Cuno opened his Winchester’s breech, and the smoking spent cartridge flew back behind him. Seating a fresh shell, Cuno slid the rifle right. Another man—one with blood gleaming on his left cheek—bolted out from behind a boulder about forty yards from the wagon.
“Look out, Stan!” One of the prisoners shouted. “The kid’s under the wagon!”
Stan stopped, snapped his rifle to his shoulder. The maw spat smoke and flames. At the same time the slug ground into the dirt three inches from Cuno’s right elbow, the report reached Cuno’s ears. A quarter-second later, Cuno triggered his Winchester three times quickly.
Stan grunted as all three slugs took him through the center of his chest, lifting him a foot in the air and punching him straight back.
“Ohhhhhhhh!”
one of the prisoners lamented as Stan hit the ground shoulder first on his back, boots and spurs soon following. His rifle clattered into the brush beside him.
Silence. No movement in the wagon over Cuno’s head.
There was only the sighing of the wind ruffling the grass and the occasional peeps of birds in the trees along the creek.
The old marshal wheezed a taut laugh. “I’ll be damned, kid. You got the son of a bitch.”
Raking his gaze back and forth across the canyon, Cuno thumbed more rounds from his cartridge belt into his rifle’s loading gate. “Should have finished him off in Buffalo Flats.” He drew a deep breath. “If I counted right, there’s one more.”
6
CUNO’S LAST WORDS hadn’t died on his lips before a girl’s scream rose from the creek.
A man in chaps, a funnel-brimmed hat, and a dark brown shirt ran out from a tight clump of aspens, water splashing up around his knees as he jogged across the stream, a rifle in his hand. He angled toward a trough in the steep, opposite bank.
Another figure—slender and with long, tawny hair—ran along behind him.
It was the girl from the Buffalo Flats Saloon whom Pepper had backhanded. She yelled sharply, closing on the brown-shirted man. The man wheeled, swinging his rifle around and smashing the butt across the girl’s forehead.
Her scream reached Cuno’s ears after she’d wheeled and fallen in the shallow water and the man had continued slogging through the water toward the trough.
Cuno scrambled out from beneath the wagon, ran into the meadow, and dropped to a knee. Backshooting disgusted him, but better to backshoot a man than let him ride off to return later to finish the bloody job he’d started.
“Look out, Shepherd!” the red-haired prisoner called from behind Cuno. “The kid’s drawin’ a bead on ya!”
Cuno fired. Dust puffed from the bank in front of the brown-shirted man. He flinched and jerked a quick look over his shoulder as he splashed onto the opposite shore and scrambled toward the trough angling down the cutbank.
Cuno fired two more quick rounds, both slugs pounding the bank on either side of the man now scrambling up the steep, eroded trough, using his rifle like a cane and frantically pulling himself up by protruding roots with his other hand.
Cursing, Cuno ran forward and racked a fresh shell.
Behind him, the prisoners whooped and hollered encouragement to their friend Shepherd. Cuno stopped, drew aim again as his target tossed his rifle over the bank and hoisted himself up over the lip with both arms.
Cuno’s rifle thundered twice more. Both slugs blew widgets of stone and clay from the side of the cutbank as the brown-shirted man threw himself into the grass atop the lip and, grabbing his rifle, rolled into the thick, shaded timber beyond.
One of the prisoners guffawed and rattled the bars of the jail wagon. “Missed him, big boy! Missed him clean!”
“But don’t worry,” yowled one of the others. “He’ll be back . . . with more!”
There was a fleshy smack. “Shut your fuckin’ trap, Simms!”
The man’s return was what Cuno was afraid of. He took his Winchester in one hand and bolted forward into an all-out run, boots pounding and spurs trilling, grass crunching beneath his feet. Vaguely, he heard the prisoners behind him cursing and arguing, someone smacking the bars angrily.
He made the trees and cut straight into the stream, glancing at the girl, who’d crawled onto the canyon-side shoreline and now lay on her hip and elbow. She held a hand to her bleeding forehead as her eyes rolled and fluttered, dazed.
Ten long strides and Cuno was at the trough, climbing fast, grabbing exposed roots. His wet boots squawked and slipped in the clay already muddied by his fleeing quarry.
When he’d pulled himself up and over the lip, he remained crouching, rifle ready, as he raked his gaze around the columnar pines and firs looming around him. When no shots exploded from nearby boles, Cuno moved forward.
His heart pounded as he began jogging slowly, sweeping his gaze around the trees, stalking the last surviving bushwhacker—aside from the girl. Ahead, several horses whinnied amongst the angry chittering of squirrels. Cuno lengthened his stride, heading up the pine-clad slope, leaping deadfalls, holding his rifle up high across his chest.
There was the clatter of pounding hooves and more whinnies and knickers. Twigs snapped under running hooves.
Cuno ran harder, his breath whooshing in and out of his broad chest, his knotted red bandanna flopping over his shoulder. When he got to the crest of the hill, he looked down into a narrow, brush-and-willow-choked gorge. Beyond, where the gorge opened out into a series of sage-covered hogbacks, the brown-shirted man galloped into the distance astride a lunging steeldust.
Five other horses fanned out around him, buck-kicking angrily and trailing their reins.
Cuno raised his rifle and snapped off three quick shots, but the bouncing rider was a hundred yards away, rising and falling over the hogbacks. Cuno couldn’t even see the dust or grass blown up by his errant rounds.
He bit out a sharp curse. He watched the fleeing rider disappear down the other side of a steep rise. The other horses scattered amongst the rolling, cedar-spotted hills, dwindling quickly until they were gone.
Cuno turned and tramped back the way he’d come, run-sliding down the slippery trough to the stream. The girl sat along the opposite shore, her back against a rock, knees bent.
Her shirt and jeans were soaked, and her tawny hair hung in wet strands to her shoulders. Her forehead was swollen and bloody around a vertical gash on her left temple. She rested her arms on her knees and watched Cuno without expression.
She’d found her wet hat and snugged it down on her head, the brim shading her eyes. She moved her head to watch Cuno cross the stream. As he started up the bank about ten feet away from her, he turned to her and tossed his chin back toward the steep cutbank.
“Where’s he headed?”
She said in a voice so soft and without inflection that the stream nearly drowned it, “How should I know?”
Cuno didn’t know what to make of her. She’d been part of the group and yet, back in the saloon, she’d seemed removed from it. He should throw her in the jail wagon, but then there was the complication of throwing a girl to four snarling male coyotes . . .
Screw it. She’d had her horns dulled by Shepherd.
He turned away and tramped through the trees and across the meadow, cutting between the two dead men—Stan and Pepper—lying in bloody heaps amidst the waving bluestem and wheatgrass. When he got back to the wagon, the prisoners were sitting against the barred walls, regarding him skeptically.
The big, one-eared Mexican, Fuego, sat with one forearm draped across a lone upraised knee, head canted as he studied Cuno like an artist might study an image he’d like to paint.
Only, unlike your average artist, Fuego’s blue-green eyes were opaque with needling menace—a deep-seated, animal-like threat the likes of which Cuno hadn’t confronted since his dealings with the savage bounty hunter Ruben Pacheca. Remembering Cuno’s part in the Mexican’s incarceration, Fuego was, without a doubt, imagining the south-of-the-border style revenge he intended to exact on the husky blond freighter, first chance he got.
“Hey, kid,” said the stocky gent with a wide, clean-shaven face and steel-blue eyes. He was short enough that he could stand in the wagon without stooping, and he stood now, thick fists wrapped around the bars of the cage’s rear door. “Grab the marshal’s key off his belt and open the damn door. Hurry up. You don’t wanna die out here. This ain’t your fight!”
Ignoring the man, Cuno walked around the rear of the wagon and crouched down before the marshal. The oldster sat where Cuno had left him, leaning back against the wheel, legs stretched straight out before him, rifle crossed on his lap.
He was just beyond the reach of the jail cage and the four seasoned killers within. He had one cartridge pinched between the thumb and index finger of his left hand, as though he’d started reloaded his rifle but was too fatigued to follow through.
His chest rose and fell heavily. His eyes had been closed but as Cuno’s shadow passed over his gray-bearded face, his lids fluttered open.
“You get the other one?” he rasped.
Cuno shook his head. “How bad you hit?”
The man shook his head as if to say he wasn’t sure. “Think my shoulder’s shattered.” He glanced at the blood bibbing his gray duck shirt over which he wore a beaded deerskin vest to which his marshal’s badge was pinned. “ ’Bout half drained, too, I reckon. Stuff my neckerchief in the hole, will you?”
Cuno leaned his rifle over a sage clump, then unknotted the sweat-stained green cloth from around the marshal’s leathery neck.
“Bullet go all the way through?”
The marshal nodded. “In through the back, out the front. Bastards backshot me. Drilled Chuck through the kneecap, and when I tried to help him to cover, they shot him through his neck. Got me when I was runnin’ toward the wagon.”
Cuno stretched the man’s neckerchief out before him, started a tear with his teeth, then ripped the cloth in two with his hands. “You have anything to clean it with?”
The old lawman tossed his head toward the front of the wagon. “Bottle under the seat . . . in the grain sack.”
Cuno moved up the side of the wagon, ignoring the prisoners’ owly stares and snarls and the continued threatening pleas of the short man called Frank to blast the lock off the cage’s door. He shoved aside several croaker sacks of camping supplies before he found the bottle stuffed in a bag of parched corn.
When he’d soaked both pieces of cloth with the whiskey, he moved back to the marshal and extended the bottle.
The oldster chuckled dryly. “Obliged, kid.”
When the man had taken a couple of hard pulls, Cuno wadded both pieces of cloth tightly in his fists, wringing out the excess whiskey. He pulled the marshal slightly forward and scuttled around beside him to inspect the entrance wound in his back.
“I feared they mighta sent someone from the north to blast the prisoners outta the cage.”
“Maybe you should have let them go and saved your own hide.” Cuno found the hole just below the man’s left shoulder blade and, gritting his teeth, stuffed the neckerchief into it. “Maybe you still should . . .”
“Gnnahhhh!”
The old marshal drew his mouth wide. Shock and misery glazed his eyes as Cuno tamped the whiskey-soaked cloth into place. The old lawman stopped breathing for about five seconds, and then he let out some air before sucking a deep, slow breath. “No lawman worth his salt’d let them critters out to run wild upon the land. No, sir. Not as long as I still got blood to bleed with.”
Cuno shoved the man back against the wheel and leaned his head close to locate the exit hole in the man’s chest. It was about six inches down from his shoulder.
“Ready?”
“Wait!”
The marshal lifted his whiskey bottle in a quivering, blue-veined hand. The bottle shook so hard that he missed his mouth twice before finally slipping the brown lip inside. He tipped back another long pull, his Adam’s apple bobbing like a duck on a millrace.
“Hey, save some for us, Landers,” said the prisoner with the long, silver hair, sitting with his back to Cuno and the old marshal but turning his head to peer over his shoulder. “We’re gonna have us a hoedown after you’re dead.”
The lawman lowered the sloshing bottle with a raspy, whiskey-fetid sigh. He looked up to see Cuno staring at the man. “That’s Bob King. Colorado Bob. Don’t look into his eyes too long.” The marshal chuckled. “They say it’ll drive you loco, sort of like sleepin’ in the moonlight.”
Despite the warning, Cuno held the man’s snaky, slant-eyed gaze. “Don’t doubt it a bit.”
Colorado Bob King stretched a slow, thin-lipped smile teeming with nearly as much menace as the eyes of Fuego. His gold teeth glistened. As he squeezed the bars in his fists, the tattoos on the back of his hands shifted and clarified—the rabbit on one, the hawk on the other.
Cuno spat to one side, then leaned forward again and shoved the wadded cloth into the old marshal’s bullet hole.
The man scrunched up his flushed, sweaty face and turned his head to one side, groaning deep in his chest. The cords in his neck stood out like ropes.
“Jay-
zuzzzz
Keee-
rist
, that smarts!”
He swallowed, let the muscles in his face slacken. “But I do appreciate it, kid. Now, if you’ll be so kind as to help me retrieve my mules, I’ll try to get this heap movin’ again . . . before that backshootin’ son of a bitch brings more of Oldenberg’s boys.”
The man had grabbed Cuno’s shoulder and began pulling himself to his feet. Cuno shoved him back down. “You’re not gonna do any walking with that shredded shoulder. I’ll fetch your mules. Then we’ll see if you’re fit to ride.”
“I gotta ride. Gotta get this vermin to the lockup in Crow Feather. They done already been sentenced up in Cody, but the judge wanted ’em to hang in Crow Feather. That’s where they robbed the army payroll detail. The widows of the men they killed put in a special request to see these coyotes’ necks stretched while they sipped tea and ate pound cake.”