Cuno removed his hat and ran his hand through his long, sweat-damp hair. No matter who cared about him, or if no one cared, the man was dead.
Murdered.
Cuno rode for another hour, until it was so black he could barely see his hand in front of his face. Then he camped in a box canyon, near a small feeder creek, building a small fire for coffee and to warm some beans.
He dug a shallow trough for his hip and slept hard, his two blankets pulled up to his chin against the high-country chill and the breeze that settled after midnight. In his sleep he heard an owl hoot, a distant bobcat scream, and the sporadic scratchings of burrowing creatures. Pinecones thudded dully around him.
He started the next day consciously putting the dead lawman and the jail wagon out of his mind . . . until, around ten a.m., as he took a detour around a section of trail obliterated by a rockslide, a distant rifle shot ripped out across pine-covered slopes, sucking at its own echo.
It was followed by the muffled, almost inaudible bray of a mule.
5
CUNO SAT HIS skewbald paint straight-backed and tense, jaws hard as he stared up the razorback ridge on his right.
Pines covered the slope slashed with charred, crumbling logs from a long-ago fire, and recent deadfall—pines as well as firs, a few aspens. At the lip of the ridge, the forest receded beneath a camel hump of pocked, fluted sandstone.
As his gaze bored a hole through the sky capping the ridge, another rifle shot cracked in the canyon on the other side. The report flatted out shrilly as it echoed across the valley—muffled with distance but crisp and clear on the high, dry western air. Renegade shook his head and stomped his right foot, then shook his head again.
Brows ridging his clear blue eyes, Cuno continued staring at the ridge, his heart thudding dully. Finally, when no more gunshots sounded, he snapped his head forward, clucked to the horse, and continued on his way, up through a broad valley cleaved by a winding, slender stream around which tall, tawny grass grew thick and breeze-ruffled. Flood-killed trees—short-branched and barkless—stood in spare groves on both sides of the slow-moving water.
Keeping his gaze on the trees and the stream, Cuno was practically holding his breath, hoping he wouldn’t hear another report, hoping the shots he’d heard had been fired by hunters and not by the renegades trailing the jail wagon.
He’d ridden only fifty yards when another whip-crack broke beyond the ridge, the echo drawing Cuno’s gut taut as braided rawhide. Another report sounded, and then another, until a veritable fusillade rose from the far canyon.
When you knew how to use a .45, there were times when you couldn’t very well
not
use it.
Cursing the past that had led to his abilities, he neck-reined Renegade back down the faint wagon trail he’d been following, then put the horse up the gradual western slope. Lunging off his rear hooves, digging with the front, Renegade climbed into the tall grass along the base of the hill and lunged up through the grass and chokecherry shrubs until the scrub thinned and the forest began.
The horse picked his own way through the thick timber, leaping deadfalls and turning sharply around occasional boulders and the giant root balls of trees uprooted by previous wind storms. Cuno ducked under branches, occasionally breaking one off. Renegade’s hooves thumped softly in the spongy turf, crunching pinecones and needles.
Gaining the sandstone caprock, Cuno trotted the skewbald along the dike’s sandy base until he found a ragged defile. He couldn’t tell if the cleft offered passage to the other side of the ridge and into the valley on the other side, but it was the only one he’d seen.
Swinging down from the saddle, he quickly tied the horse to a pine branch and shucked his Winchester from the saddle boot.
The shooting continued—the revolver and rifle reports sounding like snapping branches, with the occasional whistling screech of a ricochet. Occasionally, a man gave a clipped, angry shout.
“Stay, boy,” Cuno told the horse as, levering a shell into the Winchester’s breech, he strode back up the slope to peer into the cavern.
He couldn’t see much but rock thumbs jutting from both stone walls and narrowing the passage to a few feet in places. But the gunfire sounded louder in here. He moved forward, crawling over a couple of stacked boulders and sidestepping around a three-foot gap before angling through a dogleg.
Seconds later, he crouched behind a stone upthrust at the other end, peering over the rock and into a broad, sun-splashed valley like the one he’d left. Few trees stippled the slope below him, however. Mostly tall, tawny grass, chokecherry shrubs, occasional aspens, and moss-furred rocks and boulders.
At the far side of the valley, a narrow creek angled along the base of a steep, pine-carpeted spur ridge. Rocks and scattered aspens stood along the creek, and now as Cuno raked his gaze across the canyon, he saw several sets of smoke puffs and orange flashes of gunfire from the rocks and trees.
The shots were directed up toward the middle of the valley, where the jail wagon was parked along an almost-grassed-over wagon trail. The wagon tongue drooped into the trail, the mules gone.
The four prisoners cowered inside the wagon, yelling encouragement toward the four or five men shooting toward Cuno’s side of the canyon from the creek.
Another man crouched behind the wagon’s left front wheel, firing a Winchester toward the creek. A body humped in the grass just ahead and left of the wagon. The sun reflected off something silver on the man’s chest. Likely a deputy U.S. marshal’s badge, Cuno thought with a nettling hitch in his gut.
He returned his gaze to the man shooting from the wagon. The gray hair on the man’s hatless head, and the rounded shoulders, bespoke the older marshal. The younger one was dead or at least badly wounded. A large patch of glistening red blood shone on the older gent’s shirt, across his left shoulder blade. By the way he was hefting his rifle, as though it weighed ten extra pounds, he was losing blood and strength fast.
Cuno moved out from behind the rock, crouching, holding his Winchester low so that sunlight was less likely to flash off the copper receiver chasing. He strode down the slope, hoping he wouldn’t be seen from the creek, and crouched behind a spindly cedar and a low boulder sheathed in tawny grass.
He hunkered on one knee, listening to the fiercely sporadic cracks of the gunfire and the whining ricochets off rocks and the wagon’s iron-shod front wheels, while he considered the best way to offer a hand. Should he try to move around and flank the attackers, or just drop a little closer to the wagon and return fire at the creek from higher ground?
With a solid two hundred yards currently stretching between him and the creek, he had little chance of hitting any of the well-covered shooters from here.
He’d just decided to try to flank the attackers when movement on his left caught his eye.
A mustached man in a long, cream duster, felt sombrero, and mule-eared, stovepipe boots stole out from behind a rocky escarpment humping up out of the slope about fifty yards below Cuno. Crouching, holding his rifle in one hand, the man directed his gaze toward the jail wagon as he stole down the slope and pulled up behind a triangular boulder sheathed in spindly shrubs.
He was doing to the old marshal what Cuno had planned to do to the gunman’s compadres. Less than sixty yards away from the lawman, he had a clear shot.
On the other side of the valley, amidst the angry, sporadic rifle cracks, a man cursed sharply. Cuno looked beyond the wagon to see one of the attackers down on a knee beside a boulder, clutching his thigh. The old marshal, who had scrambled around to the other end of the wagon containing the four snarling, cursing prisoners, snapped off another shot.
The man clutching his knee by the tree jerked straight back and flopped down in the grass beside the stream, throwing his rifle high in the air. It landed in the water with a silent splash.
Behind the wagon, the old marshal chuckled as he ejected the spent brass and levered a fresh shell into the chamber. At the same time, the man downslope and left of Cuno snaked his own rifle around the right side of his covering boulder to draw a bead on the marshal’s back.
Cuno snapped his Winchester to his shoulder, squinted down the barrel, centered his sights on the side of the rifleman’s head, just above and behind the man’s ear, and squeezed the trigger.
The rifle roared as the brass butt plate slammed against Cuno’s shoulder.
The boulder in front of the gunman turned red, as though someone had slung an open can of paint at it. The man’s head jerked sharply sideways, then straightened, and he seemed to continue to peer downslope for a good three seconds before the rifle sagged in his arms.
His hands opened, the rifle fell, and the man sagged forward on his face. He rolled awkwardly about ten yards down the hill before coming to rest on his back, arms and legs spread wide.
The old marshal had just snapped off a shot toward the creek. Before he could eject his spent brass, he snapped his entire body around toward Cuno, his craggy, bearded face etched with fear.
Crouching behind his covering shrub and racking a fresh shell into his Winchester’s breech, Cuno threw up an arm. He thought he saw befuddlement brush across the old marshal’s haggard, sweating features. The man’s chin dropped slightly as he looked at the dead rifleman sprawled on the slope below the triangular-shaped boulder.
More shouts rose from the creek. Cuno took advantage of the attackers’ confusion—they’d no doubt seen the flanking shooter tumble down the hill—by bounding to his feet and scrambling down the slope past the blood-splattered boulder. He hurdled the rifleman’s corpse with its ruined head and bulging eyes.
As he hit the bottom of the slope and started across the valley, running and angling right toward the wagon fifty yards away, rifles whip-cracked fiercely from along the creek. The slugs chewed into the grass on either side of Cuno’s stomping boots.
He squeezed off two shots from his right hip, then, approaching the wagon with its prisoners snarling like circus lions and the marshal sitting with his back to the rear wheel, dove behind the front wheel as another slug barked into a log on the wagon’s other side.
Another sparked off the outside wheel with a sharp, ear-ringing clang.
“Hey, Junior!” one of the prisoners growled. “What the hell you think you’re doin’? This ain’t
none
of
your
affair!”
Cuno, breathing hard as he pressed his back to the wagon’s spoked wheel, beside the bulging hub, glanced over his left shoulder. A small but strongly built, broad-faced gent glared at him from between the wagon’s bars.
“Now, the marshal over here is on his last legs, and in about two minutes, you ain’t gonna have no one to be fighting for. Understand? So you best beat it back to where you came from.
Got it
, big boy?”
Cuno looked at the marshal at the other end of the wagon. The man’s left front chest was bloody, his large belly rising and falling sharply beneath the flaps of his beaded deerskin vest. The gray-bearded man cast Cuno a sidelong glance, a smile of ironic humor as well as searing pain tugged at his lips and long, dust-rimmed, gray-brown mustache. His hat was gone, and thin, sweat-soaked hair curled about his balding head.
“Frank’s got a point, kid.” The old marshal coughed. “Bastards jumped us when we were watering the mules at the creek. Didn’t figure it. Didn’t see it comin.’” He coughed again, sucked a rattling breath. “Ardai was so damn sure they’d never track us through this canyon.”
“Ardai’s a fool,” barked the red-haired prisoner, who’d pissed through the wagon’s bars in Buffalo Flats, poking his wedge-shaped, sunburned nose through the bars as he glared down at the marshal. “Joe Pepper’s got Dud Manover ridin’ with him. Manover can track a snake across a boulder field in the drivin’ rain!”
A couple more slugs tore into the sod around the wagon, another clanging off one of the wagon bars. As the cracks resounded around the valley, one of the prisoners—the tall, Nordic-looking hombre with long, silver hair and gold front teeth crawled over to the wagon’s far side. “Goddamn you sons o’ bitches! Watch where you shootin’!”
The red-haired gent followed suit with, “Ain’t much good springin’ us if we’re
dead
, now,
is it
?” He turned to the rangy, silver-haired man. “Which one fired that shot—did you see, Bob? Faraday, wasn’t it?”
The short, stocky gent called Frank shook his head. “The old mossy-horned badge toter done shot Faraday. He’s the one on his back by the creek. I think there’s only three left—Shepherd, Pepper, and Stan McDonald.”
Cuno had crawled beneath the wagon on his belly, holding his rifle up in front of him, cocked and ready. As the prisoners scuffed around in the wagon above his head, making the springs and wooden undercarriage squawk and creak, he cast his gaze across the grassy, cedar-stippled valley toward the creek.
There was a low hump of ground halfway between the wagon and the water, and he thought he’d seen a hat crown sway above the bending weed tips capping the hump.
“Pepper and McDonald’s all we need,” he heard one of the prisoners sneer above his head. “Them’re the cold-steel boys, sure ’nough. Boys, we’ll soon be free as the damn jackrabbits and on our way to that payroll box.”
“If Pepper and McDonald don’t kill us instead of that fool kid and the mossy horn.” Bob shouted loudly through the cracks between the wagon’s stout floorboards. “Hey, kid, where’d you go, anyways? Just what in the hell do you think you’re
doin’
under there?”
Ka-blam!
Cuno’s rifle rammed his shoulder and leapt in his hands. He stared down the smoking barrel. The man who had just poked his head up above the low, grassy mound suddenly disappeared.
“On the right, kid!” the old marshal rasped. “I’m outta shells!”