Cuno’s right hand hovered over the Colt .45 thonged low on his right thigh. His instincts, honed over the years and from dealings with such men as those before him now, were to help the girl by slapping leather and drawing iron. Opting for a less aggressive stance, he grabbed the two plates off the mahogany and moved toward the table.
The head of the other cardplayer snapped toward him. “Hold up there, big boy.”
Cuno stopped halfway between the bar and the table. Two large, round maws of a double-barreled shotgun stared at him from atop the second man’s pin-striped left thigh, in the shadows beneath the table. The square-faced, dull-eyed man held his cards atop the table in his left hand while his right was obviously wrapped around the barn blaster below.
“I don’t recollect Pepper askin’ fer any help,” he snarled. “So why don’t you turn around and set them plates back on the counter where they was?”
Pepper had turned toward Cuno now, too, grinning with drunken delight as he continued to hold the girl low in front of him. He had long, dark brown hair, a soup-strainer black mustache, and a goatee. The girl grunted painfully, chin dipped toward her chest.
“Stan’s right. I didn’t request no assistance.” Pepper winked and stretched a mirthless grin. “Now, put the fuckin’ plates back where they was so my pretty little gal here can fetch me a snack like I just told her.” He shot a glance at the old woman standing statue-still behind the bar, cloaked in wafting tobacco smoke. “Two more drinks, Agnes. Johnnie’ll fetch ’em.”
Cuno held the plates out in front of him, his mild expression belying the angry burn in his belly. “But if I bring ’em, she won’t need to.” He hiked a shoulder and added in spite of himself, “Then neither one of you will have cause for a tizzy fit.”
“I know,” the old woman crowed, her high, raspy voice echoing around the room. “Why don’t
I
haul it out there, and save you
all
—!”
“Shut up, Agnes!” Pepper snapped, cutting the woman off but keeping his eyes on Cuno. “What’s it gonna be, big boy? You gonna set down them plates or is Stan gonna have to clean out your belly button?”
Cuno looked at the twin shotgun maws yawning at him, then at the sneer on Stan’s hard face. His heart thudded. Fury burned through him. The girl stared at him from the other side of the table. Her head, with strands of mussed, tawny hair in her eyes, was level with Pepper’s belly. Her gaze was skeptical, vaguely befuddled, her lips bunched with pain and with contempt for the man clutching her wrists.
Cuno slid the plates back onto the bar. He should have followed his first instinct and hauled his .45 from its holster. A quiet life had to start somewhere, but he should have known that place wasn’t here.
“Well, then,” Pepper drawled, turning back to the girl kneeling before him. “Let’s try that again—shall we, Johnnie girl?”
As he loosened his grip, the girl jerked her hands back, glaring up at Pepper as she slowly scuttled away on her knees, massaging her wrists and flexing her fingers. Her hard, cunning eyes told Cuno she was thinking about the knife on the floor to her right.
Holding Pepper’s gaze, the girl rose slowly, defiantly, and stooped to retrieve her hat. She pressed a dent from the crown, set it on her head, gave Pepper another cool, lingering stare, then moved out from behind the table and strode up to the bar, her stockmen’s boots skidding across the puncheons.
She was tall and slender, with a womanish curve to her hips, and she moved with a headstrong, confident grace. But her smooth, peach-colored skin, slightly tanned, told Cuno she wasn’t yet twenty. Gray-blue eyes, innocent despite her girlish attempts to give them a jaded cast, glistened in the light from the front windows, framed by buffeting wings of straight, tawny hair.
She wore a man’s gray wool shirt decorated with black zigzagging stripes across the front. Her breasts were small and round, and a couple of inches of alluring cleavage shone through the gap offered by the first three open bone buttons. A turquoise ring hung from a sweat-darkened leather thong around her neck, nestling in the V of the open shirt, above the lace trim of a white camisole.
She stole a glance at Cuno as she grabbed the plates off the bar. Turning around, she favored Cuno with another lingering look, a faintly incredulous, almost disdainful cast now in her eyes. Blinking slowly, dismissively, she sauntered back to the table, plunking both plates down before turning back to retrieve the two shot glasses Agnes had filled.
“Why, thank you, sweetheart!” Pepper exclaimed, grinning mockingly up at the young, tawny-haired girl when she’d set both whiskeys on the table before him and Stan. “You didn’t have to go to all that trouble!”
He and Stan laughed as they built sandwiches over their facedown pasteboards. The two other men by the window chuffed bemusedly, wearily, as they slouched in their chairs, the one in the window keeping his eyes skinned on the dusty street outside the saloon, as though waiting for someone.
Outside, the din from the prison wagon had faded. Cuno remembered half hearing, in the midst of the trouble with the girl, the marshals yelling at their mules while cracking a blacksnake over their backs and the rattle of wagon boards and welded strap-iron bars as the wagon had rolled into the street and, presumably, out of town.
The girl stole another sidelong glance at Cuno leaning with one arm on the bar behind her, near Agnes standing statue-still again in her fetid smoke cloud. She sauntered back around the table, nonchalantly dragging her heels. She picked up her chair and plopped down into it, poking her hat brim back off her forehead, and lifted one boot onto the chair seat, throwing an arm around her knee.
She cast her bored, tired gaze toward the window. “When we gonna fog it outta this dump?”
“When I say so,” Pepper muttered, leaning forward to bite into his sandwich. Talking with his mouth full, he picked up his pasteboards. “Now then, where the hell were we, Stan, before we was so rudely interrupted by Miss High-and-Mighty?”
As the men ate, drank, and continued their game, and the girl stared out the window with the same air as before, Cuno saw that the shotgun had disappeared from Stan’s lap.
Cuno turned back to his beer and picked up his half-eaten sandwich. Who these people were and what they were after was none of his business. He had his own business to worry about. Namely, his own urgent desire to secure a freight contract with the sutler at Fort Dixon, near Crow Feather in the southern territory.
The bank loan he’d acquired in Sweetwater was for two six-mule hitches and for two new Murphy high-sided rollers cut under and heavy-braked for rugged mountain terrain. All he needed now was one more freighter, an outrider, and the contract with Fort Dixon, and he’d be set for another year or two.
After a couple of runs, and it looked as though his contract would be renewed, he’d buy a small warehouse and corral in Crow Feather or Cheyenne and maybe put cash down on his own shack so he didn’t have to hole up in boardinghouses and flea-bit hotels between runs.
Maybe he’d even think about starting a family again, with the right woman.
He finished the sandwich and beer faster than he’d intended—before he’d given Renegade enough time to rest—so he ordered one more beer and considered one of the hog knuckles.
A soft whistle sounded in the front of the room. Cuno turned to see the two men at the table by the window lazily gaining their feet, the one closest the window staring toward the two cardplayers and the girl while the other man stretched and hitched his double-rigged cartridge belts higher on his narrow hips.
“Come on, now, Gene,” Stan complained. “I’m finally winnin’ back some of the money this cheatin’ privy skunk fleeced me for in Cody!”
“The other fellas are movin’—let’s go,” Gene ordered mildly, lifting his hat and running a hand through his thin, blond hair as he headed toward the door.
The other man nearest the front chuckled mockingly at Stan, who scowled down at his cards and winnings pile. Pepper whooped as, sliding his chair back, he scooped a small pile of coins into his hat. His long, dark brown hair danced around his shoulders.
Cuno saw, as the man dumped the coins from the hat into his other hand, then deposited the coins in a pocket of his black denims, that Pepper wore a pistol on both thighs, butts forward. Another shoulder holster peeked out from under his open duster. One of his mule-eared boots bulged with a hideout gun.
As Pepper and the girl headed for the door, the girl walking briskly, stiffly ahead of the long-haired gent, Stan scooped his own coins off the table. “Hold up a minute, damnit! Christ, what’s the big, damn hurry all of a sudden?”
When he’d shoved his winnings into his pockets, Stan turned toward the door. His cream duster flapped open to reveal that he, too, carried a brace of pistols in the cross-draw position. His sawed-off ten-gauge hung from a lanyard down his neck, swinging low across his cartridge belts.
Striding toward the still-shuddering batwings, he glanced over his shoulder at Cuno and stopped suddenly.
“I’ll be along!” he shouted toward the doors from which the sound of creaking saddle leather emanated.
He turned and angled back toward Cuno. Cuno’s left hand held the handle of his beer glass, his right boot propped on the brass foot rail.
“Gonna grab me one more bite of cheese,” Stan yelled.
Stan stopped in front of Cuno. Cuno held the man’s faintly sneering gaze as Stan snaked his right arm out across the bar to snatch a thick wedge of moldy cheese from one of the free lunch plates.
Taking a bite of the cheese, he winked at Cuno, nodded, and turned toward the door. He hadn’t taken half a step before he stopped suddenly and swung back toward Cuno sharply, raising the shotgun hanging from the lanyard around his neck and, holding the barn blaster like a war club, rammed the butt toward Cuno’s head.
Having read the man’s intentions in his red-mottled face and cow eyes, Cuno dropped his head toward the bar. Stan grunted as the shotgun whooshed through the air. The man’s eyes snapped wide with shock as, propelled by his own momentum, he turned nearly a full circle before resetting his feet.
When he did, Cuno lunged forward and slammed his right fist wrist-deep in Stan’s belly. The air left Stan’s lungs in a loud surge, spittle flying out from the man’s furred lips.
As he buckled at the waist, his head tipped sideways toward Cuno’s chest. Cuno smashed his fist, knuckles out, against the side of Stan’s head.
“Uhnnn!”
The hard case’s head jerked as he dropped to a knee, his eyelids fluttering as though to shake away the stars dancing behind his retinas.
Cuno grabbed Stan’s collar and hammered another right jab against Stan’s left cheek, high on the bone and feeling the flesh tear beneath his knuckles. Holding the man firmly upright, Cuno slammed three more quick, piston-like blows against the same cheek, the solid smacks echoing around the room like distant pistol fire.
Stan yelled like an enraged, trapped coyote with each blood-drawing smack.
After the last blow, Cuno released the man’s collar and jerked the shotgun up over Stan’s head. Stan dropped to his hands and knees, blood dribbling in several streams from his laid-open cheek to the spur-scarred floor.
He breathed heavily, groaning, as though he’d run barefoot a long way over harsh terrain.
Cursing, he cupped his hand over his cheek and glanced up and sideways at Cuno, fear showing in his close-set eyes. Cuno stepped back away from the man and hefted the shotgun in both his hands, glancing down at the gut shredder bemusedly, as though pondering a fitting use for the savage weapon.
“No,” Stan croaked, “please . . . don’t . . .”
Cuno flipped the shotgun’s latch, and the gun opened. Plucking the wads from each barrel, Cuno flipped them back over his shoulder. They clattered across the puncheons.
Cuno snapped the gun closed, then threw it down to the cutthroat staring up at him skeptically, blood dribbling over his jaw and neck and onto the floorboards below. The gut shredder glanced off Stan’s shoulder and hit the floor with a thud.
Cuno set his hand on the butt of his holstered .45 and glared down at him. “Let’s be strangers, Stan.”
Relief washed through Stan’s anguished eyes as he grabbed the empty shotgun and gained his feet. He pulled a dark blue handkerchief from his back pocket and pressed it to his cheek. Keeping his eyes on Cuno and holding the shotgun down low in his left hand, he stepped backward toward the front of the room.
He backed through the doors, looped the shotgun over his shoulder, and jogged down the steps to the hitchrack where the other horses had been tied. Only a single chestnut remained.
Stan swung into the saddle and spurred the mount west, crouching low in the leather and holding his handkerchief to his cheek. The drumming of his hooves dwindled quickly, replaced by what sounded like a dry, ululating wheeze rising slowly above the distant bark of an angry dog.
Cuno turned to the barmaid, Agnes, standing behind the bar in her perpetual, smelly smoke cloud. The skinny woman held a fresh cigarillo to her lips as she peered out the window in the direction Stan had fled.
Her thin lips spread a wide, false-toothed smile, and she shook her head slowly from side to side, shoulders jerking as that queer cackle fought its way up from her shriveled lungs.
3
“I CAUGHT SUCH a bad case of the clap from the girls over to Miss Carlotta’s Purple Garter Sportin’ Palace that I thought the pony drip was gonna burn a hole right through my longhandles!”
Riding ahead of the jail wagon rattling over a rutted, two-track trail, the town constable of Buffalo Flats, Neil Ardai, slapped his denim-clad thigh and directed a laugh over his shoulder at the two deputy U.S. marshals slouched in the wagon’s driver’s box. “And you wanna know the kicker?”
“What’s the kicker, Neil?” asked the younger of the two federal lawmen, Chuck Svenson, with a faintly distracted air as he skidded his wary gaze back and forth across the rising and falling trail winding between low, pine-clad slopes.