“Like Wild Dan said,” shouted one of the throwers, black-bearded, pale-skinned, and wearing a broad-brimmed Stetson, “no Chinks allowed!”
Laughing, he and the other three wheeled and walked back into the mercantile. The doors stood wide behind them. The chimney pipe poking from the roof sent blue smoke flattening out over the dirty canvas and tinging the air with pine.
Cuno stopped his mules fifteen feet from the short, slender man lying belly-down in the mud. The man lifted his round, mud-smeared face, spat filth from his lips. He raised an arm to clean his face, only smearing it. Finally, he pushed himself onto his knees. As he looked around through enraged eyes, his gaze landed on Cuno and Serenity.
“Why you stare?” he growled in a heavy Chinese accent. He raised his small, pale fists. “I in way? Go ’round! Get the hell outta my sight, or I climb up and beat the hell outta you both!”
Cuno held the man’s gaze for a moment, glanced again at the mercantile, then gigged the mule forward, swinging wide of the Chinaman and stopping before the blacksmith barn. He set the break and dropped over the wheel, landing flat-footed.
“Have the smithy tend that rim and tar the axle,” he told Serenity. Without waiting for a reply, he strode over to where the Chinamen knelt in the mud.
“Gosh darn,” Serenity said, rubbing a nervous hand across his beard. “It’s awful early fer trouble…”
As Serenity sidled around the mule, heading for the barn’s open door while casting nervous glances at Cuno, Cuno crouched beside the Chinaman.
The man was rubbing a sleeve of his black, wool coat across his face. Lowering the arm, he saw Cuno, and jerked with a start. Cuno extended a clean, red handkerchief. The man looked at it, his black eyes gaining a wary cast as they returned to Cuno’s.
The freighter canted his head toward the mercantile. “What do you need?”
Skeptically, as if expecting the handkerchief to be snapped away, he pinched the dangling cloth between two fingers green-caked with fresh horse shit. “Tea, flour. Rope.”
Cuno stood and began moving toward the mercantile.
“Monkshood tea.”
Cuno stopped, turned.
“Some ground wheat and beans,” the Chinaman added somberly, bowing his head. “And a little molasses…for sweet.”
Cuno snorted, turned, and mounted the mercantile’s broad stoop, glanced at the live chickens hunkered in cages stacked left of the door. A sign over one of the cages read: RHODE ISLAND REDS—$1. Passing through the open doors, Cuno slung his gaze around the broad tent lined with overflowing shelves on two sides and packed with crates and barrels. A long counter stood to his right.
Near the smoky stove in the far left corner, the four bearded men played Red Dog atop a nail keg, hats shoved back on their heads. The man whom Cuno took to be the leader sat his chair backward, resting a brawny arm on the back and berating one of his brethren for betting too low. He wore a long braid down his back, Indian style, though he was definitely a white man.
The air smelled of tobacco smoke, moldy canvas, and the assorted dry goods straining the whipsawed pine shelves.
As Cuno looked around, a portly, clean-shaven gent in soiled duck trousers and a black opera hat entered through the back door with an armload of split pine logs. He gave Cuno a bored glance, dumped the wood into the crate beside the stove, then sauntered behind the counter. He stopped across from Cuno, who was eyeing the new repeaters racked beside a Cuckoo clock trimmed with a placard that promised, MADE IN SWITSERLAND!
“What’ll it be, mister?” the big gent said with a tired sigh.
“Rope, molasses, wheat, beans, and tea. Monkshood tea. On a separate ticket, put a bag of Arbuckles, bottle of whiskey, ten pounds of oats, four boxes of forty-four shells, one of forty-fives.”
The man’s dull blue eyes sharpened suspiciously as he studied Cuno from beneath the brim of the shabby opera hat, the crown of which was decorated with a single, long, curved tooth of a grizzly bear. Cuno held the man’s gaze with a mild one of his own. Behind him and left, the four bearded gents stopped bickering. Cuno felt their eyes on his back.
The portly gent behind the counter slid a quick glance at the others, then slowly turned to begin filling the order.
A man behind Cuno grunted, “Monkshood tea.” A slight pause. “Ain’t that what that slanty-eyed heathen ordered?”
Cuno kept his back to the man, fists on the countertop. top. “That’s what he ordered.”
The portly clerk stopped dipping molasses into a jar to regard Cuno gravely, then slid his eyes to the rear of the room. At length, he continued filling Cuno’s order.
Cuno looked into a sack of hard candy, perused a box of miners’ denim. He’d picked up a hobnailed boot and was inspecting the heel when a chair scraped across the hard-packed floor.
Boots scuffed toward him. The big gent with the braid appeared to Cuno’s left, bending over the counter to get a look at his face.
“You buyin’ tea fer that Chink?” The man curled his upper lip. “Who the hell you think you are?”
Cuno set the boot down and turned to the man, whose brown eyes flashed angry little darts. “Name’s Massey, and I’ll buy tea or anything else for anyone I like.”
The clerk set a small burlap bag on the counter. “That’s the tea an’ such,” he grumbled.
The bearded gent with the braid kept his eyes on Cuno, but addressed the clerk. “Put it back, Roy.”
Roy’s lips moved, but he didn’t say anything as he shuttled his tentative glance between Massey and the hard case with the braid.
“Total it up,” Cuno told him.
The hard case stretched a disbelieving smile and hitched an elbow on the counter. He cast a glance at the back of the room, where the other three men had fallen silent, then returned his mocking gaze to Cuno.
“Young man, what’d I just tell you? Roy here has a policy against servin’ heathen furriners.”
Cuno kept his eyes on the hard case, but addressed Roy. “Total it up and start fillin’ the other order.”
The hard case chuffed and dropped his head sharply, as if he couldn’t believe the stupidity of this tinhorn.
The men at the back of the tent chuckled. “Maybe he’s foreign his ownself and needs an English lesson,” said one.
A chair scraped back, and the man nearest the stove, wearing a deerskin cloak around his shoulders, said, “Maybe he needs the same English lesson we gave the Chink.”
“I don’t know,” said the man nearest Cuno, staring at the others, chuckling. “Maybe he just needs his ears cleaned out. And you know me, boys. I got just the thing.”
He wheeled toward Cuno, swinging his right fist. Cuno raised his left hand, palm out.
The hard case’s fist smacked into it as if against a stone wall. The hard case’s eyes narrowed in shock. Cuno stared into them blandly as he closed his fingers over the hard case’s fist, snapped the man’s hand back sharply.
The bones in the man’s fist snapped like kindling.
“Ahhhh!” the man roared, watching his hand dangling like a scrap of burlap, cracked bones showing through the hairy wrist. He dropped to his knees, face balled with pain, while he cursed and jabbed his left hand across his waist for the Colt Lightning holstered on his right hip.
Before the hard case could fumble the gun from the holster, Cuno stepped forward and brought his right knee up under the man’s chin. There was a sharp clack of shattering teeth.
The man’s head snapped back. Giving a clipped groan, he hit the floor on his back, spitting bits of broken teeth as his eyes fluttered closed. He lay still, the look of excruciating pain slitting his eyes and dimpling his cheeks.
“Jee-sus!” exclaimed the clerk, glancing over the counter at the fallen hard case.
To Cuno’s left, another chair scraped back. Curses and the thunder of boot heels echoed. Cuno grabbed his .44 and, thumbing the hammer back, turned to aim the gun at the other three hard cases scrambling toward him.
Se
eing the gun, they all froze in unison, hands on their own sheathed pistols.
The man with the deerskin cloak was closest to Cuno. He shifted his gaze from his fallen partner to the freighter, gritting his teeth. “You son of a bitch.”
Cuno angled the pistol barrel down. Pop! The slug drilled a ragged hole through the soft toe of the hard case’s boot. He cursed and hopped on his other foot.
“Owww! Goddamn, you son of a sow!”
Cuno raised the pistol again, hammer cocked. While keeping the gun aimed at the three hard cases glaring at him from twelve feet away, Cuno addressed the clerk. “Any law around here?”
Lower jaw hanging, the clerk shook his head.
Cuno grunted and swept his gaze around the three standing hard cases. The one with the wounded foot stood on his good one, holding his other foot above the ground. Blood dribbled from the ragged hole in the toe, seeping into the hard-packed dirt.
“If you get a hankerin’ to trail me, just remember there’s more where this came from.”
He canted his head slightly toward the clerk. “Finish my order and tally it.”
While the clerk scrambled around behind the counter, then scuttled over to the oat bin near the smoking stove, Cuno glared at the three hard cases. He pointed his gun at the small square table about five feet to his left, where an empty bottle and shot glass sat. A cigar stub lay at the bottom of the glass.
“You boys set your pistol belts on that table, then back up to your own table and sit down.”
Reluctantly, still cursing under their breath and sliding skeptical glances at their fallen comrade, out like a blown wick, blood trickling out both corners of his mouth, they did as they’d been told. When they were all seated at their table, the clerk set Cuno’s two sacks on the counter, and gave him the total for each order.
Cuno flipped several coins to the man, who caught them against his chest. The freighter grabbed the sacks by their necks, and threw them over his left shoulder. Keeping his cocked pistol aimed at the three hard cases sitting their chairs in the far rear corner, scowling at him, hands in their laps, he backed toward the door.
“Poke your noses out this door before I leave town, and I’ll blow ’em off.”
With that, he turned and went out.
He angled across the rutted trail toward his wagon parked before the blacksmith shop, which was gushing black smoke from its chimney pipe. Serenity Parker and the blacksmith had the right front wheel off and leaning against the jacked-up wagon. They stood side by side, staring toward the mercantile with wary casts to their eyes.
The Chinaman sat on a pine stump left of the shop, under a wind-buffeted aspen. He’d cleaned his face. His wool coat lay across his lap, and he scrubbed at it with a rag.
Cuno walked over to the man, dropped the bag in his lap. “Came to a dollar forty-nine.”
The Chinaman stared down at the bag, placed a hand on it to make sure it was really there. He lifted his chin toward Cuno, upper lip curled with disbelief. As if jolted from a dream, he stood and stuck his right hand into a pocket of his dirty cotton trousers, pulled out several lint-peppered coins, and dropped them in Cuno’s Gloved palm.
Cuno closed his fingers over the coins and nodded. “I wouldn’t hang around here long. Your friends are a mite piss-burned.”
He pinched his hat brim at the Chinaman, turned, and strode off toward the wagon.
10
WHEN THE WAGON had been repaired, Cuno and Serenity Parker followed the curving wagon trail up out of the valley and into the high spruce parks, where the creeks were narrow and swift and the air was a good ten degrees colder than down below.
Steel-blue rain clouds gathered after midday. As the wagon climbed higher, the rain turned to snow. There was little wind and the temperature didn’t drop much below thirty, so there was no danger of exposure or blocked roads. The day ended early, however, the soft gray light dimming as though a giant lamp was turned down.
Cuno parked beside the south fork of Roaring Creek, just upriver from an old Ute burial scaffold from which old buckskins and beaded blankets hung like tattered ribbons, revealing what the hawks and eagles had left of the Indians’ bleached bones.
Clad in a long duck coat and ancient Confederate cavalry hat, a red muffler wrapped around his scrawny neck, Serenity gathered wood for a fire while Cuno picketed the mules in the high bluestem by the creek. Cuno had removed his camping gear from the wagon box, along with the fresh Arbuckles, when a shadow flicked through the trees on the other side of the trail. He stopped, turned his head that way, breathing slowly through his mouth to listen.
Above the sound of the sifting snow and Serenity’s wheezing and scuffling, weeds cracked softly, the falling snow somehow softening and clarifying even the slightest sounds. Snow crunched under small hooves—the double thuds of a mule deer bounding away from suspected danger.
Cuno walked to the front of the wagon, grabbed his Winchester from the driver’s box, and glanced at Serenity, who’d just dropped a load of kindling near an old fire ring. “Be back in a bit.”
The old man—a scrawny, scarved, bearded visage in the failing light and slanting snow—turned toward him. “Where you off to?”
Cuno rammed a fresh round into the Winchester’s breech and started across the trail to the aspen-stippled hill rising on the other side. “Meat.”
“I heard it,” Serenity said, breathing hard, his phlegmy voice clear in the still air. “Didn’t think you did. Got good ears on ye, fer a pup.”
The old man chuckled softly and cracked a stick over his scrawny knee. Cuno climbed the low bank. He slanted through the aspens, finding a freshly rubbed sapling with bark bits littering the snow at its base. In the grainy snow only partially covering the fallen leaves were hoofprints and fresh urine dribbles. A buck then. A small one, judging by the size of the hoofprints. Cuno probably outweighed him. The deer had lost a tip off one of its front toes.
Cuno hefted the Winchester in his hands and continued up the bank. He left the trees behind and crossed a small clearing, the ground still pitching up on his right, toward a crest of scattered boulders and cedars barely seen through pines and the snow fog.
He descended a wooded trough in which a narrow, black freshet trickled amidst ice-crusted stones, and clambered up the other side. His boots slipped and slid in the slick, wet leaves and snow-mashed bluestem. He fell once, felt the icy sting of snow under his sleeve, then pushed quietly through some shagbush and into another clearing.
He stopped, slowly raised the Winchester.
Forty yards ahead, the buck stood nibbling leaves from a chokecherry shrub, jerking its head to rip the foliage from the limbs. A little buck with a big set of antlers. Cuno did outweigh him. The buck chewed, stopped, looked around, then began chewing again.
Cuno dropped to a knee and raised the rifle to his shoulder. He thumbed the hammer back, planted a bead on the animal’s left front shoulder, then brought it back and up slightly. Cuno took a deep breath, held it, and began taking up the trigger slack.
The buck jerked suddenly, flinched, twisted slightly, moved forward several steps, froze, and dropped—a dun heap upon the white-dusted grass.
Cuno’s eyes widened. He relaxed his trigger finger but kept the rifle snugged to his cheek as he looked around the clearing.
Heart beating rhythmically, his curiosity getting the better of him—deer didn’t suddenly collapse when you were drawing a bead on them—he lowered the Winchester slightly but kept the hammer cocked. Carrying the rifle across his chest, swinging his wary gaze from left to right and back again, he made his way across the clearing. He winced at the crunch and rustle of his boots.
No movement to either side or behind. Just the slow, occasional breeze gusts nudging snow tufts from wet branches. A small cottontail scuttled through the snow to his left, disappeared in the brush.
Cuno approached the deer and stopped, looked down. The animal’s eyes were glassy. Blood splotched the snow around its snout and soaked the f
ir over its right shoulder, around the four inches of feathered arrow protruding from its side.
Cuno crouched and again swept the clearing with his gaze. The shot had to have come from the buck’s right. Cuno stared in that direction, but kept his rifle down by his knee.
He’d let the brave fetch his deer. He’d earned it. Cuno wanted no trouble with Indians. He couldn’t just walk away, though. The shooter of that arrow was no doubt watching him from the evergreens on the other side of the clearing. You gave an Indian no reason to believe you weak-hearted. When the man showed himself, Cuno would give a curt nod to indicate his surrender of the other man’s meat. Only then would he walk away.
When he’d crouched there for a couple of minutes, and nothing happened, he grabbed the end of the arrow, pulled it out of the deer. Blood dribbled from the strap-iron blade. The shaft was slender, painted black with pitch, and fletched with falcon feathers.
Something sharp prodded his back, pushing through his coat. He leapt forward and swung around, dropping the arrow and bringing the Winchester up. His assailant shuffled nimbly back and raised the nocked arrow as if to show Cuno what had prodded him.
The man standing before Cuno was short, thin, and bowlegged, with a dozen or so fine, black hairs drooping off his chin. He wore a deerskin hat with dangling earflaps, quilted hide coat, baggy duck trousers, and knee-high, fur-trimmed mocassins. He wasn’t wearing gloves. The short bow he held in his stubby, brown hands was made of ash wood and sinew, with rabbit fur wrapped around each end to muffle the twang of the shot.
The man’s deerskin hat rose to a peak, giving him an odd, gremlinlike appearance.
As Cuno stared, holding the Winchester taut but only chest-high, the barrel canted sensibly askance, the man let the bowstring creak back toward the bow. The nocked arrow sagged. White teeth shone within the dark circle of the hat. The man reached up with one hand, removed the hat from his head, lowered it to his side. As his smile grew wider, showing more small, square teeth, the outside corners of his slanted eyes drew up toward his temples.
.45-Caliber Deathtrap Page 8
