.45-Caliber Firebrand
Page 1
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Cuno’s New Mission
The rancher turned to him slowly, his gray eyes glassy. Suddenly, he blinked, and recognition returned to his gaze. He removed his pipe from his teeth, knocked the dottle onto the wide-boarded floor, and lifted the coffee mug from the table.
“What would you say to hitchin’ up one of your wagons and getting my daughter and the Lassiter kids the hell out of here?”
“Out of here?” Cuno almost laughed. The man really was crazier than a tree full of owls. “You’re hemmed in by Indians on three sides, might even be some behind the house. Even if you aren’t totally surrounded, in case you haven’t checked recently, you’ve got one hell of a high granite ridge behind you. The only way outta here is to fly, and my wagons haven’t sprouted any wings.”
PRAISE FOR PETER BRANDVOLD AND HIS NOVELS:
“Brandvold creates a fast-paced, action-packed novel.”
—James Reasoner
“Action-packed . . . for fans of traditional Westerns.”
—Booklist
“Recommended to anyone who loves the West as I do.”
—Jack Ballas
“A writer to watch.”
—Jory Sherman, author of The Savage Curse
“A natural born storyteller who knows the West.”
—Bill Brooks, author of Vengeance Trail
Berkley titles by Peter Brandvold
The .45-Caliber Series
.45-CALIBER FIREBRAND
.45-CALIBER WIDOW MAKER
.45-CALIBER DEATHTRAP
.45-CALIBER MANHUNT
.45-CALIBER FURY
.45-CALIBER REVENGE
The Sheriff Ben Stillman Series
HELL ON WHEELS
ONCE LATE WITH A .38
ONCE UPON A DEAD MAN
ONCE A RENEGADE
ONCE HELL FREEZES OVER
ONCE A LAWMAN
ONCE MORE WITH A .44
ONCE A MARSHAL
The Rogue Lawman Series
BULLETS OVER BEDLAM
COLD CORPSE, HOT TRAIL
DEADLY PREY
ROGUE LAWMAN
The Bounty Hunter Lou Prophet Series
THE GRAVES AT SEVEN DEVILS
THE DEVIL’S LAIR
STARING DOWN THE DEVIL
THE DEVIL GETS HIS DUE
RIDING WITH THE DEVIL’S MISTRESS
DEALT THE DEVIL’S HAND
THE DEVIL AND LOU PROPHET
Other titles
BLOOD MOUNTAIN
THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP
Published by the Penguin Group
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
.45-CALIBER FIREBRAND
A Berkley Book / published by arrangement with the author
PRINTING HISTORY
Berkley edition / September 2009
Copyright © 2009 by Peter Brandvold.
All rights reserved.
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eISBN : 978-1-101-13613-3
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For mi amigos in the
Fort Collins Comics Collective:
Mike Baron
Scott Beiser
Kevin Caron
Jeremy de le Garza
Gabe Eltaeb
Lee Oaks
Nick Runge
Scorpio
1
CUNO MASSEY SAW the Indian a quarter second before the arrow careened toward him from a snag of brush and sun-bleached rocks. The razor-edged, strap-iron blade flashed wickedly in the high-altitude sunlight, moaning like a bobcat cub in a spring thunderstorm.
The Ute was hunkered down between two sun-blasted boulders, scowling, his face a russet, brown-eyed, war-painted oval. As he loosed the arrow, his right hand snapped back sharply from the bow. He gritted his teeth and pinched his coffee-colored eyes with fury.
The arrow traversed the thirty yards between Cuno and the Indian so quickly that Cuno had no time to do anything but wince as the feathered projectile seared a shallow trough along his left cheek before clattering and breaking against the rock scarp behind him. He’d been holding his cocked Winchester across his saddlebows. Now he raised the gun and squeezed off a shot toward the Indian.
At the same time, his skewbald paint, Renegade, startled by the clatter of the missile and the Indian’s raucous yowl, skitter-stepped sideways. The sudden lurch threw Cuno’s shot two feet wide of the still-howling Ute, who was thrusting a hand into the quiver down his back, reloading.
Another arrow whooshed past Cuno’s ear to slice into the orange sand and gravel near the paint’s right rear hoof, and a second brave loosed a savage howl behind him.
Renegade squealed and bucked. Cuno reached for the saddle horn, missed it, and holding his Winchester in his right hand, flew back over the paint’s lu
rching hip.
He turned a somersault in midair as two more arrows whistled around him, one clipping his right calf with a searing burn. Then he was on the ground, rolling, dust from his own fall and from his horse’s scissoring hooves wafting around him.
He rolled off his barking shoulder and, racking a fresh shell into the rifle’s breech, swung toward the first Indian and fired three shots, shooting and levering quickly, the whip-cracks of the .44-44 echoing off the rocky scarps looming around him. Amidst the chipping rocks and powder smoke, the Indian’s painted face disappeared.
Levering another round, Cuno wheeled. The Indian behind him was in midair, leaping straight down from the top of the northern scarp. He hit the ground on both moccasined feet, screeching like a demented brush wolf, then bounded toward Cuno, a stone club in one hand, his bow in the other.
Cuno aimed and fired. His slug sliced across the top of the Ute’s right ear exposed by his back-buffeting, chocolate mane.
The Indian didn’t blink. Raising the club, he lunged toward Cuno. The stocky blond freighter grabbed his rifle with both hands, set his feet, and smashed the Winchester’s barrel against the brave’s red-and-white-striped forehead with a dull smack.
The blow stopped the brave in his tracks. The ear-rattling war cry died on his lips, and he stumbled sideways, dropping his chin and dragging his toes, knees slackening.
The brave’s cry was replaced by a low, eerie mewling, and the growing thunder of horse hooves. Cuno wheeled to his right. Beyond the near rocks and cedars, clay-colored dust rose in the waning afternoon sunlight. Cuno levered a fresh shell into the Winchester’s breech and bounded toward the oncoming rider, leaping rocks and shrubs and wincing at the hitch in his shoulder.
He ran thirty yards and stopped.
A long-haired horseback rider in calico and deerhide appeared above the cedars and willows. The mewling rose into a deep-throated war cry as the brave, clad in a wolf-head cape, a medicine pouch dangling down his chest, aimed an old Springfield rifle straight out from his left shoulder. The brave’s entire face, beneath the wolf snout atop his head, was painted the color of a Colorado sunset, the black eyes like chunks of coal beneath two bands of solid blue.
As the head of the brave’s horse appeared above the brush and thickets, the rifle belched smoke and fire. The heavy slug thumped into a rock behind Cuno. The Indian’s cry grew shrill and, stretching his lips back from his teeth, he reined his big Appaloosa toward Cuno, intending to run him down.
Heart thudding, feeling the throb of the pounding hooves in the ground beneath his boots, Cuno held his ground. He snapped his Winchester to his shoulder and drew a bead on the Indian’s chest, just above the big stallion’s bobbing, wide-eyed head and buffeting mane.
The horse was ten feet in front of Cuno when Cuno squeezed the Winchester’s trigger and drilled a quarter-sized hole through the brave’s breastbone. The horse screamed, drowning the Ute’s grunt as he flipped straight back off the horse’s rump, disappearing into the dust and cedars behind the horse’s flying hooves.
At the same time, Cuno leapt off his boot heels, pivoting and diving left.
The horse’s broad chest smacked his right airborne boot, twisting him slightly in the air just before he hit the ground on the same shoulder he’d landed on before, and he rolled. Looking back, he saw the stallion lunge on past him, reins trailing from the braided halter, leaping shrubs and boulders and disappearing behind a cabin-sized lump of black lava rock.
The horse’s thudding hooves and angry whinnies dwindled into the distance. The dust sifted slowly.
Cuno looked in the direction the last brave had fallen. He saw only an indistinct hump in the brush, unmoving.
Cursing under his breath, he rolled onto a hip and climbed to a knee, the movement of his foot oddly restricted, though in all the excitement, he hadn’t noticed it before.
A blue ash-wood arrow trailed from his right deerskin legging, the strap-iron head touched with blood. Cuno reached down, worked the arrow back out of the cuff—it had gone through two layers of deerskin—then snapped it in half and tossed it into the brush. Now he could feel the strangely chill blood dribbling down his calf, but the ache was only slightly worse than that of a deerfly bite.
Holding his right arm stiffly against his side, he heaved himself to his feet and swung the arm up beside him, balling his cheeks as the ache in his shoulder bit him.
The shoulder didn’t seem broken or separated. A bad bruise. He’d live. He picked up his rifle, dusted it off, and, thumbing cartridges from his shell belt and into the Winchester’s loading gate, tramped slowly back to the scene of the ambush.
He’d ridden up here, away from the freight wagons that he and his partner, Serenity Parker, were trailing up from Crow Feather to the base of the Rawhide Range, to scout the movement in the hills that old Serenity had glassed from his wagon seat. They’d spied Indian sign—unshod hoof tracks and the body of a woodcutter pinned to his wagon with arrows and a feathered war lance—along the trail from Rawlins, two days back.
The Utes weren’t supposed to be making war in this neck of the woods. Why they’d been shadowing the wagons, and ambushed him up here, he had no idea. But something cold had dropped deep inside him, and he had a bad feeling the last twenty miles to the Trent ranch headquarters, at the southwestern base of the Rawhide Range, wasn’t going to be half as smooth as the first hundred and fifty.
At the edge of the slight clearing in the rocks, he stopped. The Indian he’d clubbed had disappeared. He saw the two round indentations in the sand where the brave had dropped to his knees. Scuff marks and blood drops led off between two large boulders at the edge of the clearing.
Slowly, licking his chapped lips and holding the cocked Winchester straight out from his right hip, Cuno followed the trail. He pushed through the thick cedars, meandered around the buck brush and sage, raking his gaze from left to right before him.
He stopped.
Just ahead and left, the brave was down on his hands and knees, crawling feebly away, head down. Low groans rose above the rasp of the Ute’s beaded moccasins carving twin lines in the sand behind him.
Cuno lowered the Winchester and looked around. Neither hearing or seeing any more attackers, he continued toward the brave. Spying Cuno’s broad shadow in the sage beside him, the warrior stopped and whipped around so quickly that he lost his balance and fell backward onto his elbows.
His bony chest rising and falling sharply, he glared up at Cuno, his coffee-colored eyes blazing. Blood dribbled from the deep gash in his right temple, just below his hairline.
He was a wiry, muscular warrior, with several old knife scars in his cheeks and one just above his nose. He couldn’t have been much over seventeen, but his eyes blazed and his chest heaved with a grown man’s fury. Like the Sioux and the Crows, Ute boys were taught to fight with knives at a very young age, bound to their opponents with a five-foot length of rawhide clamped between their jaws.
Cuno whipped his left arm out angrily. “Why?” At Fort Dixon, where he’d been fulfilling a freighting contract since May, he’d picked up a little Ute. He translated his question, sweeping his arm out once more for emphasis.
He wasn’t sure if the brave understood. The younker only flicked his eyes across Cuno’s Winchester ’73, a faint yearning showing there, before he snapped his head sharply right.
Cuno had heard it, too—the erratic pop of rifle fire and the unmistakable screech of attacking Indians. The young freighter’s heart turned a somersault in his chest.
The wagons!
He glanced back at the brave. The kid had found the strength to drag a knife out from the sheath strapped behind his back. With a cunning light in his eyes and a dimpling hardness in his jaws, he flicked the blade straight up to his shoulder, preparing for a killing toss.
Cuno shot him twice through the chest. The kid’s head slammed back as the knife clattered into the gravel beside him. Blood pumped from the twin holes in his calico- and wolf-ski
n-clad torso, glistening in the angling sunlight. His legs quivered and his hands clutched at the gravel.
Cuno whistled shrilly through his teeth, calling his horse, as he ran at a slant down slope toward a jumble of sandstone rocks and boulders. He bounded up the scarp on his muscular, powerful legs, ignoring the hitch in his calf.
At the top he cast his dread-filled gaze southward, and his heart leapt once more.
His three wagons—manned by Serenity Parker and two other men he’d hired in Crow Feather—were inching along the off-white trail, heading to Cuno’s left. They were little larger than brown ants from this distance of a half mile, and the trail they were following was a faint line through the scrub and cedars and occasional sandstone boulders littering the broad, bowl-shaped valley.
The Indians—five dusky figures on paint horses—were galloping along the trail behind them, within fifty yards and closing. One was extending a rifle in one arm while the others raised bows, quivers jostling down their fur-clad backs.
Cuno whistled again as with shaking hands he replaced the spent cartridges in his Winchester’s breech. Hooves thumped and a horse blew and he raked his eyes away from the Indians attacking his freight-heavy wagons to see Renegade bound out from behind a larger hump of gray-and-red-banded rock.
The horse’s silky dun mane billowed in the wind, his reins bouncing along the ground to both sides.
“Come on, boy!”
As the horse approached the base of the scarp, Cuno clambered along the curved side, stepped off a protruding thumb, and dropped into his saddle. Sliding his Winchester into its boot jutting over the right stirrup, he leaned forward, grabbed the reins, and wheeled the horse sharply.