He left unaware that the young warrior came to stand over the woman’s splattered body. To sure down at her, stare at that crimson and gore, feeling the flush of overwhelming triumph wash through him.
22
SHAD’S THROAT BURNED in torment each time he hollered out his own death song.
In the thick of it, his hot-blooded fury drove him to carry death to the door of every lodge in this camp of kidnappers, thieves, and murderers. He swore that by himself he would cut a swath through the Dog Soldier camp until he found every last one of the warriors who had burned and maimed, mutilated, raped, and butchered white folk across the whole of Kansas and Nebraska.
And a part of him hoped, prayed fervently, that he would find his son before anyone else.
Shad knew the boy was here.
As a shadow burst from behind a lodge, he fired the Spencer on instinct.
Yet High-Backed Bull was no longer a boy. He was a full-grown man. But thinking that in his head had never helped Shad’s heart deal with what had become of his shattered family. For this father, Bull would always, forever and always, be a boy. His boy. His father’s only son.
Before he realized it, Shad was hurtling through the air, heels over head, landing on his belly, sliding across the grass and sand, then slamming the side of a lodge. Behind him his horse struggled to rise, one leg broken, flopping wildly, where the animal had stumbled in a hole. Perhaps a fire pit.
A scream aroused his blood as he came slowly to his senses, making him whirl around to pull the Spencer’s trigger, finding he had not chambered a fresh cartridge. He took the warrior’s charge there, where he lay sprawled on the ground, raising the rifle in two hands to blunt the blow from the youngster’s war club.
Driving his big foot into the warrior’s groin, sending the Cheyenne reeling backward in pain, Shad clumsily levered another round into the Spencer’s action and fired.
For a moment he stared at the warrior collapsing before his eyes, studying the face, the war paint, the way he wore his hair. He sickened for an instant—believing he had killed his son.
In grief he careened over to kneel beside the body. Sweete used some of the Cheyenne’s loose hair to smear a patch of the greasy earth-paint from the young warrior’s face. This dead one’s skin was too dark to be Bull. Still, he was nearly the same age as his boy, if that old. So young to die—
The terror-filled screams were not those of a man. Not those even of a Cheyenne woman. Such blood-chilling cries for help came only from one of the white women.
Out of the swirling dust and gun smoke curling serpentine on the dry breezes among the lodges emerged a white woman, babbling incoherently in a foreign tongue. She hurled herself toward him for a moment, then skidded to a stop, bringing a hand up to her mouth when she gazed at his buckskinned frame up and down. Eyes wide as saucers, she shot away from him—careening toward some mounted soldiers.
The Pawnee darted through the thick of it, screaming at the top of their lungs, sating themselves with long-awaited blood lust. Exacting revenge on their old enemies. Hacking, butchering men and women who had fallen with the soldier onslaught.
Fifty yards away a small group of warriors held out from a ravine, drawing the white man’s fire away from their families fleeing into the sandhills. Small platoons of soldiers raced after other knots of resolute warriors who steadfastly continued to fight from horseback, but most fought their struggle on foot. These small bands would retreat for some distance before suddenly wheeling to fire at their white pursuers while the women and children doggedly made for the tall grass in the marsh, some for the sandy bluffs nearby.
It was but a moment before Sweete and an old sergeant gathered enough soldiers to lay down some blistering fire on that ravine running through the Cheyenne camp. Without thought, nothing but courage and foolhardy bravado to power their legs, the sergeant led his squad in an infantry charge on the ravine, pouring enough lead into the enemy to drive the warriors who could still move clawing up the far side of the sandy defile.
One by one the defenders went down—those brave enough to stay behind and cover the retreat of the others. Now the soldiers and Shad were among the sweat-slicked brown bodies, both dead and wounded, kneeling quickly to rechamber another cartridge spat from the spring-loaded butt-mounted tube, firing at the retreating brown backs.
“Lookee here, Sergeant Dickson!”
Shad watched a young, thin soldier come up to the old sergeant, opening his palm. In it lay the shiny crimson-and-gold badge of distinction worn by a Royal Arch Mason. On the white enamel of the banner stretched across the bottom of the badge were emblazoned the words:
“Where in hell you get that, Lorrett?” demanded the sergeant.
“Yonder,” and he threw a thumb up the ravine at the copper-skinned bodies of the enemy.
