.45-Caliber Firebrand (21 page)

Cuno removed his hands from the coat buttons, rose, and reached across the horse for the rifle. Holding it up to the vagrant light, he ran a hand down the smooth forestock and inspected the receiver still glistening with factory oil.

A new gun. Undoubtedly one of those that Cuno had hauled to the Trent ranch.

He lowered the rifle and looked down at Hayes again. Leaning the rifle against the dead horse, Cuno dropped back to a crouch and undid the man's coat buttons.

He opened the coat's flaps and froze. Winking up at him from the man's left breast, just over his heart, was a blood-drenched copper moon-and-star badge.

Engraved in the copper badge were the words WYOMING TERRITORY and MARSHAL.

19

CUNO'S HEARTBEAT QUICKENED.

He jerked back with a start, as though he'd discovered that the red-bearded Hayes had been booby-trapped with a live rattlesnake. Staring down at the blood-drenched badge, he straightened slowly.

Hand hooked over his holstered Colt, he stepped over Hayes and the legs of the dead horse and strode back to where Bone lay staring up at the sky. Cuno quickly opened the man's coat, and the same heart-leaping feeling came over him again when he saw the badge.

He walked over to Lipton and opened the man's bloody coat. Lipton's badge had been half embedded in Lipton's chest by one of Cuno's bullets.

Cuno looked around for Lipton's and Bone's rifles. He got up and kicked around through the grass but found nothing. Both rifles must still be in their saddle boots.

Cuno wanted a look at those rifles badly enough that, even in the chill darkness, he swung up onto Renegade's back and urged the horse down the steeply falling canyon, the silver stream gurgling and bubbling off to his right.

As he'd figured, the horses hadn't run far. One gave an angry whinny as Cuno approached, and he saw both their silhouettes standing near the stream, their eyes flashing like tarnished copper amongst the black trunks of the trees. He dismounted about twenty yards away and approached the horses slowly, holding his hands out as though with sugar or grain, clucking.

The saddle on one horse had slid down its side, and the boot was dangling beneath its belly. Grabbing the horse's drooping reins, Cuno crouched down, jerked the rifle from its sheath, and held it up to inspect it.

A shiny new Winchester, just like the one Hayes had been carrying.

His blood quickening, Cuno walked around to the other horse, who had now turned his head to the stream as though indignant that Cuno's offer of food had been a ruse. Its saddle was still on its back though sitting askew. Cuno could tell by the glistening walnut stock that the rifle in the boot was another new Winchester.

He pulled it out, and instantly on the cold air he smelled the oil and varnish and the coal-oil smell of new iron. He ran his hand across a blood splotch up near the forestock. Strands of brown hair were stuck to the blood . . . as though a scalp had hung there.

Quickly, he unleathered both mounts and, leaving them to find their own way or to be picked up by other travelers, he gathered the two rifles and both men's cartridge belts, including the spares he found in their saddlebags. Mounting his own horse, he rode back to where he'd left Hayes and the dead red gelding.

After collecting Hayes's rifle and cartridge belt, and taking two spare boxes of .44 shells from the lawman's saddlebags, he cut the deer free of the dead horse. He lashed the field-dressed buck behind his own saddle, mounted up once more, and put Renegade into a careful walk up the deadfall-littered canyon.

He brought the fire of his own camp up a half hour later. Serenity, sitting on a rock a few yards in front of the dancing flames and hunkered deep in his quilted hide, fleece-lined coat, stood abruptly, raising his rifle.

Cuno called out above the rushing wind and popping flames and swung down from the saddle.

“Where you been?” Serenity said. “You been gone longer'n I reckoned on.”

The old man's voice dropped suddenly when he saw the three spare rifles bristling from Cuno's cradled arms.

“Where in the lady's crapper'd you find those?”

“The lawmen.”

“Lawmen?”

“All three were wearing territorial marshal badges, just like they said.”

“Were?”

“They were headin' back this way.” Cuno set the rifles down against a boulder and glanced at the humped figures of the girls in the lean-to.

Serenity picked up one of the Winchesters, raising it slowly in both hands and frowning down at it. “I'll be jiggered. Where you suppose they got their hands on these?”

“Looks like they mighta been telling the truth.”

Serenity raised his eyes to Cuno. Firelight danced in their corners. He turned to slide a wary glance across the ravine.

Again, Cuno glanced toward the lean-to on the other side of the fire. It was too dark to see much except a few humped figures as the firelight played shadows across the blankets and robes. “They all in there?”

“Been sound asleep since about five minutes after you left.”

“Christ, I could use some shut-eye myself.”

“Go ahead. I'll keep the first watch.”

Cuno shook his head and, setting his Winchester '73 on his shoulder, turned to stare up canyon, which was now almost completely concealed in darkness. The firelight played off the sides of the wagons and showed red in the eyes of the picketed mules, a couple of whom had lain down to sleep, stretched out on their sides.

“Can't take a chance that Leaping Wolf hasn't sent his entire band after us. No, I ain't gonna sleep much tonight. Maybe just doze a little.” Cuno dropped to a knee and poured himself a cup of coffee. Setting the pot back on a rock to one side of the leaping flames, he picked up his rifle again and started walking up canyon, blowing on his coffee. “I'll scout around a little. You stay with the young'uns.”

“I'll go ahead and carve up the deer,” Serenity said, regarding the carcass lashed to Renegade's back. “We'll have venison for breakfast. Got the lawmen to thank for the fresh meat, anyways . . .”

Cuno sipped his coffee and muttered to himself, “That wasn't the only fresh meat they were after.”

Remembering those badges pinned to the men's shirts made him extra jumpy. He'd never shot a lawman before. Now he'd shot three. They were obviously rogues in need of killing, but killing a lawman was a hard thing to defend, and it was a hanging offense, to boot.

He was glad no one had been around to see.

 

Cuno dozed only once all night.

He combated sleep with coffee and anxiety and kept his ears tuned to the wind, listening for any unnatural sounds and watching his horse and the mules, as well. They'd sense danger long before he and Serenity would.

Renegade and the horses seemed relatively peaceful all night, and when false dawn pushed a wan gray light up from the eastern horizon, silhouetting the distant ridges against it, the animals were far better rested than the men were. They shook and blew and pulled at the long, tawny grass with abandon.

Cuno, Serenity, and their five charges all had a breakfast of corn cakes, roasted venison, and coffee and, while it was a task getting the two younger children back into the dreaded wagon bed—Margaret especially put up a fuss as Camilla wrapped her in a thick quilt and lifted her over the tailgate—they were off and rolling before sunrise.

They followed the path laid out by Trent's map, Serenity leading the way, with Karl Lassiter driving Cuno's wagon behind him. Cuno scouted their back trail, sweeping right and left of it, inspecting the canyons, gorges, ravines, and stony escarpments jutting above the pines.

It was a sprawling, humping heap of backbone they were on, heading east through the easiest route possible, between grassy, conifer-carpeted ridges. There were plenty of places for shadowing warriors to hide. But Cuno saw no sign that they were being followed, and this made him feel better about stopping the wagons at two o'clock in the afternoon, to let Michelle, Camilla, and the children climb out of the wagon to tend nature and to eat more of the roasted venison that Serenity had wrapped in burlap.

Cuno put the boys to the task of building a fire while the girls headed off to a nearby aspen stand. He and Serenity watered and fed the mules and inspected their harnesses and hooves.

Soon they all sat down to a lunch of coffee and venison, which they consumed in moody silence, huddled around the small fire in the crisp mountain sunshine, Camilla cajoling Margaret to take a few bites and Margaret shaking her head, refusing. Later, after two cups of coffee and a half pound of deer haunch, Cuno walked up a low hill to glass the terrain around them.

When he'd had a thorough inspection and still saw no sign of pursuing Indians, he cast his naked gaze back down to the wagons. They stood single file, most of the mules still eating grain from the feed sacks. The low-sided wagons looked bleached out and dusty. On this side of them and between them, the motley-looking party knelt or sat on rocks around the fire.

Serenity knelt on one knee beside Margaret. He was gnawing on a deer shoulder and making exaggerated motions, trying to show the little blonde how good it was. Margaret merely sat on her stone, one elbow resting on her knee, her chin in her hand, shaking her head from side to side.

Michelle sat on the ground, knees drawn up and staring into the flames that looked almost opaque in the brassy sunlight. Camilla knelt behind her on both knees, combing out her long blond hair, not saying anything, her dark features expressionless.

What a strange, hard-eyed girl—Camilla. Cuno wondered what her story was. Of course, he'd had plenty of opportunity to inquire, but it wouldn't have been an appropriate question. Besides, she seemed somehow separate, isolated from the group despite her physical presence. She spoke little even to the other two girls, and it wasn't Cuno's place to try to break into her private world.

He had no idea what she was protecting or hiding . . . what wound she was tending . . . and he had no right to know.

The younger Lassiter boy, Jack, had wandered off a ways behind the wagons, tapping at the ground with a crooked branch. He was likely distracting himself from his own worries with an imaginary game. The older boy, Karl, had broken off from the group, as well, and now he was striding slowly up the hill toward Cuno.

The older boy's blunt features looked pensive, his eyes pinched against the sun. His mint-green, hand-knit scarf blew out behind him in the wind, and he had his gloved hands shoved down in the pockets of his heavy, deerhide mackinaw. His cap—a wool, leather-billed watch cap with pull-down earflaps—must have belonged to his father, because it was too big for him, the flaps sitting too low on his ears.

“Cuno, you want I should grease the axles?” the boy said in his characteristically uninflected tone.

“You greased 'em this mornin', didn't ya?”

“Yeah.”

“They'll be all right till tonight.”

Karl stood a ways off, one foot up higher on the slope than the other, one hand on his thigh, looking back westward. Toward the home he'd left behind.

The wind blew the ends of his scarf and nipped at the bill of his cap. He licked at his chapped lips.

“I reckon,” he said matter-of-factly, “the Injuns done burned the Trent ranch.”

Again, Cuno saw no reason to mince words. He cast his own gaze westward, and nodded. “I saw the smoke.”

“Ma's likely dead, then.”

“Trent would have sent riders if they'd made it.”

Karl hardened his jaws as he continued staring westward. “Ma, Pa—they didn't do nothin' to Leapin' Wolf. He had no cause to do what he done.”

Cuno dropped to his haunches, pulled a weed stem, and fingered it absently as he looked up at the kid's implacable profile. “It ain't right, but there's nothin' you can do about it. Let it go. You and your brother and your little sis—you gotta dig deep and hold on tight. Even after we're out of this, things aren't gonna be easy. Just remember what your parents taught you. Remind yourself all the time, and don't let yourselves stray. Always do what you need to do to do what's right.”

Karl's chest rose and fell heavily as he stared into the wind. Finally, he glanced at Cuno, and there was just the slightest hint of understanding in his eyes.

“Let's mosey.” Cuno straightened, tossed the weed stem away, and started down the hill toward the wagons. “We still got a long pull ahead.”

As he approached the bottom of the hill, Serenity was kicking dirt on the fire. Camilla was helping the sullen Margaret back into the wagon. The little girl clutched a doll to her chest, the legs protruding from her trade blanket.

Michelle was tying her scarf over her head as she put her face to the strong sunlight, a faint celestial smile turning up the corners of her delicate mouth. Her brushed hair glistened like ripe wheat in the mountain light and blew around in the wind.

“Where we headed?” Serenity said, eating the last of his venison haunch with his greasy hands, his gloves stuffed into his coat pockets. “Give me a landmark to reckon on.”

“We keep pullin' west with a little dogleg to the north.” Cuno was staring west over a broad valley of varied formations while shading his eyes with his field glasses. “Key on that white chunk of rock that looks like a horse's tooth jutting up from that red ridge yonder. Don't look like it from here, but according to Trent's map, there's a saddle in there somewheres that'll see us onto our last pull out of the Rawhides.”

“There is a shorter way.”

Cuno and Serenity turned to see Camilla standing in the back of the passenger wagon, her body facing southeast, her head turned to peer at them over her left shoulder. She pointed. “There's a long canyon sloping down to an abandoned mining camp. Just beyond is the fort.”