As the horse began falling sideways, head turned toward Cuno with its flashing, terrified eyes, Cuno reversed his momentum while wrapping his right hand around the carbine’s stock and jerking the rifle from its oiled boot.
When he had the Winchester firmly in his hand, he leapt back away from the fallen, screaming horse’s flailing hooves. His left boot heel clipped a stone, and he gave his own startled grunt as he hit the ground on his butt.
He winced at the gnawing pain in his battered ribs and looked up. The horse was scrambling to its feet, tack squawking, empty stirrups flapping like wings.
As the pinto regained its feet and continued up the slope in a cloud of sifting black dust, Cuno saw the rider scrambling around on the ground beyond, about twenty feet away.
The man grunted and cursed. His shadow stopped moving.
There was a red flash followed by the pop of a .44.
The slug hammered a rock above Cuno’s left shoulder, the ricochet echoing off across the valley. Cuno had levered a live round into the Winchester’s breech. Throwing himself into a sitting position, he leveled the saddle-ring carbine and fired at the same time the man’s revolver flashed again.
The man’s slug whistled past Cuno’s ear.
“Mee-yah!”
the man screamed.
He fired once more, into the ground before his slumping silhouette, blowing up dust and gravel. Cuno levered and fired two more rounds, and when he saw through the wafting gun smoke the man’s dark figure stretched out on his back, unmoving, he hauled himself to his feet and looked straight across the slope beyond the dead man.
The second rider was a jostling shadow before him, crouched low behind his horse’s bobbing head. Steel glistened in the starlight just left of the mount’s neck.
Cuno flung himself sideways and rolled back behind the escarpment, wincing at the rocks gouging his sore ribs. A revolver smashed once, twice, three times, its rolling echoes drowning the pounding hoof thuds. Then the man and horse were in front of Cuno, rocketing on across the slope to his right.
Cuno raised the rifle toward the mounted figure who had turned his head and angled the pistol back over his horse’s right hip. As the man’s pistol flashed and roared, Cuno’s carbine loosed a reverberating whip-crack across the slope. He triggered two more hammering rounds as the horse continued galloping into the inky, vertical arrows of scattered timber.
The empty cartridge casings chinked off the escarpment to bounce off Cuno’s hat.
When the horse had disappeared in the darkness, Cuno heaved himself to his feet and rammed another round into the carbine’s smoking breech. He tramped heavy-footed up the slope, angling right, following the sound of the wounded rider’s guttural groans.
He stopped.
The man lay on the rocks before him, a pinyon sapling bowed beneath his shoulder. With a curse, the man flopped over on his side and flung a hand out toward an ivory-handled .44 wedged between two stones.
Cuno released a weary breath, raised the carbine, and triggered a finishing shot into the back of the man’s head. He picked up the revolver, dusted it off, and shoved it behind the waist band of his deerskin leggings. He removed the man’s cartridge belt, shook the sand out of the holster, and wrapped it around his own waist, adjusting the buckle for his slightly narrower girth.
Shouldering the carbine, he headed up the slope in the direction the buckskin and the first rider’s horse had fled.
The next morning, around ten o’clock, Colorado Bob King reined his horse to a halt on a low knoll in a broad bowl in the hills at the far west end of the Mexican Mountains.
The sun beat brassily down. The mountains appeared low, spruce-green humps in the far distance. A hundred yards below the knoll upon which the riders sat their weary mounts, the little whipsawed frame town of Alfred stretched along both sides of a broad, dusty, virtually deserted main street. It was an old hide hunter’s camp that hadn’t grown much beyond its original ten or twelve business establishments and flanking sod shanties and dugouts.
“Jesus H. Christ!” cried Brush Simms, slapping his dusty hat across his thigh. “Is that finally fuckin’
it
?”
“Finally?” said Colorado Bob. “We ain’t been trailin’ but a little over a day, Brush.”
“Seems like a long damn time. After all we been through. First gettin’ run down by that posse in the first place, then that damn Widow Maker and his bone-hard intent to keep our appointment with the hangman.”
Sitting his roan on the far right edge of the group, beside the girl Johnnie Wade, Frank Blackburn hooked a leg over his saddle horn and leaned back in his saddle. “Well, it’s all over now. I see the hill. You see it, Bob? I swear it’s fairly gleaming like someone sprinkled diamonds over the top.”
Colorado Bob chuckled and slowly blinked his snakelike eyes. He had two Colt Navy pistols bristling on his cartridge belt—both guns that he’d found in the saddlebags of the lusty hunters who’d tried to savage his half sister. He preferred the old cap and ball revolver to the newer models worn by Pepper and the other men who’d been greased by the Widow Maker—guns that Johnnie had appropriated and that were now worn by Blackburn, Simms, and their new partner, Fuego.
“You know, Frank,” Bob said. “I do believe I see what you’re talkin’ about. You wanna go up and git the loot first, or git the cooch first and worry about the loot later?”
“Cooch?” Johnnie Wade scowled at her older brother. “We ain’t takin’ time for no cooch, Bob. We’re gonna dig up that strongbox and hightail it south. Hell, Oldenberg’s back there, scourin’ those mountains fer us!”
“Yeah, he’s back there,” said Simms. “Way the hell back there, most like. Hell, we can rest up here a day, maybe even two days. Git some rest for us and our horses . . .”
“As well as some pussy,” interjected Blackburn.
“. . . as well as some pussy,” Simms laughed, nodding.
“Might be wise to even ambush old Karl and them other boys,” opined Colorado Bob, hipping around to look over their back trail. “Get ’em shed of our trail once and fer all.”
Simms rubbed his hands together eagerly. “And then we can hit the trail for the southern regions of this fine country of ours!”
“We get money now, goddamnit,” Fuego spat, sitting his mount at the far side of the group from Blackburn, slightly higher on the knoll.
The half-breed had been dabbing at his bullet-ruined ear again with a handkerchief. He’d scraped the ear on a rock wall earlier and opened it up. Two finger-sized blood dribbles had crusted on his neck, but the blood on his ear refused to clot again, and it was annoying the half-breed no end.
Close as he could tell, he was thirty years old, and a mere five years ago, when he’d had a full head of hair and both ears, he’d been a handsome man who’d never had any trouble with women in spite of his penchant for meanness.
Now, on top of all his other problems, his freshly ruined ear wouldn’t stop bleeding. He shook his head, ramming the handkerchief hard against the bloody knob. “I wanna see the loot. I want my cut, and then I want to get the hell shed of you crazy sons o’ bitches.”
“I hate to say it,” said Johnnie. “But I agree with the half-breed. We got no time to waste on women.”
“That ain’t for you to say, Li’l Sis,” Bob said with a strained, tolerant air. “Now, I done told you you can’t go bossin’ me. I won’t have it. You an’ me—we’re gonna start a new life for ourselves farther south. But that life don’t include old Colorado Bob King being kicked around by his little half sister from Abilene.”
Bob dipped his chin and narrowed an eye sternly. “We done had this conversation, and I don’t intend to have it again.”
Bob sealed his reprimand with a look. And as an angry flush rose in Johnnie’s smooth cheeks, the outlaw leader turned to the other men. “Let’s go dig up the loot, split it up, and then go get us some cooch and hooch. What do you fellas say to that?”
“That sounds fine as frog hair to me!” howled Simms.
“Who’m I to argue?” shouted Blackburn.
He, Bob, and Simms spurred their mounts down the knoll and into the sun-beaten little town. After a moment’s hesitation, and looking a little skeptical while pressing the bloody handkerchief to his ruined ear, Fuego gigged his own mount down the knoll.
At the rear of the pack, Johnnie Wade cursed as she pressed spurs to her pinto and cast a long, wary look along their back trail.
24
BRINGING UP THE rear of the pack, Johnnie Wade cast her gaze around the nearly deserted main drag of Alfred, Wyoming Territory, which a sign had told her was home to thirty-three souls.
A few dogs—one which looked like it had a good bit of coyote in it—sunned themselves on boardwalks before the weathered frame buildings forlornly lining both sides of the street, or sniffed through rotten, smelly trash piles in the gaps between them.
A ranch wagon was parked before the high loading dock of a mercantile on the right side of the street, and two men were silently tossing supplies into the wagon. Besides them and the dogs, the only others about were two men hammering new shingles on a livery barn on the street’s right side, about halfway down, and another man standing atop a long ladder and adding fresh spruce-green paint to the sun-bleached sign over the barn’s broad, open doors.
The staccato raps of the hammers echoed around the street.
Johnnie stared ahead at her group riding two by two toward a gaudily painted frame house on the left side of the street, sitting kitty-corner across from the livery barn. The pounding stopped as the hammer-wielding roofers turned to regard the newcomers, as did the two men loading the ranch wagon.
“I shoulda guessed,” Johnnie breathed, her blue eyes incredulous as she watched Colorado Bob and Frank Blackburn pull up just short of the gaudily painted house. It was pink with white trim and a front porch with scrolled posts and gingerbread trim, and a freshly painted sign above the porch read simply MISS ALVA’S.
Bob and Blackburn angled their mounts down along the side of the whorehouse, heading toward the backyard while the others fell into line behind them.
“Yeah,” Johnnie wheezed again. “I sure as shit shoulda known what I got myself into here. They say there ain’t no savin’ the devil . . .”
Her incredulous, angry expression remained in her eyes and in the set of her wide mouth as she followed the men around behind the whorehouse and along the edge of the backyard in which three girls clad in pantaloons, camisoles, and see-through shifts of nearly every color of the rainbow were hanging wash on several clotheslines stretched between the house, a woodshed, and a small enclosed stable at the back. The stable had been freshly painted the same gaudy pink as the house, making the sashed, flyspecked windows appear especially dark and shabby.
“Looks like Miss Alva’s done spruced the place up a bit,” Brush Simms said, grinning and tipping his hat to the wash-hanging whores.
The girls stared back at him and the others, the vaguely puzzled looks on their pale faces framed by unruly shocks of uncombed hair and multicolored night ribbons. Gauzy shifts and white silk camisoles buffeted in the dry breeze, and the wet sheets snapped and popped.
“ ’Bout time,” said Blackburn at the head of the pack, riding to Bob’s left. “It was gettin’ so’s I was embarrassed to stop here.” He laughed and called out to one of the girls—a black-haired girl apparently named Wynona—to get a hot bath ready and to pop a bottle of the best hooch in the house. He’d be along shortly.
Colorado Bob and Blackburn led the procession around the stable and up a slight knoll, then down the other side, to a little cabin dug into the side of a hill. The grass grew thick atop the hovel and in the yard around it. The windows were boarded up, and the front door hung askew.
Likely, it was an old hider’s hut, unlived in for years.
“Frank and I’ll get the strongbox.” Colorado Bob swung down from his horse, his coarse silver hair dangling over his shoulders from his shabby brown bowler.
“Why you get?” Fuego leapt Indian-like from his own horse, dropping the reins and narrowing an eye suspiciously. “Why don’t
we
get?”
Colorado Bob regarded the half-breed with an ironic furrow of his pewter brows. “You realize, don’t ya, Fuego, that there ain’t nowhere for me and Frank to spend that gold between the dynamite hole in the cabin and out here?”
Fuego threw his shoulders back and pounded his chest with a clenched fist. At the same time, he wrapped his other hand around the walnut grips of the long-barreled Buntline Special jutting from the holster tied low on his right hip. “We get!”
“All right.” Bob laughed. “
We
get!
We
get!” He glanced at Simms and Johnnie, who couldn’t shake the spine-crawling feeling that Oldenberg was a lot closer than these idiot men were giving him credit for.
Chuckling, Bob shoved the door open and ducked into the cabin, Blackburn following but not needing to duck. Simms waved the half-breed on ahead of him with a courtly bow but Fuego snarled, refusing to give any man his back. Heedless of the girl, he ducked into the cabin behind Simms.
Johnnie found her own outlaw paranoia eating at her inexplicably. She’d been running cattle back and forth across the Texas-Mexico border with all her brothers except the much older Bob since she was ten years old and had learned to trust no one, even good old Bob. She dropped her reins and entered the dark, musty cabin.
“You boys stopped for pussy at Miss Alva’s, with the posse on your tail?” she asked as Bob crouched at the back of the empty, dust-caked cabin.
“Oh, hush, Li’l Sis,” Bob said. “Give us credit for an ounce of sense. We figured we’d lost ’em.”
Johnnie just shook her head, cocked a hip, and folded her arms across her chest with exasperation. The money better be good. Ole Bob had gotten too cork-headed to pull any more jobs. The man just couldn’t be trusted. It was time for her and him to retire down south somewhere other than Texas, where Johnnie herself was wanted by the law.