.45-Caliber Widow Maker

by Peter Brandvold

Thwack! Another heavy slug rocked the rain barrel.

  Cuno rose to his knees and slid the Winchester over the top of the barrel. A pale, creased hat crown protruded from above the crate pile on the other side of the street and left. Drawing a bead on it, Cuno fired three quick rounds.

  The hat crown disappeared behind the wafting smoke veil. Cuno fired three more quick rounds, but before the sixth slug had hammered the crate pile, the man rose from behind the crates, screaming and staggering back against the wall behind him.

  “Shit!” he cried, dropping his stout Spencer repeater. “I’m hiiiiit!”

  Then he slithered around the corner of the building and dropped to his knees and out of sight.

  Cuno bolted off his heels and, squeezing his empty Winchester in one hand—he’d have to find a secure hole to reload, for he sensed men trying to gain position on him—he ran onto the boardwalk before the building on his right. A second later, he was in the gap on the building’s far side, sprinting down the gap toward the building’s rear, lifting his knees high, hearing his heels thumping in the hard-packed dirt and gravel, his own breath rasping from exertion and nerves.

  Those were the only sounds. The shooting had stopped. An eerie, brain-pulling silence had descended over the town.

  Cuno had only accounted for three of Oldenberg’s men. There were two, maybe three more. He had to buy some time to reload his guns. Getting pinned down between buildings, with an empty Winchester and a .45 holding only four rounds, was a sure way to end his journey.

  As he bolted straight out the back of the gap between the buildings, he glanced to his right. His senses hadn’t tricked him.

  Smoke puffed from behind the livery barn, and the rifle’s crashing report reached his ears at the same time the .44 slug threw up a sage clump in front of him, tossing it a good foot higher than Cuno’s head.

  “There!” the man who’d fired on him yelled.

  Cuno gritted his teeth and angled slightly left, toward a two-hole privy sitting at the end of a well-packed trail and abutted on both sides by spindly cedars. His blood quickened as another gun popped behind him to the left, the slug slicing across his left cheek and spanking a boulder ahead and right of the privy.

  Both men fired once more as Cuno bounded around the privy’s right wall and dropped to a knee behind it.

  There was a rustling thump to his right. He jerked his head with a start, sucking a tense breath. A coyote wrinkled his black-tipped nose at him and withdrew into a shadbush thicket. In front of the thicket lay a still-trembling cottontail splashed with blood.

  The thumps of pounding boots and chinging spurs rose on the other side of the privy, as did the rasps of strained breaths.

  “Is he behind the damn outhouse?” one of the men yelled hoarsely. “Did he stop there? Did you see him, Earl?”

  “Didn’t see him run beyond it!” The man’s voice quivered as both sets of foot thuds grew louder. “Careful, Karl. The dry-gulching son of a bitch!”

  Cuno was quickly thumbing cartridges from his belt into his Winchester’s loading gate. The men were within thirty yards and closing when a gun barked a hole through the privy’s back wall and whistled over Cuno’s Winchester barrel, two feet in front of him.

  He pivoted, pressing his back to the wall and stretching his lips back from his teeth as two more bullets shredded the wood of the privy’s back wall, one blowing slivers three feet above his head and one within an inch or two of his shoulder.

  Two more shots hammered in from the east flank, both over Cuno’s head.

  “Hey, bushwhacker!” one of the men shouted. “You back there?”

  Cuno bolted up and turned to the privy. He loudly racked a shell, leveled the Winchester’s barrel at the worn vertical boards, angling it slightly right, and fired four quick rounds. Amidst the cacophony of the Winchester’s blasts and the bullet-riddled wood and flying splinters, a man screamed.

  Cuno did not quit shooting until he’d emptied the Winchester and there were nine of his own holes in the privy’s back wall—four on the right, five on the left.

  Lowering the rifle and squinting against his own powder smoke wafting back from the wall to rise up around the corrugated tin roof, Cuno palmed his Colt. Rocking back the hammer, he moved quickly around the privy’s west side.

  One man lay on his back about ten feet beyond, one boot propped on a rock. His head was turned to one side, his rifle resting beside him. His boots trembled as though from an electrical charge, and blood bubbled on his thick lips pooching out from a heavy, salt-and-pepper beard with a white, lightning-like slash across one cheek.

  Kicking the man’s Winchester away, Cuno looked left.

  The other rider was stumbling slowly back toward the line of widely spaced frame structures paralleling Alfred’s main street. His black duster buffeted around his thick legs and high-topped, mule-eared boots into which his checked pants were stuffed. His rifle—a Winchester Yellow Boy with a scrolled receiver and initialed rear stock—lay in his trail behind him, near a shabby black derby hat with a brown band.

  The rifle was splattered with bright red blood drops.

  The man’s boot toes began to drag along the ground. He stopped and dropped to his knees but kept his head up, facing the rear of the building before him.

  He knelt there, unmoving, as Cuno walked up and swung wide around him, thumbing fresh shells into his Winchester’s breech.

  The man, balling his big, sunburned cheeks, rolled his befuddled gaze to Cuno and studied him in moody silence for a time.

  “Who’re you?” he said softly, knotting his thick sandy brows, as though trying to recall the name of a long-lost family member. He had muttonchop whiskers and an untrimmed goatee. In his right ear he wore a thin, gold ring.

  “Cuno Massey. Who’re you?”

  The man winced slightly and his pensive gaze strayed over Cuno’s right shoulder. “Karl Oldenberg.” With a heavy sigh, he sagged forward onto his hands and rolled onto his back. The entire front of his white shirt behind his deerskin vest was bloody.

  “Crazy damn world,” he groaned. “Can’t trust nobody in it. Not never.”

  The light left his eyes. He farted loudly, jerked, and lay still.

  “No, you can’t never,” Cuno said.

  Holding the Winchester out in front of him, he brushed a hand across his bullet-burned cheek and began tramping back toward the main street and the little pink house.

  27

  CUNO SWUNG WIDE of the little pink house and approached it from the backyard.

  He stole slowly amongst the silk sheets and brightly colored women’s underclothes flapping and dancing on the wind from two clotheslines, closing on the back door. He ducked inside, his boots crunching wood slivers on the puncheon floor, and moved through the empty kitchen and down the hall toward the front of the house.

  The place was as quiet as a sarcophagus, with only the sound of the wind buffeting curtains and rustling under the eaves. The air was thick with the rotten-egg smell of gun smoke.

  When he’d passed a couple of open doors on both sides of the house, Cuno stopped at the doorway to the front parlor and raised the Winchester stock to his cheek.

  Three figures sat before him, on the other side of the room, facing him, their backs to the wall. They made no offensive moves but merely sat looking at him dully through the powder smoke hanging in webs.

  Behind Cuno, the floor squeaked. A bulky shadow moved on the wall to his right.

  Cuno wheeled just as Fuego, starting from five feet behind him, lunged toward him. Cold steel flashed in his right fist, just above his waist—a long butcher knife with a pointed, razor-edged tip. The blade point was only four inches from Cuno’s belly before the blond freighter smashed the barrel of his Winchester against the half-breed’s hand.

  Fuego screamed and whipped sideways, smashed the knife against the freshly papered wall but retained his grip on the wooden handle. Blue-green eyes on fire, wearing only his bandanna around the top of his bald h
ead, the half-breed started bringing the knife back toward Cuno.

  Spittle sprayed from his thick, chapped lips.

  Cuno whipped his Winchester stock straight up in front of him. It slammed against the underside of Fuego’s chin with a solid smack and a crunch of breaking teeth. Fuego flew back against the wall. The knife clattered to the floor at his feet. The half-breed groaned. Cuno silenced it with a savage slash of the rifle barrel across the big man’s forehead.

  Fuego hit the floor so hard that several jars fell from a kitchen shelf and shattered loudly.

  Upstairs, a girl squealed.

  Cuno wheeled back toward the parlor and snugged the Winchester to his shoulder, sliding it across the three men still sitting where they’d been sitting before, in the same positions. None had reached for a weapon.

  Cuno was wondering if they were all dead—they were certainly bloody enough to be dead—when Colorado Bob growled, “Stand down, Widow Maker. We’re all outta cartridges.”

  He appeared to be wounded in the arm, low on his side, and in his upper left thigh. About ten feet away from him, and also facing Cuno, one leg stretched out before him, the other bent and lying flat, Blackburn had taken a nasty burn across his forehead and a slug about six inches below his left shoulder.

  Simms sat on the other side of the door. He had his knees drawn up to his chest. He, too, was a bloody mess. Glowering across the room at Cuno, he fairly sobbed, “Goddamnit, boy, don’t you have nothin’ else to do with your time?”

  He dropped his head to his knees and sobbed with abandon—an overgrown child who hadn’t gotten what he’d been promised for his birthday.

  Cuno shifted his eyes to Colorado Bob sitting with his head against the wall, left of the largest window in the room. “Where’s Li’l Sis?”

  “Done cut out on her big brother, I reckon.” Bob chuckled without mirth, then winced as pain racked him. “She doesn’t have the killin’ fire to make it in this line. Needs to get her a job in a saloon somewheres. Anywheres but Texas . . .”

  Cuno glanced around cautiously, then, seeing nothing of Johnnie Wade, he lowered the rifle and stepped into the smoky room. He saw his own Winchester leaning against the wall, near a pile of spent brass. Blackburn was wearing Cuno’s wide brown cartridge belt and his Frontier model, ivory-gripped Colt. He nudged the man’s boot with his own.

  “I’ll take my rig back now.”

  “Well, you’ll just have to pull it off yourself, because I took a bullet through my hand.”

  When Cuno had his own gun belt around his waist, with the satisfying weight of the Colt .45 hanging off his hip, and his own loaded Winchester in his hands, he stepped out the half-open, bullet-riddled front door.

  From the porch he saw a man hunkered down over a woman lying facedown in the street, as red as a side of beef. The man wore an apron, and he had a pencil behind his ear.

  He looked at Cuno, and his eyes acquired a fearful light. He straightened and backed away slightly, holding his hands up feebly. “Look, mister, I don’t know what the trouble is here, but—”

  “There any law in this burg?” Cuno moved off the porch and across the yard, heading for the street.

  The man wrinkled his nose and sniffed. “I . . . I reckon I am . . . when needed.”

  Cuno looked up and down the sun-blasted street. A few other men were angling toward him from a saloon at the far end of town, and a big woman in a shapeless gray dress stood outside a haberdashery, shading her eyes with a hand as she stared toward the brothel.

  “You got some cuffs and leg irons?”

  The man in the apron hiked a shoulder. “I reckon I can scavenge some from the jail.”

  “How ’bout a sawbones?”

  “I last seen him playin’ poker over to the Territorial Saloon.”

  “Round it up. The cuffs and the sawbones. A freight wagon, too. I got four wounded prisoners who need patching for the trail to Crow Feather.”

  When the man in the apron had limped off toward the west end of town, Cuno started back to the brothel. Slow hoof thuds drew his head around, and he saw a girl on a fresh buckskin riding toward him from the west, angling out of a gap between the buildings.

  She came on slowly, her features set with a bored, tired air. Or was it a sad, defeated air? In her gloved hand she held a carbine across the pommel of her saddle, but she didn’t seem inclined to raise it.

  Cuno let his own rifle hang down beside his right leg as he scrutinized her critically, a feeble, remembered anger stirring in him but without the heat it had before.

  “What’s the matter, Li’l Sis,” he said, putting some false steel into his voice. “Get a craw full?”

  “I’ll be pullin’ my picket pin.”

  “What about your brother?”

  “He ain’t my brother. Leastways, he ain’t the brother I thought he was.”

  Johnnie Wade filled her lungs wearily and looked at Cuno directly. “I’m sorry for what I did back there at the cabin. I figured to play this hand out different . . . for both me an’ Bob. But he’s just a killer like the others.” The skin above the bridge of her nose winkled, and she lowered her eyes. “I’m sorry, Cuno, but you ain’t takin’ me in.”

  Cuno let a silence stretch. Her defeated air was infectious, and he suddenly just wanted to be in the driver’s box of a freight wagon, hoorawing a team of mules through empty, quiet country, far away from people and all their troubles. “I’m not a lawman. I’m just finishing a job for a couple who can’t.”

  “Maybe see you again sometime.” Johnnie touched her spurs to the buckskin’s flanks.

  “Where you heading?”

  She threw a glance over her shoulder and kept riding. “I don’t know.”

  The buckskin stretched its stride into a trot, the hooves kicking up dust as the horse and its slender, tawny-haired rider trailed on out of town.

  Cuno watched her for a time. Then, seeing a man in a shabby suit and carrying a black medical bag heading toward him, he tramped back into the brothel.

  “Sit tight, fellas,” he said. “The doc’s comin’ to patch you up for the hangman.”

  Blackburn cursed.

  Fuego groaned.

  Brush Simms continued to sob into his arms.

  Colorado Bob laughed madly.

  EPILOGUE

  “IT’S . . . IT’S Colorado Bob!” a boy shouted, pointing. “And that’s . . . why, it’s . . . Frank Blackburn!” His face became all sparkling eyes in the late afternoon sunshine as he jumped around, pointing and yelling. “It’s the prisoners, fellas! We can have the hangin’, after all!”

  As the coverless freight wagon and its four sullen, heavily bandaged, and shackled prisoners traced a long, last bend in the trail from Alfred, Cuno saw the boy fairly dancing a jig by the plank bridge at the far western edge of Crow Feather. He was a towheaded lad in coveralls and holding a cane pole. A line drooped from the pole into the creek that was swollen from the summer storms that had been assaulting the Mexican Mountains looming in the north.

  Two other boys about the same age—ten or so—and one a couple of years younger leapt to their feet then, too, and, leaving their poles along the rocky, sage-stippled creek bank, wheeled and went running along the trail into the town, yelling almost in unison, “It’s the prisoners! It’s the prisoners! Colorado Bob and them! We can have the hangin’ after all!”

  “Kids,” scoffed Colorado Bob behind Cuno. “Never cared for ’em.”

  “Me, neither,” said Frank Blackburn. “Fact, that boy there needs to have his tongue cut out, dried, and hung around my neck for a fob to show off to my favorite two whores in Wichita Falls.”

  “Better make it fast,” said Brush Simms, wincing and touching his bandaged forehead as the wagon bounced violently across a chuckhole.

  Cuno glanced over his shoulder to see the redheaded outlaw straining to peer with a sour expression over the tops of the horses and into the fast-approaching town. Simms said, “I do believe that’s a gallows I see yonder. L
ike as not, built just for us.” He sank back down against the slats with a sigh. “Can’t believe it. I just can’t believe I’m really gonna die. Me . . . of all people!”

  “You earned it,” Cuno said, staring straight ahead as the Main Street business establishments of Crow Feather—sunbaked mud and whipsawed structures, and a few tents and log cabins—pushed up on both sides of the trail.

  “I wasn’t talkin’ to you, you son of a bitch!” Simms barked, his voice cracking shrilly. “I’m all through talkin’ to you!”

  “Pardon me,” Cuno said, feeling a smile lift his mouth corners for the first time in what felt like months. What a relief to have made it to his destination at long last.

  “Easy, Brush,” Colorado Bob counseled. “We each must die.”

  “But not me! Not today!” Blackburn chimed into the conversation. “And not account o’ some wet-behind-the-ears gunslick like him!”

  The wagon clattered along Crow Feather’s wide, dusty main drag, the four boys running out ahead of it and yelling, waving their hands in the air as though to announce the circus was heading into town.

  Dogs ran out from beneath boardwalks and from trash piles between the sun-seared buildings. One had been loitering under the gallows sitting before the county courthouse on the left side of the street, four hang ropes forlornly jostling over the raised platform in the vagrant summer breeze.

  Now the spotted pup, as though with all the others intu iting what the commotion was about, came out to chase the wagon, yipping and howling like a crazed coyote.

  Crow Feather was only about half again larger than Alfred, but Cuno could see the sprawling stone walls and guard towers of the federal pen at the far end, flanked by sage flats, low brown hills, and more mountains shouldering in the east. But it was the sheriff’s office Cuno was heading for, the yelling boys leading the way. He remembered that the sheriff shared quarters with federal deputy marshals down a side street not far from the prison.

  As he slouched in the driver’s box, holding the horses steady despite the dogs bolting out to nip at their hocks and at the wagon’s wheels and to jump up and snarl at the prisoners, he saw people stopping along the boardwalks to stare. More kids appeared as if from nowhere, and loafers rose from benches to shout and wave.