.45-Caliber Desperado

by Peter Brandvold

  The paint reared with a start, giving a raucous whinny.

  As Calderon’s horse whipped around and into Renegade, nearly knocking Cuno from his saddle, Cuno glanced toward the rubble pile, a stone dropping in his gut when he saw the two lawmen—the man called Spurr as well as Dusty Mason—dashing out from the far eastern edge of the pile and into the scrub, firing their Winchesters on the run and from their hips.

  “Mierda!” Camilla cried, propping her carbine on her left forearm and squeezing off a shot that sent Mason diving for cover behind a half-buried rock.

  The old marshal had dropped to a knee and was levering his Winchester. As he tried to get Renegade back under rein, Cuno heard the bullets screeching over and around him, several hammering the rocks and brush on the opposite side of the trail.

  Skinner gave a yowl and thrust his head forward, as though one of the slugs had nipped the back of his neck, then kicked his piebald into a lunging gallop on up the trail.

  “Get moving—I’ll cover you!” Cuno yelled at Camilla as she racked another shell into her Winchester’s breech, then fired another shot at the old lawman. The chestnut was already bounding forward, and her slug merely clipped a greasewood branch behind the man.

  Spurr didn’t so much as flinch but triggered two more quick rounds, evoking a yell from Haines, whose own horse had thrown him when the lead had started flying again. As Camilla hammered up the trail, casting an anxious glance behind at Cuno, Cuno jerked back hard on Renegade’s reins and triggered a round at Spurr one-handed.

  “Mount up!” he shouted at Haines.

  Haines clutched his cream’s reins in one hand and staggered toward the horse’s stirrup. Cuno racked a fresh round and glanced at the man, about to shout at him again. But then he saw the blood on the outlaw’s face. He appeared to have been shot through both cheeks. Blood oozed in a glistening, frothy torrent from between his grimacing lips.

  “Fuck!” Haines shouted, the curse obscured by the blood.

  “Mount up, Haines!” Cuno shouted again and raised his Winchester toward Spurr once more.

  The old lawman had him dead to rights, but Cuno heard the lawman’s hammer click on an empty round.

  “Goddamnit!” he shouted, tossing the rifle aside. “Mason, where the hell—?”

  Another rifle barked twice, one slug drawing an icy line across Cuno’s cheek, the other evoking another scream from Haines, who flew forward against his cream, throwing his arms up and out. The bullet that had taken the outlaw through the back must have gone all the way through him and into his horse, because the cream lurched sideways, then piled up on its right stirrup in a broiling swelter of adobe-colored dust.

  Haines fell over the horse and lay writhing along with his mount.

  Cuno reined Renegade hard right and rammed his boots into the paint’s loins. As rifles thundered behind him, stitching the air around his head with screaming bullets, causing dust to puff along both sides of the trail and perilously close to the horse’s scissoring hooves, he hunkered low and gave the beast its head.

  He glanced to his left where the soldiers were now angling toward the trail, within a hundred yards now, dust puffing from raised pistols.

  Spurr’s raspy voice bellowed behind Cuno: “Goddamnit, Wilson, ’bout time you joined the party!”

  Cuno kept Renegade several paces behind Camilla, who was riding behind Skinner, who in turn followed both Azuelo and Mateo, who held the girl on his saddle before him. Taking a hostage didn’t set right with Cuno—especially a young girl. But he’d counted close to ten cavalry riders. Including the two lawmen, that made the odds twelve against five. Having the girl might slow down their pursuers or cause them to think twice before taking potshots at the outlaws.

  When Cuno had galloped a quarter mile, he saw that Mateo was checking down his black, and the others were following suit. They were all curveting their mounts, looking down trail, as Cuno slowed Renegade and turned the skewbald paint, as well. He stared down the ribboning trail of cream-colored dirt, saw the soldiers led by two men in civilian garb—Spurr and Sheriff Mason—pounding toward him.

  Mateo cursed and booted the black past the others, a savage look in his eyes. The girl was hunched before him. She appeared pale and delicate. Her blond hair had fallen from the bun atop her head. It was mussed and dusty, and her eyes were swollen and red, her cheeks wet from tears. The sight of the terrified girl in the clutches of such a savage as Mateo de Cava poked Cuno with guilt and revulsion.

  He fought it off, swallowed it down. What could he do about the girl, anyway?

  He was on a trail that could lead him in only one direction. There was no turning back. He wasn’t fooling himself about the dandy in the powder-blue suit. He may not have had the stomach to kill the man in cold blood, but he was just as guilty of the man’s murder as the man who’d dropped the hammer on him twice.

  And the blond was likely the dandy’s daughter.

  Cuno watched as Mateo reined up the black about fifty yards back down the trail and held one of his silver-chased .45s to the girl’s head. Spurr and Mason checked their own mounts down, followed by the cavalry men behind them, about fifty yards down trail from Mateo.

  The outlaw leader shouted, “You follow us, amigos, and this pretty gringa gets a hole drilled in her head! Muchacha bastante rubia!” Mateo nuzzled the girl’s neck, keeping the pistol taut against her temple. Then he laughed jeeringly. “Clear out, or she dies!”

  Spurr and Mason shared a glance. Spurr looked back at Mateo and lifted his weathered, bearded face as he shouted over the head of his big roan, “You kill her, you die hard, amigo.” He rose up in his saddle and pinched his eyes down hard beneath the brim of his battered tan hat. “I personally will see you hang slow!”

  “I warned you!” Mateo shouted, then reined his black around hard. He galloped past Cuno, Camilla, and the others then angled off the right side of the trail and into the pinyons and mesquites carpeting a gradual rise amongst red rocks. The incline rolled up against a steep-walled, red sandstone mesa.

  “Mateo, where are you going?” Camilla yelled, taking the words right out of Cuno’s mouth.

  “We’re taking the high ground, mi hermana. We will rest our horses, wait for our pursuers to disperse, then head for Mejico!”

  “That’s tough terrain!” Cuno called after the man. “The horses are already winded!”

  Mateo said nothing as he continued galloping up a low rise, his black charro jacket powdered with white trail dust, his black, silver-stitched sombrero flopping down his back. Skinner and Azuelo followed Mateo up the rise, Skinner casting a skeptical glance back at Cuno and Camilla.

  Cuno looked down trail once more. Spurr, Mason, and the soldiers were milling around, the two lawmen conferring with a silver-bearded soldier with long gray hair wearing a tan kepi and yellow glove gauntlets.

  Maybe the hostage would hold them. Maybe she wouldn’t. If she didn’t, Cuno knew Mateo well enough to know what would happen to her.

  As he and Camilla followed the others up the rise, heading for the mesa wall, Cuno wondered how far they were from the Mexican line. They couldn’t be more than an hour’s ride. If they continued through this rough country beyond the trail, who knew how long it would take them to reach it?

  It was clear why Mateo had chosen this route, however. They could more easily be followed on the trail, and from this higher ground they could see if they were being shadowed.

  As they climbed the ever-steepening rise to the base of the mesa wall and then rode alongside the formation, in its shadow most of the time, Cuno kept an eye on their back trail and saw no sign of their pursuers. They had a low stretch of open desert on their right. On their left was the mesa wall. The longer they rode with the wall beside them—it looked like a very long ridge—Cuno grew worried.

  If they were attacked, they’d be trapped against the mesa.

  When they’d ridden several miles from the looted stage, they stopped to rest and water their horses in a smal
l stream that ran out from a narrow gorge cleaving the mesa from west to east. The gorge was rocky and lush with grama and bromegrass, small cottonwoods, and willows. A few yards beyond the gorge’s mouth, the stream tumbled down a thirty-foot ledge—a pretty falls in a setting made for a picnic . . . if one were looking for a picnic rather than an escape route to Mexico.

  They dismounted where the stream ran out of the canyon, loosened their saddle cinches to give the mounts a breather, and slipped their bits from their mouths. Renegade and the other mounts were sweat-lathered, the heat radiating off them and intensifying the pungent, leathery horse smell.

  Mateo brusquely pulled the girl down off his stallion’s back and threw her down hard beside the stream.

  “Take it easy,” Cuno told him. He’d removed his canteen from his saddle horn, and he was holding it now, ready to fill it from the creek. His voice was calm, but a burning rage at the outlaw leader made his pulse throb in his temples.

  Mateo looked surprised. “Huh?”

  “So we need her as a hostage. That’s no reason to mistreat her.”

  “I didn’t mistreat the little gringa puta.”

  “Yes, you did,” Cuno said with a mildness that betrayed his eagerness to draw his .45 from its holster. He stared hard at the dark-bearded, dark-eyed man who stood a good two inches taller. “I’m sayin’ don’t do it again.”

  Mateo grinned maliciously. “Oh? And what if I do?”

  “I’ll kill you.” The threat surprised even Cuno.

  Mateo continued grinning as he glanced at Azuelo, who’d just set the money pouch on a rock beside the creek. Azuelo returned Mateo’s devious glance, then, straightening, slid his narrowing, incredulous gaze to Cuno while sliding his hand toward his belly gun. Mateo did the same with his own hand.

  “Hold on, pendejos!” Camilla barked, shoving Cuno aside and moving up in front of her brother. “In case you lost count, we’re down to five rider—”

  A rifle bark cut her off. Mateo screamed and lurched forward, grimacing and squeezing his dark eyes closed while reaching around toward his lower back with one hand.

  Camilla screamed, then, too, and threw both hands up toward her brother’s chest as if to hold him upright but then she was crumpling beneath the tall Mexican’s powerful frame.

  Before Cuno’s mind had caught up to what had just happened, Mateo was on the ground, on top of his writhing sister. Mateo cursed shrilly and lifted his head, gritting his teeth savagely and reaching for the Green River knife sheathed on his right thigh.

  Cuno palmed his Colt and, bringing the gun up while clicking back the hammer, dropped to one knee to stare into the brush east of their makeshift day camp—the direction from which the shot had come.

  “Hold your fire, goddamnit!” Spurr’s raspy, enraged voice shouted from somewhere back in the rocks and brush growing up close to the stream, directed at his own men. “Goddamnit, Wilson—I didn’t tell no one to shoot!”

  Skinner and Azuelo had both spun around to face the brush, their bodies poised to return fire, their backs and necks taut as razor wire. Azuelo held an ivory-butted Remington while Skinner crouched over a carbine.

  Cuno’s mouth tasted like copper. He held his index finger taut against the Colt’s trigger, waiting for another blast, frustrated because he couldn’t see the men who’d been trailing them unseen and were now crouched just beyond the camp, ready to take him and the others down bloody.

  Spurr was one wily old coyote to have tracked them so stealthily with a passel of tinhorn soldiers.

  Mateo heaved himself up off his sister, leaving a patch of blood on the front of Camilla’s calico blouse.

  “Mateo!” she cried as the outlaw leader, red-faced with rage, went over and pulled the cowering blond girl up by her arm.

  He dragged the sobbing girl to a rocky ledge that overlooked the brush and trees carpeting a gradual eastern slope. Cuno saw the bloody wound in the man’s back, just up from his left kidney. It pasted his shirt tight against his body and quickly began to look like an outer layer of blood-sodden skin.

  “You bastards!” Mateo shouted, holding the girl in front of him and raising the Green River knife to her neck. “You think I was joking you about killing this girl?” He laughed demonically. “What do you think now, bastards?”

  Spurr shouted from somewhere down the brush-carpeted slope, “Don’t do it, de Cava!”

  The girl screamed as Mateo jerked her head back taut against his chest. Standing about ten feet directly behind the outlaw leader, Cuno raised his Colt straight out from his shoulder and fired.

  31

  MATEO’S HEAD JERKED violently forward.

  He dropped both arms and stumbled toward the lip of the ledge. The girl fell to her knees, shrieking. The knife fell from Mateo’s hand and clattered onto the rocks at his high-heeled black boots.

  As Camilla screamed and both Skinner and Azuelo shouted in horror, Mateo swung around toward Cuno and tried without success to palm one of his two fancy Colts. There was a gaping cavern in his saddle-brown forehead, leaking liver-colored blood and white chunks of bone and brains. The blood and brains had dribbled down to cover his right eye while the other eye rolled straight up into the man’s head, showing only an egg-like white.

  Cuno swung his smoking Colt toward Azuelo, who’d beat him to the mark. Yelling fiercely, the Mexican fired at Cuno a half second after a bullet flung from the brush-covered slope had plowed into his side beneath his outstretched arm and exited his body via his lower left rib cage, nudging his shot just wide enough that it kissed the slack of Cuno’s left shirtsleeve before hammering into a pinyon pine behind him.

  Frank Skinner was down on one knee, screaming as he triggered his carbine down the slope.

  As the crackling of pistols and rifles rose from the brush, Cuno leapt forward, grabbed the blond girl beneath her arms, and dragged her back behind a boulder, out of harm’s way. Bullets screeched through the air around him, riddling Skinner, who continued to scream and trigger his carbine as he flew backward into the stream with a splash. Cuno fired several shots to try to hold Spurr’s men at bay, then turned to Camilla, who stood staring, mouth gaping, at her dead brother.

  “We gotta go!” Cuno shouted, grabbing the girl around her waist and jerking her around toward her horse ground tied in the tall grass near the water. “We’re heading up canyon!”

  As a bullet slammed into a rock between Camilla and the creek, she jerked back to life with a start, then grabbed her chestnut’s reins. Cuno emptied his Colt at Spurr, Mason, and the cavalry riders before he grabbed the money pouch. He’d gone through too much to leave the cash behind. He’d take his chances without the girl, try to get shed of his pursuers another way, but he wasn’t going anywhere without the money.

  When he was sure that Camilla was following, crouching and triggering shots behind her, he headed up the canyon at a hard run, leading the fiddlefooting Renegade along a narrow game path along the creek.

  Bullets hammered into the rocks and brush around them, but after they’d run a few yards, boulders closed around them, and the canyon swerved southward, the walls offering cover.

  Behind, the shooting dwindled, and Cuno could hear Spurr shouting orders and arguing with another man, probably the commanding cavalry officer. That faded, too, the farther Cuno and Camilla led their horses on up the narrow, rocky canyon path, and soon all they could hear were the falls and the tinny rattle of the water of the stream dropping down its terraced bed, flowing over half-submerged rocks.

  “Are you sure we can get out of here this way?” Camilla said when they’d both stopped to eye the falls looming before them.

  Cuno shook his head. “No. We might be boxed in. At least there’s a way around the falls.” He started forward. “Let’s see if the horses can make it.”

  He led Renegade across the creek that rose to Cuno’s knees. On the other side there was a trail of sorts that snaked up the ledge, on the left side of the thirty-foot falls.

  It was
a tough, steep climb for both Cuno and the paint, both dropping to their knees several times, but they gained the ridge about fifteen minutes later. Camilla and her chestnut were right behind them, the girl’s boots squawking, the horse blowing and shaking its head owlishly, as she came up to where Cuno stood watching the stream slide on over the ridge and down into the canyon below.

  Farther down the canyon, there was no sign of Spurr and the others.

  Cuno turned to Camilla. She said nothing as she stared down the canyon. Her eyes were glassy, stricken. Her breasts rose and fell heavily as she breathed. She hadn’t yet comprehended what had happened to her brother.

  “I’m sorry, Camilla.”

  She shook her head and continued to face down the canyon.

  Cuno sucked in a deep breath, his heart continuing to pound against his rib cage. Finally, he swung around and continued on up the canyon along the stream. “A little farther and then we’ll rest.”

  A hundred yards up canyon, the walls began to open. Cuno and Camilla stopped here, where they could keep an eye on the narrower canyon up which they’d come and hold off any pursuers. They ground-reined their horses in the tall grass near the stream, fed them each a couple of handfuls of oats, and let them graze.

  Then they collapsed side by side in the grass, in the shade of a tall willow, and Camilla doffed her hat and rested her head on Cuno’s shoulder.

  Cuno removed his own hat as well as his handkerchief. From here, to his right, he had a good view of the eastern canyon floor, the steep, rocky slopes on either side glowing nearly as white as flour in the sunlight, the floor of the canyon leafy, grassy, and shaded along the stream.

  Cuno offered his canteen, which he’d just filled at the creek, to Camilla, who shook her head. He took a deep pull of the cool, refreshing liquid, then shoved the cork back into the mouth, and set the canteen beside his thigh. He wrapped an arm around Camilla’s shoulders, drawing her tight against him.

  “It’s down to just us,” she said, vacantly staring at the grass.

  “You paid a high price, springing me from the prison.”