.45-Caliber Firebrand

by Peter Brandvold

  In a second, horse and rider were plunging down the rocky, cedar-stippled slope, angling east toward the wagons, the big horse’s iron-shod hooves raising a veritable thunder, heavy dust rising behind the mount’s arched tail.

  At the base of the slope, Cuno slipped his Winchester from the boot, cocked it one-handed, and gritted his teeth. “Here we go!”

  2

  CUNO CROUCHED LOW over his saddle horn as Renegade raced through the high-desert scrub. As he topped a low rise, he saw the Indians moving in a right-to-left line before him, loosing arrows at the dust-obscured wagons while the brave with the carbine triggered sporadic rounds over his piebald’s head.

  A hundred yards from the trail, Cuno dropped over a low rise and checked the skewbald down, peering ahead through the rocks and shrubs for a new fix on his position.

  The Indians were whooping and yelling, their horses thudding along the hard-packed trail, slower than before because of the freighters’ crackling rifle fire, but still overtaking the wagons. Ahead of the galloping warriors, the Conestogas were raising a raucous clatter. Serenity and the other two drivers were shouting and triggering lead behind them, and the frightened mules were braying loudly.

  Cuno reined Renegade sharply left and pressed his knees against his saddle—all the signal the well-trained skewbald paint needed to lurch forward into another ground-chewing gallop. Cuno intended to cut the Indians off from the wagons, buy some time for Serenity, Dallas Snowberger, and Dutch Rasmussen to fort up and return fire. In their lumbering wagons, jerking along too crazily for accurate shooting, they were easy pickings.

  Horse and rider dropped into a depression behind a high, shelving dike. When they came out the other side, an arrow cut the air a foot in front of Cuno’s head—so close he could hear the windy buzz. Renegade whinnied.

  Cuno looked in the direction from which the arrow had careened and saw one of the braves angling toward him at breakneck speed. Cuno swung his rifle at the oncoming buck and triggered an errant shot.

  As he jacked another round one-handed and kept Renegade chewing up the terrain before him, angling toward the trail and the wagons, the Indian nocked another arrow. The tall, war-painted brave aimed and let go.

  Cuno timed his duck just in time. The arrow cleaved the air where his head had been. Probably would have drilled him through his ear. These warriors were more accustomed to shooting from a moving mount than Cuno was.

  Cuno took his reins in his teeth and raised the Winchester to his right shoulder. He planted the rifle’s bobbing sights in the middle of the brave’s jostling form. Their horses were on an interception course. The brave reached behind for another arrow.

  Cuno fired. The brave jerked his head up as though startled. Cuno cocked and fired again.

  The brave threw his arms out to his sides, tossing the arrow out in one direction, the bow out in the other as he flew back off his brown-and-white paint’s lurching right hip. As the horse continued forward, Cuno saw the brave bounce off a boulder and hit the ground rolling in a broiling dust cloud.

  Lowering the Winchester, Cuno hauled back sharply on his reins. Renegade whinnied again and sank back on his haunches, rear hooves skidding and kicking up dust and bits of sage and juniper. The Indian’s paint raced past, a foot in front of Renegade’s nose, and continued on up the slope toward the rocky northern ridge.

  Cuno dropped into another depression. When he came out of it again, he glanced toward the trail. Two of the three Conestoga freighters, with Philadelphia sheeting drawn across their high-sided beds, had pulled off into the brush on the far side of the trail. Behind them, four Indians were milling, no longer closing the gap between them and the wagons but continuing to yowl and loose arrows at the already pincushioned oak sideboards.

  Cuno slowed Renegade to a fast trot and glanced back along the dusty trace.

  The third wagon, driven by Dutch Rasmussen, had disappeared amidst the gently rolling, boulder-pocked scrub. Gunshots rose from that direction—no doubt Rasmussen himself trying to hold off one or more of the braves who’d likely driven him off the road.

  “Shit!” Cuno headed Renegade straight for the two wagons, raising his Winchester to dispatch one of the harassing braves and silently cursing his fate. He and his men had come within twenty miles of the Trent headquarters to get hornswoggled and tail-knotted by a half dozen mooncalf Ute younkers likely out on a whiskey-inspired tear.

  Cuno had a thousand dollars tied up in those wagons, mules, and in the freight—a winter’s worth of food and dry goods—intended for Logan Trent’s Double-Horseshoe Ranch at the base of the Rawhide Range. He and Serenity had had too good a year of freight hauling for Fort Dixon and local ranches to lose it all here at the start of winter. They needed the Trent payout to get them through the snow months, without having to swamp Denver saloons, which he and Serenity had been forced to do last winter while building up a stake for wagons and freight.

  Cuno triggered his Winchester over Renegade’s head.

  An Indian who’d just loosed an arrow at Serenity’s wagon jerked and sagged sideways in his saddle. Two rifles spoke around the wagons, the twin powder puffs rising nearly simultaneously, and the brave was punched straight back off his saddle blanket to pile up in the rocks and brush, unmoving.

  Two more Indians were milling in the tall shrubs thirty yards west of the Conestogas. They were still howling above the blasts of Serenity and Dallas Snowberger’s rifle fire, but without their previous fervor.

  Serenity was hunkered beneath the end of his Conestoga while Snowberger was shooting from amongst the jumbled black rocks on the other side of the wagons, no doubt trying to detract fire from the bellowing mules.

  Cuno leapt down from Renegade’s back. Racking a live round into his Winchester, he ran crouching behind a low shelf of sand, rock, and spindly cedars toward the wagons. As the dusty Philadelphia sheeting of the first wagon rose on his right, he dashed up from behind the shelf and ran toward the wagon beneath which Serenity was still triggering his Winchester.

  He dove beneath the high bed in a spray of dust and gravel, pushed up on his elbows, and raised his Winchester toward one of the painted figures still jostling around behind their screen of shagbark and cedars.

  Serenity whipped his wizened, gray-bearded face toward him, deep-set gray-blue eyes bright with surprise as he began whipping his rifle around. “Cuno . . . jumpin’ Jehoshaphat!”

  Cuno triggered a shot. His bullet clipped a rock and ricocheted into the scrub, trimming limbs.

  “I seen a long blond scalp hangin’ from one o’ them red devil’s loincloths and thought it was yours!”

  “Not yet.” Cuno triggered another round. He jerked his cocking lever down, and the smoking shell arced over his right shoulder. “You see what happened to Dutch?”

  “Took an arrow.” Lying belly flat, Serenity was sighting down the Winchester. “I seen him tumble outta the driver’s box. You get a fix on how many’re out here?”

  Serenity fired, his rifle screeching. An enraged cry rose from behind the screening brush. “Got you, you son of a bitch!”

  Snowberger’s rifle roared twice from the rocks on the other side of his wagon, and there was another groan and the thud of a brave hitting the ground.

  “Dallas, hold your fire!”

  Cuno scrambled out from under Serenity’s wagon, leapt a rock, and holding his cocked rifle up high across his chest, bulled through the scrub cedars. On the other side, he aimed the Winchester straight out from his shoulder and looked around.

  To his left, one of the braves was down on one knee behind a boulder, clutching his shoulder and groaning. Blood dribbled from a gash in his forehead. His horse was galloping off to the south, trailing its hemp reins.

  Another horse trotted southeast from the wagons, the brave on its back crouched forward over the animal’s neck and holding both arms across his belly.

  “I hit this son of a bitch.” It was Snowberger, walking up on Cuno’s right and angling toward the g
roaning Indian whose hand kept swiping feebly at the war club thonged on his hip. His tightly wrapped and feather-trimmed braids were caked with sand-colored dust and bristling with cactus thorns.

  The thirty-year-old freighter—clad in checked wool trousers and suspenders and a blue wool shirt under a shabby suit coat—aimed his Henry repeater at the Indian’s forehead and gritted his teeth. “Bastard damn near took my eye out.”

  The brave glanced up, saw the barrel aimed at his head, and screamed. Snowberger calmly clipped the scream with a round through the brave’s temple.

  Cuno saw the brave slump down, quivering, in the periphery of his vision as he stole forward, swinging his rifle from right to left, looking for more warriors. Serenity came up through the cedars behind him, breathing hard and thumbing fresh shells from the bandoliers crossed on his scrawny chest clad in twenty-year-old, fringed buckskin.

  “They get any of the mules?”

  Serenity had a raspy voice as pinched up as his bearded face. “One took an arrow in his rump but not deep. He’ll last to the Trent headquarters . . . if we do.”

  “How ’bout yours, Dallas?”

  “Nah.” Snowberger tossed the Indian’s tomahawk into the brush and moved up left of Cuno, ten yards away, brushing at an arrow graze under his left eye. He peered around warily from beneath the brim of his soiled, tan hat. Cuno had hired the man out of a Crow Feather saloon, when Serenity had convinced him they needed a spare driver and an extra gun in this apron land west of the Great Divide, where renegades from the mining camps were known to harass freight trains.

  Snowberger had proven a capable driver and handy with a sidearm. Two days ago he’d shot a sand rattler about to strike one of the mules—a single, clean shot through the neck with a nondescript Schofield .44. Now it looked like he could hold his own with an old, beat-up Henry sixteen-shooter, as well.

  They’d suspected they might attract trouble with white men. But not from the area’s Indian tribes—the Utes, Crows, and Southern Utes—most of whom were said to have been peacefully minding their own business for the past year or so in the wake of Custer’s demise at the Little Bighorn in Montana.

  Snowberger wiped blood on his pants. “They came up on us from both sides of the trail, not long after you pulled off to scout the ridge.”

  “Told ya I smelled the red devils,” Serenity said.

  Cuno, convinced they were alone here, was lengthening his stride and lowering his rifle, heading west toward where the third wagon had disappeared.

  “Poor old Dutch,” Serenity said, breathing hard as he walk-jogged to keep up with Cuno, who, at five-ten and a hundred and ninety pounds, most of it hard muscle, had a good three inches and fifty pounds on the graybeard. “Got a bad feelin’ about the ole boy.”

  Cuno glanced over his shoulder at the dark-eyed Snowberger. “Dallas, stay with the wagons. We’re gonna see about Dutch.”

  Snowberger was a grim, silent man, but he didn’t balk at taking orders from one nearly ten years his junior. He brushed at his cheek again and stopped, cradling the Henry in his arms and staring west with that dark, pensive gaze beneath ridged, black brows. He obviously didn’t feel any more optimistic than Serenity about Dutch Rasmussen’s fate.

  Cuno and Serenity had walked fifty yards beyond Snowberger when, beginning to climb a low, rocky hogback liberally pocked with dried cow plop, both men stopped suddenly. Serenity sucked a breath through his teeth.

  Black smoke ribboned up from the other side of the hogback, swirling gently. There was the spine-rippling scream of a mule and the sudden thud of horse hooves.

  Cuno lurched forward, breaking into a run and leaving Serenity behind as he sprinted up over the top of the hogback and down the other side. He could see the wagon now, angled off the trail and piled up on its side in rocks and brush.

  Most of the mules were down and unmoving. One wheeler and a leader thrashed in their traces, trying to stand in spite of the horribly tangled chains and leather ribbons. Behind them, flames leapt up from the wagon’s rear, growing and spreading quickly, black smoke broiling.

  Cuno dug his heels in. Holding the Winchester in one hand, he pumped with his free arm and his knees, chin up, teeth gritted. His hat blew off and drifted back behind him.

  He had to get to the wagon, put the fire out before it consumed his entire load and the precious Conestoga itself.

  Beyond the smoking, flaming wagon, a cream horse and dusky-skinned rider galloped west, away from the Conestoga—long hair bouncing down the brave’s broad back.

  As Cuno approached the wagon, which lay a good fifty yards south of the trail, he slowed to a stop, breath raking in and out of his tired lungs, arms dropping to his sides. Futility bit him deep. The entire top of the sheeted load was involved now, and the flames were curling up over the driver’s box. The two surviving mules screamed and thrashed, both bristling with fletched, red arrows.

  Cuno looked around for Dutch Rasmussen. The big Swede was nowhere in sight. Behind Cuno, boots thudded, spurs sang, and breath rasped harshly in and out of tired, old lungs.

  “Shoot those mules!” Cuno yelled over his shoulder as Serenity ran up behind him, the graybeard’s face creased with misery.

  He could hear the old man cursing behind him as he ran around the wagon and swept the sage-and-juniper-pocked terrain with his eyes, looking for Rasmussen. Serenity had just silenced the second mule with a shot to the head when Cuno spied the freighter lying up near the trail.

  A big, blond Scandinavian with a red face and bulbous nose bright from too much hooch, the old mule skinner lay on his back across a pinyon pine sapling, one tall black boot, crusted with old mule manure, propped on a mossy rock.

  Two arrows protruded from Rasmussen’s hard, swollen belly clad in a bright red calico shirt and a smoked elk-skin vest, another from the side of his hatless head. One, shot into his lower back, had been broken off in his tumble from the wagon. Blood pooled out from the wound to stain the wiry brown grass beneath him.

  Cuno dropped to a knee beside the big man—a good freighter no less reliable for Cuno’s having to drag him out of a Crow Feather brothel the morning they were to hit the trail for the Trent Double-Horseshoe.

  Cuno tugged at a dry grass clump as he stared down at Rasmussen’s inert face and scrubbed at his own forehead angrily with a sleeve of his fringed buckskin tunic. He looked toward the burning wagon. Serenity was moving toward him, silhouetted against the leaping flames and broiling smoke behind him.

  “Is that Dutch?” Serenity called when he was within twenty yards, squinting his deep-set eyes.

  Cuno stood, nodding grimly. “I’ll get a shovel.”

  Just then there was a cannon-like roar that made the ground leap beneath Cuno’s boots. He stopped dead in his tracks as the burning wagon exploded in an expanding orange ball, stabbing flames and jets of white smoke in all directions. Wood chunks and slivers from crates and barrels were tossed high, and airtight tins and burlap food bags were launched in lazy arcs high above the wreck.

  Cuno stood, hang-jawed, as several of the tins and torn, burning food pouches thumped down around him, a couple of cans clanging off rocks.

  At the same time, there was the ear-wrenching pop of ignited cartridge rounds. Several rounds whistled through the air around Cuno’s head, more plunking up dust and grass before him, a couple sending up the angry whines of ricochets.

  Cuno wheeled toward Serenity, who stood sideways, lower jaw hanging, blue eyes bright with shock. “Cover!”

  Cuno grabbed the old man’s tunic and half carried, half dragged the stove-up oldster, heavy from the brass-filled bandoliers on his chest, behind a boulder flanked with pines. They dropped to their knees and bowed their heads as the cacophony of exploding rounds crackled like Mexican fireworks on All Saints’ Day.

  The cannonade continued for nearly a minute, then died off gradually.

  When Cuno looked up, Serenity Parker was scowling down at him from his craggy, bearded face. “Damnit, ya young
firebrand—why didn’t you tell me we was haulin’ enough ammo to take on the whole Sioux Nation?”

  Cuno’s jaws were hard, his clean-shaven face red with fury, his words pinched down to a taut rasp. “Took the words right out of my mouth, you old bastard!”

  3

  CUNO MASSEY AND Serenity Parker—a young, muscular man and a bandy-legged oldster in ragged buckskins and a bullet-crowned sombrero—walked out from behind the boulder to mosey toward the burning Conestoga and its spilled freight. In the aftermath of the explosion, it was impossible to tell that the burning mass had even been a wagon, so little of it remained.

  The smoke boiling up into the clear, western sky was rife with the acrid odor of burning mule and gunpowder.

  “If you didn’t know we was haulin’ ammo,” Serenity said, blinking owlishly as he regarded the fire, “how in the hell did it get aboard that wagon? Certain-sure old Dutch didn’t put it there without tellin’ us about it.”

  Cuno bent to snuff a patch of burning sod and a burlap scrap marked with the first three letters of COFFEE. There were a dozen other such fires but a recent October rain had dampened the ground enough to prevent a wildfire. Not far from the burlap scrap, a chunk of smooth, dark wood lay against a rock.

  Cuno walked over and picked it up. It was a broken rifle stock. The varnish glistening across the smooth, walnut wood marked it as relatively new.

  Cuno showed the wood to Serenity, who tugged on his beard. “Didn’t know you was haulin’ rifles, neither.”

  Cuno tossed the stock away with a curse.

  Putting out more small fires with their hats, he and Serenity continued on past the burning wagon, which had burned so suddenly and so hotly that it was burning down now for lack of fuel. They found several more bits and pieces of Winchester rifles—some swaddled in charred burlap dusted with wheat flour—and part of a leather pouch marked with the large, red numerals .44-40.

  Dallas Snowberger had led the two remaining wagon teams onto leveler ground and had adjusted the harness ribbons and chains, some of which had gotten tangled in the frenzied run from the Utes. But he was standing behind and between the wagons as Cuno and Serenity marched up, his rifle resting on his shoulder, an incredulous expression on his dark-eyed features.