.45-Caliber Widow Maker

by Peter Brandvold

  Ten minutes later, after hearing a horselike snort, he found himself crawling up behind nine mounts tied to a long picket line between two tall pines. They were about fifty yards northwest of the fire, near the murmuring creek.

  Cuno eased up left of the remuda, the nine mounts standing still as statues in the darkness, tails hanging straight down. A couple had their heads up, as though listening. Gritting his teeth, Cuno prayed that none loosed a warning whinny.

  When he was wide of the group, he moved in slowly, holding out his hands placatingly and making low shushing sounds, setting each foot down softly. At the same time, he swung his head around, keeping an eye out for a night guard.

  He moved in on a lineback buckskin tied at the left edge of the group. The horse gave him a wary, sidelong glance, its dark eyes reflecting starlight. The musk of the horses was sharp in Cuno’s nostrils—a familiar, welcoming, hopeful smell.

  Soon he’d be on the trail toward Renegade and the cutthroats for whom a reckoning was due.

  “Easy, fella,” Cuno said, reaching toward the horse’s long neck. “Easy, now . . . easy . . .”

  He’d no sooner stepped up beside the buckskin and set a hand down on its long, coarse mane than the horse lifted its head sharply and, glaring at Cuno indignantly, loosed a shrill, bugling whinny.

  23

  CUNO PULLED THE buckskin’s snout down and snapped his head toward the camp. The silhouetted gang members jerked toward him, one dropping a coffee cup and cursing loudly.

  Uttering shocked exclamations, several men heaved to their feet and stepped out away from the fire to peer into the darkness.

  “Mountain lion, you think?” a man asked.

  Cuno didn’t hear the reply. His blood was rushing loudly in his ears as he grabbed a bridle from a branch jutting up from a nearby log. More voices and foot thuds rose from the direction of the fire. He wasted no time untying the buckskin from its picket line and slipping the bit between its teeth. The horse jerked its head up and whinnied once more, throwing the bit free.

  Cuno glanced toward the fire. Several men were jogging this way, the firelight behind them reflecting off gun metal.

  “Might be a bobcat,” one of the gang members called.

  “Might be a Crow, too! Or a Ute. Mind your hair, fellas!”

  Cuno backed the buckskin away from the other jittery horses, wrestling its head down, and rammed the bit between its teeth. The horse fought the bit but Cuno, an old hand at harnessing stubborn mules, quickly slipped the bridle straps over its ears.

  A man’s indignant cry sounded above the loudening foot thuds and breath rasps. “Someone’s got my buckskin! Son of a bitch!”

  Cuno didn’t look again over his shoulder. Holding the buckskin’s reins in one hand, he swung up onto the horse’s back.

  “Get the bastard!”

  A gun roared. The slug whistled about six inches off Cuno’s right ear. Ducking, he reined the nickering, prancing horse around and ground his boots into its flanks. The buckskin whinnied again as it lunged with a start off its rear hooves. It bolted forward so suddenly that Cuno, accustomed to a saddle, nearly flew straight back over its ass.

  “Yeah, that’s right,” he grumbled. “Steal a horse and let it throw you!”

  Regaining his balance, he ducked low and continued batting his heels against the buckskin’s ribs, urging more speed. Pistols cracked behind him, the slugs humming around him, a couple barking into trees or spanging off rocks.

  The shouting continued behind Cuno, dwindling gradually beneath the thunder of the buckskin’s hammering hooves. He didn’t like running a horse in the dark. The dangers were obvious. Besides, he needed the Oldenberg bunch to lead him to Colorado Bob, Blackburn, Simms, Fuego, and the girl. He also needed a gun.

  After a half a mile, he checked the buckskin down, and turned him back the way he’d come, listening and staring into the inky darkness. He was out of sight of the fire, and he could neither see nor hear anything of the gang. Surely, they’d send men after him. But it was doubtful the entire gang would come and risk their other horses or get caught in an ambush. They had no idea how many men were out here, and Cuno didn’t think they’d gotten a good enough look at him to tell if he was white or Indian.

  For all they knew, he was Colorado Bob King trying to lure them into a trap, or renegade Indians with a taste for white-man blood.

  But they wouldn’t let someone run off with one of their horses without protest, either.

  Cuno sat the nervous horse tensely, holding the reins taut against his chest, watching and listening. Finally, the thud of hooves rose in the direction of the camp, growing louder beneath the chitter of crickets and the gurgling of the nearby creek. One of the riders said something, but they were still too far away for Cuno to make it out.

  He counted to ten slowly, hearing the hoof clomps grow. When he hit ten, he’d begun hearing the squawk and rattle of tack and seeing the jostling, dark figures behind him. Two, maybe three riders were closing.

  He swung the buckskin around, gave a loud, mocking whoop, and ground his heels into the mount’s flanks, grabbing a handful of mane as the horse bolted forward, stretching its stride into a ground-eating gallop.

  Behind Cuno, a pistol cracked, barely audible beneath the thunder of his own hooves and those of the oncoming riders. He gave another whoop as he crossed a low saddle. About twenty strides down the other side of the saddle, he turned the buckskin right up a shallow rise amongst jutting rock outcroppings and pinyon pines.

  He drew up beside a knob, slipped straight back off the horse’s rump, and smacked the buckskin’s right hip. The horse whinnied again and bounded up the slope, kicking rocks and gravel out behind him.

  A yell rose above the sound of pounding hooves at the bottom of the slope. “Up there!”

  Cuno stepped back behind the knob and looked around for a heavy branch as one of his pursuers—there were two, he saw now—ordered the other to spread out across the slope. Not finding any near branches, Cuno settled for a stone that fit easily in the palm of his hand. He pressed his back to the knob and squeezed the rock, his chest rising and falling heavily.

  The hoof thuds rose, and he could hear the grunts and rasps of his pursers, the rattle of the bit in his horse’s teeth. If the rider hadn’t seen Cuno dismount, he’d follow the buckskin on up the slope. Or he’d try to . . .

  Cuno edged a peek around the knob. The rider was within ten feet and closing, his horse lunging straight up the slope, bounding off its back hooves, spraying gravel in the starlight.

  The man’s carbine winked, jutting up from the boot on the horse’s right side. The man himself was crouched forward, holding the saddle horn with both hands to keep from being spilled, and his legs scissored back and forth across the horse’s ribs.

  When the horse was at about the same place Cuno had been when he’d slipped off the buckskin, he sprang out from behind the knob. He flung the rock aside as he saw his opportunity for a riskier but more resolute move. Bounding forward, he slammed his 180 muscular pounds against the side of the horse, putting his head down and bulling off his heels.

  The horse whinnied. The rider loosed a shocked “Oh!”

  As the horse began falling sideways, head turned toward Cuno with its flashing, terrified eyes, Cuno reversed his momentum while wrapping his right hand around the carbine’s stock and jerking the rifle from its oiled boot.

  When he had the Winchester firmly in his hand, he leapt back away from the fallen, screaming horse’s flailing hooves. His left boot heel clipped a stone, and he gave his own startled grunt as he hit the ground on his butt.

  He winced at the gnawing pain in his battered ribs and looked up. The horse was scrambling to its feet, tack squawking, empty stirrups flapping like wings.

  As the pinto regained its feet and continued up the slope in a cloud of sifting black dust, Cuno saw the rider scrambling around on the ground beyond, about twenty feet away.

  The man grunted and cursed. His shadow s
topped moving.

  There was a red flash followed by the pop of a .44.

  The slug hammered a rock above Cuno’s left shoulder, the ricochet echoing off across the valley. Cuno had levered a live round into the Winchester’s breech. Throwing himself into a sitting position, he leveled the saddle-ring carbine and fired at the same time the man’s revolver flashed again.

  The man’s slug whistled past Cuno’s ear.

  “Mee-yah!” the man screamed.

  He fired once more, into the ground before his slumping silhouette, blowing up dust and gravel. Cuno levered and fired two more rounds, and when he saw through the wafting gun smoke the man’s dark figure stretched out on his back, unmoving, he hauled himself to his feet and looked straight across the slope beyond the dead man.

  The second rider was a jostling shadow before him, crouched low behind his horse’s bobbing head. Steel glistened in the starlight just left of the mount’s neck.

  Cuno flung himself sideways and rolled back behind the escarpment, wincing at the rocks gouging his sore ribs. A revolver smashed once, twice, three times, its rolling echoes drowning the pounding hoof thuds. Then the man and horse were in front of Cuno, rocketing on across the slope to his right.

  Cuno raised the rifle toward the mounted figure who had turned his head and angled the pistol back over his horse’s right hip. As the man’s pistol flashed and roared, Cuno’s carbine loosed a reverberating whip-crack across the slope. He triggered two more hammering rounds as the horse continued galloping into the inky, vertical arrows of scattered timber.

  The empty cartridge casings chinked off the escarpment to bounce off Cuno’s hat.

  When the horse had disappeared in the darkness, Cuno heaved himself to his feet and rammed another round into the carbine’s smoking breech. He tramped heavy-footed up the slope, angling right, following the sound of the wounded rider’s guttural groans.

  He stopped.

  The man lay on the rocks before him, a pinyon sapling bowed beneath his shoulder. With a curse, the man flopped over on his side and flung a hand out toward an ivory-handled .44 wedged between two stones.

  Cuno released a weary breath, raised the carbine, and triggered a finishing shot into the back of the man’s head. He picked up the revolver, dusted it off, and shoved it behind the waist band of his deerskin leggings. He removed the man’s cartridge belt, shook the sand out of the holster, and wrapped it around his own waist, adjusting the buckle for his slightly narrower girth.

  Shouldering the carbine, he headed up the slope in the direction the buckskin and the first rider’s horse had fled.

  The next morning, around ten o’clock, Colorado Bob King reined his horse to a halt on a low knoll in a broad bowl in the hills at the far west end of the Mexican Mountains.

  The sun beat brassily down. The mountains appeared low, spruce-green humps in the far distance. A hundred yards below the knoll upon which the riders sat their weary mounts, the little whipsawed frame town of Alfred stretched along both sides of a broad, dusty, virtually deserted main street. It was an old hide hunter’s camp that hadn’t grown much beyond its original ten or twelve business establishments and flanking sod shanties and dugouts.

  “Jesus H. Christ!” cried Brush Simms, slapping his dusty hat across his thigh. “Is that finally fuckin’ it?”

  “Finally?” said Colorado Bob. “We ain’t been trailin’ but a little over a day, Brush.”

  “Seems like a long damn time. After all we been through. First gettin’ run down by that posse in the first place, then that damn Widow Maker and his bone-hard intent to keep our appointment with the hangman.”

  Sitting his roan on the far right edge of the group, beside the girl Johnnie Wade, Frank Blackburn hooked a leg over his saddle horn and leaned back in his saddle. “Well, it’s all over now. I see the hill. You see it, Bob? I swear it’s fairly gleaming like someone sprinkled diamonds over the top.”

  Colorado Bob chuckled and slowly blinked his snakelike eyes. He had two Colt Navy pistols bristling on his cartridge belt—both guns that he’d found in the saddlebags of the lusty hunters who’d tried to savage his half sister. He preferred the old cap and ball revolver to the newer models worn by Pepper and the other men who’d been greased by the Widow Maker—guns that Johnnie had appropriated and that were now worn by Blackburn, Simms, and their new partner, Fuego.

  “You know, Frank,” Bob said. “I do believe I see what you’re talkin’ about. You wanna go up and git the loot first, or git the cooch first and worry about the loot later?”

  “Cooch?” Johnnie Wade scowled at her older brother. “We ain’t takin’ time for no cooch, Bob. We’re gonna dig up that strongbox and hightail it south. Hell, Oldenberg’s back there, scourin’ those mountains fer us!”

  “Yeah, he’s back there,” said Simms. “Way the hell back there, most like. Hell, we can rest up here a day, maybe even two days. Git some rest for us and our horses . . .”

  “As well as some pussy,” interjected Blackburn.

  “. . . as well as some pussy,” Simms laughed, nodding.

  “Might be wise to even ambush old Karl and them other boys,” opined Colorado Bob, hipping around to look over their back trail. “Get ’em shed of our trail once and fer all.”

  Simms rubbed his hands together eagerly. “And then we can hit the trail for the southern regions of this fine country of ours!”

  “We get money now, goddamnit,” Fuego spat, sitting his mount at the far side of the group from Blackburn, slightly higher on the knoll.

  The half-breed had been dabbing at his bullet-ruined ear again with a handkerchief. He’d scraped the ear on a rock wall earlier and opened it up. Two finger-sized blood dribbles had crusted on his neck, but the blood on his ear refused to clot again, and it was annoying the half-breed no end.

  Close as he could tell, he was thirty years old, and a mere five years ago, when he’d had a full head of hair and both ears, he’d been a handsome man who’d never had any trouble with women in spite of his penchant for meanness.

  Now, on top of all his other problems, his freshly ruined ear wouldn’t stop bleeding. He shook his head, ramming the handkerchief hard against the bloody knob. “I wanna see the loot. I want my cut, and then I want to get the hell shed of you crazy sons o’ bitches.”

  “I hate to say it,” said Johnnie. “But I agree with the half-breed. We got no time to waste on women.”

  “That ain’t for you to say, Li’l Sis,” Bob said with a strained, tolerant air. “Now, I done told you you can’t go bossin’ me. I won’t have it. You an’ me—we’re gonna start a new life for ourselves farther south. But that life don’t include old Colorado Bob King being kicked around by his little half sister from Abilene.”

  Bob dipped his chin and narrowed an eye sternly. “We done had this conversation, and I don’t intend to have it again.”

  Bob sealed his reprimand with a look. And as an angry flush rose in Johnnie’s smooth cheeks, the outlaw leader turned to the other men. “Let’s go dig up the loot, split it up, and then go get us some cooch and hooch. What do you fellas say to that?”

  “That sounds fine as frog hair to me!” howled Simms.

  “Who’m I to argue?” shouted Blackburn.

  He, Bob, and Simms spurred their mounts down the knoll and into the sun-beaten little town. After a moment’s hesitation, and looking a little skeptical while pressing the bloody handkerchief to his ruined ear, Fuego gigged his own mount down the knoll.

  At the rear of the pack, Johnnie Wade cursed as she pressed spurs to her pinto and cast a long, wary look along their back trail.

  24

  BRINGING UP THE rear of the pack, Johnnie Wade cast her gaze around the nearly deserted main drag of Alfred, Wyoming Territory, which a sign had told her was home to thirty-three souls.

  A few dogs—one which looked like it had a good bit of coyote in it—sunned themselves on boardwalks before the weathered frame buildings forlornly lining both sides of the street, or
sniffed through rotten, smelly trash piles in the gaps between them.

  A ranch wagon was parked before the high loading dock of a mercantile on the right side of the street, and two men were silently tossing supplies into the wagon. Besides them and the dogs, the only others about were two men hammering new shingles on a livery barn on the street’s right side, about halfway down, and another man standing atop a long ladder and adding fresh spruce-green paint to the sun-bleached sign over the barn’s broad, open doors.

  The staccato raps of the hammers echoed around the street.

  Johnnie stared ahead at her group riding two by two toward a gaudily painted frame house on the left side of the street, sitting kitty-corner across from the livery barn. The pounding stopped as the hammer-wielding roofers turned to regard the newcomers, as did the two men loading the ranch wagon.

  “I shoulda guessed,” Johnnie breathed, her blue eyes incredulous as she watched Colorado Bob and Frank Blackburn pull up just short of the gaudily painted house. It was pink with white trim and a front porch with scrolled posts and gingerbread trim, and a freshly painted sign above the porch read simply MISS ALVA’S.

  Bob and Blackburn angled their mounts down along the side of the whorehouse, heading toward the backyard while the others fell into line behind them.

  “Yeah,” Johnnie wheezed again. “I sure as shit shoulda known what I got myself into here. They say there ain’t no savin’ the devil . . .”

  Her incredulous, angry expression remained in her eyes and in the set of her wide mouth as she followed the men around behind the whorehouse and along the edge of the backyard in which three girls clad in pantaloons, camisoles, and see-through shifts of nearly every color of the rainbow were hanging wash on several clotheslines stretched between the house, a woodshed, and a small enclosed stable at the back. The stable had been freshly painted the same gaudy pink as the house, making the sashed, flyspecked windows appear especially dark and shabby.