Freighting was a bachelor’s life, July had told him.
He rolled another cigarette and strode off down the slope, into the blanketing darkness beneath the stars, feeling tired and gloomy and as alone as he’d ever been.
Everyone who’d ever loved him was dead. The thought was as raw as the chill night air.
He tramped a complete circle around the cabin, checking on the horses and adjusting a couple of tie ropes, then headed back to the fire, which had burned down to a soft, pulsating glow. It was cool, but he didn’t bother building it up. He intended to doze for an hour or two, and he didn’t want the fire attracting anyone to the camp.
Cuno spread his bedroll in front of his saddle, checked his rifle and his .45, then set the rifle against a nearby rock, within easy reach, and removed his cartridge belt. He coiled the belt around his holster, placing it between himself and the rifle, and pulled his blankets back.
On the cabin side of the fire, the girl whimpered softly. Cuno looked at her, the umber light flickering across her straight tawny hair and her lithe form mounded beneath the blankets. She turned her head slightly, groaning.
“No . . . don’t . . . please, don’t . . .”
She continued to fidget around and whimper, pleading with some phantom, likely the two men who’d attacked her, to leave her alone. Cuno left his bedroll and knelt beside her. He slid her hair back from her temple, running the backs of his fingers gently across her bruised cheek.
“It’s only a dream,” he whispered when her eyes opened and she stared up at him, fearful at first. The hard light left her glassy gaze and her chest rose and fell more slowly.
“Just a dream,” Cuno said again. “You’re all right. Go to sleep.”
She closed her eyes and snugged her cheek against her saddle, drawing the blanket up to her chin once more. Cuno went back to his own saddle and crawled under his blankets. With a rock, he dug out a place for his hip, snugged into it, drew the blankets up, and glanced once more at the stars shimmering above the jack pines.
He closed his eyes. He’d sleep for only a couple of hours, then look around again and check on his prisoners.
He fell away into a deep, dreamless slumber he couldn’t have fought off had he tried.
Something brushed his cheek. Keeping his eyes closed, he flicked it away with his hand.
It brushed his cheek again, an annoying tickle. It raked across his eyelid.
He opened his eyes, frowning. At first he thought he was dreaming that it was dawn and that Fuego knelt beside him, grinning down at him toothlessly and holding a single blade of bromegrass in one hand, a silver-chased Buntline Special in the other. Then he looked around and saw Simms, Blackburn, Colorado Bob, and the girl standing in a semicircle before him, the pink morning light falling through the dew-dappled pine boughs behind them.
The men smiled devilishly. They all held pistols or rifles, and knives jutted from their cartridge belts.
The girl stared down at Cuno, a pensive, troubled expression knotting her thin, blonde brow beneath her man’s felt hat. Colorado Bob leaned against her, one arm draped casually over her shoulder, his head close to hers.
Cuno’s blood sizzled through his veins, making his ear-drums roar like a train whistle. He reached for his .45 but clawed only leather.
The gun was gone from its holster.
The Winchester no longer leaned against the rock. Sitting up quickly, Cuno saw Fuego straighten, draw his right boot back, and sling it forward.
With a savage laugh, the half-breed buried his foot in Cuno’s gut.
21
CUNO DOUBLED OVER with a great
whush
of expelled air, blowing up dust and pine needles. He felt as though he’d been stabbed. Pain flooded his writhing guts. He opened his mouth but made only a gurgling sound as he tried in vain to draw air into his chest.
If he’d had any food in his belly, he would have spewed it all over Fuego’s boots, the right one of which flew back once more. But before the half-breed could ram it forward again, Johnnie shouted,
“No!”
The boot stopped, and Fuego set it slowly down beside the other one. Cuno stared at the boot’s silver tips as he continued to writhe and grunt in holy agony and tried to squeeze some air into his lungs before he passed out.
“I told you—we ain’t gonna kill him.”
“Pshaw,” Colorado Bob said. “Fuego ain’t gonna kill him. Just gonna clean his clock for him, make him think twice about how poorly he done treated us all out on the trail!”
“What do you mean we ain’t gonna kill him?” Blackburn stepped forward. Glancing up, Cuno saw that the stocky blond cutthroat was wearing his, Cuno’s, cartridge belt and .45. “After all he done to us? And if you think ole Widow Maker ain’t gonna come after us, you got another—”
“I done told you, Frank,” Johnnie said, jutting her jaws at the man whom she had a full inch on, “we ain’t gonna kill him. If it wasn’t for him, them two dung beetles over yonder woulda used me for a pincushion and slit my throat.”
“It ain’t our fault you can’t watch your backside, Miss Purty-Ass!”
“Hey!” Colorado Bob yelled, turning to Blackburn and flushing. “You can’t talk to my little sis like that, you pint-sized son of a bitch! If Johnnie says we don’t kill him, we don’t kill him. Simms, get some rope and—”
Just then Cuno managed to draw a half ounce of air down his throat. Rage and humiliation at having been caught with his veritable pants down—
Christ, they’d escaped the cabin and stripped him of his weapons while he’d been sawing logs!
—he propelled himself straight up off his knees, springing off his heels and plowing shoulder-first into Fuego’s broad chest.
The half-breed flew back with a grunt. He hit the ground hard, Cuno on top of him.
“Cuno!” Johnnie cried.
Incensed, his face a mask of russet fury, Cuno gained his knees and wrapped his hands around the dazed half-breed’s stout neck. He’d just started to grind his thumbs into the man’s throat when a rifle butt slammed against his left temple, whipping his head sideways and throwing him off the half-breed and onto his back.
He stared up at the lightening sky stitched intermittently with birds flying, wings spread. Some were blurry. He felt as though a railroad spike had been hammered through one temple and out the other. The railroad whistle blaring in his ears had doubled in loudness.
A voice rose as though from the bottom of a long, metal tube. “Damnit, Cuno, you crazy son of a bitch. I’m trying to save your life.”
Johnnie’s angry face appeared in his field of vision, staring down at him. She held his rifle up high across her chest. Blood shone on the brass butt plate. Fuego had gained his feet, and his broad, flat face with slitted, blue-green eyes appeared in the same sphere of vision as Johnnie’s. His nostrils flared as he raised a wide-bladed knife in his left hand.
“I cut his head off and wear it on my saddle horn!” he barked.
Johnnie stepped back and aimed Cuno’s rifle at the half-breed’s head. “Step down, breed, or buy a bullet from me!” Loudly, she jacked a live round into the Winchester’s breech.
“Christ!” Blackburn groaned.
“I’m in charge,” Johnnie grated out, still aiming the rifle at Fuego, who’d taken one step back, a skeptical look in his blue-green gaze. “Me and Brother Bob. And what we say goes. Simms, fetch that rope. Damnit, dig the fucking grease outta your ears, you deaf son of a bitch!”
“All right, all right,” Simms exclaimed as he stomped out of Cuno’s range of vision. “Heaven of mercy—outta the fryin’ pan and into the fire! Never seen such a girl!”
Colorado Bob laughed and, stepping forward, shoved the rifle down. “That’s my li’l sis. Step down now, girl. We’re gonna need ole Fuego here. A fightin’ man of his caliber—ahem, in spite of what ole Widow Maker did to his ear and his teeth—will prove valuable if Karl and the fellers start barkin’ up our back trail.”
Through the veil of pain over his eyes, Cuno studied the two—Johnnie and Colorado Bob—and, sure enough, he saw a vague resemblance in the curve of their cheeks. Johnnie’s eyes were more slanted than Cuno had noticed before, and the two had vaguely similar body shapes. Obviously, they shared one parent if not two, though there was a good fifteen years between them.
“Just stay there, Cuno,” Johnnie said, squatting down beside him as Simms came up with a couple of lengths of rope in his hands. “Don’t make this any harder than it has to be.”
Cuno was so enraged that he might have made a play for his Winchester, but Fuego stood behind the girl, aiming the big Buntline Special at Cuno’s head, glaring down the long, silver-plated barrel, his broad nostrils expanding and contracting above his blood-crusted lips.
The girl must have taken weaponry off the dead men whom Cuno had beefed back up the trail, where they’d attacked the jail wagon.
She’d been dogging him ever since. There was no doubt in his mind that the horse he’d seen on the piney bench had been her brush-tailed pinto.
Cuno lowered his gaze to the girl, staring at her through the veil of pain over his eyes. Simms grabbed one of his wrists and wrapped one of the ropes around it.
“Turn over,” Simms ordered.
“Not behind the back,” Johnnie said. “He’s gotta be able to get out of those ropes after we leave.”
Simms jutted his jaws at her and spoke through gritted teeth. “What if he gets out of them
before
we leave?”
Johnnie kept her cool, blue gaze on Cuno. “Then we shoot him.”
Simms chuckled caustically and finished tying Cuno’s wrists together, leaving about two inches of rope between them.
“Better check his boots,” Johnnie said.
After a quick inspection of Cuno’s boots, Simms pulled a horn-gripped hunting knife from the freighter’s right boot well. “Nice,” Simms said, thrusting the knife into the ground beside him. “That’ll come in handy.”
When he’d tied Cuno’s ankles together so tightly that Cuno’s feet tingled inside his boots, he grabbed the knife out of the ground, stood, and threw his arms up like a calf roper trying to beat the competition’s time at a Fourth of July rodeo celebration.
“There.” Simms rammed his boot into Cuno’s ribs. It wasn’t as savage a blow as Fuego’s but it rolled Cuno onto his side and set a new fire blazing in his ribs and curses snarling from his lips. “Take that, Widow Maker!”
“Simms!” Johnnie scolded. “Go get the gear together. We gotta pull foot!”
She straightened and turned to Fuego still aiming the Buntline at Cuno. “You, too.”
Fuego was obviously not accustomed to taking orders from women. He cut his eyes at the girl, as though she were an annoying fly buzzing around his head. The other men must have made a damn good deal with the half-breed, because he turned back to Cuno, lowered the Buntline, and turned away and began hoofing it toward the picketed horses.
He barked over his shoulder, “We will meet again, blond man. And then I will twist your head off and mount it on my saddle.”
Johnnie lowered her gaze to Cuno once more, and brushed a fleck of ash from her cheek. Her hair blew back in the rising morning breeze. “I know this ain’t much thanks for what you done yesterday. Be grateful I didn’t let them kill you.”
“Thanks.”
“You just lay still till we’re outta here.”
“Damn, here I’m in the mood for a barn dance.”
“We’re gonna take your guns and your horse. Even without your hideout knife, you’ll find a way out of them ropes soon enough. When you do, head back to Petersburg.”
She added archly, “You can rest up with Miss Ulalia—I know you’ll enjoy that—and then you can get a horse and start on the trail to Crow Feather again. Whatever you do, don’t try to follow us, Cuno. I appreciate your beefin’ those two dogs yonder, but if I see you again, I’ll let Bob or that mangy half-breed put a bullet in you.”
Johnnie wheeled and started away, resting Cuno’s Winchester on her shoulder. She stopped, turned back to him. “I’m just tryin’ to get my life together, see. Me an’ Bob’s.
He’s my half brother, but he’s old enough to be my pa. Once we get the payroll money and get shed of Oldenberg, we’re walkin’ the straight an’ narrow, Bob an’ me.”
Cuno grunted against the ache in his ribs and watched the girl stride off into the pines beyond the dead fire. Colorado Bob, on one knee, loaded a pistol from the cartridge belt around his waist. He was chuckling softly to himself and slitting those snaky eyes, as though thoroughly bemused by his own private joke.
Cuno spat grit from his lips and returned his gaze to Johnnie’s slender back and buffeting, tawny hair.
“Good luck with that.”
Cuno rolled around snarling like a trapped, wounded wolf. He’d never felt so humiliated, frustrated, and angry.
The ropes were tied too tight for him to work loose without something sharp, however. Damn that bitch for thinking about a knife.
Here he’d felt sorry for her—a poor little girl alone in the world.
His ass.
He looked at the fire. The renegades hadn’t built it up since he’d let it go out last night. But if he dug deep down in the ash pile, he’d probably find some coals hot enough to burn through the hemp.
Hooves clomped. Cuno glanced beyond the fire ring, toward the ragged edge of the forest dropping down from the crest of the ridge. Simms and Blackburn were riding toward him along the edge of the woods. Simms was mounted on Renegade. The big skewbald didn’t cotton to strange riders, and he arched his neck, chomped his bit, and twitched his ears, rage flashing in his wide eyes.
Fury welled up in Cuno once more. Simms must have seen it. The hammer-faced, ponytailed cutthroat grinned and jerked Renegade’s head around sharply, whipping his withers with his rein ends.
“Treat that horse right, you black-souled son of a bitch. Better not be a mark on him when I come for him, or before I kill you I’ll gut you first!”