.45-Caliber Desperado

by Peter Brandvold

  “Come on,” she said when he rode up beside her. “We stop soon, get good water, a good meal in our bellies.” Her eyes flicked across his broad, hairless chest with its flat ridges of hard muscle on which sweat glistened like honey. “Get you some clothes.” Her mouth corners quirked again. “Maybe even do something about your nose.”

  Cuno nodded slowly, thoughtfully. He was alive and free. And he had a pretty girl who obviously wanted him. He may not know who she was exactly, but all in all he supposed he had little to complain about.

  He nodded again, chewing his lower lip. “Let’s ride.”

  She began to turn her chestnut.

  “Wait,” he said, holding up a hand. “Where the hell are we going, anyway?”

  She turned back to him, hiked a shoulder. Her long hair was blowing across her tan, heart-shaped, chocolate-eyed face shaded by the broad, bending brim of her straw sombrero. “I don’t know. Only Mateo knows. Probably Mexico in the end. Does it really matter?”

  Cuno glanced behind him, saw only the top of the hill and beyond that the far horizon against which the riders were coming. He faced her again, gave a wry snort. “No, I reckon it doesn’t.”

  “Come on, then. You save my life, I save yours, huh?”

  “Okay,” he said, nodding—what choice did he have?—and put Renegade into a run beside her.

  6

  THEY RODE WILD and unfettered as the prairie wind, following the network of creases between the low buttes pocked with bits of dried brown buckbrush, needle-grass, sage, and cactus.

  It was obvious that Mateo de Cava had run from his share of posses; he had it down to a system, vamoosing hard and fast and maneuvering over the best ground possible for leaving little trace—namely, meandering, rocky watercourses.

  And they were moving through some of the driest, emptiest country in south-central Colorado, staying well clear of traveled roads and trails, steering wide of the few, broadly spaced ranch headquarters out there. And though their course was a zigzagging one, there was no hesitation, as though Mateo had a clear destination in mind. One that, apparently, he did not share with the others.

  No one, including his sister, seemed to know where he was going. He likely didn’t share that information in case, amongst his horde of ragged lobos, he had a traitor in his midst, which was always the risk when you ran in a pack this large. Some lawmen, Pinkerton agents, and Wells Fargo troubleshooters were good at infiltrating unwieldy bands of desperadoes and bringing them down from the inside or alerting others of their ilk to block the planned escape route and set up a bloody ambush.

  No, Mateo knew his business right down to setting up his own little network of temporary hideouts, for that’s what they reached about an hour and a half after leaving the bloody skirmish along the Arkansas. It was a row of spindly cottonwoods along a winding creek just south of a weatherbeaten jackleg ranch headquarters from which rose the smell of cow and chicken shit and from where the lazy spinning of dry windmill blades could be heard like a couple of golden eagles quarreling.

  In the trees, a picket line had been strung. There was a low fire and two butchered deer—young bucks with small racks still attached to their heads—hung upside down, rear legs splayed to show gaping, red cavities, from a stout cottonwood branch. Mateo reined up in the trees near the picket line and swung down from his mount, looking around as he instantly set about unsaddling his black Arab. Cuno checked Renegade down at the camp’s perimeter and looked around as the other men swarmed around him on their hot, sweat-silvery, blowing and snorting horses.

  From the direction of the gray ranch headquarters—consisting of a log cabin with a pole corral connecting it to a small shed—came the sound of a screen door slamming, and Cuno turned to see a man with long black hair step out of the cabin, thumbing suspenders up his shoulders clad in a faded, red plaid work shirt. The suspenders were attached to threadbare canvas trousers.

  He turned his head to one side as two more people came out of the shack behind him—one an older woman with the same Indian features as the man, and a young redheaded pale-skinned woman in a work shirt and pleated gray skirt.

  There was a buckboard wagon hitched to a mule standing out front of the shack, and the man and the two women climbed aboard and began moving at a brisk trot toward the outlaws who’d all gotten busy unsaddling their horses near the fire. Cuno glanced at Camilla, who did not meet his gaze but only stared toward the approaching wagon and then at two men, wounded in the dustup at the Arkansas, who were being helped down from their horses by other members of the bunch.

  “What do we have there?” Mateo asked one of the wounded—a small Mexican who wore his hair in a tight braid down his back. “How are you doing, Ignacio?”

  “I’m all right,” said Ignacio in Spanish, holding his bloody right arm tight against his body and crawling awkwardly down from his saddle while another man held his horse for him. He spoke again in Spanish, which Cuno mentally translated: “I just need a drink of water, and I’ll be fine.”

  “Let me see.” Mateo rose up on the balls of his feet to inspect the wound in the Mexican’s right arm about halfway between his elbow and shoulder. The outlaw leader pulled the arm away from the man’s body, and Ignacio sucked a sharp breath through the gap of his missing front teeth.

  “Sure, sure,” Mateo said in English, for the benefit of the Americans, which made a good half of his pack. “You’ll be fine.” He glanced meaningfully toward the burly, yellow-bearded Wayne Brouschard and canted his head toward Ignacio who stood leaning against his horse. “Brouschard will take you over to the creek, mi amigo. Get you some water, help you clean the wound, make it all better.”

  “Water,” Ignacio said, lifting his chin and glancing eagerly toward the stream. “Si, si—I could really use some water, Mateo.”

  As Brouschard came over and began turning Ignacio by one arm, Mateo looked at the other man who’d just ridden in and who had dismounted his palomino gelding to stand beside the horse, eyes closed, using one hand to support himself against the saddle.

  A tall half-breed with roached brown hair and one pale eye and one cobalt blue one, he swooned a little, as though drunk. He wore a ragged frock coat over crisscrossed bandoliers and three big pistols bristled on his hips and from a cross-draw holster half hidden by the coat. He wore salmon-colored checked pants, both knees patched with green ducking.

  “White-Eye—how you doin’ over there?” Mateo walked around Ignacio’s horse, heading toward the half-breed. “You don’t look so good.”

  White-Eye looked at Mateo, his milky eye dull and lifeless, the blue one sharp and anxious. “What’s that, Brother? I’m all right.”

  “You took a bullet back at the river, no?”

  “Oh, it’s just a scratch.” The half-breed chuckled, stepping away from his horse and lowering his arms to his sides as if to prove how well he was despite the blood glistening on the low left side of his dust-powdered black frock. “Shit, I’ve been hurt worse tussling with whores. Them fingernails can get mighty sharp across a man’s back when you pleasure ’em just right!”

  He laughed woodenly, the blue eye crinkling at the corner as he watched Mateo approach him.

  The outlaw grinned broadly at the half-breed. “That’s so, Brother!” He looked down at the man’s waist. “Where you hit, huh? Don’t tell me they gutted you, Brother. Huh? They gut you?”

  Quickly, he reached out and flipped the flap of White-Eye’s coat away from his side, revealing a broad patch of thick blood on the man’s shabby white shirt that was ruffled down the front, like the shirt of some fancy tinhorn gambler or southern plantation owner.

  “Oh, shit,” Mateo clucked, frowning and shaking his head. “White-Eye, they got you good, eh?”

  “What? You mean that?” White-Eye laughed a little desperately. “Looks much worse than it is, Mateo. Really. The bullet just clipped my side there, went all the way through.”

  Cuno stood tensely beside Renegade and near Camilla as he watched Ma
teo’s expression slowly change from a bemused smile to a baleful stare. White-Eye stared at the outlaw leader, and fear blazed in his blue eye. “Mateo. My brother,” the man said, groveling and taking a step back. “It’s just a flesh wound. Really. I won’t slow us down—I promise. Shit, I can’t wait to eat some of the deer and get back in the saddle again!”

  He laughed again but there was only desperation in it. His blue eye watered as he continued to laugh, his mouth stretching and twisting bizarrely, making a terrified mask of his large, brown, unshaven face. “Mateo, goddamnit!” he yelled suddenly, the blue eye flashing with rage, the other one rolling unmoored in its socket.

  “You know the rules,” the outlaw leader said reasonably. “We all agreed to the rules before our first ride. Right, White-Eye? Right, Wade?” he asked a gringo rider who was slowly, distractedly unsaddling his buckskin.

  “That’s right,” the stocky Wade agreed, nodding, his fleshy, shaven face somber as he turned away from the two men who had become the focus of everyone’s attention. “We all agreed, White-Eye. I seen that fella shoot you from three, four feet away. Preacher with a white collar.” He shook his head at the irony of White-Eye’s fate. “If that don’t beat all,” he muttered and walked away toward the trees with his saddle on a shoulder.

  “But I killed him good, didn’t I?” White-Eye called after Wade, who did not look back at him. “I got that sky pilot good—didn’t I, Wade?”

  “Let’s take a walk,” Mateo said to White-Eye.

  “No.”

  “Come on, my brother. Let’s don’t make this hard.”

  “No!” White-Eye took another step back and shucked a long-barreled, black-handled Russian from his shoulder holster. He hadn’t gotten the barrel pointed forward yet before Mateo grabbed it out of his hand and smacked him hard across the face with it.

  White-Eye screamed and staggered.

  “Don’t you ever pull a pistol on me, you half-breed son of a bitch!”

  Mateo drew one of his own pistols, shoved the barrel against the bloody stain on White-Eye’s coat. The gun’s roar was muffled slightly by the half-breed’s gangly body. The man screamed shrilly as his shirt around the fresh wound burst into flame. As he staggered backward and sideways, grabbing for another pistol, Mateo shot him twice in the chest.

  He hit the ground and lay shuddering.

  Silence except for the warily nickering horses.

  Cuno stared down at the dead man, feeling a curious lack of emotion.

  “No!” a voice screamed along the creek.

  Cuno turned, as did the others in the group, toward where Ignacio was breaking brush toward a heavy thicket of cottonwoods. Behind him, Brouschard aimed a long-barreled pistol. The gun whanged. Red licked from the barrel, smoke rising.

  Ignacio dove forward as blood and brains spewed from his forehead. He hit the ground, rolled, spraying rocks and gravel, and lay still against a fallen branch.

  “Hey, Ignacio was just my size.” This from Frank Skinner, standing next to the horse he’d just unsaddled—a beefy bay.

  Cuno had lost sight of his fellow escapee amongst the group. Skinner was still dressed—or undressed, as it were—like Cuno. Just the striped prison pajama bottoms and nothing else. He was staring off toward where Brouschard was holstering his big pistol and walking back toward the group, Ignacio lying dead behind him.

  “Help yourself,” Mateo growled, grinning hatefully down at White Eye. He glanced at Cuno as he gave the dead man before him a savage kick in the ribs. “Go ahead, mi gringo amigo. Help yourself to his boots, clothes, anything. He might have spares in his saddlebags. The only thing you cannot help yourselves to, you and Senor Skinner, is the loot we acquired from our last job.”

  He glanced at one of the other men, jerking his head toward the horses of the two dead men standing to his left. “Divide it up, equal shares for everyone except the two newest members of our party.”

  He looked at Cuno and Skinner, who was walking tenderly on bare feet toward Ignacio but glancing over his shoulder at the outlaw leader. “They will have to earn their keep soon.”

  He narrowed a black-irised eye at Cuno. “Very soon.”

  The man driving the ranch wagon had stopped a good ways from the outlaw gang when he’d seen the confrontations with the two wounded men. After the shooting, he’d come on with his cargo of two women—a pretty but sullen young redhead and his Indian wife.

  The man’s name, Cuno learned, was Romer Gaffney. A half-breed who wore an old rag around his forehead under a weathered canvas hat, he’d been in cahoots with Mateo de Cava for years, supplying the man with horses, shelter, and quick meals whenever the bandito shuffled his operations north of his usual stomping grounds and into Colorado Territory.

  Gaffney, Cuno learned as both deer were quickly spitted by the women and coffee brewed, was a dealer in stolen horses and cattle—a fairly easy trade this far off the beaten track. He occasionally sold whiskey. But mostly he provided succor to outlaws on the run, and, while he did not seem to be making an exceptionally good living at it, judging by the squalidness of his ranch headquarters, he seemed a carefree, happy man who took great pleasure in palavering with outlaws like Mateo and smoking his corncob while ordering his wife, Matilda, and his pretty redheaded niece, Wanda, around.

  While the outlaws talked and relaxed around the fire, drinking coffee spiked with Gaffney’s whiskey and ogling Wanda, Cuno dressed in the rough trail clothes he gleaned from White-Eye’s saddlebags—fringed deerskin trousers, calico shirt, red neckerchief, and horsehide vest with a torn pocket.

  The duds were none too clean, and they smelled sour, but they’d do until he could find a mercantile. He donned the man’s undershot boots and his straw sombrero, both of which were a tad on the small side but would do now in this pinch he was in.

  “Now you only need a dead eye,” said Camilla, sitting against a tree before him, the creek gurgling nearby. The others, including Frank Skinner, who looked much better now dressed and with food and whiskey in his belly, were a good fifty or sixty yards away. “A blond half-breed—that’s what you look like. One that gets into fights.”

  Cuno finished adjusting the sombrero on his head, letting the rawhide thong dangle down his chest, and touched his tender nose. He didn’t think it was a bad break. He’d had worse. He could breathe through it well enough. His eyes were still half swollen, however. Physically, he was miserable—tired and hungry and sunburned and wracked with the grinding pain in his face.

  But at least he was out of the Pit and still alive, and he knew he had Camilla to thank for that.

  “I’ll look almost human in a few days,” he said, lowering his hand from his nose.

  “That will be good. I almost did not recognize you up there on that gallows.”

  “How did you know I was about to hang?”

  She smiled coquettishly, small white teeth flashing beneath her rich upper lip. “A woman must not give up her secrets.”

  Cuno frowned at her, puzzled.

  She relented. “Mateo paid off one of the guards to inform us of the happenings at the prison. Especially about what was happening with you. The man was paid well, and he spoke with two of Mateo’s men at a saloon in Limon nightly. We have been a few weeks setting it up.”

  “My god . . .” Cuno stared at her, puzzled by all the work she and her brother had gone to in setting him free. They’d become lovers on the trail out of the Rawhides, but he’d had no idea she’d felt so strongly about him. He felt a little guilty that he hadn’t felt as strongly about her; but, after all, with the Utes hounding their trail, he hadn’t had much time for falling in love.

  She smiled at him, her brown eyes warm and inviting.

  Cuno felt his cheeks warm, still a little uncomfortable around females. He’d been married a very short time, and before that his experience had been limited by an innate bashfulness around members of the opposite sex.

  Changing the subject, he tried to whistle but because of his nose it cam
e out low and stilted. “Well, I reckon that was about as close as I’ll ever cut it. I was beginning to feel the devil reaching up out of the burning pits of hell to tickle my bare feet.”

  Camilla got up from the tree and walked over to him. Her brown eyes bored lovingly into his, causing his cheeks to burn. “You would not have gone down there. Up there is where you belong.”

  With a gloved finger, she pointed toward the sky. “After all you did for me and the Trent girl and the Lassiter children. You are a good man, Cuno. My heart broke when you gave yourself up to that Sheriff Mason.” Slowly, keeping her eyes on his, she shook her head. “All so he would make sure we made it safely to the fort. You are a saint, I would say.”

  “Far from that. Any halfways decent soul would have done the same, especially if he was wounded and needed doctorin’ himself.”

  “That is not true. Though I am only eighteen years old, I have seen much of this world, Cuno. It is a bad place, filled with bad men. But not you. You are a good man. And . . .” She let her voice trail off, wrinkling the skin above her nose as though not sure how to continue. “And . . . you must know how I fee—”

  She cut herself off, color rising in her cheeks. He was glad she’d stopped when she did, as he was also feeling snakes of nervous embarrassment coiling and uncoiling in his legs and shoulders.

  She dropped her eyes toward the ground then reached out for his hand. “Enough of that. I know what you must think of me . . . out here with my bandito brother. Half brother. Mateo’s mother was a Yaqui from southern Sonora. We will talk later. For now, let’s go eat. Knowing Mateo, he will want us to saddle up and ride soon.”

  “Ride where?” Cuno asked the girl as she led him over to the fire. She was holding his hand. “You have any idea at all?”