of the war party
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]