With shrill yips and yells Indians came at them. Arrows and bullets whizzed over the heads of Raoul's men as they ducked down behind their shelter. Raoul forced himself to concentrate on shooting. He poked his rifle through an opening between broken tree limbs, aimed at a running Indian and fired.
His two remaining close companions in this war, Levi and Armand, lay shooting on either side of him. Hodge was dead, his body sprawled a few feet behind them, and that by itself brought Raoul close to panic. He had always felt the big redheaded backwoodsman could never be hurt.
Arrows flew thick and fast. Raoul and his men, reloading from the cartridge and shot cases they had carried ashore, kept up a steady answering fire.
He felt shame smouldering in his spine and along his limbs. What a damned fool he'd been. He had been so sure that storm of grapeshot from the Victory would finish off the Indians. He had expected this to be nothing more than a stroll through the forest, counting the dead and killing off the helpless remnant. Instead it seemed there were plenty of Sauk warriors left, very much alive, fierce as wolverines. And he and his men were trapped at the tip of this damned island with no place to retreat but the river. In the river they'd be helpless under enemy arrows and bullets, just like the redskins who had tried earlier to swim away.
The Sauk war cries had fallen silent, and the shots and arrows had stopped. Raoul peered through a chink in the tree trunks piled before him. All he could see was dark green boughs with no sign of movement.
"What you figger they're doing now?" Levi said. He had his six pistols laid out on a log in front of him.
"Probably getting ready to charge us," said Raoul.
How long before the Victory got back? From here at the south end of the island he could see the white steamship anchored off the riverbank, her two black stacks giving off little white puffs, her side paddle wheels motionless. She looked very small and very far away. No chance Helmer or Kingsbury could see that Raoul and his men were fighting for their lives here.
What were the men, Levi and Armand and the others, thinking? Again and again, it seemed, his decisions cost lives. He remembered Old Man's Creek—de Marion's Run—and he felt his face get fiery hot at the shame of it.
And then there was Eli Greenglove's bitterness that night they parted, accusing him of putting Clarissa and the boys in harm's way. And something about a shock Raoul would get—what had Eli meant by that?