.45-Caliber Widow Maker

by Peter Brandvold

  “I’ll be thinkin’ about what coulda been while you and your cutthroat pals ride off with my horse and my guns, you crazy bitch.”

  “Bye.” Johnnie reined her horse around and rode away.

  Cuno watched her, feeling the reverberations of the hooves in the ground, until she was out of sight. Then, wincing at the raw, sawing pain in his ribs, he rolled onto his belly, pushed up on his knees, and crabbed awkwardly over to the fire ring.

  He shoved his hands into the powdery coals, probing deep with his fingertips. The hottest ash he could feel was only warm. Nowhere near hot enough to burn through the rope.

  He forgot himself and tried to stand, but his feet wouldn’t separate, and he fell hard on his forearms, cursing.

  Rolling onto one side, breathing hard and bunching his cheeks at the pain in his ribs, he looked around for something to cut the ropes with. Spying a rock, he wormed his way over to it, and inspected it closely. “Shit!” Its sides were too blunt.

  He looked around again, saw another rock humping up out of the ground behind him, surrounded by wiry, blond grass. Rolling onto his other side, he wormed back in the opposite direction.

  This rock was about the size and shape of a cow pie. Spotted with green-gold moss, it was dull on one side, fairly sharp on the other. It was embedded firmly enough in the ground that it shouldn’t move when he scissored his wrists across the sharp side, which wasn’t sharp by knife standards but the most he could hope for.

  He grunted as he raised his arms and dug a boot into the ground for leverage. Draping his hands over the rock, he drew them back toward him, running the rope between his wrists across the rock’s sharpest edge.

  A couple of sawing motions told him the rock wasn’t as sharp as it looked—at least, not sharp enough to make fast work of the rope. No point in wasting time looking around for something better. He continued drawing his wrists back and forth across the rock, pressing hard and gritting his teeth with the effort of sawing the tautly wound hemp.

  Clish-scritch, clish-scritch. The rope began coming apart strand by strand, the ends of the cut sinews fraying and snapping away from the edge.

  When he’d worked for a time, Cuno glanced up at the sky. The sun had risen, beating the shadows back into the forest and across the cabin. The air warmed, and the dew drops were quickly disappearing from the brown grass curling around him.

  A breezy whiz sounded overhead, and he glanced up to see a rough-legged hawk careening over him and down the slope, hunting for mice and rabbits from about fifty feet in the air, tawny wings spread, feet tucked back against its downy belly and barred, fanlike tail.

  Cuno sucked a breath and continued working at the rope—back and forth, back and forth across the rock, making sharp, quick cutting motions. He was encouraged by every strand that separated and snapped back away from the rock.

  He hadn’t given much thought to what he was going to do once he was free. He hadn’t needed to.

  He was going after the cutthroats and the girl. And god help them when he caught up to them.

  22

  CUNO TURNED HIS wrists away from each other as the last rope strand stretched, quivering with drum-taut tension, glistening in the climbing morning sun. He ran the strand across the rock’s sharp edge, and it snapped easily, the two ends leaping like tiny snakes against the undersides of Cuno’s callused palms.

  Heart quickening, the burly young freighter clawed at the left rope with his right hand, peeling it up over his knuckles and mottling the sun-browned, work-toughened skin. When he got the left rope off, he worked at the right one, stretching his lips back from his white teeth as he lifted his gaze up the slope over which his prisoners and the girl had disappeared.

  Finally, he flung the other rope away and, leaning forward, went to work on his ankles until he had both boots off, and grunting and sweating and cursing under his breath, he wrestled the ropes down his ankles and over his feet, ripping one worn white sock off with his vigorous effort.

  When his ankles were free, he pulled his boots on and stood, taking only a moment to savor the free movement of his arms and legs. He took another hard gander up the slope. The cutthroats had headed west, straight up and over the ridge. Was there a trail heading in that direction that Cuno hadn’t seen before, or were they heading cross-country to their rendezvous with the hidden loot?

  He took a slug of water from the canteen, then corked it and hung it across his chest. He dug into the jerky sack, devoured a strip for sustenance though he was too full of bile to feel hunger, and hitched his pants higher on his hips, feeling naked without his .45.

  No revolver. No Winchester. No knife.

  And Renegade was headed west under the spurs of Brush Simms . . .

  Cuno had been in some tight spots before, and if he would have thought it over, he would have decided it was about as tight a spot as he’d ever known. But he didn’t think it over. He simply looped the jerky sack over his belt by its drawstring, drew a sleeve across his sweaty forehead, stuffed his hat down lower, and began tramping up the bench, taking long, ground-eating strides.

  He couldn’t move as fast as a horse, but his mounted quarry had to stop sometime.

  The tracks of the eight horses weren’t hard to follow in the blond grass covering the slope. They climbed straight up the ridge and dropped into the valley on the other side. Cuno did the same, descending through scattered aspens on the opposite slope and starting up the next ridge, which was rockier and sparsely studded with firs and Ponderosa pine.

  Halfway up the next ridge, the gang released their spare horses. The tracks of the extras angled off to the north. Cuno considered tracking the spares down but nixed the idea. They could be miles away by now, and he’d probably only lose the trail of the gang.

  Rage propelled him ahead too quickly, and when he’d crossed the second ridge he began to pace himself, slowing his stride, taking regular sips from the canteen. Every hour, he laid a small slab of jerky on his tongue and let it slowly melt, biting down occasionally and allowing the salty fluid to dribble down his throat, sustaining him.

  An hour past noon, he stopped at a creek to refill his canteen. He took a breather on a rock, sucking another slab of jerky and flexing his feet to stretch his calves, which were beginning to tighten up on him. He was strong, and powerfully built, but he wasn’t accustomed to long, sustained walks with bruised ribs.

  His feet would look like hamburger after a few more hours, especially if he had more mountains to climb. Fortunately, the gang seemed to be sticking to draws and coulees, zigzagging relentlessly westward.

  Cuno flexed his left foot again and winced. That calf was tighter than the other. What he wouldn’t give to happen upon a horse or even a mule. Hell, a prospector’s burro would do.

  But, while he’d seen a few cattle—mostly white-faced stock crossed with longhorns—he had yet to stumble across a ranch. He’d spied one dilapidated cabin with a sagging, moss-encrusted roof hunkered in a hollow and a few mine holes, but no humans.

  He stood, rose up on the balls of his feet, and threw his arms up high above his head, stretching his legs, back, and neck, wincing at the hitch in his ribs. He tipped his hat against the sun and continued forward through the grassy valley winding southwest through scattered aspens whose small, round leaves flashed silver in the early afternoon light.

  An hour later, crossing a low saddle between grassy ridges, a cool blast of wind pushed against his sweaty back, chilling him instantly and making him shiver. He glanced behind. A purple mass of anvil-shaped clouds was moving toward him, shepherding a massive, dark shadow across the valley behind.

  The wind wooshed. A dead branch was jostled out of a tree crown and hit the ground with a clatter.

  “Shit!”

  Cuno glanced at the hoof-pocked ground before him. A hard monsoon rain would likely erase the cutthroats’ trail.

  He glanced back at the curtain of rain wavering down from the purple cloud bank, cursed again, teeth clattering as the chill w
ind shoved against him. Thunder rumbled. Lightning sparked over a rocky spur on the right side of the valley. A flock of mountain chickadees lit from an aspen copse to his left and, like a cloud of bees, careened up valley and away from the storm.

  Cuno ran down the saddle, holding the jerky sack against his thigh, and looked around for cover. Rain began ticking off his hat and peppering his back as he jogged down between two rock escarpments bottlenecking the trail just below the saddle.

  To his left, a cabin-sized, mushroom-shaped boulder loomed. The side facing the valley was concave, offering shelter. Cuno ran under it and, turning to face the valley and dropping to a knee, watched the storm move over the saddle like a lid closing on a box.

  In the aspens and ash about a hundred yards beyond, he saw what appeared to be an old Indian burial scaffold stretched between two trunks and partially concealed by foliage. As the wind and rain hit the scaffold, several branches—or branches and bones and maybe some old sheepskin from a burial shroud—were blown out of the tree to tumble from branch to branch to the ground.

  The sheepskin was whipped along the ground for several yards, like paper, before it hung up against a bole.

  Cuno shivered from the damp cold stealing down his collar and pasting his icy, sweat-soaked tunic against his back, and from the ominous visage in the trees beyond, and dropped to his butt. He pushed himself back farther beneath the boulder, drew his knees up, and wrapped his arms around them, settling in to wait out the storm.

  As thunder and lightning filled the valley, he silently prayed that the wind and rain wouldn’t obliterate the tracks. He’d never considered himself a superstitious sort, but if he had, he’d take that ruined scaffold to be one hell of a bad omen.

  Leaning back from the rain and wincing at the hammering thunder, he watched the monsoon gale slide on down the valley. It passed quickly—not as quickly as he’d have liked—but after twenty minutes the rain stopped abruptly. The thunder dwindled into the distance, and the sun’s high-country rays slanted down once more—clearer and brighter than before and glistening like melted butter off the wet rocks and leaves.

  Cuno took a drink from the canteen, and hearing the spatter of the rain tumbling off boulders and dripping off the trees, he rose from his makeshift shelter and moved down the slope to the valley bottom. He stared down at the grass for a long time, his expression implacable but his jaws set with frustration.

  The tracks were all but gone—wiped out beneath the grass that had been bent by the wind and the rain.

  Cuno moved forward, picking up occasional glimpses of the trail, but he found long stretches—one was over fifty yards long—where there was nothing but bent, sopping grass, occasional branches blown out of the trees, and leaves.

  He continued down the valley, stretching his stride and suppressing the pain in his calves, feet, and ribs.

  When he came to the confluence of three ravines, he lost precious time looking for sign. A few plops of still-warm horse apples finally pointed him down a narrow, rocky cut angling more south than west. But he soon came to another confluence, and then another, and by late afternoon he had no idea whether he was heading in the right direction.

  Where the rain had not totally obliterated the group’s tracks, it made it nearly impossible to distinguish them from those of other riders. Since the area was spotted with cattle, and he’d seen two line shacks from a distance, it was impossible to tell if the tracks he glimpsed were those of the cutthroats or merely brush-popping ranch hands.

  By sundown, he was thoroughly frustrated, weary, and lost. He continued heading west down a broad valley spotted with large tracts of pine and aspen woods, and lined with steep limestone formations, like dinosaur teeth jutting straight up from the ridges to his right and left. Nearby, a creek curled, murmuring softly and filling the juniper-tanged air with a mineral scent. Mule deer grazed or lounged along the green apron slopes rising to the base of the limestone cliffs.

  Hawks screeched as they hunted the rocky heights for gophers and rattlers. A lone wolf howled forlornly.

  As the last light retreated before him, Cuno stopped suddenly. Ahead and slightly left, a gray skein of smoke rose from the trees to curl against the distant blackening ridge.

  He bolted left from his course and dropped to a knee behind a scraggly cedar, looking around the shrub toward the trees from where the smoke rose. When he heard nothing and spied no movement except for the smoke, he rose and jogged quietly into the aspen woods, crouching, heading toward the smoke.

  His heart hammered his breastbone.

  Could he have stumbled onto the cutthroats? The fact that he had no weapon didn’t bother him. Somehow, he’d get his hands on one.

  Ahead, through the dark columns of the trees, the burned orange of a campfire shone. Cuno slowed, suppressing his urge to hurry, setting each tender foot down carefully. At the edge of the woods, he knelt and stared out into the slight clearing in the trees—not really a clearing but merely a thinning—where several hatted silhouettes were hunkered around the fire.

  It was hard to tell in the dark, but Cuno figured there were eight or nine men out there.

  A couple sat on rocks, a couple more on saddles. One tipped a coffeepot over a tin cup. The crimson light shone on leathery, bearded faces.

  Cuno’s heart sank. He hadn’t stumbled onto the cutthroats, after all. Probably waddies from a nearby ranch gathering cattle from the surrounding canyons.

  The men sat close together, turning their heads this way and that, their mouths opening and closing, deep in discussion. Cuno studied the group from beneath mantled brows.

  Cow waddies would be lounging around more sedately, wouldn’t they? With maybe one man strumming a guitar while the others laughed, played cards, and passed a bottle?

  These men looked grim, serious, and they kept their voices low and grave.

  Deciding to get close enough for a better assessment—if they were, indeed, cattlemen, they might spare him a horse and a six-shooter—he retreated back the way he’d come, then turned sharply right. He walked slowly, quietly for a couple hundred paces, then turned right again, tracing a broad half circle around the faintly glowing, flickering light of the cook fire.

  Cuno crawled on hands and knees through the short grass, meandering around the slender trunks of aspens. Before him, the fire grew as did the silhouettes of the men gathered around it.

  As he set each hand and knee down softly, the low voices grew louder. He began to hear the snaps and cracks of the flames, the occasional pop of pine sap and to see the flickering sparks rise.

  A few minutes later, as he approached a fallen log, he caught a whiff of coffee on the cooling air and the smell of cooked beans and side pork. He was only half aware of his rumbling stomach. There was a long stretch of muttered conversation, which Cuno didn’t dare crab any closer to eavesdrop on.

  One of the men leaned back against a large log angled near the fire—a blocky gent in a fringed elk-skin jacket, with long hair, muttonchops, and a goatee—and crossed his stout arms on his broad chest. “I don’t know,” he said with a heavy sigh, just loudly enough for Cuno to clearly hear. “I can’t believe ole Bob would do me that way.”

  Another man belched.

  “Hard to believe,” said a dark-haired man over the coffee cup raised to his mustached mouth. He had a twisted, knobby scar on his chin, and a Winchester leaned near his knee. “After all you done fer him, Karl. Sort of restarting his career for him, an’ all. But it looks to me like they’re headed west fer Alfred. If they was headed fer Helldorado, they’d have taken Sandy Draw.”

  “I’m pretty damn sure it was him.” A tall, long-limbed man with a rifle across his knees tugged on his bib beard as he stared into the fire, his black eyes reflecting the dancing flames. “Like I said, they was a fair stretch away, but I glassed ’em with them good German binocs I took off an army lieutenant who tried doublin’ me in a card game, and I’d swear on my pap’s grave that was Bob, Frank Blackburn, and Simms—wit
h a girl that looked a lot like Joe Pepper’s little gal and some big, dark-skinned son of a bitch.”

  “Why the hell would he be goin’ to Alfred?” inquired another member of the group.

  The tall gent said, “Maybe he went stir-crazy in that jail wagon, decided to go get him some cooch before headin’ back to Helldorado.”

  “He could get him cooch in Helldorado.”

  “Yeah, but it’s a hundred miles farther—a day and a half longer. To red-blooded men, Dean, that’s a hell of a long . . .”

  He let his voice trail off as a Mexican in a bear coat and leather hat trimmed with silver conchos said between puffs on a briar pipe, “Maybe that’s where he hid the payroll money. Maybe he intends to bring the money with him back to Helldorado.”

  The bulky gent with the long hair and goatee shook his head as he tugged at his beard. “The agreement was that if we had to ditch the money, we’d all go back for it. Together .” Karl Oldenberg looked at the others around the fire. “It ain’t that I don’t trust you boys. You all took a blood oath to the clan. We’re good as kin. But money has a way of workin’ on a fella . . . ’specially a cached fortune like the one waitin’ in the strongbox.”

  Cuno dropped his head and pressed his shoulder against the fallen log. He dug his fingers into the pine needles and rotting leaves, feeling his pulse in his fingertips.

  He’d heard enough. Oldenberg’s boys had spied the five Cuno was after. He’d never heard of a place called Alfred. In this country, looking for even a good-sized town could be like looking for a needle in a haystack. He had no choice but to follow the Oldenberg bunch.

  But to keep up he’d need a horse.

  As the gang continued to discuss the situation darkly, Cuno backed away from the fire and forted up behind another log, looking around. He’d spied no horses east or south of the fire. They had to be west or north.

  Pausing to scoop up a barkless branch about four feet long and as big around as his upper arm—it would have to do for a weapon until he could get his hands on a gun—he scuttled west of the fire, stealing amongst the trees and looking around for horses while keeping one eye skinned on the camp.