.45-Caliber Firebrand

by Peter Brandvold

  The rifle cracked sharply, loudly, echoing.

  One Indian’s yowling died abruptly, replaced by a strangled sound. He flew back off his pony’s right hip to hit the canyon floor with a thud, his bow clattering against the rocks at the base of the ridge wall behind him.

  Cuno’s Winchester roared again, leaping and bucking against his shoulder, flames stabbing from the octagonal barrel. The second lead rider screamed shrilly as he tumbled straight back off his lunging pony’s butt. One of the three pursuing riders chopped the wounded brave up beneath his horse’s hammering hooves. Then, he, too, was blown off his mount’s back.

  Cuno stood as the trampled brave screamed and groaned and, ejecting the spent brass while seating a fresh one, fired four more quick rounds from his right hip, cocking and firing, cocking and firing, the cartridge casings clinking off the rocks around him.

  When all five Indian ponies had galloped up canyon, whinnying and nickering and buck-kicking angrily, and the five braves lay in rumpled, dark heaps, unmoving on the canyon floor, sheathed in wafting powder smoke, Cuno turned and scrambled back down the escarpment.

  Renegade had shifted position, sidestepping skittishly at the racket. Cuno whistled. The horse stepped toward the scarp, turning slightly. Cuno dropped down the wall and into the saddle with a grunt of expelled air. Sliding his Winchester into the saddle boot, he leaned forward, grabbed up the reins, and turned Renegade up canyon.

  He caught up to the wagons a minute later as they cleaved the narrow chasm, rattling and rocking, hooves clomping like cracked bells on the uneven stone floor.

  “Jumpin’ Jehoshaphat!” Serenity bellowed as Cuno put Renegade up beside the graybeard’s driver’s seat. “You’re like to give me a heartstroke, comin’ up on me like that. I thought you was one o’ them Injuns!”

  “There were five. I got the jump on ’em.”

  “I heard the shootin’. Figured someone got the jump on someone.” Serenity shook his head wearily and sleeved sweat from his brow. “Only five, you say?”

  “They must have heard us outside the canyon and savvied our plan. There’ll likely be more, but our back trail’s clear for now.”

  “Any shootin’ from back toward the ranch?” Serenity called as Cuno gigged Renegade up along the other wagon, heading for the driver’s box.

  “Not yet.”

  Cuno knew the old graybeard wanted to shout, “That don’t mean there won’t be some soon!” but he held his tongue in deference to the children and the two older girls.

  Cuno dallied his reins around his saddle horn, then stepped fluidly out of his stirrups and, grabbing the side of the driver’s seat, onto the wagon. Renegade would keep pace with the freighters not only because Cuno had trained him well but because of the trouble the horse knew was behind them.

  “How you doing, Karl?” he asked the older Lassiter boy, tensely sitting the driver’s box. He held the reins loosely, though, not all balled up like a greenhorn would do, jerking them this way and that.

  “All right, I reckon,” the boy said. “Heard shootin’.”

  Cuno saw no reason to mince words. He was close enough to Karl’s age to remember how much he’d hated being lied to for his own good.

  “Five Injuns caught our scent.” Cuno took the reins from the boy. “They’re not on it anymore.”

  “That’s Margaret’s fault, I ’spect,” Karl said, keeping his voice low, the hoof clomps and the clatter of the wagons echoing off the walls around them. “The girl never could keep her mouth shut, mister . . .”

  “Cuno. Cuno Massey. Don’t cotton to bein’ called mister. It sounds like folks are addressing my old man, and he’s been dead now nearly four years.”

  Karl swallowed as he stared out over the mules’ dark, bobbing heads. “Them bastard Injuns killed my old man. Hit him with a war club, then stuck him with a lance.”

  “It ain’t easy, losing your pa. Especially when you seen it happen right out in front of you.”

  Karl glanced at Cuno, and the boy’s rawboned features with blunt nose and close-set eyes were drawn taut as a drumhead. He had a thumb-shaped birthmark on the nub of his right cheek and several red pimples spread across his forehead. “That how yours died?”

  Cuno nodded.

  “Injuns?”

  Cuno shook his head. “One was a white man but more vicious than all those sons o’ bitches behind us put together. The other was a half-breed named Sammy Spoon.”

  “Did the law track ’em?”

  Just then rocks tumbled down the wall just ahead and left and shattered on the cleft floor. “Whoa!” Cuno said, drawing back on the reins and standing up in the driver’s box, hand on his pistol grips.

  As the wagon rocked to a halt, a faint keening whine rose from the sloping ridge. Another rock dropped and broke on the ground before the mules. The team jostled around in their traces, and one brayed, but Cuno held taut to the reins.

  He released his pistol’s grips. “Bobcat, sounds like.”

  “Sounds that way to me,” Karl said.

  “Sounded like a panther,” the younger Lassiter boy said behind them, his voice hushed and conspiratorial.

  “Shut up, Jack,” Karl said.

  “You shut up!”

  There was a smacking sound, and Cuno chuckled ruefully. The Mexican girl, Camilla, had rendered the argument stillborn with a quick, resolute slap to the side of Jack’s head. There was a soft, plaintive “Ouch!” and then silence.

  Cuno looked behind his own wagon at Serenity. The graybeard sat his driver’s seat tensely, staring up the ridge.

  “Cat,” Cuno said just loudly enough for his partner to hear.

  Then he shook the reins across the mules’ backs, and the wagon rolled forward once more.

  The cleft opened and closed around the wagons. In several places, Cuno saw rock and boulder snags blasted to bits by Trent’s men, who’d kept the passage open for wood-hauling expeditions into the mountains. In a couple of places over the next couple of hours, he and Serenity had to lever with jacks and crowbars three recently fallen boulders out of the passage.

  About three hours after they’d started into it, the cleft opened on a wide, boulder-and-cottonwood-stippled wash bathed in the light of the recently risen moon. In the milky light, steam snaked up from the mules’ backs, and their breath jetted from their nostrils and around their heads.

  Cuno and Serenity pushed the teams across the wash, negotiating boulders and fallen cottonwoods and scrub cedars. When they’d reached the other side and found a passage—a broad, intersecting wash—that rose gradually into the mountains, they halted the wagons and unhitched the mules for water and rest.

  They picketed the mules amongst a few leafless cottonwoods growing around a spring-fed pool furred with ice. Leaving Serenity to tend the animals, Cuno walked back to the bivouac. He’d put Karl and Jack to work gathering wood and digging a small fire pit, but the girls had stayed inside the wagon, half buried beneath the quilts and hides.

  When he’d checked on the boys’ progress with the fire, he strode over to the wagons parked in the shadow of a giant boulder, tongues hanging. Inside, Margaret sat on Camilla’s lap, her blond head resting against the Mexican girl’s shoulder. A couple of feet to Camilla’s left, Michelle lay on her side beneath the covers. Cuno couldn’t tell if she was asleep.

  “We’ll have a fire built soon,” he told Camilla. “Best climb out and warm yourselves for a spell. There’ll be coffee, and I’ll open a can of peaches.”

  Camilla glanced at Michelle. “I will carry Margaret. Can you help her?”

  “I’ll try.”

  Camilla flipped the covers aside and shifted the sound-asleep Margaret this way and that as she gained her feet. Cradling Margaret in her arms, she moved to the back of the wagon. She handed Margaret down to Cuno, who held the blonde until Camilla had dropped down from the tailgate. Camilla took Margaret back in her own arms and strode wordlessly off to the fire.

  Cuno climbed into the back of the
wagon and hunkered down in front of Michelle. She had the covers pulled up so high that he could only see the upper half of her face beneath her hat. Her eyes appeared to be open, staring vacantly at the padded bed of the wagon.

  Haltingly, he said, “Miss Trent?”

  She offered no response or gave any indication that she’d heard him.

  “Miss Trent, boys’re building a fire,” Cuno said. “Might do you good to come on over and get yourself warm.”

  He didn’t think she was going to respond to him this time, either. But then she folded her upper lip down, stuck her tongue out slightly, and said so softly that Cuno could barely hear, “I’d like to stay here, please.”

  “Can I bring you some coffee?”

  “No, thanks.”

  “All right.” Cuno looked down at her. She was pressing her body so snug against the wagon bed that she seemed to be trying to disappear. “Let me know if I can bring you anything.”

  Cuno started to rise.

  “Mr. Massey?”

  He dropped back to his haunches.

  “Is Jedediah dead?” Michelle’s voice was louder than before, but she did not move, just continued staring down at the wagon box as though an enormous weight were holding her down. She licked her lips. “My father wouldn’t tell me.”

  Cuno filled his lungs. “Yes, ma’am. He’s dead.”

  She squeezed her eyes closed and tightened her jaws but otherwise did not move. She said nothing more.

  Cuno straightened and leapt down out of the wagon, leaving the tailgate open as he turned away and headed for the leaping flames of the coffee fire. He’d been intending to start the coffee, but Camilla was already down on both knees beside the fire ring, filling the percolator he’d set out with handfuls of ground beans from an open coffee sack.

  The boys sat around, staring glumly into the flames.

  Margaret sat between the older boy’s legs, resting her head against his knee, her eyes closed, mouth open slightly as she breathed. Camilla had wrapped her in a striped trade blanket, and it sagged down from the girl’s spindly right shoulder.

  Camilla looked up at Cuno from beneath her dark brows. The long scar along her jaw shone dully in the flickering firelight. “How much?”

  “Make it strong,” Cuno said. He picked up his rifle and racked a fresh shell into the chamber. “Good and strong.”

  He walked back across the wash they’d crossed when they’d left the cleft, holding the off-cocked rifle high across his chest. On the other side of the rock-strewn wash, which the moon silvered so magnificently that it would have been worth admiring in another situation, he concealed himself in the scrub beside a cottonwood.

  He pricked his ears, listening. There was nothing except the occasional tooth-gnashing screech of a hunting owl, the ticking of the frost in the tree’s bare branches, and the tinny murmur of a distant spring bubbling out of rocks.

  He waited there beside the tree, watching and listening, for a good fifteen minutes. When he figured the coffee was ready, he started back to the fire. He’d throw down a quick cup before hitching the mules again to the wagons.

  He stopped abruptly and swung back around.

  Faintly, the cracks of distant gunfire rose on the idle, quiet darkness. They were almost too faint to be heard unless you were listening for them, as they were carrying several miles up the mountain from the valley where the Trent ranch nestled.

  17

  SMOKE ROSE ON the bright mid-morning air.

  It was as thin as a hair ribbon from this distance of eight or nine miles as the crow flies, across several ridges and just beyond the right, sloping shoulder of the high, granite peak keeping watch at the western edge of the Rawhides—Old Stone Face. At the opposite base of the hulking ridge, the Trent ranch nestled.

  The ribbon was dark enough to distinguish itself from dust or a trick of the high-altitude light, and it rose from where the ranch would be. Or used to be.

  Smoke, all right.

  Cuno wrapped his reins around his saddle horn, then leaned back to reach into his left saddlebag. When he snagged his field glasses, he slipped them out of their case and, balancing the case on the saddle pommel, raised the glasses to his eyes, adjusting the focus.

  The granite ridge slid up close, its fissures and faults revealed, the sun reflecting harshly off its gray surface. To the right of the peak, the smoke appeared not so much like a ribbon now but like a wafting, black curtain, thinning and thickening with the vagaries of the southwestern breeze and the guttering flames feeding it.

  It was the smoke of a large, dying fire.

  Wheezing, rasping breath sounded behind Cuno. “What do you see?”

  Cuno continued staring through the glasses. “Smoke in the valley.”

  “The ranch?”

  “It’s not a grass fire.”

  Cuno turned as Serenity came huffing and puffing along the ridge to stand on the left side of the paint, staring toward the ridge. The wind whooshed over the ridges rippling all around them—a hollow sound like a strong breeze through a tunnel. It nibbled at the brim of the graybeard’s weather-stained sombrero and lifted the tails of his yellow neckerchief that, while dusty and sweat-stained, almost looked new in contrast to his thin, saddle-leather neck.

  Smoke dribbled out around the cornhusk quirley clamped between the old man’s lips. “Let me see.”

  When Serenity had raised the glasses and adjusted the focus, he shook his head slowly, then handed them back to Cuno. His gray-blue, washed-out eyes were bright in the ten o’clock sun. “My restless liver is flarin’ up.”

  “Chew it finer, hoss.”

  “Them Injuns don’t have much else to think about now, with the ranch gone. And we gotta assume it’s gone. They’ll be trailin’ us.”

  Cuno stared grimly down at the glasses as he slipped them back into their case. “You don’t think Leaping Wolf will satisfy himself with burning the ranch?”

  “ ’Pears to me he wants to mop every trace of the white eyes from the area. Now, maybe he’ll satisfy himself with the valley and leave us, in the Rawhides, alone . . .”

  “But you doubt it,” Cuno said with a grunt, reaching back to return the glasses to the saddlebags.

  “I pure-dee-damn do.” Serenity drew deep on the quirley, lifting his knobby, brown chin as he sucked the smoke deep into his lungs, lifting his scrawny chest. “Especially with the girl up here. He might even be keepin’ ole Trent alive just so the man can watch what ole Dancin’ Wolf does to his daughter.”

  Cuno hipped around in his saddle to stare back down the sloping ridge at the wagons halted in a rock-lined hollow sheltered by firs and pines. They’d pulled hard all night, following troughs and dry water courses, and it had been too rough a ride for anyone to sleep except in fits and dozes.

  When they’d stopped an hour ago to rest themselves as well as the mules, the three girls and the two boys were too exhausted to step down from the wagon. They all appeared asleep now, slumped amongst the blankets and robes in the back of Cuno’s Conestoga—too worn out to even pine for all that they had left behind them.

  The mules nibbled oats from grain sacks hooked over their ears, the sun silvering the sweat on their backs and withers, the breeze brushing their thick tails. The well-muscled, deep-bottomed beasts had made the climb from the valley floor relatively easily, but they still had a tough climb ahead, up one watershed and down the other.

  Cuno, scouting ahead and following Trent’s sketchy map, had been picking the easiest routes. But it was rough country, and they were still climbing, the air thinning as the valley dropped farther away beneath and behind them.

  Cuno could feel the altitude himself—a faint light headedness and the need to draw extra hard to gain strength from his breaths. The mules, working harder, likely felt it even more than he did.

  “I haven’t seen sign of us being followed all morning,” Cuno said, adding, “but I know, I know . . . that don’t mean they’re not behind us.”

  The oldst
er chuckled as he field-stripped his quirley between gnarled, brick-red fingers. “Son, you might learn somethin’ from me yet!”

  “What do you say we quit jawin’ and get movin’?” Cuno growled, neck-reining Renegade around and booting him down the slope toward the wagons as he called over his shoulder, “I’m gonna scout ahead!”

  “Don’t forget to scout behind us, too, dagnabbit!” the graybeard bellowed above the sighing wind.

  Cuno put Renegade up beside the driver’s box of his Conestoga. The older Lassiter boy, Karl, slumped in the seat, the reins wrapped around the brake handle.

  “Ready to roll, boy?” Cuno said.

  He had to repeat the question once more before the boy’s head jerked up with a start, and he reached for the big horse pistol on the seat beside him—his father’s old gun, which the boy had packed to protect his sister and younger brother. When he saw it was Cuno beside him, he stayed his hand and blinked sleepily, hacking phlegm from his throat and nodding. His face was red from the sun and wind, his brows bleached and his broad nose peeling.

  Karl spat over the wagon wheel and nodded again.

  “Follow me,” Cuno said. “You see any Injun sign, fire that big iron of yours into the air.”

  He glanced into the box. The others were awake now, too, blinking sleepily. Michelle lay back with her robes pulled up to her chin, staring dreamily up at the low, puffy clouds as though trying to read something there.

  The Mexican, Camilla, was staring over her shoulder at Cuno, her large brown eyes hooded with annoyance. “We must stop soon to sleep. Michelle and Margaret are tired. The boys are tired. I am tired.”

  Cuno glanced up the long ridge angling up to a grassy, pine-carpeted peak. “It’ll be a while.”

  As Cuno rode off, he heard the girl growl behind him in Spanish, something about her wondering if the bull-chested, mule-skinning gringo even knew where he was going . . .

  They pulled hard up and down the ridges for another twenty-four hours, stopping to rest for only a couple of hours at a time and to eat chunks of roasted venison, biscuits, and canned peaches washed down with coffee.