Colorado Bob grinned, showing his own choppers glistening brightly in the firelight.
“He can gum it.”
Cuno slid his gaze away from Bob, let it drag across the menacingly hang-headed Fuego, then moved off to tie the rope around a lump of granite poking up out of the ground to the right and slightly behind the seated prisoners.
In spite of his rejuvenating sojourn in the bed of Ulalia Tolstoy, his efforts with the four prisoners had fatigued him. With a weary sigh, he hunkered down on the north side of the fire, opposite the prisoners and from where he could keep a close eye on them, and drew his knees up.
He looked around, grinding the rifle butt into the ground between his boots and wondering how far away Oldenberg was.
The girl dropped a handful of venison into the churning, steaming stew pot and glanced at him. “Long ride?”
“Might say that.”
“You a marshal?”
Cuno shook his head and reached into his shirt pocket for his makings pouch. He didn’t smoke often, but occasionally, when he was tired, a cigarette went well with the cool air and the smell of pine. It helped him relax, take his mind off his troubles.
The girl, kneeling to his right, her back to the shadowed cabin, frowned and jerked her head toward the prisoners. “Why are you taking the trouble, then?”
“Because I’m a copper-riveted fool.” Cuno slowly closed the brown paper cylinder between the thumb and index finger of both hands, then raised it to his mouth and licked the paper.
“Seems like it’d be a lot easier to turn ’em loose.”
Cuno leaned back against a rock, stretching his legs out in front of him and, as he plucked a lucifer from the breast pocket of his tunic, studied her suspiciously. Was she savvy to the hidden strongbox? Was that why she was holed up here so conveniently on his way to Crow Feather?
He chuckled to himself. Now he had five possible cutthroats to keep track of . . . and one of them a girl of questionable allegiances.
“Yeah, it would be,” Cuno said, firing a match on a rock. “But I’ve grown kind of fond of them four. I think I might get lonely without ’em.” He touched the match to his quirley. “And I’d take it personally if anyone tried to get between us.”
20
“BESIDES,” CUNO ADDED to the girl glowering at him over the leaping flames, “those four running loose across the countryside would make the two that attacked you look like tail-wagging puppy dogs.”
One of the prisoners laughed.
Blackburn said, “I’ll take that as a compliment. Hope the food’s soon done. We’re hungry over here. Miss, could you put a little extra salt on mine?”
“What’d I tell you, Blackburn?”
Cuno blew cigarette smoke at the darkening sky in which several stars winked brightly. He looked at the girl biting a hunk of fat from a dark red chunk of venison before tossing the meat into the bubbling pot.
“What’s your name?” he asked her.
“Johnnie.”
She tossed the last handful of meat into the stew pot, wiped her hands on a swatch of cloth, and leaned back on her butt, drawing her knees up and wrapping her arms around them.
She’d donned her man’s tan hat, and it partially shaded her face, its leather thong dangling beneath her chin. She shook her hair back out of her eyes and regarded him soberly, defiantly, as though expecting a mocking retort.
“You’re not gonna chuckle?”
“At that name? Nah. I’m used to girls with strange names.” He was thinking of July Summer. “Got a strange one myself—Cuno Massey.”
He took his quirley in his left hand and leaned toward her, extending his right. She looked at it suspiciously, then, haltingly, leaned over to place her own right hand in his.
“Johnnie Wade.” Cuno squeezed her hand, half consciously probing the fine bones as though they might give some indication of her motives. She squeezed back slightly.
“Unusual, all right,” she said, wrapping her arms around her knees again. “Where’d it come from?”
“An old family name. I think it was my great-grandfather’s name on my ma’s side.”
The girl sniffed as she studied the fire, resting her chin on her knees. “Johnnie ain’t my real name. It’s Joanne, but Pa didn’t know what to do with a girl after five boys, so he called me Johnnie, and I reckon it stuck. I was more like a Johnnie, anyways, than a Joanne.”
A pine knot popped, throwing sparks over the bubbling stew pot. Cuno could hear a couple of the prisoners, silhouetted against the pines behind them, muttering to each other. He thought it was Blackburn and Colorado Bob, though their dark, hatted heads were turned toward the fire.
He couldn’t help feeling the target of some treacherous scheme and found himself wincing again at the lousy luck of having his fate intertwined with that of the two dead marshals and the jail wagon.
Serenity would start looking for him tomorrow. But at the speed he was moving, he wouldn’t pull into Crow Feather until the day after tomorrow. Too late, most likely, for the freight contract.
“From around here?” he asked the girl.
“Texas. You?”
“Nebraska, couple years back. Was freight haulin’ around Denver till my money pinched out last year; had to close up shop and head for greener pastures. Or less crowded ones, anyways.”
“Tough haulin’ freight in these parts, with the mountains an’ owlhoots an’ all.”
“You’re tellin’ me.” Cuno looked at the prisoners and snorted.
The coffee smelled done, so he leaned forward and used a leather swatch to pick up the steaming coffeepot. He poured himself a cup and felt the girl’s eyes on him.
“Like I said,” she said, “just cause I run with lobos don’t mean I’m a lobo.”
“I reckon a lawman would feel different—especially the ones I buried up north. To tell you the truth, I don’t know what to think about you. All I know is I’d like to make it back to Crow Feather with those four lobos over yonder, and I’d appreciate it if you didn’t get in my way . . . no matter how much they offer you to backshoot me or ram a pigsticker in my neck.” He held up the steaming coffeepot. “Belly wash?”
Johnnie reached for one of the cups beside her and, scowling at Cuno, extended it toward him. “Trustin’ sort, ain’t ya?”
“Nope.” Cuno sipped the coffee. “It’s none of my business, but how’d you end up with a son of a bitch like Pepper, anyways?”
“You’re right,” she said, as she swallowed some coffee and glowered into the flames. “It’s none of your business.”
Cuno leaned back on an elbow and hiked a shoulder. “Just makin’ conversation.”
They sat in silence broken only by the simmering coffee and the chugging beans. When the four prisoners, some of whom had obviously been dozing after the long ride, started caterwauling for coffee, Cuno fished a couple more cups out of the burlap sack near the girl’s feet.
While the girl disappeared into the cabin, where he could hear her scuffing and moving furniture around, he picked up his rifle and slipped off to scout for interlopers.
The fire was well concealed beneath the bench at the edge of the forest. And he doubted any of Oldenberg’s men were within at least a couple of miles, but he saw no reason to get careless.
He dropped to a knee downhill from the cabin, on the north side of the bench, and looked around, listening. Nothing but the usual night sounds and the occasional rasp of weeds rustled by a vagrant breeze. An inky black mass of clouds shone in the northwest. They could bring rain in a few hours, or move on to the northwest. It all depended on which way the wind blew.
After a time, Cuno strode quietly back to the cabin and stopped near a boulder about thirty feet from the fire. He could see the girl kneeling by the fire, stirring the stew pot. The four prisoners were a ragged clump ahead of her and to her left.
Simms was saying something too softly for Cuno to make out. Apprehension nibbling at him, the freighter brought his Winchester up and caressed the hammer with his thumb. Near the fire the girl laughed caustically.
“That’s right good money,” Johnnie said, above the snapping, dancing flames. “But I know I’d never get my little finger on one stolen dollar before you blew my wick and tossed me in the nearest ravine. After you done what those other two fellas over yonder
planned
to do.”
“Ah, honey,” Colorado Bob said. “You gotta learn to trust folks in this ole life! Sooner or later, ya . . .”
The silver-haired desperado let his voice trail off as Cuno stepped out from behind the boulder and tramped toward the fire. “The girl’s no fool, Bob.” He shouldered the rifle and poked his hat brim back off his forehead. “I reckon she read your hand the moment she saw you.”
“What about mine?” Blackburn asked, white teeth showing in the darkness. “I play an honest hand, honey. Why, sure. If you cut the young Widow Maker’s throat while he sleeps this evenin’, we’ll cut ya in for a full fifth.”
“Who says I’m gonna sleep?” Cuno set his rifle against his saddle and accepted the plate the girl had filled with smoking beans and venison.
“Gotta sleep sometime,” Simms said.
“Besides, what about Oldenberg?” Cuno said, taking another filled plate from the girl and tramping around the fire to the cutthroats lounging like royalty in the shadows near the tree stumps. “Ain’t he gonna be a little sore when he finds out you double-crossed him?”
“Who says he’s gonna find out?” Colorado Bob took the plate from Cuno, bowed his silver head over it, and blew on it.
“I’ll tell him.”
“How you gonna do that?” Simms said. “He’ll blow your wick long before you see him . . . or get close enough for chatter except maybe for you to beg him to put you out of your gut-shot misery.”
Cuno handed over two more plates supplied with wood-handled forks to Fuego and Blackburn. “Suppose he does blow my wick. What’re you gonna tell him about the money?”
“Don’t need to tell him nothin’.” Simms was digging into the food like a German bricklayer. “When we dig it up, we get the drop on him right quick-like. Karl—he’s the trustin’ type, you see. A big, mean son of a bitch. A master of organization and inspiration to boot. But, hell, he trusts us like we was all brothers. We’ll kill him deader’n a drowned squirrel . . . and all the boys ridin’ alongside him.”
“Ain’t too many o’ them left, thanks to ole Widow Maker here!” Simms laughed, dribbling beans down his chin and back onto his plate.
“Sure enough, Karl’s simpler than a Montana whore,” said Colorado Bob, delicately spitting a fleck of charred meat from his lower lip. “He had us all take a blood oath. I swear the son of a bitch thinks we’re all twelve years old and playin’ bank robbers in the barn loft!”
When Cuno had delivered coffee to the prisoners, then sat down with his own plate and refilled coffee cup, he saw Colorado Bob looking at him from across the fire, yellow eyes glowing like a cat’s. “Sure would be easier, though, if we could git shed of you, Widow Maker. Nothing personal, you understand.”
“You can sleep on it,” Cuno said, finding himself shoveling the tasty beans and meat into his mouth as quickly as Simms. He was so hungry he felt his ribs crowding his belly. “Just as soon as you boys are done eatin’, you’re turnin’ in.”
“Ah, come on, Pa!” Blackburn chuckled. “Just one more story?”
Even Fuego grunted a laugh at that one.
Cuno was dead-dog tired, but he kept a close eye on the men, over the barrel of his Winchester, as he freed them from their ropes and led them off into the trees to tend nature.
He kept an especially close watch on Fuego, from at least ten feet away, for the man’s entire furtive manner and sinister silence, in spite of his never looking Cuno directly in the eye, bespoke another sudden attack.
One more of those, in Cuno’s tired state, would most likely be the end of him.
When they’d washed and drank at the spring, Cuno ushered all four into the sparsely furnished cabin, from which the girl had hauled out her own gear and dropped it near the fire. Cuno had scoured the hovel for weapons, confiscating every fork, butter knife, and bottle, and when he had the men shut up inside, he nailed the shutters closed. He hammered a plank across the door, nailing the broken latch to it, barring every possible route of escape.
That done, he turned back to the fire with a weary sigh.
He had to hand it to the lawmen—hazing four cutthroats across the territory to certain death by the hangman was no task for old women or sissies. He had a pretty good idea, firsthand, why the life expectancy of a badge toter was little longer than that of a wolfer or a soldier stationed in Apacheria.
“More mud?” the girl said, stretched out against her saddle, hands crossed behind her head as she faced the fire.
“Don’t mind if I do.”
As he moseyed over to the fire and set his rifle against his saddle, the girl refilled his coffee cup, and they sat together in oddly comfortable silence, listening to the flames snap and pop and watching the stars. Cuno habitually listened for the sound—a weed or twig crunched beneath a boot—of unwanted visitors, but there was nothing but the occasional snort or hoof clomp of the horses back in the trees.
Finally, Johnnie tossed her grounds into the fire, turned onto her side, and drew the blanket up to her chin. She ground out a little place to accommodate her hip, then drew up her knees and closed her eyes, a wing of tawny hair falling over the exposed side of her face.
He watched her for a time, remembering July, his young, pregnant wife killed by ambushers who’d been gunning for Cuno. Not a day passed that he didn’t think of her, racked with the same anguish and futile regret for the past he couldn’t change any more than he could influence the spin of the stars above his head.
If she’d lived, they’d have had several children by now, a few horses with maybe a cutting pony or two, and a sizable herd. A dog running about the place. Cats for keeping down the mice. Some chickens and a milch cow. Ranching was how they’d intended to make their way together back then . . . nigh on three years ago now . . .