The lead rider—lanky, with long, dark brown hair, mustache, and goatee, and with a broad, scarred nose—spit a fleck of trail dust from his lips and narrowed a dark eye. “Afternoon, Constable.”
Ardai felt as though the copper eagle on his cracked leather vest were burning a hole through his skin. He only nodded. His gloved hand resting atop the .44 was sweating profusely.
The lead rider straightened his head and frowned, a sneering, defiant note in his voice while his eyes acquired a mock-serious cast. “Say, you haven’t seen a jail wagon around here somewheres, have you? A jail wagon driven by two deputy U.S. marshals and carrying the meanest, ugliest-lookin’ quartet of bastards you’ve ever seen in your ill-fated, too-short life?”
The other men chuckled and slid their sneering gazes from Ardai to the lead rider and back again. One of them had a long, nasty gash across the nub of his left cheek. A horse nickered. The stream curving off to the left made a soft rushing noise on the other side of the poplars.
“Well, now,” Ardai said, cocking his head to one side and trying to put some authority into his voice, “why would you fellas be trailin’ a jail wagon loaded with federal prisoners?”
The group looked around at each other as though at a secret joke.
Then the leader turned back toward Ardai. As though in response to the dumbest question he’d ever heard, he said, “Why, to run ’em down, kill the marshals, and spring our three amigos. Whadoya think we’re trackin’ ’em for—to offer ’em a drink and fresh-cut roses?”
More snickers and chuckles from the men around the leader. Nervously, the girl flicked her eyes back and forth between the constable and the lead desperado, her features tense and apprehensive.
Ardai held the leader’s sneering, level, faintly challenging gaze. The man had slid the wings of his duster back behind a brace of big .45s. He leaned smugly forward on his saddle horn.
The constable’s heart thudded so hard he thought it would crack a rib. The dreamy effect of his pull on the whiskey bottle had worn off entirely, leaving him washed out, sluggish, and scared as hell. He’d never faced a pack of trail dogs as obviously feral as the ones he faced now. Buffalo Flats was a relatively quiet little town. And Ardai had no real training as a lawman. Before, he’d sold whiskey to remote northern Colorado roadhouses and trading posts and pimped his own whores on the side.
He considered lifting his hand from his weapon, turning his horse around, and riding back the way he’d come. Screw pride. He was getting paid only twenty dollars a month, and he spent that much on girls, cards, and whiskey. But, if he gave these men his back, they’d beef him from behind.
He was stuck between a rock and sheer mountain wall.
Flicking his gaze around the sneering riders down the hill before him, he tightened his hand around his .44. Maybe he could kill one or two and set the group’s horses leaping and befouling the aims of the other shooters. Deep down, he didn’t think it would work, but his anxious mind was reeling too fast for rational thought.
As if from far away, Ardai heard himself give a savage, unpremeditated yell as he slipped the revolver from its holster and thumbed back the hammer.
But he had the gun only half raised before the lead rider, in a blur of lightning-quick motion, drew his matched Colts from their cross-draw holsters, raised them above his horse’s head, and angled them up the hill.
Both Colts roared, belching smoke and fire, at the same time.
A red-tailed hawk perched on the toe of the dead man’s right boot, staring at Cuno Massey with proprietary anger in its gold-speckled, copper eyes.
Cuno swung down from Renegade’s back, dropped the reins, and looking around warily with one hand on his .45’s grip, sidled over to the dead man.
The body lay belly up across a boulder. Blood bibbed the man’s vest and pin-striped, collarless shirt, even staining the gold pocket watch dangling just above the ground from the dead man’s vest pocket. It completely covered the copper badge attached to the vest, so that Cuno, keeping an eye skinned on the terrain around him, in case the shooter was still around, had to lean down to make out the words TOWN CONSTABLE etched across spread eagle wings, with BUFFALO FLATS written across the furled flag upon which the eagle was perched.
He also had to look close to see the two, quarter-sized holes in the man’s upper chest, spaced about six inches apart in a straight line. Dead, no doubt, before he’d hit the ground.
Cuno straightened and looked around carefully. A vinegar dun cropped bluestem a ways down the hill and off the trail’s right side, near the cottonwoods lining the stream. Aside from the horse, there was no other movement.
The man had only been dead a half hour or so, but it appeared the killer or killers were gone. Inspecting the two-track trail, he saw that a half dozen or so riders had passed recently, as had an iron-shod, wide-wheeled wagon.
Probably the jail wagon.
He looked around again, then let his gaze fall back upon the dead lawman. Perplexity needled him, and his inner voice began to whisper. Stop thinking, it told him. Your business—your only business—is in Crow Feather.
Cuno turned away from the dead man and stepped into his saddle. He had no time to waste. He had to get that contract secured before someone else beat him to it. Western military outposts offered only a couple of contracts each year, and if the bid was right, they were usually awarded on a first-come, first-served basis.
But he couldn’t leave the man draped over the boulder for the scavengers.
He rode too quickly out to where the vinegar dun grazed. The horse spooked, jogged off downstream a good hundred yards, nickering and fiddle-footing and stepping on its reins, before Cuno finally got it cornered in a thick stand of willows and poplars.
Grabbing the dun’s reins, he led the still-nickering horse back to its dead rider. Neither Renegade nor the dun cottoned to the smell of fresh blood, so Cuno had to tie both horses to separate pines along the trail.
Wrapping the constable’s blanket roll around the body, Cuno back-and-bellied him over his saddle, and tied his wrists to his ankles beneath the horse’s belly. When he’d draped the man’s hat, which he found along the trail, over the saddle horn, he aimed the horse back toward town, then slapped his hip with the flat of his hand.
The horse whinnied and, shaking its head at the blood smell, galloped buck-kicking down the trail and around the bend behind the darkening pines. The hooves’ drumming dwindled quickly beneath the stream’s incessant murmur.
Cuno sleeved sweat off his forehead and looked around the slopes and the streambed once more. He walked over to where Renegade stood tied to the pine, swishing his tail. A late breeze had lifted, blowing the silky clay-colored mane. The skewbald paint regarded Cuno expectantly over its shoulder.
“What do you say we try this again, fella?” Cuno said, grabbing the reins and swinging up into the saddle.
He backed the horse onto the trail and urged it downstream. Renegade nickered as he lengthened his stride down the long, gradual hill cloaked in shadows angling out from the ridge and turned at the bottom around a cedar-clad scarp. As horse and rider progressed down the long, narrow valley, following the twisting course of Buffalo Creek, the light faded and the breeze gained a chill, late-summer edge.
Wanting to keep pushing—he’d stop only when he could no longer see the trail, in another hour or so—Cuno reached behind his saddle and fished his red-and-black mackinaw out from under his bedroll. Wrapping his reins around the horn, he shrugged into the coat and, raising the collar, put Renegade into a ground-eating lope across a broad, grassy flat bordered by aspens.
A couple of miles downstream from Buffalo Flats, he followed the wagon trail across the stream at a rocky ford, cleaved a broad canyon, and rose slowly toward a distant saddleback ridge. Glowing stars capped the ridge, kindling brightly in a lilac sky.
Wolves howled along that ridge, and an owl hooted from a nearby branch or knob.
As he rode, keeping his eyes skinned for ge
neral trail hazards, which included predatory men as well as animals, Cuno realized his thoughts were edged with a generalized unease.
The dead lawman.
After all the death he’d witnessed in recent years—from the deaths of his mother, father, and then his stepmother to the untimely going-under of the beautiful young half-breed girl he’d taken as a wife and who’d owned the unlikely name of July Summer—death still managed to wriggle around in his gut like bad meat or spoiled milk.
It was a good thing. It meant, that in spite of all the hard knocks and all the lives he himself had been forced to take, he’d managed to retain some semblance of a soul.
Still, he needed no distractions now. After struggling to find a life for himself, one that would honor his dead parents and his dead wife and the child he never knew, he was finally on the trail of a crackling future—one that didn’t teeter at the end of a gun barrel. He needed to hit Crow Feather in two days or less. No more.
Not just for himself, but for his old friend Serenity, as well. He and the old mountain man and former saloon owner had been through hell paved with goatheads since Cuno’s partner, Wade Scanlon, had been killed by renegade white men in Colorado. Together, they’d hunted Wade’s killers and rescued a Chinese girl who’d been kidnapped by the same group.
Afterward, out a load of supplies and an expensive Murphy freighter, Cuno had found his accounts wallowing in red and no contracts on the horizon. He and Serenity had spent the winter swamping saloons in Denver.
Cuno put the skewbald up a steep hill between fast-darkening walls of aspen-sheathed granite.
The lawman . . .
Had the group he’d encountered in the saloon killed him? Why?
Were they after the jail wagon?
Cuno had thought he’d have overtaken the wagon by now. The fact that he hadn’t made the worm inside his gut wriggle. But he’d heard no gunfire. The marshals might have taken another route through the Mexicans to Crow Feather, foiling any plans the gang might have had of springing the prisoners.
The thought was still shuffling around in his head when a dull rumbling rose from the thickening night shadows. At first, it sounded like a distant rock slide.
But as the thumps grew louder and were joined by the squawks of tack and the rattle of bridle bits and chains, the occasional chuff of a horse or the throat-clearing of a man, Cuno reined Renegade off the left side of the trail. He put the horse up a steep grade and drew rein behind a vertical knob of eroded rock spiked with cedars. Leaning forward, he cupped a hand over the stallion’s nostrils, and peered around the knob’s left side.
The hoof thumps rose like the beat of several Indian war drums. Occasionally there was the ring of a shod hoof clipping a stone.
Shadows moved, rising and falling behind the rocks and shrubs and sliding from left to right along the trail below. As the riders passed, Cuno swung his head to peer around the knob’s right side. The silhouettes of men and horses flicked behind shrubs and rocks and disappeared behind another squat knob rising from the slope to Cuno’s right.
One of the riders said something in a tight, frustrated voice, too far away and too drowned by the clatter of the hooves for Cuno to make out. As quickly as they’d risen, the drumming of the hooves faded off down canyon, echoing faintly. As if to punctuate their passing, a horse whinnied, and then the rasping breeze and distant coyote yips filled the night once more.
The chill breeze slipped down Cuno’s wool collar to rake the hair over his sweat-damp back, lifting gooseflesh. He quelled the urge to shiver. That worm in his gut lifted its head and flicked its tail.
They were after the wagon.
Cuno expelled a deep breath and put Renegade down the slope, letting the horse pick its own path in the darkness, hearing rocks rattle behind. As he turned the horse down trail and nudged him with his spurs, he was off again, angling southeast through the Mexicans, darkness like a thick black glove descending quickly while stars kindled brightly and merged—sequins in bunched, black cloth.
Since the trail was merely a faint line rising and falling and curving along the ground before him, Cuno held Renegade to a walk. He didn’t want the horse slamming a cannon against an unseen rock or tripping over deadfall. As he rode, he found himself wondering if the dead lawman’s horse had found its way back to town.
If so, had the man’s family found him?
Absently, he imagined the scene. The wife, having heard the horse’s snort or whinny, wanders outside to see the vinegar dun standing in the yard, by a stack of split cord-wood. She holds up a lamp and walks around the horse. Maybe a child, or two children, having been waiting for their father since suppertime, run out of the cabin behind her.
The dull, yellow light finds the body humping up beneath the blanket, hanging belly down across the saddle, the man’s dark brown hair peeking out from the blanket’s open fold . . .
A sudden, bereaved scream shatters the quiet night.
Cuno removed his hat and ran his hand through his long, sweat-damp hair. No matter who cared about him, or if no one cared, the man was dead.
Murdered.
Cuno rode for another hour, until it was so black he could barely see his hand in front of his face. Then he camped in a box canyon, near a small feeder creek, building a small fire for coffee and to warm some beans.
He dug a shallow trough for his hip and slept hard, his two blankets pulled up to his chin against the high-country chill and the breeze that settled after midnight. In his sleep he heard an owl hoot, a distant bobcat scream, and the sporadic scratchings of burrowing creatures. Pinecones thudded dully around him.
He started the next day consciously putting the dead lawman and the jail wagon out of his mind . . . until, around ten a.m., as he took a detour around a section of trail obliterated by a rockslide, a distant rifle shot ripped out across pine-covered slopes, sucking at its own echo.
It was followed by the muffled, almost inaudible bray of a mule.
5
CUNO SAT HIS skewbald paint straight-backed and tense, jaws hard as he stared up the razorback ridge on his right.
Pines covered the slope slashed with charred, crumbling logs from a long-ago fire, and recent deadfall—pines as well as firs, a few aspens. At the lip of the ridge, the forest receded beneath a camel hump of pocked, fluted sandstone.
As his gaze bored a hole through the sky capping the ridge, another rifle shot cracked in the canyon on the other side. The report flatted out shrilly as it echoed across the valley—muffled with distance but crisp and clear on the high, dry western air. Renegade shook his head and stomped his right foot, then shook his head again.
Brows ridging his clear blue eyes, Cuno continued staring at the ridge, his heart thudding dully. Finally, when no more gunshots sounded, he snapped his head forward, clucked to the horse, and continued on his way, up through a broad valley cleaved by a winding, slender stream around which tall, tawny grass grew thick and breeze-ruffled. Flood-killed trees—short-branched and barkless—stood in spare groves on both sides of the slow-moving water.
Keeping his gaze on the trees and the stream, Cuno was practically holding his breath, hoping he wouldn’t hear another report, hoping the shots he’d heard had been fired by hunters and not by the renegades trailing the jail wagon.
He’d ridden only fifty yards when another whip-crack broke beyond the ridge, the echo drawing Cuno’s gut taut as braided rawhide. Another report sounded, and then another, until a veritable fusillade rose from the far canyon.
When you knew how to use a .45, there were times when you couldn’t very well not use it.
Cursing the past that had led to his abilities, he neck-reined Renegade back down the faint wagon trail he’d been following, then put the horse up the gradual western slope. Lunging off his rear hooves, digging with the front, Renegade climbed into the tall grass along the base of the hill and lunged up through the grass and chokecherry shrubs until the scrub thinned and the forest began.
The horse
picked his own way through the thick timber, leaping deadfalls and turning sharply around occasional boulders and the giant root balls of trees uprooted by previous wind storms. Cuno ducked under branches, occasionally breaking one off. Renegade’s hooves thumped softly in the spongy turf, crunching pinecones and needles.
Gaining the sandstone caprock, Cuno trotted the skewbald along the dike’s sandy base until he found a ragged defile. He couldn’t tell if the cleft offered passage to the other side of the ridge and into the valley on the other side, but it was the only one he’d seen.
Swinging down from the saddle, he quickly tied the horse to a pine branch and shucked his Winchester from the saddle boot.
The shooting continued—the revolver and rifle reports sounding like snapping branches, with the occasional whistling screech of a ricochet. Occasionally, a man gave a clipped, angry shout.
“Stay, boy,” Cuno told the horse as, levering a shell into the Winchester’s breech, he strode back up the slope to peer into the cavern.
He couldn’t see much but rock thumbs jutting from both stone walls and narrowing the passage to a few feet in places. But the gunfire sounded louder in here. He moved forward, crawling over a couple of stacked boulders and sidestepping around a three-foot gap before angling through a dogleg.
Seconds later, he crouched behind a stone upthrust at the other end, peering over the rock and into a broad, sun-splashed valley like the one he’d left. Few trees stippled the slope below him, however. Mostly tall, tawny grass, chokecherry shrubs, occasional aspens, and moss-furred rocks and boulders.
At the far side of the valley, a narrow creek angled along the base of a steep, pine-carpeted spur ridge. Rocks and scattered aspens stood along the creek, and now as Cuno raked his gaze across the canyon, he saw several sets of smoke puffs and orange flashes of gunfire from the rocks and trees.
The shots were directed up toward the middle of the valley, where the jail wagon was parked along an almost-grassed-over wagon trail. The wagon tongue drooped into the trail, the mules gone.
.45-Caliber Widow Maker Page 4
