.45-Caliber Firebrand

by Peter Brandvold

  Mason’s head whipped up and sideways, and his eyes fluttered.

  Cuno swung his clenched fists up behind his left shoulder, and rammed them down against Mason’s right cheek. There was a solid thud. The man’s head slammed back against the slide rock.

  The sheriff winced, bunching his untrimmed beard, the cuts on both cheeks showing in the dull light. He lifted his head slightly, the muscles in his face drawn slack, and then his lids fluttered down over his eyes, and his body fell slack against the ground.

  Out like a blown lamp.

  Blood from one of the cuts trickled down from the nub of his cheek and into his beard.

  Camilla stood beside Cuno, staring down in shock, her earflaps jostling in the wind with her hair.

  “Dig around in his pockets for his key,” Cuno said, breathing hard as he straightened, his boots straddling the lawman’s legs.

  While Camilla fished around in the lawman’s coat pockets, Cuno looked around. The sky was about as gray as it could get without turning night-dark. It was a black-and-gray world, the snow fluttering like goose down. There were no animals around. Some of the snow was starting to lay, but not enough to hinder travel.

  When Camilla found the key, she fumbled around for a time, her bare fingers numb from the cold, before the cuffs ratcheted open. Cuno flung them aside, then opened the lawman’s coat. His pearl-gripped .45 was wedged behind Mason’s cartridge belt.

  Cuno lifted the lower right flap of his own coat, slipped the revolver into its holster, then scooped up the lawman’s Schofied and stuffed it behind his cartridge belt. Taking Camilla by the arm, he started back down the hill toward Renegade.

  “He is not dead,” Camilla warned, glancing back at the lawman.

  “No.”

  “You shouldn’t kill him?”

  “Yeah, I should,” Cuno grunted. But he couldn’t.

  He helped Camilla down the last part of the slope and threw her up onto Renegade’s back. He ripped the reins from the pine branch, then climbed up in front of her.

  He clucked to the horse.

  As Camilla leaned taut against him and wrapped her arms around his waist, he heeled the paint into a wind-shredding gallop up canyon. He’d lost precious time, and Serenity might already be dead.

  But he’d get Michelle and the kids back from the murdering Leaping Wolf if he got himself killed in the bargain.

  25

  A SHRILL CRY cut through the hushed, chill air of the canyon.

  Cuno halted Renegade and looked around as another scream sounded—a shrill exclamation of unbearable pain and terror that echoed off the rolling, shrub-tufted hills to his right and off the steep, sandstone wall looming on his left, the crest of which was swallowed by heavy clouds.

  With the echoes in the eerily quiet, snow-stitched air, it was hard to get a fix on where the screams were originating. Cuno turned to peer along his back trail, toward the high saddle barely visible in the gray distance.

  He and Camilla had crossed the saddle over an hour ago, riding as fast as Cuno dared push Renegade on the uncertain terrain. At the bottom of the saddle they’d followed the canyon that they were still following now south by southwest, the tracks of the wagon and the Indian ponies clearly marking the brush, sand, rocks, and the dusting of wet snow.

  Another scream rose. It sounded as though it were uncoiling from the bottom of a deep, stone-walled well. It pricked the hair beneath Cuno’s collar, and tightened his gut. He looked around quickly, shuttling his gaze back and forth across the canyon, from the base of the high ridge on his left, along which a stony, dry creek bed snaked, stippled with leafless trees and tangled brush, to the ravine-sliced hills rising more gently on his right.

  He could feel Camilla’s heart beating in her chest pressed against his back as she, too, swept their surroundings with her eyes.

  “It’s ahead of us,” Cuno said, lifting his right boot over the saddle horn and dropping straight down to the ground.

  He couldn’t tell if the scream, which continued with frustrating, horrifying regularity about every fifteen seconds, belonged to a man or a woman. That he’d drawn to within a few hundred yards of the Utes had been plain in their sign, the snow only having just barely dusted their tracks since they’d passed. Within the last ten minutes, he’d spied steaming horse apples.

  “What are you going to do?” Camilla said, scooting up into the saddle.

  Cuno tossed her the reins. He dug around under his coat for Mason’s Schofield. He filled the .44 from shells on his own belt, spun the wheel, and extended the gun to Camilla grips first.

  She frowned at the gun, slowly wrapped her mittened hand around the handle.

  “Hole up down in that creek bottom. If I’m not back for you in an hour, you’re on your own. The Indians are ahead, so you’ll need to find a way around them to Jessup. Shouldn’t be but a few miles from here.”

  Staring gravely at Cuno, Camilla shoved the gun down in a pocket of her bulky coat. “There are too many Indios, Cuno. You don’t have a chance against them.”

  He shucked his Winchester from the boot beneath the girl’s right thigh. “Maybe I’ll get lucky.”

  He racked a shell in the Winchester’s breech, off-cocked the hammer, and set the barrel on his shoulder as he swung around and started down canyon.

  “Hold on.”

  Cuno turned. The girl reined Renegade up beside him. She grabbed his coat collar with one hand, then leaned down and kissed his lips, drawing him toward her tightly. She didn’t say anything as she released his collar and straightened. Her solemn, brown-eyed gaze held his.

  Cuno turned and began tramping west, his insides recoiling at each echoing blast of the chilling scream. Behind him he heard Camilla put Renegade down the slope toward the streambed, the horse’s shod hoofs ringing dully off snow-furred rocks and crunching frozen brush and branches.

  He walked a hundred yards, rounding a sharp zigzag between two granite scarps, the screams growing shriller and more frequent. They were joined by a softer sound that Cuno gradually came to recognize as little Margaret Lassiter’s crying. There were other sounds, too—the harsh voices of the Indians drowned by occasional bursts of hearty laughter.

  Continuing down canyon, holding his rifle up high across his chest, following the screams and the sobs and the laughter, Cuno soon found himself climbing a low scarp of raw granite. The formation had bubbled up out of the ground several millennia ago, and it now bristled with a couple of stunt cedars and a tiny juniper that grew out of a crack in the top.

  The surface was slick with melting snow.

  Cuno crabbed forward amongst the shrubs and, keeping his head low, stared into a broad horseshoe of the creek bed down the other side. The wagon was parked there along the bed, amongst sprawling cottonwoods and aspens. Nearly a dozen or so Indian ponies were there, as well, ground-tied and nibbling at the tall, yellow grass growing up around the trees. Several of the ponies stopped foraging to jerk their heads up at each tooth-gnashing scream that rose above Margaret’s continuous sobs.

  What caught the brunt of Cuno’s attention, and set his heart to turning somersaults in his chest, was the figure tied between two trees on the far side of the creek bed, at the base of the irregular ridge wall. A hand was tied to a branch above and on either side of him. The figure looked like a field-dressed deer that had been hung up to bleed out and season.

  Only, it wasn’t a deer.

  It was a man.

  What made him look like a field-dressed deer was the blood that covered his short, slender, bony, near-naked body from the top of his bald head to the toes of his bare feet. Several Indians stood or sat in a ragged circle around the man and a nearby fire, while one of the warriors circled him slowly, performing a mock victory dance, hopping from foot to foot while wielding a bloody knife in his right hand.

  As the warrior came around the right side of the tree, laughing with the others, he lunged toward the bloody figure once more, crouching low and slashing at the graybeard�
�s right thigh with the knife.

  Serenity lifted his head sharply, eyes squeezed tight, and sent a shrill, agonized scream careening around the canyon and causing one of the horses to sidestep abruptly and whinny. The scream continued to echo as Serenity dropped his chin to his bloody chest, his gray beard spotted crimson.

  “You sons o’ bitches,” Cuno raked out as he thumbed the Winchester’s hammer back to full cock.

  As he drew his index finger taut against the trigger, he glanced around quickly. The children—Margaret, Karl, and Jack Lassiter—were sitting on the ground near Cuno’s Conestoga, hands tied behind their backs. All three, including Margaret, sat leaning forward over their laps, heads down. Margaret’s and Jack’s heads bobbed as they cried. Karl stared dully at something on the ground a few feet in front of him.

  Seeing no sign of Michelle, Cuno winced once more as the man with the knife slashed Serenity from behind, and the old man sent another shrill scream bouncing around the canyon like an enraged bird trying to make its way out of hell. From the amount of blood, from the viscera protruding from his middle, and the plaintive, diminishing pitch of his screams, the old man was nearly dead. His knees were bent, his arms bulging out of his shoulder sockets.

  “Gutless bastards,” Cuno raked out again. “Preying on an old man and kids!” He snugged his cheek to his rifle stalk while drawing a bead on the man with the knife. Breathing hard, his chest on fire, he gritted his teeth and tasted the salt of tears on his tongue.

  The knife-wielding Ute shuffled to Serenity’s right side, turning his back on Cuno. When he turned around again, bobbing his head to the beat of the chant on his brown lips, he was behind Serenity once more.

  He held the bloody knife above Serenity’s head, as though showing the blade to the others gathered around the fire. Suddenly, his face collapsed in a savage scowl. He stooped down behind Serenity, thrusting toward the old man with the knife.

  “Forgive me, pard.” Cuno’s voice cracked as he took up the slack in his trigger finger, and the Winchester belched smoke and flames.

  The rifle’s whip-crack echoed loudly, and all the warriors around the fire jerked with starts. The man behind Serenity straightened quickly, frowning as he thrust his head over the old man’s spindly shoulder to stare into his face. His lower jaw dropped slightly as he saw the blood spurting from the hole in the dead center of the old man’s forehead.

  The Winchester belched again, before the echoes of the first report had even started to diminish. The slug punched through the knife-wielding Ute’s right eye, and the brave screamed shrilly as he staggered back behind Serenity’s twitching body, dropping the knife and cupping both hands to his face.

  Cuno leapt to a knee and quickly replaced the spent cartridges in the Winchester’s receiver, while the Utes were still looking around in shock and trying to figure out where the shots had come from. When he’d punched the second slug into the rifle, he calmly but quickly raised the stock to his shoulder, his jaws set hard, his blue, tear-glazed eyes stony beneath mantled, blond brows.

  The Utes were grunting and bellowing and reaching for their rifles or bows amongst the trees in which the smoke from the fire hung like a blue fog. Cuno picked out one of the bolting figures—a short, stocky brave in an open bear coat and wearing a red bandanna angled low over his ears—and fired. The brave yelped and flew back and sideways, clamping a hand to his left side, just above his hip, and sending a bright, horrified gaze toward Cuno’s rocky perch.

  As the spent, smoking cartridge flew up over Cuno’s right shoulder to clatter down the scarp, Cuno rammed his cocking lever home, picked out another skin-clad figure, and fired. The brave, who’d been jerking one of the new Winchesters to his shoulder, was punched straight back into the fire, where he fell on his ass, wailing like a bobcat in a bear trap and flopping like a landed fish, throwing the Winchester clear.

  Cuno clipped another brave in the thigh and another in the shoulder before he blew the top of another brave’s head off a half second after the brave had loosed an arrow. The arrow bounced off the scarp around Cuno’s boots, and then rifles began hammering from the trees below, which were even more obscured now because of the smoke sent up by the brave roasting in the fire pit.

  Cuno bolted forward, leapt onto a ledge about five feet down from the top of the scarp, and fired two quick rounds as slugs and arrows whistled around him, one bullet carving a loin-tingling line along his left side, halfway between his shoulder and his hip, about a half inch deep. He leapt from the ledge to a boulder on his left, fired another round, hearing a grunt as the round hit its target, then leapt from the boulder to the ground as more slugs and arrows cut the space he’d just vacated.

  Shouts, howls, groans, and screams rose from the trees fifty feet in front of him as the braves—those that weren’t down and dead or flopping around wounded—ran toward him, most wielding Winchester or Spencer rifles while a couple others wielded bows and arrows.

  One threw a feathered spear, which Cuno ducked before hearing the missile thump point down in the ground six feet behind him. Cuno racked a fresh shell and drilled the brave who’d thrown the spear just as he’d turned to run back toward the riverbed.

  Ejecting the spent brass and seating fresh, Cuno slid his rifle barrel left and pulled the trigger. Another brave grabbed his shoulder and staggered sideways, firing a Spencer carbine straight out from his right hip and blowing a hole through the top of his right moccasin.

  The brave scrunched up his face and yowled as he leapt straight up in the air and hit the ground on his butt, throwing the Spencer out behind him.

  Cuno narrowed his eyes and gritted his teeth, continuing steadily forward in spite of the bullets and arrows careening around him, blowing up sand and gravel, spanging wickedly off the scarp behind him, and taking painful nicks out of his flesh.

  He moved like a man possessed, jaws hard, tears streaking his cold, red cheeks.

  26

  A BRAVE RAN up toward Cuno and dove behind a fallen cottonwood. When the brave lifted his head and extended a Winchester over the top of the log, Cuno drew a hasty bead on the brave’s forehead and fired.

  The brave screamed as his forehead turned red and slumped forward against the log, nodding and twitching as though he were trying to heave the tree out of his way.

  Two rifles barked from inside the billowing smoke, and Cuno winced and stumbled sideways as one slug carved a hot line across his right cheek, nicking his ear, and the other plowed into his thigh, setting his entire leg on fire.

  He triggered the Winchester in the direction in which one of the rifles had flashed, but his hammer hit the firing pin with a dull ping, empty.

  Tossing the Winchester aside as another slug nipped his left shin, Cuno grabbed his .45 and stumbled forward, limping on his numb right leg. He dove forward and right, hit the ground on his shoulder, and rolled.

  Two slugs thundered into a large rock behind him.

  Flat on his belly, chin up, he aimed the .45 out and up. A brave in a knee-length bear coat was racking a fresh shell into his Spencer repeater, down on one knee ten yards in front of Cuno, his coat hanging off his shoulder.

  Cuno’s .45 roared and leapt in his hand.

  The slug hammered the breech of the brave’s Spencer with a sizzling roar, ricocheting and plowing into the brave’s right cheek. The brave threw the rifle straight out away from him as though it had grown suddenly hot in his hands and snapped his eyes wide with shock, blood pouring from the ragged hole in his face.

  A rifle barked ahead and left. The slug slammed into the rocks just ahead of Cuno, showering his face with shards. Cuno fired back through the smoke where he’d seen the gun’s red flash. His slug slammed into a tree with an angry bark. There was a grunt, and then footsteps rose, dwindling quickly as someone ran away.

  A breeze cleared some of the smoke, revealing one of the braves he’d wounded lying on his back and grunting Ute curses as he hugged a bloody knee to his chest. Cuno ratcheted back the Colt’
s hammer and aimed.

  The brave turned his head toward Cuno. His eyes snapped wide, and he opened his mouth to scream, but before the howl had left his lips, Cuno’s .45 roared, and his slug drilled a neat round hole through the brave’s forehead, snapping his head back the other way.

  The brave’s hands dropped from his knee, and his leg sagged down to the ground, his mouth opening and closing quickly, as though he were trying desperately to scream.

  More grunts and groans rose to Cuno’s left, and he turned to see the foot-shot brave crabbing belly down toward a revolver jutting from a wide, leather band around a dead warrior’s bloody waist. Grunting against his own aches and against the throbbing in his right thigh, from which blood welled to soak his deerskin breeches, Cuno pushed himself to his knees.

  He took a deep breath and, gritting his teeth, climbed to his feet. Looking around, he saw only dead bodies including the one in the fire pit, and the three Lassiter children still sitting by the wagon ahead and left. Their eyes were on him, filled with awe and terror, the boys’ lips and cheeks cut and bruised from the beatings they’d received from the merciless Utes.

  Cuno held a hand up to them, then, gritting his teeth and cursing under his breath, limped toward where the Ute brave was wrapping his hand around the Colt Navy jutting from the dead man’s hip.

  Cuno’s shadow fell over him. The brave turned his head just in time to receive Cuno’s bullet through his heart. As the brave, quivering, slumped over the other dead man, Cuno quickly thumbed open his .45’s loading gate, and replaced the spent shells with fresh from his cartridge belt.

  There were nine dead Indians around him. From atop the escarpment, he’d hastily counted eleven—the same number he’d counted when the caravan had passed him earlier.

  Spinning the Colt’s cylinder, he moved forward, left of the fire, not looking at Serenity’s bloody body hanging slack between the trees, and deeper into the dry, rocky riverbed lightly dusted with fresh, wet snow. He hadn’t realized until now that the clouds had lifted, and the sun was shining through the gaps—a wan, late-day sun making the snow-limned branches glow.