.45-Caliber Cross Fire

by Peter Brandvold

  “You mean the others aren’t getting two dollars a day?” he asked, pitching his low voice with sarcasm.

  She didn’t say anything to that, just stared at him stonily.

  He already knew what she thought of him, so it couldn’t hurt to probe her further, for the distraction, a way to pass the time, if nothing else. Besides, he enjoyed looking at her, even though, especially in her case, beauty was only skin-deep.

  “One man not enough for you? Or you playing both ends against the middle?”

  She raised her knees and pressed her palms against them thoughtfully. “Beers is a big man. That’s why I threw in with him when we met in Tucson. He’s got ambitions. But he’s a liar and a cheat. I don’t trust him.”

  “Think he’ll cut you out when the big money starts getting spread around?”

  “Who said anything about big money?”

  Cuno doffed his hat, ran his hands through his shoulder-length blond hair. “I don’t know—I figure all those guns and ammunition have to be worth a few buckets worth of Mexican gold.”

  Flora laughed, then covered her mouth—an unexpectedly girlish gesture. But her voice was genuinely cautionary. “Don’t get too curious, bucko. Men disappear in Mexico all the time.”

  “You trust Sapp?”

  She sniffed and threw her hair back from her shoulders. “I trust the way he looks at me.”

  “Right.”

  “A girl has to use what she has. It’s an ugly business, being a woman in these woods, if you get my drift.” She paused, studied the moon for a time, then rubbed her palms against her knees again. “Where’d you learn to fight like that?”

  “Here and there.”

  “You didn’t look like you had it in you, but I swear, you’d have killed Sapp if Beers hadn’t come along.” She stared at him. “What’s got your neck in such a hump?” Pitching her voice with teasing, she said, “Worried about me?”

  “That must have been it.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Twenty-four.”

  “My age.” Flora drew a deep breath, and a haughtiness entered her voice. “Me, I’m worldly. At first I thought you were just a kid lookin’ for gold or somesuch, but I think you might be worldly, too.”

  “You mean jaded?”

  “Something like that.”

  “So, then…” Cuno cocked a brow at her, waiting.

  She wrinkled her lips together as though in mild reproof. “We’ve been up here several minutes, Beers and Sapp are both snorin’ in their blanket rolls, and you haven’t even made a play on me.”

  “Hurt your feelings?”

  “Nah. I’m just starting to wonder if you’re not just a fool kid down here lookin’ for gold and about to go home broke. If you go home at all.”

  Cuno chuckled. It was crazy, but he felt wild and reckless. Since he was here he might as well make an adventure of it. “What on earth could I possibly offer you, Flora?”

  “Maybe I’m just a sucker for a man who tries to defend my honor.”

  “The first time I laid eyes on you, Flora, I knew you were many things. Honorable wasn’t one of them.”

  “That’s a helluva thing to say!” She leaned forward and slapped his face a stinging, ringing blow.

  Cuno grinned. Her eyes blazed. He wrapped his hand around the back of her neck and pulled her to him. She was pliant in his brusque hold, and when her lips met his, they were open, and her tongue jutted into his mouth. She wrapped her arms around his neck and pressed her breasts to his chest, groaning as she kissed him, digging her fingers into his shoulders and biceps.

  Finally, she pulled away from him, staring at him in the darkness. Her chest rose and fell. “Beers is… old.”

  She unbuttoned her shirt and tossed it away. She lifted her chemise above her head and threw it onto her shirt. Breathing harder, grunting, she leaned forward and started unbuttoning Cuno’s shirt. When she had it off she dug her hands into his chest, squeezing and probing his powerful torso.

  Finally, she stood and pushed her denims and underwear down to her ankles. Cuno slid his own pants down to his knees, and she straddled him.

  They were like two wildcats going at it over a fresh kill.

  When she finished, she sagged to one side, breathless.

  She stood, dressed quickly, crouched over him, ran a brusque hand through his hair, and kissed him quickly, almost painfully. “You’re gonna want me bad now, but don’t expect anything like this to happen again.” She scampered back the way she’d come, disappearing like a ghost in the darkness.

  Cuno leaned back on his outstretched arms, drew a deep breath, and chuckled. He’d be damned if he didn’t feel like a rug hung up and beaten on a clothesline.

  He spent the rest of the next hour keeping watch from his niche in the rocks, then returned to the fire, nudged awake the man assigned to relieve him, then rolled up in his blankets beneath his freight wagon near where Renegade lay, asleep on his side.

  Cuno was awake at first light and filling his coffee cup at the fire, when a man nearby said, “Hey, look there.”

  The several other men in camp now rising and tending nature and filling coffee cups turned to see one of the wagon drivers walking toward them, carrying another man over his shoulder. The man was the lanky redhead, Lusk. The man carrying him strode sullenly forward and eased Lusk onto the ground near the fire.

  The others stepped back, muttering.

  A bloody gash curved across the redhead’s throat. Lusk’s eyes were crossed and his tongue hung out a corner of his mouth.

  Beers and Sapp had heard the commotion, and now they walked over to stare down at the dead man.

  “Where’d you find him?” Beers asked Long.

  “In the rocks over yonder, where we set up the Gatling gun. Lusk was slumped there, dead.” Long cast his sharp, anxious gaze at the gang leader. “His Gatling’s gone.”

  12

  EVERYONE, INCLUDING CUNO, grabbed a rifle. Any man who wasn’t yet wearing his shell belt and pistol donned them fast, then stepped into the cover of the wagons, a few sidling up to large boulders, looking around warily.

  On the other side of the stream, the mule herd sensed the tension and stomped around and brayed, pulling against their single picket line.

  Cuno stood beside his own wagon, his Winchester in his hands, and slid a look around the jagged crests of the scarps jutting around him. He could tell what the other men were feeling—he was feeling it as well. They were feeling as though bull’s-eyes had been drawn on their chests or across their backs.

  That it was the Yaqui who had killed Lusk and taken the Gatling gun there was little doubt. Only a Yaqui could successfully pull off a stunt like that.

  Beers had a cocked Colt Navy in his hands as he peered over the tarp-covered top of the wagon standing about twenty feet from Cuno’s. To a guard standing with a rifle atop an escarpment just opposite the men and wagons, the gang leader said, “Noble—you see anything up there?”

  Holding his Winchester low across his thighs, Noble, a hatted silhouette against the dawn’s lilac sky, turned his head this way and that, then turned it back to Beers. “Nope.” He kept his voice low; it sounded eerie in the morning silence in the wake of what had happened to Lusk. “What’s goin’ on, Boss?”

  “Lusk had his throat cut last night. His Gatling gun’s gone.”

  Noble looked around once more, then turned his head toward Beers and said just as softly as before, “Yaqui?”

  “We’re gonna find out.” Gritting his teeth, Beers looked at the others around him. There were roughly fifteen, including Cuno, Flora, and Sapp, as the others like Noble were still on the night scout, either hunkered in stationary positions or making a slow patrol on foot.

  “You men spread out. I want that Gatling gun found. More important, I want the Injun who took it found! I want every last one of ’em found—you hear me?”

  The men spread out. Cuno glanced at Flora. She returned the oblique look, then, holding her Winch
ester carbine up high across her chest, began moving out away from the wagons, looking around cautiously.

  Cuno strode off in the opposite direction. In the light of what had just happened, and with the cold dawning of a new day, his and Flora’s frolic of last night left a bad taste in his mouth. It had been careless and stupid. He felt no real allegiance to these men, but that didn’t mean he should be horsing around while he was supposed to be keeping the night watch. It was easy enough to die in Mexico without acting like a tinhorn.

  He scoured the area, feeling a prickling at the back of his neck, waiting to hear the sudden hiccup of a Gatling gun that could cut him to pieces in seconds. Finding no moccasin prints or any other sign of Yaqui, Cuno returned to the wagons. Nearly all twenty men were there, with three keeping watch on the near ridges. No one said anything, but they all looked scared. Cuno thought he could safely assume that none of the others had discovered Yaqui sign, either—much less the Yaqui themselves or the stolen gun.

  The drivers were rigging up their teams while the outriders saddled their horses. Obviously, since the fire had already been doused, they were forgoing breakfast, and Cuno could see the urgent desire in the men’s eyes to hit the trail, to hightail it out of this nest in the rocks that a Gatling gun could exploit so savagely.

  Within a half hour, they’d threaded their way out of the jumbled slabs of lava and were heading across a rolling, rocky desert to the same southern ridges Cuno had been watching for the past several days. Beers and Sapp rode lead scout. The wagons followed in a line along the trail that was too meandering and rocky to make good time on. Several scout riders rode out to each side. Flora and a man named Kettleson rode drag.

  Beers had dictated no certain order, but when the wagons had pulled out of the lava bluffs, Cuno had found himself second to last in the ragged line. As they traveled, gaps of fifty to a hundred yards opened between the wagons despite the drivers’ intentions to stay close to one another, so that in case of an attack they could quickly form a defensive circle.

  As the trail was rocky and hard to negotiate, and the mules typically fickle, it was hard to stick close, and when a thunderhead closed over the caravan from the west, Cuno found himself about sixty yards from the wagon ahead of him while the wagon behind him was closer to a hundred yards distant.

  The sky darkened. A cold wind howled. Lightning forked. Thunder exploded, causing the ground to pitch. Rain spit for a time, then began hammering down at a cold, stabbing slant.

  The mules brayed and balked. Trailing behind Cuno’s wagon, Renegade whinnied and shook his head.

  The rain continued to hammer and roar. Thunder sounded like empty barrels rolling down a boulder-strewn hill. Lightning danced in the west, growing closer. Cuno stood up, put his head down, and whipped the reins over the team to keep them moving. A couple of times he had to use the blacksnake.

  It took less than a minute for him to get as soaked as if he’d jumped into a river with all his clothes on. Water sluiced off the canvas enshrouding the wagon. It dribbled from his hair under his collar and down his back, making him shiver. All around him, silver puddles stood amongst the rocks and cactus, whipped to a froth by more rain. The damp air was heavy with the smell of brimstone and sage.

  The rain hammered without any sign of letup until Cuno thought the up-and-down trail was going to become a river and wash him away. Ahead, another wagon appeared stopped in the trail, about a hundred yards in front of a narrow canyon mouth. The driver stood in the driver’s boot, his back to Cuno, staring straight ahead. A rider was galloping toward him from the canyon mouth, which, Cuno saw now as he stared in slack-jawed wonder, was crinkling closed as a mudslide tumbled down the right ridge. The slide made a low roar above the pounding rain and intermittent blasts of thunder.

  The horseback rider galloped up to the wagon in front of Cuno. Cuno couldn’t make out his identity because of the rain and the water sluicing off the man’s kepi. He’d also donned an india rubber rain slicker, and its collar rose to his jaws. The man shouted something to the other driver, but Cuno couldn’t make it out above the rain and the thunder of the slide.

  The man assaulted his bay’s flanks with his spurred heels, and the horse gave an indignant whinny as it galloped back toward Cuno. The face of Dave Sapp appeared beneath the dripping hat brim, his eyes blazing anxiously.

  “The canyon’s closed! Swing this sumbitch around—we’re headin’ west, try to get around it!”

  Again, he rammed his spurs against his horse’s flanks and galloped back toward the wagon just now splashing up behind Cuno. The wagon ahead was turned to the right, and Cuno, sleeving rain out of his eyes, followed suit, having to pop the blacksnake over his team’s back, as the sodden clay was grabbing the wagon’s wheels like giant fists.

  He made the turn and followed the other wagon along another trail that paralleled the steep wall of a mesa to the south, on his left. Several times he looked back to see the slide continuing to seal the canyon mouth as though with wet adobe. No one would ever again make passage through that chasm. He wondered if the lead wagons had been sealed in and covered or if they’d made it out the other side.

  The rain splattered like quicksilver off the mules’ backs. Their heavy hooves splashed in the trail’s water-filled chuckholes. Cuno glanced over his shoulder. The last wagon was behind him. Coming up fast was another rider, and as she passed him without even glancing at him, he saw Flora’s soaked hair pressed flat against her back. She kept her head down, hat brim drawn over her face, as she galloped on up the trail to disappear in the white fog of rain.

  Shortly, the rain lightened a little, as did the thunder and lightning, and the mules relaxed somewhat in their harnesses. The trail rose and pulled to the left, and here the mules started balking again. They were wet and tired and scared, and they were threatening a strike.

  Cuno went after them again with the blacksnake, and they pulled the wagon on up the rise and onto a bench. The rain continued but not too heavily for Cuno to see the village sprawling across the side of a mountain on his left and onto the bench before him.

  He could see no people moving about or any lights in any of the shacks. The bulk of the village lay before him—all adobes hunched along both sides of the trail that was two ancient wagon wheel ruts filled with water. The structures around this central square were all grown up with weeds and cactus, and most appeared roofless, doorless ruins. A church in the central square sank into itself, dripping.

  As Cuno pulled his team to a stop behind the wagon in front of him, a door opened on the right side of the street. A stocky little woman stood in the doorway wearing a sackcloth dress and a blue calico scarf around her Indian-dark face. Her lips were parted, showing two brown teeth. She turned her head both ways, inspecting the newcomers, then slammed the door of her mud-brick shack.

  Faintly, from elsewhere, Cuno could hear a baby crying.

  Just then an especially loud thunderclap shook the wagon and caused the mules to jump. The rain began hammering once more, tumbling straight down from a large mass of blue-black clouds. Sapp galloped around the wagons, shouting above the rain, “Barn ahead on the right. Pull in!”

  As he galloped back to the last wagon, Cuno hoorawed his fidgety team forward. The barrack-like adobe barn with an arched double doorway stood with both wooden doors thrown wide. Flora stood beside one of the doors, holding her carbine across her chest. A little man in peasant’s pajamas and a straw sombrero stood on the other side of the opening, a corncob pipe in his mouth. Behind him, a calico cat hunched just inside the doorway, pressed taut against the frame as it watched the rain and flicked its tail, peevish.

  Cuno pulled his rig inside the large, sprawling barn that smelled of musty hay. There were a few stalls on the left but the rest of the cavern-like place was open, with a hayloft stretching over a quarter of it.

  “What the hell happened back there?” yelled the driver of the wagon parked to the right of Cuno’s. He was a big, shaggy-bearded man called Ha
ys who wore a corporal’s tunic and buckskin trousers, and, like all the other cutthroats in Beers’s employ, he was heavily armed with pistols and knives.

  “You saw what I saw,” Sapp said, riding in ahead of the last wagon and swinging out of his saddle.

  Cuno climbed down from his wagon box and looked outside, beyond Flora, who stood in the open doorway, gazing inside the barn. The last outrider was riding up to the barn on a claybank gelding, and he sat his saddle oddly. As the horse stopped in front of the barn, Cuno saw why he was sitting that way.

  Cuno grabbed his Winchester and, eyes riveted on the man atop the claybank, walked out of the barn and into the street, looking around cautiously.

  “What is it?” Flora said.

  Cuno jerked his head to the last outrider, who leaned farther forward now with the Yaqui arrow bristling from between his shoulder blades. The man rolled out of his saddle and hit the muddy street with a wet squishing sound. The claybank jerked with a start and sidled away, blowing and stamping.

  Something whistled on the other side of the street. The whistling grew louder, and Cuno flinched as the arrow curled the air to his left before smacking the open wooden door behind him with a thud and a quivering shudder.

  “Get inside!” Cuno told Flora.

  The Indian who’d fired the arrow lifted his head above an adobe roof on the other side of the street. Cuno dropped to a knee, levering a cartridge into the Winchester’s breech, and fired two shots, blowing up mud and sod from the hovel’s roof a half second after the warrior pulled his green-and-ochre-painted face down.

  “We got trouble!” Flora cried.

  Sapp ran out of the barn behind Cuno and Flora and did a little dance as rifles thundered from gaps between buildings on the other side of the street and from other rooftops, the bullets ripping up mud in front of the barn and to both sides of Cuno. The young freighter picked out two more targets, and triggered two more rounds, but the Indians were hammering away in earnest now with both bullets and arrows.

  He turned to see Flora dashing into the barn while Sapp grabbed the right side door and began pulling it closed. Cuno grabbed the other door as a bullet hammered it and an arrow embedded itself in the street a foot from his right boot.