.45-Caliber Firebrand

by Peter Brandvold

“They’re gonna have a hard time doing that with broken hands.” Cuno lifted his chin at Quirt. “Beat it, fellas. Quirt’s the one with the beef . . . and my gun. Let’s not turn this into a rodeo.”

  Quirt laughed. With his broken nose, he sounded like a magpie.

  The brutes grinned.

  While Quirt hiked a hip on a water barrel and continued playing with Cuno’s .45, the brute on Cuno’s left shrugged out of his coat and hung it on a nearby nail from which harnesses drooped. Staring menacingly at Cuno, he slid his suspenders off his shoulders, jerked his shirttails out of his pants, and unbuttoned and removed his shirt.

  He didn’t stop until he was out of his grimy undershirt. Then he stood before Cuno—a big, broad, hairless mountain of a muscle-bound man, pocked and lashed here and there with knife scars. His smile, missing two front teeth, was like a giant rattler’s.

  The other brute stayed in his coat and hat. He had one wandering eye. That and his leering half smile made him look drunk. He was growling deep in his throat as the other man stepped forward, chin down, drawing his bunched left fist back and widening his eyes.

  Shorter than the bare-chested brute, and lighter on his feet, Cuno sprang forward and, before the man could swing his left haymaker forward, Cuno punched him twice in the gut hard. It surprised the brute as well as twisted him around and threw him back into a stall partition with an enraged “Whufff!”

  The other brute shuffled forward. Cuno wheeled toward him. The man grunted as he swung a roundhouse right, which glanced painfully off Cuno’s upper right cheek. Shaking off the blow, Cuno ducked to avoid the next one, then stepped forward and buried his own right fist in the brute’s gut.

  As the man chuffed and dropped his head slightly, Cuno delivered two savage jabs to the man’s face. The man’s nose gave beneath Cuno’s big fist like a bladder flask of blood, and the man was suddenly looking a lot more like Quirt.

  “Ah, come on, Deuce!” Quirt complained. “That ain’t what I paid ya for!”

  Deuce loosed a shrill curse and blinked through the blood in his eyes, gritting his teeth and balling his fists with rage.

  Cuno didn’t step back before the bare-chested gent was on him, hammering his jaws with two quick jabs. He stumbled back, hearing bells toll in his head. Setting his feet, he blocked another punch with one arm, turning the bare-chested brute slightly, and then twice he rammed his left fist against the man’s right ear.

  As the man twisted to Cuno’s right, Cuno hammered him with a right crosscut, jerking his face back around toward the freighter, his bloody lips glistening in the growing light from a window and his brown eyes snapping wide with fury. Cuno was beside the brute now, spreading his feet and preparing another couple of jabs to the dazed man’s face.

  To his left, he saw the other man stumble toward him, raising a long hickory ax handle in his right hand. “Ahhhhhhh!” the brute bellowed, swinging the handle forward in a broad arc.

  “Just fists, Deuce!” Quirt yelled from the rain barrel.

  Cuno ducked as the ax handle curved toward his head, and the mallet whistled as it cut the air unimpeded. Deuce grunted with exertion. There was a solid, bony smack and another, louder grunt. Still crouching, Cuno turned as the bare-chested brute froze suddenly, blinking slowly, eyes losing focus.

  “Oh, Jesus, Bill!” Deuce cried, dropping the ax handle down by his side and regarding his partner with exasperation. “I didn’t mean . . .”

  Bill’s head wobbled. His jaw hung askew and blood ran in twin streams down the side of his head and neck and down his shoulder. He dropped to his knees and, unblinking, fell straight forward onto his face.

  “Deuce, damnit!” Quirt cried, dropping down off the rain barrel. “I told you—only your fists! Is he dead?”

  Breathing heavily, keeping his fists balled, Cuno backed away from Bill, who was moving his feet from side to side and shuttling his glance between Deuce and Quirt.

  “Don’t think he’s dead,” Deuce said, suddenly raising the ax handle once more and glaring glassy-eyed at Cuno, “but this son of a bitch sure—”

  There was a tinkle, like a spoon tapped against a wineglass. And then, suddenly, Deuce’s head jerked slightly, and the muscles in his face planed out.

  He looked at Cuno with faint blame in his eyes.

  Cuno blinked his own eyes as if to clear them, slow to understand that the fletched end of a Ute arrow was protruding from the right side of Deuce’s head, while the sharpened strap-iron end poked out of the other side, just above Deuce’s left ear.

  The blade was sheathed in thick, red blood speckled with white bone and brain matter.

  Deuce feebly raised his right hand, almost as though he were waving, then dropped it down his side. At the same time, Cuno jerked his gaze toward the broken window and, seeing movement in the murky dawn shadows of the ranch yard, heard the rising thunder of approaching hooves and the growing cacophony of mewling warriors.

  In the periphery of his vision, as he bolted toward Quirt, Cuno saw Deuce tumble over Bill. Quirt was staring toward the window through which the arrow had sliced into the stable.

  “Is that . . . ?”

  “Who do you think it is?” Cuno grabbed his .45 out of Quirt’s hand. “Too early for Santa Claus!”

  Quirt shouted an epithet and clawed his own pistol from its holster. Cuno quickly stomped into his boots and slid his Winchester from its leather sheath.

  Quirt was moving stiffly toward the barn doors, shoulders raised, gun held low by his side.

  “What the hell you waiting for?” Cuno yelled as he ran past the segundo and heaved one of the doors open. “I don’t think they’re here bearing peace offerings.”

  Arrows thumped into the stable’s logs walls. Hooves thundered. The Indians’ war cries were now so loud that they covered the stable door’s rasp along its metal track. Cuno had thrown the door three feet wide when an arrow smashed into it, reverberating like a ricochet.

  Three war-painted Utes galloped past him, heading for the bunkhouse. Men were spilling from the bunkhouse in various stages of dress, some wearing only their longhandles and socks. One man tripped over his own pants and tumbled down the porch steps with an angry yell.

  The three braves bore down on them, loosing arrows quickly and expertly, throwing two drovers back against the bunkhouse wall while one took an arrow through his calf as he came off the porch.

  Cuno racked a shell into his Winchester’s breech, aimed quickly, and fired. The Indian he’d drawn the bead on turned, and the bullet careened wide. He nocked an arrow, howling like a mad coyote, and, putting his paint horse into a gallop toward Cuno, let fly.

  Cuno jerked his head down and to one side. The arrow buzzed by like a bee, nearly taking out his right eye, before it slammed into the stable door behind him.

  Cuno levered his Winchester and fired as the brave swung his horse to Cuno’s left. The Winchester’s round slammed into the brave’s deerskin-clad arm, and the brave howled even louder than before, throwing his head back on his shoulders, then sagging forward in his blanket saddle as his horse galloped westward.

  “Holy Christ!” Quirt cried as he bounded through the door and dropped to a knee beside Cuno. “More comin’ up from the creek!”

  Cuno could see more braves rushing up from the south, several peeling off from the main group and galloping toward the main house at the top of the hill. What had captured the brunt of his attention, however, were the two braves that had climbed atop the bunkhouse’s shake roof from the rear and were scampering up toward the front, one nocking an arrow while another held a Spencer repeater with a leather lanyard.

  They were both looking down at the cowboys and Serenity and Snowberger still stumbling bleary-eyed out the bunkhouse’s front door. A couple of the drovers were triggering pistols or rifles, but the sudden attack had caught them by surprise. Their bullets so far had grazed only one warrior who, turning his pinto in tight circles, triggered arrow after arrow at the yowling, cursing drovers.

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nbsp; While Quirt triggered his Schofield .44 at the Indians galloping up from the creek, Cuno shouted, “Serenity! Behind you!”

  Cuno aimed and fired. One of the Indians was punched back off his feet. He hit the shake-shingled bunkhouse roof on his back, then rolled down over the eave and hit the porch in a dust puff between Henry Kuttner and a bearded drover wearing only longjohns and an open buffalo robe.

  Both men, shooting the new Winchesters Cuno’s train had brought to the Double-Horseshoe, paused to glance down at the bleeding Indian who tried to climb onto his hands and knees. While Kuttner drilled a round through the wounded Ute’s head, Cuno fired three more rounds toward the bunkhouse roof.

  Serenity, wearing only his boots, long johns, and beat-up sombrero, fired his Colt Navy, and one Ute was thrown down the backside of the roof while another dropped to his butt.

  Blood leaking from the seated brave’s belly, the warrior tried to bring his Spencer carbine to bear. A drover on the porch, wielding a sawed-off shotgun in one hand and a Colt in the other, fed the brave double rounds of buckshot and a .44 slug, turning his head to pulp.

  Arrows whizzed around Cuno’s head, punching into the stable wall behind him. Levering a fresh round, he fired at the Indians streaming in from the creek.

  They galloped in a shaggy line past the corral to the bunkhouse, loosed a couple of arrows at the drovers now holed up behind rain barrels or stock troughs or kneeling behind the porch rail, then galloped back westward past the stables before which Cuno and Quirt knelt, blinking against the broiling dust as they fired into the horde.

  The Indians yowled like wolves on the trail of a bison herd. The drovers cursed and shouted. The arrows made whipping sounds as they caromed through the air, then barked loudly as they slammed into the log walls of the bunkhouse and the stables or clattered through windows.

  Rifles whip-cracked, echoing around the yard, and pistols popped. There were the intermittent, thundering blasts of the bearded man’s sawed-off gut shredder.

  As the drovers got oriented, Indians began to drop, screaming. One splashed into a stock trough in front of the bunkhouse, and the drover crouching behind it backed up, spitting water from his mouth and firing wildly into the trough until the thrashing brave stopped thrashing and sank.

  Quirt had emptied his second six-shooter when, on one knee to Cuno’s right, his hammer clicked, empty.

  “Shit!”

  He lowered the gun to his knee and thumbed open the loading gate. The segundo hadn’t plucked a single shell from his cartridge belt before a bullet tore into his forehead. Quirt flew up off his heels, bounced off the stable wall, and piled up at the wall’s base, dead.

  Cuno slid his Winchester toward the Indian galloping past the corrals on the far side of the yard, fifty yards away and racking a fresh shell into his Spencer’s breech. The brave’s dark gaze was cast toward Cuno, lower jaw rising and falling as he shrieked.

  Before the brave could raise his carbine to his shoulder once more, Cuno blew him off his horse and slammed him up against the corral gate with a crunching and cracking of strained wooden slats and breaking bones. The brave’s horse whinnied and buck-kicked, turned sharply, collided with another brave’s horse, unseating the surprised brave, and galloped back toward the creek.

  Cuno quickly thumbed fresh shells through his Winchester’s loading gate and peered through the dust wafting amidst the gradually receding shadows. Most of the horses around him now were riderless and shaken. Guns continued to pop.

  Serenity’s high-pitched shout cut through the din. “Cuno!”

  The young freighter turned sharply left. A horseback warrior galloped toward him, aiming an old Colt pistol tied to his wrist by a horsehair thong. The Indian’s face was a lip-stretched mask of wide-eyed fury as his head bobbed above that of his speckle-rumped black mustang.

  Pop!

  A bullet kissed the nap on Cuno’s tunic and plowed into the stable wall. Cuno snapped the Winchester to his shoulder and fired once, twice, three times. The brave continued toward him, screaming, “Aiyyeeeee-yawwwwww!”

  Pop! Pop!

  The brave’s bullets sizzled passed Cuno and into the stable wall. Knowing he’d fired the three fresh rounds he’d managed to slip into his receiver, Cuno flipped the rifle around, grabbing it by its barrel, and stepped up in the Indian’s path. As the horse approached, wide eyes ringed with white, the brave aimed the pistol at Cuno once more.

  The hammer pinged benignly onto the firing pin, and Cuno felt an icy nip in his bowels, knowing he’d come to within one misfired cartridge of his final resting place.

  He smashed his Winchester’s butt across the Indian’s face—a solid, cracking hit that Cuno could feel up into his shoulders. The war cries died on the Ute’s lips as he careened off his galloping black’s right hip, turning two complete somersaults before hitting the ground, rolling in the churning dust, and coming to rest on his belly.

  The black continued on past Cuno, smelling gamey with bear grease and sweat, and galloped back toward the creek, its rope reins trailing along the ground behind him. Cuno looked around for another Indian to shoot, but there was only wafting dust and scattered dead warriors and dead drovers.

  Several braves galloped back across the creek, still yelling.

  “Shit almighty!” one of the ranch hands cried, grabbing his right leg and rolling around in the dirt between the bunkhouse and one of the headquarters’ two barns. “Someone pull this fuckin’ arrow outta my knee!”

  Just then a girl’s scream rose from the direction of the main house. Cuno had dropped to a knee to thumb more cartridges into his Winchester.

  “Christ, that’s Trent’s daughter!” rasped Henry Kuttner, rising from behind one of the two stock troughs fronting the bunkhouse. He took a couple of steps and dropped to his knee, his lower right leg bloody.

  The girl screamed again. It was more like a wail this time. It sent a whipcord of electricity snapping up Cuno’s back.

  He bolted off his heels and sprinted toward the house.

  10

  CUNO RAN AROUND the stable in which the mules were braying raucously and thumping their stalls. He sprinted up the gentle grade toward the house at the base of the mountain wall.

  The sprawling lodge was purple-black in the dawn shadows, but Cuno could see pale gray smoke wisping from the open front door. Arrows bristled from the log walls and porch posts and from a few of the closed shutters on the first floor. Dust sifted through the gradually lightening air in front of the house, and the ground was freshly churned with the prints of unshod ponies.

  Cuno was twenty yards from the porch when hoof thuds rose to his left. He turned to see a horseback brave galloping out from around the lodge’s west side. The brave turned his feather-adorned head toward Cuno, then crouched low and squeezed his knees against the horse’s sides, urging more speed. He howled wildly, victoriously, as horse and rider whipped past Cuno and headed south toward the creek.

  Cuno didn’t waste time with a shot at the fleeing Indian. The girl had screamed again from inside the house—a horrific exclamation of bald terror—and Cuno took the porch steps two at a time . . . and stopped suddenly, whipping his Winchester up with a startled grunt.

  But it was no Indian standing there in the open doorway. It was Jedediah Gallantly, clad only in white silk longhandles. The man was barefoot. His hair was mussed, and his dark eyes were sunk deep in their pale sockets.

  He leaned against the open door, on the other side of the threshold, pressing one hand back against the door behind him while wrapping his other hand against the Ute-fletched arrow protruding from his belly. Blood shone darkly just up from his crotch, and dribbled down both thighs of his longhandles.

  Gallantly cleared his throat and regarded Cuno miserably. His voice was so soft that Cuno could barely hear him. “Can . . . can . . . you . . . help . . . me?”

  He looked down at the arrow, as if to indicate the problem.

  Cuno began to reach for the arrow, but stopped.
If he tried to pull the shaft out of Gallantly’s belly, he’d pull half of the man’s insides out, as well. He was a goner.

  “I don’t think so,” Cuno said regretfully, stepping gingerly past the dying man.

  Michelle screamed again from deep inside the bowels of the house, and Cuno lunged ahead down the dim, smoky hall, following her screams into the large dining room. He stopped just inside the door and squinted his stinging eyes against the smoke.

  The drapes on the other side of the table were burning. The smell of kerosene was sharp. In the middle of the room, a figure was down and crawling awkwardly. It was Trent.

  He wore a red-plaid robe over a nightgown, and elkskin slippers. He was trying to crawl across the room, toward the kitchen door, using a long-barreled, double-bore shotgun as an oar. He looked like a landed fish trying to make it back to the stream.

  As Cuno ran up to him, Trent turned suddenly, bellowing savagely and swinging the shotgun around.

  “It’s Cuno, Trent! Where’s Michelle!”

  Trent turned his enraged gaze toward the door on the far side of the room, and, with an enraged grunt, threw the shotgun, which landed just short of the door with a clattering thump. “Kitchen!”

  Cuno had heard the girl’s sobs and pleas and the guttural exclamations of the Indians and was already striding toward the kitchen door. His heart hammering and his ears ringing, eyes stinging, he bunched his lips and kicked the door wide, stepping quickly inside and raising his Winchester.

  Three Indians had the girl down on a long wooden table against the far wall, in front of a low, sashed window. She was naked, her nightclothes strewn about the floor amidst spilled flour and broken jars and bottles. Two Indians held her arms down on the table above her head. One had his deerskins breeches down around his knees.

  The third brave, who’d also dropped his breeches, crouched between her legs, holding her slender, cream thighs in his brown hands while he thrust his hips savagely against her. He wore a crisp black beaver hat that he’d obviously found inside the house, when he was hauling the girl out of her room, no doubt. It looked ridiculous on the brave’s savage head.