.45-Caliber Desperado (15 page)

Cuno ran around to the front of the tent and dashed inside. He grabbed four boxes of cartridges off one of the cluttered shelves behind the counter, stuffed them into his pockets, then leapt back over the counter and ran to the front of the tent.

He looked westward along the winding street. A bearded man in a gray hat was running toward him, crouching under the awning of a half-built saloon. Spying Cuno, he ducked down behind a supply wagon filled with lumber and snaked his rifle out around the side.

Cuno dropped to his knees as the rifle roared, puffing smoke. The bullet tore into a tent post, splitting it. As the front of the tent began to sag, Cuno returned fire on the man behind the wagon, but the man ducked behind the cargo, and Cuno's .44 slugs blew slivers from the raw green boards piled in the back.

“Cuno!” Camilla shouted.

He turned to see the girl sitting her chestnut farther up the street, partly shielded from the west by the train depot around which two railroaders stood, owl-eyed and putting their backs to the train still panting along the new tracks. The locomotive was taking on water, and black coal smoke was billowing from its large, diamond-shaped stack.

The ramp of the stock car was still down.

Cuno fired two more shots at the bearded man still hunkered behind the lumber dray, then bolted out from the hardware tent and sprinted on up the street. Camilla covered him with her pistol, squinting down the barrel as she fired several shots toward the dray. As the bearded ambusher shouted something toward his bethren still assaulting the brothel which Cuno couldn't hear above the locomotive's chugging thunder and the rush of water from the tower trough into its massive, black boiler, Cuno climbed onto Renegade's back.

“Let's get the hell out of here!” Camilla shouted, triggering one more shot toward the man behind the lumber dray.

“What about Mateo?”

“My brother is a fool! Let's ride, Cuno!”

Cuno looked at the stock car. A moment ago, he'd gotten a crazy idea. He switched his gaze to the girl. Blood oozed around the bandanna he'd wrapped around the wound, but it indeed appeared only a flesh wound. Tending it could wait.

He swung back down out of his saddle and tossed his reins to Camilla. “Lead the horses onto the car!”

“What?”

“Hurry, goddamnit. We don't have all day!”

Cuno turned toward the depot agent and the two beefy engineers clad in watch caps and striped coveralls, standing around near the locomotive and the water tower. He aimed his Winchester straight out from his right hip and put some hard-case steel into his voice as he ordered, “You two climb into the engine. Vamoose! We're goin' for a ride . . .”

CUNO ASSUMED THE men in the striped coveralls were the fireman and engineer. As he moved toward them wagging his new Winchester, they reached for the sky as though they were bank tellers being held up by the James gang. Their mustached faces were stony, but their eyes were sharp with fright.

He said, “Get this thing moving. Now. Or I'll drill ya both!”

“Moving?” said the man on the right, whose long, thick gray hair dropped from his black watch cap. He had a face like the wall of a dilapidated train station. “Move where? We're fillin' with water, and we . . .”

Cuno only hardened his jaws at the man and pressed the Winchester's barrel up snug against his broad chest. The man swallowed and let his heavy lower jaw sag as the blood ran out of his face.

The man to his right elbowed him. “I reckon we got enough water, eh, Earl?”

“I reckon we do at that, Chub.”

“Why don't I chuck some wood in the stove, then?”

Cuno said tightly, “That'd be a good idea, Chub.”

As the fireman and the engineer climbed heavily but anxiously up into the locomotive's pilothouse, Cuno heard the clacking of a telegraph key inside the cracker-box depot building. He stepped onto the new pine platform upon which the building sat and jerked the screen door open.

There was a small waiting area outfitted with simple pine benches to the left. On the right was a grilled partition adorned with a wall clock with a gold pendulum that woodenly ticked away the seconds. Behind the partition, a little man in a green eyeshade sat tapping away at a telegraph device.

“Letter home, old-timer?”

The oldster jerked around, widening his eyes beneath the cottony tufts of his silver brows. He saw Cuno's cocked Winchester and raised his withered hands, palms out. Cuno slid the barrel toward the telegraph key and pumped two steel-jacketed slugs through it, sending the pendulum, weights, springs, and thumb and finger pieces flying in all directions.

The oldster groaned and flapped his hands as though at pestering flies.

Cuno went back outside to see black smoke thickening as it swooped up and out of the diamond stack. The man filling the boiler from the scaffold supporting the tank was swinging the trough away from the locomotive and eyeing Cuno nervously. He wasn't too nervous to yell, “Your gang's done for, kid. That's the Ed Joseph bunch of bounty hunters swappin' lead with your bunch in the whorehouse yonder.” The waterman shook his head. “Ain't been no owlhoots yet who outrun Joseph's bunch.”

“Who brought 'em in?” Cuno asked the man as he climbed the ladder alongside the locomotive's pilothouse.

“Why, T-Bone, of course. Town constable.”

“T-Bone's the little man in the suit I seen out here?”

The waterman nodded as he hooked the heavy leather watering trough back into its brackets beside the wooden water tank. “That'd be him. Railroad-appointed.”

“Why don't you give him Grimley's street address while you're at it, Norman?” This from the engineer poking his gray head out of the pilothouse.

Cuno climbed into the locomotive where the fireman was busily chunking split pine and oak logs from the tinder car into the open door of the firebox. He was sweating and breathing heavily and eyeing Cuno's Winchester.

“You just do as you're told,” Cuno said, “and you won't have to worry about my long gun.”

“That's the one over at Hoyt Wilson's hardware store, ain't it?”

“So what?”

“That's the one I had my eye on,” grunted the fireman as he chunked two more sticks into the firebox.

Cuno looked at the engineer. “Get this thing moving straight ahead, fast as you can get it to go.”

“It'll take me a minute. Still buildin' up pressure.”

Cuno cursed as he stared off toward the brothel. Rifles and pistols continued to pop, and men continued to scream and shout. Smoke rose from the brothel's far side. Cuno cursed again. A bullet had likely knocked over a lit lamp. The lumber in the building was still green, but it wouldn't last long after flames started chewing at it.

Cuno climbed down off the locomotive and ran back to the stock car. Camilla had the horses inside the car but was having trouble pulling the heavy, plankboard ramp up. Cuno helped her get the ramp into the car then dropped back down to the ground. “Stay here!”

“What the hell are you doing?” she called out the stock car's open door, both horses fidgeting behind her.

“Gonna drive this straight up the track, flank them bushwhackers and cover Mateo till he's out of the brothel. Then we'll head back and pick him up east, after he's gathered his horses.”

Camilla dropped her jaw. “You're as crazy as he is,” she said. But as he ran up toward the locomotive, she climbed gingerly down from the stock car, wincing against the pain in her arm, slid the door closed with a grunt, and ran up behind him. “I'm coming with you!”

Cuno helped Camilla mount the ladder into the pilothouse, then climbed up after her. The fireman stood back against an iron bulkhead, across from the closed firebox, looking wary and weary and holding his canvas-gloved hands chest high, fingers curled toward his palms. The engineer was flipping levers and crouching to inspect dials.

Glancing at Cuno, he said, “We can't go too damn far west, ya know. They're ain't track no farther than a mile beyond the camp.”

“I want you to take us a hundred yards. No farther. See that corral up there?”

The engineer nodded.

“Stop behind it. No farther. Then get ready to put her in reverse and haul ass back east. Stop at the edge of town, no farther.” Cuno rammed the Winchester against the man's right shoulder. “You got that, mister?”

“Hell, that'll put us right in the line of fire of . . .” The brakeman let his voice trail off as Cuno gave him a deadpan look. He dropped his eyes, crestfallen, to the locomotive's copper-riveted floor.

Camilla stood with her back to the locomotive's rear bulkhead, the split wood of the tender car mounded behind her. She held her Winchester in both hands, keeping the engineer and the fireman covered, but her incredulous eyes were on Cuno. He moved past her, climbed the rear bulkhead, and slid his rifle up onto the locomotive's flat roof.

“You stay here and make sure they follow orders,” Cuno told her.

She grabbed the left cuff of his new denims and looked up at him worriedly. “You be careful, crazy gringo, huh?”

As the locomotive jerked forward, roaring and panting and spewing thick, black, cinder-laced smoke from its stack, Cuno hoisted himself easily onto the roof. He grabbed his rifle and lay down flat just behind the base of the smokestack. The hot iron roof quivered beneath him as the train's wheels lifted a caterwauling.

Tent shacks and stock pens slid back behind him on both sides of the rails. Penned pigs, geese, and chickens raised a ruckus at the roaring, squealing locomotive. He kept one eye on the brothel from which more smoke was issuing and female screams emanated, and one eye on the timber and canvas structures across the broad street from it, very near the tracks.

Bodies lay around the hotel and slumped half out of windows. More lay on the other side of the street, twisted and bloody. Both factions had suffered what appeared to be heavy losses.

Still, the gunfire continued, albeit a little more sporadically than before. Smoke puffed, showing the shooters' positions. Only a few puffs appeared in the windows of the brothel. Mateo's men were probably scrambling around, trying to find their way out of the burning building. Already Cuno glimpsed half-clad girls streaming out behind the place and disappearing behind the thickening veil of smoke.

Maybe Mateo and most of his men had fled with the women. Still, it couldn't hurt to further thin the ranks of Ed Joseph's band of bounty hunters, give Mateo's group time to gather their horses . . .

Cuno clicked the Winchester's hammer back and drew a bead on a man crouched behind a water barrel outside a broad saloon building. He and several others, hunkered here and there along the street, had turned to stare incredulously at the train. Even from his distance of fifty yards, Cuno could see the sudden hope in their eyes as they began to figure the engineer had pulled the train up so they could reboard and get the hell out of the bailiwick they'd found themselves in.

Cuno offered a grim smile and settled his rifle sights.

The Winchester bucked and roared. A man running toward him down a break between two buildings flew forward and turned a somersault, dropping his rifle, raging, and clutching his left knee. Cuno blew another man off a shake-shingled roof, and drilled another through the shoulder while a man in a black hat with a pinned up front brim stopped suddenly and shouted, “Wrong train, boys! Fall back!”

A couple triggered bullets toward Cuno. The slugs hammered and rang against the side of the locomotive, but then virtually all disappeared as they ran westward from the main part of town, threading their way amongst the tent shacks and the wood-frame structures of the slowly growing camp.

Meanwhile, flames licked up from the far side of the brothel's roof. Movement in the street below caught Cuno's eye, and he quickly ejected the last spent cartridge from his Winchester, rammed a fresh one into the breech, and planted his sights on the man's broad chest. The black-bearded man wore a black, silver-stitched Sonora hat. He had a shell belt slung over one shoulder and a rifle in his other hand. He was waving the rifle high above his head.

“Mateo!” Camilla screamed from the engine's pilothouse beneath Cuno. “Head east, Mateo.
Del este!
”

The locomotive had shuddered to a halt, and now Cuno dropped his head over the edge of the hot steel roof to shout, “Reverse!”

“Si!”
Camilla replied.

Then she shouted something to the engineer but Cuno couldn't hear above the din of squawking wheels and thundering couplings. Townsmen were shouting beyond the rails, running around and gathering wooden buckets to form a bucket brigade with which they'd try to put out the fire that would very likely consume the entire encampment if left unchecked.

As the train began jerking back the way it had come, Cuno stared out over the town, though he could see little now because of the smoke from the fire as well as the powder smoke from all the capped cartridges.

To the west, Ed Joseph's men were running into the brush along a creek that snaked around the town's outskirts and where apparently one or two of the gang had cached their horses. Only a few were actually running. Most of the nine or ten were limping or being helped into the trees by others steadier on their feet.

While the townsmen continued forming a bucket brigade obscured by the wafting smoke, Cuno settled himself against the locomotive's quivering roof. He lowered his rifle, doffed his hat, and ran a hand through his hair. His heart was hammering a persistent rhythm against his breastbone, and his mouth tasted like copper. His bones had turned to marrow. He laughed, giddy from all that had happened, electricity sparking through his veins and nerve ends.