Badlands Bloodsport

Fargo had already spotted him. He rode up and down egging on the other warriors. By long-standing battle tradition he stayed well back—if the medicine brave was killed, the battle must immediately end and the braves retreat. No Cheyenne fought without strong medicine.

“I can tag him, Fargo,” Skeets called from up on the coach, where the flurry of arrows had him pressed into the luggage well.

“Let him go for now,” Fargo called back. “It would pull our bacon out of the fire for today, but it could bring the whole Cheyenne Nation down on us later.”

So far the beleaguered Blackford party had not been able to fire on the attackers because of the deadly fusillade of flint-tipped arrows. By now the conveyances looked like porcupines. Fargo took up a prone position under the mud wagon and led a speeding brave with his Henry. The rifle kicked into Fargo’s shoulder, and the brave was wiped off his horse.

Moments later Skeets’s Big Fifty boomed, and a warrior’s head exploded in a pebbly mess.

“Bound for the Happy Hunting Grounds!” Slappy exulted.

Fargo, however, saw little to celebrate. He could hear Derek banging away to little effect, wasting more ammo. And Montoya was in serious trouble with the horses. One had already been killed, and the rest were so panicked by the din of battle that their eyes were showing all white—meaning they were frightened beyond all control.

“Montoya!” Fargo shouted when the wrangler bravely exposed himself to fire in order to reinforce the rope corral restraining the horses. “Cover down! Cover down, damn it!”

Fargo’s last word had just crossed his lips when an arrow punched into Montoya’s neck and drove halfway out the other side, pushing bloody gobbets of flesh with it. Montoya dropped to his knees choking on his own blood, his face a frozen mask of pain. Fargo cursed and scuttled out from under the wagon into a blur of arrows. By the time he reached Montoya, however, the man was dead.

Before Fargo could return to his position, a Big Fifty sounded from just behind him, and there was a sharp tug at Fargo’s buckskin shirt. He whirled around. Skeets was busy drawing a bead from atop the coach, but Derek, crouched between the coach and the mud wagon, was staring at Fargo with a deadpan face.

“You stepped into my aim,” Derek shouted above the clamor of battle. “You need to watch that, Fargo.”

For a moment Fargo felt the murderous impulse to irrigate the hangman’s guts. But a few seconds later he realized there was a slight chance it was the truth—he had been in motion and could have stepped into the line of fire. Then again, the world might grow honest, too.

There was no luxury to worry about it at the moment. Even a hobbled horse could move around, and these were about to expose themselves flush to those Cheyenne arrows. Fargo barely made it under the mud wagon without being skewered.

“Skeets!” he bellowed to their best marksman. “Never mind the ammo hoarding, start dropping them fast! We’re about to lose the horses!”

Even a tenderfoot from England knew what that meant in this vast, unsettled region. Skeets and Fargo opened up with a vengeance, killing two more braves and seriously wounding a third. Touch the Clouds, who was personally responsible at council for every battle casualty, did as Fargo hoped and sounded retreat on his eagle-bone whistle.

“Cease fire!” Fargo shouted, allowing the braves to collect their dead before they thundered off, still defiantly yipping.

He waited a few minutes, then tossed his saddle and bridle on the Ovaro and rode cautiously to the east, making sure this wasn’t a fake retreat. When he was satisfied the warriors would not return immediately, he rode back to camp.

“We made a good show of it, eh?” Lord Blackford greeted him jubilantly. “Think they’ve supped full of us?”

“Like I said before, Earl, Plains Indians pull back when casualties start to mount up. By their way of seeing it, too much death at one time and place can put a hoodoo on them. But they’ll be back today, and they’ll keep coming back until our scalps are dangling from their coup sticks. Our only chance is to get to Fort Laramie.”

“How far away is it?”

“We could make it in three nights. The real problem is reloads. That trading post on the South Platte burned to the ground just before we got there—the food we can stretch, and now we have enough water if we’re careful. But I’m down to my last magazine load for the Henry and only ten spare cartridges for my Colt. You folks didn’t stock up enough before you left Santa Fe, and now we’re all in a rum place.”

“But what about this famous ‘wit and wile’ you ballyhooed?” Aldritch asked, his tone heavy with sarcasm. “Besting the primitive savages with the white man’s superior intellect? Or is your intellect only good for bedazzling big-bosomed maids?”

“Rot in hell, you scheming dry-as-dust!” Jessica snapped, her nerves already stretched tight as a drumhead by the attack. “You are so frightfully useless that Skye had to place you with the women!”