Cuno swallowed against the nausea churning in his belly and threatening to jettison bile into his throat. The desert swayed around him. His hands inside his gloves were as soaked as if he'd dunked them in a rain barrel. Sweat dribbled down his forehead and into his eyes, stinging.
“Sorry, amigo.”
He pressed the rifle's butt hard against his shoulder and lined up the sights on the dandy's forehead. He drew his right index finger taut against the eyelash trigger. He swallowed, paused to brush sweat from his right brow, then lined up the sights once more.
Why the hell was this so hard? He'd killed the town marshal of Sand Creek. He'd killed the bounty hunters who'd attacked the brothel. Why was killing one more man, a moneyed dandy who'd likely never give Cuno so much as a passing glance on a city street, so damn hard?
Cuno stared down the rifle barrel at the man, who stared back at him, sobbing and quivering and grinding one heel into the sand as though trying to push himself away from the cold-eyed killer bearing down on him. The rifle shook. Cuno gritted his teeth and tried to steady it. He'd just gotten it relatively settled when blood suddenly dribbled out from both corners of the dandy's mouth.
He made a choking sound, shoulders jerking, belly convulsing. Then his eyelids fluttered. His eyes rolled back into his head. The tension left his wounded leg, and he sagged back against the desert floor.
He gave a hard sigh. He lay silent and still.
Cuno narrowed an eye at him. Dead?
Keeping his cheek snugged against the Winchester's stock, feeling Mateo de Cava's eyes on him, lifting gooseflesh on the back of his neck, Cuno kicked the man's right foot. The foot jerked and fell still. The man's eyes were halfway open, sightless.
Cuno felt his hands steady. His heart quickened but also lightened with relief that he'd suddenly been relieved of his grisly task. He slid the rifle slightly to the right of the dead dandy's head and squeezed the trigger.
The slug tore up sand and grit, leaving a fist-sized hole. It blew gravel up against the dead man's left ear, peppered his face with red sand.
Cuno lowered the Winchester and ejected the spent cartridge. In the desert silence, the empty casing made a soft chinking sound in the gravel.
As he levered a fresh round into the rifle's breech, he glanced toward Mateo, who stood as he'd been standing before atop the stage. But now the outlaw leader gave a slight, expressionless nod, then turned toward Azuelo, and the two of them bent down to begin removing the chains that secured the strongbox to the stage.
“Hold it right there!”
Cuno frowned at the shouted command that seemed to come from somewhere north of the stage. It was a gravelly voice, an old smoker's voice. As Cuno turned to locate its origin, the man called again: “Any of you sons o' bitches so much as twitches, I'll pump you so full o' lead you'll be rattlin' when you take that long walk through the smokin' gates!”
Silence.
Cuno froze, holding the Winchester between his chest and his belly. He moved only his eyes until he'd picked out the two rifles protruding from the rocks at the top of the mound that the three Mexican desperadoes had tumbled onto the trail to stop the stage.
His heart had slowed after the dandy had died without Cuno's having to finish him, but now it thudded again in his ears. He turned his head toward the stage. The rest of the gang was looking toward the rifles, with Mateo and Azuelo still on their hands and knees atop the coach. Inside, the girl was crying more softly now.
“Now that we're all relaxed,” the raspy voice shouted from the rocks, “go ahead and drop your guns and knivesâevery last oneânice and slow-like!”
Turning back toward the rifles, Cuno's heart beat faster. The rifles were aimed toward the men and Camilla gathered around the stage. There was a chance the two lawmenâwho else could the riflemen be but Spurr and Sheriff Mason?âcould not see him. The brush and rocks were thick between Cuno and the rubble pile.
His heart beat faster, impulses rippling up and down his spine and making his fingers tingle. He licked his lips, unable to wet them. Suddenly, he raised the Winchester to his shoulder and began ripping out one shot after another.
The slugs hammered the rocks around the rifles, and then the rifles were pulled out of sight behind the rocks but not before both maws puffed smoke and geysered burned-orange fire. Cuno kept shooting to pin the two men down. Beneath the thunder of his leaping rifle, he heard Mateo shout. Camilla shouted then, as well, and then out the corner of his left eye, Cuno saw the gang members jerking to life and bringing their rifles to their shoulders.
Their return fire joined Cuno's own thunder a couple of seconds before the burly young freighter's firing pin dropped on an empty chamber. Cuno lowered the gun and began sprinting toward the stage. He leapt sage shrubs and rocks, breathing hard, hardly aware of the burning pain in his snakebit arm.
Ahead, Mateo and Azuelo rolled the strongbox off the stage roof just as a slug fired from the rubble pile ripped into the lip of the coach's roof. At the same time, Camilla, Skinner, and the others were all down on their knees in various positions around the stage, hammering the rubble pile with return fire, keeping the lawmen pinned down long enough for the gang to secure the strongbox and fog the trail southward. The gang's horses stood ground-reined around the stage's rear, but several were fiddlefooting as though about to run from the gunfire.
As Cuno leapt a last boulder and landed flat-footed on the trail, Mateo shouted something in Spanish. The others fired and levered their rifles as they scrambled for cover on either side of the trail around the stage.
Franco Nervo lowered his rifle and ran for one of the horses. Cuno dropped to one knee behind a barrel cactus, and began frantically thumbing shells from his cartridge belt and into his still-smoking Winchester.
As he did, he cast quick glances around the cactus toward the top of the rubble pile. Occasionally, one of the two lawmen managed to return a shot, but the gang was effectively keeping them pinned down. When Nervo was leading a dapple gray by its bridle back toward the carriage, a rifle poked out from the rocks atop the rubble pile.
Most of the gang members had emptied their weapons. Cuno slipped his ninth cartridge into his Winchester, racked the shell, raised the rifle to his shoulders, took quick aim, and fired.
His bullet ricocheted off the lawman's rifle barrel with a ripping clang, tearing up rock dust. Cuno heard the old marshal bellow a curse before pulling his rifle back into the little hole he was hunkered in. Camilla, still thumbing fresh shells into her carbine's loading gate, glanced over her shoulder at Cuno, one eyebrow arched.
Meanwhile, Nervo ran the dapple gray back to where Mateo and Azuelo were arranging ropes around it. Despite Cuno and the other gang members' return fire, one of the lawmen snapped off a shot from the rubble pile.
Nervo screamed.
Cuno turned to see the short man lunge forward as blood leapt from the back of his leather jacket between his shoulder blades. Mateo cast a wild look at Cuno, shouting something in Spanish that Cuno took to be a command to keep up the covering fire while the outlaw leader and Azuelo got the money out of the strongbox and secured on the dapple gray.
“What the hell you think I'm doin', goddamnit?” Cuno bit out under his breath as he snapped off another shot at the rubble pile, behind which both lawmen were now hunkered out of sight.
When after another two minutes of steady fire neither lawman showed a rifle, Cuno and the others held their fire.
Smoke wafted. The stage horses whinnied and stomped, wanting to run.
Nervo lay belly down in the middle of the trail a few yards from where Mateo now swung a bulging burlap sack over the pommel of the dapple gray's saddle. Azuelo had his head and shoulders inside the stage, and a girl screamed, “No! Leave me be! Leave me be, you greaser bastard!” Her voice broke on that last, and the carriage lurched violently, as though she'd tried to give her attacker a savage kick.
“Greaser bastard, huh?” Azuelo's indignant voice was muffled by the inside of the coach, which jostled and squawked on its thoroughbraces as he apparently tried to pull the female occupant out the front door.
Cuno looked at Mateo, who was tying the sack to the dapple's saddle horn with a long rope. Keeping an eye on the ominously silent rubble pile, he ran over to the dapple gray and spoke to Mateo standing on the other side of the horse.
“What the hell's going on?” He jerked his chin at the stage, out the front door of which Azuelo was wrestling a kicking, screaming blond in a spruce-green riding basque. “We're only here for the money, right?”
“That's all we were here for,” Mateo snapped back.
He jerked his own chin to indicate the desert behind Cuno. Cuno swung around, casting his gaze westward. He bunched his cheeks when he saw the dark group of riders barreling toward him from a quarter mile away and closing at a hard gallop. Riding in a tight formation, they wore blue or tan hats and blue tunics, gold buttons flashing in the sunlight.
Cuno muttered, “Soldiers?”
He remembered what the old marshal had said about Mason riding out to the cavalry outpost on Hackberry Creek, and he cursed under his breath. Maybe the old mossyhorn hadn't been lying.
Behind him the blond girl wailed.
“Security,” Mateo said with a hard grin. “We're gonna need security, amigo.”
30
MATEO TOOK THE girl away from Azuelo and gave her a vicious slap with the back of his hand. She fell silent and sagged in the outlaw leader's arms.
As he threw her onto the back of his black Arabian stallion, Cuno turned to stare again at the group of soldiers hammering toward the trail from the east, a guidon whipping in the breeze above the soldiers' blue- and tan-hatted heads.
They were within three hundred yards now and closing fast, the thuds of their horses gradually growing louder, building toward a rumble.
“Mateo!” Camilla shouted, thrusting an arm out toward the soldiers, whom she'd just now seen after raking her gaze from the rubble pile behind which the two lawmen were still hunkered down out of sight.
“Si, si, mi hermana hermosa!”
Mateo swung up onto his horse's back while Azuelo hopped around on one foot, trying to toe the left stirrup of his dapple gray, the money bag flopping down the mount's right wither. “Perhaps, if you're done fooling around here, we'd best head to Mexico finally, huh?”
The outlaw leader laughed and buried his spurs into the black's scarred flanks. The stallion leapt with a shrill whinny off its rear hooves and galloped south along the powdery stage trail, Azuelo following suit on the dapple gray.
Camilla cursed in Spanish, then backed away from her covering boulder, keeping her eyes on the rubble pile. Skinner, Haines, and Calderon, who'd been hunkered in the brush near the stage's team, all whipped around and made dashes toward their jittery mounts, casting cautious looks back toward the rubble pile as well as at the oncoming soldiers.
Cuno grabbed Renegade's reins as well as the reins of Camilla's chestnut. Skinner sidled up to the younger man as Cuno pulled his horse up close to him and turned the stirrup out.
“Where the hell you suppose them blue-bellies came from?”
“How the hell should I know?”
Cuno heard the defensiveness in his tone and felt his cheeks warm. Skinner cast him a quick, narrow-eyed glance as he swung up onto the back of his buckskin. Cuno turned away from the man and tossed Camilla her reins, which she caught one-handed and on the run, not looking at him.
Wondering what she was angry about but too concerned about the soldiers as well as the lawmen to dwell on it, Cuno swung up onto Renegade's back. He was about to boot the horse on up the trail when two rifles barked nearly simultaneously behind him. Enrique Calderon was blown sideways off his saddle and directly into Renegade's path, the wound in his head spewing goo in a long, thin line across the trail.
The paint reared with a start, giving a raucous whinny.
As Calderon's horse whipped around and into Renegade, nearly knocking Cuno from his saddle, Cuno glanced toward the rubble pile, a stone dropping in his gut when he saw the two lawmenâthe man called Spurr as well as Dusty Masonâdashing out from the far eastern edge of the pile and into the scrub, firing their Winchesters on the run and from their hips.
“Mierda!”
Camilla cried, propping her carbine on her left forearm and squeezing off a shot that sent Mason diving for cover behind a half-buried rock.
The old marshal had dropped to a knee and was levering his Winchester. As he tried to get Renegade back under rein, Cuno heard the bullets screeching over and around him, several hammering the rocks and brush on the opposite side of the trail.
Skinner gave a yowl and thrust his head forward, as though one of the slugs had nipped the back of his neck, then kicked his piebald into a lunging gallop on up the trail.
“Get movingâI'll cover you!” Cuno yelled at Camilla as she racked another shell into her Winchester's breech, then fired another shot at the old lawman. The chestnut was already bounding forward, and her slug merely clipped a greasewood branch behind the man.
Spurr didn't so much as flinch but triggered two more quick rounds, evoking a yell from Haines, whose own horse had thrown him when the lead had started flying again. As Camilla hammered up the trail, casting an anxious glance behind at Cuno, Cuno jerked back hard on Renegade's reins and triggered a round at Spurr one-handed.
“Mount up!” he shouted at Haines.
Haines clutched his cream's reins in one hand and staggered toward the horse's stirrup. Cuno racked a fresh round and glanced at the man, about to shout at him again. But then he saw the blood on the outlaw's face. He appeared to have been shot through both cheeks. Blood oozed in a glistening, frothy torrent from between his grimacing lips.