Several others—women as well as men—came out of the shops and saloons. A beefy, red-bearded blacksmith stopped hammering on his anvil between the open doors of his shop to regard Cuno and the wagon and then to yell something to another gent across the street.
Cuno couldn’t hear much because of the rising din, but he’d thought the blacksmith had said something along the lines of, “I’ll be damned—lookee there, Haskell!”
“It’s them!” a man in armbands shouted from in front of a barber poll. “It’s Bob and Blackburn and, shit”—he planted his fists on his hips and laughed—“they threw in a half-breed for good measure!”
Behind Cuno, Brush Simms gritted out, “Don’t I count?”
Cuno slowed the wagon to let a farm rig pull out from a mercantile loading dock. As he did, he looked around for his old partner, Serenity Parker. His pulse hammered as he wondered—as he’d been wondering over the twenty long, hot, dusty miles from Alfred—if he and Serenity still had a contract waiting for them out at Fort Dixon.
He’d no sooner got the horses pulling again when his searching gaze held on a balcony over the Trail Driver Saloon and Dance Hall on the street’s right side, just beyond the mercantile.
There were several girls up there, looking like exotic birds in their colorful dresses, hair feathers, and breeze-buffeted boas. They stood around laughing and smooching with half-dressed drovers and a couple of mustached youn kers wearing the striped pants of cavalry soldiers. A potbel lied corporal was feeling up a pretty little brunette from behind while the brunette laughed and sucked a cornhusk cigarette.
But the soldiers and the others were all in the periphery of Cuno’s vision. What had caught the young freighter’s incredulous stare was a plump whore dressed all in pink, and the scrawny little bird of a gray-bearded gent sitting crossways in her lap.
The little gent wore only threadbare longhandles and black wool socks through which most of his gnarled toes protruded. Tufts of cottony hair poked out from around the sides of his head, the freckled, age-spotted top of which was as bald as a turkey buzzard.
Indeed, Serenity Parker resembled nothing so much as a buzzard perched bizarrely in the lap of the chubby, pink gowned whore whose swollen bosom he nuzzled and smooched, kicking his scrawny legs and swigging from a half-empty whiskey bottle.
Cuno hauled back on the horses’ reins, glaring up at the balcony and his carelessly frolicking partner. “Serenity!” he called above the calls of the gathering crowd and the barking dogs. “Is that you up there, you old son of a bitch?”
Serenity was taking a deep sniff of the whore’s cleavage. He jerked his head up suddenly and turned toward the street. “Huh?” he said, glancing at the whore. “Someone use my handle?”
“I believe it was the gent down there,” the whore said, frowning down at Cuno and his makeshift prison wagon.
“Down where?”
Serenity wheezed and chuffed himself up off the whore’s broad lap and, holding his bottle by the neck, moved up to the railing and squinted down toward Cuno. He had about three days’ growth of salt-and-pepper stubble on his hollow cheeks and jutting chin, and judging by his hair as well as his attire, he’d been frolicking in the mattress sack for just as long.
“I’m glad to see you’re all worried about me,” Cuno chided, ignoring the cacophony around him. One of his horses pricked its ears and kicked a dog, making the wagon jerk. “Hope you didn’t go to any extra trouble, saddling a horse and riding out looking for me.”
“Cuno? I’ll be goddamned!” Serenity exclaimed, widening his deep-set, frosty-blue eyes. “Where the hell you been, son? I been worried sick!”
Cuno glanced at the whore who’d come up to stand beside Serenity. She had a pretty, round face with a beauty mark on her chin, but she dwarfed the old gent.
“I see that,” Cuno growled.
Serenity glanced at the whore and flushed.
“Ah, well, hell—what’d you want me to do? Lay around pinin’? I figured I might as well have a little fun while I waited for ya. Didn’t see no point in ridin’ out after ya, this country bein’ as big as it is.”
The oldster’s eyes shifted to the back of the wagon. The bushy gray brows came down, and Serenity blinked as though to clear his vision. He ran a grimy sleeve across his eyes, then looked again and pointed with the bottle.
“Say, what the hell you got there, Cuno? I hope you realize you picked ya up some trash along the trail. Why, that there . . . hell . . . ain’t that Colorado Bob King his own-self?”
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 cal
led 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].
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