.45-Caliber Widow Maker (8 page)

Landers laughed, coughed, and spat.

“We’ll see about that.”

Cuno cursed inwardly again as he moved around the front of the wagon and tramped off into the meadow. The old marshal’s shoulder was shot to hell. He wouldn’t be able to drive the wagon. It was doubtful that he could even ride without the jarring bleeding him dry.

And if the Oldenberg whom the man had mentioned was the notorious thieving killer and gang leader Karl Oldenberg, even the long-odds bets were off.

But, like the man said, he had a wagonload of prisoners to haul to Crow Feather. They weren’t just stock or hay thieves, either. If all four weren’t seasoned killers, then Cuno didn’t know shit from Cheyenne.

Someone would have to get the wagon to Crow Feather. If Cuno had to do it, he’d be delayed a good three or four days. Likely, he’d lose the freighting contract not just for himself but for his old pal Serenity Parker, as well.

He crouched over the younger marshal, who lay on his hip and shoulder, legs scissored widely, thick red blood coating his neck and chest. His hat was gone but his sweaty, sandy hair still retained its shape.

Cuno grabbed a shoulder and turned the man over on his back. His sightless eyes stared at the sky over Cuno’s shoulder. His parted lips formed a perfect O.

Irrational guilt plucked at Cuno as he stared down at the dead man. Finally, he brushed his open palm across Svenson’s face, closing his eyes.

“Sorry, partner.”

Cuno straightened the man’s legs and crossed his arms on his belly. Leaving the body half concealed in the waving grass, he tramped off toward the northeast side of the canyon where he’d spied the wagon mules foraging in the trees along the creek. As he walked, he kept an eye skinned on the ridges.

The man called Shepherd wouldn’t be back yet, but he’d come. And, if he was a member of Karl Oldenberg’s gang, who’d been plundering mining camps across Wyoming for the past two years, he’d bring more.

Many more . . .

7

THE MULES WERE a couple of mixed-breed duns. They were docile, rested, and watered enough that they balked little at being led back across the canyon to the wagon.

When Cuno had both hitched to the traces, and he’d checked the snaps, buckles, hames, tongue, and double-tree—he wanted no problems in case they needed to hightail it—he checked on the marshal.

The oldster sat where Cuno had left him, dozing in the sunlight that was beginning to angle slowly now over the western ridges, drawing shade out from the jail wagon. The man held his bottle in one hand between his thighs.

At least he appeared to be dozing. The marshal’s cheek twitched slightly as flies buzzed around the blood jelled on his chest, but he didn’t seem to be breathing.

Cuno touched his shoulder, and the man snapped his head up, eyes bright, almost lucid, in fact.

“Got the mules hitched to the wagon,” Cuno said. “As soon as I fetch my horse, we’ll be ready to roll . . . if you still wanna give it a try.”

“Did you check on Chuck?”

Cuno nodded gravely.

“No time to bury him. Maybe we could haul him along, bury him along the trail somewheres . . . ?”

Again, Cuno nodded. “I’ll lay him over my horse.”

The old man threw an arm forward. “Pull me up, young’un. I’ll get rollin’ while you fetch your horse and Chuck.”

Cuno doubted the man would make it, but it was worth a try. He pulled him up and, throwing one arm around his neck, led the man up toward the wagon box.

“Jesus, you don’t look good, Bill,” said the short, muscular prisoner, Frank Blackburn, wagging his head gravely as he stared through the bars.

The other prisoners, even the silently menacing Fuego, were staring expectantly at the wounded lawman.

“Ah, go diddle your mother, Blackburn,” the marshal rasped.

“I’d do that,” Blackburn said, grinning and canting his head toward the wagon’s rear door. “Just as soon as you open the door o’ this here cage . . .”

The marshal stopped near the left front wheel and looked over the mules. Glancing at Cuno, he said, “You’ve rigged a team before.”

“Time or two.” Cuno steadied the wounded marshal as the man put a foot on the wheel hub and climbed heavily, grunting painfully and sucking air through his teeth, into the driver’s box.

Standing, he looked over the team once more, raking his gaze back and forth across the collars and hames and the chains securing the rig to the tongue. “Yessir, you’ll do.”

One-handed, he began unwrapping the reins from the brake handle.

“I’ll be along shortly.” Cuno turned and began striding back toward the western ridge and the defile in the caprock humping up above the pine forest.

Behind him, the old marshal shook the reins across the mules’ broad backs and yelled, “Get along there, now, you useless sacks of mule flesh!”

As the jail wagon began rattling up trail, Blackburn called behind Cuno. “Don’t worry, kid! We’ll take good care of him!”

Between mule-directed harangues, the marshal told Blackburn to do something physically impossible to himself, and, as all the prisoners except Fuego laughed, the wagon crested a low ridge and began dropping down out of sight.

 

Cuno found Renegade contentedly foraging where he’d left the horse on the other side of the spur. Locating a slightly wider defile about fifty yards away from the first one, he led the horse through the gap and down the mountain.

When he’d tied the body of the dead marshal to Renegade’s rump, he began to fork leather, then, remembering the girl, stopped and turned back to the creek. No sign of her. She’d likely run down one of her gang’s horses and hightailed it back to where she came from.

Cuno swung up into the saddle and put Renegade up trail in an easy lope. It was only fifteen minutes or so before he spied the wagon rumbling through another broad canyon rippled with rocky dikes and benches and slashed with small gullies. The wagon was a mere brown speck about a half mile ahead and nearly lost amidst the rabbit brush and clay-colored rocks.

Cuno rode up past the prisoners, who were sitting or lying in the bouncing box, all as scowling, sunburned, and dusty as a passel of trapped wolves. Hearing Renegade’s clomping hooves, the old marshal jerked with a start, fumbling his rifle off the seat beside him.

“It’s Cuno.” The blond freighter walked Renegade beside the right front wheel, keeping pace with the slow-moving wagon. “You still kicking?”

“Ah, shit,” the marshal said, shoving his rifle under the seat. “I cut myself worse than this shavin’.” He glanced at Cuno, squinting one eye. “Cuno, you say?”

“Cuno Massey.”

“I’m Bill Landers. Much obliged for the help, young Massey. I reckon I got her under control for the time bein’. I know you got business ahead, an’ I wouldn’t want to hold you up no more than I already have.”

“That’s all right,” Cuno said. “I got all the time in the world.”

He pulled Renegade up close to the wagon. He wrapped his reins around his saddle horn, then stepped off the horse and into the wagon in one smooth motion, Renegade keeping pace off the wagon’s right front wheel. The body of the dead deputy flopped behind the saddle, the man’s hair dangling toward the trail.

Cuno sat down beside the old marshal, who had fashioned a sling out of a leather rifle lanyard, and poked his hat back off his forehead. A quick inspection told him the oldster was in worse shape than he let on.

The man was of an older, hardier breed—he wore his hard, rich past in the deep lines in his face and neck—but he couldn’t drive the team and endure the wagon’s pitch and sway much more than a few miles. The man’s cheeks were sallow, his eyes glazed with pain.

Already, fresh blood had begun pumping through the cloth Cuno had stuffed into the hole in his chest. It glistened brightly as it spread out across the shirt and vest, and it rimmed the edges of the man’s badge.

“Thought you said you had business in Crow Feather,” Landers said, narrowing a skeptical eye at the husky lad.

“Nah.” Cuno hiked a shoulder. “Just didn’t think I’d look good in a badge. You want me to take over? I’ve driven a few teams.”

“I got it. You know, during the height of the Injun Wars I was shot seven times—all at
once
?”

“Sioux?”

“Nah.” The old lawman winced and shook his head. “The noncom I was playin’ poker with at Camp Wichita!”

He threw his head back and guffawed until he turned linen white and winced at a keen pain spasm. Coughing, he spat over the wagon’s left wheel and drifted into silence.

“How long you been marshaling?” Cuno asked after they’d ridden a half mile or so, just to keep the oldster alert.

“Ten years. I ranched in the Chugwater Buttes ’fore that . . . till rustlers and Injuns run off all my stock and my wife up and left me for a saloon owner in Wheatland.”

Landers shook his head again. “Bitch died of syphilis three years later, and it ain’t to my credit that I rejoiced when the devil took her black soul. I was badge totin’ by then. The feds in Cheyenne needed someone to work the area around here after three deputies got beefed by vermin like these in the back.

“I done cleaned out a good dozen or so gangs holed up from here clear down to the Laramies, the Mummies, and over west to the Wind Rivers. Been half froze, damn near beat to death, arrowed by Crows and Cheyennes, almost drowned by a whiskey peddler named Vernon Gault, and shot in the ass
and
the head by stagecoach thieves and bank robbers.”

Landers chuckled and jerked his head back to indicate the men riding in the cage, just out of arm’s reach, behind him. “You think I’m gonna let these sons o’ bitches run the chute after all that? Bullshit!”

“All four with Oldenberg?”

Landers shook his head. He was sagging forward over his bony knees. His eyelids seemed to be getting heavy, the skin over his cheekbones growing tighter.

“King, Blackburn, and Simms. Fuego’s a loner, far as anyone can tell. He was convicted by the judge in Cody of raping a twelve-year-old girl in an old mine shack not two weeks ago, just outside Crow Feather. The girl’s father found the bean eater sacked out, drunker’n a Catholic on All Saints’ Day, near his poor daughter’s cold, naked corpse. Fuego had slit her throat from ear to ear.”

Cuno glanced over his shoulder to peer into the clattering cage in which all four prisoners dozed. Fuego lay flat on his back with an arm crooked over his eyes. “After what I saw in Bismarck . . .”

Cuno had started to turn his head forward when the old marshal sagged sideways against him, the reins slithering out of his gloved hands. Cuno snapped the reins up quickly, then straightened as the old marshal, his head on Cuno’s left shoulder, gave a long, shuddering sigh and drifted deep into unconsciousness.

The man’s chest was bright with amber blood. Both ends of the wound needed to be cleaned out and wrapped with a poultice, or he’d bleed to death soon.

As the old marshal’s slow, shallow breaths rattled up like a vagrant breeze across cattails, Cuno raked his eyes across the jumbled hogbacks and sandstone dikes rising between two sheer, red stone cliffs over which several hawks or eagles circled, hunting the rims.

Unfolding on his right was a deep, narrow crease between hogbacks. It was hard to tell, but the crease appeared to lead to the base of the red stone wall. Maybe a box canyon.

Cuno turned the mules into the crease, and the wagon bounced violently over sharp hummocks, scattered rocks, and wild mahogany shrubs. As Cuno had hoped, the crease dead-ended in a well-sheltered box canyon cut a hundred yards into the cliff face. A thin trickle of water curled over a mossy granite wall, rattling over jumbled boulders on its plunge to the sand-bottomed pool below.

“Just what in the
hell
are we doin’?” the prisoner called Brush Simms barked indignantly. The violent passage through the crease had jolted him and the other prisoners around in the cage like dice in a cup. They squeezed the bars in their red fists.

Cuno stopped the wagon about thirty yards and down a slight slope from the pool, the runoff trickling through a narrow, rocky cut nearby. He set the brake, dropped the reins, and slid to the far right edge of the driver’s box, dragging the old marshal along as gently as he could.

Planting one foot on the right front wheel hub, the other on a stout wooden brace, he eased the out-cold marshal off the seat. He turned and, holding the man under his sagging arms, stepped onto the rocky ground with the old man sort of dangling off his left hip.

The lawman puffed out his cheeks and flapped his lips as he blew, cursing in his sleep. “Goddamn . . . sons’bitches . . . the whole friggin’ lot . . . !”

“You’ll get no arguments from me,” Cuno muttered.

“Jesus,” Blackburn said, squatting at the edge of the cage and peering gravely through the bars as Cuno led the marshal up the slope toward the rattling falls. “That’s a damn cadaver you’re messin’ with boy. Sure as shit up a cow’s ass!”

“If you don’t think our boys’ll find us in here, you got another think comin’, young fella!” Colorado Bob King tipped back one of the two canteens hanging from the barred ceiling of the jail wagon. Scowling, he let the canteen flop from its lanyard against a barred wall. “Hey, bring us some o’ that water. We’re bone-dry over here!”

Cuno resisted the urge to palm his Colt revolver and silence the prisoners with .45-caliber slugs. He eased the old marshal down against a boulder about twelve feet back from the pool and the rattling falls, which spread a fine mist across the nearby rocks and spindly cedar shrubs.

He looked back to see Renegade nibbling wheatgrass a ways off down the crease, then put two fingers to his mouth and whistled. The horse lifted its head with a start and, rippling its withers, stomped up the slope to the pool.

“Just like a damn dog,” one of the prisoners chuckled, barely audible above the falls.