Cuno didn’t know what to make of the three dead men. That the jug-eared kid might have shot his three compadres was too preposterous for Cuno’s rational mind. He stopped worrying about it when he realized that he’d suddenly been blessed with exactly what he needed to outrun the rest of the gang and cut cross-country to Crow Feather.
Four saddled horses . . . after he located the kid’s.
He adjusted the saddles and bridles of his two new mounts—one of which, the steeldust, had a relatively fresh bullet burn across its rump—then gathered up the reins and began leading them back along the trail to Petersburg, cutting cautious glances behind him.
He hoped Oldenberg didn’t get too curious about where his four outriders had disappeared to before Cuno and his motley chain gang had put some nicely rough mountain country between them and Petersburg. Cuno had had a nice reprieve in the dying town. He’d no doubt remember the lithe, curvaceous figure of the beguiling Cossack girl on his deathbed.
But it was time to split ass for Crow Feather.
18
“KID, YOUR LUCK’S on a short, short leash. You realize that?”
“I don’t know—I’m startin’ to feel pretty lucky.”
They were a couple of miles east of Petersburg, cutting cross-country through heavy timber, climbing a steep slope toward a saddleback ridge. The sun, what little of it shone through the high clouds remaining after the storm, was falling quickly behind the western, snow-spotted mountains.
“Oldenberg’s done got him nigh on a dozen riders, and he’ll be combin’ this country like he’s checking fer lice on a warthog’s ass!”
“Well, he’s short another four,” Cuno said with a speculative air. “That makes him down to nine or less. At this rate, I like how my odds look, say, day after tomorrow.”
He was scanning the darkening ridge ahead and above him. The food sack that Ulalia had prepared for him, before he’d abandoned the jail wagon and forced his shackled prisoners onto the saddled horses of their own dead gang members, flopped down Renegade’s left shoulder.
The prisoners’ horses, tied tail to tail, were strung out behind him single file. The prisoners themselves, hands cuffed, were tied to the saddle horns and stirrups.
“He’s right, Bob,” Blackburn said from the back of the line. “This ain’t lookin’ none too good. Kid’s tougher than he looks—a hell-thumbin’ widow maker, sure enough—and this is big country. Hell, Karl may never even find us way out here on this pimple on the devil’s ass.”
“What’re you sayin’, Frank?” Bob said, riding directly behind Cuno.
“I’m sayin’ let’s cut the bastard in. Give him a full quarter of the payroll loot.”
Simms whistled. “Let me see—a fourth of twenty-five grand . . . that’s . . .”
“Six thousand two hundred and fifty dollars.” Blackburn raised his voice. “Hey, kid, did you ever think you’d see that kind of money? I know I never did at your age. How old are ya, anyways? Nineteen? Twenty?” He clucked just loudly enough for Cuno to hear above the hoof thuds. “That kind of money, invested right, could set you up for life. You like to ranch, run stock, do ya?”
Cuno said nothing as he continued urging Renegade up the grassy slope, keeping his eyes on the ridges around him—not only for Oldenberg but, as this was Indian country, for Utes and Crows, as well.
“Big son of a bitch like yourself—obviously used to hard work—could double that sixty-two hundred in a couple years.”
“No, Frank,” Colorado Bob said, directing his words at Cuno’s back, “he didn’t learn how to shoot that forty-five diggin’ ditches. The kid’s a pistoleer. I’d say he probably rode our side of the law, time or two. Tell you what, kid—you turn us loose, we’ll let you throw in with us. We’ll double that little nest egg for you in two months down Texas way. Banks in Texas, you know, they’re just like everything else in Texas—big and filled with big money!”
Simms said, “Big whores, too. Big in all the right places!”
As his charges—all but Fuego, riding in customary, brooding silence behind King and in front of Simms—continued to try to convince Cuno that he’d be far better off if he’d turn them loose, Cuno studied what looked like a small cabin sitting just below the conifer forest draped raggedly across the saddleback ridge. The shack—if it was a shack and not just a large, dark brown dimple in the mountainside—lay about a hundred yards up the slope and another hundred yards to Cuno’s left.
The blond freighter studied the brown blotch, which seemed to shift ever so slightly as the waning, saffron light edged across the slope. He needed a place to hole up for the night, and an unoccupied cabin would do nicely.
“I seen you had your eye on that comely Russian lass back in Petersburg,” Colorado Bob was saying. “Well, if you like the brown-eyed, chocolate-haired fillies, Mexico is just the place—”
“Stow it.” Cuno had stopped Renegade at the edge of aspen woods straggling down from the ridge. He swung down from his saddle and tied the big skewbald to a stout branch.
“What’re you doin’, Widow Maker?” Simms asked. Like the others, he was crouched slightly over his saddle horn, to which his wrists were firmly tethered with rawhide. The man’s feet were tied to the stirrups so he couldn’t grind his heels into his horse’s flanks and gallop away if he got the chance. Much of his greasy, dark red hair had come loose from its queue, giving his head a tumbleweed look.
“Shut up.” Cuno looked down the ragged line of his four charges, all regarding him with dull interest. “I’m gonna take a little walk. On the off chance you should somehow free your horse from the others and decide to hightail it, keep in mind I can make a long shot with my Winchester.”
“You can’t leave us here tied to these beasts,” grouched Colorado Bob. “Suppose a griz or a cougar comes along? We’re defenseless!”
“I’ve been lucky but not that lucky.” Cuno chuffed as he wheeled and started tramping off across the shoulder of the slope, slanting upward toward the cabin.
The sun disappeared behind the western ridges as Cuno tramped through the short brown grass and sage. Almost instantly, the air cooled. Purple shadows tanged with sage and juniper washed across the slope, turning the jack pines on his right the color of India ink.
Cuno hunkered down behind a low shelf and peered over the top at what he’d concluded several yards back was indeed a rough hewn, log, brush-roofed cabin dug partway into the slope. He studied the cabin for some time before he detected a thin skein of smoke unfurling from a long, rusty chimney pipe. There was a heavy thud and resounding ping, as though someone had dropped a cast-iron skillet on a wooden floor.
Peering across his Winchester’s receiver, Cuno muttered a frustrated curse. He’d hoped the place was abandoned. He couldn’t very well ask some lone prospector to share his hovel with four cutthroats, nor risk the possibility that the cutthroats might convince the man to help free them for a share of the loot.
Cuno started to turn away to head back to his prisoners—he’d have to look for another place to throw down for the night—but snapped his head back toward the cabin. He’d heard a woman’s clipped yell. A man laughed—a pinched, barely audible sound emanating from within those stout walls.
Several seconds later, there was a ratcheting scrape of a chair or table kicked across a rough board floor.
Cuno pricked his ears to listen more closely, his curiosity piqued, but then the night wind rose, ruffling the grass and sighing in the pines and drowning all other sound. He wanted to head back to the horses and continue on up and over the ridge, find a camping place on the other side.
But before he knew it, he found himself striding straight up the slope, then, once inside the trees, heading toward the cabin’s rear corner, where the brush and the angle would conceal his approach from the door and the single window in which wan umber lamplight shone in the west wall.
He trod more carefully as he closed on the cabin, clearly hearing the scuffs, thumps, and clipped, angry ye
lls of a struggle. It sounded like two men and a woman. Pressing his shoulder against the cabin wall and holding his rifle in both hands, Cuno stole forward. One shutter was missing from the window, while the one nearest Cuno was partway open, blocking his view of the inside.
“Damn you!” the girl screamed.
“Hold her, Albert!” There was a thud and the rattle of boot spurs. “I said hold her!”
“I am holdin’ her!” The other man laughed, his voice trembling with labored breaths. “Go to it, Harrel!”
With one quick swipe of his arm, Cuno drew the shutter back against the cabin wall and edged a look across the frame.
Inside, one man in a long, fur coat and leather hat was holding a slender, blonde girl on a table in the middle of the room. Another man, his buckskin breeches and long underwear bunched around his ankles, was trying to position himself between the girl’s bare knees. Her denim trousers and frilly pink underpants were drawn down to her boots, and she was squirming around on the table, trying to close her knees.
“Damn you.” The girl spat between gritted teeth, her cheeks red with fury. “I’ll see you sons o’ bitches in hell, you do this! I’ll cut your damn peckers off!”
She’d barely got the last word out before she jerked her left arm free of the grasp of the man in the long fur coat and raked her fingers across the bearded cheek of the man trying to impale her with his jutting, brown dong.
“Ach!” The man clapped a hand against his cheek, yowling and cursing.
Cuno ducked under the window and ran around the front of the cabin.
“I told you to hold the bitch down, Albert, you brain-pickled son of a she-griz!”
The man bellowed another curse, and there was a sharp slapping sound as Cuno squared his shoulders in front of the cabin’s plank-board door that hung slightly askew from rotting leather latches.
Cuno stepped back, raised his right foot, and slammed his boot into the door just left of the steel-and-wire latch. The door burst open and slammed against the inside front wall. Cuno stepped into the room just as the man trying to impale the girl swung the back of his hand against her cheek with a crack that was drowned out by the door’s impact with the wall.
He had his back to Cuno, while his partner faced the freighter from the other side of the table. Both men reacted to the kicked-in door at the same time—the man between the girl’s flailing knees twisting around and reaching toward his shoulder holster. The man facing Cuno stumbled straight back from the table, snapping his eyes wide with surprise and whipping his right hand across his waist to the walnut-butted hogleg angled across his belly.
“Hold it!”
Neither one stayed their reaching hands.
Cuno slammed the Winchester’s butt against his shoulder. He fired and cocked, fired and cocked, the cabin leaping under the blasting echoes and powder smoke wafting in the shuttling shadows as empty cartridge casings clattered to the spongy puncheon floor and rolled in circles.
When four brass casings had been ejected, smoking, from the Winchester’s breech, the two would-be rapists lay in twisted heaps on opposite sides of the sparsely furnished cabin.
“Oh . . . Jesus . . .” rasped the one who’d been holding the girl down, as he lifted his head from the floor near a cot, wincing, blood welling up in his mouth and dribbling down over his pendulous lower lip. He dipped his chin to peer down at the two ragged holes in his baggy calico blouse, between the flaps of a smoke-stained deerskin vest trimmed with Indian beads.
His eyes closed and his head fell back to hit the floor with a hollow thud.
When Cuno had started firing, the girl had twisted around on the table, raising a shielding arm over her head and scissoring her naked legs together, slightly bent at the knees, her jeans and panties hanging down over her stockman’s spurred boots.
Now Cuno shuttled his gaze to her. She was staring up at him from beneath her raised right arm, her tusseled, tawny hair fanned out around her oval face. She had a nasty, purple gash on her right temple, and fresh blood dribbled down from it.
Cuno started to look away, in deference to the fact that she was naked, but then he returned his eyes to hers once more. Recognition mantled his brow.
“You get around,” he grunted.
It was the pretty, slender, tawny-haired girl whom Joe Pepper had slapped around in the Buffalo Flats Saloon, and whom Cuno had last seen in the valley where her party had ambushed the marshals. Apparently, she mistook Cuno’s last comment for a moral judgment instead of literal observation.
As she dropped down off the table in a huff, she told him to go diddle a goat. Then, her blue eyes pinched with fury, her lips pooched angrily, she hauled up her panties and jeans in one swift jerk, brushed a sleeve across her bloody temple, and stomped past him and out the cabin door.
19
CUNO TURNED TO the open door and watched the haughty girl stomp off across the flat, hard-packed area in front of the cabin. She knelt down where water trickled up through a rocky shelf, and, throwing her straight, tawny hair back over one shoulder, cupped the water to her face, dabbing her right cheek and bloody forehead tenderly.
Cuno turned to the man who’d been trying to savage the girl. He lay on his side, half under a dusty shelf littered with rusty pans, a half dozen airtight tins, and mouse droppings. His bloodstained buckskins and longhandles were bunched around his boot moccasins, and his limp dong had curled up against his thigh like a sleeping snake.
A trapper or market hunter, most likely.
Grunting his disapproval at having stepped unsuspecting into another in a series of proverbial bear traps, Cuno set his Winchester across the table, grabbed the man’s ankles, turned like a mule in the yoke, and dragged him unceremoniously out the door and into the yard.
He slid the half-naked body up against the bole of a pine about fifty yards from the cabin. Seeing no point in allowing him in death a dignity he obviously didn’t subscribe to in life, Cuno didn’t bother pulling his pants up.
The girl was sitting beside the spring when Cuno approached the cabin. She held a damp handkerchief to her cheek. Knees drawn up to her chest, the points of her boots aimed toward the fast-darkening sky, she watched Cuno skeptically.
The light night wind tussled her hair about her pretty face that was no less pretty for a slight tomboy quality—a firm practicality around the eyes and the frank line of her broad mouth.
For an instant, Cuno thought she was going to remind him of July. But he’d become an old hand at turning quickly, almost painlessly away from such memories.
When he’d dragged the other dead man over to where the first one lay, he grabbed his rifle out of the cabin, then walked over to where the girl sat near the spring, still regarding him like a wolf who’d wandered into her camp and she was still trying to decide if he was wild or only half wild.
He set the rifle over his shoulder and tucked a thumb behind his cartridge belt. “Put some mud on it. Take the swelling down.”
“Ain’t you just a man of the land.” She had a sexy, raspy voice, but he didn’t doubt, judging by her eyes, that she’d core him with a well-concealed pigsticker if he got too close or said the wrong thing.
The market hunters had sauntered into a wildcat’s lair. She might not have needed Cuno’s help in the long run.
Cuno glanced off to where he’d left his prisoners, feeling the urgency to get back to them and traipse up and over the mountain to find a camping spot before good dark. “I only meant you cover a lot of country fast.”
The girl looked down and waggled her boots. “So do you. I seen you comin’ through my field glass. That’s when those two jumped me from out of the trees.”
“Who are they?”
“I seen ’em at a lean-to during the storm. They was in Bailey Gulch. They musta followed me when the rain cleared.”
Cuno glanced at the shack hunkered down against the black line of the forest. “That yours?”
“Just hole up here, time to time, when I’m on my
own.” She drew the wet handkerchief away from her cheek and squeezed it in her small, strong fist.
“You alone now?”
“What’s it look like?”
Cuno turned away. “Luck.”
“Where you goin’?”
“Over the mountain.”
Cuno continued heading back the way he’d come.
“Hole up here if you want.”
Rifle on his shoulder, Cuno turned to her. “If you saw me comin’, you know I’m not alone.”
“Got ’em on a leash, don’t ya?” She glanced at the cabin. “You can lock ’em in there. I was gonna sleep out under the stars, anyways. Too much mouse and squirrel shit in the cabin.”
She must have read the suspicion in Cuno’s eyes, because, turning her back to him and soaking the handkerchief in the spring, she added, “Just ’cause I rode with coyotes, don’t mean I’m a coyote. Suit yourself.”
She pushed to her feet and, whipping the handkerchief over her shoulder, strode over to the dead men. She toed one of them, tipping his head this way and that with her boot, then gave a caustic chuff and walked off into the pines.
Cuno stared after her. Then he wheeled and tramped up and over the bench as a mourning dove cooed softly from a nearby aspen and coyotes yammered in the distance. The western horizon was a painter’s palette of mixed colors behind black, toothy peaks.
“Well, well, well,” Blackburn groused as Cuno approached the horses. “Back so soon?”
“Heard the shootin’,” said Colorado Bob, slumped over his apple-tied wrists. “Who’d you beef now, Widow Maker?”
Cuno burned at the handle they’d given him. A killer was the last thing he wanted to be. He aspired to a peaceful albeit hardworking life hauling freight—like he and his old man had done before his old man was killed by Rolf Anderson and the half-breed Sammy Spoon.
.45-Caliber Widow Maker Page 15