.45-Caliber Firebrand

by Peter Brandvold

  Hahnsbach grunted as, propelled by his own momentum, he wheeled sharply to one side. Cuno hammered his fist against the side of the man’s stout head. He’d brought his fist back to deliver another enraged blow, when thunder boomed suddenly, making the ground rock and echoing off the stables like something solid before flatting off over the valley.

  The report was still being swallowed up by the near mountains and the green-dark sky when Cuno saw the source of the thunder. A big man stood thirty yards up the grade toward the house, his hip cocked, boots spread. He was a hatless, bearded gent in whipcord trousers and a sheepskin vest over a black shirt with pearl buttons.

  He wore two pistols in soft leather holsters high on his lean hips, and a bone-handled bowie knife jutted from a deerskin sheath crowding his left-side gun. Smoke licked from the sawed-off, double-barreled shotgun that he held straight up in his left hand. The gut shredder’s brown leather lanyard hung down around his thigh.

  His short, curly, pewter-colored hair lifted in the breeze around his head. His face was expressionless, his eyes shaded by his mantling brow.

  “Cuno Massey?” he barked.

  Serenity, Snowberger, the Chinese cook, and the two other waddies were all frozen in mid-motion.

  Cuno stood, feet spread, fists balled, his chest rising and falling heavily. Before him, on one knee, Hahnsbach grunted a German epithet.

  Cuno regarded the shotgun-wielding newcomer skeptically, haltingly, half expecting a pumpkin-sized mass of double-aught buck to be blasted through his belly. “Who’re you?”

  “I’m the one with the shotgun. Mr. Trent wants you up at the house.”

  Cuno unclenched his fists and looked around. Behind him, Serenity and the Chinaman lay on their sides, their fists full of the other man’s shirt, grimaces frozen on their cheeks. Snowberger stood crouched, fists clenched, like a boxer. The other two waddies were on their knees, twisted around toward Cuno and the man with the shotgun.

  Closer by, Quirt was down on all fours, watching the ground as blood from his nose stained it. “You son of a bitch,” he grunted, keeping his head down. “Broke my fuckin’ nose!”

  Cuno walked around the grunting Hahnsbach and picked up his hat. Shaping its crown and setting it on his head, he looked around again until he saw Renegade standing near the stables at the south side of the yard. Several men had spilled out of the branding corral and had apparently been heading over to join the melee when the shotgun had filled them all with doubt.

  One of the waddies, a young, long-faced kid in an oversized black hat, held Renegade’s reins up close to the bridle and was running a soothing hand down the skewbald’s stout neck.

  “Stable him for me, will you?” Cuno said to the kid as he began tramping up the grade toward the man with the shotgun. “Plenty of oats after he’s warmed down some, and a rubdown if you feel obliged.”

  The man with the shotgun nodded at the kid, then, resting the barrel of the gut shredder on his shoulder, wheeled and began making for the big house spewing smoke from its chimney at the top of the hill.

  Cuno followed several paces behind and kept an eye skinned on the two bores of the gut shredder propped on the shoulder of the man he assumed was the foreman, Kuttner. He wasn’t sure what kind of a bailiwick he’d ridden into here. He hoped he wouldn’t have to shoot his way out, but he would if he and his men were crowded any more than they already had been.

  As he approached the house behind the foreman, he saw a man standing atop the porch, puffing a brass-tipped briar pipe. He was a slender, stoop-shouldered gent in a beat-up opera hat from which a thick mop of silver hair curled.

  The man had a long, heavy-boned, craggy face, a broad, pitted nose with a round red tip and a nasty-looking growth to one side of it, up near his right eye and tapering into his cheek that was the color of near-ripe chokecherries. A long, white scar doglegged down over his left jaw from just above a large, red ear.

  A clawhammer coat hung off his bony shoulders, and his baggy denims were secured to his equally bony hips with braided rawhide suspenders. Beneath the coat was a soft, doeskin tunic elaborately stitched with red and blue thread. From the breast pocket, another pipe, a notebook, and a pencil stub protruded.

  “Trent,” Cuno said tightly, mounting the porch steps behind the man with the shotgun, his jaws hard and his cheeks hot, “I wanna know why I was haulin’ rifles and ammo without bein’ told. And I wanna know why I wasn’t told the Utes were on the prod out here.”

  “Hey!” the foreman barked, wheeling around to stand on the other side of the door from his boss. “Check your tone, button. And it’s Mr. Trent to you!”

  Trent held up a placating hand. “Stand down, Henry. You gotta figure on a torn-up corral when you invite a broomtail maverick into your remuda.”

  “This broomtail broke Quirt’s nose, Mr. Trent.”

  “It’ll mend.” The old man looked Cuno up and down while he pensively puffed his pipe. “So you’re Cuno Massey. Built like a lumber dray, but I figured you’d be taller.”

  Cuno’s tone was one of barely restrained patience. “You have the advantage here, Mr. Trent. I wouldn’t know you from Adam’s off-ox. How do you know me?”

  “Didn’t need to meet personal. I heard about your exploits with your six-gun and fists. Shit, boy, you’re legend in these parts—don’t you know that?”

  “Let’s get back to the snubbing post, Mr. Trent.”

  “We’ll get to your business,” Trent said, wrinkling his coarse silver brows and spewing pipe smoke from one corner of his mouth. He canted his head toward the door. “Inside. You look like you could use a drink . . . and adequate recompense for your troubles.”

  Before Cuno could reply, Trent had turned and moved through the open, split-log door, limping deep on one side. Cuno glanced at the foreman. Kuttner’s face was expressionless as he stood there, holding his gut shredder on his shoulder and resting one hand on the walnut grips of the big Remington jutting from a cross-draw holster angled high on his left hip.

  Cuno moved through the door and followed Trent’s vague, limping figure through the smoky shadows that permeated the lodge, his boots sounding inordinately loud on the scuffed board floors. The place smelled gamey and smoky, with the tang of kerosene and candles.

  As Cuno moved through a hall that seemed to split the big, silent, ship-like house in two, he glanced into several rooms furnished with heavy, wooden cabinets and ornate, brocade-upholstered chairs and leather couches. Charcoal or wood-chip braziers glowed. Game trophies loomed on the walls, and hide rugs were stretched upon the floors.

  At one point, the ceiling creaked, and there was the guttural tone of an Indian speaking his mother tongue somewhere in the second story, beneath the sound of water poured from a bucket. Cuno thought he heard a softer girl’s voice, too, but maybe it was just the wind, which was making the house shift and groan like a ship at anchor.

  Uneasily, he followed Trent through an open door, with Henry Kuttner clomping lazily along behind him.

  “Come in, young Massey,” Trent said, moving around behind a heavy oak desk easily the size of a freight wagon’s bed. Trent squawked down into a deep chair upholstered in mountain goat and boasting ram horns for arms.

  As Trent threw open a large checkbook and reached into a pocket of his frock coat, he said, “Henry, pour Mr. Massey a drink, will you? I had that cognac shipped all the way from San Francisco nearly a year ago—six bottles. Still have two in the cellar. I’m more of a whiskey man, myself.”

  Cuno stood halfway between the desk and the door. He hadn’t taken his hat off. “I don’t drink the hard stuff.”

  “Oh?” Trent looked him up and down. “That strikes me as odd. Most pistoleros go in for hard hooch and easy cooch. I should know—I’ve met a passel.”

  “Look, Mr. Trent, I’m sorry if I spoil all your notions about pistoleros. I’m just a hardworking freighter who lost a good man about three hours ago—on Double-Horseshoe range, I might add—because you didn’t w
arn me about the Ute trouble.”

  “Oh?” Trent had donned a pair of silver-rimmed spectacles that looked too small and delicate atop that big, red nose. “How is that my fault? I gave no assurances that your journey would be free of the usual hazards.”

  “Utes aren’t a usual hazard. Haven’t been for a couple of years. If they had been, I’d have hired extra men. And you’d have paid for ’em.” Cuno moved forward and sat at the edge of the guest chair angled before the desk and rested his elbows on his knees. “Now, about the rifles and ammo I didn’t know I was carryin’. That’s dealin’ from the bottom of the deck, Mr. Trent.”

  Trent set his pen down, removed his glasses, and sagged back in his chair. “That, I admit, wasn’t entirely honest.”

  Cuno chuffed a caustic laugh. “Entirely? If my man hadn’t been dead before the Indians set fire to his wagon, he sure as hell would have been afterward. Lucky there weren’t more of us around that wreck when it popped, or—”

  “Hold on,” Trent said, holding up the hand in which he held his spectacles, beetling those shaggy silver brows. “Let me explain.” He looked at Henry Kuttner standing between the door and a large, popping fireplace beneath a snarling bobcat head. “Henry, give him one of those ales from the cellar.”

  “I don’t want an ale,” Cuno said, keeping his eyes on the rancher. “I want to know about them rifles.”

  Trent returned his gaze to Cuno, slitting the gray, slightly rheumy orbs once more, as though again sizing up the wolf he’d found in his office. “I don’t blame you for gettin’ your neck up. I’ll admit, it was an underhanded thing to do. But I had good reason. A mercenary reason, but a reason nonetheless.”

  Trent winced as he wrestled up from his chair and, tossing his glasses on the desk, limped over to the fireplace. “A month and a half ago we had trouble out here. A couple of my men—they hadn’t worked for me long and I hadn’t even met them; it was Quirt that hired ’em—found a Ute girl out alone on one of my creeks.”

  The stove-up old rancher turned his ass to the fire and stared out the window on the far side of the room. “They raped her. Then they killed her. Said she fell and hit her head on a rock. Well, there’s been hell to pay out here ever since . . .”

  5

  CUNO’S GUT CLENCHED at the story of the Indian girl’s rape and murder. He had a feeling he knew where the story was heading from here, but he let the old rancher, warming his bony behind in front of the fire, continue.

  “I gave the rapists their wages and sent them packing on the same hosses they rode in on,” Logan Trent said, still staring gravely out the ever-darkening window at a large cottonwood in the backyard that was a mess of untrimmed rabbit brush, rocks, gnarled trees, and wheatgrass. “Henry and two other men found them a week later. They hadn’t gotten off my range. They’d been hacked to bits no bigger than one of my hands. It was their clothes that identified them.”

  “Can’t blame the Utes for that. Probably would have done the same myself.”

  “No, you can’t blame them,” Trent agreed. “But they should have quit there.” He swung his grizzled head toward Cuno. “My range riders have been attacked on three occasions. One was killed. Two line shacks have been burned, and fifty head of my prime cattle were run off a ridge. Killed. Wolf and eagle bait.”

  “Have you talked to the cavalry stationed at the Rogers Outpost?”

  “I sent a courier. He came back the next day tied to his saddle and decked out in a Ute war lance.”

  Trent walked over to a table fronting the window and poured whiskey from a plain brown bottle into a water glass. He held the glass up to the window and studied the amber liquid against the dying light. “You see, young Massey, the girl those two cork-headed lobos raped was Chief Leaping Wolf’s youngest daughter. Wasn’t right in the head. Often ran off from the lodge to fish or swim on her own.”

  “How’d you find out who she was?” Cuno asked.

  “One of the chief’s sons-in-law, a white man named Noah Crawford, rode in and told me. Crawford has a couple of gold diggings on my land. I get a cut if he finds anything. Anyway, Crawford said that Chief Leaping Wolf is so blistering mad that when Crawford tried to get the old man to turn his horns in, to content himself with the fact the rapists had died slow, hideous deaths, Leaping Wolf almost killed him. Had him whipped and staked outside for two nights in spite of the chief’s daughter’s protests.”

  Trent sipped the whiskey, balling his cheeks and smacking his lips, then raised the glass again to the light. He laughed but there was no humor in it, only a sad fatalism. “Crawford ain’t goin’ back to the chief’s encampment anytime soon.”

  Cuno studied the man’s profile. Trent’s misfortune tempered his anger, but the image of Dutch Rasmussen’s arrow-bristling body was still fresh in his mind and the smoke from the burned wagon still lingered in his nostrils and lungs. “Why wasn’t I told about this, Mr. Trent?”

  “Because I didn’t think you’d come. Or might not be able to find enough men to come. It’s a gut-wrenching trek through rugged country even without the Indians. You throw them in . . .”

  Trent limped back over to his chair and sat down with a squawk. He favored Cuno with an admiring, coyote-like grin. “I knew you’d try to come, given the right pay, and given your reputation for taking on jobs others might shrink from. It was your father and stepmother who were murdered—correct? And you pursued their killers—the notorious Rolf Anderson and Sammy Spoon—all the way up the Bozeman Trail.”

  Cuno’s general annoyance with the man was aggravated by his cunning, arrogant demeanor, as though he was holding a royal flush and he wanted everyone to know well in advance of his throwing down and cashing in. “Where the hell’d you hear about that?”

  “Word gets around one watering hole after another. Eventually even makes its way out here.” Trent took another drink, shuttered an eye, and pointed at Cuno’s chest. “That ain’t all I know, neither. You killed Franklin Evans—rancher up around Julesburg.”

  Stonily, Cuno held the man’s gaze. “Trent, you look as happy as a tick on a fat dog.”

  “Hey!” Kuttner objected. He’d collapsed into a chair by the fire, facing his employer and Cuno.

  Unfazed by the remark, Trent merely shook his head and chuckled. “Bastard ran me off my first homestead up in the Antelope Hills, about twenty miles from Evans’s headquarters. That’s when I headed here, to the backside of the Great Divide. Always meant to go back and beef the bastard myself, but then I started raisin’ herds and kids, and the opportunity exhausted itself. Besides, I figured the old rattlesnake had done bit the wrong dog fox and got his head chewed off.

  “Yessir, I heard about all that,” the old rancher continued. “And then, after this powder keg with Leaping Wolf’s daughter exploded, and I found myself in dire need of a supply run to get me through the winter, I heard your name mentioned by a few fellas out on the range. Said they’d seen the brawny blond firebrand who killed Franklin Evans haulin’ freight for Fort Dixon.”

  Trent shrugged his bony shoulders. “So I fired off a telegraph to Dwight Doyle at the mercantile in Crow Feather to hire you on. And I gave him my list to fill.”

  “But he left out the part listing the rifles—to me, anyways.”

  “Ah, we’re back to the rifles.” Suddenly, Trent leaned forward and rammed his fist onto the desktop. His nose swelled with exasperation. “Damnit, with Leaping Wolf runnin’ wild across my graze, I needed a good thirty repeaters to get me through the winter. One for every man I got, with plenty ammo for each gun. And by God, I was gonna get it any way I could.

  “I knew you could get your wagons through, so I knew you were the one. No, I didn’t tell you about the rifles—I didn’t tell anyone about the rifles except for Doyle—because I didn’t want it to get around that Leaping Wolf was on the prod. If that happened, I’d never get anyone to run me freight! If I didn’t starve out this winter, I’d be overrun with savages, and old Leaping Wolf’s squaws would be mopping
out their lodges with my purty silver hair!”

  Suddenly, Trent winked as he gazed across the desk at Cuno. “Except you. I knew you’d come. I knew you wouldn’t be afraid. Even see it as a challenge. But most of the other freighters I’ve known are far too concerned about their wagons and their mules—”

  “And their men . . .”

  “And their men . . . for any derring-do!”

  “Well, I’ve got one dead man, a burned wagon, and six dead mules, and if the rest of that ammo had caught fire, I’d be out more wagons and more mules, and I might not be sitting here squawking about it.”

  Trent donned his glasses, picked up a pen from a holder, and flipped the cap off an ink bottle. He looked at Cuno over his smudged spectacles. “Will a bank draft do?”

  “As long as I make it back to Crow Feather to cash it.”

  Trent dipped the pen in the ink bottle and scribbled out the check. He set the pen aside, ripped the check out of the book, and tossed it across the desk to Cuno.

  Cuno picked it up. He’d been prepared to get his tail up all over again, but the amount—two thousand dollars—more than covered the agreed-upon figure as well as an additional amount for the mules and the wagon and for the thirty rifles Cuno had been hauling in ignorance.

  “I know there’s no covering the cost of a dead man,” Trent said, “but it’s a tough country. If you look close, you’ll see a grave in every wash.”

  “I’ll tell that to Dutch’s woman in Crow Feather,” Cuno said. Rasmussen had lived with an old whore named Glenda when he wasn’t hoorahing mules at the end of a jerkline. Cuno would give Glenda a couple hundred dollars to see her through a couple of years on her own.

  Stuffing the folded check in a pocket of his buckskin tunic, Cuno rose from his chair and turned to the door.

  Behind him, packing his pipe, Trent said, “I’d like to invite you and your men back to the house for dinner later. Say, around seven o’clock? Give you adequate time for a bath and a change of clothes, if you so desire.”