.45-Caliber Firebrand (14 page)

He no longer harbored any animosity toward the girl. He felt deeply, genuinely sorry for her. He'd have given anything if she'd been able to live out her life holding to the convictions she'd espoused over last night's supper—in spite of how they'd piss-burned him at the time—than to have them so abruptly, savagely disproved.

“You got better eyes than me,” Cuno said as he resumed tossing dirt into Snowberger's grave. “You see anything out there?”

Serenity stood, slowly turning his head from right to left and back again, his jaws moving as he nibbled his mustache. “Nah. I don't see shit, and I don't expect to. We won't see shit till Dancin' Wolf is good and ready for us to see shit. Then it's gonna
storm
shit!”

Cuno sunk the shovel blade into the mound of freshly turned dirt once more. “You're a dark son of a bitch, old-timer. Remind me to fire you when we get back to Crow Feather and hire a freighter with a sunnier disposition.”

The graybeard chuckled caustically and shook his head as he continued scanning the distance. “When we get back to Crow Feather—!”

“I know, I know—
shit
!”

When he'd finished filling in Snowberger's grave and mounding it with rocks, he and Serenity picked up their rifles leaning against a nearby boulder, cast a parting glance at their partner's resting place, and started back toward the ranch yard. Cuno set his rifle on one shoulder, the shovel on the other shoulder, and spat dust from his lips.

“The way I see it,” he said, “you and me are on our own. Trent's men are madder'n old wet hens, and they're used to bein' the cock of the walk out here. They're long on rage and short on sense.”

“That's how I see it, too,” Serenity said. “And if any of 'em have ever fought Injuns before, they done forgot it ain't like fightin' white men. It's more like fightin' a pack of hungry wolves on open ground.”

“In other words, we watch each other's backs.”

“I've got yours if you got mine.” The oldster snorted with an air of manufactured optimism. “I reckon I got lucky there, since yours is a whole lot bigger than mi—!”

He and Cuno jerked their heads up with a start as a gopher rose up from its hole, wringing its ratlike paws and scolding the two intruders raucously.

“Ah, shut up, ya little snipe,” Serenity barked, kicking dirt. “As if my nerves ain't shot enough!”

He shook his head, sucked a deep breath into his spindly chest, adjusted the Colt Paterson over his belly, and continued walking as well as talking. “We best make every shot count. Even with all that ammo we brought in, we're liable to run out if them red devils play cat and mouse with us. They'll likely try to draw our fire the way the Sioux did to my freight outfit in the Big Horns six years ago last October. When we're close to shot-out, and our nerves are so fried that we're shootin' at every breeze and bird chirp, they'll close like a friggin' twister. And that little dustup earlier'll look like a Fourth of July rodeo parade!”

Cuno adjusted the shovel on his shoulder and gave his old partner a wry, sidelong glance. “So you're sayin' our odds are a mite long?”

“Long?” Serenity chuckled as they strode between two haystacks, approaching the eerily quiet yard. “Long as the teeth on a fifty-year-old whore, amigo!”

Cuno stopped abruptly and stared west through the cottonwoods.

“What is it?”

“Look there.”

A long mare's tail of dust rose beyond the trees, from a hundred yards out across the tumbling hills of the valley. Faintly, the dull, muffled rumble of distant hooves sounded, and a horse whinnied.

“Hellkatoot!” Serenity rasped.

A horse appeared, and then another, galloping out from behind a low hill and following a long curve in the trail toward the ranch yard. Three more horses followed the first two in a shaggy line—a couple of duns, a paint, a bay, and a short, bucket-headed buckskin. Cuno recognized all five horses from the corral in which Trent kept his working remuda.

He squinted at the five mounts curving off toward his right, heading for the portal and the bridge. The horses were riderless, but long packs appeared to be strapped over their saddles. “What the hell are they . . . ?”

He and Serenity figured out what the horses were carrying at the same time, and both men lurched into jogs, cleaving the gap between the bunkhouse and the cook shack where a couple of drovers sat on upended logs, smoking and drinking coffee, one dabbing at a wound on his cheek with a handkerchief.

“Hey,” the wounded man snarled, turning his head toward the freighters with an angry start. “Where're you two goin' in such a damn . . . ?”

“I do believe your friends are back,” Serenity said through ragged breaths as he and Cuno passed the two loafers and headed into the hard-packed ranch yard.

“Company!”
someone yelled from a corral behind the blacksmith shop.

Two hands leapt down from the corral west of the shop, where they'd apparently been posted to keep watch with new rifles, jumped into the yard suddenly, and sprinted west. A couple of other men filtered out of the stables and the bunkhouse as the horses thundered into the yard, sweat-lathered and wide-eyed, the buckskin and one dun buck-kicking savagely and crow-hopping as if to rid themselves of the bundles on their backs.

“Grab 'em!” roared the big, bearded blacksmith, Hahnsbach, reaching for the dun's reins. He wore a black leather apron over his buckskin breeches, and the sleeves of his linsey tunic were rolled up to his bulging biceps.

The men were shouting now, and the horses were whinnying and the mules were braying inside the stables. Cuno had set his rifle and shovel down against the bunkhouse. He rushed the buckskin suddenly and grabbed its reins up close to its bit. The end of the reins had been tied around its saddle horn.

“Ay-yi,” Serenity said, crumpling his face as he moved up to the buckskin's right side.

A body dangled across the saddle, gloved fingertips nearly brushing the ground. A three-inch, hide-wrapped braid curled up over the back of the dead man's head. Two arrows protruded from his back. What had caught the brunt of Cuno's attention was the top of the man's head, which was as red as freshly butchered beef where the scalp had been hastily sliced and ripped away.

“Son of a bitch!” Hahnsbach cried when he, too, saw the grisly cargoes strapped to the back of each of the five horses. Just loudly enough to be heard above the hoof stomps and chuffs and frightened knickers, he added, “Murderin'
savages
!”

Cuno knelt down beside the buckskin and lifted the chin of the man draped across its back. The blood-smeared face and half-closed eyes and slack-jawed mouth of Henry Kuttner stared back at him, salt-and-pepper hair curling along the sides of his hacked-up head.

Feeling as though he'd been punched in the gut, Cuno released the foreman's chin, letting it slap back down against the buckskin's latigo strap, and straightened. He looked around at the other horses, all carrying arrow-pierced dead men surrounded by ten or so drovers and the Chinese cook, all regarding the grisly cargoes with looks ranging from disbelief to rage.

No one said anything.

The men, some holding the reins taut, moved slowly around the horses. The horses stomped and blew and fidgeted nervously. Flies had found the blood, the coppery stench of which filled the mild late-morning air. They swarmed loudly over the bodies and the bristling arrows.

A half dozen magpies swooped over the horses, cawing hungrily.

There was a gagging sound. Cuno turned to see the big blacksmith, Hahnsbach, bent at the waist and upchucking his breakfast into the freshly churned dirt. No one else said anything; they just sidestepped around the horses or stood dumbfounded beside the dead men, scratching their heads and trying to wrap their minds around what their eyes were telling their brains.

Distant shuffling footsteps sounded.

Cuno raked his gaze from the body of Henry Kuttner hanging slack down the buckskin's side to the big lodge sitting bathed in clear golden sunshine at the mountain's base, smoke still unspooling from its big stone chimneys.

Logan Trent was making his way down from the house, limping and dragging one boot heel. He was dressed as he'd been dressed last night, in baggy denims with a clawhammer coat over a doeskin tunic embroidered in red and blue thread. From his broad hips hung a Colt Long Cylinder conversion with pearl grips and a big bowie knife in an elaborately beaded buckskin sheath. On his curly, silver head he wore a black stovepipe hat boasting a red-tailed hawk feather.

He came on grimly, the lump on the side of his nose looking larger today than it had yesterday. His eyes were pinched and dark. He raked his gaze across the horses, and his men sort of shuffled back away from him slightly, looking somehow guilty and dread-filled.

The rancher stopped at the edge of the grouped horses, his back to the hulking, sun-blasted lodge, brown hands on his hips. His flat chest rose and fell heavily, and his mouth was a long knife slash beneath his silver mustache.

The horses blew and stomped, and the flies buzzed.

Behind Trent, a young boy ran out on the lodge's front porch. The woman who'd driven the wagon into the yard earlier gave a shriek, bounded out after the boy, and dragged him back inside, slamming the door loudly behind them, the wooden bang not reaching the lower ranch yard till a full second later.

Trent didn't look back. He continued to rake his brooding, angry gaze across the frightened horses.

Finally, his gaze holding on the buckskin that Cuno stood beside, he moved up to the horse, bent low, and lifted Kuttner's head by the fringe of rawhide-wrapped braid at the back.

Trent worked his jaws from side to side, and his eyes glinted angrily. “Henry, damn you. How could you let this happen, you son of a bitch?”

“Easy, Trent,” Cuno said, barely able to contain his own rage.

If the scalpings and killings were anyone's fault, it was Trent's. He'd lived in this country long enough to know better than to send men after the raiding Indians. He should have known they'd ride into a massacre.

The old rancher was off his nut. Too many long winters. Too much time alone out here.

“Goddamn you, Henry!” Trent raged, glowering down at Kuttner's scalped head. The rancher removed his hat and swiped it hard across the foreman's head and shoulders.
“How could you do this to me?”

Cuno stepped forward. “Trent.”

The rancher continued to pummel his foreman's bloody head.

“Trent!” Cuno grabbed the man by his coat lapels and shoved him straight back. “If you wanna blame someone for this, blame yourself.”

Trent's face swelled with rage. “Unhand me, young firebrand, or I'll—”

Trent tripped over his own feet and he would have fallen if Cuno hadn't held him upright. When he saw that the rancher had regained his balance, Cuno let him go but he stood there, only two feet away from him, staring up into the taller man's gray eyes with challenge.

Trent's eyes sparked with untrammeled fury, and he started to raise a fist when one of the other men shouted,
“Boss!”

Cuno and Trent whipped their heads around to see the man pointing across the corral of milling ranch horses. Cuno's throat tied itself in a knot when he saw five braves sitting five short-legged, broad-barreled Indian ponies side by side across the main trail, on the near side of the ranch's wooden portal—close enough so that Cuno could see the sun reflecting off their heavily painted faces as well as the new Winchester repeaters in their hands.

13

INSTANTLY, CUNO AND the other men clawed their pistols from their hips and looked around wildly, expecting to find a horde of the red devils swarming onto them from all directions.

But there were only the five, sitting their war-painted ponies at the south edge of the ranch yard, staring with silent menace toward Cuno, Trent, Serenity, and the shuffling, exclaiming waddies.

As Cuno sidestepped toward the west edge of the yard, continuing to swing his cautious gaze in all directions, he got a better look at the five braves. All five were painted for war, with feathers braided into their long obsidian hair, which framed the brick-red ovals of their faces. They wore wolf or bear or coyote skins from head to their furry moccasins, though one brave wore patched denims.

Quivers bristling with feathered arrows jutted up from behind their necks, bows were slung over their shoulders, and war clubs dangled down their thighs. But in their hands, resting butt down against their hips, were the Winchester rifles they'd taken off Kuttner and the other men they'd recently killed. The smooth, freshly varnished stocks and oiled receivers glistened in the cool, high-country sun.

“Oh, for chrissakes,” Trent groaned.

Instantly, Cuno saw what the rancher saw. From the barrels of the new Winchesters dangled five scalps, four in various shades of brown. The fifth one, of wavy pewter, had belonged to the foreman.

When the breeze jostled the grisly trophies, Cuno could see their bright red undersides.

His gut clenched, and he squeezed the ivory grips of his Colt in his right hand. The five were just out of pistol range, and Cuno and the ranch hands had all rushed into the yard with only their six-shooters.

Trent had edged up toward Cuno, making scuffing sounds in the dirt as he dragged his right boot, and, his big, pearl-gripped pistol cocked and extended in his right fist, he yelled at the Indians, “Where's Leaping Wolf?”

The Indians said nothing. They just stared brashly toward the ranch yard, their molasses-colored eyes unreadable within the bizarre rings of war paint. One of their ponies shook its head and blew. The wolf snout resting atop its rider's head jostled from side to side, dead jaws set in a perpetual snarl.