He raised the field glasses and, adjusting the focus, brought the dozen or so riders up in the single sphere of magnification. The group was trotting across the gently sloping shoulder of a pine-capped bluff, following the trail Cuno had been following. They were angling down toward the stream where Cuno had watered the mules and his prisoners only an hour ago.
Cuno’s forehead ridged as he held the glasses on the motley, bearded group in shirtsleeves and chaps, fur coats tied over bedrolls behind their cantles. Rifles jutted from saddle boots, and pistols and knives bristled about the men’s hips and torsos.
The lead rider was a big, blocky chunk of flesh in red-and-black-checked trousers, and with long, sandy hair dancing about sloping shoulders from beneath the brim of a brown bowler hat trimmed with a silver-studded band.
Bandoliers crossed his broad chest, atop a shabby linsey tunic. Two big, cream-gripped pistols jutted from holsters on his hips, one in the cross-draw position. A broad knife was sheathed under his shoulder, the handle jutting up from the V of his cartridge belts.
As he approached the stream, the others following in a ragged line, a sun ray speared from the water to flash off one of the riders’ silver-roweled spurs. Oldenberg and the others leaned out from their saddles, scrutinizing the ground around them.
“Found my trail, did ya?”
Cuno chewed his lip as he stared through the binoculars at the group of well-armed desperadoes looking around carefully as they swung down from their saddles to slip their bits to let their mounts drink. A couple loosened saddle cinches; several stared up the trail toward where Cuno hunkered atop the ridge.
He hooded his hands over the lenses to prevent sun flashes.
Finally, he lowered the glasses and turned to look down the slope he’d climbed, toward the wagon concealed in the pines on the other side of the valley. His mind shuffled through his options, few as they were.
Obviously, he couldn’t outrun the gang in the wagon. He’d have to outmaneuver them.
He crawled back away from the ridge crest, doffed his hat, and climbed to his feet. Holding the Winchester low in his right hand, he jogged back down the ridge, returned the binoculars to the saddlebags, swung onto Renegade’s back, and put the horse down the grassy slope through the pines.
“What’d you see, kid?” Blackburn asked as Cuno approached the wagon. “The devil’s hounds, maybe, huh?”
“The devil’s hounds,” Colorado Bob said, sitting against the cage, one knee drawn up, a self-satisfied smile on his face. “They’re an evil lot of demons. Have no mercy whatsoever. Hell, when they get ahold o’ you, you’re gonna be wailin’ for your dear momma.”
Simms chuckled as he stared at Cuno, his mouth a knife slash straight across his lower face. “They’re back there, ain’t they? You seen ’em. I can read it in your eyes, Widow Maker.”
Simms laughed as Cuno swung down from Renegade and tied the stallion to the wagon’s tailgate. Simms threw his head back on his shoulders and loosed a coyote-like howl.
“Come on, Boss!” he shouted as the howl echoed around the valley and set blackbirds to cawing angrily. “Come and join the party, Oldenberg. We’re over here!”
He threw his back against the cage and clapped his hands.
“Go ahead,” Cuno grunted as he climbed into the wagon. “Shout yourself hoarse.”
Oldenberg couldn’t hear the man from this distance and over the high western ridge. Besides, the wagon itself made more of a racket than all four prisoners could lift at the same time. Cuno had to stay out of hearing range or prepare to fight a dozen seasoned killers.
Unwrapping the reins from the brake handle, Cuno glanced across the stream, looked back at the brake handle, then looked across the stream again. A wagon was coming along through the adjacent canyon, a half mile away and closing on the creek a hundred yards downstream from Cuno.
A deep frown cut across Cuno’s forehead as he studied it—a beat-up-looking ore wagon drawn by a beefy, black mule and driven by a lean gent in blue jeans and a steeple-crowned sombrero. From this angle it was hard to tell, but Cuno thought he could make out a cream-colored line de marking a trail running before, behind, and below the churning wheels.
“Hay-ah!”
With a savage flick of the reins, he put the mules ahead and into the stream, the water splashing up along the rims. The wagon barked and clattered over the rocks. It bounced violently as the mules drew it up the low, opposite bank.
Water dripped from the mules’ hocks as they continued angling across the sloping meadow, on an interception course with the ore wagon. Cuno could see the trail clearly now, jogging back away from the ore wagon and disappearing into aspens where the valley’s walls steepened and drew together, forming a rocky gorge.
As the jail wagon closed on the ore wagon, the driver pulled back on his reins, then, holding the ribbons in one hand, reached stiffly beneath the seat for an old Spencer repeater with a weathered-gray stock. He held the rifle across his lap as he sat the stopped wagon, scowling toward Cuno, lines spoking his wary, deep-set eyes.
“Afternoon.” Cuno drew the jail wagon up beside the ore wagon, and glanced again at the two-track trail disappearing into the wooded gorge. “This trail lead anywhere?”
The gaunt, bearded gent in the ore wagon tipped his head this way and that to inspect the prisoners sullenly sitting the cage behind Cuno. Distracted by the peculiar-looking contraption hauling the four obvious cutthroats, he said, “Depends on what ya call anywhere. Say, what you got there, anyways?”
“Anywhere up yonder I might find some saddle horses and another trail to Crow Feather?”
“What’s wrong with the one you just left?”
“Snake-ridden.”
The man shuttled his dark, knowing gaze back to Cuno. “Friends of their’n?”
Cuno nodded.
The old man looked back over his right shoulder. “Trail here rises up to Petersburg. Mine camp. Vein done petered out two years ago, but there’s a hotel-saloon and a few hard-rock Rooshians holdin’ on. Don’t know about saddle hosses. I broke them rocks up to the gorge there till a few months ago. Now I cut and haul wood for them too busy searching for El Dorado.”
“The trail circle back to the one leadin’ to Crow Feather?”
“In a long hogleg through rough country.” The woodcutter frowned at the jail wagon. “Too rough for that devil’s contraption.”
“Obliged.”
Cuno shook the ribbons over the mules’ backs. The wagon pulled up onto the narrow trace. As the mules turned eastward, Cuno glanced behind him, at the woodcutter still staring at him from over the bed of his sawdust-and-bark-littered ore wagon.
“If you run into a herd of hard cases lookin’ for me, I’d appreciate it if you hadn’t seen hide nor hair . . .”
The woodcutter pinched his own hat, and ran a sleeve across his mouth. “In Petersburg, beware of Tolstoy’s whiskey. Turn ya blind as an old Injun mule!” He swung forward in his seat, shaking his reins and continuing west toward the stream crossing.
As the woodcutter pulled away, Cuno dropped his gaze to the jail cage rattling along behind him as the iron-shod wheels jounced through the chuckholes. Fuego sat with his back to him. The other three lounged against the other three walls, sneers on their lips and in their hard, belligerent eyes.
“Won’t work,” Colorado Bob said, poking at a hole in the knee of his black-and-gray-striped trousers. “You got the devil’s hounds on your heels, boy, and there ain’t no shakin’ ’em short of turnin’ us loose and hightailin’ fer the tall and uncut!”
Cuno nodded. “ ’Preciate the advice, Bob. Now kindly close your loadin’ gate ’fore I blow your ears off.”
The sneering light left Colorado Bob’s evil gaze as the lines in his broad, mottled forehead planed out, and his nostrils wrinkled indignantly. Cuno snorted.
He cozied to this situation no more than his prisoners did. But he kept remembering Landers’s proud boasts about always finishing his jail-wagon routes.
Cuno vowed he’d finish this one for him, too, or go down in a hail of whistling lead.
The trail rose, fell, and snaked through one deep ravine after another. The pine-choked slopes often came right down to the trail, while at other times grassy meadows rose gently off to both sides before pitching sharply to high rock walls.
Cuno could tell they were gradually climbing, for his own lungs seemed to shrink as the air grew thinner, and the mules blew more often, shaking their heads indignantly. As much to rest the mules as to let the prisoners drink and tend nature, he pulled off the trace, in a broad horseshoe of a frothy creek rumbling over boulders at the base of a high granite wall.
Unhitching the mules, he led them and Renegade down to where the water curled back in a relatively placid pool. While the beasts drank and rolled, Cuno opened the cage and ushered the four prisoners out of the wagon by pistol point.
“You got five minutes,” he said, casting an edgy glance back along the canyon toward the main trail they’d left two and a half hours ago. If Oldenberg savvied his detour, he and his dozen cutthroats would be heading this way soon.
“Don’t know how you boys feel,” Blackburn said as he and the others shuffled down the grassy slope in their leg irons, holding their cuffed hands down low before them, “but when Oldenberg catches up to us, I’m gonna take that kid’s .45 and shove it up his ass.”
The broad-faced redhead, Simms, snorted. “Would ya allow me the honor of pullin’ the trigger?”
Cuno rammed his Colt into the man’s back, shoving him forward.
The next second slowed to half a minute inside Cuno’s head as Fuego, shuffling along to the right of Simms, wheeled suddenly. The half-breed gritted his teeth, jutted his jaws, and raised a big, red fist from which the manacle chain hung slack. One of the links was twisted where the man had somehow opened it.
Cuno watched the fist grow to the size of a russet Indian squash in front of him. He watched the deep, grime-encrusted lines around the man’s scarred fingers widen until the fist plowed knuckle-first into his face and set a herd of bull moose bugling inside his head.
12
“YAHH!” THE HALF-BREED bellowed as Cuno’s head jounced back on his shoulders.
Beyond his fluttering eyes, the pine tops wavered.
“Yahh!”
Fuego grunted again as, again, he slammed the hammer-like fist into Cuno’s left cheekbone.
The first blow had rocked him back but he’d been setting his heels beneath him when the second one, twice as powerful as the first and delivered with even more fury, had smashed him straight back again. Try as he might to set his boots, he flew a good half a foot in the air.
Both his arms whipped up and, as he flew straight back up the grassy, brushy slope, he saw his Colt fly high above his head, flashing in the sunlight against the spruce-green pines as it careened back in the direction of the wagon.
He hit the slope on his back, his right cheek screaming and his head feeling like an exposed nerve on a blacksmith’s anvil, laid open by a stout steel hammer. Vaguely, he heard his revolver thump into the grass a good twenty feet upslope. Downslope, he heard the other prisoners yelling excitedly above the clanking of their cuffs and leg irons.
Blinking his blurry eyes, he stared straight up at the near-cloudless sky. The half-breed’s enraged, wide-eyed countenance filled the field of his vision as the man, mewling like an enraged bull bison, flung his arms straight out in front of him and bolted off his heels.
Fuego’s leather hat flew off his head, exposing the grisly pate above the wide fold of his bandanna and the blood-encrusted right ear. He landed on Cuno’s chest. The air whooshed out of Cuno’s lungs with the sound of a sudden, short-lived cyclone.
And then the man had his hands around Cuno’s neck, bobbing his head and drawing his mouth wide with fury, bellowing loudly as he dug his beefy thumbs into Cuno’s throat and instantly pinching off his wind.
Cuno, trained to sport box when he was only twelve years old, reacted instinctively, whipping his stout forearms straight up before him, hands clenched into one bulging, red fist. He rammed the fist up under Fuego’s bulging arms to strike the underside of the man’s chin with a dull clack, evoking an exasperated grunt from the half-breed’s throat.
As Fuego’s head jerked back as if shot through the forehead, Cuno’s hands continued straight up, and he spread his swollen arms until, releasing his hands, he flung both straight out toward his shoulders, ripping the half-breed’s hands from his throat.
As the man’s arms flew out to his sides, as though he were trying to take flight, his chin dropped. Blood spurted from his mouth to spray against Cuno’s face, and two bloody, broken teeth dribbled over Fuego’s lower lip.
At nearly the same instant, bellowing himself now like an enraged puma, Cuno kicked his boots straight up in the air, levering his head off the turf and using the momentum to propel his clenched right fist in a slight arc up from his shoulder.
It slammed into Fuego’s face with a solid, jaw-clattering smack. Fuego’s head tipped sideways, blood continuing to froth from his lips. As Fuego’s head tipped back the other way, Cuno hammered it again.
“Gnah!”
the half-breed cried as he rolled off Cuno’s left hip.
Cuno turned over, got his boots beneath him, and in spite of his pounding head and blurred vision, bolted to his feet. The other three prisoners, having sprung toward him and gotten tripped up by the chains connecting them, were sprawled in a grunting, cursing heap fifteen feet down slope.
“Get up, breed!” Blackburn shouted. “Get up! Get
up
!”
Fuego gained his knees, shouting, “You die, blondie!”
Cuno rammed the toe of his right boot into the man’s ribs. Fuego screamed and dropped to a shoulder. In half a second, he was up again, grabbing Cuno’s right boot as the freighter swung it forward again. Cuno flew up and sideways, hit the ground on his shoulder and hip with a snarling grunt.