Cuno saw plenty of deer on the high, short-grass slopes, and he spotted a brown bear lumbering along a beaver meadow, scrounging for the year’s last berries. But he resisted the temptation to take the fresh meat; the deer they were carrying was nearly gone, but the shot might give away their position to the Utes.
On their fourth day out from the ranch, they mounted a high, windy divide—a long stretch of camelbacks rolling off to the eastern horizon. Cuno had scouted their back trail and side trails thoroughly enough that he decided it was time to take a break. He led the wagons, driven by Serenity and Karl Lassiter, down through aspens and scattered birch into a deep crease in the ridge.
He estimated from the thinness of the air and the sharpness of the light that they were nearly ten thousand feet above sea level. It would get damn cold up here at night. Hell, it was cold now at three o’clock in the afternoon. But according to Trent’s map, they’d be in the high country another day or so before starting the slow, winding descent to Fort Jessup, which wasn’t so low itself at around seven thousand feet.
As he put Renegade down the slope through the scattered deciduous forest, squirrels and jays chittering around him, Cuno was glad that he’d seen no menacing clouds. A storm up this high at this time of year would likely prove deadly.
He picked out a relatively sheltered spot to bivouac at the bottom of the gully, between two steep banks with a stream chuckling over ice-crusted stones. There were plenty of scrub trees to help break the wind that would funnel down the gorge. Here, though early, a strange twilight had already settled, with lemon-salmon light burnishing the far ridge about fifty yards up from the stream.
As he put up his hand, Karl and Serenity halted their teams, and the wagons clattered to a slow, grinding halt amongst the creaking, scratching aspens and birches. The passengers in Cuno’s wagon didn’t so much climb out as crawl, so heavily bundled in blankets and robes that they were almost indistinguishable from each other.
They were all sunburned, windburned, exhausted, and chilled to the bone. Stiffly, the Mexican girl reached up to lift Margaret down from the back of the wagon. When she’d set the little girl down, Camilla helped Michelle down, taking her hand to steady her. The two older girls exchanged a few words, and Cuno was glad to see that Michelle had come at least partially out of her dolor.
To a certain extent, they each needed to be able to fend for themselves.
Cuno set the two boys to gathering firewood while he quickly built a lean-to for the girls. He erected the shelter in the trees against the steep northern bank, using canvas wagon sheeting for the three walls and angling the roof so it would shed moisture.
He dug a fire pit in front of the lean-to, far enough away that the canvas wasn’t likely to catch fire but close enough that the heat would reflect off the shelter’s back wall. As Camilla began moving the bedding from the back of the wagon to the lean-to, leaving Margaret perched sullenly on a log, a blanket wrapped around her shoulders, Michelle moved over to the wagon to help.
Trent’s daughter moved stiffly, haltingly, unsure what to do, as if her thoughts weren’t completely connecting yet, but it was a good sign. Maybe she’d come out of it.
When the shelter was filled with bedding, Michelle and Camilla each took one of Margaret’s hands and led the girl downstream. Cuno, building up the fire and preparing coffee, was about to yell to them to stay close, but he stopped when he realized they were probably just stepping away to tend nature. They hadn’t taken a break in a couple of hours.
Cuno looked around, making sure they were still alone down here. The tension, the hunted feeling, was a constant tightness in the back of his neck. It made him jumpy, starting at the slightest unexpected sound and at even subtle changes in the wind.
He’d been through a lot in his young life. But he’d never undertaken such an enormous responsibility as transporting a passel of young’uns to safety across a rugged stretch of mountains, in late fall, with kill-crazy Indians on his tail. Recently, he’d found himself driving a jail wagon loaded with four deadly brigands, including one snarling beast known as Colorado Bob King, across the Mexico Mountains up Wyoming way.
He’d thought he’d had his hands full then.
The husky young freighter chuckled ruefully at the memory as he set a knotted aspen branch on the licking, popping flames. When he made sure the fire and coffee were both going good, he got up to help Serenity with the mules. It was nearly dark in the canyon when they had all the mules staked out on a long picket line near the stream and in deep grass, eating parched corn from feed bags.
Cuno hadn’t yet unsaddled Renegade, for he wanted to take one more swing around the camp before good dark. The horse, tied in the trees just beyond the fire, lifted his head suddenly and loosed a whinny.
Cuno was down on one knee, pouring himself a cup of the smoking, black coffee. As the whinny echoed around the canyon, he set both cup and pot down abruptly and laid his gloved right hand on his holstered .45’s ivory grips.
Renegade was staring warily upstream.
As Cuno swung his gaze in the same direction, beyond the parked wagons resting single file in the brush, an answering whinny rose on the cold breeze. Three horseback riders materialized amongst the dark tree trunks, coming on slowly along the stream.
They rode side by side, roughly ten feet apart—three bearded men in heavy fur coats, fur hats, and wooly chaps strapped over buckskin breeches. Two wore pistols and cartridge belts over their coats while another had his bearskin coat pulled up over the walnut butt of a revolver positioned for the cross draw on his right hip.
All three had rifles snugged in saddle boots, the stocks of the guns jutting up near their right knees.
Serenity was sitting on a rock near the fire. He had one boot off, intending to dry his socks and warm his bare feet in front of the flames.
“What have we here?” the oldster breathed, dropping the boot, slowly reaching for his Winchester, and resting it nonchalantly across his skinny thighs.
“Hello the camp!” one of the strangers called as all three angled their horses away from the stream and came on toward the fire.
Cuno lifted his coat above his .45’s handle and released the keeper thong from the hammer.
18
THE HOOF THUDS sounded dully above the fire’s crackling flames as the three riders rode past the mules and the wagons and approached the fire. Serenity had left his boot off, and he sat ten yards to Cuno’s right, on the other side of the leaping flames, keeping one hand on his rifle’s receiver.
In the periphery of his vision, Cuno saw the old man curling his white, yellow-nailed toes beneath his feet, and he could sense the oldster’s tension.
“No call for that, now,” said the man plodding slowly forward on a blood bay gelding, on the group’s far left side.
He glanced at the ivory grips of Cuno’s low-slung .45 exposed by the raised coat flap.
“We’re territorial marshals,” the man added, canting his head toward the other two men—a hawk-nosed gent with a three-day growth of salt-and-pepper whiskers and a fair-skinned man with bulbous blue eyes and a thick, cinnamon beard. Hair of the same color dropped low across his forehead, beneath his black, heavy wool hat. He wore a half grin on his face as he moved his jaws slowly from side to side, tobacco juice dribbling down the right corner of his mouth and into his beard.
“That’s Bone there on the far side,” the first man said, canting his head to indicate the hawk-nosed man. “And this is Hayes. I’m Lipton. Pius Lipton. We’re out of Ute on official business.”
“Marshals, huh?” Serenity growled, skepticism pitching his voice low.
“We can show you our badges if you like,” the man called Bone said, trying a mild grin that looked as at home on his face as a pair of women’s hoop rings would look on his ears. “But we ain’t here on business. We just seen your fire, that’s all.”
His eyes flicked toward the lean-to behind Cuno, in which the girls and the youngest Lassiter boy s
at huddled together to stay warm. A slight, weird light shone in the man’s eyes for about half a second, before he returned his gaze to Cuno and lifted the corner of his mouth once more in that taut, counterfeit smile.
The flickering firelight made his pitted cheeks above his beard look oily. “Noticed you had a good one goin’. Hayes shot a deer a couple ridges back. It’s too much for us, and don’t care to haul it. We’d be more than happy to share if we can cook it over that nice fire you got goin’.”
“How ’bout it, ladies?” the red-bearded man called Hayes drawled in a thick Missouri accent. “You up to roasted venison this evenin’?” He dropped his chin and pinched his cap brim, peeling it out away from his forehead.
“We had a long haul,” Cuno said. “Injun trouble. Not sure we’re up to entertaining this evening.”
Lipton was a tall gent with a thick gray-brown mustache drooping down around his thin mouth and badly pocked, windburned cheeks. He wore a red muffler snugged up under his hard, straight jaws, beneath a jutting, dimpled chin. His eyes were like brown marbles set deep in bony sockets. His voice was higher pitched than you’d expect from such a severely featured hombre. “Injun trouble?”
Cuno didn’t want to mention in front of Michelle that the Trent ranch had been burned. He merely nodded and said, “You seen any westward? That’s the direction we’re from, headed east to Fort Jessup.”
“Not only seen three,” Lipton said. “We pinked three. Shot ’em all three down like cans on fence posts. Just chance we were upwind from ’em, or those savages woulda smelled or heard us for sure.”
In the periphery of his vision, Cuno saw Serenity glance at him. Cuno kept his eyes on the strangers.
“There’s safety in numbers,” Bone said. “And no point in lettin’ good deer meat go to—”
He stopped when the Mexican girl, Camilla, said in a taut, even voice brimming with hatred, “Send them on their way.” She whipped an arm out suddenly. “Vamos!”
He glanced back at her quickly, startled by the girl’s sudden passion when she’d been so silent that Cuno had often forgotten she was here. She sat beside Margaret, who had her arms wrapped around one of the older girl’s upraised knees and was regarding the newcomers with the same wary, angry expression as Camilla. Michelle, sitting right of Margaret, sat with her own knees drawn up, and she had a similarly fearful expression in her lake-blue eyes, which kept darting between Camilla and the newcomers.
Cuno turned back to the three hard-faced men sitting their mounts side by side, staring with various degrees of annoyance at Camilla. On the far side of the fire from Cuno, Karl Lassiter stood with the same armful of firewood he’d brought up when the three riders had approached from the creek.
He cut his eyes between Cuno and the three strangers, the boy’s own expression more puzzled than frightened, as though he were waiting to see how Cuno would handle it. His nose was running onto his upper lip, and he sniffed it back softly.
“You know how it is,” Cuno said, shrugging. “A woman’s opinion trumps a man’s every time.”
The strangers stared owlishly at Cuno, curling their noses or chewing their mustaches, all three incredulous.
“You ain’t no man,” Bone growled, spitting the words out like prune pits, his anger building. “Why, you’re just a wet-behind-the-ears kid, only a little older than that snot-nosed brat with the firewood. The only man here’s that old, stove-up graybeard, and he can’t even get his sock on.”
Serenity rose slowly, his jaws hard. “I weren’t trying to get it on. I was tryin’ to get it off, so’s I could dry it . . . if it’s any of your business, which it ain’t. Now, you heard the girl. Pull your picket pins an’ hoof!”
Behind Cuno, Margaret gave a muffled screech against Camilla’s knee. Across the dwindling fire, Karl sniffed sharply, his load of wood rising and falling as he breathed.
The strangers scowled down at the group before them. Finally, Lipton said, not taking his eyes off Camilla, “Come on, boys. Let’s go build us a fire and roast us up some supper.”
He reined out around the fire and spurred his horse into a trot. The other two lingered, glaring down at the campers. Cuno kept his hand near his Colt, and his heart thudded dully.
Finally, Hayes reined his red gelding around the fire, grunting, “Good luck if them Injuns come callin’!”
He tipped his hat to the girl, snarling. Then he and Bone, riding single file, trotted down canyon after Lipton, and Renegade stood lifting his hooves in place and nickering amongst the trees behind them.
Cuno turned to watch them disappear into the darkening woods, following a slow bend in the stream-cleaved canyon.
“Trouble,” Serenity said, holding his rifle down low by his side. One foot still bare, he spat into the fire to hear it sizzle. “Copper-riveted scalawags, with the boots on!”
“You think they were lawmen?”
Serenity shook his head. “Maybe, but it’s my guess they ain’t nothin’ but owlhoots on the dodge. They just said they was badge toters so we’d let ’em light here with us and the girls . . . and help us against the redskins . . . if there are any redskins, which I doubt. We woulda heard the shots.”
Cuno glanced at the older Lassiter boy as he grabbed his rifle. “Keep the fire built up, Karl. I’m gonna take a ride.”
“Where you goin’?” Serenity said, squatting to lay his sock near the fire to which Karl was adding the dry, crackling wood.
Cuno grabbed Renegade’s dangling reins and stepped into the saddle. “I’m gonna see where they camp. Go ahead and start supper. I’ll be back.”
Cuno slid the Winchester into his saddle boot and urged Renegade down canyon. He stopped when he saw Camilla standing just outside the lean-to, staring into the gathering darkness in which the three strangers had disappeared.
“Be careful,” Camilla said quietly, holding a buffalo robe around her shoulders. Her long hair danced out in the breeze like long, slender fingers.
“I will.”
Camilla reached up with one hand to slide her hair away from her eyes, then turned slowly and knelt beside the food sack to begin preparing supper.
Cuno rode slowly through the trees along the murmuring stream, the cold breeze pressing against his back. Weaving around the aspens, he followed the canyon’s first slow curve and started tracing another.
Voices sounded from downwind—muffled and ghostly. There was the snap of a stout twig beneath a heavy foot.
Cuno held his reins taut and stared straight out over Renegade’s head. Three shadows moved amongst the gnarled, black trees, just beyond a deadfall that had gotten hung up against a tree still standing.
Cuno reined the paint sharply left and held up behind a flame-shaped, cabin-sized boulder, then swung Renegade around until he was facing the stream winking dully in the fading gray light.
The hoof thuds grew gradually louder. The voices grew, as well.
One of the men—Cuno recognized Bone’s voice—said, “That little Mex is sure gonna feel good in my blanket roll tonight! Damn, it’s cold!”
There was a light thump, as though one of the men had softly punched another man’s shoulder. “I told ya—since I seen her first, she’s mine. You know I’m partial to—”
The red-bearded Hayes cut himself off when Cuno gigged Renegade out from behind the boulder, turned the horse down canyon, and stopped, facing the three riders. The three hard cases, silhouettes in the darkness of the windy canyon, all jerked with starts and hauled back on their reins, stopping their horses suddenly.
One of the horses snorted angrily. Another whinnied.
Renegade shook his head fatefully, as though he knew from experience what was coming.
Bone cursed and pulled his head up high. “Where the hell you come from, boy?”
“You followin’ us?” Lipton said in his oddly feminine voice.
Cuno raised his coat flap above his holstered .45, so that the grips were clear. He kept his voice hard but even. “We asked you boy
s to ride on. Since you didn’t, I reckon I’ve got no choice but to kill you.”
The boldness of Cuno’s statement took all three men aback for about three seconds. Bone chuckled with exasperation, glancing at a partner on either side of him. “You think so, do ya, boy?”
Lipton was the first to reach for the big, pearl-gripped Colt Navy holstered just right of his saddle horn. Cuno palmed his Colt without thinking about it but only staring at the place where he intended the bullet to go.
Automatically, he sent the slug punching through the dead center of Lipton’s bear coat. The mustached gent, whose Colt Navy hadn’t even finished clearing leather, screamed and bounded straight back in his saddle, showing his white teeth between stretched lips in the thickening darkness.
As the two other men jerked their hands toward their weapons, Cuno’s pistol bucked and roared twice more. Bone lurched back just as Lipton’s bucking horse rammed Bone’s horse, and he and Lipton both whipped sideways out of their saddles.
Meanwhile, Hayes crouched forward over his own saddle horn, holding the reins taut in one hand and firing his long-barreled Peacemaker over his horse’s left wither.
The bullets sizzled past Cuno’s right hip and plunked into a tree behind him. Cuno quickly cocked his Colt and fired another round into Hayes’s chest. The red-bearded man lurched back and fired his Peacemaker once more, this time shooting his horse in the neck.
Cuno reined Renegade quickly to the left as Hayes’s red gelding screamed and, whipping its head up and around, staggered sideways. The deer tied behind Hayes’s saddle flopped around wildly.
As Renegade, nickering nervously, wheeled in a tight circle, Cuno watched the other two horses run off buck-kicking down canyon while the red rolled atop the groaning Hayes in the high grass between two cottonwoods. The horse’s tooth-gnashing screams echoed shrilly around the canyon.
Holding Renegade’s reins taut in one hand, Cuno extended his cocked Colt, angling it down and aiming carefully this time, and drilled a round through the gelding’s head. The horse sagged as it died, hooves thrashing automatically, pummeling the groaning, sobbing Hayes into a veritable pulp in the grass.
.45-Caliber Firebrand Page 15