The Seekers Read Online Free PDF Page B

hoof had caught in a tangle of exposed roots. The Indian ran gracefully along the tree trunk, leaped as Abraham shouted:
    “Stovall! Behind y—”
    Stovall took the spike of the war club in the nape of his neck. He screamed a name—Lucy, Abraham thought it was—as he slumped over. His corpse bounced in the saddle.
    Abraham kicked Sprite ahead, hatred dizzying his mind. Stovall was a despicable young man. But he was also a United States soldier, and he had been foully murdered. Holding his seat by clenching his knees against Sprite’s heaving sides, Abraham jerked out one of the dragoon pistols and fired.
    When the smoke cleared, Abraham saw the Indian laughing at him from the other side of Stovall’s horse. Fresh blood stained Stovall’s shirt where the pistol ball had struck. The Indian had maneuvered Stovall’s corpse as a shield.
    Eyes guttering with hateful mirth, the Indian reached up as Stovall’s boots came loose from the stirrups. He tangled his fingers in Stovall’s blood-slimed hair, jerked, flung the body on the ground. In a moment the Indian was mounted and riding away, bent close to the animal’s neck as he beat the gray’s ribs with moccasined feet. Abraham pulled his other pistol, shot—but the fleeing savage was already out of range.
    Soon the Indian was gone in the smoke. Abraham rode past Stovall’s corpse, unable to look at it. Vomit filled his throat. He swallowed several times and that way kept from getting sick. But nausea still churned his middle.
    Pistols empty, he had only his bloodied saber for a weapon—and precious few enemies to use it on, he discovered. The Indians had withdrawn from the immediate area. In fact, as he reined in again, he saw scores of them retreating in a frantic scramble through the timbers at the far side of the battleground. Legion soldiers with bayonets gave chase, stabbing the fugitives in the back or shooting them.
    Abraham began to shake. He controlled the violent trembling only with great effort. He’d been in combat five minutes or a little less, and already the field was clearing. As he scanned the tumbled trees, he realized that the cavalry charge against the Indian flank had been largely responsible for the sudden retreat. Wayne’s strategy had been sound after all.
    He heard a lieutenant calling for the dragoons to assemble in a relatively open area a short distance away.
    He spoke to Sprite to send her forward. The firing was diminishing quickly, but great blue layers of smoke still lay over the blasted trees. The grotesque and gory bodies of Americans and Indians were hideous to look upon.
    As Abraham rounded the split end of a rotting tree, he heard a muffled groan, glanced down—
    He saw an Indian, hardly older than he was.
    Hunched over in pain—gut-shot—the young brave stared up at Abraham’s bloodied sword, expecting death. Abraham’s eyes locked with the brave’s. Agony and humiliation filled those eyes, but no hatred. The Indian was dying.
    Abraham had no stomach for administering a final stroke, merciful or otherwise. He rode on. The young warrior began to chant, a mournful, singsong melody. A death-litany—?
    The sight of the dying warrior lingered in Abraham’s mind, sad and ugly. He felt ashamed as he remembered his foolish bravado earlier in the morning. To take pleasure in the death and suffering of battle struck him as inhuman, no matter how important or righteous the cause of either side seemed. He was oddly proud of having survived the short but fierce engagement. Yet at the same time he was sickened and shaken by everything he had seen and done.
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    The battle along the Maumee was won in under half an hour. It was won by superior numbers and, specifically, as Abraham had suspected, by the dragoon charge against the Indian flank. When Abraham rejoined his troop, he found that seven or eight men he knew well had died somewhere in the fallen timbers.
    Not long afterward, he and the other dragoons found themselves in high