.45-Caliber Firebrand (16 page)

“What if he hits before dusk?”

“You be ready to pull out at the drop of the hat, young firebrand. I'll have Mrs. Lassiter prepare the children.”

“She won't be joining us?”

Trent shook his head and tapped his chest. “A fever a while back did something to her ticker. She'd never make it. Couldn't take the strain or the cold in the back of that wagon.” Trent sipped his coffee and sagged back down in his chair, looking down again with that bewildered gaze he'd showed before. “I owe her this, poor woman. Saw 'em only 'bout three, four times a year, but her and her husband and me were friends. Damn few friends out here . . .”

It was a question that Cuno knew he shouldn't ask, but his curiosity got the better of him. “What happened to your wife, Mr. Trent? Where're the sons you mentioned last night?”

Trent looked up at him, blinked first one eye and then the other quickly, as though the question had taken him off guard. “Dead. One boy, Phillip, rolled his horse into a ravine. The other one fancied him a pistoleer. Logan Jr. Got liquored up, and a gambler shot him down deader'n a week-old side of bad beef in Ute. My wife had thinner blood than I, Cuno. She couldn't withstand such grief in addition to the general hardships of living out here with a singular old reprobate like myself. She walked out into a blizzard nigh on three years ago now. Didn't find her till spring—frozen rock hard as she sat against a tree, staring east at Old Stone Face.”

Trent looked down at his empty cup, tilting it this way and that as though surprised to find it empty. “Strange the way things happen, after you've tried so damn hard for so damn long to carve a good life for yourself.”

Cuno knew how the man felt. He often felt the same way. Now he felt a sudden, unexpected pang of sympathy for Logan Trent. He sensed the man's desperation. It was a catching feeling.

He glanced into the distance. The shadows were growing, and in every one he saw a flicker of movement—the Indians slowly closing in for their final act of vengeance.

Starting down the porch steps, Cuno said, “Serenity and I'll prepare the teams and wagons.”

“Cuno?”

He turned back. Trent stood a little unsteadily before his chair. “You haven't yet promised me about that bullet for my daughter?”

Cuno sighed and ran a sleeve across his chin. He nodded. “All right.”

He turned and continued down the hill toward the stables.

 

Cuno relayed the plan to Serenity. Incredulous and skepti cal, the oldster said he'd rather take an arrow to the front than the back, but since loco old Trent figured on trying to save the shavetails and the girl, he'd throw in.

“Always did think it better for a man to die for a noble cause than how I figured I'd go,” he added as he and Cuno walked toward the wagons.

“How'd you think you'd go?”

“I figured I'd die of a heartstroke in the ole mattress sack with a half-breed whore in Sonora somewheres.” Serenity shrugged as he crouched down to inspect the tongue of one of the two surviving Conestogas. “I reckon this way is better. Not near as much fun, but better . . .”

Cuno leapt onto the side of one of the wagons, toeing the inch-wide ledge running along the edge of the bed. “We'll only take eight of the mules. Have to leave the other four behind.”

“Why?”

“You know why. Lighter load. We won't need 'em. And it'll be a hell of a lot easier to run eight up those mountains than twelve.”

“Ah, shit!” Serenity barked as he dragged a jack down from the swagger bed. “Grace is the best leader I got. I ain't leavin' her behind!”

“She's the only one who'll sleep with ya, too. Take any four you want, but we gotta leave four behind and you might as well get used to it.”

Cuno didn't like the idea of leaving the mules, either. He'd paid thirty dollars apiece for them. Besides, any mule skinner worth his salt felt an affinity for his pullers. He got to know each one personally, knew their quirks and pulling habits and how much grain or grass each one needed. Knew what scared or thrilled them.

“Ah, hell,” Serenity grouched. He dropped the jack and rolled up the sleeves of his buckskin tunic, eyeing the rim of the off-rear wheel, which needed reshaping and setting. “We're all wolf bait, anyways. Don't matter if we get it here or up in the mountains somewhere. And we got old Trent to thank for that.”

Using a crowbar to loosen the cleats, Cuno removed the top half of the wagon's side panel. Since they weren't hauling a thousand pounds of freight, but only the kids and trail supplies, they wouldn't need the top panels. They'd cut the wagons down to the size of army ambulances—lighter and easier to maneuver.

As Serenity continued yammering like an old coyote, Cuno looked down at him. “Shut up and get to work, old-timer.”

Serenity looked up at him, slack-jawed. “What the hell's the matter with you?”

Cuno remembered the desperation and utter befuddlement in Trent's eyes, and it made him owly and sick to his gut. “I'm trying to work, but I can't even hear myself think with all your jawin'.”

When he'd removed the top right side panel, he removed the left, and then went to work on the other wagon, removing those panels, as well. They probably wouldn't need both wagons, but they'd take both, anyway, in case they lost one in the mountains. Also, if push came to shove, they might need the spare one for parts . . . or mules.

When he and Serenity had made sure all the wheels, fel loes, rims, axles, and brakes were sound, they attached heavy log chains from the front axles to the doubletrees on both wagons for sharp cornering. Then they hauled all the tack including hames and collars outside, into the shade of the stables, and sat on a long wooden bench, soaping and repairing all the harness leather.

Meanwhile, an eerie silence had settled over the ranch compound. All the able men except Riker, who remained in the bunkhouse with the wounded, were hunkered down in a long semicircle around the western perimeter of the ranchstead, from north to south, bundled against the air's crisp autumn edge in their mackinaws and blanket coats, some in coonskin or rabbit hats with earflaps, keeping watch with their new Winchester repeaters.

Some had turned over hay wagons or were crouched behind boulders, rock piles, and trees. Several were holed up in the creek bottom. Occasionally, Cuno caught a whiff of cigarette or cigar smoke wafting toward him from the cottonwoods, or he heard the low, brief rumble of an argument caused by strained nerves.

Except for the breeze stirring dust in the sunlit yard, there was very little movement. Two or three times every hour, one of the men, clad in a heavy coat and carrying his Winchester, would slog grimly back to the bunkhouse for a fresh cup of coffee or a sandwich.

But mostly the ranch was as quiet as a cemetery in a long-abandoned churchyard.

The only sign of the waiting Indians, who were probably holed up a couple of hundred yards out from the ranch, were three smoke puffs rising in the northwest, about a half mile away. It was a signal of some kind, and Cuno, watching it, felt the blood spurt in his veins and the hair stand up beneath his coat collar.

“What's that mean, you s'pose?” Cuno said, running a heavy, greased needle through a bridle seam.

“I look Injun to you?”

“I thought you knew everything.”

“I'm tryin' to work here,” the graybeard grouched edgily, oiling a harness strap. “Can't even hear myself think with all your jawin'!”

Later, one of the men, hearing a rustle in some wild mahogany, mistook a young mule deer buck for an Indian and shot it three times before he realized what he was shooting at. The man took some ribbing by the other men, and Trent ordered him to carve the badly chopped up deer, and load it into the wagons to supplement the wagon party's food provisions.

An hour before dusk, Cuno and Serenity had the wagons ready. The mules were leathered up and hitched to the doubletrees. Renegade was saddled and tied to the back of Cuno's outfit. The skewbald paint would be used, as Cuno always used him, for scouting.

The freighters had outfitted the wagon with a month's worth of food and trail supplies and plenty of skins, robes, and quilts to ward off the high-country cold. They also packed one extra Winchester and several boxes of ammo.

At dusk, Trent came out from the house carrying his old buffalo rifle over his shoulder. He reeked of booze but he looked no drunker than before. Cuno and Serenity were eating jerky and drinking coffee on the open tailgate of one of the wagons.

“You fellas ready?”

Cuno nodded. Trent had brought down a hand-drawn map earlier, and he, Cuno, and Serenity had gone over it thoroughly.

“Drive around to the back of the house. I'll have the young'uns waiting by the back door. In a half hour, the hands're gonna start a fire on the other side of the creek, give the Injuns somethin' to ponder while you're headin' northeast along the mountain toward the canyon that'll take you to the gap.”

With that, Trent looked around warily, squinting his rheumy eyes beneath the brim of his shabby, feather-trimmed opera hat. Then he limped back up the hill to the house sitting dark and silent, its chimneys spewing gray smoke against the near-dark sky.

 

It was full dark when Cuno and Serenity swung their wagons up the slope behind the Trent lodge, Renegade tied to the rear of Cuno's Conestoga. The house was dark and the ghostly figures of Trent, the Lassiter woman, the two boys, the young blond girl, Margaret, the Mexican whose name Cuno hadn't learned, and Michelle Trent stood huddled in blankets near a large cottonwood.

The cold wind blew and Cuno could hear the blond girl and the smallest boy sobbing. Trent stood with an arm wrapped around his daughter.

Michelle held a buffalo robe around her shoulders and for a moment Cuno remembered the first time he'd seen her, soaking wet on the stairs and wrapped in a similar garment. She'd been worried that Cuno wouldn't return to the lodge to entertain her father.

So much had happened in the past twenty-four hours that last night seemed months ago. She'd been brutalized by Leaping Wolf's braves, and her well-heeled beau, Jedediah Gallantly, had died miserably in his silk longhandles with an arrow through his gut.

“Momma, I don't want to leave you,” the young blonde sobbed as Cuno drew the first wagon up beside the group and pulled the brake handle back.

“Margaret, you hush. We had this talk.”

Mrs. Lassiter's voice was stern, but there was a brittleness to it that betrayed the woman's terror as well as her own reluctance to part with her children whom she likely would never see again. But she was strong, and she knew what they had to do. If her last words to her children were coldly commanding, so be it.

Cuno climbed down out of the driver's box and grabbed a couple of the carpetbags standing around the base of the cottonwood. He looked at Michelle Trent as her father led her to the back of the wagon.

She moved as though in a dream, not saying anything as her father whispered into her ear, then suddenly stooped, picked her up his arms, and with a wince against the pain in his bum leg, lifted her up into the back of the wagon box.

Michelle said nothing. She unwrapped her arms from around her father's neck, turned, and sat quickly down amongst the robes and blankets padding the floor and the sides of the box. She drew her knees up to her chest, hugging them, and held her head forward, staring out from beneath the flat brim of a man's bullet-crowned hat.

The hat was tied to her head with a thick, red scarf. She wore a heavy blanket coat over a simple traveling dress and low-topped, lace-up black boots. Beneath the hem of the dress several layers of underwear showed.

The Mexican girl, oddly silent and grimly purposeful, climbed into the box and sat down beside Michelle, arranging a couple of buffalo robes over them both as well as the sobbing Margaret. The Mexican girl was dressed as before in layers with a long, denim coat and several wool skirts, a red neckerchief, and her floppy-brimmed hat tied to her head with a green scarf. On her feet were fur-trimmed knee-high moccasins.

As Cuno loaded the bags into the wagon—they'd reserved Serenity's wagon for the trail supplies, allowing plenty of room in Cuno's for the passengers—he saw Trent standing at the Conestoga's open tailgate, staring along the box at his daughter.

He seemed to want to say something but couldn't come up with the words. Finally, as Mrs. Lassiter's boys climbed reluctantly into the box, the rancher backed away from the tailgate in a shuffling, halting gait and ran a handkerchief across his nose.

When all the children were aboard the wagon and Mrs. Lassiter was issuing her last orders over the side panel, Trent grabbed Cuno's arm. In his other hand he held up a burlap pouch.

“This is all the cash I have here at the ranch. Fifty-five hundred dollars. There's a thousand for yourself and Mr. Parker, upon your arrival at Fort Jessup. The rest is for my daughter. Also in the pouch is a letter to my sister in Cleveland, explaining the situation in case Michelle is still unable to explain it herself. Mildred will take Michelle in and give her a home. Please see that she gets the letter and the money.”

Cuno took the pouch. “She'll get both, Mr. Trent.” Cuno glanced at Michelle still sitting and staring as before beside the dark-haired girl. “I take it she's . . .”

“She won't say a thing. Just stares off as though seeing those savages that ravaged her. I don't know if she even knows what's going on. Mrs. Lassiter's hired girl has promised to look after her.”

“What's the hired girl's name?”