.45-Caliber Desperado (6 page)

Cuno glanced once more at Christiano Arguello, who was falling a good fifty yards back behind him now, and more.

Cuno cursed and slowed Renegade to a walk, throwing out his hand to reach for Arguello's reins as the young Mexican's paint pony caught up to him. One of the riders from the main pack was riding back toward Cuno and Camilla, a burly American whom Cuno had heard someone call Brouschard.

He was dressed in sweaty buckskins with a green silk neckerchief flopping down his chest and a Sharps rifle snugged down in a beaded saddle scabbard. As he approached Arguello's paint, he shucked a big, pearl-gripped Colt from a shoulder holster, and pointed the barrel up as he thumbed the hammer back.

“No!” Cuno bit out.

Too late. The revolver roared. Christiano Arguello's head snapped straight back on his shoulders. It sagged there for a second, and then the young bandito fell straight back against the paint's rump before rolling down the left stirrup fender and piling up in the dust. The paint whinnied and buck-kicked, and Camilla reached out to snatch its reins before it could run off.

Cuno glared at the burly American, who aimed his smoking pistol at Cuno and narrowed one eye. “No slackers. They slow up the whole damn bunch. Now, let's get a move on, you two, or”—he glanced at Camilla—“your boyfriend's gonna get the same thing,
chiquita
.”

He turned back to Cuno, and his eyes flicked to the .45 that the young freighter held against his stout right thigh. Cuno looked back at him, nostrils flaring. Silently, with only his eyes, he told the man that he'd kill him if he ever aimed a pistol at him again.

The big man seemed to understand. A faint splotch rose into his yellow-bearded, sun-seared cheeks, and he depressed his own weapon's hammer, returned it to its holster, and galloped up the trail.

Cuno swung out of his saddle. He did not look at Camilla staring apprehensively at him as he said, “I'll be along in a minute.”

“We have to hurry, Cuno. There are several lawmen in Limon. They'll throw in with the prison guards, and there'll be a helluva posse after us.”

Cuno's eyes flared as he turned to her quickly and flung his arm out. “Go on! Git outta here!”

The girl shook her head slowly. “He would have died. One way or the other. He's better off this way. You can't take the time to bury him.”

He leaned down and dragged Christiano up with one arm, then bent his knees as he slung the dead man over his naked back. Shifting the young man's light load on his shoulders, he glanced up at the girl staring at him, her pretty face taut with impatience.

“Who the hell are you?” he asked.

She pursed her lips, drew a breath, and flared her nostrils. “The girl that saved you from the hangman!”

She tossed the reins of Christiano's horse down. She whipped her own horse around and ground her spurs into its flanks.

As she galloped off, Cuno walked over to a patch of thick brush and lay the dead man between two boulders. He straightened, stared grimly down at the inert form half wasted by a year in Castle's pen, then crouched over the body once more and crossed the young man's hands on his belly. If he wasn't going to bury him, he could at least arrange him decently.

Christiano stared up at Cuno, glassy-eyed, lips forming a wry smile, as though he knew as well as Cuno did that the carrion eaters would be on him soon, and crossing his hands wasn't going to mean a tinker's damn when they came.

“Sorry, amigo.”

Cuno glanced back the way he and his savage saviors had come. In the far distance he saw a slender dust plume. Beneath it, half a dozen or so riders, little more than brown blotches from this distance, were galloping toward him.

For a moment, he felt torn. He could take his horse and his gun and go his own way, or he could follow the men and the girl who'd saved him from the gallows and who'd probably figured out an escape route.

With the outlaws—cold-blooded killers, all—he had a chance. Without the outlaws, he was probably finished. Besides, having killed the Limon marshal, he was for all intents and purposes one of them now, anyway. Maybe it would have been better if he'd been hanged . . .

He'd felt his shell belt in the same saddlebag in which Camilla had placed his gun. Now he retrieved it from the pouch, wrapped it around his waist, dropped his prized .45 into the holster, and fastened the keeper thong over the hammer.

He had a gun. Now he needed a hat and clothes. The sun was branding his face and naked torso.

Swinging up into the saddle, he grabbed the reins of Christiano's horse, and led it off after the others, all of whom, including Camilla, had disappeared over a hill. She was waiting for him on the other side, a worried look in her eyes. Cuno remembered seeing the same look in the eyes of his young half-breed wife, July, a long time ago, just after he'd finished off Anderson and Spoon.

The look bit him hard, caused a stone to drop in his belly.

Christ, the world was crazy. His life was crazy. He kept reliving the same horrors, over and over. He'd always hoped he'd be able to find a safe place in which to hole up quietly and live well, but here he was running for his life with a passel of kill-happy outlaws, and all because he'd saved this girl waiting for him now from a passel of rogue lawmen intent on raping her.

“Come on,” she said when he rode up beside her. “We stop soon, get good water, a good meal in our bellies.” Her eyes flicked across his broad, hairless chest with its flat ridges of hard muscle on which sweat glistened like honey. “Get you some clothes.” Her mouth corners quirked again. “Maybe even do something about your nose.”

Cuno nodded slowly, thoughtfully. He was alive and free. And he had a pretty girl who obviously wanted him. He may not know who she was exactly, but all in all he supposed he had little to complain about.

He nodded again, chewing his lower lip. “Let's ride.”

She began to turn her chestnut.

“Wait,” he said, holding up a hand. “Where the hell are we going, anyway?”

She turned back to him, hiked a shoulder. Her long hair was blowing across her tan, heart-shaped, chocolate-eyed face shaded by the broad, bending brim of her straw sombrero. “I don't know. Only Mateo knows. Probably Mexico in the end. Does it really matter?”

Cuno glanced behind him, saw only the top of the hill and beyond that the far horizon against which the riders were coming. He faced her again, gave a wry snort. “No, I reckon it doesn't.”

“Come on, then. You save my life, I save yours, huh?”

“Okay,” he said, nodding—what choice did he have?—and put Renegade into a run beside her.

THEY RODE WILD and unfettered as the prairie wind, following the network of creases between the low buttes pocked with bits of dried brown buckbrush, needle-grass, sage, and cactus.

It was obvious that Mateo de Cava had run from his share of posses; he had it down to a system, vamoosing hard and fast and maneuvering over the best ground possible for leaving little trace—namely, meandering, rocky watercourses.

And they were moving through some of the driest, emptiest country in south-central Colorado, staying well clear of traveled roads and trails, steering wide of the few, broadly spaced ranch headquarters out there. And though their course was a zigzagging one, there was no hesitation, as though Mateo had a clear destination in mind. One that, apparently, he did not share with the others.

No one, including his sister, seemed to know where he was going. He likely didn't share that information in case, amongst his horde of ragged lobos, he had a traitor in his midst, which was always the risk when you ran in a pack this large. Some lawmen, Pinkerton agents, and Wells Fargo troubleshooters were good at infiltrating unwieldy bands of desperadoes and bringing them down from the inside or alerting others of their ilk to block the planned escape route and set up a bloody ambush.

No, Mateo knew his business right down to setting up his own little network of temporary hideouts, for that's what they reached about an hour and a half after leaving the bloody skirmish along the Arkansas. It was a row of spindly cottonwoods along a winding creek just south of a weatherbeaten jackleg ranch headquarters from which rose the smell of cow and chicken shit and from where the lazy spinning of dry windmill blades could be heard like a couple of golden eagles quarreling.

In the trees, a picket line had been strung. There was a low fire and two butchered deer—young bucks with small racks still attached to their heads—hung upside down, rear legs splayed to show gaping, red cavities, from a stout cottonwood branch. Mateo reined up in the trees near the picket line and swung down from his mount, looking around as he instantly set about unsaddling his black Arab. Cuno checked Renegade down at the camp's perimeter and looked around as the other men swarmed around him on their hot, sweat-silvery, blowing and snorting horses.

From the direction of the gray ranch headquarters—consisting of a log cabin with a pole corral connecting it to a small shed—came the sound of a screen door slamming, and Cuno turned to see a man with long black hair step out of the cabin, thumbing suspenders up his shoulders clad in a faded, red plaid work shirt. The suspenders were attached to threadbare canvas trousers.

He turned his head to one side as two more people came out of the shack behind him—one an older woman with the same Indian features as the man, and a young redheaded pale-skinned woman in a work shirt and pleated gray skirt.

There was a buckboard wagon hitched to a mule standing out front of the shack, and the man and the two women climbed aboard and began moving at a brisk trot toward the outlaws who'd all gotten busy unsaddling their horses near the fire. Cuno glanced at Camilla, who did not meet his gaze but only stared toward the approaching wagon and then at two men, wounded in the dustup at the Arkansas, who were being helped down from their horses by other members of the bunch.

“What do we have there?” Mateo asked one of the wounded—a small Mexican who wore his hair in a tight braid down his back. “How are you doing, Ignacio?”

“I'm all right,” said Ignacio in Spanish, holding his bloody right arm tight against his body and crawling awkwardly down from his saddle while another man held his horse for him. He spoke again in Spanish, which Cuno mentally translated: “I just need a drink of water, and I'll be fine.”

“Let me see.” Mateo rose up on the balls of his feet to inspect the wound in the Mexican's right arm about halfway between his elbow and shoulder. The outlaw leader pulled the arm away from the man's body, and Ignacio sucked a sharp breath through the gap of his missing front teeth.

“Sure, sure,” Mateo said in English, for the benefit of the Americans, which made a good half of his pack. “You'll be fine.” He glanced meaningfully toward the burly, yellow-bearded Wayne Brouschard and canted his head toward Ignacio who stood leaning against his horse. “Brouschard will take you over to the creek,
mi
amigo. Get you some water, help you clean the wound, make it all better.”

“Water,” Ignacio said, lifting his chin and glancing eagerly toward the stream. “
Si, si
—I could really use some water, Mateo.”

As Brouschard came over and began turning Ignacio by one arm, Mateo looked at the other man who'd just ridden in and who had dismounted his palomino gelding to stand beside the horse, eyes closed, using one hand to support himself against the saddle.

A tall half-breed with roached brown hair and one pale eye and one cobalt blue one, he swooned a little, as though drunk. He wore a ragged frock coat over crisscrossed bandoliers and three big pistols bristled on his hips and from a cross-draw holster half hidden by the coat. He wore salmon-colored checked pants, both knees patched with green ducking.

“White-Eye—how you doin' over there?” Mateo walked around Ignacio's horse, heading toward the half-breed. “You don't look so good.”

White-Eye looked at Mateo, his milky eye dull and lifeless, the blue one sharp and anxious. “What's that, Brother? I'm all right.”

“You took a bullet back at the river, no?”

“Oh, it's just a scratch.” The half-breed chuckled, stepping away from his horse and lowering his arms to his sides as if to prove how well he was despite the blood glistening on the low left side of his dust-powdered black frock. “Shit, I've been hurt worse tussling with whores. Them fingernails can get mighty sharp across a man's back when you pleasure 'em just right!”

He laughed woodenly, the blue eye crinkling at the corner as he watched Mateo approach him.

The outlaw grinned broadly at the half-breed. “That's so, Brother!” He looked down at the man's waist. “Where you hit, huh? Don't tell me they gutted you, Brother. Huh? They gut you?”

Quickly, he reached out and flipped the flap of White-Eye's coat away from his side, revealing a broad patch of thick blood on the man's shabby white shirt that was ruffled down the front, like the shirt of some fancy tinhorn gambler or southern plantation owner.

“Oh, shit,” Mateo clucked, frowning and shaking his head. “White-Eye, they got you good, eh?”

“What? You mean that?” White-Eye laughed a little desperately. “Looks much worse than it is, Mateo. Really. The bullet just clipped my side there, went all the way through.”

Cuno stood tensely beside Renegade and near Camilla as he watched Mateo's expression slowly change from a bemused smile to a baleful stare. White-Eye stared at the outlaw leader, and fear blazed in his blue eye. “Mateo. My brother,” the man said, groveling and taking a step back. “It's just a flesh wound. Really. I won't slow us down—I promise. Shit, I can't wait to eat some of the deer and get back in the saddle again!”