“Twelve years ago, when my pa still was chief, we joined up with nearly a thousand other mens from all ’round here on the prairies and we come down on that place down there.”
Milo shook his head slowly. “I’ll say this, your father had guts—about a mile of them—but he, of all people, considering what he’d been through before, should have realized that you can’t successfully oppose armored vehicles with horse cavalry, or use cavalry to attack well-fortified positions equipped with rifles and artillery. How many did you lose on that occasion, Chief Gus?”
“Well,” answered Scott, “he’d done heard from the traders and some others that won’t none of the steel wagons would work no more, and I guess as how that was right, too, ’cause they come out of the fort—some on hosses, but most on their feet and with great long old spears. They stood up in a square-like bunch and put their hosses in the middle and we rode down on ’em, but them old spears was so damn long that they stuck out way past the lines of men, and when the hosses got pricked with ’em a few times, won’t no man could get his hoss to go close again. And all the time, it was bastards standing there with crossbows and rifles and prods and some them fellers on hosses in the middle with real bows just a-shooting down man after man. Finally, one of the bugtits shot my pa and then everybody just tucked tail and ran and the damn bastards come after us with their own damn fresh hosses and killed off a lot more pore mens from ahind. That’s the kind of backstabbing, selfish murderers they is, you see, mister.”
“So,” said Milo, “you’ve spent ten or twelve years breeding and now you’re ready to ride down there and have the most of a new generation of young men butchered and maimed, eh? Well, Chief Gus, this is not my tribe’s fight and I’d far liefer ride a few miles out of our direct route to the high plains than to get involved in such a matter, thank you.”
Scott shrugged. “I didn’t ask for your help, did I, mister? I would of been willing to let you folks ride along of us all and share in the loot and stock and womens and all, but the way I done heard it, it probly ain’t going to take all what old Jules and me has got, much less of your folks, too.
“See, Squinty Merman, the trader, come th’ough in early summer and allowed as how them bastards over there at MacEvedy Station is in some kind of a bad way. Seems as how they had bad crops for two years running, then damn near no crops a-tall, last year. They done et up all what they had stored, their seed grain, too—had to eat a lot of their critters and done had a bad spate of a sickness that’s done took off a lot and left the rest damn poorly.
“Well, Mr. Moray, I figgered right then and there it couldn’t be no better time for to go ’bout paying back the murdering bastards for everything they’d done done to us and our grandfolks and all, so I sent riders out to fetch back old Jules and the rest of the boys. I told them to bring all the fighters they could and that we’d all meet here. Then my own folks and me, we moved on down here and set up our camp and waited for them as was coming.
“Since we all got here, it’s been damn few of them bastards has come out of that fort and all, and”—he chuckled coldly—“it’s damn fewer of the fuckers what done made it back ahind them walls. ’Course, we did lose us some damn good boys and some hosses, too, afore we came to find out just how godawful far them frigging rifles can shoot and kill a man at. But since we done learned how far we has to stay away from them, we ain’t lost but two men, afore today, leastways, and won’t neither one of them kilt by them bastards and their fucking rifles.”
Arabella Lindsay laid aside the body brush and the currycomb, dipped the dandy brush into the bucket of water and then after she had tossed the full mane of the dapple-gray stallion over to the off side of his neck, she began to brush his crest.
More than seventeen hands of bone, sinew and rolling muscles, the great beast stood stock-still, occasionally whuffling his physical pleasure, while all the time in completely silent, telepathic communication with this small two-leg creature whom he adored.
“But this horse needs to run, to run hard.” His beaming was becoming a bit petulant. “Trotting around the inside of the quadrangle is almost worse than no exercise at all. This horse is becoming stiff. We don’t need to go far, just a few miles and then back.”
“Capull, Capull,” the girl silently remonstrated. “I’ve been through all of this nearly every day for weeks now. There are enemies, evil, thieving, murderous men, camped all about the fort and the station, who already have killed many of our folks and stolen or killed their horses and cattle. There are no longer enough men of fighting age left hale enough to go out and drive these skulkers away, as was done in years past, and so we just must abide within our walls until they choose to go away.”
She sighed and laid her cheek against the stallion’s glossy neck. “Poor, poor Father—he is so frustrated by it all. He would like nothing better than to take out his pikemen and crossbowmen and riflemen and cavalry and trounce these filthy, bestial rovers as thoroughly as he did years ago, but all the deaths from illness and hunger this last year have so reduced the garrison that he no longer has enough force to even defend these walls, much less to mount a field operation against the skulkers. I think, as do Father and Director MacEvedy, that only fear of the two big guns and the mortars has kept them from attacking our very walls, Capull, but if they knew just how few loads there are remaining for not only them but for our rifles … Oh, Capull, I am so very frightened. I’m only fifteen, and I don’t want to die, but poor Father is so very, very worried about so many, many things that I cannot but keep a brave face and demeanor in his presence. You are the only friend with whom I can talk freely. I love you so, my dear Capull.”
The huge stallion beamed renewed assurances of undying love and adoration for the girl and added solemn assurance that he would stamp the life out of anything on two legs or four or none that ever offered her harm. He meant it and she knew it.
The two old friends, Colonel Ian Lindsay and Director Emmett MacEvedy, were indeed deeply worried, and with excellent reason. So hard had they been hit, so badly had they suffered, that even the worst of MacEvedy’s predictions had been more than surpassed in actuality. Only some two hundred men, women and children still were alive in all of the fort-station complex, and not a few of those were ill or convalescent, a convalescence lengthened by the poor and scanty rations available to them all these dark days.
The last of the seed grain was long since consumed, along with every last scrap of canned or otherwise preserved foods. Not a single chicken was left, nor any pigs; the rabbit cages gaped empty, as too did the commodious stalls of the shire horses, most of them. The director was now fearful of allowing the slaughter of any more cattle or sheep, lest there be no breeding stock left when once this string of calamities had at last come to an end; however, unless a way could be found to replace the almost expended silage, it might be a hard choice of slaughtering the last of the kine and the horses or of just watching them starve to death. He never, of course, considered surrendering his stock to the besiegers any more than he would have thought of turning over to them his wife or his children.
These days, they all were subsisting on fish from the river, herbs and mushrooms cultivated within the walls and those wild plants gathered from the nearer fields where the riflemen on the walls could keep reasonably safe from the prairie rovers the hardy souls who had agreed to go outside.
This past spring, they had had none of the usual crop or animal surpluses for the trader caravan. Rather had they had to trade metal for all of the jerky the traders would trade, and not enough value had been left of that transaction to obtain any of the needed brimstone, so the supply of gunpowder now was become desperately low. Nor were they overly well supplied with lead for bullets, though Ian Lindsay seemed to think that certain other metals still available—notably, pewter—might be utilized in a real emergency.