.45-Caliber Desperado

by Peter Brandvold

  Spurr looked out at the prison obscured by windblown dust, and asked, “Who’s in charge at the pen?”

  “Army group from Fort Sewald. Overcast sent a telegram as soon as he heard them Gatlings barking over to the prison. Then he formed a posse and they laid low at the creek, waiting for the break the sheriff figured was comin’.”

  The undertaker clucked and shook his head. “Well, if you fellas will excuse me, I got a load of business all sudden-like. Still makin’ coffins. Funerals start tomorrow.” He looked toward a small cemetery topping a low, brushy rise north of town, where two men were busy digging. “The gravedigger had to hire on a local boy to help.”

  Spurr glanced at McQueen. “I’m gonna stow my prisoner in the hoosegow yonder, under the guard of James T. Vernon. Then we’ll ride out to the prison, see what’s what.”

  “Like hell you are!” the Maiden Killer yelled. “You can’t leave me under lock and key in this jerkwater town, with some old man who’s likely so senile he’ll forget to feed me!”

  “Shut up, Marvin,” Spurr and McQueen said in unison as they and the three other lawmen gigged their horses on up the street.

  “Scalped him,” Major Pike Donleavy said, blowing cigar smoke out the warden’s open office door. “Blew a hole in his leg, another in his knee. Crippled the poor man for life. Then Mateo de Cava blew his nose off. Or the end of it, anyways. Don’t know how in the hell you get a good breath without a nose but he seems to be managing good enough through his mouth. Between screams, that is.”

  The paunchy, round-faced, high-cheekboned major from Fort Sewald shook his head and tapped ashes off the end of his cigar. “He’s down in the infirmary. The prison doctor’s lookin’ after him. Keeps him drunk on ether and laudanum, but he was screamin’ all night, I’m told. My men and I didn’t arrive until just a couple hours ago. Rode all night after we got the telegram from Overcast.”

  “Is the warden gonna make it?” Spurr asked.

  He walked from where he’d sat on a visitor’s chair in front of the warden’s desk and stood beside the major. Both men stared outside where order was finally being reestablished in the blood-splattered prison yard, the bodies of the dead prisoners and guards being hauled off by surviving guards and the major’s men in cavalry blues.

  “Doubt it,” said the major. “If the blood loss alone doesn’t kill him, gangrene’ll set in. Usually does. Seen enough men taken by it during the war.”

  “I’d sure like to know how in the hell he let this happen. This is a maximum-security federal prison, for chrissakes.”

  Spurr fired a match and turned to regard two of the roofed guard towers as he touched the flame to his cheroot, an indulgence proscribed by his doctor in Buffaloville. “Four Gatling guns and thirty guards. With a good half mile of open ground in all directions. How does a group of twenty or so just ride in and sack the place?”

  “Good question,” Major Donleavy said, turning his head as three soldiers rode through the prison’s open front gates, leading three bedraggled, barefoot men in prison stripes by riatas looped around their waists. The escapees looked ready to drop. “Ah, three more. Likely, after my reinforcements have arrived from Camp Collins, we’ll have all those prisoners who hightailed it after the break safely back behind bars. Except, probably, those who managed to grab some horses from some woodcutters on a creek just north of here.”

  “Who’d they come for, Major? Mateo de Cava’s gang. Who’d they break out?”

  “When the warden was still coherent he said they—meaning de Cava as well as a Mexican girl identified as his sister—came for . . . for . . .” The major turned and started walking toward the warden’s desk, where he’d left a sheet of notes he’d scribbled during his interview of the warden.

  McQueen was standing by the desk, as the other lawmen had taken up the rest of the visitor chairs. The Holyoke sheriff looked down at the paper, jabbing a finger at it and scowling. “Cuno Massey.”

  “Yes, Massey,” the major said, turning back to the open door. “An unusual name. You’d think I’d remember it. Cuno Massey.” He enunciated each word clearly, separately then poked his cigar into his mouth, and puffed. “A gringo. Odd for a gang led by a notorious Mexican desperado to—”

  “Cuno Massey?” This from Sheriff Mason, perched on a corner of the warden’s desk, a stove match protruding from a corner of his mouth. “I know that name.”

  Spurr and the other men in the room looked at him.

  “Matter of fact, I arrested him,” Mason said. “He killed a trio of territorial marshals in the Rawhides last winter. They caught him runnin’ rifles to the Utes.”

  “Gun runner,” Spurr said, the disdain plain in his voice. There were few men more diabolical than those who provided Indians with rifles with which they could wreak havoc on the people of the men who’d armed them purely for money. “Figures he’d be aligned with de Cava. Heard he ran rifles along the Arizona border.”

  “Who else did they take out, Major?” Mason asked.

  “An old train robber named Frank Skinner. A Mex named Arguello, but my men found him dead a few hours ago. Likely wounded in the skirmish with the townsmen on the Arkansas.”

  The old marshal turned to Donleavy. “I take it you have men tracking them killers?”

  Donleavy shook his head. “I came with only twenty men. There’s been an outbreak of typhoid at Fort Sewald. At the moment, we’re badly under-garrisoned. I’m hoping that Camp Collins is sending enough men that they can leave some to help out here and some to send after de Cava.”

  “How long till they get here?” asked Mason, his blood up. The name Massey had lit a fire inside him. “De Cava’s probably headed for the border.”

  “Another twenty-four hours by train.” The major blew a smoke plume through the open door and looked at Spurr. “By now, every lawman in Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah has heard what happened here. Thank god for the telegraph. Those lawmen will be keeping a close eye out for de Cava. I’m betting the gang won’t make it as far as Albuquerque.”

  “I wouldn’t count on that, Major.”

  Spurr stuck his cheroot between his teeth and walked over to a cherry table that sat beneath a large, framed, flyspecked map of Colorado Territory. On the table were four decanters of different colors and sizes. He turned a goblet right side up and poured a liberal jigger of what looked like brandy. He held the glass up and looked at the amber liquid, swirling it between his dirty, blunt fingers.

  “De Cava is a killing machine. Every man ridin’ with him is mean enough to shoot his own mother for overcookin’ his eggs. There ain’t no local lawmen anywhere on the frontier ready to deal with a herd of wildcats like this bunch.”

  “What are you suggesting, Deputy?” The major looked piqued. “I have five men out chasing escaped prisoners. The rest I need here to keep the other monkeys in their barrel. I’d suggest forming a posse from Limon, but Overcast already tried that, and the undertaker there is making enough money to buy a stake and move to Sherman Avenue in Denver.”

  “I ain’t suggestin’ nothin’,” Spurr said, throwing back half the brandy. “I’m sayin’ someone’s gotta go after ’em now. While their trail’s still warm.” He threw back the rest of the shot and slammed the glass down on the table. “I reckon that means us, fellas,” he said raspily, the brandy searing his tonsils as he shuttled his glance to the four other lawmen in the room.

  McQueen and his two deputies, both in their early twenties, regarded him skeptically. He knew what they were thinking. Could the old man make it? They’d likely seen him struggle to get mounted this morning, in the wake of the mule kick to the chest he’d endured in the roadhouse the day before.

  He poked his cigar between his teeth, shouldered his rifle, and brushed past Donleavy on his way out the door.

  “Hold on, hold on,” yelled Dusty Mason, quickly pouring himself a shot of the warden’s brandy, throwing it back, and choking on it. He’d arrested Massey, and he, by god, would make damn sure the lawma
n-killing younker whose fresh face belied his obviously black heart would pay for his sins.

  “Wait for me, damnit, Spurr!”

  10

  IT FELT GOOD, being free.

  Even better than he’d thought it would when he’d fantasized about it all those long months in the prison, figuring he’d spend the rest of his life there, brawling for the warden’s amusement, fighting for every drop of water, every bite of rancid food.

  But now that he was out he took special note of the grass and the sage and the hat-shaped bluffs and sand-colored cliffs cropping up around him here east of the mountains that loomed like a perpetual storm. He loved the sky here. It was all around, and clouds didn’t so much slide across it as pile up on top of him so that he had to stretch his neck back to get a look at those big, gray, billowy thunderheads.

  It was monsoon season, and the storms were spilling down off the mountains and filling the washes out here on the prairie. It was good-tasting water. The best Cuno had ever tasted. Lightning crackled and flashed like witches’ fingers poking the lime-green tableland. Thunder sounded like gods tossing boulders.

  He and the de Cava gang rode hard for three days after the prison break. Cuno wasn’t sure where in the hell they were going; he was beginning to wonder if Mateo even knew. They headed west toward the mountains, and just as they began make the climb into them, heading toward the passes, they swung hard east again and holed up in another isolated badlands.

  They headed out before sunrise the next morning, angling northeast.

  Cuno didn’t much care, as long as he didn’t have to push Renegade too hard and ruin him. He didn’t care where they were going, because he had nowhere to go now that he was a fugitive. A desperado.

  In fact, riding was as good a thing for him to do now as anything. The gang, unheeled as a pack of rabid wolves, provided safety in its numbers. The air and the sun were balms to his battered body, and now, after three days, the swelling around his nose and eyes was going down.

  As they rode, Cuno often glanced at Camilla riding beside him. She glanced back at him, her hair flying out behind her shoulders, her blouse billowing forward then pulling back taut against her breasts as she rode.

  It was exhilarating, riding hard and looking at her and then stealing off with her alone at night and enjoying the delights of her supple, dusky body. He liked how, just as he brought her to fulfillment, she snarled like a bobcat and sunk her teeth into his shoulder. And she’d said only Mateo was part Yaqui! He’d lain with her before in the Rawhides, but she’d seemed so much quieter then. Demure.

  Now there was a wild carnality, a hunger about her that thrilled him. Maybe because it matched his own savagery, which he’d felt growing in him gradually behind the prison walls, then burgeoning suddenly as soon as he rode through those prison gates and knew that he could never go back to the old life he’d had before.

  Not after killing that town marshal.

  Not that he’d been so damn civilized before. In fact, he’d killed many men. But at least he’d tried to settle down and live the life of a good citizen, until he and Sheriff Dusty Mason had made the deal that had likely saved the lives of Michelle Trent and the Lassiter kids, not to mention Camilla herself. A tough deal, because Cuno hadn’t killed those marshals in cold blood. And unlike what Mason had thought, he and his old partner, Serenity Parker, hadn’t been running rifles to the Utes.

  They had been running rifles, all right. Against their wishes, they’d hauled several crates of Winchesters to the Trent ranch, though Cuno had thought they’d just been hauling supplies, not finding out till they reached the ranch that Trent had double-crossed him and had arranged for rifles and gunpowder to be hidden in their freight wagons, to be used by Trent’s ranch hands against the marauding Utes themselves.

  That was all past now. All water under a high bridge.

  Now he had a gang and a woman and his old horse and the .45 that Charlie Dodge had given him back in Nebraska. He had the damp breeze spiced with sage and cedar in his face.

  And he had a good, albeit wild, Mexican filly who reminded him, bittersweetly, of his dead wife, July. And maybe best of all was not knowing or caring where in the hell Mateo de Cava was leading him, because he had no-where to go and he’d come from nowhere . . .

  In the late afternoon, the falling sun behind him, Cuno watched a settlement of sorts rise from a broad, shallow bowl in the prairie, surrounded by low bluffs. Shiny silver rails stretched toward the village from the east and ended a little ways south, where graders and drays were parked around large gravel mounds, and fresh rails were stacked, ready to be laid in the bed that twenty or so men were building with picks, shovels, grading pies, and horse-drawn winches.

  Coffee fires burned, sending up smoke. Mule teams stood tied to picket lines. There was the hum of the men’s raucous working conversation, and the clinks of hammered rail spikes.

  North of where the new rails were being laid, the village sprouted—a shabby oasis consisting of both simple and elaborate frame buildings surrounded by tents of all shapes and sizes. One faint wagon trail led there, and Cuno and Camilla followed the rest of the gang onto the trail and into the railroad supply camp.

  Judging by its two sturdy saloons, so new that the resin from their whipsawed planks made the whole area smell like a pine forest, and a gaudy, two-story building on the second-story balcony of which several young women milled like willowy birds of plumage, the camp had ambitions toward becoming a town.

  Dogs ran out from alley mouths to bark at the large group of dusty newcomers astraddle their sweat-frothy mounts. Chickens scattered. A white horse hitched to a small, black buggy reared and whinnied.

  Mateo’s men whooped and hollered as they thundered on up to the brothel, which was not yet identified by a sign but which could only be a whorehouse, with all the painted girls dancing and smoking and drinking on the second-floor balcony. The girls answered the men’s mating calls in kind, leaning over the wrought-iron rails, shaking out their hair, and letting their wraps and gowns billow out from their bosoms.

  “Good lord,” shouted Brouschard. “I do believe we done died and flew to heaven, amigo!”

  Mateo covered his chest with his black sombrero as he halted his big, black steed and regarded the fluttering birds on the balcony with a caballero-like grin. He didn’t appear at all self-conscious of the ugly scalping scars.

  “Good afternoon, lovely ladies,” the gang leader said in his heavily accented Spanish, giving a courtly bow, then raking the women staring down at him with his eager gaze. “Are you open for business or just getting some air?”

  Several of the girls looked at each other, vaguely puzzled. A couple were speaking in some foreign tongue Cuno didn’t recognize—French? German?—and then a big blonde stepped forward and lowered both straps of her sheer, purple gown, and let her giant breasts adorned with double strings of fake pearls spill forth.

  That was answer enough for the outlaws. Mateo and the other gang members gave another volley of jubilant yowls, leapt out of their saddles, dashed across the broad front, wraparound gallery, and bulled through the brothel’s open double doors.

  Suddenly, Cuno and Camilla were surrounded by over a dozen riderless horses. Inside the brothel, a din rose, echoing, as the men went looking for the women, some of whom remained on the balcony. Others disappeared, heading for their cribs.

  A little redhead remained, clad in a pink corset and gauzy black wrap. Her eyes were rimmed in seductive black that nicely complimented the burnished red of her hair. She rested an arm on the rail and arched a brow as she regarded Cuno still sitting Renegade in the middle of the broad street. He let his gaze stray to the twin mounds of creamy, freckled flesh pushing up from the top of her corset, and felt a surge of heat in his loins.

  Camilla put her horse up hard against his, leaned toward him, and wrapped a slender, strong arm around his neck. She mashed her mouth against his, held the kiss for a good five seconds, then pulled away and turned to the
redhead, who was about her age. Curling her upper lip, she said, “Why would he buy a cow when he gets all the milk he wants for free?”

  Lines cut into the whore’s forehead.

  Camilla hooked a thumb at a hotel up the chaotically laid-out street and winked at Cuno. “Let’s go pound the mattress sack, mi amore.”

  “I got a better idea.”

  As they’d ridden in, Cuno had seen the creek angling along the northern outskirts of the town. Now he turned to Renegade, pinched his hat brim to the incredulous whore, and booted the skewbald paint through a broad gap between a hardware tent and a bathhouse and down a slight grade beyond.

  Ahead lay the creek in its shallow ravine sheathed in tall, brown grass, alders, and the ubiquitous cottonwood. Clear water shimmered in the late light, chuckled over rocks. Cuno put Renegade up to a deep pool that back-eddied into a break caused when one of the large cottonwoods had blown down, wrenching its roots out of the earth. Only the roots remained; the rest of the tree had likely been used in the building of the unnamed encampment.

  Cuno’s boots hit the ground. He looked over Renegade’s back. Camilla’s chestnut bay lunged down the grade, hoofs thudding, the girl’s rump bouncing against her saddle. Her cheeks, brushed by her flying hair, were flushed.

  Cuno held her cool gaze as he quickly unbuckled Renegade’s latigo. She lifted her mouth corners, and a darker color rose in her cheeks as she swung down from her saddle and went to work unrigging her own horse. She had her back to Cuno now, but as she worked she tossed him several luminous glances over her shoulder, coyly tucking her lower lip under her upper front teeth.

  Cuno tossed his gear on the ground. As Renegade trotted off, then dropped and rolled, kicking up dust and weeds, Cuno kicked out of his boots and then quickly shucked out of his clothes. Shedding the dead man’s duds was like shedding extra layers of heavy, smelly grime, and when he’d tossed his underwear over a sage shrub, he threw his shoulders back and scratched his chest then ran his fingers through his longish, blond, sweat-damp hair.