.45-Caliber Desperado

by Peter Brandvold

  Mateo cleaned his knife on the warden’s coat then swung up into the saddle. He turned toward the gallows, scowled first at Skinner and then at Mule Zimmerman and Arguello. “Those of you who Warden Castle condemned to die are welcome to ride with us. We have extra horses waiting. If you cannot keep up, however, we will not leave you to mark our trail. We will shoot you and hide your bodies so that only the panthers will find you!”

  Zimmerman glanced at Cuno and grinned. “Think I’ll take my chances on my own.”

  Frank Skinner said, “Hell, I’ll ride with any man who saves me from the gallows.”

  Mateo looked at an American in a pinto vest sitting a steeldust stallion nearby and jerked his head at Skinner. The man on the steeldust rode over to the gallows, and Skinner stepped gingerly onto the back of the man’s horse.

  Cuno looked at Zimmerman. “You sure?”

  Zimmerman looked at Mateo and several of the other Mexicans with barely concealed disdain and shook his head. “I’m sure.”

  Cuno switched his gaze to Arguello, who sat at the edge of the gallows staring off through the prison’s open gates, moving his lips and muttering soundlessly. “Christiano,” Cuno said, riding over. “You wanna ride with us?”

  The Mexican prisoner said nothing. He continued staring through the open gates, at the sun-blasted sage flats beyond the prison, and moved his lips as though speaking only to himself. Brusquely, Cuno grabbed the man’s hand and drew him onto Renegade’s back, behind the cantle of his saddle.

  He wasn’t sure why he felt the urge to bring the young Mexican along, but there was something so heartbreakingly vulnerable in the young man’s eyes that he couldn’t leave him. They were roughly the same age, twenty-two, and their surviving the Pit together, as well as the gallows, had sort of made them brothers. Cuno wanted to make sure Arguello had a fighting chance to survive.

  As Mateo gigged his horse toward the open gates and threw up his arm, loosing a shrill summoning whistle to his other riders, Cuno glanced at Camilla. She returned his look with a dubious one of her one. “He won’t make it.”

  “He’ll be all right once we get some food and water into him,” Cuno said.

  Camilla smiled halfheartedly and reined her own horse into the dust of the other riders pounding on past the guards standing at their posts with their hands extended high above their heads, and on out the prison’s gaping doors.

  Hearing the warden’s bone-splintering shrieks, Cuno touched his bare heels to Renegade’s flanks, and the horse responded instantly, giving an eager whinny—maybe a whinny of relief that he was back under his old master’s rein once more—and they galloped on out the gates and onto the sage flat. Camilla and the other riders spread out across the two-track wagon trail that connected the prison to Limon on the other side of the Arkansas River. Likely, the lawmen there had heard the shooting at the prison and were forming a posse.

  A half mile from the town, Mateo lead his men off the trail’s left side, heading for a southern curve of the Arkansas that was sheathed in dull green cottonwoods, willows, and grama grass. The water beckoned to Cuno though he could see only intermittent flashes of it through the screen of heat haze and the dust being kicked up ahead of him.

  Behind him, Arguello was clinging loosely to his waist. Cuno felt the man’s head flopping against his shoulder.

  He could smell the young bandito’s sour sweat and other sundry fetors from the Pit. Doubtless Cuno smelled as bad. He hoped the group stopped long enough at the river for him to throw himself into the cool, beckoning water. He hadn’t had a bath, except the occasional sponge bath, in months.

  Camilla rode just ahead of Cuno. He stared at her slender back, the dark brown hair bouncing across her red-striped serape. He wondered again how she had come to be riding with this band of Mexican cutthroats.

  Mateo was her brother, and that was another question. How had such a sweet, innocent girl—at least, the girl he’d known back in the mountains, when they were on the run from the marauding Utes—come to have a brother like Mateo de Cava?

  As though she were reading his mind, Camilla glanced back at him and quirked the corners of her mouth slightly, telling him silently that in due time he’d have the answers to all his questions.

  The river grew brighter before him, the dusty cottonwoods looming larger and larger. A breeze rattled their branches. Behind Cuno, Arguello groaned and leaned more of his weight against the young freighter’s broad back and shoulders.

  “Hold on, Christiano,” Cuno urged. “We’ll get you a cold drink of water soon.”

  A cracking sound rose in the distance ahead of Cuno. It sounded like branches being broken over a knee. Then louder pops sounded, as well, as someone at the head of the outlaw pack screamed.

  Another man shouted.

  A horse whinnied shrilly.

  Cuno squinted to peer over the heads of the other riders. Several of the lead riders were checking down their mounts and raising rifles.

  Amidst the trees along the river, smoke puffed on the heels of the spattering gunfire.

  Cuno’s heart thudded, and his lips mouthed the dreaded word.

  Ambush!

  5

  AHEAD OF CUNO, a couple of de Cava riders flew off their horses. One horse tumbled headfirst in the dust, turned a ragged, screaming somersault, and got up shakily, its saddle and bloody rider hanging down its side.

  Mateo pumped his rifle and one fist in the air and shouted something in Spanish. The other men spread out around and behind him, and they lifted a howling din, like a pack of moon-crazed, flesh-hungry lobos. They galloped toward the river from which more pistols and rifles popped, smoke puffing to mark the shooters’ positions in the trees.

  Cuno checked Renegade down, looking around wildly, confused. He had no weapon, but he sure as hell didn’t want to sit out here on the flat like a duck on a millpond. Christ, he thought. Out of the frying pan and into the fire . . .

  “Cuno!”

  He looked to his right. Camilla had stopped her horse and squinted through the dust at him. “In your right saddlebag!”

  It took him a moment to realize what she’d said, as the shouting and gunfire had almost drowned her out.

  “Reach into your right saddlebag!” she repeated, yelling above the din.

  Cuno leaned back past Arguello, who’d awakened now at the savage popping of guns along the river. Cuno dipped a hand into the pouch and rummaged around in his cooking supplies until his hand closed around a gun handle. Instantly, before he even saw it, he knew what he was holding, and his heart quickened eagerly.

  He pulled out the old, familiar gun—the .45-caliber Colt Peacemaker that his old friend and former gunslinger, Charlie Dodge, had given him when he’d first started out after the men who’d killed his father and stepmother. Ivoryhandled, silver-chased, and factory-scrolled, the Great Equalizer was a beautiful gun. Cuno had thought for sure that when he’d turned the pistol over to the sheriff who’d arrested him that he’d lost the prized gun forever.

  He looked at Camilla, whose eyes blazed as, turning toward the river, she shouted, “It’s loaded. Come on—Mateo’s rushing the bushwhackers!”

  She drew her own Schofield from the soft leather holster she wore for the cross draw under her left arm, and buried her spurs into the flanks of her handsome chestnut bay whose rump was speckled cream. Cuno glanced behind at Arguello, who sat with his back straight now, staring anxiously toward the river.

  “Hold on, Christiano!”

  The young freighter batted his heels against Renegade’s flanks, and the horse bounded forward off its rear feet. Into the sifting dust, horse and riders galloped, Camilla several yards ahead, the other riders now entering the brush and trees bordering the river, whooping and hollering and triggering pistols and rifles.

  Pop! Pop! Pop-Pop! Boom!

  The din sounded like a mini war being waged along the banks of the Arkansas.

  Christiano grabbed Cuno tightly around the waist. Cuno stared straight a
head, where the outlaw gang was returning the fire of the ambushers, sometimes from nearly point-blank range.

  A couple of the desperadoes were shot out of their saddles. A couple more crouched as though they’d been wounded. But they clearly had gained the upper hand against the bushwhackers, who were falling by twos and threes, some taking off running toward the river where they were cut down as they splashed across the rocky ford.

  Cuno followed Camilla into the trees, her big chestnut leaping deadfalls and blowdowns, the girl riding lightly, rump rising and falling in her saddle. She held her pistol up high as she rode, looking around warily.

  Cuno had just put Renegade over a blowdown when a pistol cracked to his right. The bullet screeched past his face to tear into a cottonwood. Instinctively, he brought the .45 to bear, saw a man peering over the top of a tree stump, a smoking pistol extended in his right fist. He had blue eyes, a gray mustache, and a mole on the nub of his left cheek.

  Cuno didn’t see the tin star pinned to his brown wool vest until the Colt had already bucked in his hand, drilling a neat, round hole through the center of the lawman’s forehead. The man’s blue eyes rolled back into his head. His chin lifted. His right hand opened, releasing the .44 Remington, and he sagged straight backward until he’d disappeared behind the stump.

  Cuno’s lower jaw sagged as he continued holding the .45 straight out from his shoulder. His belly tightened, and a fist wrapped itself around his heart, squeezing.

  As he lowered the smoking Colt to his side, suddenly no longer hearing the shouts and shooting and hoof thuds around him, he put Renegade around the tree stump and looked down.

  The man lay on his back, his legs clad in brown-checked trousers curled beneath him. His head was turned slightly to one side, eyes open, blood leaking from the wound to dribble down across his forehead to the ground. The tin star that read LIMON CITY MARSHAL burned like a brand into Cuno’s retinas.

  A whooping laugh sounded, and Cuno turned to see Mateo de Cava staring down at the dead lawman, dark eyes brightly jubilant. “Nice shot, mi gringo amigo! That’s some really nice shooting!”

  Slowly lowering the .45, Cuno turned his gaze back to the dead lawman.

  “Come on!” the bandito leader shouted, beckoning. “Time to head for hills and some fresh horses!”

  Cuno ripped his gaze from the dead lawman to look around the trees. Several riders, posse men from town, were galloping back toward Limon that sweltered on the shimmering plain to the northwest. Several banditos were triggering shots at them, though most were headed on across the river. Whooping raucously, Mateo headed that way, too, his black sombrero tumbling down his back to hang by a horsehair thong, his grisly pink pate glistening in the sun, as his black Arab high-stepped across the rocky ford, spraying up water around its legs.

  Seven or eight men, including the lawman, lay dead in the trees and along the shore of the stream. One man in a brown suit lay with his head in the water as though he’d dropped down there for a drink. His brown derby hat hung by a branch extending from the bank several feet into the stream, and the water around his head was pink.

  “Cuno!”

  He turned to see Camilla sitting her chestnut in the middle of the ford, the Arkansas glimmering around her. She beckoned.

  The other riders were galloping up the opposite bank beyond her and heading out across the dun and lime-green southern plain from which a heat haze rose as though from distant wildfires. Their whoops and howls and the thuds of their horses’ hooves were quickly dwindling, so that all Cuno could now hear was the quiet voice of the river washing over the rocks. The breeze made a whushing sound in the tops of the fragrant cottonwoods.

  Camilla frowned at him impatiently, throwing up one arm, beckoning.

  “He would have killed you,” she called. “Vamonos!”

  Cuno lowered the .45. “Hold on, Christiano,” he muttered, not looking at the dead lawman again but batting his heels against Renegade’s flanks and heading on into the stream.

  He realized after he’d ridden a mile from the Arkansas, following the dust strings of Mateo’s gang that looked to be comprised of twenty or so riders, that he hadn’t stopped at the river for water. They stopped for a small remuda of extra horses, placed there in case they lost any at the prison, and to give Arguello and Frank Skinner their own saddled mounts.

  But as soon as the young Mexican and the train robber were seated, they were off again, riding hard across the sage- and greasewood-crusted hogbacks.

  Cuno was parched. He’d fallen back to keep an eye on Arguello, who seemed to ride well enough on his own but whose lips continued to move as he prayed. Occasionally, he shook his head violently as if to clear of it. They rode hard, and it soon became obvious to Cuno that Arguello wouldn’t make it on his own.

  “Forget him,” Camilla told the young freighter, as she held her chestnut to Renegade’s loping pace. “If he drops back, the posse will find him and give him water.”

  Cuno glanced once more at Christiano Arguello, who was falling a good fifty yards back behind him now, and more.

  Cuno cursed and slowed Renegade to a walk, throwing out his hand to reach for Arguello’s reins as the young Mexican’s paint pony caught up to him. One of the riders from the main pack was riding back toward Cuno and Camilla, a burly American whom Cuno had heard someone call Brouschard.

  He was dressed in sweaty buckskins with a green silk neckerchief flopping down his chest and a Sharps rifle snugged down in a beaded saddle scabbard. As he approached Arguello’s paint, he shucked a big, pearl-gripped Colt from a shoulder holster, and pointed the barrel up as he thumbed the hammer back.

  “No!” Cuno bit out.

  Too late. The revolver roared. Christiano Arguello’s head snapped straight back on his shoulders. It sagged there for a second, and then the young bandito fell straight back against the paint’s rump before rolling down the left stirrup fender and piling up in the dust. The paint whinnied and buck-kicked, and Camilla reached out to snatch its reins before it could run off.

  Cuno glared at the burly American, who aimed his smoking pistol at Cuno and narrowed one eye. “No slackers. They slow up the whole damn bunch. Now, let’s get a move on, you two, or”—he glanced at Camilla—“your boyfriend’s gonna get the same thing, chiquita.”

  He turned back to Cuno, and his eyes flicked to the .45 that the young freighter held against his stout right thigh. Cuno looked back at him, nostrils flaring. Silently, with only his eyes, he told the man that he’d kill him if he ever aimed a pistol at him again.

  The big man seemed to understand. A faint splotch rose into his yellow-bearded, sun-seared cheeks, and he depressed his own weapon’s hammer, returned it to its holster, and galloped up the trail.

  Cuno swung out of his saddle. He did not look at Camilla staring apprehensively at him as he said, “I’ll be along in a minute.”

  “We have to hurry, Cuno. There are several lawmen in Limon. They’ll throw in with the prison guards, and there’ll be a helluva posse after us.”

  Cuno’s eyes flared as he turned to her quickly and flung his arm out. “Go on! Git outta here!”

  The girl shook her head slowly. “He would have died. One way or the other. He’s better off this way. You can’t take the time to bury him.”

  He leaned down and dragged Christiano up with one arm, then bent his knees as he slung the dead man over his naked back. Shifting the young man’s light load on his shoulders, he glanced up at the girl staring at him, her pretty face taut with impatience.

  “Who the hell are you?” he asked.

  She pursed her lips, drew a breath, and flared her nostrils. “The girl that saved you from the hangman!”

  She tossed the reins of Christiano’s horse down. She whipped her own horse around and ground her spurs into its flanks.

  As she galloped off, Cuno walked over to a patch of thick brush and lay the dead man between two boulders. He straightened, stared grimly down at the inert form half wasted by a year i
n Castle’s pen, then crouched over the body once more and crossed the young man’s hands on his belly. If he wasn’t going to bury him, he could at least arrange him decently.

  Christiano stared up at Cuno, glassy-eyed, lips forming a wry smile, as though he knew as well as Cuno did that the carrion eaters would be on him soon, and crossing his hands wasn’t going to mean a tinker’s damn when they came.

  “Sorry, amigo.”

  Cuno glanced back the way he and his savage saviors had come. In the far distance he saw a slender dust plume. Beneath it, half a dozen or so riders, little more than brown blotches from this distance, were galloping toward him.

  For a moment, he felt torn. He could take his horse and his gun and go his own way, or he could follow the men and the girl who’d saved him from the gallows and who’d probably figured out an escape route.

  With the outlaws—cold-blooded killers, all—he had a chance. Without the outlaws, he was probably finished. Besides, having killed the Limon marshal, he was for all intents and purposes one of them now, anyway. Maybe it would have been better if he’d been hanged . . .

  He’d felt his shell belt in the same saddlebag in which Camilla had placed his gun. Now he retrieved it from the pouch, wrapped it around his waist, dropped his prized .45 into the holster, and fastened the keeper thong over the hammer.

  He had a gun. Now he needed a hat and clothes. The sun was branding his face and naked torso.

  Swinging up into the saddle, he grabbed the reins of Christiano’s horse, and led it off after the others, all of whom, including Camilla, had disappeared over a hill. She was waiting for him on the other side, a worried look in her eyes. Cuno remembered seeing the same look in the eyes of his young half-breed wife, July, a long time ago, just after he’d finished off Anderson and Spoon.

  The look bit him hard, caused a stone to drop in his belly.

  Christ, the world was crazy. His life was crazy. He kept reliving the same horrors, over and over. He’d always hoped he’d be able to find a safe place in which to hole up quietly and live well, but here he was running for his life with a passel of kill-happy outlaws, and all because he’d saved this girl waiting for him now from a passel of rogue lawmen intent on raping her.