The four prisoners cowered inside the wagon, yelling encouragement toward the four or five men shooting toward Cuno’s side of the canyon from the creek.
Another man crouched behind the wagon’s left front wheel, firing a Winchester toward the creek. A body humped in the grass just ahead and left of the wagon. The sun reflected off something silver on the man’s chest. Likely a deputy U.S. marshal’s badge, Cuno thought with a nettling hitch in his gut.
He returned his gaze to the man shooting from the wagon. The gray hair on the man’s hatless head, and the rounded shoulders, bespoke the older marshal. The younger one was dead or at least badly wounded. A large patch of glistening red blood shone on the older gent’s shirt, across his left shoulder blade. By the way he was hefting his rifle, as though it weighed ten extra pounds, he was losing blood and strength fast.
Cuno moved out from behind the rock, crouching, holding his Winchester low so that sunlight was less likely to flash off the copper receiver chasing. He strode down the slope, hoping he wouldn’t be seen from the creek, and crouched behind a spindly cedar and a low boulder sheathed in tawny grass.
He hunkered on one knee, listening to the fiercely sporadic cracks of the gunfire and the whining ricochets off rocks and the wagon’s iron-shod front wheels, while he considered the best way to offer a hand. Should he try to move around and flank the attackers, or just drop a little closer to the wagon and return fire at the creek from higher ground?
With a solid two hundred yards currently stretching between him and the creek, he had little chance of hitting any of the well-covered shooters from here.
He’d just decided to try to flank the attackers when movement on his left caught his eye.
A mustached man in a long, cream duster, felt sombrero, and mule-eared, stovepipe boots stole out from behind a rocky escarpment humping up out of the slope about fifty yards below Cuno. Crouching, holding his rifle in one hand, the man directed his gaze toward the jail wagon as he stole down the slope and pulled up behind a triangular boulder sheathed in spindly shrubs.
He was doing to the old marshal what Cuno had planned to do to the gunman’s compadres. Less than sixty yards away from the lawman, he had a clear shot.
On the other side of the valley, amidst the angry, sporadic rifle cracks, a man cursed sharply. Cuno looked beyond the wagon to see one of the attackers down on a knee beside a boulder, clutching his thigh. The old marshal, who had scrambled around to the other end of the wagon containing the four snarling, cursing prisoners, snapped off another shot.
The man clutching his knee by the tree jerked straight back and flopped down in the grass beside the stream, throwing his rifle high in the air. It landed in the water with a silent splash.
Behind the wagon, the old marshal chuckled as he ejected the spent brass and levered a fresh shell into the chamber. At the same time, the man downslope and left of Cuno snaked his own rifle around the right side of his covering boulder to draw a bead on the marshal’s back.
Cuno snapped his Winchester to his shoulder, squinted down the barrel, centered his sights on the side of the rifleman’s head, just above and behind the man’s ear, and squeezed the trigger.
The rifle roared as the brass butt plate slammed against Cuno’s shoulder.
The boulder in front of the gunman turned red, as though someone had slung an open can of paint at it. The man’s head jerked sharply sideways, then straightened, and he seemed to continue to peer downslope for a good three seconds before the rifle sagged in his arms.
His hands opened, the rifle fell, and the man sagged forward on his face. He rolled awkwardly about ten yards down the hill before coming to rest on his back, arms and legs spread wide.
The old marshal had just snapped off a shot toward the creek. Before he could eject his spent brass, he snapped his entire body around toward Cuno, his craggy, bearded face etched with fear.
Crouching behind his covering shrub and racking a fresh shell into his Winchester’s breech, Cuno threw up an arm. He thought he saw befuddlement brush across the old marshal’s haggard, sweating features. The man’s chin dropped slightly as he looked at the dead rifleman sprawled on the slope below the triangular-shaped boulder.
More shouts rose from the creek. Cuno took advantage of the attackers’ confusion—they’d no doubt seen the flanking shooter tumble down the hill—by bounding to his feet and scrambling down the slope past the blood-splattered boulder. He hurdled the rifleman’s corpse with its ruined head and bulging eyes.
As he hit the bottom of the slope and started across the valley, running and angling right toward the wagon fifty yards away, rifles whip-cracked fiercely from along the creek. The slugs chewed into the grass on either side of Cuno’s stomping boots.
He squeezed off two shots from his right hip, then, approaching the wagon with its prisoners snarling like circus lions and the marshal sitting with his back to the rear wheel, dove behind the front wheel as another slug barked into a log on the wagon’s other side.
Another sparked off the outside wheel with a sharp, ear-ringing clang.
“Hey, Junior!” one of the prisoners growled. “What the hell you think you’re doin’? This ain’t none of your affair!”
Cuno, breathing hard as he pressed his back to the wagon’s spoked wheel, beside the bulging hub, glanced over his left shoulder. A small but strongly built, broad-faced gent glared at him from between the wagon’s bars.
“Now, the marshal over here is on his last legs, and in about two minutes, you ain’t gonna have no one to be fighting for. Understand? So you best beat it back to where you came from. Got it, big boy?”
Cuno looked at the marshal at the other end of the wagon. The man’s left front chest was bloody, his large belly rising and falling sharply beneath the flaps of his beaded deerskin vest. The gray-bearded man cast Cuno a sidelong glance, a smile of ironic humor as well as searing pain tugged at his lips and long, dust-rimmed, gray-brown mustache. His hat was gone, and thin, sweat-soaked hair curled about his balding head.
“Frank’s got a point, kid.” The old marshal coughed. “Bastards jumped us when we were watering the mules at the creek. Didn’t figure it. Didn’t see it comin.’” He coughed again, sucked a rattling breath. “Ardai was so damn sure they’d never track us through this canyon.”
“Ardai’s a fool,” barked the red-haired prisoner, who’d pissed through the wagon’s bars in Buffalo Flats, poking his wedge-shaped, sunburned nose through the bars as he glared down at the marshal. “Joe Pepper’s got Dud Manover ridin’ with him. Manover can track a snake across a boulder field in the drivin’ rain!”
A couple more slugs tore into the sod around the wagon, another clanging off one of the wagon bars. As the cracks resounded around the valley, one of the prisoners—the tall, Nordic-looking hombre with long, silver hair and gold front teeth crawled over to the wagon’s far side. “Goddamn you sons o’ bitches! Watch where you shootin’!”
The red-haired gent followed suit with, “Ain’t much good springin’ us if we’re dead, now, is it?” He turned to the rangy, silver-haired man. “Which one fired that shot—did you see, Bob? Faraday, wasn’t it?”
The short, stocky gent called Frank shook his head. “The old mossy-horned badge toter done shot Faraday. He’s the one on his back by the creek. I think there’s only three left—Shepherd, Pepper, and Stan McDonald.”
Cuno had crawled beneath the wagon on his belly, holding his rifle up in front of him, cocked and ready. As the prisoners scuffed around in the wagon above his head, making the springs and wooden undercarriage squawk and creak, he cast his gaze across the grassy, cedar-stippled valley toward the creek.
There was a low hump of ground halfway between the wagon and the water, and he thought he’d seen a hat crown sway above the bending weed tips capping the hump.
“Pepper and McDonald’s all we need,” he heard one of the prisoners sneer above his head. “Them’re the cold-steel boys, sure ’nough. Boys, we’ll soon be free as th
e damn jackrabbits and on our way to that payroll box.”
“If Pepper and McDonald don’t kill us instead of that fool kid and the mossy horn.” Bob shouted loudly through the cracks between the wagon’s stout floorboards. “Hey, kid, where’d you go, anyways? Just what in the hell do you think you’re doin’ under there?”
Ka-blam!
Cuno’s rifle rammed his shoulder and leapt in his hands. He stared down the smoking barrel. The man who had just poked his head up above the low, grassy mound suddenly disappeared.
“On the right, kid!” the old marshal rasped. “I’m outta shells!”
Cuno opened his Winchester’s breech, and the smoking spent cartridge flew back behind him. Seating a fresh shell, Cuno slid the rifle right. Another man—one with blood gleaming on his left cheek—bolted out from behind a boulder about forty yards from the wagon.
“Look out, Stan!” One of the prisoners shouted. “The kid’s under the wagon!”
Stan stopped, snapped his rifle to his shoulder. The maw spat smoke and flames. At the same time the slug ground into the dirt three inches from Cuno’s right elbow, the report reached Cuno’s ears. A quarter-second later, Cuno triggered his Winchester three times quickly.
Stan grunted as all three slugs took him through the center of his chest, lifting him a foot in the air and punching him straight back.
“Ohhhhhhhh!” one of the prisoners lamented as Stan hit the ground shoulder first on his back, boots and spurs soon following. His rifle clattered into the brush beside him.
Silence. No movement in the wagon over Cuno’s head.
There was only the sighing of the wind ruffling the grass and the occasional peeps of birds in the trees along the creek.
The old marshal wheezed a taut laugh. “I’ll be damned, kid. You got the son of a bitch.”
Raking his gaze back and forth across the canyon, Cuno thumbed more rounds from his cartridge belt into his rifle’s loading gate. “Should have finished him off in Buffalo Flats.” He drew a deep breath. “If I counted right, there’s one more.”
6
CUNO’S LAST WORDS hadn’t died on his lips before a girl’s scream rose from the creek.
A man in chaps, a funnel-brimmed hat, and a dark brown shirt ran out from a tight clump of aspens, water splashing up around his knees as he jogged across the stream, a rifle in his hand. He angled toward a trough in the steep, opposite bank.
Another figure—slender and with long, tawny hair—ran along behind him.
It was the girl from the Buffalo Flats Saloon whom Pepper had backhanded. She yelled sharply, closing on the brown-shirted man. The man wheeled, swinging his rifle around and smashing the butt across the girl’s forehead.
Her scream reached Cuno’s ears after she’d wheeled and fallen in the shallow water and the man had continued slogging through the water toward the trough.
Cuno scrambled out from beneath the wagon, ran into the meadow, and dropped to a knee. Backshooting disgusted him, but better to backshoot a man than let him ride off to return later to finish the bloody job he’d started.
“Look out, Shepherd!” the red-haired prisoner called from behind Cuno. “The kid’s drawin’ a bead on ya!”
Cuno fired. Dust puffed from the bank in front of the brown-shirted man. He flinched and jerked a quick look over his shoulder as he splashed onto the opposite shore and scrambled toward the trough angling down the cutbank.
Cuno fired two more quick rounds, both slugs pounding the bank on either side of the man now scrambling up the steep, eroded trough, using his rifle like a cane and frantically pulling himself up by protruding roots with his other hand.
Cursing, Cuno ran forward and racked a fresh shell.
Behind him, the prisoners whooped and hollered encouragement to their friend Shepherd. Cuno stopped, drew aim again as his target tossed his rifle over the bank and hoisted himself up over the lip with both arms.
Cuno’s rifle thundered twice more. Both slugs blew widgets of stone and clay from the side of the cutbank as the brown-shirted man threw himself into the grass atop the lip and, grabbing his rifle, rolled into the thick, shaded timber beyond.
One of the prisoners guffawed and rattled the bars of the jail wagon. “Missed him, big boy! Missed him clean!”
“But don’t worry,” yowled one of the others. “He’ll be back . . . with more!”
There was a fleshy smack. “Shut your fuckin’ trap, Simms!”
The man’s return was what Cuno was afraid of. He took his Winchester in one hand and bolted forward into an all-out run, boots pounding and spurs trilling, grass crunching beneath his feet. Vaguely, he heard the prisoners behind him cursing and arguing, someone smacking the bars angrily.
He made the trees and cut straight into the stream, glancing at the girl, who’d crawled onto the canyon-side shoreline and now lay on her hip and elbow. She held a hand to her bleeding forehead as her eyes rolled and fluttered, dazed.
Ten long strides and Cuno was at the trough, climbing fast, grabbing exposed roots. His wet boots squawked and slipped in the clay already muddied by his fleeing quarry.
When he’d pulled himself up and over the lip, he remained crouching, rifle ready, as he raked his gaze around the columnar pines and firs looming around him. When no shots exploded from nearby boles, Cuno moved forward.
His heart pounded as he began jogging slowly, sweeping his gaze around the trees, stalking the last surviving bushwhacker—aside from the girl. Ahead, several horses whinnied amongst the angry chittering of squirrels. Cuno lengthened his stride, heading up the pine-clad slope, leaping deadfalls, holding his rifle up high across his chest.
There was the clatter of pounding hooves and more whinnies and knickers. Twigs snapped under running hooves.
Cuno ran harder, his breath whooshing in and out of his broad chest, his knotted red bandanna flopping over his shoulder. When he got to the crest of the hill, he looked down into a narrow, brush-and-willow-choked gorge. Beyond, where the gorge opened out into a series of sage-covered hogbacks, the brown-shirted man galloped into the distance astride a lunging steeldust.
Five other horses fanned out around him, buck-kicking angrily and trailing their reins.
Cuno raised his rifle and snapped off three quick shots, but the bouncing rider was a hundred yards away, rising and falling over the hogbacks. Cuno couldn’t even see the dust or grass blown up by his errant rounds.
He bit out a sharp curse. He watched the fleeing rider disappear down the other side of a steep rise. The other horses scattered amongst the rolling, cedar-spotted hills, dwindling quickly until they were gone.
Cuno turned and tramped back the way he’d come, run-sliding down the slippery trough to the stream. The girl sat along the opposite shore, her back against a rock, knees bent.
Her shirt and jeans were soaked, and her tawny hair hung in wet strands to her shoulders. Her forehead was swollen and bloody around a vertical gash on her left temple. She rested her arms on her knees and watched Cuno without expression.
She’d found her wet hat and snugged it down on her head, the brim shading her eyes. She moved her head to watch Cuno cross the stream. As he started up the bank about ten feet away from her, he turned to her and tossed his chin back toward the steep cutbank.
“Where’s he headed?”
She said in a voice so soft and without inflection that the stream nearly drowned it, “How should I know?”
Cuno didn’t know what to make of her. She’d been part of the group and yet, back in the saloon, she’d seemed removed from it. He should throw her in the jail wagon, but then there was the complication of throwing a girl to four snarling male coyotes . . .
Screw it. She’d had her horns dulled by Shepherd.
He turned away and tramped through the trees and across the meadow, cutting between the two dead men—Stan and Pepper—lying in bloody heaps amidst the waving bluestem and wheatgrass. When he got back to the wagon, the prisoners were sitting against the barred walls
, regarding him skeptically.
The big, one-eared Mexican, Fuego, sat with one forearm draped across a lone upraised knee, head canted as he studied Cuno like an artist might study an image he’d like to paint.
Only, unlike your average artist, Fuego’s blue-green eyes were opaque with needling menace—a deep-seated, animal-like threat the likes of which Cuno hadn’t confronted since his dealings with the savage bounty hunter Ruben Pacheca. Remembering Cuno’s part in the Mexican’s incarceration, Fuego was, without a doubt, imagining the south-of-the-border style revenge he intended to exact on the husky blond freighter, first chance he got.
“Hey, kid,” said the stocky gent with a wide, clean-shaven face and steel-blue eyes. He was short enough that he could stand in the wagon without stooping, and he stood now, thick fists wrapped around the bars of the cage’s rear door. “Grab the marshal’s key off his belt and open the damn door. Hurry up. You don’t wanna die out here. This ain’t your fight!”
Ignoring the man, Cuno walked around the rear of the wagon and crouched down before the marshal. The oldster sat where Cuno had left him, leaning back against the wheel, legs stretched straight out before him, rifle crossed on his lap.
He was just beyond the reach of the jail cage and the four seasoned killers within. He had one cartridge pinched between the thumb and index finger of his left hand, as though he’d started reloaded his rifle but was too fatigued to follow through.
His chest rose and fell heavily. His eyes had been closed but as Cuno’s shadow passed over his gray-bearded face, his lids fluttered open.
“You get the other one?” he rasped.
Cuno shook his head. “How bad you hit?”
The man shook his head as if to say he wasn’t sure. “Think my shoulder’s shattered.” He glanced at the blood bibbing his gray duck shirt over which he wore a beaded deerskin vest to which his marshal’s badge was pinned. “ ’Bout half drained, too, I reckon. Stuff my neckerchief in the hole, will you?”
.45-Caliber Widow Maker Page 5
