.45-Caliber Desperado

by Peter Brandvold

  “I was beginning to think so.” She pressed her cheek more firmly against his arm, snuggling against him. “But now I’m not so sure.”

  “What changed your mind?” Cuno frowned at her. “I killed your brother back there.”

  “You saved the girl. She was innocent. She did not deserve to die so that we could make it to Mexico with a bag of stolen money.”

  “We likely won’t make it now.” Cuno cast another cautious glance down canyon, then ran a hand through his blond hair, squeezing the sweat out the feathery lengths of it curling down behind his shoulders. “You know that, don’t you? They’ll get around us, cut us off.”

  “Si.”

  “We could give ourselves up, I reckon.” The thought galled him, but he would have done it for her. That part was surprising, but it was a feeling of silk fingers caressing his heart. He’d lost that feeling for a time.

  She raised her eyes to his and shook her head.

  He pressed his lips against her forehead, held them there for a long while. Then he leaned his head back against the tree and closed his eyes. He tried to relax, let a shallow doze steal over him, give him the rest he so badly needed.

  No, they likely wouldn’t make it to Mexico. But he wasn’t ready to unhitch his wagon. Not yet. He’d make a hard run for the border. He wouldn’t go back to prison, and he wouldn’t die. He’d fight, even if it meant killing more innocent men.

  It just wasn’t in him to give in, to stop fighting, or to relinquish his freedom after it had been stolen from him merely for his saving innocent lives.

  He’d been screwed. And yes, he’d killed innocent men, and maybe his being screwed wasn’t justification for those killings. Maybe he should give himself up. But he couldn’t. Especially not when it meant that he’d be giving up Camilla, as well.

  Calm resolve swept over him, light as hummingbird wings. The leaves rattled, caressing his sunburned cheeks with alternating hot sunshine and cool shade. The creek smelled sweet. The grass whispered. Occasionally, a twig broke out of a branch and landed in the grass with a swishing sound.

  Someone gave a clipped yell.

  Cuno lifted his head, and so did Camilla, as rolling rocks clattered. They both reached for their rifles as the clattering rose, and Cuno turned toward the canyon’s southern ridge to see a mini-rockslide. Close on the heels of the first rocks, a man slid down into view behind the screen of breeze-brushed branches. He slid boots first, on his butt, waving his arms as if to break his fall.

  A Henry repeater tumbled down the steep ridge beside him.

  Cuno bounded to his feet and ran through the brush as Sheriff Dusty Mason flopped over on his belly about halfway down the ridge and rolled violently, grunting and groaning, until he’d piled up on the loose rock mounded at the bottom.

  Cuno splashed across the creek and stopped at the base of the ridge just as Mason flung his right hand out toward a walnut-gripped Colt Army that had fallen out of his holster and now lay propped against a fist-sized rock.

  Cuno kicked the gun, sending it rolling wildly before landing several yards away. He loudly racked a shell into his Winchester’s breech and aimed the long gun at the sheriff’s head.

  Mason was on his belly, limbs akimbo, staring at his gun. Slowly, he turned his mustached face toward Cuno, his eyelids and mustache covered in chalky sand and dirt. He stared at Cuno darkly, almost without expression except for a thin parting of his lips. The skin above the bridge of his nose wrinkled, as though he were bracing himself for a bullet. Blood stained some of the rocks around and above him.

  Cuno stared tensely down at the man who had arrested him and forced him to stand trial for killing the territorial marshals. Cuno’s heart thudded faster and faster, and he felt his finger drawing tighter and tighter against the Winchester’s trigger.

  All that he’d been through over the past year had been caused by one man who wouldn’t accept his explanation for killing the badge-toting privy rats . . .

  Footsteps sounded from the direction of the creek. Cuno glanced back to see Camilla walking up from the stream, looking around warily, scanning the ridge, as she held her cocked rifle in both hands across her blouse. She turned her head toward Cuno, dropped her eyes to the sheriff, then raised them again to Cuno and held them there.

  Her gaze was cast with skepticism, expectance.

  “Go ahead,” she said softly, stopping six feet away from him and the sheriff. “This is what you have been waiting for.”

  Mason slid his frightened eyes between them.

  Cuno looked down at the man once more. Then he lowered his rifle, walked over and grabbed the man’s rifle out of the brush, and heaved it into the creek.

  “Watch him. Make sure he doesn’t have any more weapons on him.”

  He depressed his Winchester’s trigger, then ran back across the stream and stopped beside a boulder. From here he could see more clearly down canyon, and just as he swept his gaze across it, he saw a man running out from behind one boulder to crouch behind another, smaller boulder along the base of the gorge’s southern ridge.

  Cuno triggered a shot that puffed rock dust from the ridge wall about two feet behind a man’s shadow and a buckskin mocassin.

  “That’s far enough, marshal!” he shouted. “We have Sheriff Mason over here. You come another step farther, I’ll drill him!”

  Spurr poked his head out from behind the boulder, the brim of his hat casting a wedge of shade over his forehead, just above his leathery eye sockets. He was holding a rifle, and he appeared to be breathing hard, crouched low, a hand on his knee, his eyes narrowed to slits.

  He nodded, waved a hand in supplication. Then he dropped to one knee and stared anxiously up canyon toward Cuno, who shouted, “Throw that rifle out. A long ways out!”

  Spurr held his gaze for a moment, as though he were considering the order. Finally, he threw his rifle about twenty yards out toward the middle of the canyon, where it piled up in a thick tuft of sage and bear grass. Too far away for the old lawman to make a run for it without Cuno’s hearing and having time to grease him.

  Cuno cast his gaze down canyon. No soldiers. Only rocks and the shimmering creek. Spurr and Mason must have followed Cuno and Camilla alone. The soldiers had likely ridden around the mesa, surrounding their quarry.

  The young freighter turned to see Camilla leading Mason across the creek, water splashing up around their knees. Mason held his hands shoulder-high. Blood glistened low on his pin-striped shirt, just above his shell belt on his left side. It looked like a bullet wound. His long mustached face was dirty and sweat-streaked, and his dark brown hair hung in his eyes.

  “If we’re not going to kill him,” Camilla said, canting her head toward the sheriff, whose large blue bandanna ruffled around his neck in the breeze, “what are we going to do with him?”

  Cuno glared at the man. “Oh, I didn’t say we weren’t gonna kill him. But first he’s gonna clear us a path to Mexico.”

  32

  CUNO STOPPED RENEGADE at the edge of the mesa and stared down at the broken red rocks piled below, which were gathering elongated afternoon shadows.

  Over the years, the rocks had tumbled down from the crest of the mesa wall, which was neither steep nor high on this western end of the formation, and now the fallen boulders offered good cover to the blue-clad cavalry soldiers hunkered behind them.

  They waited there near the bottom of the game trail that angled down the ridge, knowing the trail was Cuno and Camilla’s only way off the mesa. They’d circled around to cut off their quarry, and they’d probably been waiting there most of the hour it had taken the two remaining outlaws to make their way from east to west across the formation’s table-flat top.

  All Cuno could see of the federals were patches of blue tunic and the crowns of their tan or blue hats, the occasional yellow-gauntleted glove wrapped around the neck of a Spencer carbine, the barrel of which bristled above the boulders. A couple of the rifles were now angled up toward Cuno, though they dropped whe
n Spurr yelled from east along the ridge, “Hold your fire! They have Mason!”

  Cuno glanced at the sheriff, who sat his pinto only two feet ahead of him and on his right side. Cuno had a slip-knotted noose around the man’s neck. He’d also tied the end of his rifle barrel into the knot, so that Cuno’s Winchester was snugged tight against the back of Mason’s neck.

  Cuno held both the end of the rope and the rifle in his right hand. The rifle had a live cartridge in the chamber; its hammer was cocked.

  If anything happened to Cuno, the slightest jerk of his trigger finger would send a .44 round careening through the sheriff’s head, killing him instantly.

  Cuno glanced at Camilla sitting her chestnut bay about five yards directly behind him, her hair slicing across her forehead in the dry afternoon breeze. She slid her eyes from the waiting soldier to Cuno, a faint question there. Cuno looked east along the crest of the mesa. He could see neither Spurr nor the lawman’s horse. He hadn’t detected the man on his trail, either, but he’d known the old marshal had been following, likely staying a good half mile back.

  Now he didn’t mind letting Cuno know he was there, likely within range of his old-model Winchester. Now he was here only to keep the nervous cavalry riders, most of whom were under twenty, from snapping off another impulsive shot and getting the sheriff drilled.

  “Keep your rifles down and let him through!” Spurr ordered.

  “What do you mean let him through?” This from a gray-haired gent down on one knee beside a flame-shaped escarpment about thirty yards out from the base of the mesa. He was staring up the ridge toward Spurr.

  “You heard me, Wilson,” Spurr shouted raspily, his voice pitched with frustration. “Let him through. Let him through clean.” A pause, then Spurr’s voice again, lower this time but still clear in the quiet desert afternoon and in the heavy silence welling up from below. “We’re gonna let him and the senorita go.”

  Wilson stared up at Cuno. His face was like a raw block of copper with wooly tufts of silver-gray sideburns and a waterfall mustache and goatee. Slowly, he rose and held his Spencer carbine across the thighs of his blue wool trousers with the yellow stripe tumbling down the outside legs.

  “All right,” Cuno heard him say with the same grim note of frustration he’d heard in Spurr’s voice. “Stand down, gentlemen. Uncock your rifles, hold them down.” His chest rose sharply. “We’ll let them pass.”

  There were ten or twelve men in the rocks around him, forming a semicircle around the area where the trail dropped down the ridge to the gravelly floor of a wash littered with driftwood chunks and dead Spanish bayonet leaves left by the recent heavy rains. Young, sun-browned faces, some sporting the down of attempted mustaches and beards, stared out from beneath shading hat brims.

  The young soldiers all lowered their rifles and slackened their shoulders. Most remained crouched behind their covering rocks, peering over the tops or around the sides while two others, one a heavy, older man with sergeant’s stripes on his sleeve, stepped out from behind their own covers, looking incredulously up the ridge at Cuno while holding their rifles straight down along their right legs.

  “Nice and easy, now, Sheriff,” Cuno said, prodding the man with a gentle push on his rifle.

  Mason held his own reins in his hands. Now, lowering the reins before him while sitting straight-backed and tense in his saddle, he tapped his heels against his pinto’s ribs and started off down the trail. Cuno put Renegade down the slope, staying close enough to Mason, riding just off the man’s left stirrup, in fact, to keep the Winchester barrel snugged against the back of the man’s neck.

  Cuno could hear Camilla’s horse’s slow hoof thuds behind him, following about five yards back. As Cuno rode, swaying easily in his saddle, he raked his gaze around the soldiers below and then to Spurr, whose craggy, chestnut face he could see peering over the top of a rock about fifty yards east along the rim of the mesa.

  Renegade dropped gradually down the gentle grade, Cuno leaning slightly back in the saddle but keeping his right arm fully extended with the Winchester, holding the rope in the same hand against the rifle’s neck. His arm was getting tired, but it kept him distracted from the continuing burn in his left forearm, a little worse now with all the tramping around.

  Sweat trickled down his back. He was relatively sure the soldiers wouldn’t disobey Spurr’s orders, but there was no telling with raw recruits, which was what several of the young soldiers appeared to be. He’d be glad to get clear, though he had little doubt the soldiers and Spurr would follow him clear to the border. What would he do with Mason?

  Kill him?

  The man deserved nothing less. Cuno had already killed one innocent lawman, and Mason wasn’t really all that innocent, after all. Besides, if he was as close to the border as he thought he was, he could kill Mason and hightail it with Camilla on down into the cool, blue Mexican mountains and never be seen or heard from again, his bills collected.

  He and the girl could live the rest of their lives quite comfortably with the money in the sack dangling from her saddle horn.

  He followed Mason onto the second switchback in the trail. Down, down they dropped until they bottomed out on the gravelly wash. The sergeant, who had a knotted white scar on his blunt chin, regarded Cuno stoically, a nerve in his cheek fluttering along his jawline. Cuno pinched his hat to the man.

  “Through there,” he told Mason, nodding toward a gap between two mounds of granite-laced limestone. A well-trammeled trail lay there, between clumps of brown bromegrass and jimsonweed, angling south down a narrower wash intersecting with the main one. A soldier stood to the left of the gap, sort of tucked into the rocks there. He stared defiantly up at Cuno, freckles sprayed across his deep red cheeks, a strip of snow-white skin showing just beneath his hat band.

  He held his rifle up across his chest, and he was flexing his right hand around the Spencer’s neck.

  Cuno kept his eyes on him, and as he and Mason approached the lad, the private’s taut cheeks slackened. He slowly lowered his rifle to his side and slid his blue gaze away.

  Cuno could hear Camilla’s horse plodding along behind him.

  A horse whinnied shrilly. Cuno jerked with a start and drew back on Renegade’s reins. Wincing and canting his head forward, away from the rifle barrel, Mason drew his own horse to a stop. There was another whinny, nearer and shriller, and he whipped his head around to see Camilla’s chestnut shaking its head as it sent the last notes of the scream careening toward the mesa ridge behind them.

  The chestnut tried to rear. Camilla cursed and held the reins taut, keeping the horse’s forelegs on the ground while it snorted and blew.

  Cuno’s heart raced. He looked around to see what had startled the chestnut.

  Then he saw the soldiers’ horses tied to a picket line off the right side of the trail, in an alcove of sorts amongst the rocks. A rangy bay stood sideways to the trail, regarding Cuno and the others curiously, its bright eyes white-ringed.

  “Shhh,” Camilla told the chestnut, leaning forward to run a calming hand across the horse’s left wither. “It’s all right. He’s just curious—that’s all.”

  Cuno glanced around at the soldiers. He winced slightly at the pain in his right arm but kept the Winchester snugged taut against the sheriff’s head. When he saw that none of the soldiers appeared to be raising a weapon, he put his head forward once more.

  Mason had turned his own head sideways, looking back at Cuno. Side teeth shone beneath his slightly upturned lip. Fear shone in the sheriff’s eyes.

  Feeling a dull satisfaction, his heart slowing, Cuno said, “Ahead, Sheriff. Nice an’ slow . . .”

  Mason touched his heels to the pinto’s flanks. Cuno did likewise to Renegade’s flanks, and the three continued on up the draw, Cuno glancing back to see the wash dwindling behind Camilla, boulders crowding into his view from both sides, the soldiers walking out away from the rocks now to track the outlaws with their baleful gazes. The trail angled around a l
arge chunk of sandstone and mica-flecked shale shouldering into the canyon from the left, and the soldiers and the main wash were out of sight.

  Only the mesa loomed, glowing dark copper now as the sun continued angling westward.

  The trail continued angling on up the draw, the walls of which lowered gradually until the canyon leveled out on a broad flat peppered with more sage, catclaw, and gnarled cedars. Here, Cuno finally removed his Winchester from Mason’s neck, but kept the noose on the man. They all three broke into a gallop and held the hard, ground-consuming pace until they stopped to rest their horses at a spring lined with rocks and small willows.

  Cuno scouted the area on foot. The northern distance stretching back toward the mesa was clear. The Diamondback range humped up beyond the mesa—rocky and pink and striped with salmon.

  Cuno looked around with his field glasses. No, nothing out there. Even the breeze had died. But he knew Spurr was there. Somewhere. The old marshal was keeping pace. Bad ticker and all. The mossyhorned bastard was not accustomed to losing, would not give up the chase until Cuno and Camilla had reached the border.

  “Get over here, Mason,” he said as he headed back to the spring.

  Camilla and the sheriff were sitting with their backs against a low, stone shelf on the far side of the spring. Camilla’s rifle lay across her thighs, the barrel angled toward the sheriff, who sat with his hands tied behind his back, the noose still circling his neck. The bloodstain on his lower left side had grown. He and Camilla were both looking at Cuno.

  “What for?”

  “I said get over here.”

  The sheriff looked at Camilla. She kept her dark eyes on Cuno.

  “I won’t tell you again,” Cuno warned.

  Mason heaved himself to his feet and tramped heavy-footed over to where Cuno stood on the other side of the spring. He was breathing hard and sweating, his shirt basted against his chest and shoulders. He grunted softly, painfully, against the wound that had opened in his side.