.45-Caliber Firebrand (2 page)

Holding his right arm stiffly against his side, he heaved himself to his feet and swung the arm up beside him, balling his cheeks as the ache in his shoulder bit him.

The shoulder didn't seem broken or separated. A bad bruise. He'd live. He picked up his rifle, dusted it off, and, thumbing cartridges from his shell belt and into the Winchester's loading gate, tramped slowly back to the scene of the ambush.

He'd ridden up here, away from the freight wagons that he and his partner, Serenity Parker, were trailing up from Crow Feather to the base of the Rawhide Range, to scout the movement in the hills that old Serenity had glassed from his wagon seat. They'd spied Indian sign—unshod hoof tracks and the body of a woodcutter pinned to his wagon with arrows and a feathered war lance—along the trail from Rawlins, two days back.

The Utes weren't supposed to be making war in this neck of the woods. Why they'd been shadowing the wagons, and ambushed him up here, he had no idea. But something cold had dropped deep inside him, and he had a bad feeling the last twenty miles to the Trent ranch headquarters, at the southwestern base of the Rawhide Range, wasn't going to be half as smooth as the first hundred and fifty.

At the edge of the slight clearing in the rocks, he stopped. The Indian he'd clubbed had disappeared. He saw the two round indentations in the sand where the brave had dropped to his knees. Scuff marks and blood drops led off between two large boulders at the edge of the clearing.

Slowly, licking his chapped lips and holding the cocked Winchester straight out from his right hip, Cuno followed the trail. He pushed through the thick cedars, meandered around the buck brush and sage, raking his gaze from left to right before him.

He stopped.

Just ahead and left, the brave was down on his hands and knees, crawling feebly away, head down. Low groans rose above the rasp of the Ute's beaded moccasins carving twin lines in the sand behind him.

Cuno lowered the Winchester and looked around. Neither hearing or seeing any more attackers, he continued toward the brave. Spying Cuno's broad shadow in the sage beside him, the warrior stopped and whipped around so quickly that he lost his balance and fell backward onto his elbows.

His bony chest rising and falling sharply, he glared up at Cuno, his coffee-colored eyes blazing. Blood dribbled from the deep gash in his right temple, just below his hairline.

He was a wiry, muscular warrior, with several old knife scars in his cheeks and one just above his nose. He couldn't have been much over seventeen, but his eyes blazed and his chest heaved with a grown man's fury. Like the Sioux and the Crows, Ute boys were taught to fight with knives at a very young age, bound to their opponents with a five-foot length of rawhide clamped between their jaws.

Cuno whipped his left arm out angrily. “Why?” At Fort Dixon, where he'd been fulfilling a freighting contract since May, he'd picked up a little Ute. He translated his question, sweeping his arm out once more for emphasis.

He wasn't sure if the brave understood. The younker only flicked his eyes across Cuno's Winchester '73, a faint yearning showing there, before he snapped his head sharply right.

Cuno had heard it, too—the erratic pop of rifle fire and the unmistakable screech of attacking Indians. The young freighter's heart turned a somersault in his chest.

The wagons!

He glanced back at the brave. The kid had found the strength to drag a knife out from the sheath strapped behind his back. With a cunning light in his eyes and a dimpling hardness in his jaws, he flicked the blade straight up to his shoulder, preparing for a killing toss.

Cuno shot him twice through the chest. The kid's head slammed back as the knife clattered into the gravel beside him. Blood pumped from the twin holes in his calico- and wolf-skin-clad torso, glistening in the angling sunlight. His legs quivered and his hands clutched at the gravel.

Cuno whistled shrilly through his teeth, calling his horse, as he ran at a slant down slope toward a jumble of sandstone rocks and boulders. He bounded up the scarp on his muscular, powerful legs, ignoring the hitch in his calf.

At the top he cast his dread-filled gaze southward, and his heart leapt once more.

His three wagons—manned by Serenity Parker and two other men he'd hired in Crow Feather—were inching along the off-white trail, heading to Cuno's left. They were little larger than brown ants from this distance of a half mile, and the trail they were following was a faint line through the scrub and cedars and occasional sandstone boulders littering the broad, bowl-shaped valley.

The Indians—five dusky figures on paint horses—were galloping along the trail behind them, within fifty yards and closing. One was extending a rifle in one arm while the others raised bows, quivers jostling down their fur-clad backs.

Cuno whistled again as with shaking hands he replaced the spent cartridges in his Winchester's breech. Hooves thumped and a horse blew and he raked his eyes away from the Indians attacking his freight-heavy wagons to see Renegade bound out from behind a larger hump of gray-and-red-banded rock.

The horse's silky dun mane billowed in the wind, his reins bouncing along the ground to both sides.

“Come on, boy!”

As the horse approached the base of the scarp, Cuno clambered along the curved side, stepped off a protruding thumb, and dropped into his saddle. Sliding his Winchester into its boot jutting over the right stirrup, he leaned forward, grabbed the reins, and wheeled the horse sharply.

In a second, horse and rider were plunging down the rocky, cedar-stippled slope, angling east toward the wagons, the big horse's iron-shod hooves raising a veritable thunder, heavy dust rising behind the mount's arched tail.

At the base of the slope, Cuno slipped his Winchester from the boot, cocked it one-handed, and gritted his teeth. “Here we go!”

2

CUNO CROUCHED LOW over his saddle horn as Renegade raced through the high-desert scrub. As he topped a low rise, he saw the Indians moving in a right-to-left line before him, loosing arrows at the dust-obscured wagons while the brave with the carbine triggered sporadic rounds over his piebald's head.

A hundred yards from the trail, Cuno dropped over a low rise and checked the skewbald down, peering ahead through the rocks and shrubs for a new fix on his position.

The Indians were whooping and yelling, their horses thudding along the hard-packed trail, slower than before because of the freighters' crackling rifle fire, but still overtaking the wagons. Ahead of the galloping warriors, the Conestogas were raising a raucous clatter. Serenity and the other two drivers were shouting and triggering lead behind them, and the frightened mules were braying loudly.

Cuno reined Renegade sharply left and pressed his knees against his saddle—all the signal the well-trained skewbald paint needed to lurch forward into another ground-chewing gallop. Cuno intended to cut the Indians off from the wagons, buy some time for Serenity, Dallas Snowberger, and Dutch Rasmussen to fort up and return fire. In their lumbering wagons, jerking along too crazily for accurate shooting, they were easy pickings.

Horse and rider dropped into a depression behind a high, shelving dike. When they came out the other side, an arrow cut the air a foot in front of Cuno's head—so close he could hear the windy buzz. Renegade whinnied.

Cuno looked in the direction from which the arrow had careened and saw one of the braves angling toward him at breakneck speed. Cuno swung his rifle at the oncoming buck and triggered an errant shot.

As he jacked another round one-handed and kept Renegade chewing up the terrain before him, angling toward the trail and the wagons, the Indian nocked another arrow. The tall, war-painted brave aimed and let go.

Cuno timed his duck just in time. The arrow cleaved the air where his head had been. Probably would have drilled him through his ear. These warriors were more accustomed to shooting from a moving mount than Cuno was.

Cuno took his reins in his teeth and raised the Winchester to his right shoulder. He planted the rifle's bobbing sights in the middle of the brave's jostling form. Their horses were on an interception course. The brave reached behind for another arrow.

Cuno fired. The brave jerked his head up as though startled. Cuno cocked and fired again.

The brave threw his arms out to his sides, tossing the arrow out in one direction, the bow out in the other as he flew back off his brown-and-white paint's lurching right hip. As the horse continued forward, Cuno saw the brave bounce off a boulder and hit the ground rolling in a broiling dust cloud.

Lowering the Winchester, Cuno hauled back sharply on his reins. Renegade whinnied again and sank back on his haunches, rear hooves skidding and kicking up dust and bits of sage and juniper. The Indian's paint raced past, a foot in front of Renegade's nose, and continued on up the slope toward the rocky northern ridge.

Cuno dropped into another depression. When he came out of it again, he glanced toward the trail. Two of the three Conestoga freighters, with Philadelphia sheeting drawn across their high-sided beds, had pulled off into the brush on the far side of the trail. Behind them, four Indians were milling, no longer closing the gap between them and the wagons but continuing to yowl and loose arrows at the already pincushioned oak sideboards.

Cuno slowed Renegade to a fast trot and glanced back along the dusty trace.

The third wagon, driven by Dutch Rasmussen, had disappeared amidst the gently rolling, boulder-pocked scrub. Gunshots rose from that direction—no doubt Rasmussen himself trying to hold off one or more of the braves who'd likely driven him off the road.

“Shit!” Cuno headed Renegade straight for the two wagons, raising his Winchester to dispatch one of the harassing braves and silently cursing his fate. He and his men had come within twenty miles of the Trent headquarters to get hornswoggled and tail-knotted by a half dozen mooncalf Ute younkers likely out on a whiskey-inspired tear.

Cuno had a thousand dollars tied up in those wagons, mules, and in the freight—a winter's worth of food and dry goods—intended for Logan Trent's Double-Horseshoe Ranch at the base of the Rawhide Range. He and Serenity had had too good a year of freight hauling for Fort Dixon and local ranches to lose it all here at the start of winter. They needed the Trent payout to get them through the snow months, without having to swamp Denver saloons, which he and Serenity had been forced to do last winter while building up a stake for wagons and freight.

Cuno triggered his Winchester over Renegade's head.

An Indian who'd just loosed an arrow at Serenity's wagon jerked and sagged sideways in his saddle. Two rifles spoke around the wagons, the twin powder puffs rising nearly simultaneously, and the brave was punched straight back off his saddle blanket to pile up in the rocks and brush, unmoving.

Two more Indians were milling in the tall shrubs thirty yards west of the Conestogas. They were still howling above the blasts of Serenity and Dallas Snowberger's rifle fire, but without their previous fervor.

Serenity was hunkered beneath the end of his Conestoga while Snowberger was shooting from amongst the jumbled black rocks on the other side of the wagons, no doubt trying to detract fire from the bellowing mules.

Cuno leapt down from Renegade's back. Racking a live round into his Winchester, he ran crouching behind a low shelf of sand, rock, and spindly cedars toward the wagons. As the dusty Philadelphia sheeting of the first wagon rose on his right, he dashed up from behind the shelf and ran toward the wagon beneath which Serenity was still triggering his Winchester.

He dove beneath the high bed in a spray of dust and gravel, pushed up on his elbows, and raised his Winchester toward one of the painted figures still jostling around behind their screen of shagbark and cedars.

Serenity whipped his wizened, gray-bearded face toward him, deep-set gray-blue eyes bright with surprise as he began whipping his rifle around. “Cuno . . . jumpin' Jehoshaphat!”

Cuno triggered a shot. His bullet clipped a rock and ricocheted into the scrub, trimming limbs.

“I seen a long blond scalp hangin' from one o' them red devil's loincloths and thought it was yours!”

“Not yet.” Cuno triggered another round. He jerked his cocking lever down, and the smoking shell arced over his right shoulder. “You see what happened to Dutch?”

“Took an arrow.” Lying belly flat, Serenity was sighting down the Winchester. “I seen him tumble outta the driver's box. You get a fix on how many're out here?”

Serenity fired, his rifle screeching. An enraged cry rose from behind the screening brush. “
Got
you, you son of a
bitch
!”

Snowberger's rifle roared twice from the rocks on the other side of his wagon, and there was another groan and the thud of a brave hitting the ground.

“Dallas, hold your fire!”

Cuno scrambled out from under Serenity's wagon, leapt a rock, and holding his cocked rifle up high across his chest, bulled through the scrub cedars. On the other side, he aimed the Winchester straight out from his shoulder and looked around.

To his left, one of the braves was down on one knee behind a boulder, clutching his shoulder and groaning. Blood dribbled from a gash in his forehead. His horse was galloping off to the south, trailing its hemp reins.

Another horse trotted southeast from the wagons, the brave on its back crouched forward over the animal's neck and holding both arms across his belly.

“I hit this son of a bitch.” It was Snowberger, walking up on Cuno's right and angling toward the groaning Indian whose hand kept swiping feebly at the war club thonged on his hip. His tightly wrapped and feather-trimmed braids were caked with sand-colored dust and bristling with cactus thorns.