.45-Caliber Firebrand

by Peter Brandvold

Cuno hiked his cartridge belt higher on his hips and glanced southward as he continued across the yard, where several drovers, fully clothed now, some wearing bandages or arm slings, were dragging off the dead Indians. Arrows bristled from the log buildings and even a couple of the adobe-brick hovels and corral slats. The corralled horses were running in several circles, tails arched and eyes fearful.

  Cuno was glad to see Renegade among them, looking unharmed but nervous.

  Blood smeared the dust and manure of the yard. One Indian, wearing the blue, gold-buttoned tunic of a cavalry sergeant and the checked trousers of a whiskey drummer, had piled up against a stock tank fronting the blacksmith shop. His liver-colored innards were piled up in front of his badly torn belly. Half his face was gone. Doubtless the work of the cowboy with the barn blaster.

  Cuno heard the mules braying inside the stables. One of the wounded ranch hands, on the ground in front of a hay barn, was sobbing and shouting curses while two others tried to lift him to his feet. One arrow protruded from his left knee while another bristled from his crotch.

  He was screaming like a woman in labor as Cuno mounted the bunkhouse porch, the floor of which owned several pools of fresh, glistening blood. Serenity was squatting near a water barrel, staring out across the yard, smoking a quirley.

  “You hit?” Cuno asked the wizened old freighter.

  “Takin’ a break. Damn near threw my back out helpin’ Dallas inside.”

  “How bad’s he hit?”

  “Bad.”

  “Will he make it?”

  “I’ve seen folks make it after worse, but he don’t look good.” Serenity rolled his pale blue eyes up to Cuno. “I’ve seen mad Injuns before, but never ones as mad as these.”

  Cuno moved toward the bunkhouse’s open door.

  “How’s it up to the house?” Serenity asked.

  “Bad,” Cuno said, moving into the bunkhouse and squinting around through the wafting powder smoke.

  One of the drovers—a middle-aged gent with close-cropped gray hair and a goatee—and the Chinaman, Ming, were tending two wounded men on bunks to Cuno’s left. On a bottom bunk to his right, Dallas Snowberger lay on his side, facing the center of the room and stretching his lips back from his teeth.

  Dallas’s face was pale and sweat-streaked. A blanket was pulled up to his neck, but he was shivering like it was forty below zero.

  “Ming, I’m gonna need help over here with Timmy,” the gray-haired drover, apparently the ranch’s medico, said as Cuno moved over to his mule skinner. “This arrow’s buried deep in his shin bone!”

  Cuno dragged a chair up beside Snowberger’s bunk and sank into it. “How you doin’, Dallas? How bad you hit?”

  “Those sons o’ bitches,” the freighter rasped, using his left hand to slide the blanket back off his left hip. The fletched end of one arrow protruded from his upper right chest, while the fletched end of a second arrow protruded from his left butt cheek.

  The corn-stuffed pad beneath him was soaked with so much blood it was seeping through the bottom of the bunk to the floor.

  Snowberger laughed through his teeth, spittle bubbling behind his lips. “Seen one trying to sneak around behind the bunkhouse, and I shot him. Didn’t see the other one by the privy. Scrawny little savage drilled one arrow through my chest and, when it turned me around and threw me against the bunkhouse, the bastard shot another arrow through my ass!”

  “All right,” Cuno said, setting the palm of his hand over the end of the arrow sticking out of the freighter’s chest. “We gotta get this out before you bleed to death.”

  “No, no, no,” Snowberger said quickly, shaking his head. “The hombre over yonder—Riker’s his name—used to be an army surgeon. He’ll be over here just as soon as he gets that arrow outta the shin of the fella I fleeced last night at cards.”

  The freighter was rambling, his eyes dancing in their sockets. He was in shock, and, mercifully, his inner lights were dimming.

  “Poor bastard,” he continued hoarsely. “They scalped him, too. Dragged him off into the brush behind the hay barn and scalped him. I won fifty dollars off ole Schotzy last night and then, first thing this morning, some Coman che shoots him in the shin and then him and another’n drag him off and scalp him. Damn! That’s gotta hurt so fuckin’ bad!”

  There was a screeching yell, and Cuno turned to see the two men carrying the man with the arrow in his crotch through the bunkhouse door. They carried the man between them, each with an arm around his back and another under his thighs. The poor man’s face was even more a picture of raging agony than was Snowberger’s.

  “Dub took one to the oysters!” one of the other men said.

  The surgeon, Riker, looked up from Schotzy’s leg. His rawboned, blood-splattered face crumpled, and he cursed. “Put him on the table . . . gentle.” Returning his attention to the arrow jutting from Schotzy’s shin, the medico grumbled, “Never had to pull one out of a man’s balls before. What I wouldn’t give to dig those two raping bastards up and spit in what’s left of their eyeballs!”

  “Can I get you anything while you’re waitin’?” Cuno asked Snowberger. “A shot of whiskey . . . ?”

  The freighter shook his head. “You . . . you know what I’d really like . . . more than anything?”

  “Tell me.”

  “A cup of hot coffee. Got up so damn fast, never even had a cup of belly wash yet this mornin’.” The freighter shook violently, gritting his teeth so hard they made slight cracking sounds. “Cravin’ a cup real bad, Cuno.”

  Cuno walked over to the stove and placed a hand on it. Cold. No one had had time to build a fire, much less brew coffee.

  When he’d gotten a fire going, he found the big, black percolator on a shelf, along with a half sack of Arbuckles. He went out to the porch, filled the percolator from the water barrel, tossed in a few handfuls of coffee, and set the pot on the stove.

  Adding more wood to the firebox, he moved back over to Snowberger, who was still shivering and gritting his teeth and staring at the floor. “It’s coming, Dallas. Hold on.”

  Snowberger nodded slightly.

  “I’m gonna go outside and see if anyone else needs help.” Truth was, he couldn’t stand watching the man suffer any longer, especially since there was nothing, aside from making coffee, that Cuno could do for him.

  Snowberger nodded again, and Cuno headed back toward the door. Five men had gathered around the table on the other side of the range. They were passing a bottle and loading their six-shooters and carbines, red-faced with fury and arguing over ammunition.

  Cuno swerved away from the door and strode over to the table. “You fellas headin’ after the Injuns?”

  “That’s right,” said one of the men. “Wanna ride along, mule skinner?”

  “How do you know it’s not a trap?”

  “Well, now, I reckon we don’t know that, do we?” said one of the others, puffing a half-smoked cheroot while filling his cartridge belt from an open box. The man’s long face was etched with anger, and he batted his lids against the smoke. “But we sure as shit up a cow’s ass are gonna find out.”

  “They’re hoping you’ll do just what you’re doing—leave the ranch and fog their trail. Meanwhile, one faction’s likely to circle back and hit us from another direction. Hit us while we’re short-handed.”

  The man with the cheroot chuckled as he glanced at one of his partners. “The mule skinner sounds yaller to me, boys!”

  “You go off half-cocked,” Cuno warned, “and you’re gonna get yourselves coldcocked out there, without help and damn little cover. Looks to me like there’s a hell of a lot more braves out there than Trent first counted.”

  “What makes you such an expert on Injuns?” asked the first man who’d spoken.

  Before Cuno could reply that he’d been hauling freight through Indian country since he was ten years old, a short, grizzled man with a two-day beard rammed a fresh load into his shiny new Winchester and said, “Look, son, those orders
came down from the main house. It ain’t our job to question ’em, just follow ’em. Savvy? Besides, Luke here lost his best friend a few minutes ago, so you can’t really expect him or any of the rest of us to sit back on our spurs, now, can you?”

  Luke blew smoke through his sunburned nostrils and gave Cuno a mocking, sidelong look. “Savvy, mule skinner?”

  “Besides,” the older man said, “those Injuns have about one firestick for every ten braves. Now, thanks to your freight run, we have these purty new Winchester repeaters.”

  “They’re no guarantee,” Cuno growled as, knowing the men were being led by passion and not reason, he swung back to the stove. He tossed two more logs into the firebox and headed outside.

  Serenity was sitting on the top porch step now, smoking a loosely rolled quirley and taking apart a short-barreled Bisley, setting each part including bullets on the red neckerchief spread out beside him. He had his regular two pistols—a Colt Trapper model and an old, rusty Paterson, large as a smithy’s hammer—resting on the splintered step between his knee-high, lace-up boots.

  The graybeard glanced over his shoulder at Cuno, squinting one pale blue eye. “Heard ya in there. You’re pissin’ into a prairie cyclone.”

  “You ain’t just choppin’ tobacky.”

  “Best clean your guns and sharpen your knives. I took this here spare off the man who dropped dead beside me. He ain’t gonna need it where he’s goin’, but when old Dancin’ Wolf returns, I sure am!”

  “Leapin’ Wolf.”

  “Leapin’, Dancin’—he’ll be back just as soon as those five big chunks of wolf bait behind you ride out the southern trail. Take my advice and save a bullet for yourself. As mad as that old war chief is over the killin’ of his little girl—and I can’t say as I blame him one damn bit—he’s fixin’ to roast us all over low fires while his squaws cut little bitty chunks out of our hides just to hear how loud we can scream.”

  “I just love talkin’ to you when I’m in a tight spot,” Cuno grunted. “You always make me feel better.”

  When he heard the percolator coughing and sputtering, he went into the bunkhouse, filled a tin cup, and took it over to Snowberger’s bunk. Crouching, he said, “Here you go, Dallas. Good and strong, just like—”

  The wounded freighter lay as before, on his side. Only now he wasn’t moving. The skin of his face hung slack, and his liquid brown eyes were death-glazed.

  12

  “THOSE SONS O’ bitches didn’t need to kill Dallas,” Serenity said as he and Cuno stood over the grave that Cuno had dug while the older freighter had fashioned a crude wooden cross from cedar branches and rawhide. “He didn’t have nothin’ to do with rapin’ and killin’ ole Dancing Wolf’s daughter.”

  Cuno stared grimly down at the blanket-wrapped bundle that was Dallas Snowberger lying at the bottom of the black hole. “I told you, Serenity, it’s Leapin’ Wolf.”

  “Leapin’, Dancin’ . . .”

  “You wanna say a few words?”

  “Wouldn’t wanna embarrass him. Dallas was a man of few words. Too much talkin’ made him antsy.”

  “All right, then.”

  Cuno picked up his shovel and, sweaty from the half hour he’d spent digging the grave in the sunshine atop a low knoll just east of the Trent ranchstead, began shoveling the orange dirt and gravel back into the grave. The first few shovelfuls thumped dully atop the mounded, zigzag-striped trade blanket Dallas had used for a bedroll.

  The breeze brushed the grass around him, and a couple of magpies were skulking and mewling in a wind-gnarled cedar.

  “He have a family?” Cuno asked while he tossed another load into the hole and Serenity adjusted the cross with a bunch-lipped grunt. “The man never talked to me about anything but mules and wagons. Most I ever heard him say at one time was in the bunkhouse, just before he died, grievin’ over Schotzy.”

  “He told me one night, when whiskey made him downright chatty, that he had a ma in Chugwater. Said she raised chickens, and that’s about all I ever knowed about Dallas . . . ’cept he liked that pretty little mulatto whore, Lilly anna, in Crow Feather.” Serenity chuckled and straightened, his knees creaking.

  “If we get outta this, I’ll get his pay to her.”

  “If we get outta this—shit!”

  Breathing hard, his old 1862 Colt Trapper model hanging off his hip in its soft, clay-colored holster, and his Colt Paterson wedged behind his cartridge belt, pressed against his belly, Serenity looked around cautiously. He nibbled the ends of his ragged gray mustache.

  “I got me a feelin’ that before the sun rises again—hell, maybe before the moon comes up tonight—there ain’t gonna be one white man within a hundred square miles of this boil on the devil’s ass. It’s apparent to this yellow-toothed squaw dog that ole Dancin’ Wolf sent for a whole heap more Utes and maybe even smoked the peace pipe with a few colicky Crows.”

  It was sunny and clear, and a good thermometer would probably register the low fifties. The valley rolled out to the west, incredibly clear in the cool saffron light, to a steep-walled mesa still pushing out a slight shadow now at ten o’clock in the morning. In the north and south, many distant peaks loomed blue in the far distance, like summer rain clouds.

  In the east, the high mountain wall, Old Stone Face, stood tall and vast, almost too much to take in from a half mile out from its base. The ridge was high enough to tickle low cloud bellies. It was bald except for tough, light green shrubs and cedars curling up from the rock-strewn troughs. The talus slides that Cuno could see from this angle appeared thumbnail-sized but were likely several acres square.

  He sleeved sweat from his forehead and looked west again, at the ranchstead sitting a hundred yards away, resembling a child’s collection of toy buildings nestled at the base of the mountain, with the gold-leafed aspens and cottonwoods following the curve of the creek at the yard’s west edge. Smoke rose from the lodge’s several chimneys, and Cuno wondered how Michelle was faring.

  He no longer harbored any animosity toward the girl. He felt deeply, genuinely sorry for her. He’d have given anything if she’d been able to live out her life holding to the convictions she’d espoused over last night’s supper—in spite of how they’d piss-burned him at the time—than to have them so abruptly, savagely disproved.

  “You got better eyes than me,” Cuno said as he resumed tossing dirt into Snowberger’s grave. “You see anything out there?”

  Serenity stood, slowly turning his head from right to left and back again, his jaws moving as he nibbled his mustache. “Nah. I don’t see shit, and I don’t expect to. We won’t see shit till Dancin’ Wolf is good and ready for us to see shit. Then it’s gonna storm shit!”

  Cuno sunk the shovel blade into the mound of freshly turned dirt once more. “You’re a dark son of a bitch, old-timer. Remind me to fire you when we get back to Crow Feather and hire a freighter with a sunnier disposition.”

  The graybeard chuckled caustically and shook his head as he continued scanning the distance. “When we get back to Crow Feather—!”

  “I know, I know—shit!”

  When he’d finished filling in Snowberger’s grave and mounding it with rocks, he and Serenity picked up their rifles leaning against a nearby boulder, cast a parting glance at their partner’s resting place, and started back toward the ranch yard. Cuno set his rifle on one shoulder, the shovel on the other shoulder, and spat dust from his lips.

  “The way I see it,” he said, “you and me are on our own. Trent’s men are madder’n old wet hens, and they’re used to bein’ the cock of the walk out here. They’re long on rage and short on sense.”

  “That’s how I see it, too,” Serenity said. “And if any of ’em have ever fought Injuns before, they done forgot it ain’t like fightin’ white men. It’s more like fightin’ a pack of hungry wolves on open ground.”

  “In other words, we watch each other’s backs.”

  “I’ve got yours if you got mine.” The oldster snorted with an
air of manufactured optimism. “I reckon I got lucky there, since yours is a whole lot bigger than mi—!”

  He and Cuno jerked their heads up with a start as a gopher rose up from its hole, wringing its ratlike paws and scolding the two intruders raucously.

  “Ah, shut up, ya little snipe,” Serenity barked, kicking dirt. “As if my nerves ain’t shot enough!”

  He shook his head, sucked a deep breath into his spindly chest, adjusted the Colt Paterson over his belly, and continued walking as well as talking. “We best make every shot count. Even with all that ammo we brought in, we’re liable to run out if them red devils play cat and mouse with us. They’ll likely try to draw our fire the way the Sioux did to my freight outfit in the Big Horns six years ago last October. When we’re close to shot-out, and our nerves are so fried that we’re shootin’ at every breeze and bird chirp, they’ll close like a friggin’ twister. And that little dustup earlier’ll look like a Fourth of July rodeo parade!”

  Cuno adjusted the shovel on his shoulder and gave his old partner a wry, sidelong glance. “So you’re sayin’ our odds are a mite long?”

  “Long?” Serenity chuckled as they strode between two haystacks, approaching the eerily quiet yard. “Long as the teeth on a fifty-year-old whore, amigo!”

  Cuno stopped abruptly and stared west through the cottonwoods.

  “What is it?”

  “Look there.”

  A long mare’s tail of dust rose beyond the trees, from a hundred yards out across the tumbling hills of the valley. Faintly, the dull, muffled rumble of distant hooves sounded, and a horse whinnied.

  “Hellkatoot!” Serenity rasped.

  A horse appeared, and then another, galloping out from behind a low hill and following a long curve in the trail toward the ranch yard. Three more horses followed the first two in a shaggy line—a couple of duns, a paint, a bay, and a short, bucket-headed buckskin. Cuno recognized all five horses from the corral in which Trent kept his working remuda.

  He squinted at the five mounts curving off toward his right, heading for the portal and the bridge. The horses were riderless, but long packs appeared to be strapped over their saddles. “What the hell are they . . . ?”