.45-Caliber Widow Maker (30 page)

Behind Cuno, Bob chuckled. Blackburn cursed. Simms asked one of the women gathered around the wagon to sit on his lap for “one last real good time.” The target of Simms desires and several other women gasped.

Cuno frowned at the din and yelled up to Serenity, “What about the contract with Fort Dixon?”

Serenity rolled his shocked gaze from the prisoners to Cuno, bunched his lips, and shook his head. “It went to an outfit from Medicine Bow yesterday. You’re a day too late.”

The bottom dropped out of Cuno’s stomach. He cursed and was about to lay into Serenity once more for cavorting and drinking while their business went down the privy pit, when the old man waved a hand in dismissal. “Not to worry, though, young’un. Serenity fixed us all up. A rancher named Trent from the Rawhide Range sent a man to town to secure a contract for hauling in winter supplies next month, and guess who landed it?”

As suddenly as Cuno had lost his stomach, it was back. He stared up at Serenity grinning proudly down at him. “Trent?”

“A damn lucrative deal, too,” the oldster said. “But we’re gonna need at least one more wagon and driver. It ain’t easy country, either—them Rawhides.”

A smile started to take shape on Cuno’s mouth when a shutter opened behind Serenity, and a gent with thick silver hair and round, steel-framed spectacles poked his head out the window. He wore a silk undershirt and string tie. His hair was badly mussed, and his eyes were rheumy from drink. He wore as much beard stubble as Serenity.

Behind the man a girl laughed as he said, his resonant voice pitched with anger, “What the hell’s all the commotion out here? Did I lose several hours, or has night fallen over Crow Feather once again?”

Long, slender, female arms wrapped around his neck from behind. A redheaded girl’s pale face appeared over his right shoulder, smiling drunkenly as she nuzzled his ear.

Serenity turned toward the man, then gestured over the railing with his bottle. “Look, Judge—it’s them prisoners you been waitin’ on! Colorado Bob, Blackburn, some redhead, and the half-breed. The partner
I
been waitin’ on brung ’em! Can you believe
that
?”

The judge blinked and frowned skeptically.

“Better hurry, try ’em, and hang ’em, Judge. All four of ’em look like they could give up their ghost at any second!”

Muttering and shaking his head, the judge pulled his head back inside the window. At the same time, two men approached the wagon from the right boardwalk, both wearing badges—one a sheriff’s badge, the other the copper moon and star of a deputy United States marshal. The sheriff was sandy-haired, the marshal gray and sporting a hooked scar on his leathery left cheek, starting just above the tip of his salt-and-pepper mustache.

Both men were shuttling awestruck gazes between the prisoners in the back of the wagon and Cuno still seated in the driver’s box.

“What the hell is this?” the marshal asked, moving with the sheriff up to Cuno’s right front wheel. “What . . . what . . . what . . .?”

“Where’d you find these men, son?” the sheriff asked, tipping his funnel-brimmed Stetson back on his thinning widow’s peak. He had a half-smoked stogie firmly wedged in the right side of his mouth.

“Long story, Sheriff,” Cuno said.

Relief washed over the young freighter. He set the wagon’s brake. His job was done. His weariness was relieved by the optimism of Serenity’s news of a freighting contract.

“Landers and Svenson are dead,” he called down to the two lawmen as people of every stripe stood around the wagon, as frenzied as coyotes around a fresh gut pile. “Killed by Oldenberg. Wasn’t no one else to get these owlhoots to town for their appointment with the gallows, so I took over.”

Cuno wrapped the horses’ reins around the brake handle and started climbing down off the wagon while the two lawmen sized him up with awe.

“Killed by Oldenberg?” the deputy marshal muttered, half to himself.

“Yeah, but don’t worry, Oldenberg’s doin’ the two-step with Old Scratch himself,” Cuno said, leaping into the dusty street between two mock-fighting dogs. He slapped thick dust from his pants and his shirtsleeves. “I’ll tell you everything you wanna know later. In the meantime, I’m officially turning these killers over to you for proper handling. All their friends are dead and, as you can see, they’ve been brought to heel. But I wouldn’t put nothin’ past ’em.”

He gave the lawmen a cordial nod, then tipped his head back to stare straight up at Serenity grinning down at him from the saloon’s second story, the oldster’s arm angled around the pink-clad whore’s broad waist.

“Come on down here and buy me a drink, you old coyote,” Cuno shouted. “I wanna hear about the contract!”

An hour later, Cuno and Serenity sat around the Trail Driver Saloon that, except for them and one lone mouse, had emptied out when the four killers had been hastily tried in the Crow Feather county courthouse and led out to the gallows for proper disposal.

The crowd was jeering and laughing. Kids were running around playing lawman and outlaw. Dogs were barking and humping each other. Prim old ladies including the town schoolmarm were looking properly disgusted as they peered out from between splayed fingers at the gallows and the four doomed killers standing there while the judge, who doubled as the executioner, tightened the nooses around their necks.

The widows of the men killed by Oldenberg’s gang stood nearest the gallows, each dressed in black and holding a rose. One held a small blond child in her arms.

Inside the Trail Driver, Serenity finished reporting to Cuno the details of their new freighting contract, sipped whiskey from his shot glass, and said, “Don’t you wanna go out and join the festivities? Sounds like the town’s having one hell of a hoof-stomping good time!”

It was so quiet inside the saloon that Cuno could hear the mouse on the bar nibbling a dry bread crust from a free lunch plate.

“Nah.” Cuno kicked back in his chair with a sigh. “I like the quiet in here. Besides, those four were as good as dead back in Alfred.”

“Well, then,” Serenity said, holding up his whiskey glass. “Here’s to four dead coyotes and a new freighting contract.”

Just then the crowd quieted.

Cuno and Serenity turned to peer out the saloon’s dusty front window. There was a shrill, horrified scream—it sounded like Simms—and then the raspy bark of four trap doors opening. The four men on the gallows shot straight down through the doors and out of sight behind the crowd.

The snapping of their necks sounded like distant pistol shots.

The crowd erupted, throwing their arms in the air and yelling.

Cuno clinked his glass against Serenity’s.

“Cheers.”

Peter Brandvold
was born and raised in North Dakota. He currently resides in Colorado. His website is
www.peterbrandvold.com
. You can drop him an e-mail at [email protected].