“I told you to hold the bitch down, Albert, you brain-pickled son of a she-griz!”
The man bellowed another curse, and there was a sharp slapping sound as Cuno squared his shoulders in front of the cabin’s plank-board door that hung slightly askew from rotting leather latches.
Cuno stepped back, raised his right foot, and slammed his boot into the door just left of the steel-and-wire latch. The door burst open and slammed against the inside front wall. Cuno stepped into the room just as the man trying to impale the girl swung the back of his hand against her cheek with a crack that was drowned out by the door’s impact with the wall.
He had his back to Cuno, while his partner faced the freighter from the other side of the table. Both men reacted to the kicked-in door at the same time—the man between the girl’s flailing knees twisting around and reaching toward his shoulder holster. The man facing Cuno stumbled straight back from the table, snapping his eyes wide with surprise and whipping his right hand across his waist to the walnut-butted hogleg angled across his belly.
“Hold it!”
Neither one stayed their reaching hands.
Cuno slammed the Winchester’s butt against his shoulder. He fired and cocked, fired and cocked, the cabin leaping under the blasting echoes and powder smoke wafting in the shuttling shadows as empty cartridge casings clattered to the spongy puncheon floor and rolled in circles.
When four brass casings had been ejected, smoking, from the Winchester’s breech, the two would-be rapists lay in twisted heaps on opposite sides of the sparsely furnished cabin.
“Oh . . . Jesus . . .” rasped the one who’d been holding the girl down, as he lifted his head from the floor near a cot, wincing, blood welling up in his mouth and dribbling down over his pendulous lower lip. He dipped his chin to peer down at the two ragged holes in his baggy calico blouse, between the flaps of a smoke-stained deerskin vest trimmed with Indian beads.
His eyes closed and his head fell back to hit the floor with a hollow thud.
When Cuno had started firing, the girl had twisted around on the table, raising a shielding arm over her head and scissoring her naked legs together, slightly bent at the knees, her jeans and panties hanging down over her stockman’s spurred boots.
Now Cuno shuttled his gaze to her. She was staring up at him from beneath her raised right arm, her tusseled, tawny hair fanned out around her oval face. She had a nasty, purple gash on her right temple, and fresh blood dribbled down from it.
Cuno started to look away, in deference to the fact that she was naked, but then he returned his eyes to hers once more. Recognition mantled his brow.
“You get around,” he grunted.
It was the pretty, slender, tawny-haired girl whom Joe Pepper had slapped around in the Buffalo Flats Saloon, and whom Cuno had last seen in the valley where her party had ambushed the marshals. Apparently, she mistook Cuno’s last comment for a moral judgment instead of literal observation.
As she dropped down off the table in a huff, she told him to go diddle a goat. Then, her blue eyes pinched with fury, her lips pooched angrily, she hauled up her panties and jeans in one swift jerk, brushed a sleeve across her bloody temple, and stomped past him and out the cabin door.
19
CUNO TURNED TO the open door and watched the haughty girl stomp off across the flat, hard-packed area in front of the cabin. She knelt down where water trickled up through a rocky shelf, and, throwing her straight, tawny hair back over one shoulder, cupped the water to her face, dabbing her right cheek and bloody forehead tenderly.
Cuno turned to the man who’d been trying to savage the girl. He lay on his side, half under a dusty shelf littered with rusty pans, a half dozen airtight tins, and mouse droppings. His bloodstained buckskins and longhandles were bunched around his boot moccasins, and his limp dong had curled up against his thigh like a sleeping snake.
A trapper or market hunter, most likely.
Grunting his disapproval at having stepped unsuspecting into another in a series of proverbial bear traps, Cuno set his Winchester across the table, grabbed the man’s ankles, turned like a mule in the yoke, and dragged him unceremoniously out the door and into the yard.
He slid the half-naked body up against the bole of a pine about fifty yards from the cabin. Seeing no point in allowing him in death a dignity he obviously didn’t subscribe to in life, Cuno didn’t bother pulling his pants up.
The girl was sitting beside the spring when Cuno approached the cabin. She held a damp handkerchief to her cheek. Knees drawn up to her chest, the points of her boots aimed toward the fast-darkening sky, she watched Cuno skeptically.
The light night wind tussled her hair about her pretty face that was no less pretty for a slight tomboy quality—a firm practicality around the eyes and the frank line of her broad mouth.
For an instant, Cuno thought she was going to remind him of July. But he’d become an old hand at turning quickly, almost painlessly away from such memories.
When he’d dragged the other dead man over to where the first one lay, he grabbed his rifle out of the cabin, then walked over to where the girl sat near the spring, still regarding him like a wolf who’d wandered into her camp and she was still trying to decide if he was wild or only half wild.
He set the rifle over his shoulder and tucked a thumb behind his cartridge belt. “Put some mud on it. Take the swelling down.”
“Ain’t you just a man of the land.” She had a sexy, raspy voice, but he didn’t doubt, judging by her eyes, that she’d core him with a well-concealed pigsticker if he got too close or said the wrong thing.
The market hunters had sauntered into a wildcat’s lair. She might not have needed Cuno’s help in the long run.
Cuno glanced off to where he’d left his prisoners, feeling the urgency to get back to them and traipse up and over the mountain to find a camping spot before good dark. “I only meant you cover a lot of country fast.”
The girl looked down and waggled her boots. “So do you. I seen you comin’ through my field glass. That’s when those two jumped me from out of the trees.”
“Who are they?”
“I seen ’em at a lean-to during the storm. They was in Bailey Gulch. They musta followed me when the rain cleared.”
Cuno glanced at the shack hunkered down against the black line of the forest. “That yours?”
“Just hole up here, time to time, when I’m on my own.” She drew the wet handkerchief away from her cheek and squeezed it in her small, strong fist.
“You alone now?”
“What’s it look like?”
Cuno turned away. “Luck.”
“Where you goin’?”
“Over the mountain.”
Cuno continued heading back the way he’d come.
“Hole up here if you want.”
Rifle on his shoulder, Cuno turned to her. “If you saw me comin’, you know I’m not alone.”
“Got ’em on a leash, don’t ya?” She glanced at the cabin. “You can lock ’em in there. I was gonna sleep out under the stars, anyways. Too much mouse and squirrel shit in the cabin.”
She must have read the suspicion in Cuno’s eyes, because, turning her back to him and soaking the handkerchief in the spring, she added, “Just ’cause I rode with coyotes, don’t mean I’m a coyote. Suit yourself.”
She pushed to her feet and, whipping the handkerchief over her shoulder, strode over to the dead men. She toed one of them, tipping his head this way and that with her boot, then gave a caustic chuff and walked off into the pines.
Cuno stared after her. Then he wheeled and tramped up and over the bench as a mourning dove cooed softly from a nearby aspen and coyotes yammered in the distance. The western horizon was a painter’s palette of mixed colors behind black, toothy peaks.
“Well, well, well,” Blackburn groused as Cuno approached the horses. “Back so soon?”
“Heard the shootin’,” said Colorado Bob, slumped over his apple-tied wrists. “Who’d you beef now, Widow Maker?”
Cuno burned at the handle they’d given him. A killer was the last thing he wanted to be. He aspired to a peaceful albeit hardworking life hauling freight—like he and his old man had done before his old man was killed by Rolf Anderson and the half-breed Sammy Spoon.
Was that too much to ask? He’d been given every indication that it was. Still, it was the direction he intended to continue traveling.
He said nothing, gave no indication of how the name chafed him. Letting the cutthroats know they’d riled him would only keep it going.
Untying Renegade from the aspen branch, he climbed into the saddle and set out toward the cabin.
“You find shelter?” Simms called from behind him. “It’s monsoon season in the high country. Clear now but liable to rain again soon.”
“Worried about a little rain?” Colorado Bob laughed. “Hell, Simms, you’re due to have your neck stretched in three days!”
“Yeah, but I want mine dry-stretched,” quipped Simms. “Besides, me an’ Fuego got us a bet.”
“Oh, yeah,” Blackburn said. “What’d you two fellas bet on, pray tell?”
“I bet Fuego a hundred dollars of the stolen loot that by this time tomorrow, we was all gonna be headed back up to Helldorado with Oldenberg and the fellers.”
Simms laughed toward Cuno’s back—a grating, mocking laugh that hardened Cuno’s jaws and made him wonder why he was doing this. He’d already killed a half dozen men since leaving Buffalo Flats. What difference would four more make?
Four more who were due to hang anyway.
“What about the strongbox?” Blackburn said, directing the question at Colorado Bob. He was speaking more quietly now. “If Oldenberg springs us, we’re gonna have to lead him to the loot. If he ever got wind that we . . .”
“A bridge we’ll cross when we come to it, Frank,” Bob said.
As Cuno led the horses over the bench and down the other side, he saw that the girl had set a fire in a large, stone-lined pit in front of the cabin. She’d led a couple of horses up to the fire—rangy mustangs heavily rigged with saddles, rifle boots, bedrolls, and bulging saddlebags.
She had a pair of saddlebags and a rifle boot on the ground before her and was holding the rifle near the firelight, working the cocking mechanism as she inspected the breech. She’d found the horses of the men who’d tried to ravage her and was seeing about some payback in fire-power and trail supplies.
Again, July drifted up to the edge of Cuno’s consciousness. She’d have appreciated the frontier logic in that.
“Well, well—lookee here,” said Colorado Bob. “Hello there, little miss. If I haven’t seen you somewheres before, my name ain’t Colorado Bob, killer of men and lover of women.”
Simms said, “Ain’t that the little number that ran with Joe Pepper?”
“A lot of little numbers ran with Pepper,” grumbled Blackburn. “Shit, he had one in every jerkwater between here and Calgary.”
The girl didn’t look up at the motley newcomers, but continued to inspect the heavy Sharps rifle in her hands.
“You got a picket line?” Cuno asked her as he led the others past the fire.
“At the edge of the trees,” she said. “Mind the pinto—he’s a biter.”
“Right.”
When Cuno found the picket line, he made it long enough to hold his five horses, giving the pinto plenty of room. He noted that the pinto had a long, shaggy brown tail that, with the afternoon sun on it, might have looked chestnut from a distance. Like the one he’d seen on the ridge before the rainstorm.
He took his time cutting each of his cutthroat charges out of their saddles, leaving their wrists tied with a foot-long strip of rawhide. When he had them all down, he ordered them to unsaddle and rub down their own mounts, then haul their gear back to the cabin.
“Shackin’ up with another filly, eh, Widow Maker?” Simms laughed as Cuno shoved him down against a broad pine stump ten yards back from the fire. “You got another one lined up for tomorrow night?”
The girl had obviously gone through the dead men’s gear, piling what she wanted near the cabin door. The sad dleless horses were hobbled near the spring. There wasn’t room for them on the picket line, and being mountain horses, they were no doubt accustomed to hobbles.
Now the girl was cutting deer meat on a board beside the fire while a pot of beans gurgled and churned on the low flames. A dented black coffeepot sat on a rock near the flames, and three tin cups sat around the burlap sack at her feet—more booty from the would-be rapists, Cuno figured.
“If you want any supper tonight,” Cuno said, aiming his rifle out from his hip, “keep your mouths shut.” He tossed the coiled rope in his hands at Colorado Bob, who sat in the middle of the group, with Simms on the left, Fuego on the far right. “Wrap that around your ankles. Tight. Any cheating, there’ll be no grub for you.”
“He’s become right proddy,” Blackburn grumbled as he coiled the rope around his ankles. “Reminds me of a teacher of mine.”
“That the one you tossed in the privy pit?” Colorado Bob asked, leaning forward to coil the rope around his high-heeled, hand-tooled black boots stitched with red thread and into which the cuffs of his striped trousers were stuffed. His slanted, Nordic eyes shone yellow in the firelight.
“That’s the one.”
When the rope was coiled around the prisoners’ ankles, Cuno tied the end nearest Simms to a stout branch protruding from another pine stump. Then, holding his rifle negligently out from his right hip, he sauntered over and stooped down beside Fuego. As he reached for the rope end, he looked at the big, bald, earless half-breed.
Fuego had been glowering at him. Cuno’d seen the fire-reflected gaze out of the corner of his eye. But now the man was staring at the ground between his raised knees with mock fascination. He was whistling very quietly between the gaps in his teeth.
“Hey, Widow Maker.”
As Cuno grabbed the end of the rope, he looked at Colorado Bob. The gold-toothed, devil-eyed man nudged Fuego with his elbow. “You’ll have to cut his meat up for him, don’t you know. That’d be the polite thing, since you broke the last of the poor man’s teeth.”