A Tale Out of Luck by Willie Nelson, Mike Blakely

me! Form a skirmish line!”
    By now the cowboys had run all the Indians to the far end of the village, where they were scattering as fast as they could, most on foot, a few on horses they had managed to mount as the Indian boys arrived with the horse herd.
    “Form a skirmish line on me!” Polk repeated.
    In the middle of the camp, he saw a mounted Indian warrior riding toward the Wolf and Crazy Bear, leading a spare pony. With precision swiftness, Crazy Bear was lifted on behind the rider, and the Wolf mounted the spare horse. Then the Wolf turned his mount on the cowboys, who were firing on the fleeing Indian men, women, and children. As his mount galloped, the young warrior reached low to pluck a stick of firewood from the ground. With this, he attacked the cowboys, clubbing the nearest one as he attempted to reload.
    “That’s a brave man,” Polk said.
    He watched, amazed, as the Wolf, armed only with the stick, bludgeoned away at the cowboys, distracting them from their murderous work. He winced when he saw Jack Brennan’s Colt belch smoke, sending a bullet through the Wolf’s torso.
    “Sons of bitches,” Polk muttered.
    He watched the Wolf escape, badly wounded, into a stand of cattails along the creek, barely clinging to his mount.
    A few shots came from the cover along the creek where most of the Indians had fled, driving the cowboys back toward the safety of the skirmish line Polk had established. They rode back, yelping idiotically, driving with them about two dozen mounts captured from the Indians’ herd. Gavilan Gutierrez returned with them, an arrow shaft protruding from his hip. He seemed to take little notice of it.
    Jack Brennan galloped right up to the dead body of Major Ralph Quitman. “Now,
that’s
the way to handle Indians!” he said to the corpse. He looked up at First Sergeant Polk. “Lucky we’re not all dead. I told him we should have charged. If I hadn’t seen that warrior drawing a bead on me, we would have been completely surprised—ambushed and massacred.”
    Polk looked back at the dead and wounded. “They were comin’ in to the fort until you started shootin’.”
    “I defended myself! I had stock stolen from me.”
    “Consider yourself under house arrest,” Polk said. “Go back to your ranch and stay there. The captured horses will go back to the fort with me as evidence.”
    “Aren’t you going to mount your men and chase those red devils down?”
    “I’ve got wounded soldiers to get back to the post hospital.”
    “Kiss my ass,” Brennan growled. “Your damn translator has got more sand than you!” He spurred his horse and ran away with his men.
    First Sergeant July Polk shot a glance at the translator. Gutierrez only shrugged, and pulled the arrow out of his hip without so much as a flinch.
    The Wolf opened his eyes and saw the cattails rising above him to the sky. He placed his hand on his wound and felt blood coursing hot between his fingers. Thinking of his people, he summoned all his strength, rolled over, and began to crawl. One glance told him he was leaving a blood trail, but he hoped the white men would be too stupid to find it way down in the cattails.
    Somehow, he knew his grandfather was already dead by now. Sorrow and worry consumed him. He scrambled on his hands and knees as fast as he could, and then he actually stumbled from weakness, though he was just crawling around like some lowly kind of four-legged. This was shameful. He decided to stand and reveal himself to his enemies and fight to the death with his bare hands. He was already good as dead anyway, judging from the way the blood ran from his belly wound.
    He tried to stand and turn all at once, while drawing in a breath for his death song, but all this shocked his core with perfect agony, and Mother Earth lurched under his feet, sending him toppling, rolling down a mud bank, sliding into a cold pool of water like a snake. There was a dead willow tree here that had fallen into the creek from