.45-Caliber Desperado (7 page)

He laughed again but there was only desperation in it. His blue eye watered as he continued to laugh, his mouth stretching and twisting bizarrely, making a terrified mask of his large, brown, unshaven face. “Mateo, goddamnit!” he yelled suddenly, the blue eye flashing with rage, the other one rolling unmoored in its socket.

“You know the rules,” the outlaw leader said reasonably. “We all agreed to the rules before our first ride. Right, White-Eye? Right, Wade?” he asked a gringo rider who was slowly, distractedly unsaddling his buckskin.

“That's right,” the stocky Wade agreed, nodding, his fleshy, shaven face somber as he turned away from the two men who had become the focus of everyone's attention. “We all agreed, White-Eye. I seen that fella shoot you from three, four feet away. Preacher with a white collar.” He shook his head at the irony of White-Eye's fate. “If that don't beat all,” he muttered and walked away toward the trees with his saddle on a shoulder.

“But I killed him good, didn't I?” White-Eye called after Wade, who did not look back at him. “I got that sky pilot good—didn't I, Wade?”

“Let's take a walk,” Mateo said to White-Eye.

“No.”

“Come on, my brother. Let's don't make this hard.”

“No!” White-Eye took another step back and shucked a long-barreled, black-handled Russian from his shoulder holster. He hadn't gotten the barrel pointed forward yet before Mateo grabbed it out of his hand and smacked him hard across the face with it.

White-Eye screamed and staggered.

“Don't you ever pull a pistol on me, you half-breed son of a bitch!”

Mateo drew one of his own pistols, shoved the barrel against the bloody stain on White-Eye's coat. The gun's roar was muffled slightly by the half-breed's gangly body. The man screamed shrilly as his shirt around the fresh wound burst into flame. As he staggered backward and sideways, grabbing for another pistol, Mateo shot him twice in the chest.

He hit the ground and lay shuddering.

Silence except for the warily nickering horses.

Cuno stared down at the dead man, feeling a curious lack of emotion.

“No!”
a voice screamed along the creek.

Cuno turned, as did the others in the group, toward where Ignacio was breaking brush toward a heavy thicket of cottonwoods. Behind him, Brouschard aimed a long-barreled pistol. The gun whanged. Red licked from the barrel, smoke rising.

Ignacio dove forward as blood and brains spewed from his forehead. He hit the ground, rolled, spraying rocks and gravel, and lay still against a fallen branch.

“Hey, Ignacio was just my size.” This from Frank Skinner, standing next to the horse he'd just unsaddled—a beefy bay.

Cuno had lost sight of his fellow escapee amongst the group. Skinner was still dressed—or undressed, as it were—like Cuno. Just the striped prison pajama bottoms and nothing else. He was staring off toward where Brouschard was holstering his big pistol and walking back toward the group, Ignacio lying dead behind him.

“Help yourself,” Mateo growled, grinning hatefully down at White Eye. He glanced at Cuno as he gave the dead man before him a savage kick in the ribs. “Go ahead,
mi
gringo amigo. Help yourself to his boots, clothes, anything. He might have spares in his saddlebags. The only thing you cannot help yourselves to, you and Senor Skinner, is the loot we acquired from our last job.”

He glanced at one of the other men, jerking his head toward the horses of the two dead men standing to his left. “Divide it up, equal shares for everyone except the two newest members of our party.”

He looked at Cuno and Skinner, who was walking tenderly on bare feet toward Ignacio but glancing over his shoulder at the outlaw leader. “They will have to earn their keep soon.”

He narrowed a black-irised eye at Cuno. “Very soon.”

 

The man driving the ranch wagon had stopped a good ways from the outlaw gang when he'd seen the confrontations with the two wounded men. After the shooting, he'd come on with his cargo of two women—a pretty but sullen young redhead and his Indian wife.

The man's name, Cuno learned, was Romer Gaffney. A half-breed who wore an old rag around his forehead under a weathered canvas hat, he'd been in cahoots with Mateo de Cava for years, supplying the man with horses, shelter, and quick meals whenever the bandito shuffled his operations north of his usual stomping grounds and into Colorado Territory.

Gaffney, Cuno learned as both deer were quickly spitted by the women and coffee brewed, was a dealer in stolen horses and cattle—a fairly easy trade this far off the beaten track. He occasionally sold whiskey. But mostly he provided succor to outlaws on the run, and, while he did not seem to be making an exceptionally good living at it, judging by the squalidness of his ranch headquarters, he seemed a carefree, happy man who took great pleasure in palavering with outlaws like Mateo and smoking his corncob while ordering his wife, Matilda, and his pretty redheaded niece, Wanda, around.

While the outlaws talked and relaxed around the fire, drinking coffee spiked with Gaffney's whiskey and ogling Wanda, Cuno dressed in the rough trail clothes he gleaned from White-Eye's saddlebags—fringed deerskin trousers, calico shirt, red neckerchief, and horsehide vest with a torn pocket.

The duds were none too clean, and they smelled sour, but they'd do until he could find a mercantile. He donned the man's undershot boots and his straw sombrero, both of which were a tad on the small side but would do now in this pinch he was in.

“Now you only need a dead eye,” said Camilla, sitting against a tree before him, the creek gurgling nearby. The others, including Frank Skinner, who looked much better now dressed and with food and whiskey in his belly, were a good fifty or sixty yards away. “A blond half-breed—that's what you look like. One that gets into fights.”

Cuno finished adjusting the sombrero on his head, letting the rawhide thong dangle down his chest, and touched his tender nose. He didn't think it was a bad break. He'd had worse. He could breathe through it well enough. His eyes were still half swollen, however. Physically, he was miserable—tired and hungry and sunburned and wracked with the grinding pain in his face.

But at least he was out of the Pit and still alive, and he knew he had Camilla to thank for that.

“I'll look almost human in a few days,” he said, lowering his hand from his nose.

“That will be good. I almost did not recognize you up there on that gallows.”

“How did you know I was about to hang?”

She smiled coquettishly, small white teeth flashing beneath her rich upper lip. “A woman must not give up her secrets.”

Cuno frowned at her, puzzled.

She relented. “Mateo paid off one of the guards to inform us of the happenings at the prison. Especially about what was happening with you. The man was paid well, and he spoke with two of Mateo's men at a saloon in Limon nightly. We have been a few weeks setting it up.”

“My god . . .” Cuno stared at her, puzzled by all the work she and her brother had gone to in setting him free. They'd become lovers on the trail out of the Rawhides, but he'd had no idea she'd felt so strongly about him. He felt a little guilty that he hadn't felt as strongly about her; but, after all, with the Utes hounding their trail, he hadn't had much time for falling in love.

She smiled at him, her brown eyes warm and inviting.

Cuno felt his cheeks warm, still a little uncomfortable around females. He'd been married a very short time, and before that his experience had been limited by an innate bashfulness around members of the opposite sex.

Changing the subject, he tried to whistle but because of his nose it came out low and stilted. “Well, I reckon that was about as close as I'll ever cut it. I was beginning to feel the devil reaching up out of the burning pits of hell to tickle my bare feet.”

Camilla got up from the tree and walked over to him. Her brown eyes bored lovingly into his, causing his cheeks to burn. “You would not have gone down there. Up there is where you belong.”

With a gloved finger, she pointed toward the sky. “After all you did for me and the Trent girl and the Lassiter children. You are a good man, Cuno. My heart broke when you gave yourself up to that Sheriff Mason.” Slowly, keeping her eyes on his, she shook her head. “All so he would make sure we made it safely to the fort. You are a saint, I would say.”

“Far from that. Any halfways decent soul would have done the same, especially if he was wounded and needed doctorin' himself.”

“That is not true. Though I am only eighteen years old, I have seen much of this world, Cuno. It is a bad place, filled with bad men. But not you. You are a good man. And . . .” She let her voice trail off, wrinkling the skin above her nose as though not sure how to continue. “And . . . you must know how I fee—”

She cut herself off, color rising in her cheeks. He was glad she'd stopped when she did, as he was also feeling snakes of nervous embarrassment coiling and uncoiling in his legs and shoulders.

She dropped her eyes toward the ground then reached out for his hand. “Enough of that. I know what you must think of me . . . out here with my bandito brother.
Half brother.
Mateo's mother was a Yaqui from southern Sonora. We will talk later. For now, let's go eat. Knowing Mateo, he will want us to saddle up and ride soon.”

“Ride where?” Cuno asked the girl as she led him over to the fire. She was holding his hand. “You have any idea at all?”

“No. Like I said, only Mateo knows. He will probably tell us soon.”

Several of Mateo's men cast furtive, dark glances at the pair approaching the fire hand in hand. Obviously, several of the bunch wanted their leader's comely sister for their own. Feelings of resentment toward Cuno were building. He could feel the animosity; apprehension plucked at his spine like a guitar string.

He'd have to take care to never give these men his back, unless he wanted a knife in it.

DEPUTY U.S. MARSHAL Spurr Morgan drew his buckskin to a halt in a chokecherry thicket near which a muddy creek trickled and shucked his 1866-model, brass-framed Winchester repeater from his saddle boot. Gently, he racked a round into the old but familiar weapon's chamber, then lowered the oiled hammer to half cock.

He stared through the tangle of shrubs and cedars and past a falling-down privy toward the back of the three-story roadhouse that looked so sun-blistered and rickety that the next strong breeze would likely obliterate it and muttered, “There's three of 'em, and I've been after them rancid polecats' hides for nigh on two months now. Let's not muck this up, shall we, Sheriff?”

To his left, Sheriff Dusty Mason out of Willow City, Wyoming Territory, slid his own, much newer rifle from his saddle boot and gave the older Spurr, who was pushing sixty though he himself was not sure of his own age, a condescending look. “You should have had him in Wheaton.”

Spurr felt anger surge up from deep in his loins. Making it all the hotter was the humiliation that came with it. Indeed, he should have taken down Wes Leggett, Christopher Fancy, and Marvin “the Maiden Killer” Candles back in Mason's county in Wyoming Territory.

Three things had gotten in Spurr's way—a bad ticker, a comely, big-bosomed whore half his age, and one of his notorious benders. Leggett, Fancy, and Candles had indeed been holed up just outside of town, at a little outlaw ranch owned by an Irishman and stage relay station manager, Burton P. Murphy, while Fancy had been sparking the Irishman's blond daughter, Lucy.

Spurr hadn't known that at the time, however. He'd thought they'd ridden on to Deadwood. But he'd been fairly deep in his cups by then, and he hadn't bothered to check the authenticity of his information.

So here he was now, riding with the tinhorn county sheriff whose father he was damn near old enough to be and whom he'd been ordered to ride with by Chief Marshal Henry Brackett in Denver as a sort of punishment for his misstep in Wheaton, and having to take load after load of subtle and not-so-subtle shit from the arrogant bastard who obviously thought Spurr had ridden roughshod after owl-hoots way longer than he should have.

Spurr didn't like the man's mustache or the liquid cobalt-blueness of his eyes. He also didn't like the fact that Mason was a Texan. Spurr didn't like Texans for too many reasons to go into, but the main one being that they thought they owned the whole fuckin' frontier—cow, wagon, six-gun, and doxie . . .

“You ever make a mistake, Dusty?” Spurr asked the county sheriff now. “Ah, never mind. You think on it hard. Chew your mustache over it and get back to me later. For now, let's go get them three fork-tailed critters and haul 'em back to Cheyenne for hangin'.”

“I'm for that.”

Mason swung easily out of his saddle, hiking his right leg up high with a flourish, even making his spur rowel trill as it cut the air. Spurr glowered at the tall, rangy lawman, almost twenty years Spurr's junior, setting himself lightly on the ground beside his tall strawberry. He often thought the man tried to look healthier, faster, and lighter on his feet for the sole purpose of getting Spurr's goat, which he'd gotten over two weeks ago now, even before they'd picked up the trail of the three killers in southern Dakota.

Spurr looped the reins of his big roan, Cochise, over a chokecherry branch. The back windows of the roadhouse had flour-sack curtains drawn over them. When gold and silver was still being hauled out of the nearby hills, the place had done double and triple time as a mercantile and brothel. Spurr had done some skirt chasing here himself not all that long ago.