.45-Caliber Firebrand

by Peter Brandvold

  He had to follow the group, see where they were going. He had to do it carefully so they didn’t see him, so their horses didn’t smell him. As badly as he wanted to gallop into the bunch, guns blazing, he had to bide his time and wait for the moment when he had the best chance of helping Serenity and the others, though his odds—one against eleven—would likely never be anything but long.

  Any other way would only get him and the others killed for certain.

  He strode over to where Renegade stood behind the boulder, wide-eyed and tense and craning his neck to stare back in the direction in which the Indians were headed.

  “I know, partner,” Cuno said as he stepped into the leather. “Don’t like tailin’ Injuns any better than you, but that’s what we’re gonna do.”

  He put the horse across the stream, through the trees, and, staying close to the edge of the woods, headed back in the direction he’d come, trotting and staring straight ahead. The Utes might roll a scout off their flank at any time, and he had to be ready to dart back into the trees.

  He pushed Renegade hard for a half mile, staying close to the trees and riding with his Winchester resting across his saddlebow.

  When he caught the first vague glimpse of the group’s flanking riders—three braves riding side by side, two fairly close, the other farther away to the left—he slowed the horse to a trot. He kept pace with the group, slipping no closer nor farther behind.

  He stared tensely at the backs of the three flanking riders. At any time one could swing a look behind. If so, Cuno had to stop Renegade quickly and rein the horse behind any available cover. Fortunately, there were plenty of shrubs, trees, and stony escarpments along the canyon floor, and the air was beginning to be obscured by light, wind-tossed snowflakes, limiting his chances of being spotted.

  When the group began moving toward the section of canyon in which Cuno had left Camilla, the bowstring of tension in his back drew even tauter. Suppose the girl was outside the cave or, figuring the hoof clomps of the lead Ute was Cuno, came running down the slope only to find herself at the mercy of Leaping Wolf’s savage warriors . . .

  There was no chance that he could somehow sneak past the Indians and warn her. He had to hope she was as savvy and cautious as she seemed to be and would stay hidden.

  As Renegade continued clomping forward, shaking his head at the snow, another worry raked Cuno. Camilla was probably keeping the fire up inside the cave. There was a chance the Utes would see the smoke issuing from the hole at the top of the scarp. If so, they’d have her out of there in seconds, and with her bad ankle she’d have little chance of escape.

  They’d either kill her or add her to their prison roll.

  Cuno slid his gaze back and forth between the Indians and the north wall of the canyon, scrutinizing the pine tops for Camilla’s wood smoke. The Indians must be approaching the cave; Cuno recognized the terrain ahead, the main stream curling along the ridge to his right, the secondary stream branching across the canyon floor and angling over to the opposite wall.

  He couldn’t see the scarp in which the cave lay, but Leaping Wolf was likely just now passing it on his palomino.

  Cuno slid his gaze back to the left and winced.

  Above the pine tops, about where the wagon was now passing, a ragged puff of dark gray smoke shone in the light gray air. Faint, but visible. And if the Utes didn’t see it, they might smell it.

  Just as Cuno slid his eyes back to the Indian party ahead, muttering a prayer that the procession would keep riding, the flanking riders suddenly started to grow slightly larger before him.

  Cuno halted Renegade, lifting the horse’s head. As the horse skitter-hopped sideways, Cuno saw that the party had stopped. One of the flanking riders turned his own horse sideways while the horse farthest left danced around, swishing its tail anxiously.

  Cuno pulled back and up on the paint’s reins, and the horse snorted with annoyance as it started backing up. When the Indians were mere blurs ahead, nearly concealed by a slight bend in the canyon, Cuno pulled Renegade behind an escarpment jutting from the north wall and dismounted.

  Quickly, he tied the horse to a pine branch, grabbed his Winchester and his binoculars, stole forward about ten yards, and dropped to a knee. He laid the rifle across his thigh and raised the field glasses, adjusting the focus until the Utes swam into relatively clear view ahead in the gray, snow-stitched distance.

  “Ah, shit!” he hissed sharply.

  In the magnified field of vision, one of the warriors, wearing a white man’s yellow-and-black mackinaw, pulled his horse sharply left and trotted toward the slope in which the cave lay.

  The brave had either seen the smoke or seen Cuno’s and Camilla’s tracks along the creek.

  24

  PEERING THROUGH HIS spyglass with one hand, Cuno fingered his rifle with the other.

  Frigid sweat trickled down his back beneath his buckskin tunic and cotton undershirt.

  The Indian in the yellow-and-black mackinaw stopped his horse at the edge of the stream directly below the cave entrance, which Cuno couldn’t see from this angle and distance. The brave dropped from the back of his coyote dun and crouched on his haunches as he reached down with one hand, as though fingering sign in the grass and gravel before him.

  Soon, Cuno thought, he’d see the tracks leading to the base of the ridge, and he’d look up and see the smoke.

  Then he’d go up and drag Camilla out of the cave.

  Again, Cuno fingered the rifle. He couldn’t sit here and watch them kill her. Just throw her in the wagon with the others, he silently beseeched. Don’t kill her. Don’t beat her. Don’t rape her.

  The other Indians sat their ponies behind him, including Leaping Wolf, who sat his palomino a little ways beyond, hipped around to regard the Indian squatting near the creek. The wagon was continuing forward, the wind drowning its rumble.

  Cuno could just barely make out Karl Lassiter jogging along behind it. Serenity was out of sight amidst the grass and sage.

  Suddenly, the brave near the creek rose and leapt fluidly back atop his horse, heeling the dun back over to the group. He threw an arm out toward the far side of the canyon and then threw it out beside him, tracing a broad semicircle, as though indicating something large.

  Ahead of him, Leaping Wolf turned to stare across the canyon. The old man lifted his head to scan the ridge above the southern stream, then heeled his horse forward after the wagon. The other braves followed suit, all looking around the canyon as though expecting the bear—whose sign they must have spotted, not Camilla’s—to charge out from the trees.

  Only partial relief eased the tension in Cuno’s back.

  He continued to glass the Indians as they moved on down the canyon. When they were a hundred yards beyond their stopping place, he strode back to Renegade, dropped the glasses back in their saddle pouch, and mounted up.

  He gigged the paint ahead, following the bending ridge wall on his left. When he gained the stream sliding blackly over the ice-edged rocks, the large, downy snowflakes melting into it silently, he saw what the Indian had crouched over.

  A big pile of chocolate-colored bear plop beaded with wine-red chokecherries. Easily the size of a dinner plate, and a good three inches high. The fetor made Cuno’s lungs contract. Even in the cold air it smelled like something three days dead.

  Cuno resisted the urge to call out for Camilla. The Indians were too close. Dropping out of the saddle, he tied Renegade to a spindly cottonwood branch—he didn’t want to lose the horse again in case the bruin returned—and climbed the slope to the mouth of the cave.

  “Camilla?” he said softly.

  Dropping to his knees, he stuck his head in the dark, oval opening. Smoke wafted inside the cavern rife with the smell of pine. He poked his head a little farther inside and raised his voice.

  “Camilla?”

  Nothing. Faintly, the air sifted through the narrow passageway behind the small, low portico. Cuno crawled inside the cave, made his way t
o the far right, then stood and, crouching, made his way through the passageway to the back room in which the fire snapped and popped softly.

  Cuno froze with one hand on his gun handle.

  A man stood on the other side of the fire, a grin revealing large, white teeth between thick, bearded lips. He held a cocked Peacemaker revolver to the underside of Camilla’s jaw. The girl stood partly in front of the man, shielding him, held there by one of the man’s hands clamped soundly across her mouth.

  Her brown eyes were bright with fear.

  “Drop the hogleg, amigo, or your girlfriend buys a pill.”

  The man was roughly Cuno’s height. He wore a heavy wolf coat that dropped to mid-thigh, wooly chaps, and a wool cap under his battered Stetson. He had bushy, dark brown brows and cobalt blue eyes, a thick wedge of a nose cleaving his face.

  “Who the hell are you?”

  “Mason. Sheriff Dusty Mason from Willow City. Seen your handiwork back west a ways—the three marshals you left deader’n last year’s Christmas turkey.”

  Cuno stared at him, his blood freezing.

  “I was supposed to meet up with ’em, and we was gonna take down some claim jumpers together.” Mason held the Schofield taut against Camilla’s chin, the hammer cocked, his gloved hand shaking slightly. “Damn near did meet up with ’em, but that was just before you killed ’em. I heard the shots. After I found the bodies, I tracked you . . . all the way to here, you murderin’ son of a bitch.”

  “They were after the women,” Cuno said, trying hard to keep his exasperation from his voice. “They drew first.”

  “Shut up and toss down that hogleg or she buys one. Damn, you’re younger’n I figured. Tough to figure a cold-blooded killer.”

  “Nothin’ cold-blooded about it, Sheriff.”

  Cuno glanced at Camilla, at the five-inch barrel of cold, blue steel shoved up against her jaw. He glanced at the sheriff again and narrowed his eyes with entreaty as he hooked his thumb over his shoulder. “There’s Injuns out there. They’ve got my party. They’re draggin’ my partner behind my wagon. If I don’t catch up to ’em soon—”

  “I saw them Injuns.” Frustration and befuddlement flashed through the sheriff’s cobalt eyes. “Seen all dozen of ’em. Nothin’ to do about that, and the way I figure it, your partner gets what he deserves. But I can arrest you for the killin’s of three lawmen and for sellin’ Winchesters to the Utes.”

  The accusation nearly rocked Cuno back on his heels. “What?”

  “I saw them bright new Winchesters they was carryin’. Seen ’em on another party farther west, before me and the marshals split up to track the claim jumpers. Pretty damn plain someone’s been sellin’ guns to Leapin’ Wolf’s band, and I ain’t seen any other freight wagons in these mountains for well over a year.”

  “Listen, mister . . .”

  “I ain’t gonna ask you again,” Mason snarled, canting his edgy gaze toward Camilla. “If she shakes so damn hard she trips my trigger, it’s her fault, not mine!”

  “Hold on, hold on.” With two fingers, Cuno slowly slid his .45 from its holster, thrust it out in front of him where Mason could get a good look at it, then, crouching low, dropped it with a thud. Just as slowly, holding both hands in front of him, palms out, he straightened.

  “Got another one on ya?”

  “No.”

  “How ’bout a knife?”

  “No,” Cuno lied.

  He had a bowie in his boot. Let the sheriff find it for himself, if Cuno didn’t find a chance to use it on the man first. He had no qualms about killing the sheriff. It was either Mason or Serenity and the children. But he needed to do it fast.

  Mason slid his hand away from Camilla’s mouth, leaving a white oval where his hand had been. He shoved her to his left, and she stumbled away, glaring at him, hardening her jaws with fury.

  “Go over there and sit down, senorita. One move out of you and your gringo friend gets drilled through his heart.”

  Keeping his Schofield leveled on Cuno, Mason reached inside his open coat and behind him. He pulled out a set of handcuffs and tossed them over the fire. They fell on the dusty, rocky floor at Cuno’s feet.

  “Put those on good and tight. Then you, me, and the girl are goin’ for a ride to Fort Jessup. Wouldn’t make it back to Willow City before the storm moves in. Besides, killin’ federal badge toters and sellin’ rifles to Injuns is a federal offense.”

  Rage sweeping him like a wildfire, Cuno said through gritted teeth, “I didn’t sell any rifles to Indians. I sold those—”

  “Put ’em on and be quick about it!” Mason glanced at Camilla. “Go over and stand by your boyfriend. Either one of you tries anything, I’ll shoot you both. Got no qualms about killin’ women. These rampaging Utes got my nerves tangled, and all I really want’s a drink and a warm bed!”

  As Camilla sidled around the fire, limping slightly on her bad ankle and keeping her eyes on the lawman, Cuno stooped, picked up the cuffs, and reluctantly set his right wrist in a ring. Desperately, his thoughts flailed around for a way out of this current dilemma. Finding none, desperation made his heart hammer and his temples pound.

  “You’re makin’ a mistake, Mason. Those federals got what they deserved, and I didn’t sell any rifles to the Utes.”

  “Tell it to the judge.”

  A log popped in the fire between Mason and Cuno, and the lawman stumbled back with a start, snapping his eyes wide. Embarrassed, he aimed the Schofield straight out from his shoulder as he shouted, “Put them cuffs on, goddamnit—I’m through triflin’ with you!”

  Cuno glanced at Camilla, then dropped his gaze to his right wrist as he closed the cuff around it. He set his other wrist in the other cuff and, closing it, hearing the click, he felt his cheek twitch and his knees turn to putty, as though the door to an inescapable trap had just been closed and bolted behind him.

  “You first, senorita,” Mason ordered, wagging his gun at the passageway. “Head on out. Then you, freighter.”

  Camilla turned slowly and, favoring the ankle she’d twisted while fleeing the bear, ducked into the passageway. Cuno turned to follow her, dropping to his knees and crawling awkwardly, unable to use his cuffed hands. Camilla was crawling out the low entrance ahead of him when he heard Mason behind him, the lawman’s boots scuffing the cave floor, spurs ringing, his nervous breaths echoing around the cavern.

  Cuno could feel the bowie snugged down in the sheath he’d sewn into the side of his boot well. If he could get to it, he’d use it. He’d cut the lawman’s throat if he had to . . . if it was the only way he could shed the man and get back on Serenity’s trail.

  He poked his head out the cave entrance. Camilla had turned toward him on her hands and knees and, wrapping her right hand around a good-sized rock, looked at Cuno meaningfully as she slowly rose to her feet.

  Cuno shook his head. Her chances of being able to knock the lawman out with the rock were slim, and the attempt might well get her killed. Frowning and pursing her lips, Camilla dropped the stone.

  “Step back away from the entrance,” Mason ordered as he poked his head out the cave entry. “Give me a good ten feet, and face me. Don’t try makin’ a run for it. I’m right handy with this here hogleg.”

  When Cuno and Camilla had stepped back away from the entry, Mason crawled out on one hand and his knees. Keeping the Schofield aimed at Cuno’s chest, the lawman heaved himself up with a wince, his bearded face flushed and sweating, steam rising around his head.

  “Whew!” he said, chuckling nervously. “Right close quarters in there.” He looked down the slope to where Renegade stood in some tall grass along the stream, staring skeptically up the ridge. Snow was beginning to stick to the horse’s back and saddle.

  Mason looked at Cuno. “Where’s the girl’s hoss?”

  “Only got the one.”

  “Head down to him, then. Mine’s in a box canyon ’bout a half mile north.” Mason grinned. “Me and the girl’ll ride your horse till we come to mi
ne. You’ll lead the way . . . on foot.”

  Cuno stared at the lawman.

  Mason read the dark intent in the young freighter’s eyes. “Remember—you try anything, I’ll drill you both. Got no time for nonsense.”

  “Yeah, I know,” Cuno grumbled as he turned and, Camilla walking beside him, started down the slope. “You just want a drink and a warm bed.”

  Cuno sidestepped down the slope that was slippery from the fresh snow dusting the grass and slide rock. It was an awkward maneuver, for he couldn’t distribute his weight with his arms, and he almost fell several times. It didn’t help that he was distracted by the urgent need to escape the lawman. Somehow, he had to get the knife out of his boot. If an opportunity didn’t show itself sooner, he’d look for his chance when they were changing horses up canyon.

  He took another step, almost slipped on a flat rock. Catching himself, he heard a loud grunt behind him. He turned his head to peer over his shoulder. Both of Mason’s boots were sliding out from beneath him, his hands flying skyward.

  Mason’s revolver roared, stabbing smoke and flames straight up at a couple of low-arching pine boughs. The lawman hit the slope on his back, and his revolver clattered against the rocks about four feet above his head.

  Cuno dropped to both knees.

  The sheriff, face etched with pain, twisted around and dug a boot heel into the slope while flinging his right hand upslope toward his revolver. Cuno wrapped his cuffed hands around the man’s left foot and jerked him straight down the slope, so that his hand missed the gun by a foot.

  Cuno was atop the man in a second, straddling the man’s torso bundled in the wolf coat.

  As Mason cursed and grunted and flung his left hand upslope and behind him like a broken wing, flailing for the gun, Cuno raised his cuffed hands back behind his shoulder like a club, his biceps drawing the sleeves of his mackinaw taut, then swung them forward and down. He smashed the knuckles of his gloved left hand soundly against the lawman’s bearded left cheek.