Dance on the Wind (37 page)

When Root returned, he handed two arrows over to Kingsbury. “Side of the boat looks like a porkypine, stuck the way it is.”

“I s’pose Ebenezer’s lucky he only catched the one,”
Kingsbury replied. “Look there, Titus,” and the boatman held both arrows to the lamplight. “These got ’em some iron points. Damn it all. See how they’re tied round the shaft with that wrap.”

“I see.”

“It all come loose inside his leg. The wrap and the point too. Got wet in his blood.”

“An’ slipped off the shaft,” Ovatt finished for them.

Root inquired, “Gotta dig it out, Hames?”

“Gotta try.” Then he peered up at Bass. “Don’t we, Titus?”

“I’ll … try.”

He went back to work, pressing down on one side of the incision with his bloody fingers, slicing down a little at a time with the point of his blade until he saw something fibrous. He snagged it between his trembling fingers and pulled slowly. Out it came in a long, thick thread.

“Just like I tol’t you,” Kingsbury declared. “Now, go back in there and get the head of it afore Ebenezer wakes up.”

“I don’t think he’s coming to till morning, Hames,” Ovatt reported.

“Good thing too,” Kingsbury responded. “Finish it, Titus.”

Back down into the meat of the river pilot’s muscle he probed, until it felt as if the tip of the blade scraped against something harder than the soft, giving tissue. Hoping it wasn’t bone, he slowly pressed two fingers deep into the incision, both of them feeling down the knife’s blade until a fingertip struck it. Taking it between his fingers, he pulled. Slick with dark, warm blood—his fingers slipped off.

Again he grabbed hold of it, pulled, and slipped off.

“I c-can’t get a hold on it.”

“Stuck in the bone, most like,” Ovatt grumbled.

“Yeah,” Kingsbury agreed. “Don’t you got something in your shooting pouch you can grab it with, Titus?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“What’s a fella use when he’s got a ball stuck down his barrel and you’re wanting to pull it out?”

“I got a screw I put on the end of my wiping stick.”

“Yeah, I know—but when you got the screw into the ball, what you use to yank hard on the wiping stick get that stuck ball out?”

It came to him all at once. “That just might work. Get me my pouch.”

Heman Ovatt flung the shooting pouch his way. Scrounging at the bottom of the front section of the pouch, Bass pulled out the forged-iron tongs he had never used all that much.

“Them looks like they’ll work,” Kingsbury declared.

“Hames, help pull that meat outta my way,” Titus told the boatman. As Kingsbury tugged the muscle in one direction, Bass eased it down in the other. Working his fingers back into the incision, he touched the rounded end of the arrow point once more. Slipping the small, narrow tongs into the incision, he guided them into position, clamped them around the point, and began to pull; “Damn, but that’s stuck in there.”

“Work on it—it’ll come,” Ovatt said.

Rocking it back and forth slightly, Titus felt it begin to give way, eventually freeing itself from its lock in that biggest bone in the human body. Carefully he slid it from the deep incision, captured between the tongs. Holding the point up to the light for a moment, Titus turned it around slowly so all could see.

“We best save that for him,” Kingsbury said.

“That’s for sure,” Root agreed. “He’ll be one mad kingfish gone alligator-horse if’n we throw that away!”

“He might even wear it on a cord round his neck,” Hames predicted.

They washed the wound out with hot water, then pried open Zane’s lips so they could extract a little of the tobacco quid he had pulverized inside his cheek before passing out. Kingsbury pressed the dark, soupy leaf and spittle down into the laceration. They finished by cutting a strip of cloth from the bottom of Ebenezer’s spare shirt and knotting it around his leg. With a pair of blankets pulled over their leader, the three boatmen decided they would draw lots to take watch until dawn, when they would once more set off downriver.

Root happily sat up the first pull, and Kingsbury took
the second watch. An hour or more back now, Hames had awakened Titus with an insistent nudge.

“Cold,” Bass had muttered as he sat up, slowly coming awake.

“Real cold,” Kingsbury said as he slid past the youngster. “And cold does a good job keeping you awake.”

But it hadn’t.

He awoke himself with a start, hearing himself snore. He sputtered, then fell silent, still half-asleep, listening to the other men snoring. He wondered if Ebenezer’s was that loudest rumble, as much of that rye as he had swallowed down. As he let his eyelids slip back down and his chin go back to resting against his chest, Bass heard the muffled scrape of another sawyer against the side of the boat. It bumped so quietly, he wasn’t sure. Then decided it was the tumble of the sawyer’s roots, hitting again, here, then a third place along the side.

He glanced up at the starry sky to the east across the river where the sun would emerge—if it ever chose to—watching his frosty breath as he pulled the blanket up against his ears.

And froze in place.

Staring into the blackness of that moonless night. Holding his breath, Titus watched the shadow take form at the gunnel, pouring over the top of the poplar plank like a big bubble in a kettle of stew ready to boil over the fire, emerging slowly from the surface of the stew, just as this shadow emerged from the top of the gunnel back there near the stern. As if it were punching an inky black hole out of that cold sky dusted with a sugary coating of stars.

He swallowed, feeling his throat constrict in fear.

The shadow congealed in the black of that night, becoming a head, then one arm, and another—eventually pulling itself atop the gunnel. Beyond it another shadow. Then three more appeared at the stern. Heads turning this way, then that. Finally slipping themselves soundlessly atop the side of the boat. He wasn’t sure, but he thought he saw bows at the ends of the arms. Saw them already strung with arrows. And then a shaft, perhaps a lance. No. Not that long. Those had to be the muskets.

Letting the blanket fall from his shoulders, he brought
the hammer back to full cock in one motion as he lowered the muzzle onto the closest of the shadows and pulled in one motion. In his rush he forgot to close his eyes for the muzzle flash. That much sudden light hurt them as everything went black. The last he saw was the shadow pitching backward, spilling over the gunnel, where it disappeared among all that blackness beyond.

Around him erupted cries and yelps as the boatmen came awake and the Chickasaw screeched their war cries. At least a half dozen were on board before the other three boatmen fought their way out of the blankets and began a heroic defense of their boat.

Arrows thwacked into wood all around him, a gun roared, then another. He had no idea whose weapon it was: boatman or Indian. Men grunted as bodies slammed together in a match of strength pitted against surprise. Beneath the dull starshine he watched a tomahawk go into the air at the end of a warrior’s arm—a gunshot—the tomahawk stopped its arc, then fell backward … the arm and the warrior spilled over the side of the boat.

Titus found his knife in his hand as he watched an Indian hurtling onto Kingsbury’s back—something huge held out at the end of his arm.

On instinct Titus lunged forward, felt the blade that had sliced an arrowhead out of a man’s leg with so much struggle now dig between another man’s ribs almost effortlessly. He didn’t know if he pulled the Indian off Kingsbury or if the boatman flung the Indian back to free himself like a dog shaking off water, but Titus fell over backward, his arm locked around the Indian’s neck. Rolling to the side, he felt the warrior quiver, tense, then go limp.

Bass was on his feet, wheeling to leap beneath the awning, his eyes searching the red-tinged darkness for sign of Ebenezer Zane. In a tangle of arms and bodies the lump on the far side of the awning struggled beneath its blankets, crying out in pain, grunting under two attackers who pinned the pilot down, one of them raising his arm to strike a second time, then a third with something that cracked dully against Zane’s head. Bass swept forward, tripping on the planks and falling against one attacker
while the second whirled and fled. Bass’s knife sank into the Indian’s back but seemed to take no immediate effect. Titus spun on that first, fleeing warrior.

Drawing the knife back, Titus reached out and snagged a handful of hair as the Indian cleared the awning. Yanking the head toward him, Bass slashed at the Indian’s neck once, then a second time. He was preparing for a third journey with that skinning blade when he sensed the warm gush spill across the back of his hand and wrist in the cold night. The body went limp beneath him.

Spinning to find another attacker, Titus cried, “Ebenezer!”

He had time only to yell out the man’s name once before he felt the searing pain against his shoulder, delivered with enough stunning force that he was flung against the pilot’s body. Spinning, Titus watched his attacker draw back a long, stone-studded war club for a second swing. Without thinking, Bass tried to raise his left arm to ward off the blow. But the arm would not respond to his command without a frantic, burning tongue of fire coursing through his shoulder. Suddenly crouching, Titus hurled himself at the Indian, slashing back and forth with the knife at the end of his one good arm while the attacker stumbled backward beneath the savage ferocity of the white man’s attack, swinging his long club side to side in a vain attempt at fending off the white man’s knife. At the end of one wide arc with that club, Titus dived, his arm extended.

The blade struck, slid to the side a little, then sank into the Indian’s chest. He drew it out. Ran it home a second time. Drew it out as the Indian stumbled backward. Again he plunged it into the chest. Pulled it back, then jammed it into the enemy with all his might. Bass watched the Indian finally sink to his knees, the front of his buckskins glistening in the pewter light of that cold starshine. The warrior keeled to the side, his eyes opened wide, and he lay completely still.

At that moment it seemed the boat grew quiet around him. So quiet he could hear the lap of water against the poplar planks. Some man’s raspy breathing nearby. The groan of another. Then a scrape against the side of
the boat. The very noise he’d heard just before the Indians had come aboard. His mind swimming with a charge of hot adrenaline, his heart squeezed with terror in his chest, Titus knew the warriors were in canoes.

And now more of them were about to come over the gunnels!

Leaping from the awning, he reached the stern, ready to hack at the next warriors to climb out of their canoes. When the voice startled him.

“That you, T-titus?”

“Heman?”

He growled, “Pull me up, goddammit!”

Ovatt stood precariously, his legs shaky, in one of the canoes, holding one of his arms up the side of the flatboat. As Bass pulled, Heman clambered over the side and into the broadhorn with a grunt. Gasping, he asked, “Where the others?”

Only then did Titus turn, drenched with the chill of that darkness, fully realizing the significance of the great, cold, inky black silence around them.

“Kingsbury?” he called.

“Hames?” Ovatt cried in desperation.

“Here,” came the reply. A shadow appeared halfway down the far side of the boat, hand to its head. “I … I need some help, boys.”

Bass watched the shadow pitch to its knees, struggle up again, before he reached Kingsbury. “Only got one good arm right now,” Titus apologized for his struggle in getting the other man to his feet.

“Me too,” Kingsbury replied. Into the dim starshine he turned, showing his right arm, dark stains tracing its length from shoulder to wrist. “Cain’t move it too good.”

“Then don’t,” Ovatt ordered.

“Reuben?”

They heard a splash from the bow.

“I’m here,” came the growl. “Just throwing one of the dead bastards overboard.”

Root turned about, darkening a patch of the starry sky as he strode back toward the stern atop kegs and casks and crates.

“You hurt?” Kingsbury asked as he tore his own bloody sleeve asunder.

“I been better,” Root growled. “A few scratches. Nothing I ain’t ever had afore in a good brawl. You boys?”

“Looks to be Hames got the worse of it,” Ovatt explained as he finished tearing the sleeve from Kingsbury’s shirt, looping it quickly around the upper arm. “Gonna have to stop this bleeding for you. Me—I just head-butted a few of them red bastards and followed ’em over the side into the shallow water, where we tussled.”

“You finish a few of ’em off?” Kingsbury asked.

“They ain’t none of ’em left I can see of,” Ovatt replied gruffly.

Root turned to the youngster. “Your arm—you stuck, Titus?”

“Just hit my arm, maybe my shoulder. A club. It’ll be all right come morning.”

“Ain’t long till morning,” Kingsbury said, settling clumsily to the deck. His head weaved wearily. “Well, now, Titus—that were your first Injun fight—”

“How ’bout Ebenezer?” Ovatt interrupted suddenly as he rose from Kingsbury’s side, turning on his heel. “Eb—”

“I pulled one of ’em off him,” Titus began to explain. “One what was smashing Zane with a club.”

“Here that’un is,” Ovatt declared, dragging the body out of his way to step over it getting to the tick mattress where they had worked on the river pilot beneath candlelight.

“Ebenezer?” Root called out, rushing to Ovatt’s side.

“Maybeso he’s still drunk,” Kingsbury declared as he pushed up to join them.

“Likely so,” Ovatt said as he rolled the man over, pulling the blankets down gently. He held his ear over Zane’s face, listened. Then jerked back, his hands feeling around the pilot’s head in the dark. “Shit.”

“What?” Titus asked, inching forward a step.

Ovatt wiped his hands on the front of his coat. “Ebenezer’s done for.”

“Dead?” Root demanded.

“Just as dead as that son of a bitch there,” Ovatt growled as he whirled and kicked the dead Indian with all he could muster.

Whimpering like a wounded animal, Heman fell atop the Chickasaw’s body, pummeling it with his fists. Then seized the Indian’s ears and drove the head down onto the deck repeatedly as Root and Titus struggled to pull him off the body.