Colorado Bob scrambled to his feet, then fell again, cursing, as the chain drew taut between himself and Blackburn. “Kill him, breed!” he shouted, chest down on the ground but raising his head and slitting his yellow Nordic eyes with exasperation. “Pluck his eyes out!”
Fuego bolted off his heels and hurled his big frame—he probably had a good four inches on Cuno though Cuno was more compactly and thickly built—into him as he again tried to rise. Cuno flew back, and as the back of his head hit the ground, causing two half-breeds to swim in and out of his blurring vision, he pivoted up and left.
Fuego had cocked his arm for a vicious punch, but the fist glanced off Cuno’s left temple as the half-breed bellowed savagely and flew up and over Cuno’s shoulder. Gritting his teeth, pent-up rage boiling up from deep inside him, Cuno scrambled onto his feet.
Clenching his fists, he moved on the half-breed like a bear closing on certain prey. His jaws appeared about to burst through his red-mottled face, and his blue eyes shone with a killing fire.
Fuego had just gained his knees and lifted his head when Cuno swung a right cross into the man’s stout jaw. As the half-breed jerked sideways, Cuno pivoted from the hips and put his entire 180 pounds into his left fist, which he swung from his thigh and rammed, thumb up, against the half-breed’s bullet-torn ear.
Fuego’s head jerked back in the other direction. His eyes snapped even wider than before, and his face turned nearly as white as that of a Scandinavian princess rarely exposed to the sun.
“Nnnghhh,”
Fuego grunted, his features slackening as his gaze drifted off, a dull haze of misery dropping over his eyes.
Blood gushed from the ragged lower edge of his ear, dribbling down his neck and under his collarless calico shirt.
Cuno pivoted once more and rammed his left fist again into the man’s ear.
Fuego’s chin snapped up, and he looked as though he’d been hit with frigid snowmelt, eyes and mouth snapping wide once more.
As he began to fall to his left, Cuno grabbed the front of his shirt and pounded another left against Fuego’s ear. Holding the man’s slack body before him, Cuno hammered the ear again and again, hearing his own grunts rake out through gritted teeth, barely audible above the solid smacks of his knuckles pounding the half-breed’s hideous ear like the regular blows of a blacksmith’s hammer.
Wham! Wham! Wham! Wham!
Fuego’s chin dropped to his chest in spasm-like jerks, shoulders slumping, a soft mewling issuing from his bloody lips.
Cuno released the man’s shirt, and the half-breed fell over sideways, hitting the ground like a fifty-pound sack of cracked corn. He lay on his side, legs bent, unmoving.
Suddenly remembering the other prisoners, Cuno wheeled and raised his fists as though for another onslaught. His broad chest rose and fell sharply, his sweat-soaked tunic clinging to his torso like a second skin, his neckerchief turned backward and hanging down behind his neck.
The three other prisoners lay six feet away, immobilized by the chains connecting them. Blackburn was on his hands and knees. Simms was on his side. Colorado Bob was on his butt, one arm thrown ahead toward Blackburn’s, the links connecting them drawn taut.
All three stared up the slope at Cuno, snarling, Blackburn muttering sharp curses, Simms merely wagging his head with the fateful chagrin of a man who’d missed his train.
“Ah, fer Pete’s sake!” Blackburn grunted. “Shit! Shit! Shit!”
Cuno looked at the chain trailing from Fuego’s ankle. Somehow the half-breed had pried a manacle link loose as well as a cuff link. Cuno should have expected that. Turning upslope, he grabbed his .45. Mopping sweat from his brow with his forearm, he swung the gun toward the wagon. “Back inside.”
“I gotta take a piss,” said Colorado Bob.
“Simms’ll show you how to do it through the bars.”
Cuno cocked the Colt and spread his feet. The rage hadn’t died in him yet. His boiling blood still churned. He had to make a conscious effort not to draw his finger back against the .45’s trigger and blow them all back to the demon that had spawned them.
“Inside. Pronto. Unless you want some o’ what ole Half-Ear got.”
When Cuno had the three gang members back in the cage, he strode downslope to where Fuego lay sprawled, unconscious and groaning like a dog squashed by a lumber dray. A few kicks drew the half-breed back to consciousness, and a few more got him crawling back up the slope to the jail wagon, cursing and snarling like a wolf in a leg trap.
The man was as white as Dakota snow and shaking like a leaf in a Texas windstorm, but the threat of more abuse to his badly shredded ear compelled him to crawl back up through the open cage door on his own.
While the others watched grimly, he crabbed to the far end of the wagon, where he reclined on a shoulder and, with shaking hands, removed his already bloody kerchief from around his neck and pressed it to his ear. Groaning deep in his throat, he spread his bloody lips back from his bloody, gapped teeth in a tortured wince.
“Now, then . . .”
Cuno slammed and padlocked the door, then tramped out to fetch the mules and Renegade dining on the rich bluestem growing along the roiling stream. Cuno cursed as he probed his face with a thumb. His jaw and cheek ached fiercely, and a small heart hammered inside his head, but he didn’t think anything was broken.
His vision was still semi-blurred, but all in all, he was damn lucky to have come out of the brawl intact. The look in Fuego’s eyes had warned him such a move was coming, and he should have been ready for it. You had to expect the unexpected from yellow-toothed, child-killing demons like the half-breed.
Any more carelessness, and Cuno would be snuggling with snakes at the bottom of a deep ravine.
When he had the mules hitched and Renegade tied to the back of the wagon, he mounted the driver’s box and cast a long, cautious glance behind him. Relieved not to see twelve green-broke killers galloping up his back trail, he shook the reins over the mules and resumed his trek toward the fir-studded slopes of the eastern Mexicans.
If he could have seen through the hills and forests behind him, he would have seen the brown mass of thirteen riders, led by the beefy Karl Oldenberg, galloping along the north-south trail Cuno had left two hours ago.
As the group approached the fork in the trail, on the west side of Spring Creek, they paused, dust billowing around them, horses stomping and chewing bridle bits as the men turned this way and that, looking around and conferring.
A few dug around in shirt or duster pockets for tobacco sacks and leaned back in their saddles, building smokes.
A few minutes later, while one of the riders was still hunched forward, lighting his hastily rolled quirley, the mass continued straight along the trail toward Crow Feather, while four riders branched eastward, splashing along the stream and putting their sweaty mounts into long strides along the trail to Petersburg.
13
THE LEANING WOODEN sign along the road read in burned black letters: PETERSBURG, WYO TERR—POP 223. A line carved with a dull knife had been drawn through the 223, and above it had been scrawled with the same knife—4.
From what Cuno could see, sitting on the wooded, rocky hillside above a deep, dark gorge, the town—if even a town remained aside from a few abandoned log shacks huddled in the rocks and firs of the steep slopes rising and falling around him—was deserted. Crows cawed in the gorge, the cries sheathed in the steady murmur of a late-year stream tumbling down a steep, boulder-lined bed.
In the distance, thunder rumbled.
Cuno looked up at the sky, which was plum-colored in the north. The mass of bruised, ragged-edged clouds was slowly moving toward him.
He’d reached the town, or what remained of it, just in time. It was monsoon season in the high country, and while the storms rarely lasted longer than a half hour or so, the amount of moisture and lightning they could hammer earthward, and the amount of wind they could kick up, was often deadly.
Such a tempest could drown you, fry you, or blow you into the next territory.
You didn’t want to experience it without a roof over your head if you could help it. And the iron bars of the jail wagon would attract lightning like a cougar to a three-legged rabbit. Cuno had to snort at the thought of his problem being solved by all four of his prisoners fried to cinders with one quick witch’s fork of a lightning strike, turning the wagon into a blue-white ball of howling electricity.
Problem was, he’d be turned into a hush puppy, as well.
Intending to locate a barn in which he could shelter himself and the wagon, he urged the mules on down the curving slope pocked with rocks, roots, and boulders heaving up from below. The trail dropped steeply and, standing with one foot braced against the dashboard and holding the reins taut, he checked the skittery mules back as more thunder rumbled like crashing boulders and a pitchfork of bright white lightning flicked over the bald crags looming on the north side of the gorge.
As the wagon gained the gorge’s bottom, dilapidated log shacks shoved up on both sides of the narrow trail. Over rough plank bridges, the trace twisted back and forth across a deep creek bed through which water gurgled and troughed over rocks and mossy shelves.
Thunder continued to rumble, growing louder as the mass of purple clouds approached. The mules brayed and shook their heads. Behind the wagon, Renegade whinnied.
Someone rapped angrily on the cage’s bars. “Stop this heap before we’re all toasted blacker’n Bob’s soul!” Blackburn yelled.
Cuno kept the mules moving along the trail, swinging his head from side to side as he looked for a stable with a complete roof. Virtually all the shacks appeared to have been abandoned for a good length of time. Birds winged in and out of the glassless, shutterless windows. Porches drooped into the street or the creek bed. Chimney pipes were rusting, shingles were missing from gapped roofs.
Flanking the hovels, corrals and stables were partly dismantled, dilapidated, overgrown, or partly crushed by boulders fallen from the steep, sheer ridges.
At the far edge of town, smoke ribboned from a large fieldstone chimney on the canyon’s right side. Cuno headed toward it, following the street across a gap-boarded bridge and having to hoorah the jittery mules, frightened by the oncoming storm, over the hazardous bridges with the rush of tea-colored water churning through the creek bed.
He pulled up in front of a sprawling, three-story, log, gambrel-roofed affair with a large front porch and real glass windows trimmed in white. Over the porch a large sign announced TOLSTOY’S TAVERN in blocky green letters. Piano and fiddle music emanated from over the batwings, as did the succulent aroma of spicy stew.
“A bar—now you’re talkin’!” Colorado Bob whooped above the rumbling thunder. “Hooch and pussy. Just what a man needs after bein’ locked up in a clatterin’ damn gut wagon for nigh on a week with these smelly curs.”
Cuno wrapped the reins around the brake handle, then leapt off the wagon and, taking another glance at the gunmetal-blue clouds now almost entirely filling the sky over the canyon, took the tavern’s porch steps two at a time. From inside he could hear heavy-heeled boots and thigh-slapping hands keeping time to the jaunty dance tune being played by a scratchy fiddle and an out-of-tune piano.
He pushed through the batwings and poked his hat brim off his forehead, squinting into the heavy-beamed, cavernous room’s deep, smoky shadows.
Several silhouettes were clustered around a piano near the back and around a brown-haired girl in a wine-red dress dancing in a circle with her arms thrown out, skipping and kicking between leaps and quick spins. Such a vigorous, fast-moving step Cuno had never seen. He’d have liked to have seen more if he hadn’t been trying to outrun an angry mountain gale.
As several masculine faces turned toward Cuno and the fiddle and piano music dwindled, the young woman stopped suddenly, her back to Cuno and her long, wavy hair flopping against her slender back. Arms still thrown straight out to both sides, frozen in motion, she looked over her right shoulder toward the front of the room, frowning curiously, her liquid blue eyes glistening in the wan light angling through the windows.
The violin scratched out another note, and then the old man in the black cloth hat and sweeping gray mustache, sitting near the piano player, lowered it. Frosty gray eyes drilled through the shadows at Cuno. “Drink? Eat?”
Before Cuno could reply the girl swung full around to him and began striding forward on red-slippered feet showing beneath the pleats of her billowing dress. She said something in a foreign tongue, which Cuno assumed was Russian.
The old man with the fiddle stretched a smile beneath his mustache, set the fiddle on a table beside him, and leaned back in his chair, digging in the pocket of his duck shirt for a makings sack.
As the girl continued toward Cuno, the husky blond freighter felt a hitch in his chest. The girl’s heart-shaped, blue-eyed face glistened with perspiration, and her red lips spread a bemused, welcoming, faintly curious smile.
In her false eyelashes, lightly applied rouge, and eye-liner, all of which served to accentuate the exoticness of her features rather than to obscure them, she appeared like some wraithlike conjuring from an imaginative young man’s erotic dream. Polished silver rings danced beneath her ears, half concealed by curls of her thick, chestnut hair. The hair continued down to frame an ample bosom only half hidden by the lace edges of her low-cut dress, the wine red of which, relieved by stitched black stars, glistened with a faint metallic sheen.
Outside, the increasing wind moaned. Thunder rumbled, punctuated by a vicious, whiplike crack. A fire snapped and cracked in the large, stone hearth on the room’s far right wall.
The girl moved as she looked, dreamlike, as though she weren’t quite touching the floor. “You’ve probably heard about the whiskey.” Her accent was thick, bespeaking stone huts in snowy glens in an ancient, mysterious world. “How ’bout an ale? My uncle brews it here the way he brewed it at home. We get orders from as far away as Bismarck in Dakota Territory.”