She stood before Cuno, only two feet away, her head canted up toward his. Her teeth were fine and white between the rich, cherry lips, the stream-blue eyes primitively alluring.
Cuno was conscious of his bruised cheek and jaw, both of which he knew were liberally swollen. Remembering his hat, he doffed it quickly and cleared his throat. “I’m lookin’ for a shelter for my wagon.”
Her eyes flicked across his wide, thick shoulders. “Freighter?”
“That’s right.”
“How precious is your cargo?”
“A locked shed would be nice, but any solid roof will do.”
The girl spun on a heel, floated over toward the horseshoe-shaped mahogany bar to Cuno’s left. Propping a foot on the brass rail running along the base of the bar, she leaned across the mahogany and dropped a hand below. She floated back to Cuno holding a ring with two dangling keys in her long-fingered olive hand.
“This is for the lock on a red shed straight across the canyon, behind the green cabin with the falling-in roof. Park your wagon there . . . then come back for ale and stew.” She dropped her chin, and her eyes glistened as she added with a slightly coquettish air, “It is elk, and it is very good.”
She pronounced “good” like “goot.”
She ran her soft, caressing gaze across his swollen cheek and jaw. “And I will find some raw meat for your face.”
Another thunder crack made the whole room leap. Outside, Blackburn shouted something inaudible beneath the groaning wind and the rain beginning to fleck against the saloon’s log walls.
“Obliged,” Cuno said, his voice thick.
He held the gaze of the dark-haired waif smiling smokily up at him for another stretched second before he plucked the keys from her hand and found himself reluctantly turning away and tramping back out through the batwings.
“Come on, goddamnit!” shouted Colorado Bob from the jail cage. “Get us outta here before we’re sent to our rewards in furry cinders!”
He and his two cohorts stood squeezing the bars in their hands, facing the saloon and glaring up at the ragged, angry sky. Fuego was lying on his side, unmoving except for the slow rise and fall of his shoulders, his head toward the partition dividing the cage from the driver’s box.
As a lightning bolt shot out of the northern sky, flashing blue-white and hammering the stony ridge crest, and the accompanying thunder boomed like planets colliding, Cuno bounded down the saloon’s broad steps and circled the skitter-hopping mules. Behind the wagon, Renegade loosed a bugling, angry whinny, his bit jangling as he shook his head.
“Hold on, boy,” Cuno muttered to the horse as he climbed into the driver’s box, released the brake, and started the mules forward.
He hadn’t rolled two feet before the rain started slashing down. The drops were so large they sounded like small-caliber slugs plunking into the wagon and ticking loudly against Cuno’s snugged-down hat, lifting a veritable cacophony in his ears.
By the time he’d pulled the mules past the green cabin that a wooden shingle dangling from a rusty chain identified as a former bakery, Cuno was soaked to the skin. He pulled the wagon into the shed rife with the smell of hay and the barley, malt, and hops fermenting in several large oak casks. Then he unhitched the mules to the rumble of hail hammering the roof over the hayloft. When he’d rubbed the animals down, and watered and hayed them, he checked the jail wagon’s padlock.
“Let us outta here, so we can get out of these wet clothes and get ourselves dry,” Simms pleaded through the bars.
“Like hell,” Cuno chuckled. He had already passed a couple of dry blankets, which he’d found in the stable’s tack room, through the bars. “You try pullin’ what ole Half-Ear did, they’ll be hangin’ you gut shot in Crow Feather.”
“Jesus God!” bellowed Colorado Bob, slumping down against the bars, his wet silver hair plastered against his scalp and shoulders. “The bastard’s gonna leave us in here smellin’ that beer without givin’ us a drop!”
As he and the other two pleaded with Cuno for hooch and dry clothes, Cuno looked between them at Fuego. The half-breed lay back with his head against the cage’s front wall. He’d drawn his bandanna lower and angled it taut across his freshly ruined ear.
One eye was swollen nearly shut, and his lips were crusted with dry blood.
With his stout arms crossed on his chest, he met Cuno’s gaze with a hard one of his own, hardening his jaws and flaring his nostrils. He opened his mouth to speak, but, reconsidering, he closed it again. His brows drew up, the deep lines in his forehead planed out, and his eyes dropped to the wagon’s blood-splattered floor and stayed there.
Cuno gave the padlock another tug, then let it drop against the cage. As the other three prisoners cursed and pounded the bars, Cuno went out, closed and locked the stable door behind him, then, lifting his collar against the driving rain and pea-sized hail that whitened the muddy ground, he jogged back through the brush around an abandoned chicken coop and the bakery and into what remained of the boomtown’s main drag.
The sky now broiled with low, dark clouds, lightning flashed sharply, and thunder set the ground to quivering. Hail and rain javelined out of the sky at a forty-five-degree angle. As Cuno crossed the bridge, he glanced down to see that the creek had already risen a good six inches, bubbling and churning with clay-colored water and floating hail.
He stumbled into the saloon in his wet boots, ice and rain dripping off his hat. The girl was waiting for him with towels draped over her arms, a wistful smile etched on her plump, apple-red lips.
“First thing we need to do is get you out of those wet clothes and into a hot bath.” She laughed.
14
THE GIRL WITH the heart-shaped face and full, red lips gave Cuno a towel, then wheeled and started into the shadows at the back of the room, red pleats swishing about her finely curved hips and long legs. “Right this way, sir.”
Holding the towel stiffly, puzzled and mesmerized, and not a little taken aback by the invitation from a girl whose name he didn’t even know, Cuno stared after her.
To the right of the broad stairs at the back of the room, the men sat, looking between Cuno and the girl. All were smoking either cigars or pipes, lounging back in their chairs and chuckling and muttering amongst themselves. On a table nearby were plates crusted with stew leavings and bits of bread.
It was hard to tell from this distance, but Cuno didn’t think any of the men were under forty. They were work-bowed, weather-wizened men in blue denims, work shirts, and suspenders, with billed cloth caps on their gray heads and lace-up boots on their feet. Their bright, flickering eyes betrayed an air of wry, hearty optimism.
As the girl approached the stairs, pinching her dress up her thighs, she loosed a breathy “Oh!” as though remembering something. She let her dress fall to her ankles again as she padded around behind the bar. The shadows semi-concealed her as she rummaged around, turning this way and that.
There were several clattering sounds, a sharp thud, as of a cleaver driven into a cutting board, and then she padded out from behind the bar, heading for the stairs and glancing over her shoulder at Cuno. He was still standing in front of the door, holding his hat in one hand as he dabbed tentatively at his face with the towel and regarded the girl uncertainly, vaguely suspicious of her intentions.
“Come on!” she rasped, beckoning, then starting up the stairs, which she climbed quickly with a swish of her bunched skirts, her swirling chestnut hair dancing about her shoulders.
The storm seemed to be hovering directly over the building, like a massive Indian war party powwowing before an onslaught against an ancient enemy. The roof shook under the pounding rain like a giant rattle.
Cuno grunted skeptically and started across the room, running the towel over his chest and down his arms. As the girl disappeared into the darkness at the top of the stairs, he glanced at the four men lounging to his right, all grinning as they puffed their pipes or cigars.
The bib-bearded man who’d been playing the fiddle and who now held a loosely rolled, smoldering quirley in a hand propped atop the table beside him muttered something in Russian. The man to his right pulled an old, cracked briar out from between his teeth and chuckled.
He squinted an eye at Cuno. “Tolstoy says you better mind yourself around his niece, me lad,” he warned in a thick Scottish or Irish accent, “as he’s got a Greener under the bar.”
As the others wheezed and snorted, shoulders jerking, Cuno started up the stairs, taking the steps one at a time, while the men’s muttering continued behind him, barely audible above the rumbling storm. A keen male desire drove him, as did the prospect of a hot bath. At the same time, apprehension tied a hard knot at the base of his spine.
There was a chance that the beguiling girl’s intentions weren’t as pure as her dancing, stream-colored eyes wanted him to believe. According to stories he’d heard, he wouldn’t be the first traveler ambushed and robbed in some out-of-the-way dive, his carcass fed to the bobcats in the nearest deep canyon.
But then, he doubted he appeared worth the trouble to any but an inexperienced and sorely desperate siren. Something told Cuno this girl was neither . . .
His wet boots squawking on the rough puncheons, his spurs trilling in time with the soggy heel thumps, Cuno followed her up another set of stairs to the third story where the storm was even louder.
Lightning flashed in the window on the hall’s far end, silhouetting the girl against it as she paused before a door and glanced again at Cuno. It was too dark for him to see the expression on her face, if there was one. He sensed she was smiling the beguiling smile that probed his swelling loins like a dull, rusty knife. Then she pushed the door open with a slight squawk of rusty hinges and disappeared into the room beyond it.
Cuno felt his stride lengthening, his heart quickening as he headed for the door. The girl stood in the room’s shadows, lightning flashing in the curtained windows behind her, holding the door open with one hand. Another lightning flash limned her smile, and she stepped back, beckoning with one hand.
“Come, come—it’s all right. There’s no trickery here. Aside from my uncle Leo’s whiskey, that is.”
Looking around, holding his hand down over the holster thonged low on his right thigh, Cuno stepped into the room.
The girl lit a lamp. “If you’d like whiskey to cut the chill, though, I know where he keeps the good stuff. It’s called vodka, actually. Have you tried it?”
“I don’t think so,” Cuno said as she closed the door behind him.
Strange aromas pushed against his face—pine, maybe sandalwood, and another musky, tealike scent he couldn’t specify. Besides the soft umber lamplight, the only light in the room was the intermittent lightning bursts in the rain-streaked, thunder-rattling windows.
“Come on, now—out of the clothes,” the girl ordered in a soft, seductive, slightly mocking voice as she went to a high-standing chest between the room’s two windows. “I’ll prepare a nice, hot bath. I’ve had the water steaming. I was going to take one myself before Uncle and his friend coerced me into dancing for them.”
“Didn’t look to me like it took much convincing.”
“I love to dance.” She casually flicked her gaze across Cuno’s chest to which his rain-soaked tunic clung, then dragged a large copper bathtub out from where it sat against the wall on a red velvet rug, under the mounted head of a large mountain goat.
She placed the tub in the middle of the room, then swept her eyes across Cuno once more as she headed for the door, swinging her hips coquettishly and letting her thick, chestnut waves dance across her slender back.
“I’ll bring the water. Good ’n’ hot!”
“I don’t wanna be any trouble, Miss . . .”
At the door, she turned back to him. “Ulalia.” She hiked a shoulder and opened the door. “It is no trouble. You’re the only guest we’ve had here in weeks. A girl gets tired of dancing for men old enough to be her grandfather.”
She went out. Cuno stared at the closed door with his pulse throbbing in his ears and his neck feeling as though a hot iron were laid against it. He should be keeping an eye on the prisoners, but the storm showed no sign of letup. Oldenberg and his men were doubtless holed up in a cave somewhere back in the previous canyon through which the main trail to Crow Feather snaked.
Besides, he couldn’t very well guard his charges effectively with a bad case of chilblain. And after all he’d been through, a hot bath offered by a pretty girl was just what the doctor ordered, though he was probably only torturing himself. If he tried discovering what succulent wares were hidden beneath that alluring red dress, he’d no doubt receive a buckshot-peppered ass for his troubles, courtesy of the protective Uncle Tolstoy’s Greener.
Cuno doffed his hat and ran his hand through his damp hair, looking around the room—the large, canopied bed piled high with colorful quilts and embroidered pillows, a mirrored dresser, several chests of fine, ornately scrolled wood, and steamer trunks. A well-appointed room in spite of the bare, whipsawed boards paneling the walls. Pewter-framed tintypes of mustachioed gentlemen and dour, thick-necked ladies in high, ruffled collars hung from rusty nails.
The lamp guttered as rain blasted the room’s single window. The building creaked in the gusting wind.
Downstairs, old Tolstoy had resumed playing his fiddle—a snappy tune to which a couple of his compatriots stomped their feet. Female voices sounded beneath the music, and Cuno realized he hadn’t undressed yet.
He looked around uncertainly, then dragged a spool-back chair out from in front of a cluttered dresser and set it near the tub. He kicked out of his boots and wrestled out of his soaked tunic, deerskin pants, socks, and longhandles, and piled everything but his boots on the chair. Then he looped his cartridge belt over the chair back, angling the holster toward the tub, so that the .45’s ivory handle would be in easy reach if a passel of ill-intentioned bandits returned in the girl’s stead.