Awkwardly, he rolled off the girl, rose to a knee, and levered a cartridge into the Winchester’s breech. He kept his head down beneath the level of a table between him and the hardware proprietor. He could hear the man sort of groaning and wheezing fearfully as he shuffled around, likely maneuvering for another shot.
“Mister!” Cuno shouted, “you’re one dead son of a bitch!”
“Not yet, you young devil!” the man returned, his voice quaking. “There’s gotta be a bounty on your head, and I aim to get it!”
Cuno jerked his head up above the table. The man had moved out from behind his counter and was ducking under some deerskin leggings hanging from a rope. He jerked his head toward Cuno, eyes wide and glassy. Grinding his teeth, he slid the double-bore shotgun toward his target.
Cuno quickly drew a new bead on the man and triggered the Winchester. He fired twice more until three bloodpumping holes shone in the center of the man’s aproned chest, forming a triangle pattern. The man shot a hole in his floor with the barn blaster, twisting around and staggering backward before falling behind a table strewn with miscellaneous hardware including tin pots and pans. He hit the floor with a heavy thud and a liquid sigh.
“Madre Maria!” Camilla said, gaining her feet and looking at the smoking carbine in Cuno’s hands. “You should never shoot a man with his own gun. It is very bad luck.”
Cuno reached down for the box of cartridges he’d dropped. “It’s not his anymore. You bought it from him, remember?”
“Oh, si!” Camilla ran around the tables to the counter, swept her pile of wrinkled greenbacks off the pine boards, and stuffed them down her shirt. “He doesn’t need them anymore, right?”
Cuno laughed again from nerves and the excitement of this new life he’d suddenly, unexpectedly found himself in. “Come on!”
He ran to the tent’s open flap, the canvas around it torn by the proprietor’s shotgun blast, and looked up the street in the direction the gunmen had gone. There was only the churned dust of their passing. Boots thumped behind him, and then Camilla was beside him, anxiously flushed and staring up the street.
“Clear so far.”
Cuno moved on out of the tent and headed up the street. It wasn’t much more than a trail, twisting amongst the tent shacks and a few timber dwellings that had been placed willy-nilly though generally along the spur-line tracks. The smell of latrines, chickens, and horses was heavy on the warm air.
“We have to warn Mateo,” Camilla whispered.
Cuno nodded. He was about to tell the girl they’d work around to the back of the hotel, but just then they rounded a broad beer tent—empty now but likely patronized by the track layers after hours—and Cuno could see the brothel. It was easily one of the two or three largest, most permanent structures in town.
Headed back away from it and toward him and Camilla were three men carrying rifles.
Cuno recognized the three from the group that had gotten off the train. They’d come back to check out the gunfire. The others were positioning themselves around the hotel while one led the horses on up the street and out of the line of imminent fire.
Cuno pushed Camilla back behind a stock pen in which goats milled, staring at the pair through the ocotillo slats. A man shouted. Cuno gritted his teeth and, levering a round into the Winchester, bolted out from behind the pen. He dropped to one knee as he pressed the rifle’s butt against his right shoulder.
The three men walking toward him stopped suddenly, jerked their own rifles up. Behind him, Camilla screamed in Spanish, “Mateo! Emboscada, Mateo! Emboscada!”
Ambush!
Firing and levering, Cuno dispatched two of the riflemen before they could get a shot off. One sent a round screeching just over the crown of Cuno’s new hat before Cuno drilled the man in his lower belly and sent him stumbling dustily backward, lowering his head and shaking it fiercely and yowling as his rolling-block repeater tumbled into the street at his boots.
From the direction of the hotel came the screech of breaking glass and then a raucous scream, like that of a moon-crazed lobo. A man on the street shouted. A rifle boomed. Then there was more breaking glass and men shouting in Spanish and English.
Cuno could see dust puffing in the brothel’s windows, heard girls screaming, saw bullets hammering the brothel’s walls as others plunked into the street and sent the riflemen scattering.
One ambusher clutched his upper right leg and dropped to a knee. Another bullet silenced his wails as it snapped his head violently sideways and tore his hat from his head. He crumpled, his duster forming a shroud, and lay still in the street.
One of the gunmen who was sidled up to a tent shack on the street’s left side triggered a rifle toward Cuno. As Camilla returned the man’s fire, Cuno wheeled and dove back behind the goat pen. Camilla bolted around a corner of the building as several rounds hit the ocotillo slats of the pen and dropped to a knee beside Cuno.
“Shit!” she cried. “I told Mateo we shouldn’t stay here so long!”
“The whores yonder must be right talented. Makes me wish I’d have checked ’em out myself.”
Ignoring the quip, Camilla said, “What are we going to do? They’re trying to surround the whorehouse! They’ll have us surrounded soon, too!” She cursed and punched her thigh as she looked around the front of the goat pen toward the brothel. “My crazy brother is getting careless. He’s been a lucky bandito for too long!”
A savage fusillade rose from the direction of the brothel. It sounded like all-out war. Men shouting and screaming. Bullets hammering wood and lifting angry whines as they ricocheted.
There was a shrill cry and then the loud smashing thud of what was probably one of the outlaws being shot out of a window of the brothel. From the south side of the street, one of the ambushers raised a victorious cry.
Cuno ran crouching toward the other end of the pen in which the goats were bleating and running in tight, frantic circles. He edged a look around the pen, saw the brothel with smoke puffing from its broken windows on both floors. The man who’d fallen out of the window lay stretched in the street before the place, ankles crossed. He was clad in only his socks and neckerchief. Blood pooled in the dust beneath his head. A rifle lay nearby.
On the south side of the street, to Cuno’s left, the ambushers had taken up positions behind rain barrels fronting the timber and canvas shacks. Some were stretched out prone on rooftops. Others were shooting from the gaps between the buildings. Some had fallen dead where they’d been shooting.
Cuno’s stomach heaved. It was already a bloodbath and it was fast getting bloodier. He was only vaguely surprised to feel such a strong alliance with Mateo and the other outlaws. They were all he had now. Somehow, he had to help them get out of the brothel and over to the stable where their horses waited.
If he could work around behind the ambushers, he might be able to take down enough of them that the others would get discouraged and call a retreat. At the very least, he could thin their ranks, though he could hear by the intermittent yowls and screams that Mateo’s men, despite the bender they’d been on, were holding their own.
He turned and ran back toward the other side of the goat pen. He stopped suddenly, jaw falling slack. Camilla was sitting back against a lower slat of the pen, clutching her upper right arm and wincing, breathing hard.
“What the hell’d you do?” Cumo admonished the girl.
“It’s just a nip.”
“Nick,” he corrected her, not so sure.
Cuno saw the bullet hole in the slat near her arm, heard several more thumps as the ambushers, knowing part of the gang was here by the pen, triggered lead in Cuno’s and Camilla’s direction. Soon, a couple would peel away from the main bunch and work around them. So much for Cuno’s idea. They had to get out of here fast.
Cuno ripped off his neckerchief and quickly tied it around the girl’s arm.
“Ouch! Not so tight!”
“Shut up.”
“You’re mad at me, damn you!” She gave him a
petulant look as he lifted her to her feet.
“I get that way when girls I like get themselves shot.”
He’d said it before he’d realized that he was voicing his fear of losing another woman he’d fallen in love with. She studied him curiously as he steadied her, then handed over her rifle, which she’d leaned against the pen.
“Never mind,” he said. “Come on.”
Glancing over his shoulder to make sure none of the ambushers was closing on them, Cuno ran east, keeping the goat pen between him and the riflemen. He and Camilla passed behind the hardware tent, saw Renegade and Camilla’s mount standing outside the timber, shake-roofed box that was the town’s only café.
They’d left the horses there after they’d had breakfast a little over an hour ago. The café’s long-haired half-breed cook was hunkered down behind a rain barrel on the little front stoop, hands clamped over the side of the barrel as he stared toward the sounds of battle, wearing an expression much like that of the horses.
Cuno stopped, remembering the cartridge boxes he’d seen lined up in the hardware tent. “You go on over and fetch the horses. I’m going back for more ammo. Didn’t realize we’d be going through it this fast.”
Camilla nodded, her face tight with pain, and jogged on over to where the horses waited, stretching wary looks behind them and flapping their tails.
Cuno ran around to the front of the tent and dashed inside. He grabbed four boxes of cartridges off one of the cluttered shelves behind the counter, stuffed them into his pockets, then leapt back over the counter and ran to the front of the tent.
He looked westward along the winding street. A bearded man in a gray hat was running toward him, crouching under the awning of a half-built saloon. Spying Cuno, he ducked down behind a supply wagon filled with lumber and snaked his rifle out around the side.
Cuno dropped to his knees as the rifle roared, puffing smoke. The bullet tore into a tent post, splitting it. As the front of the tent began to sag, Cuno returned fire on the man behind the wagon, but the man ducked behind the cargo, and Cuno’s .44 slugs blew slivers from the raw green boards piled in the back.
“Cuno!” Camilla shouted.
He turned to see the girl sitting her chestnut farther up the street, partly shielded from the west by the train depot around which two railroaders stood, owl-eyed and putting their backs to the train still panting along the new tracks. The locomotive was taking on water, and black coal smoke was billowing from its large, diamond-shaped stack.
The ramp of the stock car was still down.
Cuno fired two more shots at the bearded man still hunkered behind the lumber dray, then bolted out from the hardware tent and sprinted on up the street. Camilla covered him with her pistol, squinting down the barrel as she fired several shots toward the dray. As the bearded ambusher shouted something toward his bethren still assaulting the brothel which Cuno couldn’t hear above the locomotive’s chugging thunder and the rush of water from the tower trough into its massive, black boiler, Cuno climbed onto Renegade’s back.
“Let’s get the hell out of here!” Camilla shouted, triggering one more shot toward the man behind the lumber dray.
“What about Mateo?”
“My brother is a fool! Let’s ride, Cuno!”
Cuno looked at the stock car. A moment ago, he’d gotten a crazy idea. He switched his gaze to the girl. Blood oozed around the bandanna he’d wrapped around the wound, but it indeed appeared only a flesh wound. Tending it could wait.
He swung back down out of his saddle and tossed his reins to Camilla. “Lead the horses onto the car!”
“What?”
“Hurry, goddamnit. We don’t have all day!”
Cuno turned toward the depot agent and the two beefy engineers clad in watch caps and striped coveralls, standing around near the locomotive and the water tower. He aimed his Winchester straight out from his right hip and put some hard-case steel into his voice as he ordered, “You two climb into the engine. Vamoose! We’re goin’ for a ride . . .”
14
CUNO ASSUMED THE men in the striped coveralls were the fireman and engineer. As he moved toward them wagging his new Winchester, they reached for the sky as though they were bank tellers being held up by the James gang. Their mustached faces were stony, but their eyes were sharp with fright.
He said, “Get this thing moving. Now. Or I’ll drill ya both!”
“Moving?” said the man on the right, whose long, thick gray hair dropped from his black watch cap. He had a face like the wall of a dilapidated train station. “Move where? We’re fillin’ with water, and we . . .”
Cuno only hardened his jaws at the man and pressed the Winchester’s barrel up snug against his broad chest. The man swallowed and let his heavy lower jaw sag as the blood ran out of his face.
The man to his right elbowed him. “I reckon we got enough water, eh, Earl?”
“I reckon we do at that, Chub.”
“Why don’t I chuck some wood in the stove, then?”
Cuno said tightly, “That’d be a good idea, Chub.”
As the fireman and the engineer climbed heavily but anxiously up into the locomotive’s pilothouse, Cuno heard the clacking of a telegraph key inside the cracker-box depot building. He stepped onto the new pine platform upon which the building sat and jerked the screen door open.
There was a small waiting area outfitted with simple pine benches to the left. On the right was a grilled partition adorned with a wall clock with a gold pendulum that woodenly ticked away the seconds. Behind the partition, a little man in a green eyeshade sat tapping away at a telegraph device.
“Letter home, old-timer?”
The oldster jerked around, widening his eyes beneath the cottony tufts of his silver brows. He saw Cuno’s cocked Winchester and raised his withered hands, palms out. Cuno slid the barrel toward the telegraph key and pumped two steel-jacketed slugs through it, sending the pendulum, weights, springs, and thumb and finger pieces flying in all directions.
The oldster groaned and flapped his hands as though at pestering flies.
Cuno went back outside to see black smoke thickening as it swooped up and out of the diamond stack. The man filling the boiler from the scaffold supporting the tank was swinging the trough away from the locomotive and eyeing Cuno nervously. He wasn’t too nervous to yell, “Your gang’s done for, kid. That’s the Ed Joseph bunch of bounty hunters swappin’ lead with your bunch in the whorehouse yonder.” The waterman shook his head. “Ain’t been no owlhoots yet who outrun Joseph’s bunch.”
“Who brought ’em in?” Cuno asked the man as he climbed the ladder alongside the locomotive’s pilothouse.
“Why, T-Bone, of course. Town constable.”
“T-Bone’s the little man in the suit I seen out here?”
The waterman nodded as he hooked the heavy leather watering trough back into its brackets beside the wooden water tank. “That’d be him. Railroad-appointed.”
“Why don’t you give him Grimley’s street address while you’re at it, Norman?” This from the engineer poking his gray head out of the pilothouse.
Cuno climbed into the locomotive where the fireman was busily chunking split pine and oak logs from the tinder car into the open door of the firebox. He was sweating and breathing heavily and eyeing Cuno’s Winchester.
“You just do as you’re told,” Cuno said, “and you won’t have to worry about my long gun.”
“That’s the one over at Hoyt Wilson’s hardware store, ain’t it?”
“So what?”
“That’s the one I had my eye on,” grunted the fireman as he chunked two more sticks into the firebox.
Cuno looked at the engineer. “Get this thing moving straight ahead, fast as you can get it to go.”
“It’ll take me a minute. Still buildin’ up pressure.”
Cuno cursed as he stared off toward the brothel. Rifles and pistols continued to pop, and men continued to scream and shout. Smoke rose from the brothel’s far
side. Cuno cursed again. A bullet had likely knocked over a lit lamp. The lumber in the building was still green, but it wouldn’t last long after flames started chewing at it.
Cuno climbed down off the locomotive and ran back to the stock car. Camilla had the horses inside the car but was having trouble pulling the heavy, plankboard ramp up. Cuno helped her get the ramp into the car then dropped back down to the ground. “Stay here!”
“What the hell are you doing?” she called out the stock car’s open door, both horses fidgeting behind her.
“Gonna drive this straight up the track, flank them bushwhackers and cover Mateo till he’s out of the brothel. Then we’ll head back and pick him up east, after he’s gathered his horses.”
Camilla dropped her jaw. “You’re as crazy as he is,” she said. But as he ran up toward the locomotive, she climbed gingerly down from the stock car, wincing against the pain in her arm, slid the door closed with a grunt, and ran up behind him. “I’m coming with you!”
Cuno helped Camilla mount the ladder into the pilothouse, then climbed up after her. The fireman stood back against an iron bulkhead, across from the closed firebox, looking wary and weary and holding his canvas-gloved hands chest high, fingers curled toward his palms. The engineer was flipping levers and crouching to inspect dials.
Glancing at Cuno, he said, “We can’t go too damn far west, ya know. They’re ain’t track no farther than a mile beyond the camp.”
“I want you to take us a hundred yards. No farther. See that corral up there?”
The engineer nodded.
“Stop behind it. No farther. Then get ready to put her in reverse and haul ass back east. Stop at the edge of town, no farther.” Cuno rammed the Winchester against the man’s right shoulder. “You got that, mister?”
“Hell, that’ll put us right in the line of fire of . . .” The brakeman let his voice trail off as Cuno gave him a deadpan look. He dropped his eyes, crestfallen, to the locomotive’s copper-riveted floor.
Camilla stood with her back to the locomotive’s rear bulkhead, the split wood of the tender car mounded behind her. She held her Winchester in both hands, keeping the engineer and the fireman covered, but her incredulous eyes were on Cuno. He moved past her, climbed the rear bulkhead, and slid his rifle up onto the locomotive’s flat roof.
.45-Caliber Desperado Page 11