.45-Caliber Widow Maker

by Peter Brandvold

  As he began to fall to his left, Cuno grabbed the front of his shirt and pounded another left against Fuego’s ear. Holding the man’s slack body before him, Cuno hammered the ear again and again, hearing his own grunts rake out through gritted teeth, barely audible above the solid smacks of his knuckles pounding the half-breed’s hideous ear like the regular blows of a blacksmith’s hammer.

  Wham! Wham! Wham! Wham!

  Fuego’s chin dropped to his chest in spasm-like jerks, shoulders slumping, a soft mewling issuing from his bloody lips.

  Cuno released the man’s shirt, and the half-breed fell over sideways, hitting the ground like a fifty-pound sack of cracked corn. He lay on his side, legs bent, unmoving.

  Suddenly remembering the other prisoners, Cuno wheeled and raised his fists as though for another onslaught. His broad chest rose and fell sharply, his sweat-soaked tunic clinging to his torso like a second skin, his neckerchief turned backward and hanging down behind his neck.

  The three other prisoners lay six feet away, immobilized by the chains connecting them. Blackburn was on his hands and knees. Simms was on his side. Colorado Bob was on his butt, one arm thrown ahead toward Blackburn’s, the links connecting them drawn taut.

  All three stared up the slope at Cuno, snarling, Blackburn muttering sharp curses, Simms merely wagging his head with the fateful chagrin of a man who’d missed his train.

  “Ah, fer Pete’s sake!” Blackburn grunted. “Shit! Shit! Shit!”

  Cuno looked at the chain trailing from Fuego’s ankle. Somehow the half-breed had pried a manacle link loose as well as a cuff link. Cuno should have expected that. Turning upslope, he grabbed his .45. Mopping sweat from his brow with his forearm, he swung the gun toward the wagon. “Back inside.”

  “I gotta take a piss,” said Colorado Bob.

  “Simms’ll show you how to do it through the bars.”

  Cuno cocked the Colt and spread his feet. The rage hadn’t died in him yet. His boiling blood still churned. He had to make a conscious effort not to draw his finger back against the .45’s trigger and blow them all back to the demon that had spawned them.

  “Inside. Pronto. Unless you want some o’ what ole Half-Ear got.”

  When Cuno had the three gang members back in the cage, he strode downslope to where Fuego lay sprawled, unconscious and groaning like a dog squashed by a lumber dray. A few kicks drew the half-breed back to consciousness, and a few more got him crawling back up the slope to the jail wagon, cursing and snarling like a wolf in a leg trap.

  The man was as white as Dakota snow and shaking like a leaf in a Texas windstorm, but the threat of more abuse to his badly shredded ear compelled him to crawl back up through the open cage door on his own.

  While the others watched grimly, he crabbed to the far end of the wagon, where he reclined on a shoulder and, with shaking hands, removed his already bloody kerchief from around his neck and pressed it to his ear. Groaning deep in his throat, he spread his bloody lips back from his bloody, gapped teeth in a tortured wince.

  “Now, then . . .”

  Cuno slammed and padlocked the door, then tramped out to fetch the mules and Renegade dining on the rich bluestem growing along the roiling stream. Cuno cursed as he probed his face with a thumb. His jaw and cheek ached fiercely, and a small heart hammered inside his head, but he didn’t think anything was broken.

  His vision was still semi-blurred, but all in all, he was damn lucky to have come out of the brawl intact. The look in Fuego’s eyes had warned him such a move was coming, and he should have been ready for it. You had to expect the unexpected from yellow-toothed, child-killing demons like the half-breed.

  Any more carelessness, and Cuno would be snuggling with snakes at the bottom of a deep ravine.

  When he had the mules hitched and Renegade tied to the back of the wagon, he mounted the driver’s box and cast a long, cautious glance behind him. Relieved not to see twelve green-broke killers galloping up his back trail, he shook the reins over the mules and resumed his trek toward the fir-studded slopes of the eastern Mexicans.

  If he could have seen through the hills and forests behind him, he would have seen the brown mass of thirteen riders, led by the beefy Karl Oldenberg, galloping along the north-south trail Cuno had left two hours ago.

  As the group approached the fork in the trail, on the west side of Spring Creek, they paused, dust billowing around them, horses stomping and chewing bridle bits as the men turned this way and that, looking around and conferring.

  A few dug around in shirt or duster pockets for tobacco sacks and leaned back in their saddles, building smokes.

  A few minutes later, while one of the riders was still hunched forward, lighting his hastily rolled quirley, the mass continued straight along the trail toward Crow Feather, while four riders branched eastward, splashing along the stream and putting their sweaty mounts into long strides along the trail to Petersburg.

  13

  THE LEANING WOODEN sign along the road read in burned black letters: PETERSBURG, WYO TERR—POP 223. A line carved with a dull knife had been drawn through the 223, and above it had been scrawled with the same knife—4.

  From what Cuno could see, sitting on the wooded, rocky hillside above a deep, dark gorge, the town—if even a town remained aside from a few abandoned log shacks huddled in the rocks and firs of the steep slopes rising and falling around him—was deserted. Crows cawed in the gorge, the cries sheathed in the steady murmur of a late-year stream tumbling down a steep, boulder-lined bed.

  In the distance, thunder rumbled.

  Cuno looked up at the sky, which was plum-colored in the north. The mass of bruised, ragged-edged clouds was slowly moving toward him.

  He’d reached the town, or what remained of it, just in time. It was monsoon season in the high country, and while the storms rarely lasted longer than a half hour or so, the amount of moisture and lightning they could hammer earthward, and the amount of wind they could kick up, was often deadly.

  Such a tempest could drown you, fry you, or blow you into the next territory.

  You didn’t want to experience it without a roof over your head if you could help it. And the iron bars of the jail wagon would attract lightning like a cougar to a three-legged rabbit. Cuno had to snort at the thought of his problem being solved by all four of his prisoners fried to cinders with one quick witch’s fork of a lightning strike, turning the wagon into a blue-white ball of howling electricity.

  Problem was, he’d be turned into a hush puppy, as well.

  Intending to locate a barn in which he could shelter himself and the wagon, he urged the mules on down the curving slope pocked with rocks, roots, and boulders heaving up from below. The trail dropped steeply and, standing with one foot braced against the dashboard and holding the reins taut, he checked the skittery mules back as more thunder rumbled like crashing boulders and a pitchfork of bright white lightning flicked over the bald crags looming on the north side of the gorge.

  As the wagon gained the gorge’s bottom, dilapidated log shacks shoved up on both sides of the narrow trail. Over rough plank bridges, the trace twisted back and forth across a deep creek bed through which water gurgled and troughed over rocks and mossy shelves.

  Thunder continued to rumble, growing louder as the mass of purple clouds approached. The mules brayed and shook their heads. Behind the wagon, Renegade whinnied.

  Someone rapped angrily on the cage’s bars. “Stop this heap before we’re all toasted blacker’n Bob’s soul!” Blackburn yelled.

  Cuno kept the mules moving along the trail, swinging his head from side to side as he looked for a stable with a complete roof. Virtually all the shacks appeared to have been abandoned for a good length of time. Birds winged in and out of the glassless, shutterless windows. Porches drooped into the street or the creek bed. Chimney pipes were rusting, shingles were missing from gapped roofs.

  Flanking the hovels, corrals and stables were partly dismantled, dilapidated, overgrown, or partly cru
shed by boulders fallen from the steep, sheer ridges.

  At the far edge of town, smoke ribboned from a large fieldstone chimney on the canyon’s right side. Cuno headed toward it, following the street across a gap-boarded bridge and having to hoorah the jittery mules, frightened by the oncoming storm, over the hazardous bridges with the rush of tea-colored water churning through the creek bed.

  He pulled up in front of a sprawling, three-story, log, gambrel-roofed affair with a large front porch and real glass windows trimmed in white. Over the porch a large sign announced TOLSTOY’S TAVERN in blocky green letters. Piano and fiddle music emanated from over the batwings, as did the succulent aroma of spicy stew.

  “A bar—now you’re talkin’!” Colorado Bob whooped above the rumbling thunder. “Hooch and pussy. Just what a man needs after bein’ locked up in a clatterin’ damn gut wagon for nigh on a week with these smelly curs.”

  Cuno wrapped the reins around the brake handle, then leapt off the wagon and, taking another glance at the gunmetal-blue clouds now almost entirely filling the sky over the canyon, took the tavern’s porch steps two at a time. From inside he could hear heavy-heeled boots and thigh-slapping hands keeping time to the jaunty dance tune being played by a scratchy fiddle and an out-of-tune piano.

  He pushed through the batwings and poked his hat brim off his forehead, squinting into the heavy-beamed, cavernous room’s deep, smoky shadows.

  Several silhouettes were clustered around a piano near the back and around a brown-haired girl in a wine-red dress dancing in a circle with her arms thrown out, skipping and kicking between leaps and quick spins. Such a vigorous, fast-moving step Cuno had never seen. He’d have liked to have seen more if he hadn’t been trying to outrun an angry mountain gale.

  As several masculine faces turned toward Cuno and the fiddle and piano music dwindled, the young woman stopped suddenly, her back to Cuno and her long, wavy hair flopping against her slender back. Arms still thrown straight out to both sides, frozen in motion, she looked over her right shoulder toward the front of the room, frowning curiously, her liquid blue eyes glistening in the wan light angling through the windows.

  The violin scratched out another note, and then the old man in the black cloth hat and sweeping gray mustache, sitting near the piano player, lowered it. Frosty gray eyes drilled through the shadows at Cuno. “Drink? Eat?”

  Before Cuno could reply the girl swung full around to him and began striding forward on red-slippered feet showing beneath the pleats of her billowing dress. She said something in a foreign tongue, which Cuno assumed was Russian.

  The old man with the fiddle stretched a smile beneath his mustache, set the fiddle on a table beside him, and leaned back in his chair, digging in the pocket of his duck shirt for a makings sack.

  As the girl continued toward Cuno, the husky blond freighter felt a hitch in his chest. The girl’s heart-shaped, blue-eyed face glistened with perspiration, and her red lips spread a bemused, welcoming, faintly curious smile.

  In her false eyelashes, lightly applied rouge, and eye-liner, all of which served to accentuate the exoticness of her features rather than to obscure them, she appeared like some wraithlike conjuring from an imaginative young man’s erotic dream. Polished silver rings danced beneath her ears, half concealed by curls of her thick, chestnut hair. The hair continued down to frame an ample bosom only half hidden by the lace edges of her low-cut dress, the wine red of which, relieved by stitched black stars, glistened with a faint metallic sheen.

  Outside, the increasing wind moaned. Thunder rumbled, punctuated by a vicious, whiplike crack. A fire snapped and cracked in the large, stone hearth on the room’s far right wall.

  The girl moved as she looked, dreamlike, as though she weren’t quite touching the floor. “You’ve probably heard about the whiskey.” Her accent was thick, bespeaking stone huts in snowy glens in an ancient, mysterious world. “How ’bout an ale? My uncle brews it here the way he brewed it at home. We get orders from as far away as Bismarck in Dakota Territory.”

  She stood before Cuno, only two feet away, her head canted up toward his. Her teeth were fine and white between the rich, cherry lips, the stream-blue eyes primitively alluring.

  Cuno was conscious of his bruised cheek and jaw, both of which he knew were liberally swollen. Remembering his hat, he doffed it quickly and cleared his throat. “I’m lookin’ for a shelter for my wagon.”

  Her eyes flicked across his wide, thick shoulders. “Freighter?”

  “That’s right.”

  “How precious is your cargo?”

  “A locked shed would be nice, but any solid roof will do.”

  The girl spun on a heel, floated over toward the horseshoe-shaped mahogany bar to Cuno’s left. Propping a foot on the brass rail running along the base of the bar, she leaned across the mahogany and dropped a hand below. She floated back to Cuno holding a ring with two dangling keys in her long-fingered olive hand.

  “This is for the lock on a red shed straight across the canyon, behind the green cabin with the falling-in roof. Park your wagon there . . . then come back for ale and stew.” She dropped her chin, and her eyes glistened as she added with a slightly coquettish air, “It is elk, and it is very good.”

  She pronounced “good” like “goot.”

  She ran her soft, caressing gaze across his swollen cheek and jaw. “And I will find some raw meat for your face.”

  Another thunder crack made the whole room leap. Outside, Blackburn shouted something inaudible beneath the groaning wind and the rain beginning to fleck against the saloon’s log walls.

  “Obliged,” Cuno said, his voice thick.

  He held the gaze of the dark-haired waif smiling smokily up at him for another stretched second before he plucked the keys from her hand and found himself reluctantly turning away and tramping back out through the batwings.

  “Come on, goddamnit!” shouted Colorado Bob from the jail cage. “Get us outta here before we’re sent to our rewards in furry cinders!”

  He and his two cohorts stood squeezing the bars in their hands, facing the saloon and glaring up at the ragged, angry sky. Fuego was lying on his side, unmoving except for the slow rise and fall of his shoulders, his head toward the partition dividing the cage from the driver’s box.

  As a lightning bolt shot out of the northern sky, flashing blue-white and hammering the stony ridge crest, and the accompanying thunder boomed like planets colliding, Cuno bounded down the saloon’s broad steps and circled the skitter-hopping mules. Behind the wagon, Renegade loosed a bugling, angry whinny, his bit jangling as he shook his head.

  “Hold on, boy,” Cuno muttered to the horse as he climbed into the driver’s box, released the brake, and started the mules forward.

  He hadn’t rolled two feet before the rain started slashing down. The drops were so large they sounded like small-caliber slugs plunking into the wagon and ticking loudly against Cuno’s snugged-down hat, lifting a veritable cacophony in his ears.

  By the time he’d pulled the mules past the green cabin that a wooden shingle dangling from a rusty chain identified as a former bakery, Cuno was soaked to the skin. He pulled the wagon into the shed rife with the smell of hay and the barley, malt, and hops fermenting in several large oak casks. Then he unhitched the mules to the rumble of hail hammering the roof over the hayloft. When he’d rubbed the animals down, and watered and hayed them, he checked the jail wagon’s padlock.

  “Let us outta here, so we can get out of these wet clothes and get ourselves dry,” Simms pleaded through the bars.

  “Like hell,” Cuno chuckled. He had already passed a couple of dry blankets, which he’d found in the stable’s tack room, through the bars. “You try pullin’ what ole Half-Ear did, they’ll be hangin’ you gut shot in Crow Feather.”

  “Jesus God!” bellowed Colorado Bob, slumping down against the bars, his wet silver hair plastered against his scalp and shoulders. “The bastard’s gonna leave us in here smellin’ that beer without givin�
�� us a drop!”

  As he and the other two pleaded with Cuno for hooch and dry clothes, Cuno looked between them at Fuego. The half-breed lay back with his head against the cage’s front wall. He’d drawn his bandanna lower and angled it taut across his freshly ruined ear.

  One eye was swollen nearly shut, and his lips were crusted with dry blood.

  With his stout arms crossed on his chest, he met Cuno’s gaze with a hard one of his own, hardening his jaws and flaring his nostrils. He opened his mouth to speak, but, reconsidering, he closed it again. His brows drew up, the deep lines in his forehead planed out, and his eyes dropped to the wagon’s blood-splattered floor and stayed there.

  Cuno gave the padlock another tug, then let it drop against the cage. As the other three prisoners cursed and pounded the bars, Cuno went out, closed and locked the stable door behind him, then, lifting his collar against the driving rain and pea-sized hail that whitened the muddy ground, he jogged back through the brush around an abandoned chicken coop and the bakery and into what remained of the boomtown’s main drag.

  The sky now broiled with low, dark clouds, lightning flashed sharply, and thunder set the ground to quivering. Hail and rain javelined out of the sky at a forty-five-degree angle. As Cuno crossed the bridge, he glanced down to see that the creek had already risen a good six inches, bubbling and churning with clay-colored water and floating hail.

  He stumbled into the saloon in his wet boots, ice and rain dripping off his hat. The girl was waiting for him with towels draped over her arms, a wistful smile etched on her plump, apple-red lips.

  “First thing we need to do is get you out of those wet clothes and into a hot bath.” She laughed.

  14

  THE GIRL WITH the heart-shaped face and full, red lips gave Cuno a towel, then wheeled and started into the shadows at the back of the room, red pleats swishing about her finely curved hips and long legs. “Right this way, sir.”