.45-Caliber Widow Maker

by Peter Brandvold

  Holding the towel stiffly, puzzled and mesmerized, and not a little taken aback by the invitation from a girl whose name he didn’t even know, Cuno stared after her.

  To the right of the broad stairs at the back of the room, the men sat, looking between Cuno and the girl. All were smoking either cigars or pipes, lounging back in their chairs and chuckling and muttering amongst themselves. On a table nearby were plates crusted with stew leavings and bits of bread.

  It was hard to tell from this distance, but Cuno didn’t think any of the men were under forty. They were work-bowed, weather-wizened men in blue denims, work shirts, and suspenders, with billed cloth caps on their gray heads and lace-up boots on their feet. Their bright, flickering eyes betrayed an air of wry, hearty optimism.

  As the girl approached the stairs, pinching her dress up her thighs, she loosed a breathy “Oh!” as though remembering something. She let her dress fall to her ankles again as she padded around behind the bar. The shadows semi-concealed her as she rummaged around, turning this way and that.

  There were several clattering sounds, a sharp thud, as of a cleaver driven into a cutting board, and then she padded out from behind the bar, heading for the stairs and glancing over her shoulder at Cuno. He was still standing in front of the door, holding his hat in one hand as he dabbed tentatively at his face with the towel and regarded the girl uncertainly, vaguely suspicious of her intentions.

  “Come on!” she rasped, beckoning, then starting up the stairs, which she climbed quickly with a swish of her bunched skirts, her swirling chestnut hair dancing about her shoulders.

  The storm seemed to be hovering directly over the building, like a massive Indian war party powwowing before an onslaught against an ancient enemy. The roof shook under the pounding rain like a giant rattle.

  Cuno grunted skeptically and started across the room, running the towel over his chest and down his arms. As the girl disappeared into the darkness at the top of the stairs, he glanced at the four men lounging to his right, all grinning as they puffed their pipes or cigars.

  The bib-bearded man who’d been playing the fiddle and who now held a loosely rolled, smoldering quirley in a hand propped atop the table beside him muttered something in Russian. The man to his right pulled an old, cracked briar out from between his teeth and chuckled.

  He squinted an eye at Cuno. “Tolstoy says you better mind yourself around his niece, me lad,” he warned in a thick Scottish or Irish accent, “as he’s got a Greener under the bar.”

  As the others wheezed and snorted, shoulders jerking, Cuno started up the stairs, taking the steps one at a time, while the men’s muttering continued behind him, barely audible above the rumbling storm. A keen male desire drove him, as did the prospect of a hot bath. At the same time, apprehension tied a hard knot at the base of his spine.

  There was a chance that the beguiling girl’s intentions weren’t as pure as her dancing, stream-colored eyes wanted him to believe. According to stories he’d heard, he wouldn’t be the first traveler ambushed and robbed in some out-of-the-way dive, his carcass fed to the bobcats in the nearest deep canyon.

  But then, he doubted he appeared worth the trouble to any but an inexperienced and sorely desperate siren. Something told Cuno this girl was neither . . .

  His wet boots squawking on the rough puncheons, his spurs trilling in time with the soggy heel thumps, Cuno followed her up another set of stairs to the third story where the storm was even louder.

  Lightning flashed in the window on the hall’s far end, silhouetting the girl against it as she paused before a door and glanced again at Cuno. It was too dark for him to see the expression on her face, if there was one. He sensed she was smiling the beguiling smile that probed his swelling loins like a dull, rusty knife. Then she pushed the door open with a slight squawk of rusty hinges and disappeared into the room beyond it.

  Cuno felt his stride lengthening, his heart quickening as he headed for the door. The girl stood in the room’s shadows, lightning flashing in the curtained windows behind her, holding the door open with one hand. Another lightning flash limned her smile, and she stepped back, beckoning with one hand.

  “Come, come—it’s all right. There’s no trickery here. Aside from my uncle Leo’s whiskey, that is.”

  Looking around, holding his hand down over the holster thonged low on his right thigh, Cuno stepped into the room.

  The girl lit a lamp. “If you’d like whiskey to cut the chill, though, I know where he keeps the good stuff. It’s called vodka, actually. Have you tried it?”

  “I don’t think so,” Cuno said as she closed the door behind him.

  Strange aromas pushed against his face—pine, maybe sandalwood, and another musky, tealike scent he couldn’t specify. Besides the soft umber lamplight, the only light in the room was the intermittent lightning bursts in the rain-streaked, thunder-rattling windows.

  “Come on, now—out of the clothes,” the girl ordered in a soft, seductive, slightly mocking voice as she went to a high-standing chest between the room’s two windows. “I’ll prepare a nice, hot bath. I’ve had the water steaming. I was going to take one myself before Uncle and his friend coerced me into dancing for them.”

  “Didn’t look to me like it took much convincing.”

  “I love to dance.” She casually flicked her gaze across Cuno’s chest to which his rain-soaked tunic clung, then dragged a large copper bathtub out from where it sat against the wall on a red velvet rug, under the mounted head of a large mountain goat.

  She placed the tub in the middle of the room, then swept her eyes across Cuno once more as she headed for the door, swinging her hips coquettishly and letting her thick, chestnut waves dance across her slender back.

  “I’ll bring the water. Good ’n’ hot!”

  “I don’t wanna be any trouble, Miss . . .”

  At the door, she turned back to him. “Ulalia.” She hiked a shoulder and opened the door. “It is no trouble. You’re the only guest we’ve had here in weeks. A girl gets tired of dancing for men old enough to be her grandfather.”

  She went out. Cuno stared at the closed door with his pulse throbbing in his ears and his neck feeling as though a hot iron were laid against it. He should be keeping an eye on the prisoners, but the storm showed no sign of letup. Oldenberg and his men were doubtless holed up in a cave somewhere back in the previous canyon through which the main trail to Crow Feather snaked.

  Besides, he couldn’t very well guard his charges effectively with a bad case of chilblain. And after all he’d been through, a hot bath offered by a pretty girl was just what the doctor ordered, though he was probably only torturing himself. If he tried discovering what succulent wares were hidden beneath that alluring red dress, he’d no doubt receive a buckshot-peppered ass for his troubles, courtesy of the protective Uncle Tolstoy’s Greener.

  Cuno doffed his hat and ran his hand through his damp hair, looking around the room—the large, canopied bed piled high with colorful quilts and embroidered pillows, a mirrored dresser, several chests of fine, ornately scrolled wood, and steamer trunks. A well-appointed room in spite of the bare, whipsawed boards paneling the walls. Pewter-framed tintypes of mustachioed gentlemen and dour, thick-necked ladies in high, ruffled collars hung from rusty nails.

  The lamp guttered as rain blasted the room’s single window. The building creaked in the gusting wind.

  Downstairs, old Tolstoy had resumed playing his fiddle—a snappy tune to which a couple of his compatriots stomped their feet. Female voices sounded beneath the music, and Cuno realized he hadn’t undressed yet.

  He looked around uncertainly, then dragged a spool-back chair out from in front of a cluttered dresser and set it near the tub. He kicked out of his boots and wrestled out of his soaked tunic, deerskin pants, socks, and longhandles, and piled everything but his boots on the chair. Then he looped his cartridge belt over the chair back, angling the holster toward the tub, so that the .45’s ivory handle would be in easy reach if a
passel of ill-intentioned bandits returned in the girl’s stead.

  The storm had dropped the temperature, already cool at this altitude, a good fifteen degrees and gooseflesh rose on his arms and legs. He felt the fine hair prick across the back of his neck and his shoulders.

  Still, looking down toward his crotch, he saw that the girl’s warming effect had drilled through the chill and, hearing footsteps on the stairs and women’s voices echoing around the cavernous halls, he stepped quickly into the tub and hunkered low, dropping his hand to hide the evidence of his automatic, carnal aspirations.

  No sooner had his bare ass touched the tapered tub’s icy seat than the footpads in the hall were replaced by the click of the door latch. The door swung open, revealing the beguiling, alluring countenance of the dark-haired Ulalia. As she stepped into the room, crouching over the steaming wooden bucket she carried in both hands, another dark-haired girl flanking her, Cuno pressed his hands down tighter over his crotch, thrusting his shoulders forward and curling his toes with embarrassment.

  Exposed to one woman was awkward enough. But two?

  “Ready or not!” trilled Ulalia, laughing as she moved toward the tub, with the other woman—a round-bodied Indian with tobacco-dark skin and a pronounced limp—shuffling along behind her, dour-faced, eyes respectfully averted.

  Ulalia walked around behind Cuno and grunted, laughing, as she lifted the bucket above his head. The steaming water hit his scalp and slithered down his face and back, spilling over his thighs and knees. The soothing contrast to the chill room and tub made him shiver and loose an involuntary howl drowned by a thunderclap that made the floor jump.

  “That good, yes?” Ulalia laughed as she handed the empty bucket to the Indian and took the second one.

  “Not bad,” Cuno said, sucking in a sharp breath as the second bucket was dumped over his head, swathing his body in the soothing, womb-like warmth. “Oooh, yeah. Not bad.”

  “These,” she said, grabbing Cuno’s clothes off the chair and dropping the entire pile except for his hat and boots into the second empty bucket, “Lame Fawn will wash and dry before the fire.”

  “Jeepers,” Cuno exclaimed, cupping the steaming water across his chest, “this is better service than you get at the Larimer Hotel in Denver!” He glanced at Ulalia ushering the Indian girl out the door. “Not that I know from firsthand experience, ya understand.”

  The girl looked at him as she closed the door. “You’ve never been to Denver?”

  “Oh, I’ve been to Denver. Never been to the Larimer.” Cuno continued splashing the water up over his shoulders and knees, chuckling now with the feeling of well-being in the unexpected presence of this charming foreign waif and the hot bath, energetic fiddle music leaping up through the floorboards to be drowned occasionally by another thunderclap. His problems were a hundred miles away, on the other side of the storm. “Doubt I ever will.”

  “I was to Denver once,” Ulalia said, opening a drawer of the chest between the windows. “But only once . . . when we first came here from Russia. It was a dusty city, with the smells of the cows.” She wrinkled her nose as she moved to the tub, a cake of blue-speckled white soap in one hand, a stout scrub brush in the other. “But I heard the hotels and restaurants are wonderful!”

  “Overrated. I swamped a few.” Cuno set his hand over the hand in which she held the soap. “But I’ll bet you’ll get back there and see for yourself someday.”

  He tried to take the soap, but she moved her hand away and dipped the brush into the water beside his right thigh. “I wash your back.”

  “You don’t have to . . .” Cuno let the sentence die on his lips and gave an audible groan as Ulalia ran the brush across his back, between his shoulder blades, where his muscles had grown taut as rawhide from tension and riding stooped in the driver’s box of the jail wagon. “Well, I reckon . . . if you insist . . .”

  He leaned forward, letting his shoulders hang slack as the girl worked the brush over his back gently at first, in a swirling motion. When she’d worked up a heavy lather, she scrubbed harder, and he could see her buffeting hair in the periphery of his vision, hear her soft grunts and sighs as she worked.

  “You come here to prospect the rocks?” she said, dipping the brush in the water once more and making him even more conscious of the erection he was trying to keep hidden between his thighs. “Some say the gold is pinched out, but Uncle doesn’t think so. As quickly as the others came and went, he thinks, after someone has followed another feeder creek to the mother lode, Petersburg will boom again.”

  “Just passin’ through,” Cuno said, the girl’s question unfortunately reminding him of what he was doing here in the first place. “You know if this trail hooks up with the main one to Crow Feather—farther east, I mean?”

  “You must ask my uncle. He goes to Crow Feather for supplies.” Ulalia rubbed the soap across the brush again, and kneeling behind him, leaned forward to run the brush down over his shoulder and begin slowly scrubbing his chest. Her long hair brushed against his ear. “The main trail over the passes is six miles west. It goes south.”

  “Been through there,” Cuno said, tipping his head up to look into the girl’s pretty face. “I was lookin’ for a more scenic route.” He reached up and ran his thumb against her cheek. “I reckon I found it.”

  As she ran the brush in long, slow strokes across his chest, her eyes dropped to the soapy water between his thighs. The corners of her mouth quirked up, and Cuno followed her gaze.

  His red shaft jutted boldly, proudly, above the suds.

  He sucked a sharp breath, dropped his hands down to cover himself once more, and closed his knees. “Uh . . . whoa. Now, that there is . . .”

  Ulalia dropped the brush into the water and rose. “Why don’t you finish washing yourself?”

  She walked away from the tub, and Cuno thought she was going to leave the room—possibly to hail her uncle and his shotgun—but then swerved off to a chair in the corner near the door. It was a high-backed, brocade chair beside an accordion privacy screen—cherrywood frames covered with black velvet in which large yellow moons and stars were stitched and over which several articles of women’s undergarments were draped.

  Keeping her eyes on Cuno, who stared back at her skeptically, she slowly lifted one of her feet to the edge of the chair, peeled off the bright red slipper, and dropped it to the floor. Her eyes were round and smoky, and her lips were frozen in that same beguiling half smile.

  When she’d removed the other slipper, she rose and stepped behind the screen, which covered her only chest high. She wrinkled the skin above her nose and looked at him from under her thin chestnut brows, between the flowing wings of her chestnut hair, with mock reproof. “You finish washing. No lingering.” She chuckled huskily. “I bring you towel.”

  As the storm continued to pummel the saloon with rain and thunder, Cuno resumed scrubbing himself with the brush more vigorously than necessary, his blood boiling in his veins. He hadn’t been with a woman in many months, and his loins, he suddenly realized, were ready to burst.

  Uncle Leo’s ominous threat had retreated to the far back shadows of his heated mind.

  Partly concealed by the black velvet screen, holding Cuno’s heated gaze, the girl unbuttoned the front of her dress and leaned sideways to let if fall down one arm. She leaned the other way, and the dress fell down the other arm, leaving her creamy shoulders bare and accenting the pale length of her neck sheathed in the thick curls of her hair.

  Her smile broadened, and she dropped her arms straight down in front of her. A moment later, they came up lifting a gauzy camisole. The lacy, white garment rose up over her face, taking her hair with it, and when she tossed it aside, her hair cascaded in a wonderfully messy mass about her cheeks and shoulders.

  She stooped, her head and shoulders jerking this way and that as, obviously, she removed her stockings and other sundry unmentionables. Cuno had finished his hasty scrubbing by the time the girl turned away from the p
artition for a moment, grabbed something from down low by the back wall, then emerged wrapped in a thick, purple towel that covered her from the bottoms of her ripe breasts to the tops of her thighs.

  As Ulalia strode toward him, holding the towel with one hand and grinning like the cat that ate the canary, Cuno bounded up out of the soapy water so quickly that he got his feet tangled and nearly fell. Ulalia laughed as, placing one hand on the edge of the tub, he righted himself and, no longer caring if she saw how engorged he was, straightened and regarded the half-naked girl boldly.

  Her eyes flicked down to his crotch, and her cheeks turned rosy. As Cuno leaned toward her, reaching out with his big hands, the girl stepped back, chuckling softly. With the grace of a practiced dancer, she wheeled off to his left, peeling the towel from around her with one hand and holding it up to Cuno, still partly concealing herself with it as she twirled over to the bed.

  In a blur of a single motion, she swept the covers back and scuttled beneath them, drawing them up to her chin as Cuno, drying himself quickly, stepped out of the tub and moved toward her. He was breathing hard, and there was a low scream of wanton lust in his ears, fairly drowning out the storm.

  Umber lamplight and blue lightning flickered across the shadowy bed, illuminating the girl reclining on one side and regarding him impishly, biting her lower lip as she slid the covers down to her waist, revealing the two healthy, pink-tipped globes of her succulent breasts.

  15

  NAT AVERY DIDN’T like folks pulling on his ears.

  It rubbed him the wrong way, made him more conscious of how big the damn things were—large as a man’s hand, some said, hanging off the sides of his long, horsy, red-haired head.

  But the other gang members, especially Bo Creel, gave Avery’s earlobes a tug every chance they got. Creel got such a chance when, caught in the rainstorm not long after leaving Oldenberg and the rest of the gang on the main trail to Crow Feather, Nat Avery, Bo Creel himself, and the two others in the foursome, whom Oldenberg had sent to scout the trail to Petersburg, sought shelter from the wicked gale in a cave close to the road.