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  There was going to be a lottery when they got back to the prison, and seven lucky winners would become the owners of the seven unclaimed pups. The puppies would survive. She knew there was a case of canned milk at the Cherokee Indian camp. It had been packed in with their other supplies. There was another case of the stuff back at the prison. There was also an eyedropper in Jenny Radford's emergency bag. *** "We did not kill all of the Spaniards," Watkins said "We're not even sure the horseman Lieutenant Hulbert shot was actually de Soto. None of us knows what he looked like." Andy nodded, accepting the Cherokee chief's assessment. He'd never really expected they could kill all of the conquistadores. Not with just one battle. This one had gone as well as you could ask for, but things would get a lot harder from now on. They'd had the huge advantage of catching the Spaniards completely by surprise. De Soto and his men hadn't even known of their existence until the prison guards started firing. Now, they did. And there were still at least two hundred of them alive. Most of them were still armed, too. With swords and halberds, if nothing else. They'd run out of ammunition quickly, though. The Spaniards had abandoned all of their pack mounts and supplies except whatever they were carrying on their persons when they were routed. The one cart they'd had was also now in the possession of Blacklock's people-and it obviously carried most of the expedition's powder and shot. Still, it was going to get hairy. Having a couple of hundred murderers running around loose with swords was bound to get hairy. De Soto finally rallied his men, once they got perhaps a mile and half from the slaughter at the village. "Rallied," at least, in the sense of getting them to stop running. There was no possibility of getting them to return to the battle. The carnage there had been incredible. Whoever those blue-uniformed strangers were, their muskets were deadly beyond belief. De Soto knew, because he'd been able to watch the entire battle from behind shelter. He'd dismounted and gone into the shrubbery to relieve himself, just before the ambush took place. He'd been lucky. If he'd still been on his horse with his top lieutenants, de Soto didn't doubt at all that he'd have been the first one shot instead of Hernandez. Whoever had been the sniper targeting the expedition's commanders, his marksmanship was satanic. Moscoso was dead, too. De Soto was sure of that, even though he hadn't seen him killed. He'd sent Moscoso to bring order to one of the companies of his army, and that had been the company that received the worst casualties. Only a handful of the men in that company had come out alive, and Luis had not been one of them. At least de Soto had kept his horse. He was now one of only three men in his expedition still on horseback. He glared down at his men. They glared right back at him.

  The first thing to do was to reestablish his authority, of course. But de Soto was not particularly concerned about that. He was very good at establishing authority. "We will have our revenge!" he shouted, drawing his sword. "What do we do with the bodies?" Edelman asked.

  He grimaced, looking over the field. Andy had been considering the matter himself. The bodies of the dead Spaniards had been stripped of everything. Clothes as well as the armor, tools and weapons they'd had on them. Any and all of that stuff could prove useful in the future, and they'd been able to round up enough horses to haul the stuff back on the travois the Cherokees had made. The pack mounts were already fully loaded. That left the bodies themselves, piled naked in horrid stacks. Andy didn't much like the answer he'd come up with, but he could live with it. The most important thing was to get back to the Cherokee town as soon as possible-and then, back to the prison. By now, the C.O.'s he'd left behind to guard the convicts would be nearing exhaustion. "Nothing, is what we do," he said harshly. He moved his head in a little circling motion. "There'll be scavengers out there who'll do the work for us." He took a deep breath. "Except Yost and Littleton, of course. I don't want to bury them here, though.

  Even in this heat and humidity, we can get their bodies back to the town in time for a funeral there." Hulbert looked a bit skeptical.

  "Well… yeah. But forget any idea of carrying them all the way back to Alexander." They'd lost two of the guards in the battle. Both from gunshot wounds, both of which were obviously stray shots. The two men had been killed before the charge started, while still behind shelter. But the Spaniards had gotten off a lot of shots, in that first minute or two, and it was only to be expected that a few of them would hit something they'd been aimed in the general direction of, even if only by accident. Perhaps ironically, the Spaniards had fired many fewer shots once the charge started. By sheer happenstance-Andy certainly couldn't claim the credit for it-the charge had caught most of the Spaniards while they were still reloading their guns. A half dozen other guards had gotten wounded then, mostly by edged weapons when they got too close. But only Steve Adams had been hurt badly enough to require being carrying on a stretcher, and his injury wasn't life-threatening as long as they could keep it from getting infected.

  The casualties had been much fewer than Andy had expected, actually.

  But they were still a blow. Yost had been a new guard, whom nobody really knew. So while his death was a matter of concern, it didn't cause anyone any personal grief. Ted Littleton, on the other hand, had worked at the prison for years and had been well liked. Andy himself had spent more evenings than he could remember having a beer and a pleasant conversation with the man after work. Watkins didn't say anything, but his opinion was obvious. It wouldn't be fair to say the Cherokee chief was callous, as such. But he had a very thick hide and wasn't given to fretting over indignities suffered by his enemies.

  Certainly not dead ones. "The much bigger problem," Edelman said, "is what to do with the captives we freed." Andy had been skirting around that problem. They'd rescued twenty-three of the villagers. Thirteen of them were children. No babies or very young children, though. The Spaniards had butchered those. Apparently, they'd only wanted children big enough to make the march to the coast. Have a chance, rather. Some of them would have died along the way, even if there'd still been a coast to reach at the end of the forced march. After Andy saw a baby in one of the huts whose skull had been crushed by a musket butt, he stopped having any qualms about the work Kershner and his men had been doing. For a moment, he'd just had a fierce wish that the rifle he was carrying was equipped with a bayonet. And he stopped second-guessing himself about whether or not he should have tried to parlay with de Soto. From now on, as far as he was concerned, the only good conquistador was a dead conquistador. That still left the problem of the captives. If they simply left them here, he didn't think they had much chance of surviving. Not most of the kids, for sure. Andy's experience with the Cherokees had taught him not to underestimate the survival skills of so-called "primitive peoples," but these Indians were on a much lower cultural level than very sophisticated and often literate Cherokees. They were in a world they didn't know at all, and had just lost everyone in their village old enough to have really know very much. Even the adult captives were young, no older than their early twenties. On the other hand, Andy wasn't sure at all how the captives would react if the guards simply started marching them along.

  There was a complete language barrier, for the Cherokees as much as for the modern Americans. Watkins and his people had no idea what language the captives were speaking. It wasn't any Indian language they knew, although Kevin Griffin thought some of the words sounded like garbled Choctaw. Andy wished Jenny were here. She was the only one of them with any experience at all when it came to dealing with a situation like this. "Why you get paid the big bucks," he muttered.

  "I'll see what I can do," he said, and headed toward the captives.

  They were still huddled together in a group. They watched him come, all of them down to the littlest and youngest child. They were obviously apprehensive, but Andy had no idea if they were scared of him, or by him-or perhaps simply scared that he might leave them. When he reached the group of captives, he turned and pointed in the direction of the Cherokee town. He didn't accompany the gesture with any words. Words as such were pointless, and he'd just feel stupid
doing another recitation of poetry. Then, he made a circling gesture that, more or less, indicated the entire group of guards and their Cherokee allies. He felt stupid as it was. Then, made areally stupid sort of gesture that-he hoped-would get across the idea that all of them were leaving now, headed for the town. Finally, he half-bowed and made a gesture with both hands that-he hoped-would convey the idea that the captives were welcome to join. Without-he hoped-implying any sort of coercion. Apparently, he was something of a genius at jury-rigged sign language. It didn't take the adult captives more than twenty seconds to look at each other, jabber something back and forth, and then start nodding at him. It didn't occur to him until much later than maybe a headnod wasn't a human gesture that meant the same thing to every group of people who'd ever lived. But, by then, it was a moot point. Clearly enough, it meant the same thing tothis group of people. If there was any point at which a corner was turned, Marilyn Traber provided it. After they'd marched maybe two hundred yards, she said: "Put the kids on the cart. I bet they'll get a charge out of that." And so they did. In fact, before the first minute was up, they were squealing gleefully. They couldn't all fit at once, of course, so pretty soon Marilyn was having to arbitrate whose turn it was. She managed that pretty well, given that she and the kids didn't speak the same language. If Andy remembered right, the inhabitants of the New World hadn't ever used wheeled transport until the Spanish and Portuguese arrived. It was obvious that this group of native Americans had never seen wheeled transport. It took a lot longer to coax the adults onto the cart. One of the young women just flatly refused, and never relented until they reached their destination. Then, with the cart safely unhitched from the horses, she climbed up on it. But she only stayed there for a few seconds before hastily clambering down.

  The poor horses having to haul the cart looked long-suffering. The Spaniards had loaded the cart heavily to begin with, even before the human cargo got added. But Andy wasn't worried about that. The horses that de Soto's expedition had brought with them were on the small side, true. But they were obviously hardy. Carmichael and Hulbert said they were some sort of jennets, and then fell to arguing about whether they were more like modern Sorraias, Spanish Barbs or Andalusians.

  Horse enthusiasts. Andy thought they probably suffered from a mild form of mental disease. A variant of obsessive-compulsive disorder, maybe. The horses looked still more long-suffering when Kershner and his men insisted on piling the four pigs they'd caught onto the cart, too. Trussed and bound. They were taking no chances that their culinary future might get jeopardized by escaping into the wilds.

  Which was where they belonged, in Andy's opinion. Those had to be the ugliest-looking pigs he'd ever seen. Long-snouted and looking as tough as wild boars. Salt pork and potatoes sauced in hog lard sounded bad enough to begin with. He could only imagine what it would taste like with pigs like this for the main entree-and he didn't even want to try to imagine what sort of substitute Kershner and his soldiers would eventually turn up for potatoes. To each his own. To each his own.

  Andy had thought that was a good motto to live by even in the world he'd come from. In this new one, it was pretty much a necessity. A pack of twenty troodontids broke off their stalking of a nearby herd of hadrosaurs and looked at each other. There was a new scent in the air. A very powerful scent, too. It was an unfamiliar odor mixed with one they knew well, the smell of blood. Something-or some many things-had been killed recently. They were hungry. Confused, too. The hunting had changed and they were trying to adapt. Out of desperation, they'd even started stalking the hadrosaurs, although their prey was much larger than anything they were comfortable attacking. None of the troodontids weighed more than two hundred pounds. Even the smallest hadrosaur calf was much bigger than that. They didn't recognize the new scent, except for the blood. But they didn't recognize many scents any longer. And one thing was clear. Whatever was producing that scent, it possessed the most prized trait of all prey. It was already dead. The oldest female sniffed the air once more and then turned north. The others followed her lead.

  Chapter 43 Marie Keehn looked at the smoke rising in the distance.

  She was too numb to cry. Instead she took off her shoes and socks and looked at her feet. She had blisters on both heels and her right foot had blisters on three of her five toes. Her shoes, fine for an eight or sixteen hour shift at the prison, weren't suited for a long trek through a wilderness. She had thought she would find Alexander's staff and the Cherokees today. But that wasn't going to happen. Ten minutes back she had spotted smoke from what should be their camp. The location wasn't exactly where she had been led to believe it would be, but it was close. It was also about three miles away. On a good day, she could walk that distance in less than two hours, even across rough terrain, but today was not a good day. She was moving at a snail's pace. She guessed she still had a three to four hour hike ahead of her, and the sun was less than ten minutes from setting. At least she'd found a cave to sleep in tonight. More like a horizontal crevice in a short cliff than a cave, really, but it'd do. Especially since it was a steep twenty foot climb to reach it. That climb had used up her strength, for the moment. She could only hope it would look too chancy for any would-be nocturnal predator. Of which she hadn't seen any signs, anyway. Not once during the whole trek. So far as she could tell, all the dangerous predators in this world seemed to hunt by daylight. Whatever night hunters there might be were probably too small to see her as suitable prey. It didn't matter. She'd rather deal with nocturnal predators than risk sleeping in a tree again. She almost fallen out of the tree twice, during that horrible night-and when she finally woke up in the morning discovered that she'd somehow wound up twisting herself completely around in the fork. Her head was where her feet had started. How she'd managed to do thatwithout falling out of the tree was a complete mystery. The first and only case of possible divine intervention Marie had ever seen. Once she reconciled herself to another night alone, though, she started feeling better about the situation. True, she hadn't eaten in days-she wasn't even sure how many, any longer-but it had been long enough the hunger was gone. And she'd come across a small creek early in the day, so she'd had plenty to drink and had managed to refill her improvised canteen. That meant, come dawn, she'd still have the reserves to get to where she was going. "In the morning, babes," she whispered, as the last rays of sunlight disappeared.

  Chapter 44 "Don't shoot, Nickerson. We're not looking for trouble." Hearing the soft voice coming from somewhere in the woods close to him, Frank Nickerson froze for an instant. Then, quickly, he crouched and began scanning the area, his pistol ready. "I said, 'don't shoot.' And we're over here." The voice was accompanied by a rustling branch. Frank's eyes could see it moving, when he pinpointed the location of the voice and the noise. But he still couldn't see anyone. Another voice came from a different part of the woods, about four o'clock from the rustling branch and the first voice. "I can take him if he tries anything, James." "Don'tyou get trigger-happy either, Geoffrey." A laugh came from the area when Frank had heard the second voice. "I don't never get trigger-happy. Pulled too many triggers. The thrill is gone." The first voice spoke again. "You don't have to put the pistol away, Nickerson. But lower it a little, will you? Once you do, I'll come out." Frank's mind was racing. These had to be convicts speaking to him. He was trying to remember which of the convicts were named James and Geoffrey. The problem was that he'd been too new to the prison to know most of the inmates by name. He did recall one Geoffrey, though. The man had been pointed out to him by another guard. Geoffrey Kidd. One of the more notorious inmates. Not because he ever gave the guards trouble, but just because of who he was and what he looked like. He hoped to God it wasn'tthat Geoffrey. Or that if it was, he didn't have a gun. But he had a bad feeling he was going to be out of luck, on both counts. Seeing nothing else to do, he lowered the pistol. Doing that much didn't bother him, since Frank was very good with a pistol. He could get it back up almost as quickly as he could pull the trigger. The
man named James probably understood that himself. He'd just wanted to make sure no triggers got pulled by reflex when the pistol was pointed at him. All things considered, it was a reasonable enough request. Then, with a considerably greater mental effort, Frank made himself stand up straight. There really wasn't much point to staying in the crouch, he figured. If these convicts didn't have guns, the crouch would be worse than standing up in case they attacked him with blades. And if they did have guns, they could have ambushed him before he even realized they were there. The brush moved again and a man stepped into view. A convict, sure enough.

  The reason Frank hadn't been able to spot the distinctive orange coverall was because the man had it covered with a blanket. He even recognized him, although he wouldn't have been able to attach a name to the face except the other convict had called him James. It was that new prisoner who'd been working in the infirmary. More to the point, from what Frank had heard, the one who'd gotten into trouble with Adrian Luff. Under the circumstances, that was a relief. The man completed his name. "I'm James Cook." He hooked a thumb toward the bushes behind him. "What's left-most of 'em-of Boomer's boys are with me. We escaped the prison three days ago. A rebellion started against Luff, he went berserk and started a slaughter, and we figured it was time to bail." Boomer's boys. Frank knew who they were, too, although he didn't know most of the individuals in the gang. The other guards had told him about Boomer. That was another bit of relief. Boomer's gang never caused the guards much trouble. Not even Boomer himself, whenever his temper blew, because his fury was always targeted on some other inmate. Restraining him was something of legendary task, though, by all accounts. Since Frank couldn't think of anything better to say, he asked: "What do you want?" "Well, that's partly up to Captain Blacklock. At a minimum, we want full paroles. But we actually think some kind of alliance would make more sense. At least, if you plan to take the prison back." Frank had no idea what to say in response. He had no authority to make any sort of deal with convicts. Cook must have understood that, because he nodded. "Yeah, I know. It's above your paygrade. So how about you just go get Blacklock?" "I can't.