.45-Caliber Cross Fire

by Peter Brandvold

  “It’ll pass when I’m dead, Padre.” Spurr winced and took another pull from the flask. “My ole ticker’s about done for.” He looked at Cuno. “Fancy findin’ you here.”

  “You get around.”

  “We both get around.”

  “What’s a U.S. lawman doing in Mexico?”

  Spurr shook his head impatiently. “The girl with you?”

  “Flora?”

  Spurr’s eyes brightened with interest. “That’s her.”

  “She was. Rode out of here like a donkey with its tail on fire.”

  Spurr frowned, befuddled. “Why in the hell did she do that? Didn’t she realize I was law?”

  Cuno chuckled as he off cocked his Winchester’s hammer. “I reckon that’s why she did it.”

  Spurr continued to frown at Cuno as though the young freighter were speaking in a foreign tongue. He was about to say something else when the Yaqui queen moaned and lifted her lovely breasts behind her vest with a short, gasping intake of air.

  Spurr narrowed an eye at Cuno. “You ain’t gonna try to kill me, are you?”

  “I reckon I wouldn’t have to try.” Cuno glanced at the Winchester in his hand, then returned his cool gaze to Spurr.

  He’d seen the old lawman once back in Arizona a couple of months ago, and while the man had hunted him a long ways, he found himself harboring no ill feelings for him. He was just doing his job. Cuno knew what that was like—just trying to do a job. Besides, Spurr had let him go.

  “But if I wanted you dead, I could have let her do it,” he said.

  “Then do me a favor.” Spurr reached behind his back for a set of handcuffs, which he extended to Cuno. “Cuff her before she lays into us like the wildcat she is.”

  Cuno glanced at the Indian girl, who was trying to lift her head but was squeezing her eyes closed painfully. He took the cuffs and went over and grabbed one of her wrists. She fought him weakly, still half unconscious, and after he’d gotten the cuffs on both her wrists, she relaxed a little, as though the struggle had exhausted her.

  Relaxed, her face was incredibly beautiful, with rich full lips, a strong chin, and a long imperial nose. A medicine pouch dangled from a braided rawhide thong around her neck, as did a necklace of grizzly claws. Her skin was the color of varnished cherry, her long coarse hair like the tail of a coal-black horse.

  Her eyes opened suddenly, and she became a demon—a beautiful, chocolate-eyed demon glaring up at him, wanting to kill him, torture him slowly. But then her lips stretched back from her teeth painfully once more, the flames left her eyes, and the lids dropped over them. Her body relaxed, and she lay still.

  “Fire Eyes.”

  “What’s that?”

  “That’s what I’m told the border toughs call her.”

  “Acoma,” said the padre, taking a small sip from his flask and acquiring a slightly sheepish flush. “She is well known as a fierce fighter in these parts, determined to win back her tribal lands or die trying.” The priest studied the girl with a mix of fear and appreciation. “She tries very hard. The peons think she is a demon from the spirit world, sent here to test their faith. I think they might be right.”

  He turned to Spurr, who was also studying the Yaqui queen. “Are you better now, senor?”

  “Call me Spurr. And help me up, would you?” Spurr began pushing off the wall, and the padre slipped his flask into his robe and helped the old lawman to his feet. Spurr flexed his left arm and hand, then lowered the limb and took a deep breath of the damp air, the rain just a mist now and continuing to bead his thin-bearded face. “I reckon your brandy put some spark back in my blood. Thought I was a goner there. That’d have been simpler. Oh, well.”

  “Now what?” the padre asked.

  Spurr looked at Cuno and then at the girl. “Yeah, now what?”

  “You need to rest, Spurr. Please—I have a casa behind the church. You are most welcome there though I confess my furnishings are humble.”

  “I appreciate that, Father. I’d like to spend the night and…” He looked at Cuno. “I wanna hear about Miss Hammerlich. And I want answers to a few more questions swirlin’ around in this tired old brain, so if you’re thinkin’ of runnin’ out on me, you got another think comin’, boy. You’re with me till I say otherwise.”

  Spurr groaned and leaned heavily against the padre, and Cuno grabbed his other arm. Spurr glanced at him, “Forget me. Bring Fire Eyes. I don’t want her gettin’ away to cut our throats later tonight.”

  “That she would try,” the priest agreed as he began leading Spurr down the steps.

  Cuno gave a wry snort as he turned back to the girl. He’d do the lawman’s bidding, because he didn’t have anything pressing at the moment, or anywhere else to be, for that matter. And he supposed he owed the man for turning back with Mason near the Mexican border and not causing Cuno to have to kill him.

  Cuno leaned his rifle against the wall, then crouched and drew the queen up over his shoulder. She groaned and stiffened and rolled her head but otherwise did not fight him.

  When he had her positioned comfortably enough, he grabbed his rifle with his free hand and carried her on down the stairs. He followed Spurr and the padre out the rear side door and along a twisting path toward the high northern ridge. It was a five-minute walk during which Cuno saw no one, though smoke lifted from plenty of chimneys and goats and chickens milled in their pens that reeked of hay and ammonia.

  The aroma of beans and chili peppers wafting in the damp air made Cuno’s empty belly gurgle. A few rain-damp curs scrounged around privies and trash heaps, and one loose sow snorted around a dried-up corn and pumpkin patch.

  The padre’s shack sat alone near a low, sheer-sided dike about a hundred yards from where the main ridge rose sharply in the south. It was a small, square, brush-roofed stone shack with a wooden front gallery and a dozen chickens pecking in the hard-packed yard. A chicken coop, a small, trenched garden, and a privy flanked the place. A spring bubbled out of the side of the hill and formed a creek that curved around the shack’s right side, fringed with willows.

  “Come inside, senor,” the padre said, his rope-soled sandals flapping against the ground, chickens clucking their disdain for the intruders. “You may rest in my bed, small and lumpy as it is.”

  “Just a straw pallet would do me fine, Padre.”

  “Nonsense.”

  Behind the two men, Cuno stopped with the unconscious Yaqui dangling down his back. “Where you want her?”

  The padre pointed at the front gallery that was propped on stones. “Set Fire Eyes there. Tie her to a post, if you wish. I see no reason to keep her, however. She is Yaqui. They are savages. It might be best for all of us, including her, to take her out back and shoot her.” The padre regarded the unconscious girl fatefully and crossed himself.

  “You’re prob’ly right, Padre,” Spurr said. “But I reckon I’m weaker than you folks down here and couldn’t shoot the girl like I’d kill a rabid dog.” He glanced at Cuno, jerking his head to the gallery. “Cuff her to the post good and tight. I’ll figure out what to do with her tomorrow.”

  While the padre led Spurr into the cabin, Cuno eased the girl onto the porch floor, resting her back against the post that sat at the top of the gallery’s three steps and supported the sagging roof. He removed her cuffs, then wrapped her arms around the post behind her and cuffed her wrists.

  Her head sagged, hair tumbling down both sides of her red-brown face, obscuring it. But as Cuno straightened, she lifted her head and opened her eyes that shone amber in the dying light. She pulled at the cuffs till Cuno thought she was going to break the post, but then she stopped and, gritting her teeth, said in a menacingly low voice and in Spanish-accented but clear English, “I am going to gut you and twist your insides around your neck. Keel you slow!”

  “Wouldn’t blame you a bit.”

  Spurr poked his head out the open door. “Boy, fetch my horse. Just off the main trail into town. Big roan.”

  Cu
no stared at him.

  Spurr shrugged. “Call it payback for savin’ your hide back there.”

  “I saved your hide.”

  “But I saved yours first. Them Yaqui were movin’ in quick!”

  Spurr turned away from the door and disappeared inside.

  Again, Cuno snorted. His belly gurgled. He could do with a meal.

  He glanced at the stream running down from a stone trough someone had mortared around the lip of the spring, embedding a single silver cross in the mortar. Water would do for now. He walked into the grass and willows, knelt, and took a long drink of the cold, sweet water. He hadn’t had a drink in hours. Inside the livery barn, he’d been sure he was going to die—probably slowly—at the hands of the Yaqui.

  The situation had looked especially grim when the Gatling gun had opened up in the bell tower and hammered forty-five slugs through the rotten door and sent them zinging around inside the barn’s brick walls. While the idea hadn’t frightened him overmuch, it had made him thirsty though his canteens were empty. Funny the things you think about when you think you’re about to die. He’d really wanted a last drink of water, as dying thirsty seemed especially uncomfortable.

  He took another long drink, rubbed some of the fresh water across his damp, sweaty, grimy face, then grabbed his rifle and tramped off in search of the old lawman’s horse, chuckling again at the oldster’s nerve but feeling no acrimony. There was something about the old lawman—his wry toughness despite his obvious health problems—that reminded him of his own frontiersman father, one of the toughest old devils Cuno had ever known.

  As he walked through the town, meandering around mud puddles, the light faded from the slate-gray sky, like a lamp slowly being turned down beneath an old dishtowel. There were a few people out now, one dippering water from a rain barrel, one feeding his three penned cattle, both regarding him somberly. He found the big roan where Spurr had told him he would. It was a surprisingly sleek and fine, big-boned animal with some obviously noble Spanish blood in him—in sharp contrast to its knotted-up, craggy-faced, bandy-legged owner.

  At first the horse resisted Cuno’s lead, then, when Cuno had offered a few lumps of sugar from his shirt pocket, the horse trailed him willingly as he led him along the meandering main street where more and more people were beginning to appear, mostly standing around outside cantinas or brothels. They all stopped talking as he passed and swung their heads around to follow him down the street with their wary, incredulous gazes.

  As he approached the big, mud-brick livery barn at the far end of town, the old man whom he’d assumed owned the place was walking around the dead white men and Yaqui littering the street, his corncob pipe in his teeth. Cuno tied the roan to a handle of one of the barn’s open doors.

  “You kill the Yaqui,” the livery owner said, wagging his head as he puffed his pipe. He looked at the dead Indians sprawled before him and continued shaking his head. “Very bad. Very bad. More will come. They will be very angry.”

  “Talk to the old lawman about that.”

  Cuno stepped over the dead outrider, a man called Hansen, whom the Gatling gun had shot through the door, and stopped just inside the barn. He turned around quickly and walked over to where the dead cutthroats lay. All except for Sapp, that was. He could see the tamped down mud and blood splatter where Beers’s second-in-command had fallen, but the man himself was gone.

  “Where’s Sapp?” Cuno looked at the old man smoking his pipe. “Where’s the man who fell here?”

  The old livery owner didn’t say anything, but he cut his eyes toward the livery barn behind Cuno. The younger man turned, raised his Winchester, levered a shell into the breech, and slowly approached the opening. If Sapp was alive, he’d be trouble if he knew Cuno had helped the old lawman.

  Cuno stepped into the barn’s musty darkness, saw the three saddle horses at the front, including Renegade, and two wagons still hitched to the mules. None of the stock had been hit by the Gatling fire, but the beds and canvas covers of both wagons had taken a few shots. They must have been carrying dynamite or gunpowder, because Sapp and the others had kept regarding the wagons warily after the Gatling had started hammering bullets through the front window and the brittle front doors.

  None of that concerned Cuno now. What had attracted his attention was the gap between the two wagons, where the third wagon had sat.

  It and its team were gone.

  Cuno looked down and followed the fresh wheel tracks with his eyes. They wagon had backed over Hansen—the impression of one wide wheel shone across the man’s broad back clad in a black wool shirt—and into the street before turning westward into the open desert.

  Cuno studied the tracks for a time, then, realizing it was no concern of his if Sapp had made it out alive, he retrieved Renegade from the large pen at the front of the barn, looked the horse overly quickly for any possible bullet wounds, then led him out into street where the old livery owner studied him incredulously.

  He looked to the west. Why was it that he had no urge to follow Flora and Sapp and rejoin the rest of the caravan?

  He turned to the liveryman. “What’s in them two wagons is yours. You might find something in there to help stave off a Yaqui attack, if one comes.”

  He swung up onto Renegade’s back and headed into a break between the church and another building, trailing the old lawman’s roan.

  15

  IT WAS NEARLY dark when Cuno rode into the yard of the padre’s shack, scattering the chickens that the padre was scrambling around, trying to herd back into their coop. He was being helped by a little dog, part Chihuahua, who ran frantically around the yard, yipping and nipping at the chickens’ tail feathers and sending them flying.

  The padre yelled at the little dog in Spanish. The little dog ignored him, a devilish glee in its eyes.

  The shack’s windows were lit, silhouetting Fire Eyes sitting where Cuno had left her against the post, and the old lawman sitting back in a wicker chair between the front door and the window to the right of it. Spurr held a steaming cup in one hand, a cigarette in the other.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” the old lawman said in his gravelly voice, faintly slurred from the brandy he’d obviously laced his coffee with. “I figured you must have taken my horse and lit out for South America.”

  Cuno stepped down from Renegade’s back and tossed his reins over the ironwood porch rail. “Nah, you didn’t neither.”

  Spurr pursed his lips as he studied the young man.

  Cuno tied the big roan to the porch rail as well, then unbuckled the latigo beneath his belly. “How you feelin’?”

  “Fit as a fiddle. Coffee and tanglefoot and a cigarette rolled with this peppery Mexican tobaccy is the best medicine known to man.” Spurr drew deep on the quirley, causing the coal to glow against his seamed, broad-nosed face. He held the smoke in his lungs, savoring it, then released it slowly and looked at Renegade. “Nice horse you got there.”

  Cuno pulled the saddle off the roan’s back and set the saddle over the porch rail. “You got four fine hooves here yourself. You federals must make better wages than I figured.”

  “Got ole Cochise there off a wild horse trapper in the Pryor Mountains, Wyoming Territory. Got some old Spanish blood in him, and the pride of a noble line.” As if in response to his rider’s compliment, Cochise lifted his head high, blew softly, spreading his chest, and twitched his ears.

  Cuno slung Cochise’s bridle over the horse’s saddle, then began unleathering Renegade. He glanced at Fire Eyes, who sat now with a wool blanket draped across her shoulders. The padre had wrapped a white gauze bandanna around her head. It glowed against her smooth, dark skin, blood spotting the wrap across her temple. She sat with her back straight, shoulders pulled back, breasts out. Her eyes were wide and unblinking, her jaws set hard with mute defiance.

  “Looks like the queen is feelin’ better, too,” Cuno said.

  “I think so. She done called me just about everything I ever been called in
English and Spanish and threw in some Yaqui I couldn’t understand for good measure.” Spurr chuckled. “That’s the thanks I get for convincing the padre to wrap her head.”

  “What’re you gonna do with her?”

  “Hell, I don’t know. If I leave her here, the Mexicans will kill her.” Spurr glanced at the padre now closing the door of his coop on the last, clucking chicken, the little dog standing on its back feet to observe the festivities. “It’s sort of like havin’ a rabid puma in a cage. If I turn her loose, she’ll likely go back to her bloody ways. I’d best feed her a bullet, but I’ll have to work up to it.” Spurr took another sip of his coffee. “Shame to kill a girl so purty, but the rules play out different down here.”

  Fire Eyes stared straight ahead, at neither Spurr nor Cuno but straight across the edge of the gallery. Her chest rose and fell slowly, heavily. Her anger was almost a palpable thing hovering over the cabin.

  “Come and sit down over here,” Spurr said.

  Cuno racked his tack near’s Spurr’s on the porch rail. “That an order?”

  “Hell, yes,” Spurr barked as the padre approached, carrying a dead chicken, the little dog following close on his heels. “You’re a fugitive from American justice, damnit, so don’t go actin’ all snooty. I let you go at the border because Mason seemed to think he made a mistake, but I can still haul you back in chains.”

  The padre glanced at both men warily, then mounted the porch between them and held up the chicken. “Stew and tortillas, amigos! And perhaps a little pulque, uh? It will soften the hardness between you.” He went on inside, and the dog’s toenails clicked on the hard-packed earthen floor behind him.

  Cuno had held on to his blanket roll, and now he draped it over Fire Eyes’s nearly bare shoulders against the growing, penetrating night chill.

  She shook her head and shoulders fiercely, and the blanket dropped to the ground beneath the gallery.

  Cuno sighed and picked up the blanket. He tossed it over the rail near his saddle and looked at Spurr, who sat watching him closely, his eyes reflecting a little of the amber lamplight emanating from the window behind his right shoulder. Cuno met the look with a grave one of his own.