Simms chuckled as he put the horse up close to Cuno, Renegade’s chopping hooves dangerously close to his master’s face. “I’ll be waitin’!”
With that, Simms reined Renegade in a complete circle, showering Cuno with dust, pinecones, and needles, then stabbed the skewbald’s flanks with his spurs. Renegade loosed a furious, bugling whinny, lunged off his rear hooves, and bolted straight up over the bench, angling past the dark cabin and heading for the western ridge.
“You’re damn lucky that girl took a shine to you, Widow Maker!” Blackburn grinned down at him, leaning forward on his saddle horn. “But not even she’s gonna be able to save your hide if you get it into your thick head to track us.”
More hooves thudded in the south. Cuno glanced that way. Fuego, Johnnie, and Colorado Bob were galloping toward him. As Blackburn turned and headed off in the same direction as Simms, Fuego directed his horse—one of the hunters’ orphaned mounts—toward Cuno.
Shouting something in a strange argot Cuno didn’t understand, the half-breed jumped his horse over Cuno and, laughing and slapping his horse’s rump with one hand, galloped up and over the bench.
Colorado Bob tipped his hat to Cuno. “Good day, Widow Maker. I hope you get those ropes off before a cougar finds you. Thought I heard one mewling around last night . . . while you were sleepin’!”
“Diddle yourself,” Cuno rasped as the silver-haired killer put his buckskin up the bench.
Johnnie reined up beside Cuno, who sat on the ground, wrists and ankles tied, scowling up at her. She tossed a canteen into the grass beside him. She reached back and pulled a small burlap sack from her saddlebags and tossed that down beside the canteen.
“Water and jerky,” she said. “That should hold you until you make it back to Petersburg.”
“Don’t do me any more favors.”
“Sorry you’re takin’ it so hard.” The girl squirmed around in her saddle. “Keep in mind, you ain’t the first man I’ve hornswoggled. I’ve had some practice.”
“You hornswoggle Pepper, too?”
“I couldn’t take down the marshals myself, could I? I knew Karl would send Pepper. Don’t worry—he’d say I was worth it. I’m sorry you won’t be able to find that out for yourself.” She studied him smokily, knotting her brows. “We mighta had a good time.”
“I’ll be thinkin’ about what coulda been while you and your cutthroat pals ride off with my horse and my guns, you crazy bitch.”
“Bye.” Johnnie reined her horse around and rode away.
Cuno watched her, feeling the reverberations of the hooves in the ground, until she was out of sight. Then, wincing at the raw, sawing pain in his ribs, he rolled onto his belly, pushed up on his knees, and crabbed awkwardly over to the fire ring.
He shoved his hands into the powdery coals, probing deep with his fingertips. The hottest ash he could feel was only warm. Nowhere near hot enough to burn through the rope.
He forgot himself and tried to stand, but his feet wouldn’t separate, and he fell hard on his forearms, cursing.
Rolling onto one side, breathing hard and bunching his cheeks at the pain in his ribs, he looked around for something to cut the ropes with. Spying a rock, he wormed his way over to it, and inspected it closely. “Shit!” Its sides were too blunt.
He looked around again, saw another rock humping up out of the ground behind him, surrounded by wiry, blond grass. Rolling onto his other side, he wormed back in the opposite direction.
This rock was about the size and shape of a cow pie. Spotted with green-gold moss, it was dull on one side, fairly sharp on the other. It was embedded firmly enough in the ground that it shouldn’t move when he scissored his wrists across the sharp side, which wasn’t sharp by knife standards but the most he could hope for.
He grunted as he raised his arms and dug a boot into the ground for leverage. Draping his hands over the rock, he drew them back toward him, running the rope between his wrists across the rock’s sharpest edge.
A couple of sawing motions told him the rock wasn’t as sharp as it looked—at least, not sharp enough to make fast work of the rope. No point in wasting time looking around for something better. He continued drawing his wrists back and forth across the rock, pressing hard and gritting his teeth with the effort of sawing the tautly wound hemp.
Clish-scritch, clish-scritch.
The rope began coming apart strand by strand, the ends of the cut sinews fraying and snapping away from the edge.
When he’d worked for a time, Cuno glanced up at the sky. The sun had risen, beating the shadows back into the forest and across the cabin. The air warmed, and the dew drops were quickly disappearing from the brown grass curling around him.
A breezy whiz sounded overhead, and he glanced up to see a rough-legged hawk careening over him and down the slope, hunting for mice and rabbits from about fifty feet in the air, tawny wings spread, feet tucked back against its downy belly and barred, fanlike tail.
Cuno sucked a breath and continued working at the rope—back and forth, back and forth across the rock, making sharp, quick cutting motions. He was encouraged by every strand that separated and snapped back away from the rock.
He hadn’t given much thought to what he was going to do once he was free. He hadn’t needed to.
He was going after the cutthroats and the girl. And god help them when he caught up to them.
22
CUNO TURNED HIS wrists away from each other as the last rope strand stretched, quivering with drum-taut tension, glistening in the climbing morning sun. He ran the strand across the rock’s sharp edge, and it snapped easily, the two ends leaping like tiny snakes against the undersides of Cuno’s callused palms.
Heart quickening, the burly young freighter clawed at the left rope with his right hand, peeling it up over his knuckles and mottling the sun-browned, work-toughened skin. When he got the left rope off, he worked at the right one, stretching his lips back from his white teeth as he lifted his gaze up the slope over which his prisoners and the girl had disappeared.
Finally, he flung the other rope away and, leaning forward, went to work on his ankles until he had both boots off, and grunting and sweating and cursing under his breath, he wrestled the ropes down his ankles and over his feet, ripping one worn white sock off with his vigorous effort.
When his ankles were free, he pulled his boots on and stood, taking only a moment to savor the free movement of his arms and legs. He took another hard gander up the slope. The cutthroats had headed west, straight up and over the ridge. Was there a trail heading in that direction that Cuno hadn’t seen before, or were they heading cross-country to their rendezvous with the hidden loot?
He took a slug of water from the canteen, then corked it and hung it across his chest. He dug into the jerky sack, devoured a strip for sustenance though he was too full of bile to feel hunger, and hitched his pants higher on his hips, feeling naked without his .45.
No revolver. No Winchester. No knife.
And Renegade was headed west under the spurs of Brush Simms . . .
Cuno had been in some tight spots before, and if he would have thought it over, he would have decided it was about as tight a spot as he’d ever known. But he didn’t think it over. He simply looped the jerky sack over his belt by its drawstring, drew a sleeve across his sweaty forehead, stuffed his hat down lower, and began tramping up the bench, taking long, ground-eating strides.
He couldn’t move as fast as a horse, but his mounted quarry had to stop sometime.
The tracks of the eight horses weren’t hard to follow in the blond grass covering the slope. They climbed straight up the ridge and dropped into the valley on the other side. Cuno did the same, descending through scattered aspens on the opposite slope and starting up the next ridge, which was rockier and sparsely studded with firs and Ponderosa pine.
Halfway up the next ridge, the gang released their spare horses. The tracks of the extras angled off to the north. Cuno considered tracking the spares down but nixed the idea. They could be miles away by now, and he’d probably only lose the trail of the gang.
Rage propelled him ahead too quickly, and when he’d crossed the second ridge he began to pace himself, slowing his stride, taking regular sips from the canteen. Every hour, he laid a small slab of jerky on his tongue and let it slowly melt, biting down occasionally and allowing the salty fluid to dribble down his throat, sustaining him.
An hour past noon, he stopped at a creek to refill his canteen. He took a breather on a rock, sucking another slab of jerky and flexing his feet to stretch his calves, which were beginning to tighten up on him. He was strong, and powerfully built, but he wasn’t accustomed to long, sustained walks with bruised ribs.
His feet would look like hamburger after a few more hours, especially if he had more mountains to climb. Fortunately, the gang seemed to be sticking to draws and coulees, zigzagging relentlessly westward.
Cuno flexed his left foot again and winced. That calf was tighter than the other. What he wouldn’t give to happen upon a horse or even a mule. Hell, a prospector’s burro would do.
But, while he’d seen a few cattle—mostly white-faced stock crossed with longhorns—he had yet to stumble across a ranch. He’d spied one dilapidated cabin with a sagging, moss-encrusted roof hunkered in a hollow and a few mine holes, but no humans.
He stood, rose up on the balls of his feet, and threw his arms up high above his head, stretching his legs, back, and neck, wincing at the hitch in his ribs. He tipped his hat against the sun and continued forward through the grassy valley winding southwest through scattered aspens whose small, round leaves flashed silver in the early afternoon light.
An hour later, crossing a low saddle between grassy ridges, a cool blast of wind pushed against his sweaty back, chilling him instantly and making him shiver. He glanced behind. A purple mass of anvil-shaped clouds was moving toward him, shepherding a massive, dark shadow across the valley behind.
The wind wooshed. A dead branch was jostled out of a tree crown and hit the ground with a clatter.
“Shit!”
Cuno glanced at the hoof-pocked ground before him. A hard monsoon rain would likely erase the cutthroats’ trail.
He glanced back at the curtain of rain wavering down from the purple cloud bank, cursed again, teeth clattering as the chill wind shoved against him. Thunder rumbled. Lightning sparked over a rocky spur on the right side of the valley. A flock of mountain chickadees lit from an aspen copse to his left and, like a cloud of bees, careened up valley and away from the storm.
Cuno ran down the saddle, holding the jerky sack against his thigh, and looked around for cover. Rain began ticking off his hat and peppering his back as he jogged down between two rock escarpments bottlenecking the trail just below the saddle.
To his left, a cabin-sized, mushroom-shaped boulder loomed. The side facing the valley was concave, offering shelter. Cuno ran under it and, turning to face the valley and dropping to a knee, watched the storm move over the saddle like a lid closing on a box.
In the aspens and ash about a hundred yards beyond, he saw what appeared to be an old Indian burial scaffold stretched between two trunks and partially concealed by foliage. As the wind and rain hit the scaffold, several branches—or branches and bones and maybe some old sheepskin from a burial shroud—were blown out of the tree to tumble from branch to branch to the ground.
The sheepskin was whipped along the ground for several yards, like paper, before it hung up against a bole.
Cuno shivered from the damp cold stealing down his collar and pasting his icy, sweat-soaked tunic against his back, and from the ominous visage in the trees beyond, and dropped to his butt. He pushed himself back farther beneath the boulder, drew his knees up, and wrapped his arms around them, settling in to wait out the storm.
As thunder and lightning filled the valley, he silently prayed that the wind and rain wouldn’t obliterate the tracks. He’d never considered himself a superstitious sort, but if he had, he’d take that ruined scaffold to be one hell of a bad omen.
Leaning back from the rain and wincing at the hammering thunder, he watched the monsoon gale slide on down the valley. It passed quickly—not as quickly as he’d have liked—but after twenty minutes the rain stopped abruptly. The thunder dwindled into the distance, and the sun’s high-country rays slanted down once more—clearer and brighter than before and glistening like melted butter off the wet rocks and leaves.
Cuno took a drink from the canteen, and hearing the spatter of the rain tumbling off boulders and dripping off the trees, he rose from his makeshift shelter and moved down the slope to the valley bottom. He stared down at the grass for a long time, his expression implacable but his jaws set with frustration.
The tracks were all but gone—wiped out beneath the grass that had been bent by the wind and the rain.
Cuno moved forward, picking up occasional glimpses of the trail, but he found long stretches—one was over fifty yards long—where there was nothing but bent, sopping grass, occasional branches blown out of the trees, and leaves.
He continued down the valley, stretching his stride and suppressing the pain in his calves, feet, and ribs.
When he came to the confluence of three ravines, he lost precious time looking for sign. A few plops of still-warm horse apples finally pointed him down a narrow, rocky cut angling more south than west. But he soon came to another confluence, and then another, and by late afternoon he had no idea whether he was heading in the right direction.
Where the rain had not totally obliterated the group’s tracks, it made it nearly impossible to distinguish them from those of other riders. Since the area was spotted with cattle, and he’d seen two line shacks from a distance, it was impossible to tell if the tracks he glimpsed were those of the cutthroats or merely brush-popping ranch hands.