Wild to the Bone

by Peter Brandvold

  A dynamite-like blast sounded from up on the roof.

  There was a scream, and Haskell whipped his head around to see one of the riders go tumbling backward off his mount. As the now-riderless horse angled off away from the trail, there was another blast—the second barrel of the shotgun rider’s ten-gauge coach gun—and another rider’s face turned bright red as the man’s hat flew off to be followed by the man’s head itself.

  The headless rider stayed in the saddle for another three or four strides before his hands opened, the reins dropped, and the headless corpse sagged to the right and dropped off its horse to roll into the rocks and cactus.

  There was more shooting from galloping riders on both sides of the trail. A sharp grunt from the top of the coach cut through the cacophony. Haskell winced, knowing the shotgun rider had had his ticket punched.

  A shadow dropped down the right side of the stage, a hat blowing off in the wind. The shotgun messenger hit the ground with a crunching thump, and Haskell watched in wide-eyed shock and dread as the dead man rolled wildly, limbs flailing, into the rocks and sage beyond the trail.

  Meanwhile, the stage seemed to be picking up speed. The short hairs on the back of Bear’s neck pricked eerily, for he suddenly realized that the stage was beginning to fishtail as the horses, frightened by the gunfire, were galloping hell-for-leather, without anyone holding the ribbons or in any control at all.

  “Unhand me, you brigand!” the girl cried, sitting up with her back to the rear seat and giving Haskell a hard shove.

  He looked at her, realizing after the fact that he’d pinned her back for her own safety against the seat, his forearm pressed across her ample bust. Her shirtwaist had been pulled down far enough that part of one tender, pink nipple was showing. Her skirt had blown up to expose one long, silk-stockinged leg, a pink garter belt, and a little tuft of pubic hair peeking out her panties.

  Haskell lowered his arm. The girl wasn’t doing anything for him anymore. Good. That meant he wasn’t a total animal. Realizing that he was aboard a runaway stage, with three—no, four—owlhoots still galloping after him and flinging lead at him was better than a bucket of icy snowmelt thrown directly on his crotch.

  “Grab onto somethin’ and hold on tight!” Haskell shouted as he reached for his Yellowboy near the left doorjamb.

  “Oh, my God!” Miss Downing cried, stretching her arms out along the edge of the seat behind her, her lithe body flopping around like windblown wash on a line. “There’s no driver, is there? I saw him fall, and if he fell, and the shotgun rider is gone as well . . .”

  “Just hold on tight, Miss Downing!”

  Haskell racked a live round into the Winchester’s breech. He looked out both sides of the stage.

  Both doors banged against the doorframe as the stage pitched and swayed, rocks clanging off the iron-shod wheels. Four owlhoots remained, two galloping just off the carriage’s left rear wheel, the other two galloping off its right rear wheel. They were too busy trying to catch up to the runaway team—and the strongbox chained to the roof—to continue firing.

  Planting one of his size-thirteen boots against the coach’s rear seat and pressing a shoulder against the doorframe on the coach’s left side, Haskell pressed the rear stock of his Winchester against his shoulder, laid a bead on one of the two riders galloping on that side of the stage, and promptly emptied the man’s saddle.

  He emptied the saddle of the other horse and then swung around to the stage’s opposite side.

  Both riders over there, having watched another two of their party tumble off into the dirt, their riderless horses galloping off away from the trail, shaking their heads miserably, suddenly drew rein, staring incredulously after the stage. They curveted their mounts in the trail and grew smaller and smaller beyond the roiling dust cloud.

  Apparently, they no longer liked the odds.

  Or maybe they were going to let the runaway team finish their business for them and then ride in and scoop the strongbox out of the wreckage . . .

  Not if Haskell could help it.

  Still sitting on the floor with her arms stretched along the edge of the rear seat, Miss Downing looked to both sides and cried, “Oh, my God—we’ve left the trail! ”

  Haskell jerked a look out both flopping doors. They were hammering across a relatively flat stretch of low grass and tangled sage tufts, buttes rising in the far distance. Glancing at the ground nearer the coach’s churning wheels, he saw only more grass and low-growing sage over which the wheels were bouncing raucously, breaking off sage branches and throwing them up behind the rear luggage boot.

  Bear looked behind the coach to see the stage trail they’d been on now forming a slender, pale, horizontal line behind them, dipping around behind a sandstone-capped butte.

  Another stone dropped in Haskell’s belly. This one colder than before.

  The girl was right. Something had caused the team to leave the trail. Where they were headed now only the good Lord knew, and he wasn’t telling.

  “So we have,” he said, his bemused tone belying the dread twisting his innards in a knot. “So we have.”

  As he stowed his rifle behind the forward seat, he glanced at Miss Downing, who now had her eyes squeezed closed and was silently moving her lips in prayer.

  “Send up one for this old sinner, will you, girl?” Bear moved to the right-side door, gave his back to the passing countryside, the rushing wind blowing his thick dark brown hair around his big sunburned head, and winked. “Unless you don’t want the association.”

  He looked up over the edge of the coach’s roof, spied the brass rail running along the side, and then glanced once more at the pretty girl, whose hair had come undone from its French braid and was now bouncing prettily atop her slender shoulders. “For that I wouldn’t blame you one bit.”

  He leaped up and grabbed the rail and said through a strained grunt, “Nope, wouldn’t blame you one damn bit. But you hold on, now, hear?”

  He began to hoist himself up with his powerful arms and shoulders. But before he could throw a knee over the rail, the stage tipped toward him hard, and his legs went flying out into the rushing air.

  One hand was ripped free of the rail, and it, too, went whipping out into the rushing wind.

  Miss Downing screamed, “Doomed! Oh, God, I’m doooomed !”

  3

  Haskell managed somehow to keep his left hand wrapped around the rail. He could feel that hand slipping, however, as the wind became a hundred stout arms trying to rip him off the bouncing coach and hurl him into the rocks and sage.

  Again, Miss Downing screamed. “You fool! Oh, you fool! What are you doing, crazy man?”

  Haskell pulled his right arm out of the wind’s taut grasp and wrapped that hand around the rail. By now, the coach had settled back onto all four wheels, and he was hanging nearly straight down the side of the carriage, the door beating him like a jealous lover.

  As he began to pull himself up over the edge of the roof once more, he said through a grunt, veins bulging in his temples, “Just tryin’ to pull our fat out of the fire, my peach.”

  With a louder grunt, he hoisted himself up until he’d locked his arms above the rail. He swung his right boot over, and then the left one, and then he rolled his big body over the rail and onto the roof. He lay on his back, breathing hard. He took about three seconds to catch his breath before rising to all fours.

  Hunkered near the stout lockbox chained to the rails, he stared out over the driver’s seat, which was splattered with blood, and over the team still galloping as though the devil’s hounds were nipping at their hocks. He squinted against the dust and bits of grass and sage being thrown up by the hammering hooves. The warm midsummer wind blew his hair.

  Another heavy, cold, sharp-edged stone dropped in his guts, made his intestines flatten, spread, and writhe.

  The team was lunging toward
a canyon that cut a dark line in the rolling, high-altitude prairie before them, a half-mile away but sliding toward them fast. With every foot the team dragged the stage farther to the west, the canyon seemed to open like the jaws of a giant steel trap.

  The sight of that trap opening wider and wider caused Haskell to grow light in the head. His knees and his toes tingled as he imagined the plunge of the team and the two-thousand-pound coach into the canyon. Him, the girl, the money he was guarding—all scattered like matchsticks and pummeled to cherry jelly.

  Instantly, he bolted forward and leaped down into the driver’s boot. He looked around for the lines and had another dark moment when he saw all six ribbons tattered and broken and dragging along the ground, popping up from the scissoring hooves like striking black rattlers.

  Since Bear had no time to shake his clenched fists at the heavens, he stepped over the dashboard and balanced there on the slight steel ledge over the front axle, watching the ground slide past in a green-brown blur beneath him.

  Grounding his heels on the ledge, he steadied himself and looked at the horse nearest him.

  Knowing he didn’t have time to think about the damn fool thing he was about to do—and knowing that if he thought about it, he wouldn’t do it and might only piss his pants—he eased himself down onto the tongue, which was bouncing like a canoe on a storm-tossed sea. He’d barely gotten his weight onto it before he let its upward thrust propel him up onto the back of the left wheeler.

  The horse’s back was frothed with silver sweat and slick as hell. He almost slid over the wheeler’s left side but managed to reach up and grab the leather collar and hang on for dear life while the horse’s back pitched beneath him more violently than the stage had. The horse’s wild thrusts set up an ache in Bear’s balls, and he used the pain to help propel him onto his hands and knees and then to a crouched standing position atop the horse’s withers.

  What in Sam Hill is Alma Haskell’s middle boy doin’ now? he asked himself as his heart turned somersaults in his chest.

  There was no backing out now. Nowhere to go but down . . .

  He funneled every ounce of his considerable strength into his ankles and legs and heaved himself up and over the wheeler’s bouncing head. It was hard to gauge how hard to throw himself from one wildly moving horse to another, but he landed on the back of the swing horse up near the animal’s neck.

  For a mind-numbing second, he almost fell down the sweat-slick horse’s right flank, but, grabbing the horse’s collar, harness straps, and mane, he managed to right himself, spitting dirt and bits of chopped sage from his lips and blinking it out of his eyes.

  Clinging to the swing horse’s collar, he lowered his head and sucked a shallow breath against the javelin of sharp pain ripping through both his tender oysters, and then he rose again to a crouch before making a last, what he hoped would be death-defying leap.

  The canyon was less than sixty yards before him, near enough to see the eroded opposite wall and the thin stream twisting along the bottom. A couple of white water birds were sunning themselves on a slender sandbar, and a blue heron was just then winging up from a nest of shrubs toward the crest of the opposite ridge.

  Wider and wider the chasm grew, so that he could see more and more of the bottom.

  “Holy shit!” Haskell shouted, and he lunged forward to grab the ribbons dangling from the puller’s bit.

  He drew back on the reins gently at first, so the horse wouldn’t take a header. Then, when he felt the horse slowing, he drew back with more pressure, yelling, “Whoaa, there, hoss! Whooo-ahhhhhh! ”

  The puller shook its head belligerently, not liking having a man on its back, much less tugging on its bit. Nevertheless, it slowed, and the one to the right of it also slowed. All the others followed suit.

  Still, the canyon yawned before Haskell, who kept his fear-bright eyes on it as the horses continued to run toward it, seemingly oblivious to the danger that lay twenty, fifteen, ten yards ahead.

  Nothin’ dumber than a goddamn hoss!

  Hunkered low against the puller’s sweat-slick neck, pressing his left cheek into the foamy mane, Haskell pulled back harder on the ribbons.

  “Who-ahhhhh, you mangy, good-for-nothin’ cayuses!” he cried, stretching his bearded lips back from his teeth and staring at the edge of the canyon sliding closer and closer toward the puller’s chopping hooves.

  Which suddenly stopped no less than two feet from the drop.

  The two white water birds that had been sunning themselves on the sandbar took wing, squawking their dismay at the intrusion.

  A rock broke loose from the lip of the ridge and bounced down the cliff—tick, tick, tick—for two hundred feet before striking bottom.

  Haskell eased himself off the side of the puller and dropped to his knees. He leaned forward, pressing his wrists against his bruised and battered balls and drawing deep, heavy breaths. Remembering the girl, he turned to stare back at the coach, obscured behind a heavy red-tan veil of dust.

  The door on the near side was swinging slowly back against the carriage.

  The horses heaved like six separate blacksmith’s bellows.

  The girl appeared on her hands and knees in the open doorway. She was caked in dirt, and her hair was in total disarray. She looked around warily, spotted Haskell, and then climbed heavily down out of the coach.

  She strode drunkenly toward him, a beaded reticule still hanging from her right wrist. Her powder-gray dress clung to her like a glove, accentuating the fullness of her bosom and the flatness of her belly.

  “Oh, you dear man,” she said thinly, standing over Haskell, staring down at him, her ripe breasts rising and falling as she breathed.

  She stared out into the canyon. Her green eyes grew wider for a moment when she realized how close they’d been to bloody ruination. She licked her lips. Then she dropped to her knees before Bear and wrapped her arms around his waist and pressed her bosom to his chest.

  “How can I ever repay you for saving my life?” she trilled.

  “Ah, hell,” Bear said with a self-effacing chuff.

  “No, I mean it,” she said, pulling her head back from his chest, placing her hands on both sides of his face, and staring deeply into his eyes. “How can I ever repay you, you dear, dear man?”

  4

  Miss Downing’s pussy felt like a pot of warm honey overturned on his fully engorged, iron-hard cock, which curved up deep inside her.

  Straddling him, the girl rose slowly onto her knees, lifting that warm honey pot to the very tip of his organ, before leaning forward and pressing both her soft hands on his chest and lowering the honey pot once more, twisting her hips slightly from left to right and back again. When she’d bottomed out, Haskell swallowed and gasped as she ground down hard against him, making little whimpering sounds deep in her throat.

  He could hear her honey crackling softly against his shaft, feel the wet hair of her bush prickling deliciously against his crotch.

  “Feels . . . sooo . . . goooood,” she said raspily, continuing to lean into her hands on his chest.

  Her long hair, still lightly damp from the bath they’d taken together when they’d pulled into the little ranch-supply town of New Haven, tickled as the feathery ends danced across his chest and neck. He stared up into her soft jade eyes as she slowly lowered her head to his, and he opened his mouth slightly as she pressed her lips against his, sticking her tongue out to gently caress his own.

  Haskell reached up to cup her deliciously full, supple breasts in his hands, feeling the jutting nipples rake across his palms.

  “So, so . . . good!” she said, pulling her head back from his and slowly lifting her pussy to the end of his cock once more.

  “Oh, yeah,” Haskell said through a long sigh, rolling the girl’s nipples between his thumbs and index fingers and trying hard to keep his passion on a leash. He didn’t
want to come. Not yet. He wanted to thoroughly enjoy every ounce of pleasure this girl had to offer.

  It was an old rancher heading to town for supplies who had given Haskell and Miss Downing a ride after Haskell turned all the stage horses loose and removed the strongbox from the roof. New Haven wasn’t much but a handful of tent shacks and plank-board shops, but it did boast a two-story hotel with a café and saloon in it.

  After reporting the trail trouble to the local stage office and stowing the lockbox, he and Miss Downing wandered over to the New Haven Hotel and Saloon for a meal over which they’d gotten to know each other, and a bath, during which they’d gotten to know each other better.

  Of course, the middle-aged gent who ran the place didn’t know that Haskell had slipped into the girl’s room by prior arrangement, and he hoped like hell no one ever found out. She was from this neck of the woods, after all, and her reputation was on the line. In fact, the station agent had sent a telegram to Cybill’s father, Harcourt Downing, in Montrose, so he’d likely ride to town in the morning to fetch the stranded girl, whom he had hadn’t seen in the two years she’d been away bettering herself at the girls’ school in New York State.

  Miss Downing herself didn’t seem overly worried that someone might find out about the little fuck party she was throwing in her room for the relative stranger who’d saved her life, because several times over the course of the late afternoon, Haskell had had to clamp a hand over the girl’s mouth to muffle her groans of pleasure.

  He did so again now as she slid her slick little pussy down to his belly and tipped her head back, opening her mouth as though to scream. “Hmmmmmmmm!” she said, grinding her lips into the palm of Bear’s big hand, jerking her shoulders with sultry laughter.