.45-Caliber Deathtrap (17 page)

“You okay?” the Chinaman asked.

“Am I alive?”

“I borrow horse from whores, follow you. Lucky for you I did. Lost your trail for a while, but found it again.”

Cuno was too tired and sore to do anything but nod.

“Li Mei!”

Cuno snapped his eyes open again to see Kong bound off behind him. He rolled over to his other side. Li Mei sat with her back to the cave's outside wall, head resting against the wooden frame. She wasn't moving. Kong dropped to a knee, pressed an ear to the girl's chest.

He grabbed her arm. “Li Mei!”

The girl lifted her head slightly and groaned as she jerked the arm away.

Kong moved the arm out before her to inspect it. Slowly, he turned his head to Cuno. His voice was low and thick with shock. “My daughter shot!”

CUNO STOOD HEAVILY.
His steps faltering and wet boots squeaking, he walked over and knelt down beside Kong. The Chinaman was talking to his daughter, lightly shaking her, getting no response except groans.

“Let me see.” Cuno nudged Kong aside and took the girl's arm gently in his hands, inspecting the bloody, wet hole in her shirt, about three inches above her elbow.

With his bowie knife, he made a long cut up the sleeve, then peeled the wet wool back from the small, round bullet hole. The slug had entered through the back of her arm, exiting the front. It didn't appear to have hit the bone.

No doubt she'd been shot when she and Cuno were trying to elude Cannady's jackals. Hadn't said anything. Tough girl.

With two deft knife slashes, Cuno cut the sleeve entirely off her arm, then sheathed his knife and began wrapping the cloth around the arm, knotting it taut over the hole, ignoring the girl's groaning protests.

“Gotta get her warm.”

Kong nodded. “You too.”

Cuno looked around. His roan and Kong's steeldust, which Cuno remembered from the Heaven's Bane stables, stood left of the rubble, head-to-head, reins dangling.

Cuno picked up the girl and pushed himself to his feet. He tripped over his boot toes as he staggered toward the horses. When Kong had climbed into the steeldust's saddle, Cuno lifted the girl up to him. He couldn't keep his teeth from clacking as he shivered.

“We'll head for cover and build a fire.”

He grabbed the roan's reins and climbed heavily into the saddle, booted the gelding down the hill toward the valley bottom. He wasn't aware of much after that, but went through the motions of finding a hidden hollow in the darkness, unsaddling his horse, building a fire, and throwing out his bedroll as if sleepwalking. He stripped quickly, lay down beside the fire, wrapped himself in his blankets, and went to sleep.

There was a long, luxurious blackness. As if in the far distance, he heard someone moving around, heard twigs snapping and the dull thuds of an ax driven into wood.

When he opened his eyes, his lids were heavy and sticky. For a second, he thought he'd been buried alive. He looked down his chest. Several ratty blankets and a shaggy, musty deerskin had been piled atop his own army blankets. The heavy covers and the fire popping and cracking somewhere near his feet made him feel mummified.

The air was rife with the succulent smell of roasting meat, making Cuno's mouth water.

Five feet above his head, an awning of spruce limbs had been erected, lean-to fashion, over willow poles bound with rawhide.

Spying movement to his left, Cuno turned his head. Kong squatted over Li Mei, who slept under a pile of covers much like Cuno's. The Chinaman was running a wet cloth down the girl's flushed, glistening forehead. He met Cuno's gaze.

“Found blankets in abandon trapper cabin. Killed deer.” The Chinaman wrung out the cloth in the pan. “How you feel?”

Cuno swallowed, looked outside the lean-to. A few feet away lay the cook fire over which a venison haunch roasted on a braided willow spit. Cuno's coffeepot chugged and sputtered on a flat rock in the coals.

Over the small hollow surrounded by a tangle of brush, evergreens, and boulders, the sky was soft gray. It was either early morning or early evening. The lack of dew in the brush indicated the latter. Chill air pushed against him from both sides while the fire bathed him with heat, filled his nostrils with the rich, succulent aroma of the meat.

“How long I been asleep?”

“Nearly whole day. Li Mei too. She sweats from fever, in and out of sleep.” Kong sponged the girl's right cheek, lines of concern in his face. His voice was soft. “I worry.”

Cuno rose to a sitting position, lifted his hands to finger the bandage around his head, where the lookout's rifle slug had creased his skull. Kong must have dressed the wound while Cuno slept.

His brain felt heavy and he realized, sitting up and looking around, the small encampment pitching gently from side to side, that the slug had addled him more than he'd thought during his and the girl's run. His weak limbs told him he'd lost a good bit of blood too.

They'd have to get the girl to Sundance tomorrow, find a doctor. Cuno would guide them. No telling how Kong and Li Mei might be received. Without the proper urging, a white doctor might not treat a Chinese.

Cuno said as much to Kong as he flipped all the blankets aside but one.

“What about Mr. Parker?” Kong asked.

“He'll have to bring the team on alone.” Cuno wrapped the blanket around his naked waist and stood heavily, staggering, and padded across the pine cones and gravel to the right side of the hollow.

Pissing on a juniper shrub, he glanced over his left shoulder. “Once I get you two situated in town, I'll see to the Cannady wolves. If they haven't robbed the bank already, maybe I can throw a wrench into their wheel spokes.”

Finished with his business, he wrapped the blanket tight around his waist and stumbled back to the lean-to. The cool air felt good against his chest, sweaty from the fire-warmed robes.

Kong glanced at Cuno, who was using a leather swatch to remove the blackened coffeepot from the fire. “They are very bad men. Too bad for just one man.”

Cuno poured the smoking coffee into a battered tin cup, tore off a chunk of meat from the haunch roasting on the spit. He bit off some of the meat and chewed as he stared into the fire, hearing the revolver pop as Cannady blew lead through Wade's forehead.

“You worry about your daughter.” He swallowed the meat, chased it with hot coffee. “I'll worry about Cannady's bunch.”

Cuno and Kong were up the next morning well ahead of the sun in this deep mountain hollow, cold and swathed in fog.

Bundled in their heavy coats, they washed more of the venison haunch down with hot coffee and corn cakes, which Kong had cooked the night before, then saddled up and broke camp. Kong eased the blanket-wrapped, half-conscious Li Mei onto his saddle, then crawled up behind her.

They were on the trail a good hour before the fog finally lifted and a cobalt sky shone above the pine-mantled, hawk-hunted ridges. An hour after that, the town of Sundance appeared on a craggy, bald, saffron ridge high above the tree line. From a mile out and two hundred yards below, the swaybacked village looked like a giant anthill, with the heavy mountain ore wagons and horseback riders milling amongst the rocks and scarps below and on both sides being the ants.

Rough wooden buildings formed a rickety line atop the ridge, the makeshift structures rammed together like battered, multicolored dominoes ready to be swept into the rocky gorge below at the first blast of a November snow squall. The town was a mile away, but it looked improbably close and detailed under the clear, white light of the high-country sun. Three mongrel dogs fought over refuse on the slope below the town, two snarling angrily while the third—a pup—sat back and howled. The dogs' sparring and the metronomic pounding of an unseen stamping mill carried as clearly as a throat clearing in a hushed cathedral.

Cuno, Kong, and Li Mei followed the switchbacks into the town, where the chill wind rattled the shingle chains and made the rickety buildings squawk and lean to the south. They made their way around wagons as well as pedestrians, dogs, and chickens into the heart of the raucous village. Sundance was typical of mining camps in that every other building was either a saloon or a brothel or both, and every other woman was painted and proudly displaying her wares from a balcony overlooking the main trace.

Cuno turned his roan toward a hitch rack before a hotel he'd patronized on previous trips. It was painted bright green, and the huge letters over the roofed stoop identified it as the
EVERGREEN INN
. There were better places in town, but during his last two visits he hadn't awakened to more than one or two bedbug bites, and the rats ran mostly only on the first floor. The miners' famous shovel fights usually occurred over at the Mother Lode on the other end of town, and whores tended to shun the place because the owner was a lay minister from Iowa.

Just the place for Li Mei to recuperate from her bullet wound.

Carrying the blanketed girl in his arms, Kong followed Cuno inside. The freighter paused at the front desk, where the pious, fat-faced owner, whose name he couldn't recall, was scribbling a letter on a lined notepad, sticking his pudgy tongue out the right corner of his mouth with concentration. His round, gold spectacles hung low on his chubby nose, which was impossibly white for being so close to the sun here in Sundance.

As the clock ticked loudly onto the papered wall behind him, Cuno flipped several coins on the man's notepad. “Two rooms. Not sure when we're leavin', but I'll pay three days in advance.”

The man—Cuno just remembered that his name was Carl Miller—looked up with a pleasant smile. He nudged his glasses up his nose with an ink-stained forefinger. His mild blue eyes found Kong and the girl, and the corners of his mouth turned down. He swept the coins from his pad with a quick flick of the hand that held the pen.

“I'm sorry.” He glanced at a chalked sign hanging from a nail beneath the stairs. “No Indians, niggers, Jews, Poles, dogs, pigs, or Mongolians. I'll accept Prussians, but they must bathe elsewhere
first.
”

He dipped his pen and returned his attention to his notepad.

Cuno unsheathed his revolver. He clicked the hammer back. As Miller jerked his head up at the sound, Cuno planted the end of the barrel against the hotel proprietor's forehead, shoving him straight back in his chair. The man dropped his pen and threw his hands up, grunting and crossing his eyes as he stared at the Colt in Cuno's clenched fist.

Cuno gritted his teeth. “You're gonna make an exception for these two
Mongolians
, aren't you?”

The man gasped, swallowed, and nodded his head.

“You're not going to tell anyone about us…are you?”

The man shook his head quickly.

“And you're going to waddle your fat ass across the street and fetch the sawbones pronto…aren't you?”

The man swallowed again, flexed the fingers of both hands. He was breathing hard. Sweat was popping out on his forehead as his voice quaked, “Yes…yes, I suppose I can do that.”

Cuno lowered the pistol but kept it cocked and aimed at Miller. “Now, why don't you hand over a couple keys and get on about your errands?”

A few minutes later, Kong carried Li Mei up to their second-floor room while Cuno stabled the two horses in the livery barn. When he was making the second and final trip back to the hotel with their gear, he heard the doctor speaking inside Kong's room. The tone was administering, even gentle. Not belligerent, as Cuno had expected.

The freighter went into his own room next to Kong's, and stretched out on the bed.

He'd have a smoke and a glass of water, then head out looking for Cannady's clan and ponder the problem of taking them all down without taking himself down as well.

He hadn't been on the bed long, however, before his eyes grew heavy. The cold water and the blood loss. Damn.

He mashed out his cigarette and scuttled down on the bed.

He'd doze just a bit….

He didn't how much time had passed when he opened his eyes and looked up from his pillow. The room was dark but for the flickering torchlight angling in his street-side window. There was no longer much wagon traffic, and the voices on the street were raucous, at once angry and jubilant.

It was late enough that the miners were getting well into their cups. Another hour, and the shovel fights would start….

Cuno set one boot on the floor, then froze.

Shambling footsteps in the hall. They stopped outside Cuno's room. Someone knocked—three soft taps.

Cuno grabbed his .45, ratcheted back the hammer.

“Who is it?”

The raspy male voice on the other side of the door betrayed a Scotch accent. “Message from a lady, sir.”

Cuno frowned. He didn't know any ladies in Sundance.

“You must have the wrong room.”

“Not if you're Cuno Massey.” The man pitched his voice low with irony and gravity. The slurred words betrayed a libation or two. “The lady—and a fine-lookin' lass she is too—wants to see ye in her room at the Periwinkle.”