.45-Caliber Firebrand (3 page)

The thirty-year-old freighter—clad in checked wool trousers and suspenders and a blue wool shirt under a shabby suit coat—aimed his Henry repeater at the Indian's forehead and gritted his teeth. “Bastard damn near took my eye out.”

The brave glanced up, saw the barrel aimed at his head, and screamed. Snowberger calmly clipped the scream with a round through the brave's temple.

Cuno saw the brave slump down, quivering, in the periphery of his vision as he stole forward, swinging his rifle from right to left, looking for more warriors. Serenity came up through the cedars behind him, breathing hard and thumbing fresh shells from the bandoliers crossed on his scrawny chest clad in twenty-year-old, fringed buckskin.

“They get any of the mules?”

Serenity had a raspy voice as pinched up as his bearded face. “One took an arrow in his rump but not deep. He'll last to the Trent headquarters . . . if
we
do.”

“How 'bout yours, Dallas?”

“Nah.” Snowberger tossed the Indian's tomahawk into the brush and moved up left of Cuno, ten yards away, brushing at an arrow graze under his left eye. He peered around warily from beneath the brim of his soiled, tan hat. Cuno had hired the man out of a Crow Feather saloon, when Serenity had convinced him they needed a spare driver and an extra gun in this apron land west of the Great Divide, where renegades from the mining camps were known to harass freight trains.

Snowberger had proven a capable driver and handy with a sidearm. Two days ago he'd shot a sand rattler about to strike one of the mules—a single, clean shot through the neck with a nondescript Schofield .44. Now it looked like he could hold his own with an old, beat-up Henry sixteen-shooter, as well.

They'd suspected they might attract trouble with white men. But not from the area's Indian tribes—the Utes, Crows, and Southern Utes—most of whom were said to have been peacefully minding their own business for the past year or so in the wake of Custer's demise at the Little Bighorn in Montana.

Snowberger wiped blood on his pants. “They came up on us from both sides of the trail, not long after you pulled off to scout the ridge.”

“Told ya I smelled the red devils,” Serenity said.

Cuno, convinced they were alone here, was lengthening his stride and lowering his rifle, heading west toward where the third wagon had disappeared.

“Poor old Dutch,” Serenity said, breathing hard as he walk-jogged to keep up with Cuno, who, at five-ten and a hundred and ninety pounds, most of it hard muscle, had a good three inches and fifty pounds on the graybeard. “Got a bad feelin' about the ole boy.”

Cuno glanced over his shoulder at the dark-eyed Snowberger. “Dallas, stay with the wagons. We're gonna see about Dutch.”

Snowberger was a grim, silent man, but he didn't balk at taking orders from one nearly ten years his junior. He brushed at his cheek again and stopped, cradling the Henry in his arms and staring west with that dark, pensive gaze beneath ridged, black brows. He obviously didn't feel any more optimistic than Serenity about Dutch Rasmussen's fate.

Cuno and Serenity had walked fifty yards beyond Snowberger when, beginning to climb a low, rocky hogback liberally pocked with dried cow plop, both men stopped suddenly. Serenity sucked a breath through his teeth.

Black smoke ribboned up from the other side of the hogback, swirling gently. There was the spine-rippling scream of a mule and the sudden thud of horse hooves.

Cuno lurched forward, breaking into a run and leaving Serenity behind as he sprinted up over the top of the hogback and down the other side. He could see the wagon now, angled off the trail and piled up on its side in rocks and brush.

Most of the mules were down and unmoving. One wheeler and a leader thrashed in their traces, trying to stand in spite of the horribly tangled chains and leather ribbons. Behind them, flames leapt up from the wagon's rear, growing and spreading quickly, black smoke broiling.

Cuno dug his heels in. Holding the Winchester in one hand, he pumped with his free arm and his knees, chin up, teeth gritted. His hat blew off and drifted back behind him.

He had to get to the wagon, put the fire out before it consumed his entire load and the precious Conestoga itself.

Beyond the smoking, flaming wagon, a cream horse and dusky-skinned rider galloped west, away from the Conestoga—long hair bouncing down the brave's broad back.

As Cuno approached the wagon, which lay a good fifty yards south of the trail, he slowed to a stop, breath raking in and out of his tired lungs, arms dropping to his sides. Futility bit him deep. The entire top of the sheeted load was involved now, and the flames were curling up over the driver's box. The two surviving mules screamed and thrashed, both bristling with fletched, red arrows.

Cuno looked around for Dutch Rasmussen. The big Swede was nowhere in sight. Behind Cuno, boots thudded, spurs sang, and breath rasped harshly in and out of tired, old lungs.

“Shoot those mules!” Cuno yelled over his shoulder as Serenity ran up behind him, the graybeard's face creased with misery.

He could hear the old man cursing behind him as he ran around the wagon and swept the sage-and-juniper-pocked terrain with his eyes, looking for Rasmussen. Serenity had just silenced the second mule with a shot to the head when Cuno spied the freighter lying up near the trail.

A big, blond Scandinavian with a red face and bulbous nose bright from too much hooch, the old mule skinner lay on his back across a pinyon pine sapling, one tall black boot, crusted with old mule manure, propped on a mossy rock.

Two arrows protruded from Rasmussen's hard, swollen belly clad in a bright red calico shirt and a smoked elk-skin vest, another from the side of his hatless head. One, shot into his lower back, had been broken off in his tumble from the wagon. Blood pooled out from the wound to stain the wiry brown grass beneath him.

Cuno dropped to a knee beside the big man—a good freighter no less reliable for Cuno's having to drag him out of a Crow Feather brothel the morning they were to hit the trail for the Trent Double-Horseshoe.

Cuno tugged at a dry grass clump as he stared down at Rasmussen's inert face and scrubbed at his own forehead angrily with a sleeve of his fringed buckskin tunic. He looked toward the burning wagon. Serenity was moving toward him, silhouetted against the leaping flames and broiling smoke behind him.

“Is that Dutch?” Serenity called when he was within twenty yards, squinting his deep-set eyes.

Cuno stood, nodding grimly. “I'll get a shovel.”

Just then there was a cannon-like roar that made the ground leap beneath Cuno's boots. He stopped dead in his tracks as the burning wagon exploded in an expanding orange ball, stabbing flames and jets of white smoke in all directions. Wood chunks and slivers from crates and barrels were tossed high, and airtight tins and burlap food bags were launched in lazy arcs high above the wreck.

Cuno stood, hang-jawed, as several of the tins and torn, burning food pouches thumped down around him, a couple of cans clanging off rocks.

At the same time, there was the ear-wrenching pop of ignited cartridge rounds. Several rounds whistled through the air around Cuno's head, more plunking up dust and grass before him, a couple sending up the angry whines of ricochets.

Cuno wheeled toward Serenity, who stood sideways, lower jaw hanging, blue eyes bright with shock.
“Cover!”

Cuno grabbed the old man's tunic and half carried, half dragged the stove-up oldster, heavy from the brass-filled bandoliers on his chest, behind a boulder flanked with pines. They dropped to their knees and bowed their heads as the cacophony of exploding rounds crackled like Mexican fireworks on All Saints' Day.

The cannonade continued for nearly a minute, then died off gradually.

When Cuno looked up, Serenity Parker was scowling down at him from his craggy, bearded face. “Damnit, ya young firebrand—why didn't you tell me we was haulin' enough ammo to take on the whole Sioux Nation?”

Cuno's jaws were hard, his clean-shaven face red with fury, his words pinched down to a taut rasp. “Took the words right out of my mouth, you old bastard!”

3

CUNO MASSEY AND Serenity Parker—a young, muscular man and a bandy-legged oldster in ragged buckskins and a bullet-crowned sombrero—walked out from behind the boulder to mosey toward the burning Conestoga and its spilled freight. In the aftermath of the explosion, it was impossible to tell that the burning mass had even been a wagon, so little of it remained.

The smoke boiling up into the clear, western sky was rife with the acrid odor of burning mule and gunpowder.

“If you didn't know we was haulin' ammo,” Serenity said, blinking owlishly as he regarded the fire, “how in the hell did it get aboard that wagon? Certain-sure old Dutch didn't put it there without tellin' us about it.”

Cuno bent to snuff a patch of burning sod and a burlap scrap marked with the first three letters of COFFEE. There were a dozen other such fires but a recent October rain had dampened the ground enough to prevent a wildfire. Not far from the burlap scrap, a chunk of smooth, dark wood lay against a rock.

Cuno walked over and picked it up. It was a broken rifle stock. The varnish glistening across the smooth, walnut wood marked it as relatively new.

Cuno showed the wood to Serenity, who tugged on his beard. “Didn't know you was haulin' rifles, neither.”

Cuno tossed the stock away with a curse.

Putting out more small fires with their hats, he and Serenity continued on past the burning wagon, which had burned so suddenly and so hotly that it was burning down now for lack of fuel. They found several more bits and pieces of Winchester rifles—some swaddled in charred burlap dusted with wheat flour—and part of a leather pouch marked with the large, red numerals .44-40.

Dallas Snowberger had led the two remaining wagon teams onto leveler ground and had adjusted the harness ribbons and chains, some of which had gotten tangled in the frenzied run from the Utes. But he was standing behind and between the wagons as Cuno and Serenity marched up, his rifle resting on his shoulder, an incredulous expression on his dark-eyed features.

“We haulin' ammunition?” he asked.

“Help me get this sheet off here,” Cuno ordered.

When they had the canvas free of the metal tie rings fixed to the outside of the wagon panels and had rolled it up against the back of the driver's box, Cuno lowered the end gate and leapt up into the freight box. He shifted crates and sacks around until he'd exposed one of the big Colefax & Co. ground-wheat barrels.

When he'd pried the top of the barrel up with a claw hammer, he removed his gloves and sank his hands into the brown-speckled flour. Leaning forward, he sank them wrist-deep. He felt something that wasn't flour. Wrapping his hands around the object, he pulled it up, spewing flour around the barrel.

He held up the long, burlap-wrapped object and tossed it to Serenity. He dug another one out of the barrel, tossed it to Dallas Snowberger, who'd been regarding his silent industry with grim skepticism. Cuno dug two more similar objects out of the barrel, tossed one onto the freight efficiently packed around him, and jerked the leather ties from both ends of the other one.

He pulled the flour-dusted burlap back from what he already knew would be a rifle. Specifically, it was a .44-40 Winchester Model 1878 with a smooth, varnished walnut stock and blue-steel receiver. It was so new that Cuno could smell the oil, the wood, and the freshly milled iron. Nothing fancy about the carbine. Nothing distinctive about it. It was like the ten thousand other saddle guns that Winchester had built that same year.

Except for the fact it had been loaded onto Cuno's wagon without his knowing about it. Or, he thought, loaded into flour barrels that he himself, Serenity, Snowberger, and Rasmussen had loaded into the wagons back at the trail-head in Crow Feather, off the wagons of another supply train fresh in from the railroad line at Ute.

“That skunk!” Serenity said, hefting his rifle in his hands and glaring at Cuno. “Trent didn't tell you nothin' about haulin' guns and ammo for him?”

“If you're haulin' ammo,” observed Dallas Snowberger, setting his Winchester and its burlap wrapping onto the wagon's tailgate, “you sure wanna know about it. An' get paid for it.”

Cuno hammered the lid back on the flour barrel. He jumped down off the Conestoga and grabbed a shovel from the supply box under the driver's seat. “I'm gonna go down and bury Dutch. Then we're gonna find out what these hidden rifles are about.”

Cuno whistled for his horse and started walking back toward the burning wagon. The blaze had died down to the size of a large cookfire, the charred scrub around it still smoking. When he'd walked forty yards, Renegade came running in from the south, trailing his reins, his eyes jittery from all the shooting, the explosion, and the popping ammo.

Cuno swung up into the leather and galloped over the low hills to where a good man lay dead along the trail.

* * *

When Cuno had buried Dutch under some cedars along the northern slope, Serenity said a few words over the rock-covered grave, his sombrero in his hands. Then he and Snowberger climbed into the wagons, got their ribbons straightened out, and muscled the heavy oak handles back, releasing the wooden wheel brakes.

The mules blew and the wheelers swished their tails with anticipation. A few brayed raucously. The teams didn't like the smell of smoke and the heavy death fetor of their own.

Cuno mounted his skewbald, glancing once more at Dutch's grave humping against the slope, marked with a crude wooden cross. He lifted his gaze to the ridge beyond and then along the trail behind.