.45-Caliber Firebrand

by Peter Brandvold

Cuno tramped past the grimly staring Kuttner to the door. “No, thanks.”

  “I have a wonderful cook. A full-blooded Sioux with a club foot. Ain’t much good for anything but cooking, and the cooking he does right well. He’s preparing an elk roast with a delightful chokecherry sauce.” Cuno turned from the office door as the old man sat back in his chair, casually touching a match to his pipe and puffing smoke like an old steam engine on an uphill push.

  Trent said, “You and your men are welcome to bed down here in the lodge, as well. I have four empty rooms upstairs.”

  “We’ll dine in the cook shack and throw down with your men in the bunkhouse, Mr. Trent.” Cuno drew a deep, weary breath. “Thanks just the same. We’ll rest the mules for a day or two, be pullin’ out again by Wednesday.”

  Trent lowered the pipe and stared across the room at Cuno, brows beetled. “Please. It’s the least I can do to compensate your men—”

  Cuno tapped his breast pocket. “The check will do.” He wheeled and tramped back down the dark hall toward the front door.

  In the ceiling, he heard the slap-squawk of running, wet feet. The tapping continued beyond him overhead. As he approached the broad foyer of the front door, steps squeaked to his right.

  He stopped and turned to see a girl standing halfway down a dark, narrow stairwell—the same long-haired blonde he’d seen in the yard with the cat.

  She stood now, dripping wet and holding a buffalo robe around her slender shoulders. With her hair plastered across her head and over the robe’s broad collar, she looked like a half-drowned gopher. Only her face was far from gopher-like.

  It was, in a word, angelic.

  “Mr. Massey?” she said softly, her chest rising and falling heavily beneath the bulky, brown robe.

  The robe came down to just below her knees. One bare foot was slightly lifted on one step, while the other had come down sideways on the step below. Her wet calves were peach-pale, smooth, and perfectly sculpted.

  Cuno’s voice caught in his throat, and he found himself fumbling his hat from his head. “It’s Cuno, Miss . . . ?”

  “My bathroom is over Father’s office, and I heard you talking. I wasn’t meaning to eavesdrop.” The girl tipped her head to one side and knotted her brows. “Won’t you please come to supper? We seldom get company out here, and Father gets lonely. He told me all about how you hunted down the killer of your father and stepmother. He’s quite the connoisseur of gunslingers, you see, and he’s been waiting to meet you.”

  The pretty, blue-eyed waif bent her knees with beseeching and balled her cheeks, which were mottled red from her hot bath and from chagrin at her half-dressed state. “Won’t you please join us? It would mean so much to him, and he’s ordered a big, elaborate meal in your honor, Mr. Massey.”

  She fumbled with the robe, which she held from the inside, up close to her throat, with both hands. As she did, the two unbuttoned flaps parted slightly to reveal the deep, inside curves of her creamy breasts. They, too, appeared pink from the hot bath.

  The vision bit Cuno deep, and his throat dried. In one fell swoop, his beef with the old, arrogant rancher was gone, and all that remained was this naked, wet vision of young, vibrant femininity clad in a buffalo robe before him.

  “I reckon . . . if you think it’s that important . . .”

  “I do, indeed, Mr. Massey.”

  “All right, then,” he stammered, his eyes roving down her delicate body once more before climbing back to those deep, soulful eyes set wide above a long, fine nose. “I’ll be back.”

  The girl turned suddenly and began padding back up the stairs. “Thank you!”

  “Hey, wait a minute.”

  She stopped, turned. The robe parted even farther, revealing for a split second all of one pink, bud-like nipple. She seemed totally oblivious of her beauty and sensuality, which was somehow enhanced by that bulky, moth-chewed robe.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Oh,” she said, smiling, the flush rising in her cheeks. Her eyes flashed in the last of the light emanating from the windows on either side of the lodge’s front door. “I’m Michelle Trent. I live here most all the time now.”

  “You’ll be joining us for supper?”

  “Of course.”

  Cuno felt his lips spread with a shit-eating grin, and he was glad Serenity couldn’t see him now. “All right, then.”

  The girl continued up the stairs. Cuno donned his hat and stumbled out the lodge’s front door.

  6

  AS CUNO DESCENDED the grade from the big house toward the bunkhouse and stables, he saw Renegade staring at him from over the corral gate at the yard’s western edge. The skewbald whinnied and twitched his ears—little more than a silhouette in the last of the twilight.

  “Eat your hay,” Cuno said, glancing at the pile of cured timothy mounded at the horse’s feet. His mind was on the girl and the flesh peeking out from behind the bulky robe.

  The men had disappeared from the branding corral, and buttery light shone in the sashed bunkhouse windows, over the broad porch equipped with a hammock and several stout log chairs as well as a sandbox spittoon. A rumble of conversation emanated from both the bunkhouse and the cook shack, which was still spewing smoke from its fieldstone chimney. The smoke was rife with the aroma of spiced beef and coffee.

  The Chinese cook could be heard, berating someone for tracking manure onto his floor then ordering the man outside: “Git! Git! Git!”

  A hatted silhouette carrying a plate and a steaming cup of coffee stumbled out the shack’s side door, laughing, and mounted the bunkhouse porch. As the waddie pushed into the bunkhouse, Cuno moved up to his two wagons fronting the supply shed’s loading dock.

  One of the wagons was nearly empty, and Serenity and Dallas Snowberger were winching one of the crates up to the loading dock on the shed’s raised platform—raised to keep rodents and other critters from burrowing into the place from under the floor and befouling costly supplies that weren’t all that easy to acquire out here.

  “You fellas about done?” Cuno said.

  “Oh, look who’s here!” Serenity said as he turned the winch’s squeaky crank atop the loading dock. “Just in time to help us unload the last wagon.”

  “Quit grousin’, you stove-up ole mossy horn.” Cuno tapped his tunic pocket as he climbed the ramp angling off the wagon’s open tailgate. “I got your money. We’ll split it up when we get to Crow Feather. Enough here for a nice, long drunk and carouse in Denver on the way to New Mexico.”

  “Hazard pay?” asked Snowberger as he headed back to the wagon.

  “I reckon.”

  “Ain’t gonna do Dutch much good,” the graybeard said as Cuno carried a crate of bagged Arbuckles down the wagon ramp.

  “Were you expecting it to?” Cuno set the crate on the ground under the winch hook, wrapped the leather harness around the crate, and set the hook. As Serenity winched up the crate, Cuno looked around. “I thought Quirt was gonna send some of his rannies out to give us a hand.”

  “That broken nose you gave him changed his mind,” Snowberger said, balancing a bag of parched corn on his shoulder. “He decided we could do the unloadin’ ourselves.”

  “Hope there’s food left,” Serenity said. “The smell o’ that beef’s been pressin’ my belly button ever tighter against my backbone.”

  “No beef tonight,” Cuno said, grunting under the weight of a parched corn sack that Snowberger handed over the side of the wagon. “Fellas, tonight we’re headin’ to a fancy sit-down meal up to the main house. Trent’s special invitation.”

  Cuno didn’t mention the daughter’s fortification of the invitation, but the image of her standing on the narrow, dark stairs, sopping wet under that bulky robe with the partly open front, scampered across his mind again like a mischievous cat, flooding his loins with a young man’s keen, hot desire.

  “You mean we’re gonna sit down to a meal with the man that hornswoggled us into carryin’ rifles and ammo he didn’t pay
us for?”

  “He paid us.”

  “Only after we done carried ’em,” Snowberger grunted.

  “And Dutch went under on account o’ them savages we weren’t warned about,” Serenity added, angrily cranking the winch. “What’d he have to say about that?”

  “Not much,” Cuno snapped, annoyed at the question. “He wrote us a check.”

  He grabbed the last feed sack out of Snowberger’s hands and tossed it down beneath the hook. “But I don’t think Dutch would mind all that much if we went up to the house and sat down to a meal with the man. At least, I’m gonna go. You two can stay down here and swap big windies with Quirt’s boys, if you wanna be rock-headed about it.”

  “Ah, hell, I’ll go,” Snowberger said, dropping out of the wagon’s empty bed with a grunt. “Like to tell the man where he can go . . . after I’ve done smoked his cigars and enjoyed his food and liquor.”

  “Hell, I’ll throw in,” Serenity said, stomping bandy-legged down the loading dock’s board steps. “I wanna tell ole Trent what I think of him up close enough that he can smell my rancid breath!”

  “Yeah, well, you’re gonna have a bath first,” Cuno grouched as he started removing the sheeting from the second wagon. “So you best spend the next hour or so, while we bed the mules down, getting used to the idea.”

  On the other side of the wagon, Serenity dropped his jaw and widened his eyes, flabbergasted. “A bath?”

  “You heard me.”

  “Jesus Christ! Who else the old fucker got dinin’ up there—U. S. Grant?”

  The tips of Cuno’s ears warmed, but he kept his mouth shut.

  In spite of the dustup earlier in the yard, the Chinaman seemed pleased to oblige Cuno and his men with hot-water baths in the open lean-to shed off the rear of the cook shack.

  The stocky son of Han seemed downright eager to do it, in fact, in spite of the twenty men he’d just fed and all the cleanup he had yet to do in the kitchen. The man enjoyed a good row now and then, Cuno figured, as he ran a bar of lye soap across his work-sculpted pecs, and the Chinaman dumped another bucketful of steaming water between his legs. The steam billowed in the cold night air.

  The Chinese cook didn’t seem to take umbrage with the nick Serenity had given him across his fleshy right cheek, for, as the Chinaman filled the tubs and rummaged for towels, the two got on like old army pals, bantering and joking and wheezing deep laughs, though the Chinaman appeared to understand only about half of all Serenity’s raspy, half-shouted words.

  As Cuno scrubbed at the grime and mule stench en-grained in his brawny hide, Serenity sang as he lathered his bony chest, looking like some scrawny, plucked, bearded chicken in his own corrugated tin tub nearby. Dallas Snowberger, contented to merely soak and let the suds do all the work, hunkered low in his own tub and puffed a long, black cigar from the Chinaman’s own personal stash.

  Cuno lifted a leg to scrub a foot, unable to extinguish the hauntingly celestial face of Logan Trent’s daughter from his mind. A girl like that—all sensuous innocence with a well-filled corset, to boot—could tie a man’s loins in knots. Cuno found himself not as eager as he had been to hightail it back to Crow Feather.

  “Come on, fellas,” he ordered, rising from the tub, the suds sliding on down his chest and thighs. “Time to haul ass up to the lodge.”

  Serenity squawked a mocking laugh. “Wouldn’t wanna keep ole Trent waitin’, now would we?”

  “Trent sure got stuck in his craw,” Snowberger mused aloud as he slitted an eye at Cuno and continued puffing his cigar.

  “Somethin’ up there did, anyways,” Serenity said, clamping an arthritic hand on each side of his tub and hoisting his bony, pale body up out of the water. “Sorta looks like he seen a ghost, don’t he?”

  “Or a witch. Maybe one o’ them warlocks the Injuns believe in.”

  “I’m hungry,” Cuno growled. “Christ, I haven’t eaten since noon, and then it was only a handful of Serenity’s overboiled beans.”

  They dried, then dressed in the only other set of clothes they’d brought along, shivering in the chill night air behind the cook shack, the water still steaming from the tubs, a big moon rising over the high, bulky eastern ridge.

  Cuno pulled on a pair of faded denims—old but clean—and a thin doeskin tunic bleached bone-white by countless washings. He knotted a red neckerchief with white polka dots around his neck, stuffed the tails into the tunic, stomped into his boots, strapped on his gun belt, and donned his hat, taking an extra moment to adjust the angle.

  He strode back through the cook shack, where the cook was washing dishes on one of the ranges in the back shadows, and singing in his eerie tonal tongue, a cigarette dangling from between his mustached lips. Cuno tossed the man a silver dollar, thanked him for his generous services, and continued on out to the porch.

  Impatiently, he waited for his less-eager comrades. When they both arrived—Serenity wearing buckskins that looked no fresher than the ones he’d worn on the trip and Snowberger in denims, brown shirt, and simple black vest—they began tramping across the dark yard and up the slow grade toward the well-lit house hulking atop the hill.

  Near one of the several corrals on the south side of the yard, fronting the creek, three horseback riders sat talking to a man standing before them. Cuno couldn’t hear what they were saying, but their tones were grave. It took him a few seconds to realize the man on the ground, clad in a black frock coat, wavy pewter hair glistening with oil and smoking a stout cigar, was the foreman, Henry Kuttner.

  The aroma of the man’s cigar as well as his musky cologne wafted on the chill, fall breeze.

  Beyond the men, on the far side of the creek, running hoof thuds rose. Cuno, Serenity, and Snowberger stopped and turned toward the creek, as did the mounted men and Kuttner.

  “Jesus Christ!” one of the waddies said, hipped around in his saddle. “Sounds like those boys got the devil’s hounds on their tails!”

  “What now?” Kuttner said, removing his cigar from his teeth and squaring his shoulders at the ranch’s front portal into which a couple of old bison skulls had been nailed. The portal and the bleached skulls were silhouetted against the starry, moonlit sky.

  The jostling shadows of the four riders came on across the sage-tufted flat, galloping hard. They thundered across the bridge and pushed on under the portal, and in seconds they were rounding the far corrals and checking their mounts down as they approached Kuttner and the other mounted waddies.

  “Trouble, Boss!” one of the newcomers exclaimed, sliding out of his saddle while his horse skidded to a dust-lifting halt and one of the other horses whinnied angrily behind him. The man scrambled around to one of the other men, who crouched low in his saddle, one hand clamped around the arrow protruding from the side of his neck, just behind his ear. “Blackie took an arrow around Wolf Head Canyon!”

  Kuttner stood statue-still, fists on his hips, feet spread. His cigar glowed in his right hand.

  “He said there was five of ’em, Boss,” one of the other newcomers said, holding the reins of his jittery mount up close to his chest. “Ambushed him at the very bottom of the canyon. Lucky he was on old Tom, or he never woulda made it outta there with his hair!”

  “Get him into the bunkhouse,” Kuttner said, jerking his head toward the lighted windows behind him. “Have Riker tend him. Any of you other boys see anything?”

  “Just sign,” said a bulky man in a blanket coat, his collar drawn up to his ears. “And what the magpies left of three more dead cows. But I don’t like it, Mr. Kuttner.” The man cursed his leaping horse, and when the horse settled some, the man returned his bright-eyed gaze to Kuttner once more. “I got a bad sense o’ things. Lots of tracks criss crossin’ the range, every which way. Movin’ in closer to the headquarters. You know that big cottonwood tree on that saddleback butte by the Three-Fork range? There was a Ute arrow stickin’ out of it. Just the arrow. Nothin’ else. They’re gettin’ set for something—I’ll guaran-damn-tee you th
at!”

  “You don’t know that, Bill,” Kuttner said calmly, just loudly enough for Cuno to hear on the other side of the yard. “Might be they’re just tryin’ to make us jumpy.”

  “They done it,” Bill said. “Yessir, Mr. Kuttner, I don’t mind tellin’ you—I’m damn jumpy!”

  The first rider had eased the wounded man out of his saddle, and as they moved off toward the bunkhouse together, Kuttner tapped ashes from his stogie. “Put your horses up and get some grub, Bill. You, too, Reno. I’ll be up at the house. Send someone to fill me in on Blackie’s condition after Riker has checked him out.”

  When Bill and Reno had led their own and the other two horses off to the stables, Kuttner talked to the four fresh riders for another half minute, then sent them galloping out of the ranch yard. Cuno glanced at Serenity and Snowberger standing beside him. Serenity cocked a brow. Snowberger just looked dark.

  Kuttner strode up to them puffing his stogie. He, too, looked dark as he regarded the ground as though he’d dropped a quarter.

  “Looks like you got your hands full out here, Kuttner.” Cuno jerked his head toward the men just now thundering across the wooden bridge and heading off into the moonlit flats beyond. “Scout riders?”

  Kuttner nodded. “Try to keep four out at all times after sunset.”

  Cuno introduced Serenity and Snowberger to Kuttner, and after a stiff shaking of hands, the four headed up toward the house.

  “How many men do you have on the place, Kuttner?” the graybeard asked.

  “Nearly twenty. Enough to hold off Leaping Wolf’s band. He don’t have no more than fifteen or twenty himself, and, from what my scouts tell me, only a handful of rifles.”

  “Well, you got about twenty brand-new Winchesters, now, don’t you, Kuttner?” Snowberger growled as they headed up the house’s broad porch steps.

  “That we do,” the foreman said, opening the front door and waving the others in ahead of him. A frosty smile shone in his eyes. He had a voice like sandpaper raked across a steel file. “All the way back and left, gentlemen. First, don’t be offended if I ask you to hang your hats and guns on the pegs just inside the door, and to scrape your boots on the mat.”