The others shook their heads, their expressions grim.

They moved to the next body. The pungent odour of animal grease rose from the corpse and mingled uneasily with the smell of blood. Squatting down, Tewanias drew a finger along the single white feather attached to the corpse’s scalp lock and viewed the breech-clouted remains with disgust.

“Oneniote’á:ka!” He stood and spat out the word. “Oneida! Bear clan.”

“I know this one,” Beddowes said, a resigned look on his face as he indicated the chevrons on the dead man’s sleeves. “Name’s Stryker. A good soldier, I heard.”

Tewanias had walked on. He stopped and called softly, “Wy-att.”

Wyatt turned.

Tewanias was standing over a blood-soaked corpse which lay trapped beneath one of the horses. There was a lot of injury to the dead man’s skull, Wyatt saw, as he approached, which he might have put down to a killing blow from a war club had it not been for the pistol that was held loosely in the corpse’s right hand. It wasn’t hard to gauge the sequence of events. Then he saw who it was lying there and realized why Tewanias had summoned him over and his throat went dry.

“I got three more,” Donaldson said, breaking into his thoughts. “Two white, one Indian. More dead horses, too.”

Billy Drew, who’d been examining the perimeter called across, “Got one over here; an Indian. Been gut shot.”

“Looks like they put up quite a fight,” Donaldson said.

Maybe not all of them, Wyatt thought as he stared down at the pastor’s corpse. He tried to imagine what he might have done, had he been in the pastor’s shoes; unable to free himself and with only one loaded pistol to repel what had quite evidently been a superior number of attackers. Only a fool would have viewed the pastor’s decision to take his own life as an act of cowardice. By using his own pistol, De Witt had saved himself the pain of an excruciating death, though his actions had not prevented his scalp from being taken after his demise.

At least Wyatt hoped the man had been dead when the deed had been committed. Scalping was usually carried out after death, though he’d heard of cases where someone came to, having lost consciousness during an attack, and discovered they had been mutilated in this manner.

Sickened, the Ranger turned away.

A body count revealed a total of eight dead, excluding the horses; five white men and three Indians.

What the hell were they doing here? Wyatt asked himself.