.45-Caliber Widow Maker (29 page)

Cuno was wondering if they were all dead—they were certainly bloody enough to be dead—when Colorado Bob growled, “Stand down, Widow Maker. We’re all outta cartridges.”

He appeared to be wounded in the arm, low on his side, and in his upper left thigh. About ten feet away from him, and also facing Cuno, one leg stretched out before him, the other bent and lying flat, Blackburn had taken a nasty burn across his forehead and a slug about six inches below his left shoulder.

Simms sat on the other side of the door. He had his knees drawn up to his chest. He, too, was a bloody mess. Glowering across the room at Cuno, he fairly sobbed, “Goddamnit, boy, don’t you have nothin’ else to do with your time?”

He dropped his head to his knees and sobbed with abandon—an overgrown child who hadn’t gotten what he’d been promised for his birthday.

Cuno shifted his eyes to Colorado Bob sitting with his head against the wall, left of the largest window in the room. “Where’s Li’l Sis?”

“Done cut out on her big brother, I reckon.” Bob chuckled without mirth, then winced as pain racked him. “She doesn’t have the killin’ fire to make it in this line. Needs to get her a job in a saloon somewheres. Anywheres but Texas . . .”

Cuno glanced around cautiously, then, seeing nothing of Johnnie Wade, he lowered the rifle and stepped into the smoky room. He saw his own Winchester leaning against the wall, near a pile of spent brass. Blackburn was wearing Cuno’s wide brown cartridge belt and his Frontier model, ivory-gripped Colt. He nudged the man’s boot with his own.

“I’ll take my rig back now.”

“Well, you’ll just have to pull it off yourself, because I took a bullet through my hand.”

When Cuno had his own gun belt around his waist, with the satisfying weight of the Colt .45 hanging off his hip, and his own loaded Winchester in his hands, he stepped out the half-open, bullet-riddled front door.

From the porch he saw a man hunkered down over a woman lying facedown in the street, as red as a side of beef. The man wore an apron, and he had a pencil behind his ear.

He looked at Cuno, and his eyes acquired a fearful light. He straightened and backed away slightly, holding his hands up feebly. “Look, mister, I don’t know what the trouble is here, but—”

“There any law in this burg?” Cuno moved off the porch and across the yard, heading for the street.

The man wrinkled his nose and sniffed. “I . . . I reckon I am . . . when needed.”

Cuno looked up and down the sun-blasted street. A few other men were angling toward him from a saloon at the far end of town, and a big woman in a shapeless gray dress stood outside a haberdashery, shading her eyes with a hand as she stared toward the brothel.

“You got some cuffs and leg irons?”

The man in the apron hiked a shoulder. “I reckon I can scavenge some from the jail.”

“How ’bout a sawbones?”

“I last seen him playin’ poker over to the Territorial Saloon.”

“Round it up. The cuffs and the sawbones. A freight wagon, too. I got four wounded prisoners who need patching for the trail to Crow Feather.”

When the man in the apron had limped off toward the west end of town, Cuno started back to the brothel. Slow hoof thuds drew his head around, and he saw a girl on a fresh buckskin riding toward him from the west, angling out of a gap between the buildings.

She came on slowly, her features set with a bored, tired air. Or was it a sad, defeated air? In her gloved hand she held a carbine across the pommel of her saddle, but she didn’t seem inclined to raise it.

Cuno let his own rifle hang down beside his right leg as he scrutinized her critically, a feeble, remembered anger stirring in him but without the heat it had before.

“What’s the matter, Li’l Sis,” he said, putting some false steel into his voice. “Get a craw full?”

“I’ll be pullin’ my picket pin.”

“What about your brother?”

“He ain’t my brother. Leastways, he ain’t the brother I thought he was.”

Johnnie Wade filled her lungs wearily and looked at Cuno directly. “I’m sorry for what I did back there at the cabin. I figured to play this hand out different . . . for both me an’ Bob. But he’s just a killer like the others.” The skin above the bridge of her nose winkled, and she lowered her eyes. “I’m sorry, Cuno, but you ain’t takin’ me in.”

Cuno let a silence stretch. Her defeated air was infectious, and he suddenly just wanted to be in the driver’s box of a freight wagon, hoorawing a team of mules through empty, quiet country, far away from people and all their troubles. “I’m not a lawman. I’m just finishing a job for a couple who can’t.”

“Maybe see you again sometime.” Johnnie touched her spurs to the buckskin’s flanks.

“Where you heading?”

She threw a glance over her shoulder and kept riding. “I don’t know.”

The buckskin stretched its stride into a trot, the hooves kicking up dust as the horse and its slender, tawny-haired rider trailed on out of town.

Cuno watched her for a time. Then, seeing a man in a shabby suit and carrying a black medical bag heading toward him, he tramped back into the brothel.

“Sit tight, fellas,” he said. “The doc’s comin’ to patch you up for the hangman.”

Blackburn cursed.

Fuego groaned.

Brush Simms continued to sob into his arms.

Colorado Bob laughed madly.

EPILOGUE

“IT’S . . . IT’S
Colorado Bob
!” a boy shouted, pointing. “And that’s . . . why, it’s . . .
Frank Blackburn
!” His face became all sparkling eyes in the late afternoon sunshine as he jumped around, pointing and yelling. “It’s the
prisoners
, fellas! We can have the hangin’, after all!”

As the coverless freight wagon and its four sullen, heavily bandaged, and shackled prisoners traced a long, last bend in the trail from Alfred, Cuno saw the boy fairly dancing a jig by the plank bridge at the far western edge of Crow Feather. He was a towheaded lad in coveralls and holding a cane pole. A line drooped from the pole into the creek that was swollen from the summer storms that had been assaulting the Mexican Mountains looming in the north.

Two other boys about the same age—ten or so—and one a couple of years younger leapt to their feet then, too, and, leaving their poles along the rocky, sage-stippled creek bank, wheeled and went running along the trail into the town, yelling almost in unison, “It’s the prisoners! It’s the prisoners! Colorado Bob and them! We can have the hangin’
after all
!”

“Kids,” scoffed Colorado Bob behind Cuno. “Never cared for ’em.”

“Me, neither,” said Frank Blackburn. “Fact, that boy there needs to have his tongue cut out, dried, and hung around my neck for a fob to show off to my favorite two whores in Wichita Falls.”

“Better make it fast,” said Brush Simms, wincing and touching his bandaged forehead as the wagon bounced violently across a chuckhole.

Cuno glanced over his shoulder to see the redheaded outlaw straining to peer with a sour expression over the tops of the horses and into the fast-approaching town. Simms said, “I do believe that’s a gallows I see yonder. Like as not, built just for us.” He sank back down against the slats with a sigh. “Can’t believe it. I just can’t believe I’m really gonna die.
Me
. . . of all people!”

“You earned it,” Cuno said, staring straight ahead as the Main Street business establishments of Crow Feather—sunbaked mud and whipsawed structures, and a few tents and log cabins—pushed up on both sides of the trail.

“I wasn’t talkin’ to you, you son of a bitch!” Simms barked, his voice cracking shrilly. “I’m all
through
talkin’ to you!”

“Pardon me,” Cuno said, feeling a smile lift his mouth corners for the first time in what felt like months. What a relief to have made it to his destination at long last.

“Easy, Brush,” Colorado Bob counseled. “We each must die.”

“But not me! Not today!” Blackburn chimed into the conversation. “And not account o’ some wet-behind-the-ears gunslick like
him
!”

The wagon clattered along Crow Feather’s wide, dusty main drag, the four boys running out ahead of it and yelling, waving their hands in the air as though to announce the circus was heading into town.

Dogs ran out from beneath boardwalks and from trash piles between the sun-seared buildings. One had been loitering under the gallows sitting before the county courthouse on the left side of the street, four hang ropes forlornly jostling over the raised platform in the vagrant summer breeze.

Now the spotted pup, as though with all the others intu iting what the commotion was about, came out to chase the wagon, yipping and howling like a crazed coyote.

Crow Feather was only about half again larger than Alfred, but Cuno could see the sprawling stone walls and guard towers of the federal pen at the far end, flanked by sage flats, low brown hills, and more mountains shouldering in the east. But it was the sheriff’s office Cuno was heading for, the yelling boys leading the way. He remembered that the sheriff shared quarters with federal deputy marshals down a side street not far from the prison.

As he slouched in the driver’s box, holding the horses steady despite the dogs bolting out to nip at their hocks and at the wagon’s wheels and to jump up and snarl at the prisoners, he saw people stopping along the boardwalks to stare. More kids appeared as if from nowhere, and loafers rose from benches to shout and wave.

Several others—women as well as men—came out of the shops and saloons. A beefy, red-bearded blacksmith stopped hammering on his anvil between the open doors of his shop to regard Cuno and the wagon and then to yell something to another gent across the street.

Cuno couldn’t hear much because of the rising din, but he’d thought the blacksmith had said something along the lines of, “I’ll be damned—lookee there, Haskell!”

“It’s them!” a man in armbands shouted from in front of a barber poll. “It’s Bob and Blackburn and, shit”—he planted his fists on his hips and laughed—“they threw in a half-breed for good measure!”

Behind Cuno, Brush Simms gritted out, “Don’t I count?”

Cuno slowed the wagon to let a farm rig pull out from a mercantile loading dock. As he did, he looked around for his old partner, Serenity Parker. His pulse hammered as he wondered—as he’d been wondering over the twenty long, hot, dusty miles from Alfred—if he and Serenity still had a contract waiting for them out at Fort Dixon.

He’d no sooner got the horses pulling again when his searching gaze held on a balcony over the Trail Driver Saloon and Dance Hall on the street’s right side, just beyond the mercantile.

There were several girls up there, looking like exotic birds in their colorful dresses, hair feathers, and breeze-buffeted boas. They stood around laughing and smooching with half-dressed drovers and a couple of mustached youn kers wearing the striped pants of cavalry soldiers. A potbel lied corporal was feeling up a pretty little brunette from behind while the brunette laughed and sucked a cornhusk cigarette.

But the soldiers and the others were all in the periphery of Cuno’s vision. What had caught the young freighter’s incredulous stare was a plump whore dressed all in pink, and the scrawny little bird of a gray-bearded gent sitting crossways in her lap.

The little gent wore only threadbare longhandles and black wool socks through which most of his gnarled toes protruded. Tufts of cottony hair poked out from around the sides of his head, the freckled, age-spotted top of which was as bald as a turkey buzzard.

Indeed, Serenity Parker resembled nothing so much as a buzzard perched bizarrely in the lap of the chubby, pink gowned whore whose swollen bosom he nuzzled and smooched, kicking his scrawny legs and swigging from a half-empty whiskey bottle.

Cuno hauled back on the horses’ reins, glaring up at the balcony and his carelessly frolicking partner. “Serenity!” he called above the calls of the gathering crowd and the barking dogs. “Is that you up there, you old son of a bitch?”

Serenity was taking a deep sniff of the whore’s cleavage. He jerked his head up suddenly and turned toward the street. “Huh?” he said, glancing at the whore. “Someone use my handle?”

“I believe it was the gent down there,” the whore said, frowning down at Cuno and his makeshift prison wagon.

“Down where?”

Serenity wheezed and chuffed himself up off the whore’s broad lap and, holding his bottle by the neck, moved up to the railing and squinted down toward Cuno. He had about three days’ growth of salt-and-pepper stubble on his hollow cheeks and jutting chin, and judging by his hair as well as his attire, he’d been frolicking in the mattress sack for just as long.

“I’m glad to see you’re all worried about me,” Cuno chided, ignoring the cacophony around him. One of his horses pricked its ears and kicked a dog, making the wagon jerk. “Hope you didn’t go to any extra trouble, saddling a horse and riding out looking for me.”

“
Cuno?
I’ll be goddamned!” Serenity exclaimed, widening his deep-set, frosty-blue eyes. “Where the hell you been, son? I been worried
sick
!”

Cuno glanced at the whore who’d come up to stand beside Serenity. She had a pretty, round face with a beauty mark on her chin, but she dwarfed the old gent.

“I see that,” Cuno growled.

Serenity glanced at the whore and flushed.

“Ah, well, hell—what’d you want me to do? Lay around pinin’? I figured I might as well have a little fun while I waited for ya. Didn’t see no point in ridin’ out after ya, this country bein’ as big as it is.”

The oldster’s eyes shifted to the back of the wagon. The bushy gray brows came down, and Serenity blinked as though to clear his vision. He ran a grimy sleeve across his eyes, then looked again and pointed with the bottle.

“Say, what the hell you got there, Cuno? I hope you realize you picked ya up some trash along the trail. Why, that there . . . hell . . . ain’t that Colorado Bob King his own-self?”