“Easy, easy,” he told the horse as it bobbed its head restlessly, wary of the stranger.
He led the gelding back through the open doors and into the weedy lot fronting the stable.
As he threw the doors closed behind him, Simms yelled, “Hey, we’re hungry, ya son of a bitch!”
The doors thudded closed, rocking the stable’s front wall. Holding his Winchester in one hand, Cuno swung into the leather and reined the jittery mount back toward the main trail, the roan’s hooves splashing up water around the stirrups.
Though more rain had fallen since the kid had ridden into town, his water-filled tracks still shone in the muddy caliche. Cuno racked a shell into the Winchester’s breech one-handed as he put the horse up the trail rising and twisting up out of the canyon’s west end.
The sky was clearing, and the sun was peeking out between high, ragged clouds, when Cuno checked the roan down suddenly. He lowered the Winchester over the horse’s head and rose up in the saddle.
A body lay belly down along the left side of the trail, parallel to it, head on the downslope, boots on the upslope. The water had dug shallow troughs to either side, and chunks of clay and stones had washed up against the man’s arms and legs and against the base of his chin, damming up against his open lips and mustache.
His hat lay farther off the trail and a gaping hole shone in the back of his head, blood and white flecks of brain and bone congealing in his thin brown hair. More of the same viscera had spewed off into the rocks and grass and against a bullet-pocked pine trunk.
Cuno looked around warily, then quickly slid off the roan’s back. Holding the reins in one hand and the rifle in the other, he crouched over the dead man and turned him over.
Cuno’s mouth quirked up on one side. The man’s right eye socket was a grisly mess of liver-colored blood flecked with lice-like bits of brain tissue. The other eyelid rested lightly shut, as though the man were only dozing.
Cuno straightened slowly, swinging his head this way and that. His gaze held on the opposite side of the trail. Hefting the rifle, he crossed the trail and tramped into the brush, stopping before a dense chokecherry thicket over which another dead man lay, back down, legs and arms dangling across the gray, spindly branches, as though he’d been dropped from the sky.
His upside-down head faced Cuno. One bullet had bored a clean hole through his cheek. Cuno couldn’t see it from this angle, but apparently the man had taken another slug through the top of his head. Blood as thick as molasses webbed down from his scalp, pooling in the wet yellow grass beneath.
His eyes were wide and bloodshot. His thin, mustached lips were drawn far back from his teeth, in a perpetual agonized scream.
Cuno sucked air between his two front teeth. “Christ.”
Both this man and the one by the trail were well-armed. Cuno had seen enough cutthroats to know these two fit the bill. Oldenberg’s men, without a doubt. But how had they ended up dead?
He scoured the trail and saw where four horses had held up amidst a mess of scuffed sand, dirt, and blood, and one horse—the kid’s, from the hoofprints—had ridden on down canyon toward Petersburg. Straightening after examining the blood-washed trail, he heard a whinny from down the northern slope. The roan answered, rippling its withers.
Cuno walked to the edge of the steep slope and peered down into scattered pines and deadfall. A quarter mile away, two saddled horses—a buckskin and an Appaloosa—stood at the base of the far canyon wall, facing each other as though conferring upon a serious dilemma.
They were swishing their tails. The Appy turned toward Cuno, lifted another whinny, and shook its head belliger ently.
“I’ll be damned.”
Cuno mounted the roan and gigged the horse down the steep bank and gently sloping meadow. Not far from the two horses, he found the third body—another cutthroat deader than last year’s Christmas goose.
This one had been shot through the mouth. The bullet had exited the back of his neck. He was rolled up against the boulder he’d apparently fallen against, judging by the blood smear, and upon which he’d apparently cracked his head open. He lay in a twisted heap, one knee up, one arm bent behind him, his chin pointed at the eastern horizon. Blood dribbled down his scalp and into his eyes. More thick, half-congealed blood flowed from his mouth like oil from a spring.
Cuno didn’t know what to make of the three dead men. That the jug-eared kid might have shot his three compadres was too preposterous for Cuno’s rational mind. He stopped worrying about it when he realized that he’d suddenly been blessed with exactly what he needed to outrun the rest of the gang and cut cross-country to Crow Feather.
Four saddled horses . . . after he located the kid’s.
He adjusted the saddles and bridles of his two new mounts—one of which, the steeldust, had a relatively fresh bullet burn across its rump—then gathered up the reins and began leading them back along the trail to Petersburg, cutting cautious glances behind him.
He hoped Oldenberg didn’t get too curious about where his four outriders had disappeared to before Cuno and his motley chain gang had put some nicely rough mountain country between them and Petersburg. Cuno had had a nice reprieve in the dying town. He’d no doubt remember the lithe, curvaceous figure of the beguiling Cossack girl on his deathbed.
But it was time to split ass for Crow Feather.
18
“KID, YOUR LUCK’S on a short,
short
leash. You realize that?”
“I don’t know—I’m startin’ to feel pretty lucky.”
They were a couple of miles east of Petersburg, cutting cross-country through heavy timber, climbing a steep slope toward a saddleback ridge. The sun, what little of it shone through the high clouds remaining after the storm, was falling quickly behind the western, snow-spotted mountains.
“Oldenberg’s done got him nigh on a dozen riders, and he’ll be combin’ this country like he’s checking fer lice on a warthog’s ass!”
“Well, he’s short another four,” Cuno said with a speculative air. “That makes him down to nine or less. At this rate, I like how my odds look, say, day after tomorrow.”
He was scanning the darkening ridge ahead and above him. The food sack that Ulalia had prepared for him, before he’d abandoned the jail wagon and forced his shackled prisoners onto the saddled horses of their own dead gang members, flopped down Renegade’s left shoulder.
The prisoners’ horses, tied tail to tail, were strung out behind him single file. The prisoners themselves, hands cuffed, were tied to the saddle horns and stirrups.
“He’s right, Bob,” Blackburn said from the back of the line. “This ain’t lookin’ none too good. Kid’s tougher than he looks—a hell-thumbin’ widow maker, sure enough—and this is big country. Hell, Karl may never even find us way out here on this pimple on the devil’s ass.”
“What’re you sayin’, Frank?” Bob said, riding directly behind Cuno.
“I’m sayin’ let’s cut the bastard in. Give him a full quarter of the payroll loot.”
Simms whistled. “Let me see—a fourth of twenty-five grand . . . that’s . . .”
“Six thousand two hundred and fifty dollars.” Blackburn raised his voice. “Hey, kid, did you ever think you’d see that kind of money? I know I never did at your age. How old are ya, anyways? Nineteen? Twenty?” He clucked just loudly enough for Cuno to hear above the hoof thuds. “That kind of money, invested right, could set you up for life. You like to ranch, run stock, do ya?”
Cuno said nothing as he continued urging Renegade up the grassy slope, keeping his eyes on the ridges around him—not only for Oldenberg but, as this was Indian country, for Utes and Crows, as well.
“Big son of a bitch like yourself—obviously used to hard work—could double that sixty-two hundred in a couple years.”
“No, Frank,” Colorado Bob said, directing his words at Cuno’s back, “he didn’t learn how to shoot that forty-five diggin’ ditches. The kid’s a pistoleer. I’d say he probably rode our side of the law, time or two. Tell you what, kid—you turn us loose, we’ll let you throw in with us. We’ll double that little nest egg for you in two months down Texas way. Banks in Texas, you know, they’re just like everything else in Texas—big and filled with big money!”
Simms said, “Big whores, too. Big in all the right places!”
As his charges—all but Fuego, riding in customary, brooding silence behind King and in front of Simms—continued to try to convince Cuno that he’d be far better off if he’d turn them loose, Cuno studied what looked like a small cabin sitting just below the conifer forest draped raggedly across the saddleback ridge. The shack—if it was a shack and not just a large, dark brown dimple in the mountainside—lay about a hundred yards up the slope and another hundred yards to Cuno’s left.
The blond freighter studied the brown blotch, which seemed to shift ever so slightly as the waning, saffron light edged across the slope. He needed a place to hole up for the night, and an unoccupied cabin would do nicely.
“I seen you had your eye on that comely Russian lass back in Petersburg,” Colorado Bob was saying. “Well, if you like the brown-eyed, chocolate-haired fillies, Mexico is just the place—”
“Stow it.” Cuno had stopped Renegade at the edge of aspen woods straggling down from the ridge. He swung down from his saddle and tied the big skewbald to a stout branch.
“What’re you doin’, Widow Maker?” Simms asked. Like the others, he was crouched slightly over his saddle horn, to which his wrists were firmly tethered with rawhide. The man’s feet were tied to the stirrups so he couldn’t grind his heels into his horse’s flanks and gallop away if he got the chance. Much of his greasy, dark red hair had come loose from its queue, giving his head a tumbleweed look.
“Shut up.” Cuno looked down the ragged line of his four charges, all regarding him with dull interest. “I’m gonna take a little walk. On the off chance you should somehow free your horse from the others and decide to hightail it, keep in mind I can make a long shot with my Winchester.”
“You can’t leave us here tied to these beasts,” grouched Colorado Bob. “Suppose a griz or a cougar comes along? We’re defenseless!”
“I’ve been lucky but not that lucky.” Cuno chuffed as he wheeled and started tramping off across the shoulder of the slope, slanting upward toward the cabin.
The sun disappeared behind the western ridges as Cuno tramped through the short brown grass and sage. Almost instantly, the air cooled. Purple shadows tanged with sage and juniper washed across the slope, turning the jack pines on his right the color of India ink.
Cuno hunkered down behind a low shelf and peered over the top at what he’d concluded several yards back was indeed a rough hewn, log, brush-roofed cabin dug partway into the slope. He studied the cabin for some time before he detected a thin skein of smoke unfurling from a long, rusty chimney pipe. There was a heavy thud and resounding ping, as though someone had dropped a cast-iron skillet on a wooden floor.
Peering across his Winchester’s receiver, Cuno muttered a frustrated curse. He’d hoped the place was abandoned. He couldn’t very well ask some lone prospector to share his hovel with four cutthroats, nor risk the possibility that the cutthroats might convince the man to help free them for a share of the loot.
Cuno started to turn away to head back to his prisoners—he’d have to look for another place to throw down for the night—but snapped his head back toward the cabin. He’d heard a woman’s clipped yell. A man laughed—a pinched, barely audible sound emanating from within those stout walls.
Several seconds later, there was a ratcheting scrape of a chair or table kicked across a rough board floor.
Cuno pricked his ears to listen more closely, his curiosity piqued, but then the night wind rose, ruffling the grass and sighing in the pines and drowning all other sound. He wanted to head back to the horses and continue on up and over the ridge, find a camping place on the other side.
But before he knew it, he found himself striding straight up the slope, then, once inside the trees, heading toward the cabin’s rear corner, where the brush and the angle would conceal his approach from the door and the single window in which wan umber lamplight shone in the west wall.
He trod more carefully as he closed on the cabin, clearly hearing the scuffs, thumps, and clipped, angry yells of a struggle. It sounded like two men and a woman. Pressing his shoulder against the cabin wall and holding his rifle in both hands, Cuno stole forward. One shutter was missing from the window, while the one nearest Cuno was partway open, blocking his view of the inside.
“Damn you!” the girl screamed.
“Hold her, Albert!” There was a thud and the rattle of boot spurs. “I said
hold
her!”
“I
am
holdin’ her!” The other man laughed, his voice trembling with labored breaths. “Go to it, Harrel!”
With one quick swipe of his arm, Cuno drew the shutter back against the cabin wall and edged a look across the frame.
Inside, one man in a long, fur coat and leather hat was holding a slender, blonde girl on a table in the middle of the room. Another man, his buckskin breeches and long underwear bunched around his ankles, was trying to position himself between the girl’s bare knees. Her denim trousers and frilly pink underpants were drawn down to her boots, and she was squirming around on the table, trying to close her knees.
“Damn you.” The girl spat between gritted teeth, her cheeks red with fury. “I’ll see you sons o’ bitches in hell, you do this! I’ll cut your damn
peckers
off!”
She’d barely got the last word out before she jerked her left arm free of the grasp of the man in the long fur coat and raked her fingers across the bearded cheek of the man trying to impale her with his jutting, brown dong.
“Ach!” The man clapped a hand against his cheek, yowling and cursing.
Cuno ducked under the window and ran around the front of the cabin.