.45-Caliber Widow Maker (12 page)

His chest rising and falling sharply, Cuno stared into Fuego’s insolent, grinning eyes. His jaws hardened painfully as he raised the cocked Colt to the half-breed’s broad, flat face. As he drew a bead on the big man’s forehead, something like apprehension dropped over the half-breed’s eyes, like a shadowy inner lid.

Slowly, Fuego unwrapped his fingers from the cage’s bars and straightened his legs, raising his hands chest high, palms out. The mocking grin continued drawing up the corners of his thick-lipped mouth as he held Cuno’s enraged stare.

Cuno held his gun on the man’s forehead. Rage seared him from the tips of his toes to the top of his head. He felt his index finger draw back against the Colt’s trigger.

“Easy, kid,” warned Colorado Bob. “You wouldn’t kill an unarmed man, would ya?”

“Yeah, kid,” Blackburn said, shuttling his bemused gaze between Cuno and the big half-breed standing like a subdued grizzly before him. “Can’t blame Fuego here for what he was born to. It was the old marshal’s fault. Shouldn’t have gotten so close to the wagon.”

Cuno only half heard them. His own rage was screaming in his ears, howling across every nerve ending like a pack of raging wolves. As his own eyes bored holes into Fuego’s, he slid his .45 slightly to the left, and squeezed the trigger.

As the gun’s roar shattered the morning quiet, Fuego’s head jerked straight back, and the skin above the bridge of his nose wrinkled. He slapped a hand to where his right earlobe and silver ring had been a moment before, then held the bloody hand in front of his face.

His lower jaw dropped and his eyes, totally lacking the mockery that had been in them when his sole remaining ear had been intact, flashed like rifle fire.

“I kill you for that, man!” Fuego slapped his hand to his ear once more and looked at the even bloodier hand as though he couldn’t believe what the first swipe had told him. “I kill you for that, you know? You hear me?” He bolted forward, making the wagon rock and squawk, and curled his hands around the bars. “I tear your
heart
out with my
hands
, and I take a bite as you
die
, you bastard son of a tiny-titted
whore
!”

Cuno grinned acidly as he thumbed the Colt’s hammer back and raised the gun once more. The half-breed’s eyes grew as wide as two fresh cow plops as the bore of the .45 stared down at him. The killer gave a terrified yowl and ducked, stumbling straight back.

Cuno’s Colt roared, and the slug glanced off the bar where Fuego’s face had been a quarter-second before. It screeched off another bar on the other side of the wagon, then dug into the ground with an angry plunk.

Cuno twirled the Colt on one finger and dropped the smoking iron into its holster. He narrowed an eye as he stared through the bars at Fuego, who’d fallen on his back and now lay propped on an elbow, his hat off, the grisly scars of his olive pate showing above the wide, white-and-blue bandanna wrapped around his forehead.

Blood dribbled from where his right earlobe had been.

“The only reason I’m not gonna blow your ugly head off right here and now,” Cuno growled, “is to save me the pleasure of watching you dance three feet off the ground in Crow Feather. Now, I liked you a whole lot better when you were keeping your mouth shout. I strongly suggest, unless you want some other parts to go missing pronto, you get mute again fast.”

Fuego stared back at him, his jaw hinges twitching. But his eyes, still glowing lime green with rage, had softened considerably under a hazy fear shadow. The others stared through the bars with similar expressions—all except Colorado Bob.

The notorious regulator lifted his chin and narrowed his slanted, Viking-like eyes, and the yellow orbs flashed in the growing dawn light filtering into the canyon, his broad, thin mouth spreading with a grin that said his initial estimation of the brawny blond lad before him had been correct.

Keeping his six-shooter clear of the wagon—he knew any one of these jaspers was waiting for an opportunity to reach through the bars and snag the weapon from his holster—Cuno reached down and pulled the dead Landers up by one arm. Stooping, he drew the man up over his shoulder, then backed away from the wagon, keeping his eyes on the prisoners still glaring through the bars at him.

Then he turned and tramped off to where he’d buried Chuck Svenson, intending to plant the second dead lawman beside the first.

He knew that burning daylight for a dead man might cost him his own life, but he couldn’t leave the tough, old Landers to the coyotes and magpies. If for only not having foreseen the danger of letting the marshal, in his pain-racked, inebriated state, get within arm’s length of the jail wagon, he owed him at least the gesture of a burial.

Quickly, he dug the hole, hacking away at the flinty clay with the shovel he’d found behind the wagon seat. When the hole was just deep enough to cover the old marshal’s body, Cuno lay the man in the hole, covered him with the dirt and gravel he’d mounded beside it, then covered the grave with stones heavy enough that coyotes or bobcats couldn’t get at him.

As he’d done with Svenson, he’d buried the man with everything he’d had on him but his guns, ammunition, and badge. The badge he’d save for Landers’s widow. Soon, when Karl Oldenberg sent out more men from his devil’s lair—wherever it may be—Cuno might need all the weaponry he could get his hands on. Oldenberg was known throughout Wyoming Territory and Colorado Territory for riding with only seasoned thieves and killers, the kind of men not even the wiliest of bounty hunters dared track.

The kind of men it would take plenty of cold steel and hot lead to hold off . . .

Cuno didn’t take time to build another crude cross like the one he’d fashioned for Svenson. The lone cross—two pine branches joined with rawhide—would have to serve both graves. He simply moved it to the front center of the two rock mounds and hammered it into the ground with the flat side of his shovel. He wasted no time with words, only a silent apology that he hadn’t gotten to the wagon in time to save the old marshal’s life.

Fifteen minutes later, perched in the driver’s box and with Renegade saddled and tethered to the rear, Cuno drove the wagon back toward the valley. At the box canyon’s mouth he paused to study the rising and falling hogbacks and stony shelves pushing up around him, across the valley’s broad bowl, which was now bathed in golden morning sunshine glistening off the dew-beaded brome and grama grass.

Behind him, Renegade blew. The prisoners sat silently entangled in their cuffs, leg irons, and chains. Cuno could sense their drum-taut expectation, hoping and waiting and watching for Oldenberg.

Fuego sat against the wall directly behind Cuno. The freighter could hear the half-breed’s clipped, guttural grunts as he dabbed at his ruined ear with his neckerchief and no doubt vowed to exact payment for the missing lobe soon.

Spying no movement across the valley, Cuno pulled the wagon on through the box canyon’s mouth, gritting his teeth at the thunderous rattle of the bars and the wide, shod wheels as he put the mules through the winding ravine.

There was nothing he could do about the racket except hope Oldenberg wasn’t yet close enough to hear it. If the gang descended on the wagon, Cuno would climb aboard Renegade and hightail it for the nearest high ground or fortification. From there he’d either hold the gang off with his .45 and Winchester, or, failing that, shoot the prisoners through the jail wagon’s bars.

Better to kill them in cold blood than to allow the jackals to be freed to resume their depredations—especially the rapist and child killer, Fuego.

He pulled the wagon onto the main trail and headed southwest, rattling and clattering, the prisoners for the most part sullen and silent behind him. The trail forked in several places, and signs for ranches stood at each fork, but he continued on the trace that headed toward Crow Feather and Sand River, a small mining camp at the edge of the Cheyenne Drum Hills.

There were several other small towns in the Mexicans but it was doubtful there were any with a telegraph office or even any law beyond a local marshal likely handier with a beer schooner than a .45.

Cuno would keep to the main trail for as long as he could. That the trail was pocked and grooved with other wagon traffic meant that Oldenberg would have a tougher time tracking him than if Cuno’s was the only wagon out here. If he could find a side trail to Crow Feather, he’d take it.

The sun was nearly straight up in the clear, blue, high-country sky, beating mercilessly down on the sage and rabbit brush. Cuno suddenly drew back on the mule’s reins. Scanning the low hills to the west, he’d seen a horseback rider meandering around sparsely scattered pines along a hill shoulder.

As he stared now, the wagon’s dust catching up to him, his brows hooded his keen blue eyes. The rider he’d seen for maybe a single second was gone. Probably dropped into one of the several ravines troughing the low, dun hills bristling with pines, cedars, and a smattering of aspen.

At least, he thought he’d seen a rider. Maybe it was only a phantom conjured by his nettled, anxious mind.

He was about to flick the reins over the mules’ backs when movement again caught his eye, and he returned his gaze to the slope ahead and right. A long, cinnamon tail swished on the other side of a ravine, between two pines. As the tail swished back in the opposite direction, catching the light, the horse continued into the trees, and disappeared.

Cuno’s heart quickened.

He grabbed his Winchester off the seat beside him and took a long, steady look around, casting his gaze into every brush snag and depression around, trying to sear through the pines and scattered, sage-colored boulders.

Nothing.

He looked into the denser forest on the left side of the trail. Finding nothing there, either, he glanced back through the barred cage at Renegade standing passively hang-headed behind the wagon. Obviously, the horse had picked up no foreign scents.

Colorado Bob was sitting with his back to the barred door, smoking a quirley. A sneer etched itself on his thin, pink lips.

“What’s the matter, Widow Maker? They closin’ in?”

Cuno turned his head forward and, setting the Winchester back onto the seat beside him, flicked the reins over the mules’ backs. When the bank along the left side of the trail became less sheer, he turned the team off the trail and into the heavy pines, bulling through low branches and sending pinecones cascading onto the cage.

The mules brayed angrily and Renegade chimed in with several indignant snorts as he thumped along behind. Squirrels chittered raucously and a magpie screeched as it winged up from a fir.

Cuno pulled the wagon up behind two boulders in a slight clearing opening onto a brush-sheathed stream. Setting the brake, he grabbed his rifle, jumped out of the wagon box, and tramped back to where Renegade stood, eyeing him skeptically.

“Easy, boy.”

He grabbed the stallion’s reins off the tailgate, and wrapped his right hand around the horn.

“ ’Bout time you wised up.” Blackburn stood, looking disheveled from the rough ride and peering at Cuno through the bars. A self-satisfied expression flashed in his wintery gray eyes beneath the flat-brimmed hat shading his tanned, stubbled cheeks. “Before you go, throw open the door, will ya? Save the boys a bullet shootin’ the lock off.”

Cuno pulled himself into the saddle and reined Renegade away from the wagon. “Don’t fret, Blackburn.” He touched spurs to the stallion’s loins and started off through the pines, heading back toward the trail. “I’ll be back.”

11

RENEGADE LUNGED ACROSS the wagon trail and into the gently rising meadow beyond, his great lungs heaving and his heart thudding beneath the saddle. When they made the forest, Cuno lowered his head to keep from being hammered from the saddle by low-hanging branches.

The slope grew steeper. The skewbald, enjoying the workout, shook his head and drew deep, clean breaths. Hooves thumped in the tall, sun-cured grass and rattled in occasional patches of slide rock.

Cuno drew rein at the lip of the shallow ravine where he’d spied the rider. He cast his gaze into the scattered conifers on the ravine’s other side, where he’d seen the cinnamon horse tail. Swinging down, he dropped to a knee and traced a clearly defined hoofprint in the exposed dirt with one gloved finger. A crooked line ran along the right side of the print. The shoe was cracked.

Cuno stared into the trees once more, in the direction in which the rider had disappeared. Could be a range rider from one of the nearby ranches, but the skulking way of the man bespoke someone of more furtive intent.

Probably an Oldenberg scout. At least, Cuno would have to assume so.

Rising, he looked up at the crest of the ridge he was on, then reached into his saddlebags for his cavalry binoculars and looped them over his neck. He shucked his Winchester, dropped Renegade’s reins in the grass, and patted the horse’s rump.

“Stay, boy.”

He tramped up the slope through scattered cedars and occasional rocks, keeping his ears pricked and his eyes skinned. Ten feet from the crest, he dropped to his knees, doffed his hat, and crabbed the rest of the way.

Keeping his head low, he cast a look over the ridge and into another, narrower valley down the other side. Beyond, countless rocky, pine-studded ridges rolled off toward high, blue mountains, several of the toothy crests flocked with old snow.

To the right, a slender stream snaked through a wide drainage running perpendicular to the others. He was running his gaze along the stream when he spied movement—three deer splashing across the stream and disappearing into another ravine to Cuno’s left, hidden by the next ridge west.

Grown deer didn’t run for fun. Something had spooked them.

Cuno stretched his gaze upstream from where the deer had crossed, until he saw what appeared, from a mile as the crow flies away, a disjointed brown worm snaking across a tan hillside.