.45-Caliber Deathtrap (7 page)

Cuno squinted one eye and grunted, “You're going where I'm going.”

“I'm goin' after those killers, same as you,” the old man said, shoving the fresh wads into both shotgun barrels. “I didn't do right by ole Wade. I froze up. Damnit, I peed my pants!” He stopped, pursed his lips. A tear rolled down from his right eye. “I just stood there inside my saloon and watched through the doors while they looted his wagon and shot him like a damn dog on the boardwalk.”

He looked up at Cuno, both eyes shiny now, his gaunt, bearded face crimson with rage. “I'm goin' after 'em, same as you, and I'm gonna give 'em my two cents' worth.” He closed the gun with a metallic snap. “For Wade.”

Cuno held his gaze. “How far were you going to ride in the back?”

“Till we were far enough from Columbine you wouldn't send me back afoot.”

Cuno turned, set his rifle on the open tailgate, and walked around the right side of the wagon, scrutinizing the wheels that stood nearly as tall as he. The back one looked all right, but the right front would need its rim reshaped when he found a blacksmith. The felloe might be cracked, but he'd worry about that when it gave out. He hoped it didn't give out on the down side of a steep hill, but he could have thrown a wheel and busted an axle pin and lost a day making repairs.

The old man stood beside the trail, cradling his shotgun in his arms with a defiant expression. Cuno dragged Webber and Zorn across the trail, and kicked them both into the ravine, their bodies rolling down and splashing water at the edge of the stream. When he'd disposed of the other two bodies, he settled the mules down with handfuls of cracked corn, then backed them slowly out of the rocks and onto the trail.

The back wheel turned smoothly. The front one gave a slight thump as the bent rim hit the ground, but the felloe held.

Cuno checked the straps and buckles, then grabbed his shotgun and climbed into the driver's box. He released the brake and looked over his left shoulder. The old man stood regarding him from the shade of the cottonwoods, his defiant expression tempered with wariness.

“Well?” Cuno said.

The old man pursed his lips, adjusted his suspenders with a shrug of his shoulders, then walked around behind the wagon and slid his shotgun onto the floor of the driver's box. He gingerly climbed the wheel, and sat in the seat beside Cuno.

He stared straight ahead. “How come you ain't balkin'?”

“'Cause it's too damn far from Columbine to turn out an old fool.” Cuno clucked to the mules, shook the reins.

The mules leaned into their collars. The wagon rolled forward.

LATE THAT SAME
day, when the sun had fallen over the Front Range and cold shadows bled down from the high peaks, “The Committee” rode into the little river-crossing settlement of Danger Ford.

Danger Ford Creek was far from dangerous this time of the year, long after the spring rains that often made it so. And the piano clattering in the sprawling whorehouse called Heaven's Bane, atop a bluff on the creek's south side, cast a downright gay ambience over the steep-walled canyon.

The chill air, bespeaking fall, was perfumed with pine smoke from the whorehouse, the miners' shacks and tents sheathing the creek, and the mountain diggings up and down the gorge. There was also the usual mining-camp fetor of trash heaps, privies, and butchered deer and elk carcasses.

As The Committee crossed the broad plank bridge over the rushing creek, the horses' shod hooves clattering like cannon blasts, two young boys, fishing along the creek, jerked their worms from the water and, casting frightened looks over their shoulders, ran toward a stone hut crouched in hemlocks and cedars.

Whooping and howling like wolves, the gang climbed the shelves rising to the bluff upon which the whorehouse sat, its windows glowing yellow against the purple twilight. Riding at the head of the group, Waco and El Lobo triggered pistols into the air. The big black man, Ed Brown, guffawed at some joke the man riding beside him, Ned Crockett, had told.

When Clayton Cannady had pulled his horse up to the hitch racks before the broad front porch set atop high, wide steps, he turned to regard the group gathering in the yard behind him. He ordered Waco and El Lobo to holster their pistols, to quit acting like tinhorns, and to stable the gangs' mounts in the barn.

As he began to dismount, he cast a glance back the way he and the others had come, and froze, staring. Sunflower Paxton rode slowly up the last rise, the young Chink girl riding wedged between the blond hard case and his saddle horn. The girl's head sagged between her shoulders. She was half-asleep, terrified and exhausted from travel.

Cannady's voice was sharp. “Paxton, I thought I told you to give that girl the send-off and toss her in a ravine. She's slowin' you down.”

As the lathered, hang-headed horse approached the group, Paxton shrugged. “What's the hurry, Boss?”

“That roan is tired. Look at him. He ain't big enough to carry double, even a girl small as her. Now, grow some sense, will you, or I'm gonna give
you
the send-off just for actin' stupid.”

“Ah, come on, Cannady. I ain't had her yet, and you know I'm partial to slanty-eyes. Besides, after I've had my fill of her, I'll sell her to one of these lonely prospectors, make some extry cash.”

The Indian, Young Knife, walked over to Paxton's horse, reached up to brush the girl's hair back from her face, and roughly grabbed the back of her neck to stare into her eyes. As Li Mei howled and tried to pull away, the Indian grinned, his black gums showing.

“Shit, you might sell her to me, Sunflower. I
like
skinny women with slits for eyes.” He rubbed his belly and laughed. “Most Injun women very fat!”

“With big asses too!” said Ned Crockett, chuckling and tossing his horse's reins to Waco, who had gathered a good half dozen already.

“There, you see, Boss?” Paxton said to Cannady. He slipped down from his saddle and turned to the gang leader still sitting his own stallion. “This girl's in high demand around here.”

“Why bother with her?” said the old graybeard called Whinnie. Having dismounted and turned his horse over to El Lobo, he was brushing dust from his brush-scarred chaps, his necklace of dried human ears—the ears of a posse that had once trailed him—flopping around his hairy, naked chest. He wore only a thin deer-hide vest, with no shirt underneath, and two big, stag-gripped pistols jutted high on both hips. “Shit, once we get our hands on that mine money in Sundance, you won't—”

The graybeard clipped his sentence when Li Mei kicked her left slippered foot into Paxton's throat, shrieking like an Asian witch. As Paxton staggered back, she reached down, grabbed the reins, slid back in the saddle, jabbed her heels into the roan's ribs, and screamed, “Gooo!”

The tired horse leapt off its rear hooves and bounded forward. As it lit out across the yard between the whorehouse and the barn, its right shoulder slammed into Whinnie. The graybeard flew sideways, bellowing and clawing at one of his .44s.

The others scrambled out of the way, yelling and cursing.

“Christalmighty, shoot that bitch!” ordered Cannady, holding his stallion's reins in one hand and thumbing his Smith & Wesson's hammer back.

Paxton knelt on the ground, trying to suck wind down his battered throat, so he didn't see the girl gallop to the other end of the yard, kicking the horse's ribs and screaming, her long, black hair whipping in the wind. When she saw only a corral, several wagons, and a high, shelving hill in her path, she turned the horse and raced back the way she'd come. She tried to skirt the milling gang members, several of whom were laughing by now, several more expounding angrily and aiming revolvers.

“Don't shoot!” railed the big Negro, Ed Brown, as he bounded sideways, slamming his right fist into the palm of his left hand and throwing a shoulder against the racing roan's left stirrup. “Might hit the horse!”

The horse and the girl screamed in unison. The horse stumbled sideways and, throwing the girl out over its left shoulder, fell hard and rolled. The stirrups flapped like the wings of a crazy bat. Dust, gravel, saddlebags, and bedroll flew.

The stallion lay on its side for a moment, blowing, its ribs expanding and contracting, as though in shock. Finally, the horse gained its feet with a groan, shook itself, the saddle falling beneath its belly, and trotted away.

Behind it, near the barn, the girl lay in a pile.

She was breathing sharply, groaning and trying to push herself up with her hands, but her head remained on the ground, her skirts bunch up around her butt, exposing her white bloomers, thin brown legs, white socks, and slippers.

Hushed silence.

Several of the men chuckled softly, like schoolboys after a prank.

“She dead?” growled Whinnie, shaking his frizzy, gray hair back from his hoop earrings as he moved toward her, both long-barreled Starr revolvers drawn. “I hope she ain't, 'cause she's got my name tattooed on her skinny ass now.”

Sunflower Paxton beat the old man over to Li Mei, and stood staring down at her. His chest rose and fell sharply, his fists balled at his thighs.

“Say what you want,” Ned Crockett said from the whorehouse's front porch, onto which several men from inside had gathered to see what all the commotion was about. “The girl can ride!”

Snickers.

Paxton heard Whinnie click one of his hammers back. The blond firebrand wheeled, filling his hand so quickly with his own revolver that Whinnie stopped dead in his tracks, hang-jawed.

“Get the fuck back!” Paxton raged, crouched and swinging his Colt around the crowd of onlookers. “Get the fuck
back
!”

Whinnie stood frozen, gaping. Finally, he depressed his Starr's hammer, lowered both revolvers, and stepped back. “Easy, boy.”

Paxton was breathing so sharply through his nose, his lips pinched tight, that you could have heard him on the other side of the creek. “She's
mine
!”

The crowd fell silent. Inside, the piano was no longer playing. Silhouetted faces appeared in the windows.

“Boys, stand down,” Cannady ordered mildly.

Paxton took a deep breath, holstered his Colt, then reached down and jerked the girl to her feet. She sobbed and groaned, her hair hanging in her face, as Paxton half-dragged, half-carried her through the parting crowd and up the whorehouse's broad front steps. Several men scrambled out of the doorway to let him pass.

Paxton pulled the girl inside and left the door hanging wide behind him.

“Well,” drawled Crockett, smoking a stogie on the front porch, “I reckon that girl's about to learn a lesson.”

When Paxton and the Chink had disappeared upstairs and the horses were led away to the livery barn, the other men filed into the whorehouse, politely scraping their boots on the hemp mat before the front door, and doffing their hats.

Cannady turned to Crockett, who was smoking beside an awning post. “I don't know about you, Ned, but I could use an ash-haulin'.”

“You come to the right place fer it. I heard the Heaven's Bane is
the
place in these parts.”

As Crockett carefully mashed out the cigar against the post, saving it for later, Cannady headed for the front door, from which the clatter of piano music was again issuing—a jovial, Old World waltz. Girls laughed, and glasses clinked. Cannady was about to step over the threshold when a hand reached toward him, shoving him brusquely back.

A gruff voice spoke. “We don't cotton to smelly Texicans around these parts…stinkin' the place up.”

Cannady turned his head right. A man a couple of inches taller than Cannady stood beside the front door, nearly concealed by the shadows between the door and a tall window framed inside by pink curtains. The man was straight-backed and heavy-shouldered and wearing a high-crowned felt sombrero. A sandy mustache drooped over his broad mouth.

He must have seen Cannady's jaws lock, felt the heat rise in Cannady's cheeks. He chuckled affably, lightly punched the outlaw leader's left shoulder. “Ah, smooth your neck hairs down, ye proddy ole bushwhacker. It's Karl Burdette.”

Cannady stared at the man, chuffed, and relaxed his fists.

Burdette laughed softly, his yokelike shoulders shuddering behind his red-and-white checked shirt. His black neckerchief, pierced by a turquoise-studded pin and too small for his neck, appeared about to choke him.

Cannady stepped back, glanced at Crockett standing behind him, wary-eyed. “Ned, this is Karl ‘The Crocodile' Burdette.”

“No shit?”

“Willie and Alfred's brother. They done set up this whole bank thing in Sundance.”

“Burdette,” muttered Crockett thoughtfully, studying the broad-shouldered gent. “You weren't the one that shot my cousin, Lloyd Petersen, is you? During that riverboat shindig in St. Pete?”

“Hell, no,” said Burdette, his sandy brows closing down over his deep, dark eyes. “That was my cousin, Ramsey. I done killed Ramsey near five years ago now, 'cause he sold me out to the federal law in Galveston and I done two years. I apologize if he wronged ye just the same, on account o' he was family.”

“Where's the others?” Cannady asked.

“Willie and Alfred's in Sundance, playin' like they're sheriff's deputies.” Burdette got a chuckle out of that. “I'm here with Case Oddfellow. You remember him from that Brazos job? We was supposed to meet you and your boys here, give you the lowdown. Case is upstairs gettin' a French lesson. I already had me one and, jumpin' Jehovah, do I recommend 'em!”

“Do believe I'll find me a gal, if they ain't all taken up by now,” said Crockett. “You boys can give me the lay o' the land later, eh?”

“Sure thing, partner, but don't go contractin' no goat burn!” Cannady cautioned, clapping Crockett on the back. “I'd hate to have to cauterize your drippin' pecker with a hot bowie knife!”

“No, you wouldn't!” Crockett returned, tipping the gang leader's hat over his eyes as he passed.

When the older man had gone inside, where the others were whooping like maverick studs in the springtime, Cannady turned to Burdette. “Let's have a drink and talk it out. I want to know everything we got ahead of us in Sundance.”

“I already had enough to fill the steamer on one o' them iron train engines,” said the tall Burdette, who looked more like a drover than a desperado, “but it wouldn't be polite to make you drink alone.”

Inside, they ordered drinks at the bar—behind which two enchanting, eye-batting blondes dressed all in black were filling orders and parrying the drunken propositions of the miners and prospectors and Cannady's gang of newcomers. The place was dark, lit by red or blue bracket lamps and coal-oil lanterns hanging from posts. Dark, smoke-shrouded shadows slid this way and that.

There were several open, cavelike rooms, all filled with intimate nooks and crannies, some of which were hidden behind curtained doors, with tables, chairs, and benches scattered everywhere. It took Cannady and Burdette a good five minutes to find a free table—and one that wasn't missing a leg—near a doorway covered with a flour-sack curtain behind which Ed Brown was trying to convince a girl with a high voice that her rates were too steep. Over their heads angled a broad, open staircase. Men and working girls moved, hand in hand and staggeringly drunk, in a near-steady stream.

“What's this about Willie and Alfred sportin' badges?” Cannady asked, raising his voice to be heard above the din.

Burdette threw back his tequila shot, then took a long drink from his beer mug. “The sheriff o' Sundance is an old mossy-horn. Dangerous son of a bitch, I heard tell. Burt Nielsen's his name. Used to be a hide hunter and a market hunter for the railroad. Anyway, Case got wind that the man was advertisin' fer deputies. Case got this wild hair up his ass to send Willie and Alfred up there to apply. Hell, they done deputied before, you know.” Burdette slapped the table and laughed. “Sure enough, they got the jobs! Our asses are covered.”