Winter Rain

“Throw them down!” they were yelling at each other. “Throws ’em down!”

The first of the horses were falling as Hook slid his mount to a halt near Two Sleep and stuffed one of the pistols away. He snugged the animal’s muzzle down tight, struggling to shoulder the animal up beside Callicott’s horse already down and kicking its last. He fought him, fought the smell of blood and gunpowder strung in thick layers in the air. Stuffing the gun’s barrel in front of the ear, he pulled the trigger. The big roan yanked its head away, thrashing as its legs went to water beneath its great weight. He barely had time to leap out of the way as it crashed onto the thin, icy crust of snow and lay there at Hook’s feet heaving its head, as if willing itself to stand. Then, as its life seemed to ebb before his eyes, the roan lay almost still in a matter of moments, still except for the last wheezing cries coming from that heaving chest. In a shudder it was done.

“Awright, boys!” Niles Coffee was yelling. “In a matter of minutes there’s gonna be lead smacking around here, thicker’n smoked bees!”

Jonah dropped behind it as the new line of warriors came splashing across the narrow creek and flung sand from a couple hundred hooves in great golden cascades like roosters’ tails. To his left came one of the men running for the barricade on foot. Slade Rule slid behind the carcass of horse, his chin whiskers and the front of his dirty shirt smeared with blood. The man rolled onto his side, wheezing, trying to speak, his back and chest pocked with uncounted bullet holes.

“You made it,” Jonah said, kneeling over him. Gazing into the fear-drenched, teary eyes of that youngster beneath him. “You hang on for now—you’re gonna make it rest of the way.”

As Jonah tried to inch away, Rule snagged his sleeve, pulling him back, his mouth working mechanically, soundlessly against the great cacophony of battle snarling around them: bullets whining past or thudding into the bodies of their dying horses, the cursing of men, the bellows of Lockhart’s and Coffee’s and Deacon Johns’s orders, the cries of the wounded Rangers, the shrill death songs of the enemy, the wailing of the women across that arroyo … in the village where Jonah had intended to go.

“Good and kind, brother Jesus!” the deacon shrieked, half standing, firing with a pistol in each hand. “Heartily smite these heathen sinners!”

As he gazed back down at the Ranger, Rule’s eyes widened, then eased half-down the mast. His hand loosened on Jonah’s arm as the rest of his body slumped. Hook used two thumbs to ease the eyelids closed.

“What the hell are those bastards up to now?” June Callicott was hollering, half standing at the barricade of carcasses.

Hook found the greater number of warriors breaking off their attack after those first few grinding minutes. The Rangers, what was left of Company C inside that ring of carcasses, lay waiting among the sprawled and leg-flung horses for the next rush by the Comanche.

“Sonsabitches gonna work us down with their goddamned wheel,” Coffee reminded them.

Harley Pettis dropped his serious bulk to his knees. “They re-forming, Sarge?”

Coffee and the rest watched the horsemen pulling off. The second wave from the village joined up with the first, swirling about one another, working themselves up into a fighting frenzy, shrieking at one another, waving lances and shaking scalps.

“Looks like they’re ready to wear us down, boys!” Lockhart promised them.

But as the Rangers watched, breaking open the actions on their pistols to dump empty cartridges, jamming new ammunition into their heated weapons, the lords of the southern plains surprisingly did not form into that spinning, death-carrying wheel that would work itself around and around its prey, inch by inch, yard by yard, moment by moment grinding away, working ever closer to the white man until the enemy could be overrun in one great sweep of terror.

Instead, the Comanche drew off.

Stunned, slack-jawed in shock, Jonah stood, watching the horsemen drive their ponies into the arroyo, plunging across the sand and up the far side into the remnants of the village where all was of a sudden panic.

Above the screaming and wailing of the women, the barking of the dogs and the war cries of the men, above it all floated the first distant, but no less distinct, notes of a bugle.

43

February-Early April 1875

“HOOK! GET BACK here!”

Most of the Rangers had to be in shock, finding themselves between two overwhelming waves of battle-frenzied warriors in those first few minutes of panic, only to watch utterly dumbfounded as the horsemen drew off their attack.

“Hook! Goddammit—you’ll be killed!”

Jonah heard Lockhart’s voice behind him as he vaulted the horse carcass and skidded down the loose, giving sand at the icy side of the arroyo. His high-heeled riding boots felt clumsy in sand as he plowed through, heading for the narrow stream, for the far side, for the village suddenly up, screaming and on the run.